There's a lot of junk in space. Tens of thousands of pieces of it, circling the Earth at thousands of miles per hour. Each piece is an orbital bullet that can endanger satellites, manned capsules, and the International Space Station.
The European Space Agency is about to pull one of the bigger hunks of garbage from orbit. But there's a problem: The same tech that could help make space cleaner might, in the long run, also make it more dangerous.
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India Announces Plans For Its First Human Space Mission | WAMU
This pitch-black exoplanet is spiraling toward its doom | Popular Science
Researchers discovered WASP-12b in 2008, as its passage in front of its star dimmed the host's light, causing a daily flicker. Follow-up observations also revealed that the planet's heat makes it glow, letting astronomers tell when it disappeared behind the star as well.
After years of scrutiny from multiple teams, astronomers noticed that the star wasn't flickering with perfect regularity. Rather, the sun started to dim earlier and earlier.
The new research, which appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters , settles this debate. The researchers report new data from ten transits (which happen when the planet passes in front of the star) and four "occultations" (when it slips behind). If WASP12-b's orbital oval were turning, the timing of the planet's disappearances would evolve differently from those of its transits, because a planet's speed changes more in an elliptical orbit.
You've likely never heard of the world's greatest ocean migration.
The greatest animal migration on Earth is likely something you never heard of and few have witnessed: legions of tiny marine creatures rising to the ocean surface every night to feed on tiny plants, then sinking back into the deep, dark water at dawn.
Called the diel vertical migration, it was first recorded nearly 200 years ago by hauling ship nets through the water column. Today, marine scientists still sample the movement using shipboard nets. They also shoot acoustic signals into the water to track the sound “backscattering” off the zooplankton as they migrate up and down. Some collect data from aircraft, deploying a lidar system that uses a kind of laser radar to create the backscatter.
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U.S. military tests radiation belt cleanup in space | Science
The U.S. military thought it had cleared the decks when, on 9 July 1962, it heaved a 1.4-megaton nuclear bomb some 400 kilometers into space: Orbiting satellites were safely out of range of the blast. But in the months that followed the test, called Starfish Prime, satellites began to wink out one by one. There was an unexpected aftereffect: High-energy electrons, shed by radioactive debris and trapped by Earth's magnetic field, were fritzing out the satellites' electronics and solar panels.
Astronomers slam high-speed global internet plans as new satellites will 'get in the way'
Astronomers have dubbed plans for a high-speed global internet a 'tragedy' as the thousands of new satellites required will get in the way of key scientific observations.
These 'mega-constellations' of satellites are intended to beam internet to the ground from low-earth orbit, with the potential to offer coverage in even remote regions.
Meanwhile, UK firm OneWeb are planning to send up between 650–2,000 satellites and Amazon a constellation of 3,200 orbiting craft.
Breezy, warm Thursday ahead of cold front
The 2010s: Decade of the exoplanet | Ars Technica
The last ten years will arguably be seen as the "decade of the exoplanet." That might seem like an obvious thing to say, given that the discovery of the first exoplanet was honored with a Nobel Prize this year. But that discovery happened back in 1995—so what made the 2010s so pivotal?
To get a sense of how this happened, we talked to someone who was in the field when the decade started: Andrew Szentgyorgyi , currently at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where he's the principal investigator on the Giant Magellan Telescope's Large Earth Finder instrument. In addition to being famous for having taught your author his "intro to physics" course, Szentgyorgyi was working on a similar instrument when the first exoplanet was discovered.
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The European Space Agency is about to pull one of the bigger hunks of garbage from orbit. But there's a problem: Th… https://t.co/Ej6MUXliaS thedailybeast (from New York, NY) Thu Jan 02 14:40:03 +0000 2020
The same tech that could help make space cleaner could double as a weapon https://t.co/E7FC2gweWR thedailybeast (from New York, NY) Thu Jan 02 17:40:06 +0000 2020
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