Ryugu: the asteroid giving credence to the idea that water was delivered to the hot early Earth by icy space rocks.
Callisto is likely an ocean world. I once wrote a graphic novel called OCEAN set around Europa, which was established as an ocean world. I love the idea of Jupiter being surrounded by ocean moons.
The Einstein Ring, an extremely rare phenomenon, turned out to be hiding in plain sight in a galaxy not far away. The galaxy, called NGC 6505, is around 590 million light-years from Earth, a stone’s throw away in cosmic terms. But this is the first time that the ring of light surrounding its center is detected, thanks to Euclid’s high-resolution instruments.,
Physicists have performed a simulation they say sheds new light on an elusive phenomenon that could determine the ultimate fate of the universe.
Pioneering research in quantum field theory around 50 years ago proposed that the universe may be trapped in a false vacuum—meaning it appears stable but in fact could be on the verge of transitioning to an even more stable, true vacuum state.
While this process could trigger a catastrophic change in the universe’s structure, experts agree that predicting the timeline is challenging, but it is likely to occur over an astronomically long period, potentially spanning millions of years.
“Quantum Annealer,” though. That’s a good term. In the paper itself, I also find the term “Quench dynamics of the Ising chain.” No idea what it means but I love the sound and shape of the term. Science as accidental poetics once again.
Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses.
The Quipu Superstructure! That’s the sort of thing I get up in the morning for.
I could also have gone with The Long Ringdown:
Scientists at Goethe University Frankfurt have identified a new way to probe the interior of neutron stars using gravitational waves from their collisions. By analyzing the “long ringdown” phase—a pure-tone signal emitted by the post-merger remnant—they have found a strong correlation between the signal’s properties and the equation of state of neutron-star matter.
I want to hear that. I want to hear the conversion into sound of that single pure tone emitted by two neutron stars colliding.
Or even this:
Matter in intergalactic space is distributed in a vast network of interconnected filamentary structures, collectively referred to as the cosmic web. With hundreds of hours of observations, an international team of researchers has now obtained an unprecedented high-definition image of a cosmic filament inside this web, connecting two active forming galaxies—dating back to when the universe was about 2 billion years old.
The Cosmic Web!
Under the influence of gravity, dark matter forms an intricate cosmic web composed of filaments, at whose intersections the brightest galaxies emerge. This cosmic web acts as the scaffolding on which all visible structures in the universe are built: within the filaments, gas flows to fuel star formation in galaxies.
Vast intergalactic superstructures, the ringing tone produced by colliding dark stars and the cosmic web it all hangs in. What glories.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
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There are plans, I have read, to send humans to the south pole of the moon. That’s where the water is, and it presents a more stable communication position with Earth. The new issue it presents to human exoplanetary habitation is to do with light.
At the South Pole, the sun never rises more than seven degrees off the horizon. That means the shadows are long and deep black, and the sun will always be in people’s eyes. Moving around on the moon will mean moving from pitch black to bright white in a single step, and human eyes can’t adapt to that.
A spacecraft that can provide the propulsion necessary to reach other planets while also being reproducible, relatively light, and inexpensive would be a great boon to larger missions in the inner solar system.
The idea is called Hummingbird, and it’s basically an engine and fuel tank with slots in it for mounting CubeSats. The whole thing was set to weigh 80 kg fully-fuelled. The idea, however, is eleven years old and nobody tried it. I imagine it’s being resurfaced now because people are thinking about the US presidential transition and the seesaw potential between either NASA getting superfunded or being essentially folded into a superfunded SpaceX. If you want to make a future NASA-as-SpaceX-service still look like NASA, lofting a hundred cheap exploratory probes looks virtuous and science-y.
Like the Saunders-Roe test site at High Down, the Ansty (space rocket) test bed used thousands of gallons of water running through a curved duct to soak up the heat from the engine. Huge columns of steam rose up into the Midlands sky. There were occasional complaints from the maternity hospital nearby, not about the danger, but the noise. Sometimes, if a cloud already heavy with vapour passed overhead, the extra steam was just enough to make the droplets precipitate out and start a very localised shower. One memorable day, an inspection team from the Ministry of Supply were soaked by a downpour a hundred yards across and never wondered why they had been placed at that exact spot on the tarmac to witness a firing.
As Space.com reports, the critters — consisting of 15 adults and 40 pupae — caught a ride aboard the recent Tianzhou 8 resupply mission, which successfully linked up with the orbital outpost on November 15.
Now, the flies will be used to study the biological effects of living beyond the pull of Earth’s gravity — and beyond the purview of its magnetic field.
Synthesizer workstations can look like the inside of NASA command modules for spaceflights, so it makes perfect sense that a synthesizer session could be used to create an ersatz field recording of an orbital space station. Such “space ambience,” or satellite ASMR, is heard here as an array of clanking and voices and beeps and signals, and an overall metallic reverberance that lends the whole thing a sense of place.
The search for the universe’s dark matter could end tomorrow—given a nearby supernova and a little luck. The nature of dark matter has eluded astronomers for 90 years, since the realization that 85% of the matter in the universe is not visible through our telescopes. The most likely dark matter candidate today is the axion, a lightweight particle that researchers around the world are desperately trying to find.
Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, now argue that the axion could be discovered within seconds of the detection of gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion. Axions, if they exist, would be produced in copious quantities during the first 10 seconds after the core collapse of a massive star into a neutron star, and those axions would escape and be transformed into high-energy gamma rays in the star’s intense magnetic field.
Dark matter obviously fascinates me. But one of the things that hooks me is: if it doesn’t exist, our standard model of the universe doesn’t work and we know nothing.
Recent research by a student-faculty team at Colgate University unlocks new clues that could radically change the world’s understanding of the origin of dark matter.
Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie and Richard Casey have explored an idea put forth by two scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler, suggesting that dark matter may have originated from a separate “Dark Big Bang,” occurring shortly after the birth of the universe.
There’s lovely accidental poetics in science, all the time:
In 2023, Freese and Winkler proposed that dark matter, unlike ordinary matter, may have arisen from a distinct Big Bang event, which could have taken place months after the conventional Big Bang. In this model, dark matter particles are produced via the decay of a quantum field that only couples to the Dark Sector and is initially trapped in a false metastable vacuum state.
The Dark Sector! The Dark Big Bang!
On Sunday November 23, 1924, 100 years ago this month, readers perusing page six of the New York Times would have found an intriguing article, amid several large adverts for fur coats. The headline read: Finds Spiral Nebulae are Stellar Systems: “Dr. Hubbell Confirms View That They Are ‘Island Universes’; Similar to Our Own.”
We’ve only known there is more than one galaxy for a hundred years.
A research team led by Assistant Professor Makoto Miyoshi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has independently re-analyzed observation data of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy obtained and published by the international joint observation project Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). They found that the structure is slightly elongated in the east-west direction.
A passage in the Norse “Sverris Saga,” the 800-year-old story of King Sverre Sigurdsson, describes a military raid that occurred in AD 1197, during which a body was thrown into a well at Sverresborg Castle, outside Trondheim in central Norway, likely as an attempt to poison the main water source for the local inhabitants.
A new study published in iScience on October 25 describes how researchers used ancient DNA to corroborate the events of the saga and discover details about the “Well-man,” blending history and archaeology with science and setting a precedent for future research on historical figures.
“This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found,” says Professor Michael D. Martin of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s University Museum in Trondheim, Norway.
