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Category: space – Page 944

Scientists are no strangers to healthy debate. You need criticism to strengthen your ideas, and when debate is done right, both parties leave knowing more than they did when they started. But there are some things that will just make a scientist mad. One of those things? Saying their scientific theory isn’t scientific. That’s what a trio of physicists did in a 2017 article they published in Scientific American, which stated that the idea of an expanding universe simply isn’t testable. The response from other physicists? Oh, it’s on.

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Situated at about 340 million light-years away from Earth, it finds itself very close to its host star (around a hundredth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), which itself is a medium-sized active K dwarf in the Virgo Constellation.

K2-229b orbits this star every fourteen hours, according to the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Interestingly K2-229b is also the innermost planet in a system of at least three planets, though all three orbit much closer to their star than Mercury. More discoveries like this will help us shed light on the formation of these unusual planets, as well as Mercury itself,” Armstrong added.

Using the K2 telescope, Armstrong and colleagues employed the Doppler spectroscopy technique — also known as the ‘wobble method’ to discover and characterise this faraway planet.

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Today, NASA held a press conference on the status of the James Webb Space Telescope, the organization’s successor to Hubble, and the news was grim. The observatory was supposed to launch between March and June of 2019. JWST will miss that window; while a specific launch time frame hasn’t been established, NASA is currently targeting May 2020.

While the telescope’s individual components meet their requirements, contractor Northrop Grumman needs more time to test them, integrate them together and do environmental testing. In order to monitor the telescope’s schedule, NASA is creating a Independent Review Board (IRB) to monitor this testing and NASA will take its recommendations into account when determining a specific launch window. That will occur sometime this summer.

Many suspected this announcement was coming after a report from the US Government Accountability Office earlier this month. The GAO found that ongoing technical issues with the telescope meant that launch delays were likely, and that the project was at risk of breaching the $8 billion cap set by Congress, which would mean it would need to be reauthorized. The telescope has already encountered delays, and it’s safe to say that more will follow. It’s an incredibly complex, detailed and delicate device, after all.

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China’s defunct space station Tiangong-1 will soon plummet toward Earth, likely this weekend. You will almost certainly not be harmed in any way by it—the odds of it striking an individual person are worse than winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. You should not worry about it.

But we’re humans. We’re all probably wondering, what happens if it becomes clear that pieces of the debris will strike a populated area? This is a long discussion that far predates Tiangong-1.

China launched the house-sized Tiangong-1 space station in 2011. It was a prototype that could only hold a three-person crew, and the plan was for it to fall back to Earth in a controlled reentry, meaning scientists would get to pick where it lands. In 2016, China informed the UN that the satellite was no longer functioning, but denied that it lost control of the ship in some more recent reports. Tiangong-1’s orbit is decaying as the craft slowly succumbs to Earth’s gravity.

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Space Development Nexus will span 6 continents, and serve as the water cooler for the New Space industry as we all make our way to LEO and beyond, Networking individuals and companies from every aspect of the industry from launch vehicles to communications to astrogeology. Where social networking takes constant management, these meetups, Activities, workshops, seminars and other interactive activities will make our message available across the industry, and to the public, with one coherent voice – “Space is for everyone, and we’re bringing it down to Earth.”

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It has no inherent value and causes observers to rotate between feelings of fascination and anger. We’re talking about cryptocurrency, but also art. In a new series, artist Andy Bauch is bringing the two subjects together with works that use abstract patterns constructed in Lego bricks. Each piece visually represents the private key to a crypto-wallet, and anyone can steal that digital cash—if you can decode them.

Bauch first started playing around with cryptocurrencies in 2013 and told us in an interview that he considers himself an enthusiast but not a “rabid promoter” of the technology. “I wasn’t smart enough to buy enough to have fuck-you money,” he said. In 2016, he started to integrate his Bitcoin interest with his art practice.

His latest series of work, New Money, opens at LA’s Castelli Art Space on Friday. Bauch says that each piece in the series “is a secret key to various types of cryptocurrency.” He bought various amounts of Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other alt-coins in 2016 and put them in different digital wallets. Each wallet is encrypted with a private key that consists of a string of letters and numbers. That key was initially fed into an algorithm to generate a pattern. Then Bauch tweaked the algorithm here and there to get it to spit out an image that appealed to him. After finalizing the works, he’s rigorously tested them in reverse to ensure that they do, indeed, give you the right private key when processed through his formula.

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Scientists have used the same technology that brought us time crystals to create a room-temperature maser—a microwave laser—that overcomes many of masers’ past problems.

Masers predate lasers. They’re pretty much the same thing, but masers shoot out microwave light instead of visible or infrared light. Lasers have always been more popular, since masers have only worked in short pulses and required incredibly cold temperatures and vacuums to operate. But now, a team of scientists in the United Kingdom has overcome both old and new challenges to debut their continuously emitting, room-temperature maser. Their research was published this week in Nature.

Masers and lasers operate on basically the same principle. Atoms typically have electrons orbiting their nuclei in specific energy levels. Add some energy in the form of, say, a photon, and the electrons jump to higher energy levels. Pump enough of those electrons into the same higher energy level, and you can release a cascade of photons of the same color (or wavelength, in physics speak) whose waves line up.

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