“NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin are in good condition following an aborted launch of their Soyuz spacecraft.
The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station at 4:40 a.m. EDT Thursday, October 11 (2:40 p.m. in Baikonur) carrying American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. Shortly after launch, there was an anomaly with the booster and the launch ascent was aborted, resulting in a ballistic landing of the spacecraft. Search and rescue teams were deployed to the landing site. Hague and Ovchinin are out of the capsule and are reported to be in good condition.”
“A new model is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the kinds of light signals produced when two supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, spiral toward a collision. For the first time, a new computer simulation that fully incorporates the physical effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity shows that gas in such systems will glow predominantly in ultraviolet and X-ray light.
Supermassive mergers will be much more difficult to find than their stellar-mass cousins. One reason ground-based observatories can’t detect gravitational waves from these events is because Earth itself is too noisy, shaking from seismic vibrations and gravitational changes from atmospheric disturbances. The detectors must be in space, like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) led by ESA (the European Space Agency) and planned for launch in the 2030s. Observatories monitoring sets of rapidly spinning, superdense stars called pulsars may detect gravitational waves from monster mergers. Like lighthouses, pulsars emit regularly timed beams of light that flash in and out of view as they rotate. Gravitational waves could cause slight changes in the timing of those flashes, but so far studies haven’t yielded any detections.”
“Using NASA’s Hubble and Kepler space telescopes, astronomers have uncovered tantalizing evidence of what could be the first discovery of a moon orbiting a planet outside our solar system. This moon candidate, which is 8,000 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation, orbits a gas-giant planet that, in turn, orbits a star called Kepler-1625. Researchers caution that the moon hypothesis is tentative and must be confirmed by follow-up Hubble observations.
Since moons outside our solar system – known as exomoons – cannot be imaged directly, their presence is inferred when they pass in front of a star, momentarily dimming its light. Such an event is called a transit, and has been used to detect many of the exoplanets cataloged to date. However, exomoons are harder to detect than exoplanets because they are smaller than their companion planet, and so their transit signal is weaker when plotted on a light curve that measures the duration of the planet crossing and the amount of momentary dimming. Exomoons also shift position with each transit because the moon is orbiting the planet.”
“Two days before Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the NASA-Japan Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory satellite captured a 3-D view of the storm. At the time Maria was a Category 1 hurricane. The 3-D view reveals the processes inside the hurricane that would fuel the storm’s intensification to a category 5 within 24 hours.
For the first time in 360-degrees, this data visualization takes you inside the hurricane. The precipitation satellite has an advanced radar that measures both liquid and frozen water. The brightly colored dots show areas of rainfall, where green and yellow show low rates and red and purple show high rates. At the top of the hurricane, where temperatures are colder, blue and purple dots show light and heavy frozen precipitation. The colored areas below the dots show how much rain is falling at the surface.”
“When a small Solar System body such as a moon or an asteroid passes in front of a star and temporarily blocks its light, the occultation is an extraordinary chance for astronomers to study the properties of the foreground object. And, of course, the more accurate the prediction of both objects’ positions on the sky, the better the observations. This is why, when a group of astronomers were planning to observe the rare occultation of a distant star by Neptune’s moon Triton on 5 October 2017, they made a special request to the Gaia team.
The astronomers, led by Bruno Sicardy from Pierre and Marie Curie University and the Observatory of Paris, France, had used all available observations to compute the path that the moon’s shadow would sweep across our planet. Within less than three minutes, the occultation would first cross Europe and North Africa, rapidly moving towards North America. They knew that somewhere, within this couple of thousand kilometre-wide stretch, would lie a very special thin strip, only about 100-km across. Observers situated on this strip would be perfectly aligned with both Triton and the distant star, and therefore able to see the so-called central flash. This sharp brightening of the star happens half way through the occultation, and is caused by focussing of the starlight by deep layers in the moon’s atmosphere – about 10 km above surface. The central flash contains all-important information to study the profile of Triton’s atmosphere and the possible presence of haze in it.”
“Global sea level rise is accelerating incrementally over time rather than increasing at a steady rate, as previously thought, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data. If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100, enough to cause significant problems for coastal cities.”
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