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Another Clue About the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: Magnetic Turbulence
Space largely seems quite empty! Yet even in the dark voids of the cosmos, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are streaming through space. The rays contain 10 million times as much energy as the Large Hadron Collider can produce! The origin of the rays though is still the source of many a scientific debate but they are …
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NASA Thinks it Knows Why Ingenuity Crashed on Mars
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter sent its final signals to Earth in the earlier part of the year. Engineers have been studying these and have started to piece together a picture of events that led up to its final flight. They concluded that data provided by the navigation system was inaccurate leading to a chain of events …
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New Research may Explain how Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Grew so Fast
Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered into Cosmic Dawn, the cosmological period when the first galaxies formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. In the process, it discovered something rather surprising. Not only were there more galaxies (and brighter ones, too!) than expected, but these galaxies had supermassive …
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Early Earth's Oceans of Magma Accelerated the Moon's Departure
When the Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet in its early history, it ejected a debris cloud that led to the formation of the Moon. In the beginning, the Moon was extremely close to the Earth, but then conservation of angular momentum led to the Moon drifting away from the Earth - it's still doing it today. Because the Earth was covered in oceans of magma, researchers think the Moon moved quickly away from the Earth, getting to 25 Earth radii within 100,000 years.
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Could the ESA’s PLATO Mission Find Earth 2.0?
Currently, 5,788 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,326 star systems, while thousands more candidates await confirmation. So far, the vast majority of these planets have been gas giants (3,826) or Super-Earths (1,735), while only 210 have been “Earth-like” – meaning rocky planets similar in size and mass to Earth. What’s more, the majority of these …
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Zap! A Black Hole Scores a Direct Hit With its Jet
Most galaxies are thought to play host to black holes. At the center of Centaurus A, a galaxy 12 million light years away, a jet is being fired out into space. Images that have been captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory show that the high energy particles have struck a nearby object creating a shockwave. …
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Does Life Really Need Planets? Maybe Not
Do we have a planetary bias when it comes to understanding where life can perpetuate? It’s only natural that we do. After all, we’re on one. However, planets may not be necessary for life, and a pair of scientists from Scotland and the USA are inviting us to reconsider the notion. We focus on planets …
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Tidal Steams of Interstellar Objects May Flow Through the Milky Way Like Braided Rivers
Interstellar objects visit our solar system all the time. A new study shows they likely come in streams of sibling objects from the same star system.
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An Interstellar Visitor Helped Shape the Orbits of the Planets.
The orbits of the planets around the Sun have been the source for many a scientific debate. Their current orbital properties are well understood but the planetary orbits have evolved and changed since the formation of the Solar System. Planetary migrations have been the most prominent idea of recent decades suggesting that planetary interactions caused …
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A Commercial Tie-Up Bring High-Energy Nuclear Electric Propulsion Closer to Reality
Propulsion technologies are the key to exploring the outer solar system, and many organizations have been working on novel ones. One with a long track record is the Ad Astra Rocket Company, which has been developing its Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) system for decades. However, this type of electric propulsion system requires a …
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