Turning Forgotten Telescope Data into New Discoveries

Artist's depiction of a star's magnetic field interacting with it's a planet. Credit - Danielle Futselaar

Astronomers have been collecting data for generations, and the sad fact is that not all of it has yet been fully analyzed. There are still discoveries hiding in the dark recesses of data archives strewn throughout the astronomical world. Some of them are harder to access than others, such as actual physical plates containing star positions from more than a hundred years ago. But as more and more of this data is archived, astronomers also keep coming up with ever more impressive tools to analyze it. A recent paper from Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory and his co-authors, published recently in Nature Astronomy describes an algorithm that analyzes hundreds of thousands of previously unknown data points in radio telescope archives - and they found some interesting features in it.

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Researchers Match Up 12 Meteorites with the Near-Earth Asteroids They Came From

Every day meteoroids blast through our planet’s atmosphere to hit the ground as meteorites. A team of researchers in Italy traced twelve of them to progenitor asteroids that orbit in near-Earth space. Scientists treasure meteorites because they reveal information about their parent bodies. In an arXiv paper, two Italian researchers—Albino Carbognani and Marco Fenucci—analyze the characteristics of the parent bodies of 20 selected meteorites. They were able to track all but eight back to their parent asteroids. Based on their work, the pair says at least a quarter of meteorites come from collisions that happened in near-Earth space and not in the Main Belt. Meteorites from Near-Earth Asteroids: How They Got Here Many meteorites are chondritic, similar to asteroids in the Main Belt (or came from it). In their paper, the authors point out that progenitor meteoroids (including many that fall to Earth and become meteorites) formed millions of years ago following collisions between main-...

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For over sixty years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This consists of listening to other star systems for signs of technological activity (or “technosignatures), such as radio transmissions. This first attempt was in 1960, known as Project Ozma, where famed SETI researcher Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct a radio survey of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, the vast majority of SETI surveys have similarly looked for narrowband radio signals since they are very good at propagating through interstellar space. However, the biggest challenge has always been how to filter out radio transmissions on Earth – aka. radio frequency interference (RFI). In a recent study, an international team led by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) applied a new deep-learning algorithm to data collecte...

What Blew Up the Local Bubble?

In our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we see a region surrounding the solar system that is far less dense than average. But that space, that cavity, is a very irregular, elongated shape. What little material is left inside of this cavity is insanely hot, as it has a temperature of around a million Kelvin. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/KvVDeiC via IFTTT

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