The Scale of the Universe: bellissimo!

Life in the universe is rare

Life Is an Accident of Space and Time

Considering the billions of planets in our galaxy, and the billions of galaxies in the observable universe, few scientists believe that our planet is the only habitat with life. Nonetheless, finding definite evidence of living things elsewhere in the cosmos would have deep emotional and psychological import, as well as philosophical and theological meaning. Such a finding would force us humans to reconsider some of our fundamental beliefs: How do we define “life”? What are the possible varieties of life? Where did we living things come from? Is there some kind of cosmic community?

In fact, recent scientific research suggests that life in the universe is rare.


:eek: :bye: :bye:

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Interstellar

Hubble Captures 2 Galaxies Overlapping to Form a Stunning Interstellar 'Snail'

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope beautifully illustrates why astronomers need to be so careful about distance in space.

Over 1 billion light-years away, two galaxies float in the darkness, beautiful golden snail-like spirals seemingly caught in the act of colliding. They're named SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, and in spite of appearances, they're not interacting at all.
Instead, they're separated by quite some distance. Their alignment is an absolutely beautiful line-of-sight coincidence.

:D :clap:

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Blob!!

Watch a Tiny Robot Blob Transform Into Even Tinier Bits to Squeeze Through Cracks

Scientists have created a robot that can transform from a black glob into a swarm of tiny beads and back again.

The inventors say that the robot's ability to split itself into many pieces and then snap back together makes it potentially useful for drug delivery.

:D :clap:

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Miniature ferrofluidic robot splitting into tiny versions of itself.
 
Spectacular!

DART asteroid collision captured by Hubble and James Webb telescopes

The spectacular moment NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) craft smashed into a distant asteroid has been captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope — and the footage is incredible.

The DART spacecraft smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, which is 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, at 7:14 p.m. ET on Monday (Sept. 26), marking humanity's first attempt to test its planetary defense system by altering an asteroid's trajectory.

:D :clap:

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Superhot blob!

Superhot blob of gas discovered orbiting Milky Way's black hole at 'mind-blowing' velocity

Astronomers have detected a blob of hot gas whizzing around the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy at an extraordinary speed. A powerful magnetic field surrounding the colossal space-time tear has supercharged the bizarre gaseous globule, speeding it up to 30% the speed of light, a new study finds.

:D :clap:

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The orbit of the newly discovered rapid hot spot around Sagittarius A* superimposed on top of the first image of the supermassive black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. (Image credit: EHT Collaboration, ESO/L. Calçada (Acknowledgment: M. Wielgus))
 
First Stars in The Universe

We May Finally Have Evidence of The First Stars in The Universe

The very first stars might have appeared when the Universe was only 100 million years old, or less than 1 percent of its current age. Since then, the rapid expansion of space has stretched their light into oblivion, leaving us to seek clues about their existence in cosmic sources closer to home.

:D :clap:

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A field of Population III stars as they would have appeared 100 million years after the Big Bang.
 
Every hour of the day, every day of the year

Breathtaking Footage Shows a Martian Moon Eerily Eclipsing Jupiter

Every hour of the day, every day of the year, our Solar System is just out there beyond Earth's pale blue sky, doing its thing. Sometimes – if we're in the right place at the right time – we get to see that thing from a new perspective.

A little spacecraft over 100 million kilometers (62 million miles) from home happened to be in the right place at the right time, and we couldn't be more grateful.

:D :clap:

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A still from the video showing Deimos, Jupiter, and the four Galilean moons. (ESA)
 
World's oldest complete star map, lost for millennia, found inside medieval manuscript

Evidence points to the map being made by Hipparchus, the "father of scientific astronomy."

Scholars may have just discovered a fragment of the world's oldest complete star map.

:D :clap:

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Faint tracings of the hidden text were revealed by multispectral imaging. (Image credit: Museum of the Bible/Early Manuscripts Electronic Library/Lazarus Project/University of Rochester/multispectral processing by Keith T. Knox/tracings by Emanuel Zingg)
 
Cribbio!

Climate Change Is Burying Archaeological Sites Under Tons of Sand

29.09.2022

Desertification can wear down ancient ruins or hide them under dunes—leaving researchers scrambling to keep track of where they’re buried.

The Nizari garrison at Gird Castle resisted the Mongol horde of Hulagu Khan for 17 years before surrendering in December 1270. The fortress rose 300 meters above the surrounding plains of present-day eastern Iran, with three rings of fortifications enclosing its base. But dwindling supplies and an outbreak of cholera forced the defenders to abandon their posts after one of the longest sieges in medieval history.

Eight hundred years later, the remaining fortifications at Gird Castle face the onslaught of a new invader: sand. For the past three months, Bijan Rouhani, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, has been monitoring about 700 sites in Iran’s Sistan region using satellite imagery. His comparison of US intelligence photos taken in 1977 and Google Earth’s most recent images of the area shows the advance of vast dunes that now almost bury the fortress at Gird.


