Space @ interstellar news

NASA provides first evidence of “marsquakes” The spacecraft InSight detected tremors from deep underneath the rust-colored surface of Mars indicating, for the first time ever, that the planet is geologically active. The quakes could potentially give seismologists insights into the interior composition of the planet. The Insight lander also uncovered magnetized rocks "consistent with a past dynamo with Earth-like strength" under the surface of the landing sight. Stirrings detected from deep below the surface of the Red Planet indicate, for the first time ever, that Mars is geologically active.  It's alive! A trove of new data is in from the  NASA InSight lander 's stay on Mars revealing new discoveries above and below the planet's terrain. One of the most fascinating findings is that the planet experiences marsquakes. According to mission lead Bruce Banerdt, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, this is the first time

The Earth Has a Second Moon, And No One Noticed All This While The researchers say the new and perhaps temporary minimon is probably between 1.9 meters and 3.5 metres across, which is around the same size as a mid-size car. Incidentally, this isn’t the first-time earth has had an additional moon, albeit temporarily. We really are having to relearn things these days, aren’t we? Just a day after we got to learn that there is an organism that can survive without oxygen, we are now getting the information that the Earth might have more than one moon. Oh dear, this is all getting a bit much now. Researchers have discovered that an object, now dubbed 2020 CD3, has been gravitationally bound to earth for about three years now. And it is only now that we have discovered it. It was on February 19 that astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted a dim object moving quickly across the sky somewhere close to earth. The same object was then observed by researchers at six

A wobbling star may explain pattern of weird radio signals from space The strangest fast radio burst (FRB) yet is helping us to narrow down the possibilities of what causes these odd, powerful blasts of radio waves from space. The unusual patterns we see in its light suggest that it may be coming from a wobbly neutron star. FRBs generally last only a few milliseconds, but some of them have been observed to repeat, bursting many times from the same location. We don’t know what causes them, although everything …

The antimatter factory about to solve the universe's greatest mystery Why is there something rather than nothing? We’re finally making enough antimatter to extract an answer – and it might reveal the dark side of the universe too SURE, the  big bang  is cool, in a hot sort of way. The beginning of all things.  Space ,  time , matter and energy bursting into existence from a pinprick of infinite temperature and density. Space racing away from itself faster than the speed of light. Maybe even the making of a  multiverse . But a second moment shortly afterwards doesn’t get half the press. Perhaps that is because it is when precisely  nothing happened . Call it an anti-moment. It is when all the matter that suddenly and inexplicably came into being in the big bang equally suddenly and inexplicably failed to go out of being again. When it didn’t cease to be available to create stars, galaxies, planets, an unquantified quantity of questioning life and, on one world at leas

क्या भारत में मनुष्य 74,000 साल पहले एक सुपर-ज्वालामुखी विस्फोट से बच गया था? विस्फोट की भयावहता ने इस बहस को जन्म दिया कि क्या "ज्वालामुखी सर्दियों" ने पूरी मानव जाति को मिटा दिया लगभग 74,000 साल पहले, सुमात्रा के इंडोनेशियाई द्वीप पर माउंट टोबा फट गया और राख भारतीय उपमहाद्वीप पर बर्फ की तरह गिर गई।  टोबा विस्फोट के रूप में जाना जाता है, यह घटना पिछले 2 मिलियन वर्षों में पृथ्वी को हिला देने वाले सबसे भारी ज्वालामुखी विस्फोटों में से एक थी।  विस्फोट की भयावहता ने इस बहस को जन्म दिया कि क्या "ज्वालामुखी सर्दियों" ने पूरी मानव जाति को मिटा दिया।  वर्षों से एकत्र एशिया और अफ्रीका के पुरातात्विक साक्ष्यों से पता चलता है कि विस्फोट वास्तव में जबरदस्त था, लेकिन विलुप्त होने के कगार पर मनुष्यों को छोड़ने के लिए इतना सर्वनाश नहीं था।  राख के नीचे दबे हुए पत्थर के औजारों के नेचर कम्युनिकेशंस में प्रकाशित एक नए अध्ययन से पता चलता है कि मध्य भारत में न केवल शुरुआती मानव विस्फोट से बच गए बल्कि अगले 50,000 वर्षों तक जीवित रहे।  मध्य प्रदेश के ढाबा खुदाई स्थल

