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Uh oh. Hubble's Having Gyro Problems Again
The Hubble Space Telescope has gone through its share of gyroscopes in its 34-year history in space. Astronauts replaced the gyros during the last servicing mission in 2009, bringing it back up to six (three with three spares), but they only last so long. Last week, HST went into safe mode because one of the …
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Astronomers Will Get Gravitational Wave Alerts Within 30 Seconds
Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance. Events where black holes and neutron stars collide can send out waves detectable here on Earth. It is possible that there can be an event in visible light when neutron stars collide so to take advantage of every opportunity an …
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Next Generation Ion Engines Will Be Extremely Powerful
During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated the concept of ion propulsion. Like many early Space Age proposals, the concept was originally explored by luminaries like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth – two of the “forefathers of rocketry.” Since then, the technology has been validated repeatedly by …
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Neutron Stars Could be Capturing Primordial Black Holes
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to explain this for years. One of the more interesting ideas comes from a team of astronomers in Europe and invokes dark matter, neutron stars, and primordial black holes (PBHs). Astronomer Roberto Caiozzo, of the International School for Advanced Studies in …
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Japan?s Lunar Lander Survives its Third Lunar Night
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too common but it’s wonderful to see missions exceed expectations. The Japanese Space Agency?s SLIM lunar lander was only supposed to survive a single day but it?s survived three brutal, harsh lunar nights and is still going. The temperatures plummet to …
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Black Holes Can Halt Star Formation in Massive Galaxies
It?s difficult to actually visualise a universe that is changing. Things tend to happen at snails pace albeit with the odd exception. Take the formation of galaxies growing in the early universe. Their immense gravitational field would suck in dust and gas from the local vicinity creating vast collections of stars. In the very centre …
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Mapping the Milky Way?s Magnetic Field in 3D
We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth?s magnetic field. It turns out that most objects in space have magnetic fields but it?s quite tricky to measure them. Astronomers have developed an ingenious way to measure the magnetic field of the Milky Way using polarised light from interstellar dust grains that align …
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NASA?s New Solar Sail Has Launched and Deployed
Solar Sails are an enigmatic and majestic way to travel across the gulf of space. Drawing an analogy to the sail ships of the past, they are one of the most efficient ways of propelling craft in space. On Tuesday a RocketLab Electron rocket launched NASA?s new Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. It aims to …
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Here?s Why We Should Put a Gravitational Wave Observatory on the Moon
Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been hungering for better detectors. But the Earth is warm and seismically noisy, and that will always limit the effectiveness of Earth-based detectors. Is the Moon the right place for a new gravitational wave observatory? It might be. Sending telescopes into …
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TESS Finds its First Rogue Planet
Well over 5,000 planets have been found orbiting other star systems. One of the satellites hunting for them is TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Astronomers using TESS think they are made a rather surprising discovery; their first free-floating – or rogue – planet. The planet was discovered using gravitational microlensing where the planet passed …
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