Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 164

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, astronomers have detected incredibly large rings around a black hole.

Astronomers observed the black hole which is part of the binary system dubbed V404 Cygni that's located around 7,800 light-years from Earth. What the astronomers discovered was that the black hole was drawing material away from its local star, and using Swift Observatory, astronomers discovered a burst of X-rays from V404 Cygni back in 2015.

This burst from the black hole created high-energy rings from a phenomenon known as light echoes, which is when a burst of X-rays bounce off dust clouds between V404 Cygni and Earth. Below is an image that shows the X-rays in light blue overlayed on optical data (stars seen in the image) acquired by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. The team of researchers looked at observations made by Swift in 2015, and found that they the distance between each of the intervening dust cloud could be measured with the diameter of each ring.

A procedure that is uncomfortable, but can be life-saving, is a colonoscopy, but it's not everyday doctors manage to find an insect inside someone's colon.

Gastroenterologists Keith Siau of The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust found something "particularly eye-catching" inside a 59-year-old man's colon. A colonoscopy is a procedure where a camera is placed in the colon of a man to check for any health abnormalities inside of the large intestine, and while the procedure is uncomfortable for many, it can "sometimes be life-saving" if a health abnormality is found before it becomes life-threatening.

Before a colonoscopy is conducted, doctors tell patients not to eat anything 24 hours before the procedure and to drink 1 gallon of polyethylene glycol, an osmotic laxative used to treat constipation, during the evening of the day before the colonoscopy. Researchers suspect that the colonoscopy preparation may have assisted the ladybug in escaping from digestive enzymes.

A team of marine archaeologists has unearthed some rare archaeological "treasures" that date back to a now sunken Egyptian city.

The team of marine archeologists from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) teamed up with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt to conduct a mission in the site of Thonis-Heracleion in the Bay of Aboukir. IEASM said that the entrance to Egypt is at the mouth of the Canopic branch of the Nile, and that it was once controlled by Thonis-Heracleion. However, due to tidal waves and earthquakes, parts of the Nile collapsed into the sea, including the cities of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus.

Researchers rediscovered both cities in 1999 and 2000, and in 2021 a mission to discover more about cities went underway. Researchers uncovered "a Greek funerary area" that was "covered with sumptuous funerary offerings" that dated back to the start of the fourth century. Additionally, researchers also found that "imported luxury Greek ceramics" and "wicker baskets that were still filled with grape seeds and doum fruit...the fruit of an African palm tree, which is often found in tombs."

At the end of April, NASA released a high-resolution video of its Ingenuity helicopter taking flight off the martian surface.

The video was captured by NASA's Perseverance rover that is currently stationed in the Jezero Crater. Perseverance is searching for ancient signs of life on Mars, and Ingenuity is being used as a scout to map efficient pathways for Perseverance and locate landmarks in the area. As NASA states in the description of the video, the first flight Ingenuity ever took on April 19, 2021, marking a milestone in human space exploration.

Since April, Ingenuity has taken more flights and has blown past the NASA engineers' expectations. If you are wondering the total distance Ingenuity has flown since it first took flight at the end of April, the calculations have already been done for you - here. In other space news, Elon Musk's SpaceX has recently taken the crown for having created the tallest rocket ever, and Perseverance has begun collecting its first samples.

Astronomers have used NASA's exoplanet-hunting satellite to detect an unprecedented collection of pulsating red giant stars.

Astronomers from the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy have used observations from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to detect what is called stellar oscillations or material from inside stars. NASA designed TESS to primarily hunt for exoplanets out in the cosmos, but due to the nature of TESS's sensitive instruments that detect and measure stellar brightness, researchers can also use the satellite to discover stars.

Not only can astronomers find new stars, but they can also measure their mass and size with high precision. Marc Hon, a NASA Hubble Fellow at IfA, said, "Our initial result, using only a month of stellar measurements from TESS's first two years, shows that we can determine the masses and sizes of these oscillating giants with high precision that will only improve as TESS goes on. What's really unparalleled is that TESS's broad coverage allows us to make these measurements uniformly across almost the entire sky."

