Clouds are made of silicate minerals.
The clouds of the distant brown dwarf contain silicate material, making it a quite unusual atmospheric composition.
Category: space – Page 456
Astronomers may have found some of the very earliest stars thanks to James Webb
Peering incredibly far back into time, astronomers found a group of much older stars than they expected.
Astronomers made a new discovery in the very first full-color image released from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The first full-color James Webb image, revealed by President Joe Biden on July 11, shows a vast network of galaxies and peers billions of years into the past. Within that network, astronomers believe they have identified the most distant globular clusters ever identified, as per a BBC report.
Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, and stsci
The discovery is indicative not only of the new insight James Webb is yet to reveal but also of the treasure trove of information stored in every image it has already released.
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter flew with a ‘foreign’ piece of debris attached to its foot
The helicopter has been scouting the red planet for over a year.
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter went from being a proof of concept for off-world flight to becoming a fully-fledged aerial scout for NASA’s Perseverance mission.
The helicopter wasn’t alone, as per a blog post from NASA. Images from the chopper show a flowing debris object, resembling a piece of a plastic bag, for part of its journey.
NASA
The helicopter was initially only expected to fly about five times — proving humans could perform a controlled flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere — but it took off for the 33rd time on September 24 for a short repositioning flight.
MIT Engineers Build Wireless Underwater Camera That Doesn’t Need Batteries!
New underwater camera could help scientists explore unknown regions of the ocean, track pollution, or monitor the effects of climate change.
More than 95 percent of Earth’s oceans have never been observed, according to estimates by scientists, which means we have seen less of our planet’s ocean than we have the far side of the moon or the surface of Mars.
Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. It is a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars’ surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname “The Red Planet.” Mars’ name comes from the Roman god of war.
Humanity’s future beyond Earth: Multiplanetary or Islands in Space?
Is the future of humanity in space or on multiple planets?
You can’t build massive space habitats without harvesting resources from nearby asteroids. The resources of the Moon and asteroids are needed to create their proposed habitats.
The prospects for colonization of other planetary surfaces are unappealing.
It is an exciting time to be alive for fans of space exploration. Between the launch of Artemis I, the fabled “return to the Moon,” plans to send the first astronauts to Mars in the next decade, and the almost-daily updates coming from the commercial space industry, there is a level of interest and activity in space that has not been seen for generations.
Princeton physicists make plasma confinement breakthrough
Physicists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have proposed that the formation of “hills and valleys” in magnetic field lines could be the source of sudden collapses of heat ahead of disruptions that can damage doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion facilities. Their discovery could help overcome a critical challenge facing such facilities.
The research, published in a Physics of Plasmas paper in July, traced the collapse to the 3D disordering of the strong magnetic fields used to contain the hot, charged plasma gas. “We proposed a novel way to understand the [disordered] field lines, which was usually ignored or poorly modelled in the previous studies,” said Min-Gu Yoo, a post-doctoral researcher at PPPL and lead author of the paper.
Fusion is the process that powers the Sun and stars as hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium, and matter is converted into energy. Capturing the process on Earth could create a clean, carbon-free and almost inexhaustible source of power to generate electricity, but comes with many engineering challenges: in stars, massive gravitational forces create the right conditions for fusion. On Earth those conditions are much harder to achieve.