:eek: :(

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Deposited Sands in the Northern Cemetery of Meroe in shape of pyramid
 
The strong force isn’t quite as strong as theory predicts

Protons may be stretchier than physics predicts

Quarks inside the particles seem to move more than they should in an electric field

Protons might be stretchier than they should be.
The subatomic particles are built of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound together by a powerful interaction known as the strong force. New experiments seem to show that the quarks respond more than expected to an electric field pulling on them, physicist Nikolaos Sparveris and colleagues report October 19 in Nature. The result suggests that the strong force isn’t quite as strong as theory predicts.

:D :clap:

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A proton (illustrated) contains three particles called quarks (red, green and blue blobs). In electric fields, those quarks seem to move more than theory predicts, making the proton stretchier than imagined.
 
Bronze Age gold belt with 'cosmological' designs unearthed in Czech beet field

A beet farmer discovered an ornate Bronze Age gold belt on his land in the Czech Republic

A beet farmer in the Czech Republic got the surprise of his life last month when he unearthed a thin, crumpled sheet of gold that turned out to be nearly 2,500 years old.

The Bronze Age "saw a really extraordinary flourishing of metalworking practice, including very ornate goldworking, and wide distribution of elaborate gold objects in central and western Europe," Frieman told Live Science in an email. "Gold objects with circular motifs are often linked to Bronze Age cosmological systems believed to focus on solar cycles."

:D :clap:

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Astronomers have found the closest known black hole to Earth

The closest black hole yet found is just 1,560 light-years from Earth, a new study reports. The black hole, dubbed Gaia BH1, is about 10 times the mass of the sun and orbits a sunlike star.

Gaia BH1 is the nearest black hole to Earth ever discovered — the next closest is around 3,200 light-years away. But it’s probably not the closest that exists, or even the closest we’ll ever find. Astronomers think there are about 100 million black holes in the Milky Way, but almost all of them are invisible.


:D :clap:

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Stellar winds from a companion star might accrete onto black hole Gaia BH1 (illustrated), giving it a wispy halo distorted by gravity.
 
The enigmatic radiation

Catastrophic solar storms may not explain shadows of radiation in trees

A cryptic chemical signature of unknown origins, hidden for centuries inside the trunks of Earth’s trees, just became even more mysterious.

In the last decade, scientists have discovered traces on Earth of six intense bursts of radiation, known as Miyake events, scattered over the last 9,300 years. The most popular explanation is that these mysterious signatures were left behind by massive solar storms, leading some scientists to warn that the next Miyake event could cripple the world’s electrical grid. But new research, published in the October Proceedings of the Royal Society A, suggests that more than just solar flares might be behind the enigmatic radiation.

:D :clap:

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As trees grow, they add rings to their trunks. Scientists can measure the chemical compositions of these rings to learn about the environment’s past.
 
Time crystal

What the heck is a time crystal, and why are physicists obsessed with them?

You’re probably quite familiar with the basic states of matter—solid, liquid, gas—that fill everyday life on Earth.

But those three different sorts of matter that each look and act differently aren’t the whole of the universe—far from it. Scientists have discovered (or created) dozens of more exotic states of matter, often bearing mystical and fanciful names: superfluids, Bose-Einstein condensates, and neutron-degenerate matter, to name a few.

In the last few years, physicists around the world have been constructing another state of matter: a “time crystal.” If that seems like B-movie technobabble, it’s technobabble no longer. Using a quantum computer, a few researchers have created a time crystal that, they think, firmly establishes time crystals in the world of physics.

:D :clap:

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Sponsiano, chi era costui?

Una nuova indagine su antiche monete d'oro rileva l'esistenza di imperatore romano sconosciuto, Sponsiano

Una ricerca indica che i pezzi d'oro rinvenuti secoli fa e a lungo ritenuti falsi sono autentiche monete romane, tra cui una moneta raffigurante un ufficiale dell'esercito romano che si dichiarò imperatore nel III secolo

Una nuova analisi di rare monete romane che si dice siano state portate alla luce più di tre secoli fa, ma che per lungo tempo sono state considerate dei falsi, fornisce una prova inconfutabile della loro autenticità e del fatto che l'uomo con la corona che appare su una di esse fosse un vero personaggio storico che governò come imperatore romano quasi 2000 anni fa.

"Le monete sono l'unica prova della sua esistenza", ha dichiarato Paul Pearson, ricercatore associato dell'University College di Londra, a proposito di Sponsiano, l'uomo raffigurato sulla moneta. "Non ci sono prove storiche scritte. È davvero emozionante riportare in vita qualcuno dall'oscurità".

La ricerca, pubblicata mercoledì 23 sulla rivista scientifica PLOS One, suggerisce che le monete risalgono al terzo secolo ed esclude l'idea che si tratti di falsi del XVIII secolo, ha aggiunto il dottor Pearson, che è l'autore principale del nuovo studio.

:D :clap:

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