Scientists took a second look at a recently discovered asteroid and realized it was in fact two space rocks orbiting together.
Category: space – Page 830
The ESA is about to turn one of its spacecraft into a fireball
Next week, the European Space Agency is going to jettison a cubesat called Qarman from the International Space Station and watch it burst into a fireball as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere—all on purpose.
What’s the mission: Qarman (short for “QubeSat for Aerothermodynamic Research and Measurements on Ablation”) is a shoebox-sized experiment meant to help researchers better understand the physics at play when objects plummet into the planet’s atmosphere and burn up. Qarman was brought up to the ISS in December during a cargo resupply mission. On February 17, it will be cast back out into space and begin slowly drifting toward Earth before entering the atmosphere and burning up in about six months.
Tell me more: Qarman has four solar-cell-covered panels that are designed to increase atmospheric drag and hasten reentry. Its nose is made from a special kind of cork that’s typically used in thermal protection systems on spacecraft. Ground testing shows that when the cork heats up, it chars and flakes away a bit at a time. The Qarman team is interested in learning how this process works during reentry.
Newborn giant planet discovered 330 light-years away
But researchers just located a baby giant exoplanet orbiting a young star just 330 light-years from Earth, making it the closest of its kind to us.
The planet is known as 2MASS 1155–7919 b, and it’s located in Epsilon Chamaeleontis Association, a young group of stars seen in our southern sky near the Chameleon constellation.
Researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology made the discovery using data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory.
This solar telescope just released its first close-up video of the Sun — and it’s stunning
Astronomers using the new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii have released their first public images of the Sun, and they are the most detailed images of our parent star ever taken. Images from the next-generation National Science Foundation (NSF) solar observatory reveal details on the surface measuring just 30 kilometers (18 miles) in diameter.
The new four-meter (157 inch) instrument (the largest solar telescope in the world) recorded images and video of turbulent plasma on the surface of the Sun, providing an unprecedented level of detail for solar researchers.
Incredible Technology: Laser Space Communications for Interplanetary Travel
2019
Editor’s Note: In this weekly series, SPACE.com explores how technology drives space exploration and discovery.
Since the dawn of the space age, NASA probes have beamed data home to Earth using radio-frequency communication. But that’s all set to change soon.
‘CT Scan’ of Distant Universe Reveals Cosmic Web in 3D
Circa 2004
On the largest scales, matter in the Universe is arranged in a vast network of filamentary structures known as the ‘cosmic web’, its tangled strands spanning hundreds of millions of light years. Dark matter, which emits no light, forms the backbone of this web, which is also suffused with primordial hydrogen gas left over from the Big Bang. Galaxies like our own Milky Way are embedded inside this web, but fill only a tiny fraction of its volume.
Now a team of astronomers led by Khee-Gan Lee, a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, has managed to create a three-dimensional map of a large region of the far-flung cosmic web nearly 11 billion light years away, when the Universe was just a quarter of its current age. Similar to a medical CT scan, which reconstructs a three-dimensional image of the human body from the X-rays passing through a patient, Lee and his colleagues reconstructed their map from the light of distant background galaxies passing through the cosmic web’s hydrogen gas.
The use of the combined starlight of background galaxies for this purpose had been thought to be impossible with current telescopes – until Lee carried out calculations that suggested otherwise. Lee says: “I was surprised to find that existing large telescopes should already be able to collect sufficient light from these faint galaxies to map the foreground absorption, albeit at a lower resolution than would be feasible with future telescopes. Still, this would provide an unprecedented view of the cosmic web which has never been mapped at such vast distances.”
Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris) Facts: Star System, Location, Constellation
Essentially based on myth the sirius cat people live here. O,.,o.
Sirius, Alpha Canis Majoris (α CMa), is the brightest star in the night sky and one of the nearest star systems to Earth. It has an apparent magnitude of −1.46 and lies at a distance of only 8.6 light years from the Sun. It is also known as the Dog Star, in reference to its position as the luminary of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog.
Sirius appears so bright both because it is intrinsically luminous, with an energy output about 25.4 times that of the Sun, and because of its proximity to the solar system. However, compared to other bright stars like Rigel (120,000 solar luminosities), Betelgeuse (90,000 to 150,000 L☉) and Canopus (10,700 L☉), or even Arcturus (170 L☉) and Capella (78.7 L☉), Sirius is not exceptionally bright.
The Sirius star system is the fifth nearest star system to Earth and it contains two of the eight nearest stars. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun, lies at only half the distance (4.37 light years).
Listening to quantum radio
Circa 2019
Researchers at Delft University of Technology have created a quantum circuit to listen to the weakest radio signal allowed by quantum mechanics. This new quantum circuit opens the door to possible future applications in areas such as radio astronomy and medicine (MRI). It also enables experiments to shed light on the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity. The results have been published in Science.
The usual solution to a weak radio signal is to find a bigger signal, for instance, by picking a different radio station or by moving to the other side of the room. However, m what if we could just listen more carefully?
Weak radio signals are not just a challenge for people trying to find their favourite radio station, but also for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners at hospitals, as well as for the telescopes scientists use to peer into space. In a quantum leap in radio frequency detection, researchers in the group of Prof. Gary Steele in Delft demonstrated the detection of photons or quanta of energy, the weakest signals allowed by the theory of quantum mechanics.