Space Engine is a free-to-download, procedurally generated simulator that’s ten years in the making. Despite the incomprehensible size of the game’s universe, it was developed by one man. But now, he says, he can’t do it alone.
Category: space – Page 861
Newly discovered comet is likely interstellar visitor
A newly discovered comet has excited the astronomical community this week because it appears to have originated from outside the solar system. The object—designated C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) — was discovered on Aug. 30, 2019, by Gennady Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnij, Crimea. The official confirmation that comet C/2019 Q4 is an interstellar comet has not yet been made, but if it is interstellar, it would be only the second such object detected. The first, Oumuamua, was observed and confirmed in October 2017.
The new comet, C/2019 Q4, is still inbound toward the Sun, but it will remain farther than the orbit of Mars and will approach no closer to Earth than about 190 million miles (300 million kilometers).
After the initial detections of the comet, Scout system, which is located at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, automatically flagged the object as possibly being interstellar. Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL worked with astronomers and the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center in Frascati, Italy, to obtain additional observations. He then worked with the NASA-sponsored Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to estimate the comet’s precise trajectory and determine whether it originated within our solar system or came from elsewhere in the galaxy.
Toyota Wants to Slather Solar Panels All Over Its Prius Hybrid
Since July, Toyota has been working on a brand-new design. It features special, much higher efficiency solar panels that are mounted on the hood, roof and even hatchback of the car, charging the car’s batteries even when it’s moving.
Panel Van
The new solar system could allow the Prius to cover 50 kilometers, four days a week, on solar alone, Bloomberg reports.
New Test to Measure The Expansion of Our Universe Provides Even More Puzzling Results
Advances in astronomical observation over the past century have allowed scientists to construct a remarkably successful model of how the cosmos works. It makes sense – the better we can measure something, the more we learn.
But when it comes to the question of how fast our Universe is expanding, some new cosmological measurements are making us ever more confused.
Since the 1920s we’ve known that the Universe is expanding – the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us. In fact, in the 1990s, the rate of expansion was found to be accelerating.
Study finds the universe might be 2 billion years younger
The universe is looking younger every day, it seems.
New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos.
The huge swings in scientists’ estimates—even this new calculation could be off by billions of years—reflect different approaches to the tricky problem of figuring the universe’s real age.
Is the Universe Actually a Giant Quantum Computer?
According to MIT professor Seth Lloyd, the answer is yes. We could be living in the kind of digital world depicted in The Matrix, and not even know it.
A researcher in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, Lloyd is one of the leaders in the field of quantum information. He’s been with the field from its very conception to its sky-rocketing rise to popularity. Decades ago, the feasibility of developing quantum computing devices was challenged. Now, as quantum computation is producing actual technologies, we are only left to wonder—what kind of applications will it provide us with next?
But, first things first. In a round-table discussion with undergraduates, Lloyd speaks of his early days in the field with a touch of humor, irony, and most surprisingly—pride. When he just started to research quantum information in graduate school, most scientists told him to look into other areas. In fact, out of the postdoctoral programs he considered, not many were too invested in researching of information in quantum mechanics. Most universities and institutes were reluctant to take up quantum computing, but Murray Gell-Mann accepted Lloyd for a position at the California Institute of Technology. This is where many ideas behind quantum computation were born, and Lloyd is “excited by the popularity of the field today.”