Science, Space, Health & Robotics News - Page 170

Only a year after its discovery, Comet Leonard has made its perihelion, or its closest approach with the Sun, as of January 3, 2022.

Comet Leonard or C/2021 A1 was discovered by Gregory Leonard, a senior research specialist at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. According to Leonard, who spoke to EarthSky, the comet's main feature is the long tail that is comprised of charged particles that researchers call ions.

Since Leonard is mainly composed of ice as it was approaching the Sun, "the comet's tail began to show some complicated structure, possibly due to pieces breaking off the nucleus, revealing new areas that the sun would then heat," wrote EarthSky. The first confirmation about Leonard breaking up as it journeyed closer to the Sun came from Martin Masek and was then backed up by images released by the SLOOH telescope in Chile that showcased a streak across the sky of what once was Comet Leonard.

Earlier in March, UFO researcher Scott Waring shared his alleged discovery of a UFO hiding beneath the surface of the ocean.

Waring posted his "discovery" on UFOSightingsDaily.com, where he claimed to have discovered the UFO while he was "exploring" the Pacific Ocean on Google Earth. The researcher claims that the object is a 4.3 mile-wide UFO sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Nazca, Peru. Waring connects the underwater UFO with the Nazca Lines in Peru, which are a group of geoglyphs etched in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru somewhere between 400 BC to 500 AD.

Researchers believe that the Nazca Lines were attempts at early civilizations communicating with gods, while other scientists believe they are physical representations of ancient astronomy. Waring believes the lines were used by ancient civilizations to contact alien life, but there is no solid proof to confirm that suggestion. As with most things "UFO," there is very little solid evidence to confirm anything, and Waring's latest update of an underwater UFO is no different.

On Monday, a flight carrying 132 people nose-dived towards the surface of Earth in Tengxian county in southwestern China.

The flight was identified as China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735, and the nose-dive was captured on video by a CCTV camera and a car dash-cam. The crash has marked the worst air disaster for China in nearly 30 decades as authorities were unable to identify any survivors at the wreckage. Now, Chinese authorities are saying that investigators are facing "a very high level of difficulty" in figuring out what caused the plane to nose-dive.

Zhu Tao, director of aviation safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), said on Tuesday, "The jet was seriously damaged during the crash, and investigations will face a very high level of difficulty." Adding, "Given the information currently available, we still do not have a clear assessment of the cause for the crash." Tao also added that the plane met all "airworthiness standards before taking off", and that during its descent, the pilots didn't respond to calls from air controllers.

NASA has announced it has discovered 5,000 exoplanets, which are planets orbiting stars beyond our own solar system.

The news was announced via a blog update on NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website, where the space agency explained for more than 30 years it has been on a journey of discovering what lies beyond our solar system. On March 21, the latest batch of now exoplanet data was received, adding 65 new exoplanets to the total that has now reached over 5,000.

The 5,000 confirmed exoplanets come in various shapes and forms as some include small, rocky worlds similar to Earth, while some others are gas giants like Jupiter and even "super-Earths", which are planets like Earth but much larger. Additionally, NASA writes that included in the 5,000 total are some exoplanets that orbit two stars at once and planets that are even orbiting the dead corpses of stars.

A series of "particularly dangerous" forest fires have broken out around the abandoned nuclear power plant Chernobyl.

According to a statement from Ukraine's parliament, at least seven forest fires have broken out around Chernobyl and have been spotted by satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). The statement from the Ukrainian government blames the "armed aggression of the Russian Federation" for the fires, but doesn't specify what they were caused by.

Ukraine claims that fires such as the ones recently spotted at "particularly dangerous" within a 6.2 miles of the nuclear site, and that Ukrainian firefighters are unable to put the fires out due to the presence of Russian troops that took control of Chernobyl close to the beginning of the invasion. Additionally, Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia's invasion has interrupted attempts at monitoring the radiation levels in the failed reactor.

SpaceX is currently developing the world's most powerful and advanced rocket, and the company's CEO said when it will perform its first orbital test flight.

