INFORMATION

Cherenkov radiation isn't just a beautiful phenomenon. It turns up in nuclear reactors, in the upper atmosphere, in gamma ray telescopes on three continents, in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and in hospital imaging suites. Here's what a light boom is actually good for. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/BucGWlt via IFTTT

Using lunar regolith simulant, a team of researchers demonstrated that "immature" regolith similar to what is expected around the Moon's southern polar region is suitable for rovers to drive on. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/SiM6mhB via IFTTT

We have the crowd. We have the star. Now it's time to put them together. Here's exactly what happens — and why — when a charged particle outruns the local speed of light in a material. Also: why it's always blue. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Sa1f5qF via IFTTT

In 2014, a strange cloudy object called G2 made a close approach to Sagittarius A*, (Sag A*) the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers were pretty excited, partly because they thought it might get torn apart by Sag A*'s intense gravitational pull. That didn't happen, and the event was a cosmic fizzle. Instead, G2 skipped around the black hole. Various observations showed that it wasn't just a gas cloud. It was likely a dusty protostellar object encased in a dusty cloud. Or perhaps several merged stars. But, it survived the flyby and continued on a shortened orbit. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/0hRZeAO via IFTTT

Understanding the beginning of the solar system requires us to look at some very strange places. One such place is at the so-called “Trojan” asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit in front of and behind it. But for a long time, these cosmic time capsules have held a mystery for astronomers: why are they color-coded? The populations of larger asteroids are very clear split into two distinct groups - the “reds” and the “less reds”, because apparently they’re all red to some extent. A new paper from researchers in Japan tried to solve this mystery by taking a close look at even smaller asteroids, and their findings, published in a recent edition of The Astronomical Journal, actually brings up a completely different question - why don’t smaller Trojan asteroids have the same color-coding? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/PYa7Dy3 via IFTTT

Living long-term on the Moon means surviving the devastating toll that deep space takes on a human body. Astronauts in low gravity environments suffer muscle and bone loss, vision-altering fluid shifts, and heavy radiation exposure - all of which are incredibly hazardous to our biology. So, to help future lunar explorers survive, a new crew just arrived at the International Space Station (ISS). That might not sound surprising, except this crew is composed of worms. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/tbXZFIB via IFTTT