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Dinkinesh's Moonlet is Only 2-3 Million Years Old
Last November, NASA’s Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinish, one of the Main Belt asteroids it will investigate as it makes its way to Jupiter. In the process, the spacecraft spotted a small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid, now named Selam (aka. “Lucy’s baby”). The moonlet’s name, an Ethiopian name that means …
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The Universe Could Be Filled With Ultralight Black Holes That Can't Die
Steven Hawking famously calculated that black holes should evaporate, converting into particles and energy over vast periods. But what if the evaporation process stops at the Planck scale? A new paper suggests that primordial black holes that formed early in the Universe could still be around, unable to evaporate fully. They would continue roaming the Universe as cosmic relics, occasionally accreting matter and evaporating again.
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Starlink on Mars? NASA Is Paying SpaceX to Look Into the Idea
NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its Starlink broadband internet satellites for use in a Martian communication network. The idea is one of a dozen proposals that have won NASA funding for concept studies that could end up supporting the space agency’s strategy for bringing samples from …
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Did You Hear Webb Found Life on an Exoplanet? Not so Fast?
The JWST is astronomers’ best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect the light passing through a distant world’s atmosphere and determine its chemical components. Scientists are interested in everything the JWST finds, but when it finds something indicating the possibility of life it seizes everyone’s attention. That’s what happened in September …
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Vera Rubin?s Primary Mirror Gets its First Reflective Coating
First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is reaching milestone after milestone. A few weeks ago, the observatory announced that its digital camera, the largest one ever made, is complete. Now the observatory has announced that its unique primary/tertiary mirror has its first reflective coating. The Rubin’s massive …
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Two Stars in a Binary System are Very Different. It's Because There Used to be Three
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it’s center seems to break our standard models of stellar evolution. But new data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggests that there may once have been three stars, and that one was destroyed in a catastrophic collision. About 3800 light years away, …
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The Highest Observatory in the World Comes Online
The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and higher to get better views of the Universe. On Earth, the best locations are at places such as the Atacama Desert in Chile. So, that’s where the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory just opened its high-altitude eye on the sky, …
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Is the JWST Now an Interplanetary Meteorologist?
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope’s latest act of outdoing itself, it examined a distant exoplanet to map its weather. The forecast? An unending, blistering inferno driven by ceaseless supersonic winds. WASP-43b is a hot Jupiter orbiting a main sequence star about 261 light-years away. It has a slightly larger radius than Jupiter …
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Solar Orbiter Takes a Mind-Boggling Video of the Sun
You’ve seen the Sun, but you’ve never seen the Sun like this. This single frame from a video captured by ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission shows the Sun looking very ?. fluffy! You can see feathery, hair-like structures made of plasma following magnetic field lines in the Sun?s lower atmosphere as it transitions into the much …
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What Can AI Learn About the Universe?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become ubiquitous, with applications ranging from data analysis, cybersecurity, pharmaceutical development, music composition, and artistic renderings. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have also emerged, adding human interaction and writing to the long list of applications. This includes ChatGPT, an LLM that has had a profound impact since …
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