The Milky Way is not alone in its neighborhood. It has captured smaller galaxies in its orbit, and the two largest are known as the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible as twin dusty smears in the Southern Hemisphere.
As the Magellanic Clouds began circling the Milky Way billions of years ago, an enormous stream of gas known as the Magellanic Stream was ripped from them. The stream now stretches across more than half of the night sky. But astronomers have been at a loss to explain how the stream became as massive at it is, over a billion times the mass of the sun.
Now, astronomers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues have discovered that a halo of warm gas surrounding the Magellanic Clouds likely acts as a protective cocoon, shielding the dwarf galaxies from the Milky Way’s own halo and contributing most of the Magellanic Stream’s mass. As the smaller galaxies entered the sphere of the Milky Way’s influence, parts of this halo were stretched and dispersed to form the Magellanic Stream. The researchers published their findings today (September 9, 2020) in the journal Nature.
Astronauts lose bone and muscle mass on long-duration missions, but a new treatment administered to mice in space could prevent that from happening, a new study finds.
It’s good news for anyone planning on spending months floating around in the International Space Station (ISS) or for those who might one day find themselves on a long-haul flight to Mars, as researchers imaging the brains of Russian cosmonauts have found that while the brain does undergo changes in a microgravity environment, it doesn’t deteriorate.
New research suggests prolonged exposure to microgravity does cause parts of the brain to reorganise itself, but does not trigger loss of brain tissue.
NASA changed its mind and decided not to buy a seat on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to deliver its astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) in the spring of 2021, according to Roscosmos’ 2019 annual report.
In May, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine announced that the option of acquiring a seat on the Soyuz MS-18 manned spacecraft, which would be launched in April 2021, is being considered. In August, a source in the space industry said that for the first time in the history of the ISS, a crew consisting of only Russian cosmonauts would fly on Soyuz MS-18, but there was no official confirmation of this so far.
“At the beginning of 2020, the US side announced its readiness to purchase services for the delivery of only one astronaut in the fall of 2020: the conditions are currently being discussed, the modification project is being adjusted,” the report says. In December 2019, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin announced the decision to provide NASA with one seat on the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft to be launched in October 2020 and Soyuz MC-18 to be launched in April 2021.
An alert pops up in your email: The latest spacecraft observations are ready. You now have 24 hours to scour 84 hours-worth of data, selecting the most promising split-second moments you can find. The data points you choose, depending on how you rank them, will download from the spacecraft in the highest possible resolution; researchers may spend months analyzing them. Everything else will be overwritten like it was never collected at all.
These are the stakes facing the Scientist in the Loop, one of the most important roles on the Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission team. Seventy-three volunteers share the responsibility, working weeklong shifts at a time to ensure the very best data makes it to the ground. It takes a keen and meticulous eye, which is why it’s always been left to a carefully-trained human – at least until now.
A paper published recently in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences describes the first artificial intelligence algorithm to lend the Scientist in the Loop a (virtual) hand.
The present generation has witnessed a rare phenomenon during one’s life: the rise of a new civilization. Fueled by the global-minded elite who influenced and controlled the comprehensive economic policies and strategies, a new wave of globalization has emerged. Targowski (2014) defined “global civilization” as the following:
“Global Civilization is a large Global Society living in integrated horizontally whole or partial spaces of contemporary, autonomous civilizations as a fuzzy reification (invisible-visible) which is not a part of the larger one and exists over an extended period of time.”
For Targowski, this new global civilization is characterized by an advanced global culture, a “wealth and power-driven global business religion,” and global societal values based on shared knowledge systems.
In fact, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) provoked a shift in the postindustrial societal modus apredi through shifting the economy from a product-based to a service-based economy. It also transformed a theoretical based knowledge into a technological based experience based on smart machines, and thus, the global Civilization continues to emerge and evolve following the technological evolution as well as the economic trends. Consequently, such an evolution affected the global elite’s orientations who transformed from a colonial minded elite to a technological, information-minded elite [1].
Other scholars attributed global Civilization’s evolution to the Internet, which induced the globalization waves to transform societies into a globalized society. Nonetheless, the contemporary global society Consists of many sub-societies whereby many are virtual. In this context, Muzaffari argued that the Internet was the precursor for the creation of a “Web Culture,” bringing together individuals from various “conventional cultures” to share new common terminology, rules, and principles [2]. Furthermore, Castells claimed that the Internet processed a kind of “individuation” due to the decline of the community’s physical dimensions and ascription. Nonetheless, Castells emphasized that “individualism” did not isolate individuals. On the contrary, he demonstrated that “individualism” gave birth to a new social construction based on individuals’ quest for like-minded people who shared the same values, agendas, philosophies, and interests [3], among which space was consecrated a considerable part.
