Scientists still aren't sure. But researchers have figured out a new way to model in a lab the sort of defect that could have caused the great unbalancing of the early universe. In a new paper, published today (Jan. 16) in the journal Nature Communications, scientists showed that they can use supercooled helium to model those first moments of existence — specifically, to re-create one possible set of conditions that may have existed just after the Big Bang.
The rate at which asteroids are slamming into Earth has nearly tripled since the dinosaurs first roamed, according to a survey of the scars left behind.Researchers worked out the rate of asteroid strikes on the moon and the Earth and found that in the past 290m years the number of collisions had increased dramatically.Before that time, the planet suffered an asteroid strike about once every 3m years, but since then the rate has risen to once nearly every 1m years. The figures are based on collisions that left craters at least 10km (6.2 miles) wide.
The question now is whether the rate of asteroid strikes is still rising, or perhaps falling back to a lower level. Either way, Ghent believes there is no cause for alarm. “Because large impacts are very rare in the first place, even if you double or triple the probability they are still very rare,” she said.
A team of scientists has, for the first time, used a single, cohesive computer model to simulate the entire life cycle of a solar flare: from the buildup of energy thousands of kilometers below the solar surface, to the emergence of tangled magnetic field lines, to the explosive release of energy in a brilliant flash.
New study of nearby supernova SN1987A answers longstanding debate
Stephen Hawking liked to claim that, if his most famous prediction had been verified experimentally, he would have won a Nobel prize. The prediction was that, as he once put it, “black holes ain’t so black”. These stars, which collapse to an infinitely dense singularity, can emit intense radiation from just outside their event horizon – the point of no return beyond which even light can’t escape from the intense gravity.
Physicists from the Higher School of Economics and Space Research Institute have identified a mechanism explaining the appearance of two dusty plasma clouds resulting from a meteoroid that impacted the surface of the Moon. The study was published in JETP Letters.
(Abstract)Despite the existence of co-orbital bodies in the solar system, and the prediction of the formation of co-orbital planets by planetary system formation models, no co-orbital exoplanets (also called trojans) have been detected thus far. Here we study the signature of co-orbital exoplanets in transit surveys when two planet candidates in the system orbit the star with similar periods. Such pair of candidates could be discarded as false positives because they are not Hill-stable. However, horseshoe or long libration period tadpole co-orbital configurations can explain such period similarity. This degeneracy can be solved by considering the Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) of each planet. We then focus on the three planet candidates system TOI-178: the two outer candidates of that system have similar orbital period and had an angular separation near π/3 during the TESS observation of sector 2. Based on the announced orbits, the long-term stability of the system requires the two close-period planets to be co-orbitals. Our independent detrending and transit search recover and slightly favour the three orbits close to a 3:2:2 resonant chain found by the TESS pipeline, although we cannot exclude an alias that would put the system close to a 4:3:2 configuration. We then analyse in more detail the co-orbital scenario. We show that despite the influence of an inner planet just outside the 2:3 mean-motion resonance, this potential co-orbital system can be stable on the Giga-year time-scale for a variety of planetary masses, either on a trojan or a horseshoe orbit. We predict that large TTVs should arise in such configuration with a period of several hundred days. We then show how the mass of each planet can be retrieved from these TTVs.
But long before the EHT, there was an astrophysicist named Jean-Pierre Luminet. All the way back in 1978, he already gave us what could be thought of as the very first image of a black hole's event horizon.It's not, of course, an actual photo. Luminet, whose background was in mathematics, used his skillset to perform the first computer simulation of what a black hole might look like to an observer, using a 1960s punch card IBM 7040 computer.
[...] we should remember that we once endowed SCDM with the same absolute certainty we now attribute to ΛCDM. I was there, 3,000 internet years ago, when SCDM failed. There is nothing so sacred in ΛCDM that it can’t suffer the same fate, as has every single cosmology ever devised by humanity.
Scientists have discovered a tiny object in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, a kilometer-scale world that could shed light on how planets formed in the early days of the solar system.The find—which marks the first time that a world smaller than ten kilometers has been detected in this part of the solar system—seems like it would require high-resolution telescopes like the 10-meter Keck Observatory in Hawaii. However, it was actually spotted by two modest “amateur telescopes,” according to research published Monday in Nature Astronomy.
Shows you how much amateur equipment has advanced in recent times.Astronomers Discover Rare Kilometer-Sized Object in Outer Solar SystemQuoteScientists have discovered a tiny object in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, a kilometer-scale world that could shed light on how planets formed in the early days of the solar system.The find—which marks the first time that a world smaller than ten kilometers has been detected in this part of the solar system—seems like it would require high-resolution telescopes like the 10-meter Keck Observatory in Hawaii. However, it was actually spotted by two modest “amateur telescopes,” according to research published Monday in Nature Astronomy.
Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, citizen scientists have discovered a planet roughly twice the size of Earth located within its star's habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where liquid water may exist on the planet's surface. The new world, known as K2-288Bb, could be rocky or could be a gas-rich planet similar to Neptune. Its size is rare among exoplanets - planets beyond our solar system.