Space News and Discussions

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A new method for predicting the 11-year solar cycle strength

by Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-method-ye ... ength.html
Scientists from Skoltech and their colleagues from the University of Graz & the Kanzelhöhe Observatory (Austria), Hvar Observatory (Croatia), and the Belgian Solar-Terrestrial Center of Excellence—SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium presented a new method to predict the strength of the 11-year solar cycle. The results are important for anticipating and mitigating space weather effects on astronauts, pilots and modern technological systems both in space and on Earth. The study will be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The sun is the source of powerful explosions that can affect astronauts and modern technologies in space and on Earth. At the beginning of the 17th century, Galileo Galilei directed his telescope to the sun and discovered sunspots. In the 19th century, it became clear that sunspots appear and disappear with a certain periodicity, on average, every 11 years. Sunspots are now regularly monitored by more than 80 observatories across the world and researchers have compiled continuous sunspot records for over four centuries, which is the longest scientific experiment in the history of humanity.
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Scientists discover how first quasars in universe formed
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-scientist ... verse.html
by University of Portsmouth

The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed—something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years—has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings are published in Nature.

The existence of more than 200 quasars powered by supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang had remained one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics because it was never fully understood how they formed so early.

The team of experts led by Dr. Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth have found that the first quasars naturally formed in the violent, turbulent conditions of rare reservoirs of gas in the early universe.

Dr. Whalen, from the University's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: "This discovery is particularly exciting because it has overturned 20 years of thought on the origin of the first supermassive black holes in the universe.
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Two new rotating radio transients discovered by astronomers
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-rotating- ... omers.html
by Tomasz Nowakowski , Phys.org
Using the Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory (PRAO), Russian astronomers have carried out a search for rotating radio transients (RRATs). In a recently published paper on the arXiv pre-print server, they report the detection of two new RRATs as part of this observational campaign.

RRATs are a subclass of pulsars characterized by sporadic emission. First objects of this type were identified in 2006 as sporadically appearing dispersed pulses, with frequencies varying from several minutes to several hours. However, the nature of these transients is still unclear. In general, it is assumed that they are ordinary pulsars that experience strong pulses.

So far, only slightly more than 100 RRATs have been found, therefore astronomers are interested in detecting new such transients in order to characterize them and to improve our knowledge about their nature.

Now, a team of astronomers led by PRAO's Sergey Tyul'bashev reports the discovery of two new RRATs—designated J1550+09 and J2047+13. The finding was made with the Large Phased Array at PRAO with a channel width of 78 kHz and a readout time of 12.5 milliseconds. The observations were conducted simultaneously in 96 spatial beams at declinations from -7 to +42 degrees.

"The large effective area of the radio telescope, which is approximately 45,000 m2, provides high fluctuation sensitivity, which makes it possible to search for RRATs," the researchers explained.
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Dark matter: Our review suggests it's time to ditch it in favor of a new theory of gravity
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-dark-ditc ... avity.html
by Indranil Banik, The Conversation

We can model the motions of planets in the Solar System quite accurately using Newton's laws of physics. But in the early 1970s, scientists noticed that this didn't work for disk galaxies—stars at their outer edges, far from the gravitational force of all the matter at their center—were moving much faster than Newton's theory predicted.

This made physicists propose that an invisible substance called "dark matter" was providing extra gravitational pull, causing the stars to speed up—a theory that's become hugely popular. However, in a recent review my colleagues and I suggest that observations across a vast range of scales are much better explained in an alternative theory of gravity proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982 called Milgromian dynamics or Mond—requiring no invisible matter.

Mond's main postulate is that when gravity becomes very weak, as occurs at the edge of galaxies, it starts behaving differently from Newtonian physics. In this way, it is possible to explain why stars, planets and gas in the outskirts of over 150 galaxies rotate faster than expected based on just their visible mass. But Mond doesn't merely explain such rotation curves, in many cases, it predicts them.
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Machine learning identifies crater that ejected famous Martian rock
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-machine-c ... rtian.html
by Curtin University
New Curtin-led research has pinpointed the exact home of the oldest and most famous Martian meteorite for the first time ever, offering critical geological clues about the earliest origins of Mars.

Using a multidisciplinary approach involving a machine learning algorithm, the new research—published today in Nature Communications—identified the particular crater on Mars that ejected the so-called Black Beauty meteorite, weighing 320 grams, and paired stones, which were first reported as being found in northern Africa in 2011.

The researchers have named the specific Mars crater after the Pilbara city of Karratha, located more than 1,500km north of Perth in Western Australia, which is home to one of the oldest terrestrial rocks.

