Category: The Moon

Our moon

Hubble Telescope spies a very sparkly mini-galaxy (image)

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New images released by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are of the Pegasus Dwarf spheroidal galaxy, also known as Andromeda VI.  Pegasus is located in the Andromeda Galaxy, also called Messier 31, which is the Milky Way’s closest neighbour at about 2,480,000 light-years away from Earth. As such, Andromeda is one of the few galaxies visible to the naked eye — best observed in November. The images were captured as part of a re-examination of the entire Andromeda system, meant to gather further information to answer long-standing questions related to dark…

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Celestron Origin Intelligent Home Observatory smart telescope review

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The Celestron Origin Intelligent Home Observatory is Celestron’s first smart telescope that brings the wonder of deep sky imaging into the palm of your hand. This makes it easier than ever to take your own photos of nebulas, galaxies and more with just a few seconds of setup. The telescope and built-in camera are controlled with an easy-to-use app that takes all the fuss out of locating and photographing distant celestial spectacles. Priced at $3,999 (£3,069 GBP), the Celestron Origin isn’t within everyone’s budget. This also isn’t a grab-and-go, do-everything…

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Hubble telescope spies a sparkling ‘cosmic fossil’ 3 million light-years away (image)

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The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered an isolated cosmic fossil, which may offer new insight on galaxy formation.  Located about 3 million light-years from Earth, the Tucana Dwarf galaxy sits at the far edge of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes our Milky Way galaxy. This galaxy is home to older stars, leading researchers to believe it may contain traces from the early universe, according to a statement from NASA.  “Having such pristine properties enables scientists to use the Tucana Dwarf as a cosmic fossil,” NASA officials said in…

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Thruster issues delay BepiColombo probe’s Mercury arrival until November 2026

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The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft is set for a Mercury flyby late on Wednesday (Sept. 4), but thruster issues mean the probe faces a lengthy delay before entering orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet. BepiColombo launched in 2018 on an Ariane 5 rocket to seek out answers to mysteries surrounding Mercury. Its circuitous route to entering orbit around Mercury involves one Earth flyby, a pair of Venus flybys and six more around Mercury itself. The Sept. 4 flyby will be BepiColombo’s fourth of Mercury to date.  However, plans for…

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Scientists make lab-grown black hole jets

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An experiment using beams of protons to probe how plasma and magnetic fields interact may have just solved the mystery of how quasars and other active supermassive black holes unleash their relativistic jets. Let’s picture the scene at the heart of a quasar. A supermassive black hole, perhaps hundreds of millions — or even billions — of times the mass of our sun, is ravenously devouring matter that is streaming into its maw from a spiraling, ultra-hot disk. That charged matter is called plasma, and  it gets gravitationally drawn into…

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Satellites are making the night sky brighter — as a launch site, New Zealand has a duty to combat light pollution

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This article was originally published in The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. New Zealand’s space sector has been developing rapidly since the first rocket lifted off in 2017. It now contributes about NZ$1.7 billion in revenue, with plans to grow to $10 billion by 2030. Last year, New Zealand hosted seven rocket launches, all by the US-listed but local company Rocket Lab. It was in response to Rocket Lab’s initial proposal for a launch site that New Zealand developed a regulatory system from scratch in less than two years…

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Stick to the shade in new extended ‘Dune: Awakening’ gameplay trailer (video)

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Dune: Awakening – Gamescom Gameplay Presentation – YouTube Watch On “Your journey begins here, in the desert. Find the Fremen. Wake the Sleeper” It might have felt like we were all living on Arrakis this past July with the relentless scorching heat. Rest assured that cooler temperatures are rapidly arriving, but not for that storied sci-fi destination commonly known as Dune. Folding space back to that desolate planet where the spice Melange is harvested and water is held sacred, a new 27-minute gameplay trailer for Funcom’s upcoming “Dune: Awakening” was…

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‘Unbreakable’ quantum communication closer to reality thanks to new, exceptionally bright photons

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Scientists have created an “exceptionally bright” light source that can generate quantum-entangled photons (particles of light) which could be used to securely transmit data in a future high-speed quantum communications network. A future quantum internet could transmit information using pairs of entangled photons — meaning the particles share information over time and space regardless of distance. Based on the weird laws of quantum mechanics, information encoded into these entangled photons can be transferred at high speeds while their “quantum coherence” — a state in which the particles are entangled —…

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Best Alien comic books of all time

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Alien: Romulus is the shot in the arm the Alien movie franchise desperately needed, and FX’s Alien: Earth, its first-ever TV show, could keep the momentum going next year. If you’re dying to learn more about the Xenomorphs and experience wildly different tales of horror, we’ve put together our list of the best Alien comic books of all time. For decades, it was Dark Horse Comics who had the rights to both Alien and Predator in the realm of comic books, putting out several series and one-shots that were well…

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Weird mystery waves that baffle scientists may be ‘everywhere’ inside Earth’s mantle

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Mysterious zones in the deep mantle where earthquake waves slow to a crawl may actually be everywhere, new research finds. Scientists already knew that ultra-low velocity zones (ULVZs), hover near hotspots — regions of the mantle where hot rock moves upward, forming volcanic island chains such as Hawaii. But mysterious earthquake waves suggest that these features might be widespread. ULVZs, which are located in the lower mantle near the core-mantle boundary, can slow seismic waves by up to 50%. That’s remarkable, said Michael Thorne, a geologist and geophysicist at the University of Utah.…

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