KREUZADER (Posts tagged space)

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Squishy Neutron Star Setback Dampens Hopes of Exotic Matter NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope installed on the International Space Station two years prior, measured the size of a 1.4-solar-mass neutron star...

Squishy Neutron Star Setback Dampens Hopes of Exotic Matter

NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope installed on the International Space Station two years prior, measured the size of a 1.4-solar-mass neutron star called J0030, which is 1,000 light-years from Earth, to be about 26 kilometers across. Now, using NICER data, two independent teams have performed the same analysis for another neutron star, J0740, located 3,000 light-years from Earth.

The results are surprising. With 2.1 solar masses, J0740 is the most massive known neutron star — about 50% more massive than J0030. Yet the two are essentially the same size — the two teams arrive at 24.8 or 27.4 kilometers across for the former, with uncertainties of several kilometers. The results, which are not yet peer reviewed, were each posted to the online preprint site arxiv.org earlier this month.

The finding implies that neutron stars may be bizarre, but not so bizarre that they obliterate neutrons themselves. “It might suggest these very exotic states of matter may not be realized in the core of a neutron star,” said Jorge Piekarewicz, a theoretical physicist at Florida State University.

Source: quantamagazine.org
physics astrophysics astronomy space
Physicists Identify the Engine Powering Black Hole Energy Beams Black holes have so much gravity that they trap even light, which cloaks them in spheres of invisibility. But why jets shoot out from the edges of many black holes has proved far harder...

Physicists Identify the Engine Powering Black Hole Energy Beams

Black holes have so much gravity that they trap even light, which cloaks them in spheres of invisibility. But why jets shoot out from the edges of many black holes has proved far harder to understand. “One of the biggest mysteries in the universe is how black holes launch jets,” said Sara Issaoun, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Now, through the work of Issaoun and her colleagues on the black hole-observing Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team, the mystery has started to unravel. Several weeks ago, the EHT released its second photo of a black hole — another view of the same fiery ring pitted by darkness seen in 2019. Both images show the glowing plasma around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, whose giant jet rises outside the frame. Unlike in the first photo, the ring in the new image has stripes, indicating that the light is strongly polarized.

Source: quantamagazine.org
physics astrophysics black hole space astronomy
‘Out-of-control’ Chinese rocket falling to Earth could partially survive re-entry Part of a huge rocket that launched China’s first module for its Tianhe space station is falling back to Earth and could make an uncontrolled re-entry at an unknown...

‘Out-of-control’ Chinese rocket falling to Earth could partially survive re-entry

Part of a huge rocket that launched China’s first module for its Tianhe space station is falling back to Earth and could make an uncontrolled re-entry at an unknown landing point.

The 30-metre high core of the Long March 5B rocket launched the “Heavenly Harmony” unmanned core module into low Earth orbit on 29 April from Wenchang in China’s Hainan province.

The Long March 5B then itself entered a temporary orbit, setting the stage for one of the largest ever uncontrolled re-entries. Some experts fear it could land on an inhabited area.

“It’s potentially not good,” said Jonathan McDowell, Astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University.

Source: theguardian.com
space cnsa rocket
Nature’s most magnetic objects, ripped apart in starquakes, can unleash powerful flashes of light On 15 April 2020, a wave of gamma rays, nature’s most powerful kind of light, washed across the Solar System like a storm front. First contact came...

Nature’s most magnetic objects, ripped apart in starquakes, can unleash powerful flashes of light

On 15 April 2020, a wave of gamma rays, nature’s most powerful kind of light, washed across the Solar System like a storm front. First contact came above Mars, where photons at energies comparable to the radiation from a nuclear bomb peppered a Russian particle detector on NASA’s Mars Odyssey probe. Six minutes later, the burst of light lit up a solar wind probe between the Sun and Earth. Five seconds after that, the signal splashed into specialized detectors on Earth’s surface.

Gamma ray bursts are not so unusual. Space-based observatories pick one up every day or two; roughly two-thirds of them, lasting tens or hundreds of seconds, hail from massive stars exploding in supernovae. Brief bursts of less than 2 seconds make up the rest, and are thought to arise from the cataclysmic collision of two neutron stars, the smoldering ruins left at the heart of a supernova. But when astrophysicists noticed that the 15 April event fluttered in brightness over microseconds, curiously fast variation, they began to think the mystery source was something else altogether.

The explosion was also uncommonly close. By triangulating the signal’s arrival times at the different detectors, astronomers traced it to Sculptor, a neighboring galaxy. All the evidence was pointing to a legendary but elusive type of event: a giant flare erupting from a magnetar—a neutron star with an outlandishly intense magnetic field.

Source: sciencemag.org
astrophysics physics astronomy space
Searching for interstellar quantum communications “ The modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with the seminal publications of Cocconi & Morrison (1959) and Schwartz & Townes (1961), who proposed to search for narrow-band...

Searching for interstellar quantum communications

       The modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with the seminal publications of Cocconi & Morrison (1959) and Schwartz & Townes (1961), who proposed to search for narrow-band signals in the radio spectrum, and for optical laser pulses. Over the last six decades, more than one hundred dedicated search programs have targeted these wavelengths; all with null results. All of these campaigns searched for classical communications, that is, for a significant number of photons above a noise threshold; with the assumption of a pattern encoded in time and/or frequency space. I argue that future searches should also target quantum communications. They are preferred over classical communications with regards to security and information efficiency, and they would have escaped detection in all previous searches. The measurement of Fock state photons or squeezed light would indicate the artificiality of a signal. I show that quantum coherence is feasible over interstellar distances, and explain for the first time how astronomers can search for quantum transmissions sent by ETI to Earth, using commercially available telescopes and receiver equipment.    
Source: arxiv.org
seti astronomy space physics
All Eyes on Alpha Centauri For me, the most eyebrow-raising talk was by Sofia Sheikh of Penn State University, who walked the audience through the story of a radio signal called BLC1, which made the news last year as a possible signal originating...

All Eyes on Alpha Centauri

For me, the most eyebrow-raising talk was by Sofia Sheikh of Penn State University, who walked the audience through the story of a radio signal called BLC1, which made the news last year as a possible signal originating from the Centauri system. The evidence was a narrow-band signal (near 982 MHz) detected in April and May 2019, which seemed to shift over time, had a non-zero drift rate, and persisted for a few hours with repeated observations. While these are all traits you might expect from an artificial object orbiting Alpha Centauri, unfortunately it turned out to be nothing quite so exciting. Careful analysis revealed that the it was, in her words, “a pathological example of [radio] interference,” emanating from our own planet or Earth orbit.

Source: airspacemag.com
seti blc1 proxima centauri alpha centauri astronomy space
2I/Borisov: A Remarkably Pristine Interstellar Comet The beauty of comet 2I/Borisov, the second interstellar object discovered in our Solar System, is that it looks and acts more or less like, well, an interstellar comet, without the puzzling...

2I/Borisov: A Remarkably Pristine Interstellar Comet

The beauty of comet 2I/Borisov, the second interstellar object discovered in our Solar System, is that it looks and acts more or less like, well, an interstellar comet, without the puzzling characteristics of its predecessor, the still controversial ‘Oumuamua. 2I/Borisov’s cometary nature is clear in the latest observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, data from which also tell us that this is one of the most undisturbed relics of a circumstellar disk ever found. Scientists believe it never passed close to any star before its 2019 passage by the Sun.

Source: centauri-dreams.org
astronomy space comet comet borisov