Sunday, October 27, 2019

From rovers on Mars to an orbiting Tesla, this decade revolutionized how we see space - CNET

The decade didn't yield actual aliens anywhere, UFOs, perhaps , but certainly no confirmed close encounters.

Reaching the nearest exoplanet would require inventing some sort of breakthrough propulsion technology to travel at or near the speed of light and then spending several years traversing the 24 trillion miles (39 trillion kilometers) to get there.

* * *

Space has been more than just a canvas for a handful of super-rich dudes to project their childhood dreams upon. Over the past 19 years publicly funded robotic missions fanned out across the solar system, and beyond.

Remarkably, another place that might be hiding a liquid ocean is the frozen surface of Pluto. This supposition comes courtesy of New Horizons, a NASA probe that flew by the dwarf planet in 2015 and returned images of a world far more dynamic and diverse than the distant snowball many long assumed it to be. We're talking a world of methane snow, possible nuclear volcanoes and even hazy blue skies.

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Publisher: CNET
Author: Eric Mack
Twitter: @CNET
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And here's another article:

Exoplanet orbits its star every 18 hours

As the team states in their study, which recently appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ( MNRAS ), the planet was discovered by the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). Located at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile, this telescope is used by a consortium of European universities and agencies to hunt for extrasolar planets.

Specifically, the NGTS is concerned with finding Neptune and super-Earth sized exoplanets around bright stars . To date, the majority of large planets that have short orbital periods have been hot Jupiters, which are the easiest to spot using the transit method, especially with ground-based telescopes.

"The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a robotic exoplanet survey designed to discover Neptune-sized exoplanets! List of Mars orbiters - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org /wiki/List_of_ Mars _orbiters The following table is a list of Mars orbiters, consisting of space probes which were launched from Earth and are currently orbiting Mars .As of December 2016, there are up to fourteen known artificial satellites in Mars ' orbit, six of which are active.!! It consists of 12 identical 20cm telescopes and is located at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. We measure the minuscule drop (as low as 0.1 percent) in the light intensity as a planet transits across the face of its star. To date, we have found nine new transiting exoplanets, including one Neptune-like planet (NGTS-4b)."

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Could a habitable planet orbit a supermassive black hole? - MIT Technology Review

Interstellar holds a special place for science fiction fans. The film's executive producer and scientific advisor was Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who vowed that nothing in the film would violate the laws of physics and that any wild speculation would stem from science.

Various planets orbit Gargantuan. So NASA sends a number of missions to survey the planets in the hope of finding one that is habitable.

Much has been written about the scientific accuracy of the film, its depiction of black holes, and so on, most of it full of praise! Mars Rover Landing Photographed From Mars Orbit | Space www.space.com /16946- mars - rover ...The spectacular descent of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been captured on camera by a spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the view on Aug. 5, 2012.!! The physicist Michio Kaku said it was the gold standard by which future science fiction films will be judged.

But one question has yet to be addressed—is it possible for a habitable planet to orbit a supermassive black hole at all? And today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Jeremy Schnittman at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Publisher: MIT Technology Review
Date: 2019-10-09T11:26:49-04:00
Author: Emerging Technology from the arXiv
Twitter: @techreview
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Planet 9 could be an ancient black hole orbiting the sun - Business Insider

At the edge of our solar system, some unknown object is manipulating the paths of chunks of ice as they circle the sun.

These objects' oval-shaped orbits all point in the same direction and tilt the same way, suggesting that an unseen force is herding them.

At first, scientists thought the culprit was a mysterious planet, which they dubbed Planet Nine (though some call it Planet X ). But a new paper suggests the gravitational pull could come from a primordial black hole — a type of small black hole that scientists have theorized formed during the Big Bang.

Although the existence of primordial black holes has not been confirmed, some scientists think the universe is teeming with them. If they exist, such black holes could make up the 80% of the universe that scientists can't see. They know this " dark matter " exists because its gravity pulls on things throughout the universe.

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Publisher: Business Insider
Date: 2019-09-27
Author: Morgan McFall Johnsen
Twitter: @SciInsider
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This may worth something:

"The Gargantua Hypothesis" --Habitable Planets May Be Orbiting Black Holes | The Daily

A bigger problem says Schnittman “is that if the accretion rate were lower, the density of the disc would also be lower, making it more difficult to radiate! How many satellites and how many rovers are on Mars ...rovers _are_ on_mars How many rovers are orbiting mars ? None. Rovers do not orbit Mars , they move about on its surface. Seven rovers have been sent to Mars of which four landed successfully. Two of the rovers ...!! And without this radiation, the accretion disc would just heat up beyond the temperature of liquid water! Why don't signals from rovers on Mars get lost on the long ...Why don't signals from rovers on Mars get lost on the long trip to Earth? [duplicate] ...I read that there is a satellite orbiting Mars that the rovers send data to but I still find it amazing how that satellite can send signals tens of millions of miles to earth without any amplifications. ...How do the Mars rovers sleep through the night on ...!! So there is a paradox at the heart of this argument that ultimately invalidates it.”

Schnittman calculates that a planet orbiting just beyond the gravitational radius would experience enough heating from the cosmic microwave background to do the trick. "This would be like orbiting a white dwarf at a distance of 0.2 AU," providing enough energy for liquid water, but would also bathe the planet in dangerous levels of ultraviolet.

Then there is the light from o the density of stars at galaxy centers where the night sky of the alien black hole planet would be 100,000 times brighter than on Earth, providing a significant background of UV light and x-rays. Schnittman imagines, reports Technology Review that a civilization that is sufficiently advanced to construct a sort of "reverse Dyson sphere" that reflects this energy. "This would allow habitability much closer to the host supermassive black hole, even in the face of overwhelming background UV or x-ray radiation."

Publisher: The Daily Galaxy
Date: 2019-10-11T12:36:32+00:00
Twitter: @dailygalaxy
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Astronomers Detect a 'Hot Jupiter' With a Staggering 18-Hour-Short Orbit

We have a new record. Perhaps 1,060 light-years away, a gas giant called NGTS-10b is whipping around its star so closely, it completes an entire orbit in just 18.4 hours.

That's nearly as close as the planet can get to the host star without being ripped apart by gravitational forces! Mars Exploration Rovers - NASA Mars mars .nasa.gov/mer Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity exploring the planet mars - facts, information, videos and pictures. Memorable Images from the Rovers View Images. Opportunity's Parting Shot Was a Beautiful Panorama MORE. NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End.!! But it will get closer.

Astronomers have estimated that the exoplanet is spiralling in towards the star, and will cross that ripping-apart point - called the Roche limit - in just 38 million years. It's utterly doomed.

The finding makes this solar system an incredible laboratory for studying tidal interactions between a star and a perilously close giant exoplanet. A paper describing the exoplanet - which belongs to the 'hot Jupiter' type - has been published on pre-print resource arXiv .

Hot Jupiters are fascinating exoplanets. As the name suggests, they are gas giants like Jupiter; unlike Jupiter, however, they orbit very closely to their host stars, with orbital periods of less than 10 days. This is what makes them "hot" (and here you were thinking it was the swimsuits).

Publisher: ScienceAlert
Author: Michelle Starr
Twitter: @ScienceAlert
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