Science

Our Sun is one of the most fascinating objects in the universe and photographing it with specialized equipment to capture its splendor and beauty has become increasingly more common around the world. This is most evident with the work obtained by renowned astrophotographer, Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy), who owns Cosmic Background Studios in Florence, Arizona. On July 27, 2024, McCarthy posted an image of the Sun on X (formerly known as Twitter) taken with his specialized equipment designed to safely photograph our life-giving star, which revealed active coronal loops and plasma within the solar chromosphere that are some of the many intriguing features of the Sun. However, McCarthy is quick to mention in his post that this image isn’t entirely genuine, but a combination of several attributes. My recent solar print release drew a lot of questions about some of the features of the sun… particularly in this close up. The second post in this thread features a time-lapse showing...

The Standard Model describes how the Universe has evolved at large scale. There are six numbers that define the model and a team of researchers have used them to build simulations of the Universe. The results of these simulations were then fed to a machine learning algorithm to train it before it was set the task of estimating five of the cosmological constants, a task which it completed with incredible precision.  The Standard Model incorporates a number of elements; the Big Bang, dark energy, cold dark matter, ordinary matter and the cosmic background radiation. It works well to describe the large scale structure of the Universe but there are gaps in our understanding. Quantum physics can describe the small scale of the Universe but struggles with gravity and there are questions around dark matter and dark energy too. Understanding these can help in our understanding of the evolution and structure of the Universe.  Enlarged region of the Saraswati Supercluster, the large...

Everyone has that one pet in life who they fall in love with at first sight — or first scratch. For San Francisco resident Wyatt Boumedine, that was Zine, his white cat with a raccoon-like tail who would constantly growl, claw — and probably curse, if he could speak — at his owner. But Boumedine adored him. When Zine died from cancer in 2016, he was devastated. But just before he passed, Boumedine discovered Texas-based ViaGen Pets, the only U.S-based firm to offer commercial cloning of dogs and cats. For $25,000 — the company’s price for cat cloning in 2016 — Boumedine could have a copy of his beloved pet. Wyatt Boumedine’s house is full of cats, including an orange rescue named Peanuts, and Zine Jr,, a cat that was cloned from a feline named Zine, that is also memorialized in a painting at his home in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. (Karl Mondon/ Bay Area News Group)  The French native knew his bond with Zine couldn’t be replicated with another cat — even a ge...

Want a clear view of a supermassive black hole’s environment? It’s an incredible observational challenge. The extreme gravity bends light as it passes through and blurs the details of the event horizon, the region closest to the black hole. Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) just conducted test observations aimed at “deblurring” that view. The EHT team collaborated with scientists at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other facilities to do the tests. The antennas detected light from the centers of distant galaxies at a radio frequency of 354 GHz, equivalent to a wavelength of 0.87 mm. A map of the Event Horizon Telescope observatories used in recent test observations at 0.87 mm of distant galaxies, to bump up its resolution. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser This pilot experiment achieved observations with detail as fine as 19 microarcseconds. That’s the highest-ever resolution ever achieved from Earth’s surface. Although there are no images f...

Digging in the ground is so commonplace on Earth that we hardly ever think of it as hard. But doing so in space is an entirely different proposition. On some larger worlds, like the Moon or Mars, it would be broadly similar to how digging is done on Earth. But their “milligravity” would make the digging experience quite different on the millions of asteroids in our solar system. Given the potential economic impact of asteroid mining, there have been plenty of suggested methods on how to dig on an asteroid, and a team from the University of Arizona recently published the latest in a series of papers about using a customized bucket wheel to do so. Bucket wheel designs seem to be gaining popularity in space mining more generally lately. NASA’s ISRU Pilot Excavator (IPEx) uses a similar design and has been advanced to Technology Readiness Level 5, according to its latest yearly report. However, it was designed for use on the Moon, where gravity is significantly larger than that of the as...

