Offbeat: General Offbeat: Space Space: Astronomy Space: Astrophysics Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features Space: The Solar System
Published

Astronomers find no young binary stars near Milky Way's black hole      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Scientists analyzed over a decade's worth of data about 16 young supermassive stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Supermassive stars typically are formed in pairs, but the new study found that all 16 of the stars were singletons. The findings support a scenario in which the supermassive black hole drives nearby stars to either merge or be disrupted, with one of the pair being ejected from the system.

Offbeat: General Offbeat: Space Space: Astronomy Space: Astrophysics Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features Space: The Solar System
Published

Researchers measure the light emitted by a sub-Neptune planet's atmosphere      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers observed exoplanet GJ 1214b's atmosphere by measuring the heat it emits while orbiting its host star. Astronomers directly detected the light emitted by a sub-Neptune exoplanet -- a category of planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

Space: Astronomy Space: Exploration Space: General Space: The Solar System
Published

How 1,000 undergraduates helped solve an enduring mystery about the sun      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

For three years at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of students spent an estimated 56,000 hours analyzing the behavior of hundreds of solar flares. Their results could help astrophysicists understand how the sun's corona reaches temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

Offbeat: General Offbeat: Space Space: Astronomy Space: Astrophysics Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features
Published

Galactic bubbles are more complex than imagined      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Astronomers have revealed new evidence about the properties of the giant bubbles of high-energy gas that extend far above and below the Milky Way galaxy's center.

Space: Astronomy Space: Exploration Space: General Space: The Solar System
Published

Webb looks for Fomalhaut's asteroid belt and finds much more      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that's 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system's Kuiper Belt of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune. The inner belts -- which had never been seen before -- were revealed by Webb for the first time.

Chemistry: Biochemistry Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Computer Science: General Engineering: Robotics Research
Published

The influence of AI on trust in human interaction      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

As AI becomes increasingly realistic, our trust in those with whom we communicate may be compromised. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have examined how advanced AI systems impact our trust in the individuals we interact with.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineering: Robotics Research Offbeat: Computers and Math Offbeat: General
Published

Scurrying centipedes inspire many-legged robots that can traverse difficult landscapes      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Intrigued to see if the many limbs could be helpful for locomotion in this world, a team of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians are using this style of movement to their advantage. They developed a new theory of multilegged locomotion and created many-legged robotic models, discovering the robot with redundant legs could move across uneven surfaces without any additional sensing or control technology as the theory predicted.

Biology: Cell Biology Biology: Genetics Biology: Microbiology Biology: Molecular Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Geoscience: Geochemistry
Published

AI could run a million microbial experiments per year      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Automation uncovers combinations of amino acids that feed two bacterial species and could tell us much more about the 90% of bacteria that humans have hardly studied. An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments -- as many as 10,000 per day -- potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Offbeat: General Offbeat: Space Space: Astrophysics Space: Cosmology Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features
Published

Neutron star's X-rays reveal 'photon metamorphosis'      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A 'beautiful effect' predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar -- a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to an astrophysicist.

Space: Astronomy Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features Space: The Solar System
Published

Hubble follows shadow play around planet-forming disk      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

The young star TW Hydrae is playing 'shadow puppets' with scientists observing it with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In 2017, astronomers reported discovering a shadow sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding the red dwarf star. The shadow isn't from a planet, but from an inner disk slightly inclined relative to the much larger outer disk -- causing it to cast a shadow. One explanation is that an unseen planet's gravity is pulling dust and gas into the planet's inclined orbit. The young star TW Hydrae is playing 'shadow puppets' with scientists observing it with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Now, a second shadow -- playing a game of peek-a-boo -- has emerged in just a few years between observations stored in Hubble's MAST archive. This could be from yet another disk nestled inside the system. The two disks are likely evidence of a pair of planets under construction.

Offbeat: General Offbeat: Space Space: Astronomy Space: Astrophysics Space: Cosmology Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features
Published

Astronomers find distant gas clouds with leftovers of the first stars      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers have found for the first time the fingerprints left by the explosion of the first stars in the Universe. They detected three distant gas clouds whose chemical composition matches what we expect from the first stellar explosions. These findings bring us one step closer to understanding the nature of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Computer Science: General Engineering: Nanotechnology Offbeat: Computers and Math Offbeat: General
Published

A touch-responsive fabric armband -- for flexible keyboards, wearable sketchpads      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

It's time to roll up your sleeves for the next advance in wearable technology -- a fabric armband that's actually a touch pad. Researchers say they have devised a way to make playing video games, sketching cartoons and signing documents easier. Their proof-of-concept silk armband turns a person's forearm into a keyboard or sketchpad. The three-layer, touch-responsive material interprets what a user draws or types and converts it into images on a computer.

Offbeat: General Offbeat: Space Space: Exploration Space: General Space: The Solar System
Published

What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away?      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth.

Offbeat: General Offbeat: Space Space: Astronomy Space: Astrophysics Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features
Published

Webb finds water vapor, but from a rocky planet or its star?      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to study a rocky exoplanet known as GJ 486 b. It is too close to its star to be within the habitable zone, with a surface temperature of about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius). And yet, their observations show hints of water vapor.

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Published

Astronomers detect 'nearby' black hole devouring a star      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Astronomers have discovered a new 'tidal disruption event,' in which the center of a galaxy lights up as its supermassive black hole rips apart a passing star. The outburst is the closest tidal disruption event observed to date, and one of the first to be identified at infrared wavelengths.

Space: Astronomy Space: Exploration Space: General Space: Structures and Features Space: The Solar System
Published

Superflare with massive, high-velocity prominence eruption      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A team of Japanese astronomers used simultaneous ground-based and space-based observations to capture a more complete picture of a superflare on a star. The observed flare started with a very massive, high-velocity prominence eruption. These results give us a better idea of how superflares and stellar prominence eruptions occur.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineering: Robotics Research
Published

Highly dexterous robot hand can operate in the dark -- just like us      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers demonstrated a highly dexterous robot hand, one that combines an advanced sense of touch with motor learning algorithms in order to achieve a high level of dexterity. In addition, the hand worked without any external cameras -- it's immune to lighting, occlusion, or similar issues. Because the hand doesn't rely on vision to manipulate objects, it can do so in difficult lighting conditions that would confuse vision-based algorithms -- it even operates in the dark.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineering: Robotics Research Offbeat: Computers and Math Offbeat: General
Published

Speedy robo-gripper reflexively organizes cluttered spaces      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A new gripper robot grasps by reflex. Rather than start from scratch after a failed attempt, the bot adapts in the moment to reflexively roll, palm, or pinch an object to get a better hold.