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Category: space

The pair of galaxies NGC 1531/2, engaged in a spirited waltz, is located about 70 million light-years away towards the southern constellation Eridanus (The River). The deformed foreground spiral galaxy laced with dust lanes NGC 1532 is so close to its companion — the background galaxy with a bright core just above the centre of NGC 1532 — that it gets distorted: one of its spiral arms is warped and plumes of dust and gas are visible above its disc. The cosmic dance leads to another dramatic effect: a whole new generation of massive stars were born in NGC 1532 because of the interaction. They are visible as the purple objects in the spiral arms.

This exquisite image was made using the 1.5-metre Danish telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory, Chile. It is based on data obtained through three different filters: B, V and R. The field of view is 12 x 12 arcmin.

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Since their invention, computers have become faster and faster, as a result of our ability to increase the number of transistors on a processor chip.

Today, your smartphone is millions of times faster than the computers NASA used to put the first man on the moon in 1969. It even outperforms the most famous supercomputers from the 1990s. However, we are approaching the limits of this electronic technology, and now we see an interesting development: light and lasers are taking over electronics in computers.

Processors can now contain tiny lasers and light detectors, so they can send and receive data through small optical fibres, at speeds far exceeding the we use now. A few companies are even developing optical processors: chips that use laser light and optical switches, instead of currents and electronic transistors, to do calculations.

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A team of researchers with the University of Copenhagen and the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions has come up with a new explanation regarding the difference in composition of the planets in our solar system. In their paper published in the journal Nature, they describe their study of the calcium-isotope composition of certain meteorites, Earth itself, and Mars, and use what they learned to explain how the planets could be so different. Alessandro Morbidelli with Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.

As Morbidelli notes, most planetary scientists agree that the in our solar system had similar origins as small rocks orbiting the sun, comprising the , which collided and fused, creating increasingly larger rocks that eventually became protoplanets. But from that point on, it is not clear why the planets turned out so differently. In this new effort, the researchers have come up with a new theory to explain how that happened.

The protoplanets all grew at the same rate, the group suggests, but stopped growing at different times. Those that were smaller, they continue, stopped growing sooner than those that were larger. During this time, they further suggest, material was constantly being added to the disk. Early on it, it appears that the composition of the material was different from the material that came later, which explains why the we see today have such differences in composition.

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A young startup called Relativity is pushing space technology forward by pushing 3D printing technology to its limits, building the largest metal 3D printer in the world. And other major companies anxious to try these new ways of manufacturing, too. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at some of the amazing advances that’s launching the technology into a new era.

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A handout photo made available by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows the Soyuz rocket inside Building 112 prior to being rolled out by train to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, March 19, 2018. Expedition 55 crewmembers Ricky Arnold and Drew Feustel of NASA and Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos are scheduled to launch at 1:44 p.m. Eastern time (11:44 p.m. Baikonur time) on March 21 and will spend the next five months living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said.

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