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SPACE: Making Nuclear Pasta – Live Science

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Nuclear Pasta

How to cook “nuclear pasta” in three easy steps: 1. Boil one large, dying star until it goes supernova and explodes. (This could take a billion years, so be patient.) 2. Vigorously stir any leftover protons and electrons inside the star’s shriveled core until they merge into a soup of ultradense neutrons. Apply as much gravity as necessary. 3. Scrunch the neutron stew into an airtight sphere the size of Toronto. Cover in a crystalline crust and serve at 1.08 million degrees Fahrenheit (600,000 degrees Celsius). Voila! You have just made one of the universe’s strangest concoctions — nuclear pasta. … Read more

SPACE: Colliding Galaxies Create Ring of Black Holes

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Giant Ring of Black Holes

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study. The bright X-ray source emanates from the ring galaxy AM 0644-741 (abbreviated AM 0644), which lies approximately 300 million light-years from Earth. By combining data from Chandra and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers created a … Read more

ANNOUNCEMENT/GIVEAWAY: Priest & Pariahs, by J. Alan Veerkamp

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Priest & Pariahs

QSFer J. Alan Veerkamp has a new MM sci fi book out: Costa McQuillen has escaped from Earth, where being para-human—a Pariah—with tech empathic abilities is illegal, and marks him for extermination. Arrogant and standoffish, Costa is unable to trust anyone but is willing to risk everyone’s safety in his desperate effort to reach the planet Omoikane. His best solution, gaining passage on board the Santa Claus. Arbor Kittering is the crew’s newest coding tech. Having spent a short time in prison for data hacking and falsifying government files, the Santa Claus is his last chance at a new start—if … Read more

SPACE: Scientists Search for Our Mother Sun

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mother sun

Image Credit: NAOJ Billions of years ago, a huge star blasted open and spewed its guts into space. At that energetic moment, the so-called core-collapse supernova formed a debris cloud of brand-new atoms, forged in the heat of its blast. Time passed. The cloud contracted, attracted to itself by its own gravity. A star formed — our sun — surrounded by chunks of rock and gas that formed our planets and other orbiting bodies. Much later, we came along. That’s the basic story of our solar system’s birth. And, mostly from watching other supernovas and other star births out in … Read more

SPACE: Saturn Sprouts Another Weird Hexagon

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saturn hexagon

A bizarre, hexagon-shaped vortex has formed above Saturn’s north pole as the planet’s northern hemisphere enters summer, data from the international Cassini-Huygens mission revealed. The unusual vortex is circulating hundreds of kilometers above the clouds in the stratosphere layer of the ringed planet’s atmosphere, a new study reported. This warm polar vortex resembles another, previously discovered hexagon formation, also located at Saturn’s north pole, but lower in the atmosphere. But how and whether these bizarre low- and high-altitude hexagons are related remains a mystery to scientists. “Either a hexagon has spawned spontaneously and identically at two different altitudes, one lower … Read more

SPACE: Cosmic Zombies

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Cosmic Zombies - NASA

Close encounters with medium-size black holes can reanimate dead stars, if only momentarily, a new study suggests. A team of astronomers performed computer simulations to determine what happens when a burned-out stellar corpse known as a white dwarf passes close to an intermediate-mass black hole — one that harbors between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of Earth’s sun. The researchers determined that the black hole’s powerful gravity can stretch and distort the white dwarf’s previously inert innards so dramatically that nuclear-fusion processes can reignite for a few seconds, converting helium, carbon and oxygen into heavier elements such as iron. … Read more

SPACE: Closest Exoplanet to Earth Could Be ‘Highly Habitable’

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Proxima Centauri b - NASA

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet — known as Proxima Centauri b— in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions, Proxima Centauri b can sustain enormous areas of liquid water on its surface, potentially raising its prospects for harboring living organisms. “The major message from our simulations is that there’s … Read more

SPACE: There’s Ice on the Moon!

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Lunar Ice - NASA

Scientists have detected the first-ever evidence of frozen water on the moon, on the darkest and coldest parts of the lunar surface. While prior analysis of the moon hinted at some ice reserves, this is the first time that ice has been observed at the north and south poles ­— and the signs of water ice are “direct and definitive,” according to a new study. Researchers peered at suspected icy patches using an instrument called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), which used the near-infrared spectrum to pinpoint the signature activity of ice molecules interacting with infrared light. This helped the … Read more

SPACE: Is Terraforming Mars Impossible?

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Terraforming Mars - Live Science

Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk has a vision for colonising Mars, based on a big rocket, nuclear explosions and an infrastructure to transport millions of people there. This was seen as highly ambitious but technically challenging in several ways. Planetary protection rules and the difficulties of terraforming (making the planet hospitable by, for example, warming it up) and dealing with the harsh radiation were quoted as severe obstacles. Undeterred, Musk took a first step towards his aim in February this year with the launch of a Tesla roadster car into an orbit travelling beyond Mars on the first … Read more

SCIENCE: What If Earth Turned into a Giant Pile of Blueberries?

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Blueberries - pixabay

If our planet suddenly turned into an Earth-size pile of blueberries, things would start exploding. This is science. Specifically, it’s the conclusion of a juicy paper submitted to the preprint server arXiv on July 27. (Papers on arXiv have not yet passed through the peer-review process or been published in journals.) The author, Anders Sandberg, a computational neuroscientist with a broad research portfolio at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, addresses the problem — originally posed on the website Stack Exchange — in thorough, blueberry-bursting fashion. Sandberg’s paper aims to answer the question, “What if the entire Earth … Read more