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Category: space

Although we usually have a pretty good handle on all the different kinds of blips and blobs detected by our telescopes, it would be unwise to assume we’ve seen everything there is to see out there in the big, wide Universe. Case in point: a new kind of signal spotted by radio telescopes, which has astronomers scratching their heads.

Four of these strange objects have been detected. All of them are circular in shape, and three are particularly bright around the edges — like a ring, or a bubble that is more opaque around the edges.

An international team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Ray Norris of Western Sydney University in Australia has nicknamed them ORCs — short for “Odd Radio Circles” — in a new paper posted to arXiv and submitted to Nature Astronomy, where it awaits peer review.

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Astrophysicians have used AI to discover 250 new stars in the Milky Way, which they believe were born outside the galaxy.

Caltech researcher Lina Necib named the collection Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night. She suspects the stars are remnants of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way many moons ago.

To develop the AI, Necib and her team first tracked stars across a simulated galaxy created by the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. They labeled the stars as either born in the host galaxy, or formed through galaxy mergers. These labels were used to train a deep learning model to spot where a star was born.

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Mars’ poles contain millennia-old ice deposits. They also contain carbon dioxide, iron, aluminium, silicon and sulfur, which could be used to make glass, brick and plastic. Furthermore, the planet’s atmosphere contains enough hydrogen and methanol for fuel.

The tallest mountain on Mars and in the solar system is Olympus Mons, and it is two and a half times taller than Mt. Everest. A Martian canyon system, called Valles Marineris, is the length of the entire continental United States and three times deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Mars Colony: Location, Location, Location

The first step to building a colony is to figure out where the best chance of survival is. For Mars, some researchers have identified the planet’s poles, which contain millennia-old ice deposits. These are thought to contain large amounts of ice, which mars settlers could extract and turn into liquid water.

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There’s something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they’re unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before.

The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, or ORCs, for their shape and overall peculiarity. Astronomers don’t yet know exactly how far away these ORCs are, but they could be linked to distant galaxies. All objects were found away from the Milky Way’s galactic plane and are around 1 arcminute across (for comparison, the moon’s diameter is 31 arcminutes).

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NASA is about to begin building its latest spacecraft. Called “Psyche” it will explore a 140 miles/226 kilometers-wide asteroid called “16 Psyche.” Today it’s passed a major milestone.

Why is NASA going to ‘16 Psyche?’

Located in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, metal-rich 16 Psyche is thought to be the exposed metallic iron, nickel and gold core of a protoplanet. Most asteroids are rocky or icy.

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Quantum information scientists have introduced a new method for machine-learning classifications in quantum computing. The non-linear quantum kernels in a quantum binary classifier provide new insights for improving the accuracy of quantum machine learning, deemed able to outperform the current AI technology.

The research team led by Professor June-Koo Kevin Rhee from the School of Electrical Engineering, proposed a quantum classifier based on quantum state fidelity by using a different initial state and replacing the Hadamard classification with a swap test. Unlike the conventional approach, this method is expected to significantly enhance the classification tasks when the training dataset is small, by exploiting the quantum advantage in finding non-linear features in a large feature space.

Quantum machine learning holds promise as one of the imperative applications for . In machine learning, one for a wide range of applications is classification, a task needed for recognizing patterns in labeled training data in order to assign a label to new, previously unseen data; and the kernel method has been an invaluable classification tool for identifying non-linear relationships in complex data.

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On March 12th 2020 a space telescope called Swift detected a burst of radiation from halfway across the Milky Way. Within a week, the newly discovered X-ray source, named Swift J1818.0–1607, was found to be a magnetar, a rare type of slowly rotating neutron star with one of the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe.

Spinning once every 1.4 seconds, it’s the fastest spinning known, and possibly one of the youngest in the Milky Way. It also emits pulses like those seen from pulsars—another type of rotating neutron star. At the time of this detection, only four other radio-pulse-emitting magnetars were known, making Swift J1818.0–1607 an extremely rare discovery.

In a recently published study led by a team of scientists from the ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), it was found that the pulses from the magnetar become significantly fainter when going from low to high : It has a steep radio spectrum. Its radio emission is not only steeper than the four other radio magnetars, but also steeper than ~90% of all pulsars. Additionally, they found the magnetar had become over 10 times brighter in only two weeks.

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