Science, Space, Health & Robotics News - Page 267

Eyewitnesses have reported seeing an extremely bright fireball pass overhead in the night sky. Officials have confirmed its existence.

The American Meteor Society has confirmed a meteor estimated to be the size of a house entering Earth's atmosphere above Colorado, United States. The fireball was captured on film by numerous cameras, some of which were porch cameras, and they show a bright fireball enter the sky, lighting it up a beautiful blue hue. According to Josh Ellis, located in Evergreen, Colorado, the fireball was so bright that it charged his solar lights.

Doug Robinson, who captured a video of the fireball over Boulder, Colorado, said, "Everything was pitch dark, and all of a sudden it lit up as if it was a brightly lit moon." Additionally, six people reported hearing a boom sound as they saw the fireball pass overhead. This "boom" was likely the fireball exploding as it broke up in the atmosphere.

Numerous reports have surfaced about a fireball appearing in the night sky and confirming the reports are videos published on the American Meteor Society (AMS) YouTube Channel.

A meteor is a space rock that has entered Earth's atmosphere and is plummeting towards the surface. Luckily, most meteors never make it to Earth's surface and burn up as they get lower and lower into our atmosphere. The American Meteor Society was created to track events such as these, and just recently, AMS received around a dozen reports that an extremely bright fireball streaked across the night sky above Colorado.

When a meteor enters Earth's atmosphere, it's introduced to our thick atmosphere that slows it down, and heats it up via friction. This friction causes the meteor to catch on fire, which results in the bright object we see up in the sky. As previously stated, most of these fireballs aren't large enough to make it to the surface, and as a result, they disintegrate or explode. As for this fireball, reports state that it was around the size of a house.

A study that used nearly 20 years of data indicates that Earth is becoming dimmer, and climate change is the likely culprit.

Earth reflects around 30% of the sunlight that hits the planet, and according to the researchers who published the paper in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, Earth's albedo, or reflectance, has reduced. Researchers used data from 1998 to 2017 to measure the amount of Earthshine that causes the Moon to be illuminated and found that it has reduced by half a watt less light per square meter, or 0.5% when compared to data recorded in 1998.

According to theoretical physicist Philip Goode from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, "The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last three years of data after 17 years of nearly flat albedo." The study found that the likely culprit of the reduction in reflectance is not due to a reduction in sunlight coming from Earth, but a reduction in the number of reflective clouds that appear over the eastern Pacific Ocean. The researchers link the reduction in these clouds to climate change.

The volcanic eruption that has happened on Spain's La Palma island doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon, and some new images from space reveal its destruction.

Locals in the area have reported earthquakes in the region as the La Palma volcano continues to spew lava out into the surrounding area. The images from space come from Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov, who are aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The cosmonauts snapped images of the volcanic eruption as the ISS passed overhead at night, which made for a beautifully horrific image of a river of lava passing through a surrounding town.

Reports indicate that more than 1,000 buildings have been buried in lava since the volcano first began erupting back on September 19. In total, 1.4 square miles of land have been swallowed by the lava, and due to new earthquakes that occurred on October 1, the flow of lava isn't stopping. As for people, more than 6,000 residents in the local area have been evacuated. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

A new paper that has appeared on the pre-print server arXiv has detailed the arrival time for what could be the largest comet humans have ever discovered.

The comet is Bernardinelli-Bernstein and researchers estimate that it is at least 62 miles in diameter, which is around 1,000 times larger than a typical comet. Researchers previously incorrectly estimated that Bernardinelli-Bernstein was a dwarf planet due to its size but later found out that it was a comet. Further analysis of the celestial object found that it's making its way towards the Sun.

At the moment, Bernardinelli-Bernstein is located in the Oort cloud, 29 astronomical units away from Earth. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the Sun, which is about 93 million miles. Researchers detail in their paper that Bernardinelli-Bernstein will make its closest approach to Earth within 10.97 astronomical units, which will put it just outside of Saturn's orbit. The researchers estimate that Bernardinelli-Bernstein will make its closest approach with Earth 10 years from now.

The Hubble Space Telescope is at it again with another jaw-dropping image. This time the space telescope has snapped a photo of a celestial "eye".

The image is of a spiral galaxy dubbed NGC 5728 that's located around 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. NGC 5728 is a Seyfert galaxy, which means it has an active nucleus at its center. According to Space.com, at the center of this galaxy, there is a black hole that has lots of gas and dust surrounding it, causing it to be bright.

The image was released by the European Space Agency, which co-operates the Hubble Space Telescope with NASA. According to European Space Agency, "As this image shows, NGC 5728 is clearly observable, and at optical and infrared wavelengths it looks quite normal. It is fascinating to know that the galaxy's centre is emitting vast amounts of light in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that WFC3 [Wide Field Camera 3] just isn't sensitive to!"

A mystery that has spanned almost half a century has just been answered, according to a team of researchers.

The mystery involved the above image, which is a trace fossil. A trace fossil shows the activity of an animal rather than the animal themselves, and these types of fossils provide really valuable information to researchers looking to understand the evolution of complex life on Earth. The quartzite rock was discovered in Mount Barren in southwestern Australia, and the tracks embedded in it appear to have been made by crustaceans that burrow into the sand.

The only problem is, "quartzite is as hard as concrete and impossible for burrowing animals to penetrate. The traces would therefore have had to be made while the sand was still loose. But the sand was deposited 1.7 billion years ago - a billion years prior to the appearance of the first animals in the fossil record, and its transformation to quartzite occurred more than 1.2 billion years ago, much earlier than the oldest animal fossils, which are less than 0.6 billion years old," said paleontologist Bruce Runnegar from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In a bombshell report from CBS Mornings, current and former Blue Origin employees have signed an essay that accuses Blue Origin of prioritizing speed over safety.

The report occurred on October 1st, and according to Alexandra Abrams, a former head of employee communications at Blue Origin, the company pushes employees to sign brutal nondisclosure agreements that infringe on rights, doesn't listen to any feedback, and disregards safety warnings provided by employees. On top of that, the essay, which was published on the website Lioness, details that the workplace environment at Blue Origin was "toxic" and an uncomfortable sexist climate for women.

Now, NASA has fired back at Blue Origin, saying that the company is threatening to destroy the "once-in-a-generation momentum" because it gambled on its original proposal for a new lunar lander and lost. NASA's lawyers stated in legal documents obtained by The Verge through the Freedom of Information Act that "Blue Origin made a bet, and it lost." Due to the legal battle between NASA and Blue Origin the construction of a new lunar lander has been put on hold which throws the 2024 date of the next Moon landing into jeopardy.

Yellowstone National Park, located mostly in Wyoming, is a 3,500 square-mile volcanic hotspot that is home to the world's largest active geyser.

The geyser named Steamboat Geyser has been observed for a number of years, along with the rest of the park, as researchers fear that one day the supervolcano located underneath the surface will erupt. Monitoring the geysers and the overall park will give researchers the data they need to be able to predict if an eruption is likely, which in turn will help save lives if an evacuation is needed.

As for Steamboat, onlookers of this active geyser will see water being shot out of the northern vent at heights of 300 feet to 400 feet. As with all geysers, Steamboat's eruptions go through cycles, and depending on what stage of the cycle the geyser is in will determine how active it is. In the past three years, there have been over 110 eruptions, leading some researchers to believe that Steamboat is slightly more active than what it usually is.

A team of researchers has achieved a world first by capturing the first footage of inside a Category 4 hurricane.

The footage has been released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and it shows the terrifying inside of Hurricane Sam that is currently causing havoc in the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers used a robotic surfboard that is called a Saildrone to capture the footage. In the below image, you can see that Saildrone has a thick surfboard as a base, a sail, and a camera arm.

The ocean craft measures at just 23 feet in length and features a "hurricane wing" that is designed to withstand the force of the elements. Saildrone is powered by solar and is designed to record important data such as wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, temperature, salinity, humidity, and more. According to NOAA scientist Greg Foltz, "We expect to improve forecast models that predict rapid intensification of hurricanes."