Wednesday, January 5, 2022

The mysterious dusty object orbiting TIC 400799224

Boston MA (SPX) Jan 05, 2022
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, was launched in 2018 with the goal of discovering small planets around the Sun's nearest neighbor stars. TESS has so far discovered 172 confirmed exoplanets and compiled a list of 4703 candidate exoplanets. Its sensitive camera takes images that span a huge field of view, more than twice the area of the constellation of Orion, and TESS has also as

Webb telescope fully deploys sunshield in mission milestone

Washington (AFP) Jan 4, 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope fully deployed its tennis-court sized sunshield Tuesday, a critical milestone for the success of its mission to study every phase of cosmic history, NASA said. "All five layers of the sunshield are fully tensioned," said an announcer at the observatory's control center in Baltimore, where team members cheered, a live feed showed. The 70-foot (21 meter) long

Kerstin Perez is searching the cosmos for signs of dark matter

Boston MA (SPX) Jan 04, 2022
Kerstin Perez is searching for imprints of dark matter. The invisible substance embodies 84 percent of the matter in the universe and is thought to be a powerful cosmic glue, keeping whole galaxies from spinning apart. And yet, the particles themselves leave barely a trace on ordinary matter, thwarting all efforts at detection thus far. Perez, a particle physicist at MIT, is hoping that a

Real-time alert system heralds new era in fast radio burst research

Montreal, Canada (SPX) Jan 05, 2022
McGill University scientists have developed a new system for sharing the enormous amount of data being generated by the CHIME radio telescope in its search for fast radio bursts (FRBs), the puzzling extragalactic phenomenon that is one of the hottest topics in modern-day astronomy. It is not uncommon for the CHIME/FRB project to pinpoint several FRB events in a single day of operation as i

Monday, January 3, 2022

China launches final rocket of the year into orbit

Beijing (XNA) Jan 01, 2022
China launched a Long March 3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province early on Thursday morning, marking the completion of the country's annual launch schedule. The rocket blasted off at 12:43 am and carried an experimental satellite, named Communication Technology Demonstrator 9, into a geosynchronous orbit, according to a statement published by China

China receives data from newly launched resource satellite

Beijing (XNA) Dec 27, 2021
The China Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station has successfully received the first data transmitted from the newly launched resource satellite ZY-1 02E, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said Monday. The ground station in Beijing's Miyun District tracked and received the downlink data from the 5-meter optical satellite in two receiving tasks that lasted about nine minutes and five m

Quantum marbles in a bowl of light

Bonn, Germany (SPX) Jan 01, 2022
Which factors determine how fast a quantum computer can perform its calculations? Physicists at the University of Bonn and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology have devised an elegant experiment to answer this question. The results of the study are published in the journal Science Advances. Quantum computers are highly sophisticated machines that rely on the principles of quantum