Warp drives have a long history of not existing, despite their ubiquitous presence in science fiction. Writer John Campbell first introduced the idea in a science fiction novel called Islands of Space. These days, thanks to Star Trek in particular, the term is very familiar. It’s almost a generic reference for superliminal travel through hyperspace. Whether or not warp drive will ever exist is a physics problem that researchers are still trying to solve, but for now, it’s theoretical. Recently, two researchers looked at what would happen if a ship with warp drive tried to get into a black hole. The result is an interesting thought experiment. It might not lead to starship-sized warp drives but might allow scientists to create smaller versions someday. NASA’s Eagleworks attempted to test Alcubierre warp drive concept. Credit: 2012 Remo Garattini and Kirill Zatrimaylov theorized that such a drive could survive inside a so-called Schwarzschild black hole. That’s provided the ship ...

In 2022, NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft collided with an object named Dimorphos. The objective was to test redirecting hazardous asteroids by deflecting them with an impact. The test was a success, and Dimorphos was measurably affected. Follow-up research shows that Dimorphos was more than deflected; it was deformed. In recent decades, we’ve made progress cataloguing the asteroids in the Solar System. Some of them are close enough to Earth to be dangerous. If an object comes within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun, it’s called a Near Earth Object (NEO.) If it’s more than 140 meters (460 ft) across and crosses Earth’s orbit, it’s called a Potentially Hazardous Object (PHO.) Over 99% of NEOs and PHOs are asteroids, and the remainder are comets. Earth has suffered many impacts from these objects in the past. The most famous impactor was Chicxulub . When it struck Earth about 65 million years ago, it was responsible for the end of the dinosaurs. Now t...

The FDA has approved an updated COVID-19 shot for everyone 6 months old and up, which renews a now-annual quandary for Americans: Get the shot now, with the latest covid outbreak sweeping the country, or hold it in reserve for the winter wave? The new vaccine should provide some protection to everyone. But many healthy people who have already been vaccinated or have immunity because they’ve been exposed to COVID enough times may want to wait a few months. COVID has become commonplace. For some, it’s a minor illness with few symptoms. Others are laid up with fever, cough, and fatigue for days or weeks. A much smaller group — mostly older or chronically ill people — suffer hospitalization or death. It’s important for those in high-risk groups to get vaccinated, but vaccine protection wanes after a few months. Those who run to get the new vaccine may be more likely to fall ill this winter when the next wave hits, said William Schaffner, an infectious disease professor at Vanderbilt Uni...

Just outside the Milky Way Galaxy, roughly 210,000 light-years from Earth, there is the dwarf galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Measuring about 18,900 light-years in diameter and containing roughly 3 billion stars, the SMC and its counterpart – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – orbit the Milky Way as satellite galaxies. Scientists are particularly interested in these satellites because of what they can teach us about star formation and the process where galaxies evolve through mergers, which is something the Milky Way will do with these two galaxies someday. Another interesting feature of the SMC is the spectacular star cluster known as NGC 346, located near the center of the brightest star-forming region in the SMC, the hydrogen-rich nebula designated N66. Yesterday, NASA released a new image of this star cluster acquired by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope , which provides a unique and breathtaking view of this star cluster. These images were made possible than...

Any mission to Jupiter and its moons must contend with the gas giant’s overwhelming radiation. Only a judicious orbital pattern and onboard protective measures can keep a spacecraft safe. Even then, the powerful radiation dictates a mission’s lifespan. However, researchers may have found a way to approach at least one of Jupiter’s moons without confronting that radiation. When NASA launched its Juno mission to Jupiter in 2011, it knew it was sending its spacecraft into an extreme radiation environment. Jupiter’s radiation is generated by its magnetic field, which is 30,000 times stronger than Earth’s. The magnetic field captures charged particles from Jupiter’s environment and accelerates them to create its powerful radiation belts. Juno follows an elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter, dipping into the hazardous radiation for periods of time and then leaving it behind. Juno’s most sensitive electronics are inside a titanium vault designed to resist the radiation for as long as pos...