News and bits of interest
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New MeerKAT radio image reveals complex heart of the Milky Way
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) has released today a new MeerKAT telescope image of the centre of our Galaxy, showing radio emission from the region with unprecedented clarity and depth. The international team behind the work is publishing the initial science highlights from this image in The Astrophysical Journal. The article is accompanied by…
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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Measures Intriguing Carbon Signature on Mars
The type of carbon is associated with biological processes on Earth. Curiosity scientists offer several explanations for the unusual carbon signals. After analyzing powdered rock samples collected from the surface of Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists have announced that several of the samples are rich in a type of carbon that on Earth is…
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How the Tonga eruption is helping space scientists understand Mars
NASA scientists say that the eruption of a submarine volcano in Tonga is helping them to understand how features formed on the surfaces of Mars and Venus. The unusual explosion — which has been calculated at more than 500 times the force of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 — is offering…
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Proof of concept verifies physics that could enable quantum batteries
Quantum batteries could one day revolutionize energy storage through what seems like a paradox – the bigger the battery, the faster it charges. For the first time, a team of scientists has now demonstrated the quantum mechanical principle of superabsorption that underpins quantum batteries in a proof-of-concept device. The quirky world of quantum physics is…
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China’s Mars rover has amassed reams of novel geological data
More than 30 scientists across mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau are rushing to process data collected by China’s Mars rover, Zhurong, and by the nation’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which is in orbit around the planet. Several studies have trickled out, but researchers say that more are coming in the next weeks and months, offering insights…
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Vast satellite constellations are alarming astronomers
On may 24th 2019 a Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX launched 60 communication satellites into a low orbit around the Earth. That evening they appeared as a string of sunlit dots moving across the sky, many of them as bright as the brightest stars, a source of passing wonder and mystery to casual observers—and…
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Magellanic Stream arcing over Milky Way may be five times closer than previously thought
Our galaxy is not alone. Swirling around the Milky Way are several smaller, dwarf galaxies — the biggest of which are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere. During their dance around the Milky Way over billions of years, the Magellanic Clouds’ gravity has ripped from each…
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Intermediate mass black hole in the centre of M31’s largest globular cluster
Very cool research on the detection of an intermediate-mass (approx. 100,000 times the mass of the Sun) black hole in the most massive Globular Cluster of Andromeda. This means that this cluster is a tidally stripped nucleus of a larger galaxy. This technique can be used to estimate the number of galaxies that have merged…
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Record number of new gravitational waves offers game-changing window into universe
Scientists say 35 novel discoveries included a pair of massive black holes 145 times as heavy as the sun orbiting each other. Astronomers have detected a record number of gravitational waves, in a discovery they say will shed light on the evolution of the universe, and the life and death of stars. An international team…
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Squeezing down the Theory Space for Cosmic Inflation
An updated search for primordial gravitational waves has not found a signal, which implies that some popular early Universe models are becoming less viable. Remarkably, the large-scale Universe can be adequately described by a model involving only a handful of parameters. This lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) model postulates that the expansion of the Universe…
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Scientists Are Close to Finally Solving the Three-Body Problem
No- not the novel by the same name. Picture Earth and the moon careening together around the solar system. It’s clear what will happen as the moon continues to circle our planet, completing its full orbit each month. Now picture—as in the 2011 film Melancholia—a rogue planet barreling toward Earth. More here – https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a36343431/three-body-problem-solved/”
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Instrument Ready to Discover New Planets
As the NEID spectrometer on Kitt Peak begins its scientific mission of discovering Earth-like planets elsewhere in the Milky Way, a University of Arizona team is providing the software hub that allows the instrument to probe stars for telltale signs of invisible planets. More here https://news.arizona.edu/story/instrument-ready-discover-new-planets
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Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy
Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—have produced definitive evidence for two physics phenomena predicted more than 80 years ago. The results were derived from a detailed analysis of more than 6,000 pairs…
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Astronomers make first clear detection of a moon-forming disc around an exoplanet
“Our work presents a clear detection of a disc in which satellites could be forming,” says Myriam Benisty, a researcher at the University of Grenoble, France, and at the University of Chile, who led the new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that…
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