INFORMATION

Multiple mobile phones, dashcams, and dedicated meteor cameras capture a fireball over part of Europe on Sunday night. Thousands of people witnessed it, and the ESA's Planetary Defence Team is analyzing it. So far, it looks like it was a few meters in diameter. It lit up the sky, and some debris even struck some buildings in Koblenz, Germany. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/8eCVMgv via IFTTT

One of the Vera Rubin Observatory's objectives is to detect incoming objects. It's decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will detect one-meter class objects about to impact Earth and allow more detailed observations of them. That will help determine their impact sites with greater accuracy, allowing for more recovery. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/23Iln0m via IFTTT

Astronomers have turned to some of the oldest stars in our Galaxy to tackle one of cosmology's most stubborn puzzles and their answer might surprise you. By analysing precise age data for more than 200,000 Milky Way stars, researchers have placed the age of the universe at around 13.6 billion years. It's a deceptively simple idea that the universe cannot be younger than the stars it contains. What they found doesn't just give us a number, it adds a compelling new dimension to a decades long argument that has divided the scientific world. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/iOyusDk via IFTTT

Back in the early 2000s, my computer screen, like that of many other space enthusiasts, was typically covered in a series of rainbow-colored spectral signals. As my computer crunched through thousands of data points of radio signals collected by the SETI@Home initiative, I was hoping I was in some small way contributing to one of humanity’s greatest scientific endeavours - the search for extraterrestrial life. But, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Vishal Gajjar and Grayce Brown of the SETI Institute, it seems unlikely that the signals SETI@Home was tailored to look for actually exist. That doesn’t mean there weren’t aliens yelling into the void at the top of their electronic lungs, but simply that the space weather from their local star might have changed the signal to make it unrecognizable by the time it reached us. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/5nBgruU via IFTTT

Scientists occasionally have a hard time figuring out whether data they are seeing is an actual physical phenomenon or just a trick of their instrumentation. A new paper in The Planetary Science Journal from Jessica Sunshine and their colleagues at the University of Maryland describes one such confusing scenario. In this case, the researchers noted some fan-like patterns across the surface of Dimorphos, the asteroid hit by NASA’s DART mission, and thought it might be a trick of their camera. But after some image correction, computation, and physical experimentation, they determined the patterns were caused by the first-ever documented cases of material transfer between two asteroids. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/xiyuaow via IFTTT

Jupiter's powerful, continuous aurorae dwarf those of Earth. Scientists know that Jupiter's Galilean moons created bright spots on Jupiter's northern aurora. The JWST observed these bright spots and generated infrared spectra of them for the first time. Those observations showed that Io's bright spot is extremely variable in both temperature and density, and researchers want to know why. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/r8h23sP via IFTTT