So, why was everyone on Earth stretched and compressed by an event that happened in space on January 5, 2020? An astrophysicist has answered that question.

Kirsten Banks, an Australian astrophysicist that graduated from the University of New South Wales, has replied to this question on her TikTok account, where she posts lots of digestible astronomy and space-related content. Banks explains that on January 5, 2020, gravitational waves traveled through the entire Earth and that these gravitational waves were caused by a black hole engulfing a neutron star. Video here.

Banks continues and says that these gravitational waves affect all of spacetime, and when the gravitational waves passed through Earth, for a fraction of a second, all human bodies were stretched and compressed by 1/10,000th of the size of a proton, or about 30% of the size of human sperm (if the cosmic event happened one-light year away from Earth). Additionally, Banks explains that this isn't the first time researchers have detected these gravitational waves, as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has "detected more than 50 gravitational waves since the first detection in 2015."

SpaceX briefly assembled the newest prototype of Starship on August 6 and has broken the world record for the tallest rocket ever.

SpaceX engineers at the SpaceX Starbase facility located in Texas connected Starship SN20 to its Super Heavy booster for around an hour while checks to the fitting were made. Starship alone is 165 feet tall, and Super Heavy is 230 feet, together Starship and Super Heavy brought the total height to 395 feet, breaking the previous record set by NASA's Saturn V moon rocket that was 363 feet standing.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk celebrated the Starship being briefly assembled on Twitter, saying, "Dream come true". While Starship can be assembled, that doesn't mean it's completely ready, as Musk writes on Twitter that there are at least "4 significant items" it needs before it's ready for launch. Those "4 significant items" are heat shields to protect it from Earth's atmosphere, thermal protection for Super Heavy's 33 raptor engines, "ground system propellant storage tanks and a quick disconnect arm", according to Space.com.

Perseverance, NASA's newest Mars rover that landed on Mars in February this year, is about to begin its quest for finding evidence of alien life.

Perseverance has been observing the martian planes for many months now and has found its home in the Jezero Crater, where it will now begin drilling into the Red Planet's surface to collect rock samples that researchers back on Earth will inspect. Perseverance will collect rock samples, examine them, relay any data back to NASA and pass on the samples when they are picked up to be returned to Earth.

NASA believes that the Jezero Crater contained a large lake around 3.5 billion years ago, which could be conditions that supported life, hence Perseverance being stationed there. The Mars rover will drill a hole into the surface that will take about 11 days to complete and search for any signs of microbial life in the deep lake bed. NASA is expecting to collect around 30 martian samples and return them to Earth in the 2030s. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

NASA is showcasing some of the best achievements of its Hubble Space Telescope, and one image, in particular, contains 10,000 galaxies.

NASA is celebrating #DeepFieldWeek and has decided to take viewers for a trip down memory lane with some incredible images Hubble snapped, with the first being the original Hubble Deep Field. The tweets from the Hubble Twitter account continue, and with each new image, NASA explains which instrument was used and how many galaxies are contained within the image.

One image that is worth highlighting is from 2003 and 2004, where Hubble captured a million-second-long exposure to "create the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, which contains about 10,000 galaxies!". In 2019, Hubble Legacy Field released and contained within it is data representing 16 years of the telescope's observations and "265,000 galaxies, and 13.3 billion years - making it the largest collection of galaxies documented by Hubble."

Scientists have poured years and years of time ironing out all of the details of launching the Hubble Space Telescopes successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The telescope has been under construction for many years now and has been cursed with numerous delays for various different reasons. Billions and billions of dollars have been poured into the telescope that is poised to unlock secrets of the universe for us, and now engineers, scientists, and NASA are approaching the end of the development runway and are almost ready for launch.

All of the years of work, money, and time developing JWST could all end in a matter of seconds if the launch on the Ariane 5 rocket fails. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science missions at NASA, summed all of the risks JWST will endure from the moment it's about to launch to when it is successfully deployed and operational. Zurbuchen wrote, "Those who are not worried or even terrified about this are not understanding what we are trying to do."

