Space

As Hubble falters, astrophysicists find hope in the telescope’s successor

Space, Technology / /

Late afternoon on Sunday, June 13, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center received an unlucky but increasingly familiar message: The Hubble Space Telescope entered safe mode. The telescope’s primary computer halted, likely because of degrading hardware. NASA’s inability to send astronauts on a servicing mission, due to the Space Shuttle’s retirement, severely limited the Goddard team’s […]

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Sticking together for life (quite literally)!

Biology, Space / /

As the search for living entities in outer space continues, a team of researchers found that some bacteria may have the ability to survive amidst the harsh environment. Outer space is notorious for its inability to support living organisms. Extreme temperatures and low pressures prevent organisms from surviving. Additionally, ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun

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A sight to behold: Supernovae through the eyes of an artificial intelligence

Space, Technology / /

Only 0.1 percent. Without artificial intelligence (AI), cutting-edge astral observatories around the world may be able to comprehensively classify only 0.1 percent of the approximately 1 million supernovae observed yearly. Ashley Villar of Columbia University, along with many other experts, is aware of the limitations of data collection using human techniques. In response, these experts

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Terraforming Mars: The hard science & bizarre culture surrounding the sci-fi concept

Space / /

Elon Musk walks out to applause for his September 2015 interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” After exchanging pleasantries, Colbert asks Musk about his fascination with our closest solar neighbor: “You sincerely think that we should go to Mars…Why do we want to go to Mars? It’s uninhabitable.” “It is a fixer-upper of

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Disappearance of exoplanet Fomalhaut b: A Q&A with George Rieke, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona

Space / /

In 2008, Hubble Telescope Observations detected Fomalhaut b, an exoplanet 25 light-years away from Earth. It was one of the first directly imaged exoplanets, and was considered a benchmark in search for exoplanets. Latest research published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concludes that Fomalhaut is not an exoplanet at all but

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