Skip to main content

Posts

Astronomers Find New Circumbinary "Tatooine-like" Planet Candidates

There's a distinct category of exoworlds out there that orbit two stars. They're called "circumbinary" planets and up until recently, astronomers had only found about 18 of them among the 6000+ other known exoplanets and candidates. Now, a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, have found 27 more potential circumbinary worlds. They credit a new method, called apsidal precession, for their finding. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/CMQocJU via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

A Brief-ish History of SETI. Part V: The First Interstellar Messengers

During the 1970s, the first interstellar probes were launched, carrying messages specifically designed to be intelligible to extraterrestrial species. The messages were essentially a "message in a bottle" intended for an advanced civilization, should they find the probes someday. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/fODmRzC via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

Iron and Ice: Earth's Passage Through the Interstellar Cloud

Our Solar System is currently passing through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a region of highly diluted gas and dust between the stars. On its path, Earth continuously accumulates iron-60, a rare radioactive isotope of iron produced in stellar explosions. This has now been confirmed by an international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) through the analysis of Antarctic ice tens of thousands of years old. From the steady but time-varying influx, the researchers conclude that the radioactive isotope has been stored within the cloud since a long-past stellar explosion. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/TeGsU3J via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

Gazing Into the Past With TIME

How can astronomers observe ancient galaxies when they're so challenging to resolve? By looking at a whole bunch of them at once in a single spectral line and seeing how it changes over time. That's what a new instrument called the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment (TIME) does. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/qHsQJ57 via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

The Milky Way's Turbulence Distorts Light from Distant Quasars

We may be getting better images of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole in the future. Astronomers used 10 years of observations of a distant blazar to detect turbulence in the Milky Way's interstellar medium. This turbulence makes images of Sagittarius A-star blurry. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/4Bye3od via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

New Algorithm Cracks the Asteroid Routing Problem

The Traveling Salesman is a classic problem in mathematics that requires a solution to the most efficient path to take to visit a given number of cities in the least amount of time. But scale this relatively simple concept up to space travel and the calculation becomes much more complex. Instead of visiting a stationary spot on Earth, when calculating the most efficient path to visit asteroids you must account for the fact they are traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour, and their exact position will change based on when a spacecraft leaves. This is known as the Asteroid Routing Problem, and a new paper from a group of Canadian and European researchers lays out a framework that can find the exact solution to any particular combination of asteroids to be visited. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/pYjzVrh via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

What If the Universe Had No Beginning? Part 2: No Boundary, No Problem

Hawking faced a question with no answer hiding behind it. The best boundary condition for the universe, he decided, was that there was no boundary at all. To make that statement into physics, he had to do something deeply strange to time. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/6fX5unl via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more