Researchers have recently got their hands-on a long-lost fragment of Stonehenge that was taken from one of the pillars back in 1958.

Robert Phillips represented a drilling company back in 1958 that was restoring Stonehenge. While restoring the monuments, Phillips snagged a cylindrical core from of the pillars, Stone 58, and in the years later emigrated to the United States. Now, it's illegal to drill into the stones, but researchers in 2018 got a hold of Phillips cylindrical stone core sample and began to study it. Their findings have recently been published in the journal PLOS One on August 4.

Researchers put the core sample through many different scans and found that stone was 99.7% quartz, described as "quartz cement" and "an interlocking mosaic of crystals". On top of that, the researchers found that some of the sandy sediments contained in the sample dated back Paleogene period, 66 million to 23 million years ago.

A new study has explored the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a crucial circulation system that transports salty water from the tropics north and cold water southward.

Led author of the study, Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research located in Germany, said the AMOC is "one of our planet's key circulation systems", and according to the findings from the study, the AMOC is on the verge of collapsing, which would have major impacts around the world. The authors warn that if the AMOC halts, Europe and North America could begin to experience extremely cold weather, as well as parts of the US East Coast could see a rise in sea levels.

Boers goes on to explain that the results of the study indicate that the AMOC is approaching what is described as a "critical threshold", "beyond which the circulation system could collapse." The led author recognizes that the study's method doesn't provide a time for when the AMOC will collapse. However, Boers states that it provides enough evidence that the AMOC has lost its stability, "which I take as a warning that we might be closer to an AMOC tipping than we think", says Boers.

Astronomers believe they have located a planet that is showing promising signs of having an atmosphere that can support life.

A new study published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal has honed in on a planetary system dubbed L 98-59 after the star it orbits. The system contains a rocky planet that has half the mass of Venus and is believed to be an ocean world. The team of astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, and found evidence of a fifth planet in what is called the "habitable zone" of its local star.

The "habitable zone" is a location in space that is not too hot and not too cold to host life. While the results from the study are definitely significant, astronomers don't have the telescope resolution to be able to detect biosignatures on the planet, even though it's only 35 light-years away, which is quite a small distance when discussing distances in space.

Since being denied by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Blue Origin has been posting infographics that payout Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The beef between the two companies and NASA begun when NASA awarded SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract for SpaceX to construct a lunar lander and a transportation method to the moon. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin officially protested NASA's decisions, and after reviewing the protest, the GAO denied Blue Origin's request, which prompted SpaceX to continue working on its design.

Since these events transpired, Blue Origin has taken its emotions about the situation public with infographics comparing its own design to SpaceX's. Laura Seward Forczyk, the founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, spoke to Inverse about Blue Origin's argument in the most recent infographic seen below. She said, "it was quite the argument to make when Blue Origin has not yet launched anything to space", referencing how SpaceX has successfully transported astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station.

A tablet that dates back some 3700 years has been found to be the oldest example of applied geometry in the history of mathematics.

Australian mathematician Dr. Daniel Mansfield from UNSW Science's School of Mathematics and Statistics revealed the oldest known origins of applied geometry on a 3700-year-old clay tablet named Plimpton 322 that dates back to the Old Babylonian period between 1900 to 1600 BCE. According to a new study released on August 4 in Foundations of Science, the clay tablet was used to survey the land with "Pythagorean triples", which are used to make accurate right angles.

Dr. Mansfield says, "The discovery and analysis of the tablet have important implications for the history of mathematics. For instance, this is over a thousand years before Pythagoras was born." Dr. Mansfield added that "It is generally accepted that trigonometry-the branch of maths that is concerned with the study of triangles-was developed by the ancient Greeks studying the night sky in the second century BCE. But the Babylonians developed their own alternative 'proto-trigonometry' to solve problems related to measuring the ground, not the sky."