Scientists Find The First-Ever Animal That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one. Scientists have just discovered that a jellyfish-like parasite doesn't have a mitochondrial genome - the first multicellular organism known to have this absence. That means it doesn't breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency. This discovery isn't just changing our understanding of how life can work here on Earth - it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. Life started to develop the ability to metabolise oxygen - that is, respirate - sometime  over 1.45 billion years ago . A larger  archaeon  engulfed a smaller bacterium, and somehow the bacterium's new home was beneficial to both parti

SpaceX aims to launch up to 4 tourists into super high orbit CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX aims to launch up to four tourists into a super high orbit, possibly by the end of next year. The private company is working with Space Adventures Inc. for the flight, officials announced Tuesday. Ticket prices are not being divulged but expected to be in the millions. Space Adventures already has helped put tourists into orbit with trips to the International Space Station, working with the Russian space program. For this trip, paying customers will skip the space station and instead orbit two to three times higher, or roughly 500 miles to 750 miles (800 kilometers to 1,200 kilometers) above Earth. It's a lofty goal that would approach the record 850-mile-high (1,370 kilometers) orbit achieved by Gemini 11's Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon in 1966. The tourist flight “will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it,” Space

MIT develops plans to deflect “planet-killer” asteroids bound for Earth t’s not often the Earth is at risk of being hit by a giant speeding asteroid from outer space. But on the off chance one is heading our way, MIT scientists want us to be prepared. expected to pass near Earth on April 13, 2029. The giant icy space rock — known as 99942 Apophis, for the Egyptian God of Chaos — will speed by at over 67,000 miles per hour. Astronomers say it will be one of the largest asteroids to cross that close to Earth’s orbit in the next decade. Early observations suggested Apophis could potentially enter Earth’s gravitational keyhole — in other words, come close enough that our planet’s gravity would alter its trajectory. That might have put it on track to impact Earth its next time around in 2036. While scientists later determined it should pass by safely both times, they are eager to come up with viable strategies for deflecting any future asteroids that threaten to come too close for

Dream Job? NASA Is Hiring New Astronauts For Moon Mission For anyone reminiscing about their childhood, you may remember being asked at school “what do you want to be when you’re older?” Doctor, sports player…astronaut! All very common answers, and although few of us follow through with our childhood dreams and career ambitions, now may be your chance to become employed in one the world’s rarest positions. NASA is now looking for new astronauts to reach the South Pole of the moon by 2024. The American space agency wants the first person to reach the southern pole of the moon to be a woman, with a male also joining on the mission. Applications are set to open in just over a week on March 2. With the dawn of SpaceX and other private agencies aiming to put humans on Mars, the world’s attention on space travel has rarely been this high since the space race in the 1960s which saw the U.S. and the former USSR battle it out to out the first person in space and eventually put th

Google & Other Search Engines Found Indexing Links to Private WhatsApp Groups It has been discovered that search engines, including Google, are indexing invites to private groups on WhatsApp. A journalist named Jordan Wildon made this discovery and shared the following information on  Twitter : “Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think they are. The “Invite to Group via Link” feature allows groups to be indexed by Google and they are generally available across the internet. With some wildcard search terms you can easily find some… interesting… groups.”   Any link to a WhatsApp group that was shared outside of a private message could be found in Google. Users could follow the links to join the group. The fact that the links were, at some point, shared publicly is what lead Google to indexing the content in search results. Google’s Danny Sullivan acknowledged this on Twitter,  saying : While these links have been removed from Google, they’re still

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc

MIT Team Claims to Have Found The Best Way to Deflect Scary Earth-Bound Asteroids One can only hope that never ( again ) will a substantially-sized asteroid come barrelling towards Earth. But if it should happen, we're now better prepared for it: MIT scientists have come up with a decision map for figuring out the best response in the event of an incoming asteroid crisis. The decision map weighs up factors like an asteroid's mass and momentum, and then predicts the most effective way of avoiding a collision if it looks like the object will hit Earth's  gravitational keyhole  – that window of space where a hit would be guaranteed. At the end of the decision map are three choices: steering the asteroid away  with a projectile ; sending a scout up to take more measurements; or sending two scouts up to take more measurements and maybe shift the path of the asteroid slightly (making the projectile option easier further down the line). "People have mostly cons