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Virgin Galactic customers who have splashed out hundreds of thousands of dollars on a trip to space are finally set to be rewarded. The firm, founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, has confirmed it will perform its first commercial flight, 'Galactic 01', at the end of June. It has a three-day window from June 27 to launch a crew of six aboard the VSS Unity spaceplane from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Galactic 01 will be followed by a second commercial spaceflight, 'Galactic 02,' in early August 2023, with monthly spaceflights expected thereafter. Virgin Galactic completed its final test...

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M.—Richard Branson is scheduled to travel to the edge of space Sunday in a flight aimed at spurring a new, multibillion-dollar space-tourism industry. The flight, originally scheduled for 9 a.m. ET, was delayed 90 minutes on Sunday because of weather overnight at the launch facility in New Mexico. The launch is now scheduled for 10:30 a.m. ET. At that time, a highflying Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. airplane is expected to take off from the Spaceport America facility near Truth or Consequences. The plane, called the VMS Eve, will carry the spacecraft VSS Unity, which will include Mr....

It’s no secret that the commercial space industry (aka. NewSpace) has become immensely lucrative in recent years, nor the fact that it has become intensely competitive as a result. To illustrate, one needs to look no further than the top three NewSpace companies in the world right now: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. Between these three companies, all founded by billionaires with similar visions, a new space race has begun. In recent months, the race has intensified as Jeff Bezos announced that he would be going to space on the inaugural flight of the New Shepard rocket. In response,...

Posted on June 17, 2021June 17, 2021 by Evan GoughThe Largest Rotating Objects in the Universe: Galactic Filaments Hundreds of Millions of Light-Years LongWe’ve known for a while about the large-scale structure of the Universe. Galaxies reside in filaments hundreds of millions of light-years long, on a backbone of dark matter. And, where those filaments meet, there are galaxy clusters. Between them are massive voids, where galaxies are sparse. Now a team of astronomers in Germany and their colleagues in China and Estonia have made an intriguing discovery.These massive filaments are rotating, and this kind of rotation on such a...

Earth Is a Whole Lot Closer to Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole Than We Thought MICHELLE STARR 27 NOVEMBER 2020 It seems that Earth has been misplaced. According to a new map of the Milky Way galaxy, the Solar System's position isn't where we thought it was. Not only is it closer to the galactic centre - and the supermassive hole therein, Sagittarius A* - it's orbiting at a faster clip. It's nothing to be concerned about; we're not actually moving closer to Sgr A*, and we're in no danger of being slurped up. Rather, our map of the Milky...

Russia Admits It Isn’t Ready to Fight Space Aliens Fortunately America’s got a plan Russia Admits It Isn’t Ready to Fight Space Aliens UNCATEGORIZED October 2, 2013 David Axe Fortunately America’s got a plan by DAVID AXE A Russian space official just admitted that Moscow has no strategy for combating an invasion by galactic marauders. Lucky for Planet Earth, the United States does have a plan. And it counts on Russia and America fighting together. Sergei Berezhnoy, on the staff of the Titov Space Control Center near Moscow, said that Russian air-defense officers “have not been tasked with preparing for...

Anticipated but never before seen, the existence of tens of thousands of these dark objects at the galactic center could have far-reaching implications for astrophysics An artist's rendering of the Milky Way's core, with a supermassive black hole at its center. Scientists have discovered what appear to be twelve smaller black holes orbiting our galaxy's central giant. Each is thought to actually be a binary system composed of a black hole and a low-mass star. Gas siphoned from the star glows in x-rays as it falls into the black holes, allowing them to be seen. Credit: Columbia University For the...

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane disintegrated in mid-air after two tail stabilizers prematurely extended, federal investigators said Sunday, a discovery that could shift the focus of the probe into Friday’s fatal crash away from the craft’s rocket motor. But the National Transportation Safety Board’s acting chairman Christopher Hart cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “What I’m about to say is a statement of fact and not a statement of cause,” Hart said. “We are a long way from finding cause. We still have months and months of investigation to do, and there’s a lot that we don’t know. We have extensive...

Richard Branson's dream to charter commercial space flights has taken a step closer to reality. His company, Virgin Galactic, yesterday signed a deal with U.S. aviation authorities to let it blast paying customers into space. Commercial flights are to begin by the end of this year and more than 600 people have already signed up at $250,000 (£150,000) each to take a trip on SpaceShipTwo.

Explanation: The bulging center of our Milky Way Galaxy rests on a pillar of light in this luminous skyscape. Recorded on September 22nd in dark South African skies, rivers of dust seem to flow downward from the galactic center towards Antares, yellowish alpha star of the constellation Scorpius, near the top of the scene. The brightest celestial beacon present is not a star at all though, but planet Venus, still dominant in the western sky after sunset. Of course, the pillar of light stretching upward from the horizon is Zodiacal light. Sunlight scattered by dust along the plane of the...

