This physicist’s work adds a new twist to the tale of Dyson spheres.
And Earth-bound astronomers should be able to tell if someone is out there doing it, a physicist says.
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Category: space – Page 857
Chandra Discovers New Signal for Neutron Star Collision
- A neutron star merger without an observed gamma-ray burst has been discovered using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
- This result gives astronomers another way to track down neutron star mergers as well new information about their interiors.
- This source, called XT2, is located in the Chandra Deep Field-South, the deepest X-ray image ever obtained.
- By studying how XT2 changed in X-ray brightness, astronomers were able to identify it as two neutron stars that merged into a larger one.
These images show the location of an event, discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, that likely signals the merger of two neutron stars. A bright burst of X-rays in this source, dubbed XT2, could give astronomers fresh insight into how neutron stars — dense stellar objects packed mainly with neutrons — are built.
XT2 is located in a galaxy about 6.6 billion light years from Earth. The source is located in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S), a small patch of sky in the Fornax constellation. The CDF-S is the deepest X-ray image ever taken, containing almost 12 weeks of Chandra observing time. The wider field of view shows an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope of a portion of the CDF-S field, while the inset shows a Chandra image focusing only on XT2. The location of XT2, which was not detected in optical images, is shown by the rectangle, and its host galaxy is the small, oval-shaped object located slightly to the upper left.
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Evolutionary Biologist: Mars Colonists Will Mutate Really Fast
Contact with Earthlings could even be deadly for Martians — and vice versa. Mars doesn’t have any microorganisms to carry disease, and so if cross contamination between Earth and Mars is controlled, Solomon explains that all infectious disease could be eliminated — meaning there should be no intimate connection between the two groups.
But all mutation isn’t bad. Every new baby on Earth is born with 60 new mutations, a number which Solomon says will jump to the thousands on Mars. By mutating, humans on Mars would gain critical, life-saving benefits to cope with the brutal planet: a different skin tone to protect from radiation, less reliance on oxygen to adapt to the thin atmosphere, denser bones to counteract calcium loss during pregnancy.
Solomon even suggests that we could use CRISPR to more purposefully design these helpful mutations.
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Geologists Just Discovered a Source of Volcanoes Deeper Than Ever Before
Researchers have pinpointed a previously unknown source of volcanoes in the extreme depths of Earth — in the transition zone between the upper and lower mantle.
Until now, we thought we had a handle on the ways in which volcanoes form, welling up from the molten regions in the upper mantle beneath our planet’s crust, but the new discovery takes things much farther down.
In the Bermuda islands, which sit atop an extinct volcanic seamount, geologists have found the first direct evidence that material from the transition zone, between 400 and 650 kilometres (250 and 400 miles) below Earth’s surface, can bubble up and be spewed out of volcanoes.
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NASA’s Juno Finds Changes in Jupiter’s Magnetic Field
The discovery will help scientists further understand Jupiter’s interior structure — including atmospheric dynamics — as well as changes in Earth’s magnetic field. A paper on the discovery was published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“Secularvariation has been on the wish list of planetary scientists for decades,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest ResearchInstitute in San Antonio. “This discovery could only take place due toJuno’s extremely accurate science instruments and the unique nature of Juno’sorbit, which carries it low over the planet as it travels from pole to pole.”
Characterizing the magnetic field of a planetrequires close-up measurements. Juno scientists compared data from NASA’s pastmissions to Jupiter (Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and Ulysses) to a new model ofJupiter’s magnetic field (called JRM09). The new model was based on datacollected during Juno’s first eight science passes of Jupiter using itsmagnetometer, an instrument capable of generating a detailed three-dimensionalmap of the magnetic field.
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Juno finds changes in Jupiter’s magnetic field
NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter made the first definitive detection beyond our world of an internal magnetic field that changes over time, a phenomenon called secular variation. Juno determined the gas giant’s secular variation is most likely driven by the planet’s deep atmospheric winds.
The discovery will help scientists further understand Jupiter’s interior structure—including atmospheric dynamics—as well as changes in Earth’s magnetic field. A paper on the discovery was published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“Secular variation has been on the wish list of planetary scientists for decades,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “This discovery could only take place due to Juno’s extremely accurate science instruments and the unique nature of Juno’s orbit, which carries it low over the planet as it travels from pole to pole.”
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Hyperspectral camera captures wealth of data in an instant
Standard snapshots from space don’t quite show Earth in all its glory. There’s so much more to see.
To reveal details impossible to observe with the naked eye, Rice University engineers are building a portable spectrometer that can be mounted on a small satellite, flown on an airplane or a drone or someday even held in the hand.
Bioengineer Tomasz Tkaczyk and his colleagues at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering and Wiess School of Natural Sciences have published the first results from a NASA-funded project to develop a small, sophisticated spectrometer with unusual versatility. Their paper appears in Optics Express.
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