The Nordic KvarkenSpaceEco project, led by the University of Vaasa, has brought the Kvarken region into a new space age. Sustainable space economy and space-based data are now offering exciting business opportunities for companies in the region.
This galaxy, named 9io9, is situated at such an immense distance that its light has traveled for over 11 billion years before reaching the Earth.
A powerful ground-based telescope has detected a magnetic field in a most distant galaxy, making it an unprecedented discovery. To date, astronomers have mostly detected and mapped magnetic fields in nearby galaxies.
Continue reading “Most remote galactic magnetic field found in early universe” »
Chinese scientists have apparently developed a new kind of magnetized coaxial gun that can generate magnetized plasma rings to move stuff at a distance without physical contact.
Chinese scientists are working on a device that uses plasma rings to move objects at a distance. Touted as possibly being used for contactless satellite recovery, delivery, or space object deflection, the team behind the program is confident the device would work in principle, the South China Morning Post.
Likened to the “Jedi” abilities of ‘Force Push’ and ‘Force Pull’ in the science fiction franchise ‘Star Wars’ (though possibly closer in concept to an actual ‘tractor beam’), the device could prove revolutionary for many industries if proven viable.
The newly found explosion is so powerful that it produced brightness comparable to hundreds of billions of Suns.
The vast and continuously expanding nature of our universe implies that there is a high probability that our current knowledge and documentation of it represent only a small fraction of the whole picture. And there are millions of new cosmic events and objects waiting to be discovered.
Scientists have now discovered an unusual type of star explosion that is exceptionally luminous and outshines the majority of known supernovae.
Japan’s space agency has launched a rocket on September 6 at 7:42 PM EDT carrying a telescope that’s more advanced than NASA’s Chandra and other X-ray observatories already in orbit. The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission — or XRISM but pronounced as “crism” — is a mission led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in collaboration with NASA and with contributions by the European Space Agency. Lia Corrales, a University of Michigan astronomer and mission participant, told The New York Times that XRISM represents “the next step in X-ray observations.”
The telescope is considered more powerful than its predecessors because of its tools. One of them, called Resolve, is a microcalorimeter spectrometer with the capability to measure tiny increases in temperature when X-rays hit its 6-by-6-pixel detector. It must operate in an environment that’s a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, enabled by a multistage mechanical cooling process inside its refrigerator-sized container with liquid helium. But so long as it’s working, the tool can measure each individual X-ray energy and can provide information on its source’s composition, motion and physical state.
Continue reading “Japan launched an X-ray telescope more advanced than its peers” »
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is best known for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, which was made by smashing together high-energy protons (see Collection: The History of Observations of the Higgs Boson). But protons are not the only particles accelerated by the collider, and some studies call for colliding much heavier objects. Now a team working on the LHC’s ALICE experiment has collided lead nuclei to study an exotic particle called a hypertriton [1]. The result could help researchers reduce errors in models of the structure of neutron stars.
A hypertriton is a tritium nucleus in which one neutron has been replaced with a lambda hyperon, a heavier particle with a quark configuration of up-down-strange rather than up-down-down. Researchers have long known the energy it takes to bind tritium’s proton and two neutrons. But it was unclear how that energy changed with the neutron–lambda hyperon switch.
The ALICE Collaboration turned to lead–lead collisions to answer this question because these collisions produce hypertritons in much greater numbers than proton–proton ones do. A hypertriton quickly decays into a helium-3 nucleus and a pion, with the decay time and the energy of the decay products depending on the binding energy between the lambda hyperon and the hypertriton core.
Several telescopes are still down weeks after a cybersecurity attack was discovered by US National Science Foundation (NSF) researchers. There is presently no information available on when the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the Gemini South telescope in Chile will resume operations. A number of smaller telescopes on the slopes of Cerro Tololo in Chile were also shut down “out of an abundance of caution”.
The IT team at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab discovered suspicious behavior in the laboratory’s computer systems early on the morning of August 1. This led to the decision to temporarily halt activities at the huge optical infrared telescopes located on Hawaii’s Maunakea for the sake of safety.
The ‘double’ telescope located in the southern Andes of Chile was already in the process of being prepped for maintenance and required very little more work.
To check out any of the lectures available from Great Courses Plus go to http://ow.ly/dweH302dILJ
We’ll soon be capable of building self-replicating robots. This will not only change humanity’s future but reshape the galaxy as we know it.
Continue reading “Self-Replicating Robots and Galactic Domination” »
Evolutionary robotics is a sub-field of robotics aimed at developing artificial “organisms” that can improve their capabilities and body configuration in response to their surroundings, just as humans and animals evolve, adapting their skills and appearance over time. A growing number of roboticists have been trying to develop these evolvable robotic systems, leveraging recent artificial intelligence (AI) advances.
A key challenge in this field is to effectively transfer robots from simulations to real-world environments without compromising their performance and abilities. A paper by researchers at University of York, Edinburgh Napier University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of the West of England and University of Sunderland, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, investigated the impact that hardware can have on the development space of evolvable robots.
“One of the greatest challenges for evolutionary robotics is bringing it into the hardware space and creating real, useful robots,” Mike Angus, a research engineer who designed hardware for the study, told Tech Xplore.