Suborbital, private joyrides will cost $200,000 a ticket A private spaceship built to launch space tourists on suborbital joyrides could by flying on its own by this fall, Space.com has learned. The SpaceShipTwo spacecraft VSS Enterprise, which the space tourism company Virgin Galactic has been flying on test flights attached to a huge mothership, could make its first drop flights over California's Mojave Desert for glide and landing tests. "There's a reasonable possibility that we could see the first drop flight in the fall, but as always, everything is predicated on thoroughness and safety," Virgin Galactic's commercial director Stephen Attenborough...

PASADENA, CALIF. — Baby stars have at last been found in the harsh environment at the center of the Milky Way, astronomers said here this week at the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. These are "stars that have just ignited their core and they are just starting to produce light. So it is a very early phase in the star formation process," said team member Solange Ramirez of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech. The heart of our galaxy is an extreme environment, with fierce stellar winds, shock waves and a core supermassive black hole all packed into...

PARIS (AFP) – An orbiting observatory has spotted a massive cluster of galaxies in deep space that can only be explained by the exotic phenomenon known as dark energy, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Monday. Spotted in a scan by ESA's orbiting X-ray telescope XMM-Newton, the cluster's mass is about 1,000 times that of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it said. The huge cluster, known by its catalogue number of 2XMM J083026+524133, lies 7.7 billion light years from Earth and helps confirm the existence of dark energy, the agency said. Under this hypothesis, most of the Universe...

A new image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows baby stars sprouting in the backwoods of a galaxy -- a relatively desolate region of space more than 100,000 light-years from the galaxy's bustling center. The striking image, a composite of ultraviolet data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and radio data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array in New Mexico, shows the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, also known simply as M83. In the new view, the main spiral, or stellar, disk of M83 looks like a pink and blue pinwheel, while its outer arms appear to flap away from the...

[...snip...] But on to antimatter, a cloud of which has been known to exist around the galactic center since the 1970s, when balloon-based gamma-ray detectors first located it. Gamma rays are significant in terms of antimatter because electrons encountering positrons (their antimatter equivalent) annihilate each other, with their mass converted into high energy gamma rays. So the cloud’s presence is well established. The question since its detection is what could have caused it. Now a new paper in Nature may offer an answer, noting the asymmetric distribution of the antimatter cloud, which extends further on one side of galactic center...

Universe's most energetic particles point to huge black holesThe most energetic particles in the universe – ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays – likely come from supermassive black holes in the hearts of nearby active galaxies, says a study by scientists from nearly 90 research institutions worldwide, including the University of Utah. “We discovered the sources of the highest energy particles in the universe,” says Miguel Mostafa, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah and one of 370 scientists and engineers belonging to a 17-nation collaboration that operates the $54 million Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. “The sources are the...

Everyone is scientific circles is abuzz with the big news: there's proof that dark matter exists! The paper from the scientists who made the discovered is here; and a Sean Carroll (no relation) has a very good explanation on his blog, Cosmic Variance. This discovery happens to work as a great example of just why good science needs good math. As I always say, one of the ways to recognize a crackpot theory in physics is by the lack of math. For an example, you can look at the electric universe folks. They have a theory, and they make predictions:...

CALGARY, ALBERTA--A newly detected stream of stars festoons the northern sky in a sweeping arc that cuts across the entire constellation of Ursa Major (through the Big Dipper), from just above the head of Leo the lion to the constellation Cancer the crab. Although it spans fully 63 degrees (one-third of the northern celestial hemisphere), the star stream escaped notice until now because its individual stars are far too faint to see with the naked eye. Also, they don't jump out as a readily discernible shape or pattern, like a cluster or constellation, amid the surrounding star fields. To snare...

Astronomers have figured out why a series of small galaxies surrounding the Milky Way are distributed around it in the shape of a pancake. Theorists believed that the eleven dwarf galaxy companions should have a diffuse, spherical arrangement. But a University of Durham team used a supercomputer to show how the galaxies could take the pancake form without challenging cosmological theory. The results were presented at the UK National Astronomy Meeting. According to cosmological theory, soon after the Big Bang, cold dark matter formed the first large structures in the Universe, which then collapsed under their own weight to form...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 February 6 X-Rays from M83 Credit: R.Soria & K.Wu (MSSL, UCL) CXC, NASA Explanation: Bright and beautiful spiral galaxy M83 lies a mere twelve million light-years from Earth, toward the headstrong constellation Hydra. Sweeping spiral arms, prominent in visible light images, lend this galaxy its popular moniker -- the Southern Pinwheel. In fact, the spiral arms are still apparent in this Chandra Observatory false-color x-ray image of...