Astronomy

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/18298626

"I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel. Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing “divide by two” that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years."

I still can't believe how this one comes back again and again. One of the greatest feat of humanity.

The sun fired off a volley of radiation-riddled outbursts in May. When they slammed into Earth's magnetic bubble, the world was treated to iridescent displays of the northern and southern lights. But our planet wasn't the only one in the solar firing line. From a report:

A few days after Earth's light show, another series of eruptions screamed out of the sun. This time, on May 20, Mars was blitzed by a beast of a storm. Observed from Mars, "this was the strongest solar energetic particle event we've seen to date," said Shannon Curry, the principal investigator of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or MAVEN, at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

When the barrage arrived, it set off an aurora that enveloped Mars from pole to pole in a shimmering glow. If they were standing on the Martian surface, "astronauts could see these auroras," Dr. Curry said. Based on scientific knowledge of atmospheric chemistry, she and other scientists say, observers on Mars would have seen a jade-green light show, although no color cameras picked it up on the surface. But it's very fortunate that no astronauts were there. Mars's thin atmosphere and the absence of a global magnetic shield meant that its surface, as registered by NASA's Curiosity rover, was showered by a radiation dose equivalent to 30 chest X-rays -- not a lethal dose, but certainly not pleasant to the human constitution.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/when-cosmic-inflation-occurred/ <-- before the big bang

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/beginning-big-bang/ <-- the big bang happens here

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-at-its-hottest/ <-- energy is converted into particles here

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/matter-defeated-antimatter/ <-- war between matter and antimatter particles

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/higgs-gave-particles-mass/ <-- actual matter with mass is created here.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/protons-and-neutrons-formed/ <-- subatomic particles created

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/last-antimatter-disappeared/

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/first-elements-formed/ <-- our atoms are created here

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-like-when-no-stars-existed/

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/first-stars-began-shine/ <-- first stars are created here

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/very-first-stars-died/

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/polluted-stars-formed/

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/first-galaxies-began-to-form/ <-- first galaxies are created here

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/cosmic-dark-ages-ended/

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/life-first-became-possible/

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-formed-most-stars/

I'd certainly seen this exoplanet somewhere in my mainstream news world somewhere ... so nice to see a breakdown here from "Dr Becky" about how the science isn't so clear cut.

Anyone else able to provide insight on what the possible outcomes of the newly acquired data will be?

Roughly a year ago, astronomers announced that they had observed an object that shouldn't exist. Like a pulsar, it emitted regularly timed bursts of radio emissions. But unlike a pulsar, those bursts were separated by over 20 minutes. If the 22-minute gap between bursts represents the rotation period of the object, then it is rotating too slowly to produce radio emissions by any known mechanism.

Now, some of the same team (along with new collaborators) are back with the discovery of something that, if anything, is acting even more oddly. The new source of radio bursts, ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0, takes nearly an hour between bursts. And it appears to have three different settings, sometimes producing weaker bursts and sometimes skipping them entirely. While the researchers suspect that, like pulsars, this is also powered by a neutron star, it's not even clear that it's the same class of object as their earlier discovery.

...using data from the radial velocity (RV) detection method. This study holds the potential to help astronomers develop more efficient methods in detecting Earth-like exoplanets, which are traditionally difficult to identify within RV data due to intense stellar activity from the host star.

Canonical YouTube link