Blue Origin has posted a new info-graphic to its website that states that SpaceX's method of transporting NASA astronauts back to the moon is "immensely complex & high risk".

The Jeff Bezos-founded space exploration company, protested NASA's decision to award SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract to construct the next lunar lander and transportation system to put NASA astronauts back on the moon. Blue Origin officially protested NASA's decision, and NASA told SpaceX to halt any construction until the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a decision, which they gave on Monday.

The GAO said, "NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award," which was Blue Origin's entire defense in protesting the initial decision. Since then, Bezos' Blue Origin has been slinging criticisms out at NASA and SpaceX for being denied the opportunity to construct their own method, and the recent info-graphic that was discovered on its website is another example of how the company is expressing itself about the decision made.

Over the many years, humans have been exploring what is in and around our solar system. We have sent many spacecrafts out to relay data back to us that has been used to piece together a better idea of our home.

Researchers know that Earth is the third planet furthest from the sun, and they know that Earth is the sixth planet from the edge of the solar system, or more accurately referred to as the outer heliosphere. The solar system's edge is defined by locating the region of space where the sun's charged solar particles are "deflected" by interstellar radiation present in the vacant space behind the edge. This border is defined as the heliosphere.

Researchers used data from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) that NASA launched in 2008 to create a new 3D map that shows the size of the heliosphere in relation to the sun and our solar system. Below is an image, and as you can see, the sun is located in the middle. On the right-hand side of the image is Voyager 1 and 2, two satellites now in interstellar space where there is abundant interstellar radiation. To the left of the image is the heliosphere, and as you would have probably already noticed, the heliosphere isn't symmetrical. This is due to how the sun is moving throughout the Milky Way.

SpaceX will be conducting its first all-civilian mission with Crew Dragon soon, and the astronauts aboard will have a series made about them by Netflix.

Netflix has announced what is called "Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space", which is a new documentary series that Netflix confirmed is in production on August 3, 2021. The new documentary series is produced by Netflix and Time Studios and is directed by Jason Hehir, the director behind the Michael Jordan documentary series "The Last Dance".

Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Chris Sembroski, and Sian Proctor will be boarding SpaceX's dragon capsule for launch on September 15. Netflix is planning on releasing one episode for the show on September 6 and then another on September 13. The final will be released closer to the end of September. Deadline reports that the creation of Inspiration4 represents a business shift by Netflix into real-time documentary production.

Researchers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have documented the presence of a new class of fire known as "cool flames".

Peter Sunderland, a Professor of Fire Protection Engineering and Keystone Professor at the University of Maryland, said that this discovery could transform what we know fire can be and increase the possibilities of what it can do. Sunderland continued and said that the current goal of his research is to understand these "spherical cool diffusion flames" and eventually model how they work, which can lead to designing "a new class of clean combustion engine."

The new class of fire is known as "cool flames" due to how extremely low the temperature is and how hard the blue hue of the flame is to see. In 2012 "cool flames" were first discovered on the ISS, but only for a brief moment before all fuel was exhausted. This event sparked interest in "cool flames" due to how very little was known about them. To push the humans' envelope of understanding of fire even further, a team of researchers partnered with astronauts aboard the ISS to test different gas fuels.

Back in 2018, a team of astronomers and astrophysicists measured all of the light in the history of the observable universe.

Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at Clemson University, led the team that used NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to view all of the light within the observable universe bubble, which is estimated to be about 14 billion light-years in radius. This bubble represents how far researchers are able to see back in time to the beginning of the universe, and so far researchers know that the observable universe contains, "contains at least two trillion galaxies and a trillion trillion stars," writes Dennis Overbye in New York Times Science.

Ajello and his team analyzed all of the relevant data acquired by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and found, "From data collected by the Fermi telescope, we were able to measure the entire amount of starlight ever emitted. This has never been done before. Most of this light is emitted by stars that live in galaxies. And, so, this has allowed us to better understand the stellar-evolution process and gain captivating insights into how the universe produced its luminous content", says Ajello.