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The image of a black hole has a bright ring of emission surrounding a "shadow" cast by the black hole. This ring is composed of a stack of increasingly sharp subrings that correspond to the number of orbits that photons took around the black hole before reaching the observer. Credit: George Wong (UIUC) and Michael Johnson (CfA) _________________________________________________________________________________ Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme...

With concerns of the Coronavirus Outbreak the media has been less involved with other matters. As a result I would like to post something unrelated to that of the virus. The linked asteroid collision map is a simulation that lets ordinary users like you take the powers of nature into your hands and view the destruction of asteroid collisions in different magnitudes and mediums. It's extremely interesting to see how a relatively small object can wreak havoc on society because of it's high impact speed. I believe that having tools similar to this is important because it raises awareness to...

According to the provided article, asteroid 99942 Apophis has a 1 in 40 chance of hitting earth in 2029. If it misses in 2029, it would have an even higher chance of hitting in 2036. According to NASA and other reputable sources the asteroid is of 370 meters in diameter which is about the size of the Eiffel Tower. When you plug this into a simulation like the asteroid collision map, you can see that its large magnitude can cause some pretty serious damages depending on the location it impacts. According to the simulation, some of these effects are earthquakes,...

SETI@home is shutting down. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need.

Two asteroids projected to come zooming past planet Earth on 2 March have had NASA on alert, with its Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) tracking the wayward space rocks that possess orbits intersecting Earth’s trajectory. The first asteroid to venture into Earth’s vicinity has been dubbed 2020 DZ3. With an orbit that goes through the paths of Mercury and Venus, according to CNEOS’ database, the asteroid has built up a speed of over 48,000 miles per hour and boasts an estimated diameter of about 154 feet (47 Meters). This asteroid’s next near-Earth approach is calculated to happen on 28...

Although major killer asteroids are extremely rare, minor asteroids called meteors often impact earth going unnoticed. Most of the time they burn up in the atmosphere. However, if they do not these smaller scale asteroids can weigh anywhere from 20 pounds to upwards of hundreds or thousands of pounds. Maybe even more! Fortunately, these smaller scale asteroids do not usually collide with highly populated areas and mainly impact the earths large swaths of uninhabited areas. Most of these collisions go unreported or unnoticed. However, reported collisions are usually added to a list. For example, a map simulation from an asteroid...

Pallas, which is third largest object in the asteroid belt and named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, can be seen in detailed images published Monday in a study in Nature Astronomy. Researchers believe that the asteroid's pockmarked surface is a result of its unique orbit. Pallas has a tilted orbit, so it is basically smashing through the asteroid belt at an angle, unlike most other similar objects. The astronomers obtained 11 series of images, observing Pallas from different angles as it rotated. After pulling the images together, the researchers generated a three-dimensional reconstruction of the shape of the asteroid,...

Astronomers have never before seen fast radio bursts being emitted in such a regular pattern, and still don't know their origin. Astronomers have detected alien signals - that is, signals from a foreign galaxy - being emitted in an unusually regular 16-day cycle. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are not in and of themselves unusual - the first was detected in 2007 - but previous observations have shown them to be mostly emitted at random. While there have been some bursts which repeated, as astronomers discovered previously, they have never been seen repeating in such a steady cycle. The origin of...

An attempt by Iran to launch a satellite into orbit failed Sunday, the Iranian state television outlet Fars reported Sunday evening. A Simorgh or “Phoenix” rocket was used in the attempt to deploy the Zafar I communications satellite. The launch failed to deploy the satellite into orbit, however, Iranian television reported, due to low rocket speed. "It was launched with success and ... we have reached most our aims ... but the Zafar satellite did not reach orbit as planned," Fars reported. The Simorgh rocket had been launched from the Imam Khomeini Spaceport in Semnan province, about 145 miles southeast...

Expedition 61 Flight Engineer Christina Koch of NASA returned home to Ellington Field in Houston, Texas Feb. 7 aboard a NASA plane some 24 hours after a parachute-assisted landing in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in Kazakhstan. Koch set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman – 328 days – in a mission on the orbiting laboratory that spanned 5248 orbits of the Earth and 139 million miles, roughly the equivalent of 291 round trips to the Moon. Koch performed six spacewalks during her mission and saw the arrival of a dozen visiting vehicles and the departure of...