Lead author Dr. Anthony Lagain, from Curtin's Space Science and Technology Center in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the exciting discovery offered never-before-known details about the Martian meteorite NWA 7034, known as "Black Beauty," which is widely studied across the globe. Black Beauty is the only brecciated Martian sample available on Earth, meaning it contains angular fragments of multiple rock types cemented together which is different from all other Martian meteorites that contain single rock types.
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A new measurement record for strongest magnetic field in universe
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-strongest ... verse.html
by Chinese Academy of Sciences
Neutron stars have the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, and the only way to measure their surface magnetic field directly is to observe the cyclotron absorption lines in their X-ray energy spectra. The Insight-HXMT team has recently discovered a cyclotron absorption line with an energy of 146 keV in the neutron star X-ray binary Swift J0243.6+6124, corresponding to a surface magnetic field of more than 1.6 billion Tesla. After direct measurement of the strongest magnetic field in the universe at about 1 billion Tesla in 2020, the world records for the highest energy cyclotron absorption line and direct measurement of the strongest magnetic field in the universe have been broken.

The findings, obtained jointly by the Key Laboratory for Particle Astrophysics at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Kepler Center for Astro and Particle Physics, University of Tübingen (IAAT), were published on June 28 in Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL). Dr. Kong Lingda, Prof. Zhang Shu, and Prof. Zhang Shuangnan from IHEP are the corresponding authors of the paper. Dr. Victor Doroshenko and Prof. Andrea Santangelo from the University of Tübingen significantly contributed to the discovery.
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Researchers Capture the First Example of an Extremely Bright, and Fast-evolving Astronomical Event in the Distant Universe

July 14, 2022

Introduction:
((EurekAlert) A team of astronomers have discovered a mysterious short-duration astronomical event, or transient, that is as bright as a superluminous supernova, but evolving much faster, reports a study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters published on July 12.

The universe is full of energetic transient phenomena, astronomical events that occur over a short period of time. For example, most massive stars end their lives by exploding spectacularly, known as a supernova, a major type of transients. In order to understand the origin of these transient phenomena, various time-domain surveys have been carried out in the past few decades. As more and more transients have been discovered, researchers began noticing some new transient types in recent years.

To figure out the nature of various transient phenomena, an international transient survey project called "MUltiband Subaru Survey for Early-phase Supernovae" (MUSSES), led by Ji-an Jiang, a former Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Project Researcher (currently postdoctoral fellow at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ)) attempt to catch various fast-evolving transients within one day of their occurrence, using the most powerful survey facility in the world, the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) mounted on the 8.2-m Subaru telescope.

By carrying out consecutive Subaru/HSC observations in December 2020, 20 fast-evolving transients have been discovered, and one of them, MUSSES2020J (AT 2020afay), caught Jiang's attention.

"MUSSES2020J was discovered with very low brightness on December 11 in 2020, and its brightness showed significant brightening during our observation. More surprisingly, the fast light curve evolution and very high redshift of the transient confirmed by follow-up observations indicate that the brightness of MUSSES2020J was about 50 times higher, while the rising phase was much shorter than those of normal supernovae, which indeed show high similarity to a recently discovered peculiar transient, AT 2018cow. We suggest calling these extreme transients as Fast Blue Ultraluminous Transient (FBUT). So far only a handful of them have been discovered, and we had never seen one soon after its occurrence due to their extremely fast evolution. Thanks to the high-cadence survey mode and the excellent performance of Subaru/HSC, we were able to perfectly catch this amazing phenomenon for the first time. The early multiband light-curve data bring some unique information to understand the origin of these amazing transients," said first author Jiang.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/958794

Caltrek’s comment: In reading this, I just had a thought for a futuristic science fiction story. What if such events were caused by wars between highly advanced civilizations?

Alternatively, I would think that such naturally occuring events might be very bad news for nearby advanced civilizations, or for any nearby planets (or moons etc.) harboring life forms.
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
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Human and machine intelligence work together to find 40,000 ring galaxies
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-human-mac ... axies.html
by Royal Astronomical Society

Image
Human and machine intelligence worked together to find 40,000 ring galaxies, scientists at the National Astronomy Meeting will announce this week. Dr. Mike Walmsley of the University of Manchester and the Galaxy Zoo collaboration will present the new work, describing how this "cyborg" approach measured the shapes of millions of galaxies.

Galaxies live a chaotic life. Collisions with other galaxies and bursts of energy from supermassive black holes disrupt the colors and orbits of billions of stars, leaving tell-tale markers that volunteers search for on the Galaxy Zoo website. But understanding exactly which cosmic events lead to which markers requires millions of measured images—more than humans could ever search.

To help, Dr. Mike Walmsley used a decade of Galaxy Zoo volunteer measurements (totaling more than 96 million clicks) to create an automatic assistant—a new AI algorithm. The algorithm, affectionately named "Zoobot," can not only accurately predict what volunteers would say but understands where it might be mistaken.
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Dmitry Rogozin, the bellicose director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos who has railed against NASA and its western space allies over sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is stepping down under orders from President Vladimir Putin, the Russian news agency Tass reported Friday.

Rogozin, who once derisively joked that NASA would need trampolines to get its astronauts to space without Russian help and who later said the United States would need "broomsticks" to reach orbit without Russian rocket engines, will be replaced by Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-sp ... int-crews/
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