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It’s even more fascinating than we thought.


The Milky Way looks nothing like the flat space pancake it is usually depicted as. The newly-created and most accurate 3D map of our galaxy reveals that it’s warped and twisted, and even more fascinating.

A group of astronomers from Australia and China have built their “intuitive and accurate three-dimensional picture” by mapping the so-called “classical Cepheids.”

Burning their fuel quickly, those pulsating stars that live fast and die young are 100,000 times brighter than the Sun. The combination of their pulsation periods and known luminosity allowed the scientists to determine their location with the high accuracy of between 3 to 5 percent.

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Jack Beard, a professor in the University of Nebraska College of Law’s Space, Cyber and Telecommunications Law Program, told Politico that the Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations “will become the definitive document on military and security law as it applies to space.”

The Woomera Manual won’t actually lay out any new guidelines. Instead it will organize and present the laws that are already on the books so that politicians, industry leaders, and others can make better informed decisions regarding activity in space.

Given the fact that the Outer Space Treaty, which banned military actions in outer space, has all but been tossed aside, it’s unclear how much they’ll actually listen.

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Interesting concept.


Architectural students working with the European Space Agency (ESA) have created a new concept for a sustainable lunar habitat.

The ESA’s astronaut center in Cologne, Germany, partners with universities and research institutions to study moon-related concepts in preparation for future missions. Angelus Chrysovalantis Alfatzis is one of the researchers who has contributed to the development of a promising concept for a moon base, according to a statement from ESA.

“I always strive to find material and structural solutions in accordance with the resources available on site,” Alfatzis, who is in his final year of the architectural engineering program at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, said in the statement. “At the moment, my focus is on using unprocessed lunar soil for construction and the architectural applications of this [technique].” [Moon Base Visions: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Photos)].

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This animation video provides a good summary, about the challenges that need to be solved in order to establish an outpost on #Mars


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Humans love to explore. Strangely enough even horrible places – like Mars. Let’s see how building a Mars base could work and how insanely nerve-wracking exactly it would be.

Sources & Further Reading:

While inspecting a known globular cluster, a team of astronomers began to notice that some of its stars didn’t seem to belong. Investigating further, they realized the anomalous stars were part of a nearby galaxy—one previously unknown to us.

Science works in mysterious ways.

One moment you’re investigating a globular cluster, and the next you’re unexpectedly writing a research paper about something else entirely, namely the discovery of previously unknown dwarf spheroidal galaxy. But that’s how it goes sometimes, and the authors of the new study, published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, couldn’t be happier.

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