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Are Space Elevators Still a Thing for the Future?

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It’s been an idea that has been around since 1895 but only since the 1960s that it was taken seriously. But the biggest issue is how to make a cable over 36,000km that is light enough and strong enough. We now have the ability to make the materials but can we make them long enough to make it a reality, find out in today’s video.

Written, researched and presented by Paul Shillito.

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As puzzling as a platypus: The JWST finds some hard to categorize objects

The platypus is one of evolution’s lovable, oddball animals. The creature seems to defy well-understood rules of biology by combining physical traits in a bizarre way. They’re egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver-like tails, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind feet. In that regard, it’s only fitting that astronomers describe some newly discovered oddball objects as “Astronomy’s Platypus.”

The discovery consists of nine galaxies that also have unusual properties and seem to defy categorization. The findings were recently presented at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. The results are also in new research titled “A New Population of Point-like, Narrow-line Objects Revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope,” posted to the arXiv preprint server. The lead author is Haojing Yan from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“We report a new population of objects discovered using the data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which are characterized by their point-like morphology and narrow permitted emission lines,” the authors write in their research. “Due to the limitation of the current data, the exact nature of this new population is still uncertain.”

NASA’s Juno measures thickness of Europa’s ice shell

Data from NASA’s Juno mission has provided new insights into the thickness and subsurface structure of the icy shell encasing Jupiter’s moon Europa. Using the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR), mission scientists determined that the shell averages about 18 miles (29 kilometers) thick in the region observed during Juno’s 2022 flyby of Europa. The Juno measurement is the first to discriminate between thin and thick shell models that have suggested the ice shell is anywhere from less than half a mile to tens of miles thick.

Slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, Europa is one of the solar system’s highest-priority science targets for investigating habitability. Evidence suggests that the ingredients for life may exist in the saltwater ocean that lies beneath its ice shell. Uncovering a variety of characteristics of the ice shell, including its thickness, provides crucial pieces of the puzzle for understanding the moon’s internal workings and the potential for the existence of a habitable environment.

The new estimate on the ice thickness in the near-surface icy crust was published on Dec. 17 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Thinking on different wavelengths: New approach to circuit design introduces next-level quantum computing

Quantum computing represents a potential breakthrough technology that could far surpass the technical limitations of modern-day computing systems for some tasks. However, putting together practical, large-scale quantum computers remains challenging, particularly because of the complex and delicate techniques involved.

In some quantum computing systems, single ions (charged atoms such as strontium) are trapped and exposed to electromagnetic fields including laser light to produce certain effects, used to perform calculations. Such circuits require many different wavelengths of light to be introduced into different positions of the device, meaning that numerous laser beams have to be properly arranged and delivered to the designated area. In these cases, the practical limitations of delivering many different beams of light around within a limited space become a difficulty.

To address this, researchers from The University of Osaka investigated unique ways to deliver light in a limited space. Their work revealed a power-efficient nanophotonic circuit with optical fibers attached to waveguides to deliver six different laser beams to their destinations. The findings have been published in APL Quantum.

NASA Launches Its Most Powerful, Efficient Supercomputer

NASA is announcing the availability of its newest supercomputer, Athena, an advanced system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects. The newest member of the agency’s High-End Computing Capability project expands the resources available to help scientists and engineers tackle some of the most complex challenges in space, aeronautics, and science.

Housed in the agency’s Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Athena delivers more computing power than any other NASA system, surpassing the capabilities of its predecessors, Aitken and Pleiades, in power and efficiency. The new system, which was rolled out in January to existing users after a beta testing period, delivers over 20 petaflops of peak performance – a measurement of the number of calculations it can make per second – while reducing the agency’s supercomputing utility costs.

“Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible,” said Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer and lead for the agency’s High-End Computing Capability portfolio at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now with Athena, NASA will expand its efforts to provide tailored computing resources that meet the evolving needs of its missions.”

Astronomers just revealed a stunning new view of the Milky Way in radio colors

A groundbreaking new radio image reveals the Milky Way in more detail than ever before, using low-frequency radio “colors” to map the galaxy’s hidden structures. The image is sharper, deeper, and wider than anything previously released, uncovering both star-forming regions and the remains of ancient stellar explosions. Scientists can now better distinguish where stars are being born versus where they’ve met dramatic ends. The discovery opens powerful new ways to study the life cycle of stars and the shape of our galaxy.

$99,000 smart observatory captures the cosmos with Canon optics

One would think that a US$99,000 telescope requires specialist training and a thick instruction manual. But the new Hyperia from French company Vaonis flips that assumption on its head. It’s powerful enough for professional observatories yet runs entirely from a simple smartphone app.

Vaonis has been bringing astrophotography to the masses for years now. The company has stripped away the complexity, allowing anyone to snap spectacular images of galaxies and nebulae hundreds of light-years away without wrestling with multi-component setups requiring serious technical chops – all wrapped in Vaonis’s trademark minimalist design.

The Hyperia started as a custom build for the Palais de la DĂ©couverte in Paris, which needed a next-gen digital observatory. After wrapping up the installation, Vaonis saw the bigger picture and decided to sell the system commercially.

A white dwarf’s cosmic feeding frenzy revealed by NASA

Using NASA’s IXPE, astronomers captured an unprecedented view of a white dwarf star actively feeding on material from a companion. The data revealed giant columns of ultra-hot gas shaped by the star’s magnetic field and glowing in intense X-rays. These features are far too small to image directly, but X-ray polarization allowed scientists to map them with surprising precision. The results open new doors for understanding extreme binary star systems.

Scientists have, for the first time, used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarization Explorer) to investigate a white dwarf star. The mission’s ability to measure the polarization of X-rays allowed astronomers to closely examine EX Hydrae, a type of system known as an intermediate polar. These observations provided new insight into the physical structure and behavior of powerful binary star systems.

During 2024, IXPE spent nearly a full week observing EX Hydrae. This white dwarf system lies about 200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra. The results of the study were published in the Astrophysical Journal. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge led the work, with additional contributors from the University of Iowa, East Tennessee State University, the University of Liége, and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University.

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