Category: Solar System

Our solar system

Supermassive black holes prefer to eat from wobbly plates

NeRD

Black holes exert a tremendous influence on their surroundings, meaning that when they spin, they literally drag the very fabric of space and time around with them. That means nothing can sit still around a rotating black hole, including the “plates” that these cosmic titans feed from. Those flattened clouds of gas and dust surrounding supermassive black holes are known as accretion disks. Around some supermassive black holes, the churning of these disks is one of the most efficient ways of converting energy in the known universe — changing gravitational…

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SpaceX launching 24 Starlink satellites from Florida on Monday

NeRD

SpaceX plans to launch 24 more of its Starlink internet satellites from Florida’s Space Coast on Monday (Nov. 11). A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday during a four-hour window that opens at 4:02 p.m. EST (2102 GMT). The launch had originally been planned for Sunday evening, but was delayed due to “unfavorable recovery weather conditions,” according to SpaceX. SpaceX will webcast the launch live via X, beginning about five minutes before liftoff. If all goes to…

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NASA’s Roman space telescope gets ready to stare at distant suns to find alien planets

NeRD

In a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, scientists have successfully integrated a crucial component onto the Roman Space Telescope. This device, known as the Roman Coronagraph Instrument, is designed to block starlight, enabling scientists to detect the faint light from planets beyond our solar system. This achievement marks a significant milestone for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a next-generation space observatory that will launch around May 2027. With a field of view at least 100 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope,…

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This Week In Space podcast: Episode 136 —SpaceX Ascendant

NeRD

SpaceX Ascendant – Can Anyone Compete? – YouTube Watch On On Episode 136 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik talk with journalist and author Eric Berger about the rise of SpaceX and Elon Musk’s future in US politics and the market. At this point, can anyone compete with SpaceX? Love him or hate him, Elon Musk and his cadre of very talented employees and partners have built the most remarkable launch service in history, increasing the US launch rate from a handful to over 100 per…

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Where do fast radio bursts come from? Astronomers tie mysterious eruptions to massive galaxies

NeRD

Every day, invisible to the human eye, thousands of enigmatic flashes of cosmic energy known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) erupt across the sky, releasing as much energy in milliseconds as the sun does in a day. Thanks to their fleeting nature, scientists have often had to rely on luck just to observe FRBs, let alone pinpoint where they come from or what causes them to behave the way they do. Now, astronomers led by Kritti Sharma at the California Institute of Technology posit that such energy-packed light flashes tend…

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Australian company Gilmour Space gets country’s 1st orbital launch license

NeRD

Australia is poised to be the next country to take the giant leap into orbit. Aussie-based company Gilmour Space received the country’s first orbital launch license this week, as it prepares for the first test flight of its Eris rocket. A specific launch date is expected within the next few weeks, according to a Gilmour Space press release, with a liftoff from the company’s Bowen Orbital Spaceport, in northern Queensland. Gilmour Space opened its doors in 2015, and has since grown to more than 200 employees. Located on Queensland’s Gold…

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4 years after the giant Arecibo Observatory collapsed, we finally know what happened

NeRD

What does the discovery of a binary pulsar in 1974, the discovery of the first exoplanets, and the most powerful message humans have ever sent out into space all have in common? They all happened at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. With a spherical reflector dish that was 305 meters (roughly 1000 feet) in diameter, Arecibo held the title of world’s largest radio telescope for over half a century — from its construction in 1963 until 2016. To the dismay of astronomers around the world, in 2020, Arecibo’s reflector…

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NASA still mum about SpaceX Crew-8 astronaut’s medical issue

NeRD

NASA is not yet ready to tell us why one of its astronauts was hospitalized shortly after returning to Earth last month. That astronaut was one of the four members of SpaceX‘s Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station (ISS), which ended with a splashdown off the coast of Florida on Oct. 25. Everything appeared to go well with the landing. Shortly thereafter, however, all four astronauts — NASA’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos — were taken to a Florida hospital for…

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Saturn and the moon put on a celestial show Sunday night. Here’s how to see it

NeRD

Saturn gets close to the moon tonight, and skywatchers in Florida, northwestern South America, the Caribbean and Central America will see the ringed planet briefly disappear behind our lunar companion. When a celestial body, such as a moon, planet or an asteroid passes in front of another celestial body, blocking its view, we call that an occultation. The word is derived from the Latin occultäre, to conceal or hide.  Occultations of planets by the moon are fairly rare events for any given location on Earth, but when they do occur,…

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Milky Way swirls over famous Easter Island statutes in stunning photo

NeRD

Sometimes a photo can captivate so powerfully that you are transported to another place and time. When photographer Josh Dury traveled to Easter Island for last month’s annular solar eclipse, he wasn’t going to let a single moment go to waste. Although primarily there with a group of expert Astro Trails eclipse chasers for the day-time event, Dury also managed to capture some images overnight, with some of the island’s famous statues, known as Moai. Due to its remote location, Easter Island has one of the darkest skies on Earth.…

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