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ESA Launches 7 New Missions to Supercharge Space Data Transfer
Space is getting crowded – and not just with satellites, but with the massive amounts of data they’re generating. The amount of information being generated and passed through orbit is exploding. From high-resolution Earth observation images to global maritime monitoring, it’s also become a critical link in our infrastructure. But there’s another space this growing
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Scientists Spot a Solar Flare With Surprising Spectral Behavior
On August 19, 2022, solar astronomers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui caught the fading remnants of a C-class solar flare. Their observations showed something unusual: very strong spectral fingerprints of calcium II H and hydrogen-epsilon lines. It was the first time these two light signatures were
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NASA Releases Images of Artemis II’s Flight Behind the Moon
NASA’s Artemis II mission has completed its pass of the far side of the Moon, establishing a new distance record for a crewed spaceflight, over 400,000 km (250,000 mi) from Earth. And in the process, its four-person crew is capturing images of lunar regions no human has ever seen! Fortunately for the rest of us,
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A Baby Star Blows A Giant Gaseous Ring
Despite all we’ve learned about star formation, the process is still riven with mystery. Our prying telescopic eyes struggle to pierce the thick gaseous regions that give birth to stars. Progress has been steady, though, and we can thank the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) for some of it. ALMA is a radio-telescope interferometer comprised
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Could We Actually Terraform Mars? A New Scientific Roadmap Lays Out the Blueprint—And the Risks
Reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson brings the benefits and pitfalls of efforts to terraform the Red Planet into sharp relief. Since the 1970s, when Carl Sagan first suggested the possibility that we could make Mars more Earth-like, that process has been a staple of science fiction. But there’s always been a significant
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Mercury Scout Mission Concept with Solar Sail Propulsion
The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and also the most difficult for spacecraft to visit and explore. This is because as spacecraft get closer to Mercury, the Sun’s enormous gravity pulls in the spacecraft, greatly increasing its speed and making it hard to slow down without large amounts of fuel. But
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Exploding Primordial Black Holes Might Have Reshaped the Early Universe – And Created All Matter As We Know It
The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it’s hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn’t filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That’s the
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Scouring TESS Data With AI Reveals A Hundred New Exoplanets
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are making a growing contribution to astronomy. As powerful telescopes and large automated surveys become more commonplace, the vast quantities of data they generate demand equally powerful diagnostic tools. The Vera Rubin Observatory and its enormous data-generating capacity drive the point home. The observatory’s Legacy Survey of Time
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The Largest Survey of Exoplanet Spins Confirms a Long-held Theory
For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. In the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn both rotate rapidly, completing a rotation in roughly ten hours, while accounting for a significant fraction of the Solar System’s rotational energy. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai’i, a team
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Astronomers Find a Third Galaxy Missing Its Dark Matter, Validating a Violent Cosmic Collision Theory
Astronomers have long argued that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding that holds galaxies together. Without its immense gravitational pull, the rotational spins of galaxies would force them to simply fly apart. But now, scientists have found a string of galaxies that seem to be missing their dark matter entirely. The latest in this string,
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