In the cradle of the new global societal construct, network technologies have brought together individuals from different parts of the world around their shared interest in space exploration, which has become an indivisible part of the Global Civilization’s culture. In fact, from time immemorial, humankind has been inspired by space as he looked up to the “heavens” and questioned his place in the universe. Furthermore, when addressing the critical space’s impact on the global cultural and intellectual life, Stephen Hawking argued that narrowing the human’s attention to “terrestrial” issues would limit the human spirit [4].
History also demonstrates that humankind’s interest in space is not a new phenomenon [5]. By nature, man pursues his endeavors to explore new dawns, despite the motives propelling his risky ventures that evolved with his evolution [6]. Ignited by Yuri Gagarin’s spacewalk and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, human prospects on space travel have unleashed unlimited possibilities on the humankind’s expansion beyond the Earth’s boundaries.
Thus, space has not only impacted the global culture. It created a shift from a mere inspirational driver and curiosity feeder on existential questions to a space race by which the quest of human expansion beyond what was previously called the “last frontier” is closer than imagined. A paradigm shift gave birth to new space endeavors. Thus, from being contained in the hands of the United States and the former Soviet Union, space exploration has witnessed an unprecedented transformation. Consequently, a fierce race is evolving in which new actors have become active participants [7].
Therefore, the inspirational culture ignited around space, in the cradle of the new global civilization, induced humankind to realize further complex developments in the space field. The gradual proliferation of space activities in communication, technological and scientific research, defense and intelligence, surveillance, command, and control, grew to revolutionize man’s intervention into the space dominion [8]. “New Space” has transformed space from what was once called “The Last Frontier” into “The New Frontier,” where an unprecedented business-driven dynamic of a global space sector emerged to form what economists called a “New Space Ecosystem” [9].
As a consequence of the “New space” race, humankind’s exploration and use of space have been taken to a new level, and thus, the global space sector contributed to the socio-economic development addressed by the author in various articles and conferences.
Note: The use of the above pictures falls under the scope of “fair use” doctrine.
References
[1] Targowski, Andrew From Globalization Waves To Global Civilization, Comparative Civilizations Review (CCR) 70:70 (2014):73–89. <https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol70/iss70/7>. (Accessed on February 27, 2020).
[2] Mozaffari, Mehdi, Civilization, And Globalization In A World Of Turmoil, Glocalism: Journal Of Culture, Politics And Innovation (JCPI) (2019):1–12, p 10. DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2019.1.5
[3] Castells, Manuel. 2014. « The Impact Of The Internet On Society: A Global Perspective.» In Change: 19 Key Essays On How The Internet Is Changing Our Lives. 2014: BBVA’s annual series. Sixth Edition: at 127.
[4] Hawking, Stephen « Foreword to The Physics of Star Trek.» In Lawrence M. Krauss, ed., The Physics of Star Trek. 2007: Basic Books.
[5] Cousins, Norman, Philip Morrison, James Michener, Jacques Cousteau, Ray Bradbury, Why Man Explores, California Institute of Technology Symposium, Pasadena, July 2, 1976, California, NASA Educational Publication 123, Government Printing Office: Washington D. C., 1977.
[7] Bockel, Jean Marie, The Future of The Space Industry, General Report of the Economic and Security Committee, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, NATO Publishing, NATO, 2018, p 1.
[8] Jean Marie Bockel, The Future of The Space Industry, General Report of the Economic and Security Committee, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, NATO Publishing, NATO, 2018, p 1.
[9] Iacomino, Clelia, Commercial Space Exploration: Potential Contributions of Private Actors to Space Exploration Programs, European Space Policy Springer Briefs in Applied Sciences and Technology Series, Vienna, 2019, Springer, p 3.
Many colorful stars are packed close together in this image of the globular cluster NGC 1805, taken by the NASA /ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This tight grouping of thousands of stars is located near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. The stars orbit closely to one another, like bees swarming around a hive. In the dense center of one of these clusters, stars are 100 to 1000 times closer together than the nearest stars are to our Sun, making planetary systems around them unlikely.
The striking difference in star colors is illustrated beautifully in this image, which combines two different types of light: blue stars, shining brightest in near-ultraviolet light, and red stars, illuminated in red and near-infrared. Space telescopes like Hubble can observe in the ultraviolet because they are positioned above Earth’s atmosphere, which absorbs most of this wavelength, making it inaccessible to ground-based facilities.
This young globular cluster can be seen from the southern hemisphere, in the Dorado constellation, which is Portugese for dolphinfish. Usually, globular clusters contain stars which are born at the same time; however, NGC 1805 is unusual as it appears to host two different populations of stars with ages millions of years apart. Observing such clusters of stars can help astronomers understand how stars evolve, and what factors determine whether they end their lives as white dwarfs, or explode as supernovae.
