Nuclear deflection is seen as a last resort, but a new CERN study shows it is more effective for planetary defense than previously thought.
Category: space – Page 3
Hidden magma oceans could shield rocky exoplanets from harmful radiation
Deep beneath the surface of distant exoplanets known as super-Earths, oceans of molten rock may be doing something extraordinary: powering magnetic fields strong enough to shield entire planets from dangerous cosmic radiation and other harmful high-energy particles.
Earth’s magnetic field is generated by movement in its liquid iron outer core—a process known as a dynamo—but larger rocky worlds like super-Earths might have solid or fully liquid cores that cannot produce magnetic fields in the same way.
In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, University of Rochester researchers, including Miki Nakajima, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, report an alternative source: a deep layer of molten rock called a basal magma ocean (BMO). The findings could reshape how scientists think about planetary interiors and have implications for the habitability of planets beyond our solar system.
New state of matter discovered in a quantum material
At TU Wien, researchers have discovered a state in a quantum material that had previously been considered impossible. The definition of topological states should be generalized.
The work is published in Nature Physics.
Quantum physics tells us that particles behave like waves and, therefore, their position in space is unknown. Yet in many situations, it still works remarkably well to think of particles in a classical way—as tiny objects that move from place to place with a certain velocity.
Researchers solve mystery of universe’s ‘little red dots’
Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) went into operation, red dots in its images have puzzled researchers around the world. Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have explained these enigmatic findings, revealing the most violent forces in the universe concealed in a cocoon of ionized gas. The discovery is published in Nature.
Since December 2021, when the James Webb super telescope saw first light, some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, researchers around the world have been scratching their heads over unexplained red dots among stars and galaxies in the images taken by the telescope.
The so-called ‘little red dots’ can be seen when the universe was “only” several hundred million years old, and a billion years later, they seem to disappear again. So what were they?
Hackers Exploit c-ares DLL Side-Loading to Bypass Security and Deploy Malware
Security experts have disclosed details of an active malware campaign that’s exploiting a DLL side-loading vulnerability in a legitimate binary associated with the open-source c-ares library to bypass security controls and deliver a wide range of commodity trojans and stealers.
“Attackers achieve evasion by pairing a malicious libcares-2.dll with any signed version of the legitimate ahost.exe (which they often rename) to execute their code,” Trellix said in a report shared with The Hacker News. “This DLL side-loading technique allows the malware to bypass traditional signature-based security defenses.”
The campaign has been observed distributing a wide assortment of malware, such as Agent Tesla, CryptBot, Formbook, Lumma Stealer, Vidar Stealer, Remcos RAT, Quasar RAT, DCRat, and XWorm.
Critical Node.js Vulnerability Can Cause Server Crashes via async_hooks Stack Overflow
Node.js has released updates to fix what it described as a critical security issue impacting “virtually every production Node.js app” that, if successfully exploited, could trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.
“Node.js/V8 makes a best-effort attempt to recover from stack space exhaustion with a catchable error, which frameworks have come to rely on for service availability,” Node.js’s Matteo Collina and Joyee Cheung said in a Tuesday bulletin.
“A bug that only reproduces when async_hooks are used would break this attempt, causing Node.js to exit with 7 directly without throwing a catchable error when recursions in user code exhaust the stack space. This makes applications whose recursion depth is controlled by unsanitized input vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks.”
Astronomers discover 19 new pulsars by analyzing FAST archival data
Astronomers from Nanjing University in China have analyzed the archival data from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), searching for new pulsars. As a result, they detected 19 such objects that were missed by previous studies. The findings were presented January 5 on the pre-print server arXiv.
Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. They are usually identified in the form of short bursts of radio emission; however, some of them are also observed via optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes.
Massive impact could be the cause of our lopsided moon
Our nearest neighbor, the moon, is still something of a mystery to us. For decades, scientists have wondered why it appears so lopsided, with dark volcanic plains on the near side (the side we see) and rugged, cratered mountains and a thicker crust on the far side. Now we might be closer to knowing why.
Analysis of lunar soil and rock brought back from the far side by China’s Chang’e-6 mission suggests that a massive impact long ago changed the moon’s interior.
The samples were collected from the South Pole-Aitken basin, a massive impact crater covering nearly one-quarter of the moon’s surface. Because it is so deep, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences wanted to see whether the impact had reached the moon’s mantle and changed its chemistry.
Strange New Side of Viral Evolution Revealed on the International Space Station
Viruses that infect bacteria can still do their job in microgravity, but space changes the rules of the fight.
In a new experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station, scientists found that viruses which infect bacteria can still successfully infect E. coli under near-weightless microgravity conditions. While infection still occurred, the interaction between viruses and bacteria unfolded differently than it does on Earth. The research, led by Phil Huss of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A., was published today (January 13th) in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.
A microscopic arms race in an unusual environment.