(snip) a cryptic startup called SpinLaunch starts suborbital test flights of a rocket that is launched using an enormous centrifuge. Here's the gist: A centrifuge the size of a football field will spin a rocket around in circles for about an hour until its speed eventually exceeds 5,000 miles per hour. At that point, the rocket and its payload will feel forces 10,000 times stronger than gravity. When the centrifuge finally releases the rocket at launch speed, it should, practically speaking, fly through the stratosphere until it fires its engines at the periphery of our atmosphere. (snip) SpinLaunch hopes its...

"After consultation with our Great Military Leaders, designers, and others, I am pleased to present the new logo for the United States Space Force, the Sixth Branch of our Magnificent Military!"

The Space Development Agency wants to move fast. The agency, which was established less than a year ago, wants dozens of satellites providing initial capabilities by fiscal year 2022 and nearly 1,000 satellites on orbit in fiscal year 2026.

Gravitational waves are caused by calamitous events in the Universe. Neutron stars that finally merge after circling each other for a long time can create them, and so can two black holes that collide with each other. But sometimes there's a burst of gravitational waves that doesn't have a clear cause. One such burst was detected by LIGO/VIRGO on January 14, and it came from the same region of sky that hosts the star Betelgeuse. Yeah, Betelgeuse, aka Alpha Orionis. The star that has been exhibiting some dimming behaviour recently, and is expected to go supernova at some point in...

The newly created United States Space Force has new uniforms to match. The unit's official Twitter account posted a picture of the new "U.S. Space Force" nameplate and "United States Space Command" patch and said the uniforms had "touched down in the Pentagon." The US Space Force has been in the works of President Donald Trump's administration since March 2018, and it was officially created alongside the US Space Command when the president signed the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act on December 20. **SNIP** "Space Force" trended on Twitter after the Department of Defense debuted the new uniforms, with many...

The oldest solid material on Earth has just been identified, and it predates the Solar System itself by at least a few hundred million years. The teensy tiny microscopic grains of dust were forged in a distant star somewhere between 5 and 7 billion years ago, according to new research. By comparison, our Sun is just 4.6 billion years old. Eventually, these grains were carried to Earth in a meteorite. "This is one of the most exciting studies I've worked on," said cosmochemist Philipp Heck of the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago. "These are the...

According to the first Briton to go into space, Dr. Helen Sharman, extraterrestrials do exist, and it could even be possible that they are among us here on Earth. Sharman recently spoke with Observer Magazine about her beliefs on the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe, and had some very surprising things to say. She seemed extremely confident in her beliefs, saying with certainty: “Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it.“ “There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life,” she added. Sharman...

Astronomers unveiled new insights by NASA's TESS this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. The satellite spotted a new Earth-like exoplanet within its star's habitable zone, a new Tatooine star system, and a strange eclipse. TESS has been working hard to uncover new corners of the universe since its launch in 2018. Exoplanet enthusiasts, rejoice! This week, scientists revealed a series of new discoveries made by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The telescope has spotted a number of strange new worlds circling star systems near and far, the scientists announced at the 235th meeting of...

A mysterious repeating radio signal from space revealed last year is now the fifth fast radio burst to be tracked back to its source galaxy. It's a location unlike any of the others, and astronomers are having to rethink their previous assumptions about how these signals are generated. The origin of this repeating signal is a spiral galaxy, located 500 million light-years from Earth, making it the closest known source of what we call fast radio bursts (FRBs) yet. And the FRBs are emanating specifically from a region just seven light-years across - a region that's alive with star formation....

Mission operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have lost contact with the ASTERIA satellite, a briefcase-sized spacecraft designed to study planets outside our solar system. The last successful communication with ASTERIA, short for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics, was on Dec. 5; attempts to contact it are expected to continue into March 2020. ASTERIA belongs to a category of satellites called CubeSats, which vary in size but are typically smaller than a suitcase. Deployed into Earth orbit from the space station on Nov. 20, 2017, the technology demonstration mission showed that many technologies necessary for...