The Pillars of Creation, revisited.
The James Webb Space Telescope recaptured the Pillars of Creation in a newly-released photo, revealing a star-studded view of the iconic Hubble target.
Gravitational waves are invisible to the naked eye, but can be detected with instruments such as the Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Pasadena, California. So, after LIGO detected the first blast of waves from the colliding stars in 2017, astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on the merger to learn whatever they could about it. Before long, astronomers saw visible evidence of a high-speed jet of particles, blazing out of the collision site and lighting up globs of matter that had been ejected by the stars.
In their new paper, astronomers analyzed that jet with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory and several additional radio telescopes on Earth. With these observations, the team calculated both the actual speed of the jet, and the perceived physics-defying speed.
The beyond-light-speed illusion arises from the difference in speed between the particles in the jet, and the light particles (or photons) that they emit. Because the jet’s particles move nearly as fast as the light they emit, it can appear as though particles in the early part of the jet are arriving at Earth at nearly the same time as photons in the later stages of the jet — making it appear as though the jet is actually moving faster than the speed of light.
But the true nature of the pillars was famously revealed in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, an image that wowed the public and was soon one of the most recognized and widely published photos ever captured by the venerable observatory.
But Hubble is primarily a visible-light telescope with only a limited ability to detect cloud-piercing infrared emissions from the interior of the pillars and from stars shining in and behind a translucent, obscuring layer of gas making up the interstellar medium that is most apparent looking into the plane of the galaxy.
Continue reading “Webb space telescope reveals ‘Pillars of Creation’ in stunning new detail” »
The massive launch system will carry a mysterious U.S. Space Force payload to a high-altitude geosynchronous orbit.
It’s been a while since SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy to orbit.
A string of payload delays has stopped the heavy-duty rocket from hitting the launch pad since the summer of 2019.
Aeromine says its unique “motionless” rooftop wind generators deliver up to 50% more energy than a solar array of the same price, while taking up just 10% of the roof space and operating more or less silently. In independent tests, they seem legit.
Distributed energy generation stands to play a growing part in the world’s energy markets. Most of this currently comes in the form of rooftop solar, but in certain areas, wind could definitely play a bigger part. Not every spot is appropriate for a bladed wind turbine, though, and in this regard, University of Houston spinoff Aeromine Technologies has designed a very different, very tidy form of rooftop wind energy capture that looks like it could be a real game-changer.
Continue reading “Rooftop wind system delivers 150% the energy of solar per dollar” »
The 2022 Global Satellite Servicing Forum, the DARPA-originated @_CONFERS consortium’s annual event, is Oct. 19–20. In-space servicing and manufacturing stakeholders will discuss in-space lessons learned and their work toward achieving common technical and safety standards to extend satellite utility, resilience, & reliability. Learn more and register at https://www.satelliteconfers.org/gssf/#satelliteservicing #inspaceservicing #GSSF22
Imagine taking a star twice the mass of the sun and crushing it to the size of Manhattan. The result would be a neutron star—one of the densest objects found anywhere in the universe, exceeding the density of any material found naturally on Earth by a factor of tens of trillions. Neutron stars are extraordinary astrophysical objects in their own right, but their extreme densities might also allow them to function as laboratories for studying fundamental questions of nuclear physics, under conditions that could never be reproduced on Earth.
Because of these exotic conditions, scientists still do not understand what exactly neutron stars themselves are made from, their so-called “equation of state” (EoS). Determining this is a major goal of modern astrophysics research. A new piece of the puzzle, constraining the range of possibilities, has been discovered by a pair of scholars at IAS: Carolyn Raithel, John N. Bahcall Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences; and Elias Most, Member in the School and John A. Wheeler Fellow at Princeton University. Their work was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Continue reading “New tool allows scientists to peer inside neutron stars” »
