Category: Cosmos

phys.org

By closely tracking light coming off a pulsar in the PSR J1141-6545 system, scientists have confirmed another prediction from Einstein’s General Relativity theory.
The system consists of a pulsar and a white dwarf that’s 100 billion times as dense as Earth, which makes it particularly interesting for studying relativity.
It took 20 years of gathering data with the CSIRO Parkes 64-metre radio telescope, and a team of scientists to untangle the mysteries hidden in the data.
The mystery was uncovered by treating the pulsar as a clock, which enabled the team to find evidence of frame-dragging.
Frame-dragging is the twisting of space and time that occurs due to the spin of celestial bodies.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on February 3, 2020

Chinese scientists found an elusive type of black hole by studying X-rays in an attempt to find stars orbiting an invisible object.
LB-1 is a stellar black hole with a mass equal to 70 Suns, 15,000 light years away.
What’s interesting, is that the theoretical mass limit for this type of black hole was capped at 20 Suns before this discovery.
This throws a wrench into black hole theory, and explaining this phenomenon could be a crucial step towards new discoveries about black holes.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on November 29, 2019

Analysis of 3 meteorites shows that they contain arabinose, xylose and ribose.
Ribose also exists in our RNA, which is additional proof that the ingredients for life on Earth may have come to our planet on meteorites.
This discovery is the first evidence of ribose in space, as well as the process of delivering sugar to Earth.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on November 22, 2019

After over a year of simulations run on a 16,000-processor core supercomputer, the most detailed model of the Universe’s expansion has been created.
The model is ~230 million light-years wide, with tens of thousands of evolving galaxies.
Among the findings are new, previously unstudied, phenomena that were not explicitly programmed into the simulation.
The simulation shows exactly how galaxies formed from clouds of gas after the Big Bang.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on November 20, 2019

The Tether Electrodynamic Propulsion CubeSat Experiment (TEPCE) is bringing back a technology from the 90’s that could be used for star sailboats.
TEPCE consists of two minisatellites connected with a 1km ‘rope’, the experiment will determine how the device responds to Earth’s magnetic field in the ionosphere.
Success of this mission could bring about spacecrafts that don’t require fuel to move around Earth’s orbit.
It could also lead to a new generation of space-cleaning spaceships for getting rid of all the space junk currently floating in Earth’s orbit.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on November 8, 2019

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