Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 66

A spinning white dwarf drags space-time around it 100 million times more powerfully than Earth.

Astronomers have recently provided compelling evidence of a star dragging space-time, showcasing one of Einstein’s lesser-known predictions. This phenomenon, known as “frame-dragging,” describes how a spinning object distorts the very fabric of space-time around it. While this effect is nearly imperceptible in everyday life, even on a planetary scale, certain cosmic conditions make it much more noticeable. A study published in Science details these observations using a radio telescope to study a rare pair of compact stars.

Frame-Dragging and Einstein’s Predictions Einstein’s theory of general relativity is fundamental to our understanding of gravity. It suggests that massive objects bend space-time, affecting the motion of nearby objects. Additionally, when these massive bodies spin, they twist space-time around them. Detecting frame-dragging on Earth is extremely challenging, requiring highly sensitive instruments like the Gravity Probe B, a satellite that measures minute changes in angular velocity. But in the cosmos, certain celestial objects can serve as natural laboratories to observe this effect with greater clarity.

Read more | >

Astronomers have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects — the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the team monitored the central regions of our Galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.

“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever,” says Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile who led the overall project.

This record-breaking map comprises 200,000 images taken by ESO’s VISTA — the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. Located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, the telescope’s main purpose is to map large areas of the sky. The team used VISTA’s infrared camera VIRCAM, which can peer through the dust and gas that permeates our galaxy. It is therefore able to see the radiation from the Milky Way’s most hidden places, opening a unique window onto our galactic surroundings.

Read more | >

SpaceX was awarded an eight-launch, $733 million contract by the U.S. Space Force on Friday, as part of an ongoing program intended to foster competition among launch providers.

The award includes seven launches for the Space Development Agency and one for the National Reconnaissance Office, all anticipated to use Falcon 9s and occur no earlier than 2026.

The massive new contract is part of a U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command (SSC) program with the catchy name of “National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1.” This third round of contracts was split into two lanes last year: Lane 1, for lower-risk missions and near-Earth orbits; and Lane 2, for heavy-lift missions and the more demanding orbits.

Read more | >

In the future, there could be a spacecraft capable of maneuvering with unprecedented speed and agility, without the constraints of limited fuel.

The U.S. Space Force has provided funding of $35 million to create a new spacecraft that can “maneuver without regret.”

The University of Michigan is leading a team of researchers and institutions to develop this advanced spacecraft.

Read more | >

Earth’s magnetic field dramatically flipped a little more than 40,000 years ago. We can now experience this upheaval as an unnerving clatter interpreted from information collected by the European Space Agency’s Swarm satellite mission.

Combining the satellite data with evidence of magnetic field line movements on Earth, European geoscientists mapped the so-called Laschamps event and represented it using natural noises like the creaking of wood and the crashing of colliding rocks.

The resulting compilation from the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Center for Geosciences is unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

Read more | >

The system that produced this outburst is referred to as CXOU J005245.0–722844. It was recently identified by members of the Einstein Probe team and confirmed by the Swift team as the seventh-known example of a Be/White Dwarf X-ray binary. Be/White Dwarf binaries are binary systems in which a white dwarf star orbits a hot young star surrounded by a disk of stellar material. Astronomers expect these binaries to be commonly observed, Gaudin said, and the lack of known examples is a mystery.

“Novae are explosions that happen when material from a nearby star is deposited onto the surface of a white dwarf,” Gaudin said. “After enough material has been built up, the surface undergoes rapid thermonuclear fusion which creates the outburst. Most are events that reach moderate luminosities and decay over the course of several weeks. This nova is strange not just in its extremely luminous behavior but also in its short duration.”

The thermonuclear reaction during the nova is similar to a massive hydrogen bomb exploding—the explosion produces that can be seen by telescopes on Earth and in orbit around Earth. According to the researchers, the nova was visible at optical wavelengths, or , for just under a week and in X-rays for just under two weeks.

Read more | >

“One option could be to have astronauts use this simulation to prepare for upcoming lunar exploration missions,” said Joe Louca.

How will future missions to the Moon help extract valuable resources that can be used for scientific research or lunar settlement infrastructure? This is what a recent study being presented this week at the IROS 2024 (IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Bristol investigated how a combination of virtual simulations and robotic commands could help enhance teleoperated robotic exploration on the lunar surface on future missions.

For the study, the researchers used a method called model-mediated teleoperation (MMT) to create simulated regolith and send commands to a robot that carried out the task. In the end, the researchers found effectiveness and trustworthiness of the simulated regolith to the robot conducting the tasks was 100 percent and 92.5 percent, respectively. The reason teleoperated robots are essential is due to the time lag between the Earth and the Moon and extracting resources from the lunar surface, known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), is also being deemed an essential task at developing lunar infrastructure for future astronauts.

Read more | >