In response to a CNBC post on Twitter, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk replied by posting a series of tweets that were all updates on the Starship rocket and the Super Heavy booster. Musk took to Twitter on Monday and wrote that SpaceX will have 39 flight-worthy Raptor engines built by next month, and it will take another month to integrate those engines into the Super Heavy Booster.

For those that don't know, Starship, when equipped with a Super Heavy booster, stands at nearly 400 feet tall, making it the tallest and most powerful launch vehicle ever created. Starship is designed to be a reusable rocket that is capable of taking lots of cargo and people to the moon and even to Mars. SpaceX has already completed some high-altitude tests with Starship, but it hasn't reached space yet. According to Musk, Starship will attempt to reach space in May.

After suffering heavy losses Russia has turned towards upgrading its firepower, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Institute for the Study of War.

A recent assessment posted by the Institute for the Study of War revealed that Russian troops have begun to dig in its heels around cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa and more as the Russian military underestimated the level of Ukraine's defense. With heavy losses Russia has seemingly switched tactics by increasing its firepower which will likely mean more artillery strikes and missile strikes that will no doubt cause more civilian causalities.

Over the weekend Russia's Ministry of Defense announce the country had used Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, or dagger missiles which are a Russian nuclear-capable hypersonic aero-ballistic air-to-surface missile. Each missile has a range of more than 1,200 miles, reaches Mach 10, and is able to perform evasive manuevers throughout its flight towards its target. Russia followed up with another announcement on Sunday that stated it had used Kinzhal missiles to destroy a fuel depot in the Mykolaiv region.

NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and has recently completed its 39th close flyby of the planet.

Juno only recently completed its approach with Jupiter as the spacecraft passed by on January 12 at approximately 38,000 miles away from the top of Jupiter's clouds. During its approach, Juno snapped several images of the southern hemisphere of Jupiter, with two moons to the right of the frame. NASA shared the image on March 16 and explained that by zooming in on the image, you can see Io on the left and Europa on the right.

On NASA's blog post, it wrote that Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system and that Europa is an icy moon surface that has an ocean of liquid water deep beneath its surface. NASA researchers have previously suggested that Europa's subsurface ocean may house some form of life. Juno will be making "the closest flyby of the enigmatic moon in decades," where it will be able to get a closer look at its surface with several of its scientific instruments.

Since Russia began its invasion into Ukraine and the West retaliated with heavy sanctions, the tension between the United States and the Kremlin rose, spilling over to the space program and the International Space Station.

The relationship between Russia's space agency, Roscosmos and NASA begun being strained when Roscosmos' chief Dmitry Rogozin started publishing subtle threats on Twitter towards the ISS, causing many to be concerned about the safety of the astronauts aboard the station. Rogozin posted videos of the ISS crashing, threatened to decouple the Russian segment of the station, and let the station crash into the United States.

Russian state-owned media recently published a spliced video that showcased Russian cosmonauts abandoning NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, which was later followed up by a statement from Roscosmos that pledged it wouldn't leave behind the astronaut and that it has never "let anybody doubt its reliability as a partner." Now, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet has spoken out about the future of the ISS, marking one of the first active astronauts to comment on the overall situation with Russia, Ukraine, and the ISS.

Two new studies of a solution to the paradox titled "Quantum hair and black hole information" and "Quantum Hair from Gravity" have been published in the journals Physics Letters B and Physical Review Letters, respectively.

Stephen Hawking proposed in 1976 that as black holes evaporate, they destroy the information about what formed them. This contradicts a fundamental law of quantum mechanics, which dictates any process in physics can be mathematically reversed. Black holes' lack of observable features aside from their total mass, spin, and charge led physicist John Archibald Wheeler in the 1960s to state "black holes have no hair," resulting in the no-hair theorem.

The first study now demonstrates that black holes have gravitational fields which contain information about their formation. When matter collapses into a black hole, an imprint is left behind in its gravitational field, referred to as a "quantum hair." The quantum hairs allow information about the black holes' formation to be retained, solving Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox.