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Continuing on its path through the outer regions of the Solar System, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has now traveled half the distance from Pluto, its storied first target, to 2014 MU69, the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) that it will fly past on January 1, 2019. The spacecraft reached that milestone on April 3, 2017 when it was 486.19 million miles (782.45 million kilometers) beyond Pluto -- the same distance to MU69. I suppose that when you're making history at 32,000 miles per hour, time moves faster and distances start to shrink.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft is back in contact with Earth after its successful first-ever dive through the narrow gap between the planet Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017. The spacecraft is in the process of beaming back science and engineering data collected during its passage. With this first dive, Cassini begins the "Grand Finale" of a remarkable mission that started in 1997. During this final chapter, Cassini will loop around Saturn approximately once per week, making a total of 22 dives between the rings and the planet. The spacecraft is now on a trajectory that will eventually plunge it into Saturn's atmosphere -- and end Cassini's mission -- on September 15, 2017.
So what is Dark Energy? Well, the simple answer is that we don't know. It seems to contradict much of our understanding about the way we think the Universe works. The strangeness of Dark Energy is perplexing. It shows us that there is a gap in our knowledge that needs to be filled. But what if there is an alternative explanation for this enigmatic Dark Energy? What if it does not exist at all? That is what a Hungarian-American team of researchers is starting to conclude. They believe that they can explain the observed acceleration of the Universe without the need for Dark Energy. If their findings are upheld, it could have a significant impact on the direction of future research in physics.
A groundbreaking new optical device, developed at New Jersey Institute of Technology's (NJIT) Big Bear Solar Observatory is designed to correct images of the Sun that are distorted by multiple layers of atmospheric turbulence. This next generation adaptive optics device is providing scientists with the most precisely detailed, real-time pictures to date of solar activity occurring across vast stretches of the Sun's surface.
Three decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months following its discovery on February 23, 1987. Since that first sighting, SN 1987A has continued to fascinate astronomers with its spectacular light show. Located in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud, it was the nearest supernova explosion observed in hundreds of years and provided the best opportunity yet for astronomers to study the phases before, during, and after the death of a star. Recent data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Atacama Large Millimeter-Submillimeter Array (ALMA) indicates that SN 1987A has passed an important threshold as the supernova shock wave blasts through the dense ring of gas initially expelled by the pre-supernova star.
A surprising new class of X-ray pulsating variable stars has been discovered by a team of Villanova University astronomers. New X-ray observations obtained by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal that the star known as "d Cephei," the bright prototype of all Classical Cepheids, is actually a periodic pulsed X-ray source. At a distance of 890 light years away, this star, after which all Cepheids are named, is also one of the closest. Cepheids are among the most astronomically important objects in the Universe, for by measuring the pulsation periods and brightness of Cepheids, astronomers can measure distances to other galaxies.
Astronomers are borrowing principles applied in biology and archaeology to build a family tree of the stars in our galaxy. By studying chemical signatures found in the stars, they are piecing together evolutionary trees looking at how the stars formed and how they are connected to each other. The signatures act as a proxy for DNA sequences. It's akin to chemical tagging of stars and forms the basis of a discipline astronomers refer to as Galactic Archaeology.
The holographic universe, an idea first suggested in the 1990s, is one where all the information that makes up our 3D "reality" (plus time) is contained on a 2D surface. The idea is similar to that of an ordinary hologram on a credit card, where a three dimensional image is encoded on the two dimensional card. A team of UK, Canadian, and Italian theoretical physicists have now provided what is believed to be the first observational evidence that our universe could indeed be a vast and complex hologram. They have found substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe -- In fact, as much evidence as currently exists for traditional explanations based on the widely accepted theory of cosmic inflation.
First of all, I must apologize for the deliberately provocative and over-hyped title for this News Item. I got all wrapped-up in the sensationalism surrounding any mention of our new President Trump and I just couldn't resist. FACT #1 - President Trump has been in office for about a month. FACT #2 - Some scientists (including some prominent NASA scientists) are proposing a new definition for "Planet" that would reinstate Pluto as a planet. What I deliberately left out of the title is FACT #3 - The two statements are totally unrelated to each other. But face it -- You are reading this because you fell for a cheap trick referred to as a "Post-Hoc Fallacy," where you as a reader infer a cause and effect for two facts simply because they occurred about the same time and are presented together. But enough of this -- Back to the News Item. If this new definition is accepted by the IAU, then Pluto may once again be a planet.
The nature of dark matter has long been questioned, but the recent discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has renewed interest in the possibility that dark matter could actually consist of primordial black holes in the mass range of 10 to 1000 solar masses. Could dark matter be made of these intermediate-mass black holes that formed at the beginning of the Universe? A recent study takes a new look at this question and concludes... Probably not.
By analyzing the gas motion of an extraordinarily fast moving cosmic cloud in a corner of the Milky Way, astronomers have detected hints of a wandering black hole hidden in the cloud. Millions of lone black holes are believed to be zipping through the Milky Way, although only a few dozen have been found to date.
For decades, astronomers have known that our Milky Way galaxy, together with our companion Andromeda galaxy, are moving through space at about 1.4 million miles per hour. Scientists have generally assumed that excessive gravity from two dense regions of the universe, known as the Great Attractor and the Shapley Concentration, were responsible for this motion. But now, in a groundbreaking study, a team of researchers is reporting the discovery of a previously unknown and nearly empty region of space located in the opposite direction that is effectively exerting a repelling force and pushing our Local Group of galaxies through space. This void has been dubbed the "Dipole Repeller."
It was 50 years ago today -- January 27, 1967, when tragedy struck on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy during a pre-flight test for Apollo 1. The mission was to be the first crewed flight of Apollo, and was scheduled to launch on February 21, 1967. Astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives when a fire swept through the Apollo Command Module.
Neutron stars are the very dense remnant cores of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae at the ends of their lives. They have extreme magnetic fields that are billions of times stronger than that of the Sun. By studying the light emitted from an extraordinarily dense and strongly magnetized neutron star using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers may have found the first observational indications of a strange quantum effect first predicted by Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler in the 1930s. The polarization of the observed light suggests that the empty space around the neutron star is subject to a quantum effect known as "Vacuum Birefringence," which results from the interaction between photons and virtual charged particles that appear and vanish all the time due to quantum mechanics.
Remarkable new observations derived by linking Arecibo Observatory's 305 meter dish with Russia's RadioAstron Space Radio Telescope has provided results that are causing much head scratching in radio astronomical circles. The achievable resolution from this combination of observatories is equivalent to seeing a golf ball on the Moon or a fingernail on the surface of the Earth from a spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit. What used to be a well understood explanation for the mechanism that generates intense radio signals from tiny and very distant quasar nuclei has now been tested in previously impossible ways. The results make it difficult to interpret the data in terms of conventional theories.
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