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Category: space

While many of us have a nebulous familiarity with the universe, a very clever animation by the Royal Observatory Greenwich explains the height and purposes of the different layers of the Earth’s atmosphere before it is officially considered to be “space”. These layers include the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and the Kármán Line. The thermosphere, which continues on and on eventually becomes the exosphere and then on to space as we know it.

Have you ever wondered how far away space is; how far are the different things you see above your head? Join the Royal Observatory Greenwich astronomers as they ascend up through the different layers of the Earth’s atmosphere to reveal what we would see at different heights.

The Royal Observatory also put together an equally clever animation that describes how the solar system was formed.

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You may have thought, “Hey, if we’re threatened by an incoming asteroid, we should just nuke it!” You’re not alone: a team of Russian scientists are working on a plot to do so, by detonating miniature asteroids in a lab.

In fact, several groups of researchers are now toying with the idea of asteroid nuking for the sake of planetary defense. The Russian team has even calculated about how much firepower they’d need to perform such a feat.

According to the translated paper published in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics: “Given the scale factor and the results of laboratory experiments, the undeniable destruction of a chondritic asteroid 200 m in diameter by a nuclear explosion with an energy above 3 Mt was shown to be possible.”

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Scientists have mapped 6,000 new craters on the Moon with the help of a newly developed technique based on artificial intelligence (AI).

“When it comes to counting craters on the Moon, it’s a pretty archaic method,” said Mohamad Ali-Dib from the University of Toronto, Scarborough in Canada.

“Basically we need to manually look at an image, locate and count the craters and then calculate how large they are based off the size of the image. Here we’ve developed a technique from artificial intelligence that can automate this entire process that saves significant time and effort,” Ali-Dib said.

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All galaxies, no matter how big they are, rotate once every billion years, astronomers have discovered. The Earth spinning around on its axis once gives us the length of a day, and a complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun gives us a year. “It’s not Swiss watch precision. But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small, if you could sit on the extreme edge of its disk as it spins, it would take you about a billion years to go all the way round,” said Gerhardt Meurer, from of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia.

By using simple maths, you can show all galaxies of the same size have the same average interior density. “Discovering such regularity in galaxies really helps us to better understand the mechanics that make them tick — you won’t find a dense galaxy rotating quickly, while another with the same size but lower density is rotating more slowly,” Meurer said.

Researchers also found evidence of older stars existing out to the edge of galaxies. “Based on existing models, we expected to find a thin population of young stars at the very edge of the galactic disks we studied,” Meurer said.

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In this modern day David and Goliath battle (multiplied by eight), one man is trying to take down a bevy of behemoth industries. CB Insights reports,” Elon Musk thinks and acts on a larger, more cosmic scale than we’re accustomed to… His main projects take on almost every major industry and global problem conceivable, and imagine a disruptive fundamental rewiring of that space or sector.”

Above: The companies and initiatives connected to Elon Musk (Source: CB Insights)

So which sectors are on Musk’s hit list? CB Insights looks at: “8 different industries where Musk and his companies operate to understand how they have begun to change,” transform, and mold them into Musk’s futuristic vision. Digital Journal provides a top-line recap highlighting the scope and breadth of what Elon Musk is attempting…

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AI spots nearly 7,000 undiscovered craters on the moon within a matter of hours — and one could some day host a lunar colony…

The finding was made by a team of researchers led by Ari Silburt at Penn State University and Mohamad Ali-Dib at the University of Toronto.

They fed 90,000 images of the moon’s surface into an artificial neural network (ANN).

ANNs try to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn and can be trained to recognise patterns in information.

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In this modern day David and Goliath battle (multiplied by eight), one man is trying to take down a bevy of behemoth industries. CB Insights reports, “Elon Musk thinks and acts on a larger, more cosmic scale than we’re accustomed to… His main projects take on almost every major industry and global problem conceivable, and imagine a disruptive fundamental rewiring of that space or sector.”

*This article comes to us courtesy of EVANNEX (which also makes aftermarket Tesla accessories). Authored by Matt Pressman.

So which sectors are on Musk’s hit list? CB Insights looks at: “8 different industries where Musk and his companies operate to understand how they have begun to change,” transform and mold them into Musk’s futuristic vision. Digital Journal provides a top-line recap highlighting the scope and breadth of what Elon Musk is attempting…

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Following a public naming campaign that drew 115,000 participants, NASA’s New Horizons team has selected the name Ultima Thule for the spacecraft’s second target, Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 2014 MU69, which the probe is scheduled to fly past on New Year’s Day 2019.

Pronounced ultima thoolee, this name was nominated by more than 40 participants in the campaign, which ran from early November through December 6 of last year.

Initially scheduled to end on December 1, the project was extended five days due to high levels of participation.

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“They are extraordinarily stable arrangements of such chaotic elements.”

One of these was the question of what lay at its elusive poles. When scientists got the first images, they were stunned. At the north pole, eight storms surrounded one storm at the center. At the south pole, it was the same arrangement, only with five storms.

But the numbers stayed oddly constant: the storms weren’t drifting and merging, as current understanding of the science suggests they should.

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