#thecosmosnews It was in 1610 that the father of modern astronomy Galileo Galilei first spotted Saturn’s spectacular rings – although through his pioneering but primitive telescope he...

#thecosmosnews The 40 pairs of free-floating entities, which have been named Jupiter-mass binary objects, or Jumbos, appear in spectacular images taken by the James Webb space telescope. The...

#thecosmosnews A researcher calls to explore deep waters to hunt for UFOs Earth's oceans are vast, representing some of our planet's most intriguing and least explored parts. A much anticipated...

#thecosmosnews The comet could be visible to the naked eye... if the circumstances are favorable. Now, we have a new comet that could reach naked-eye visibility over the next few weeks: C/2023...

#thecosmosnews Modern humans first left Africa and migrated to Eurasia between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago . But a fossilized skeleton with surprisingly human-like characteristics found in...

#thecosmosnews This month has given us some truly breathtaking sky displays, and the weekend ahead holds another treat. On October 28, the Moon will put on a spectacular show in the form of...

#thecosmosnews Jupiter, who hurt you? Last month, NASA’s Juno mission spotted a region of the gas giant’s atmosphere forming an abject face, complete with wide eyes, a nose, and frowning...

#thecosmosnews Astronomers Thrilled by Potential Life Signs on Alien Planet. Are we alone? This question is nearly as old as humanity itself. Today, this question in astronomy focuses on finding...

#thecosmosnews @TheCosmosNews Black holes are among the most awesome and mysterious objects in the known Universe. These gravitational behemoths form when massive stars undergo gravitational collapse at the end of their lifespans and shed their outer layers in a massive explosion (a supernova). Meanwhile, the stellar remnant becomes so dense that the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite in its vicinity and its gravity so intense that nothing (not even light) can escape its surface. This makes them impossible to observe using conventional optical telescopes that study objects in visible light. As a result, astronomers typically search for black holes in non-visible wavelengths or by observing their effect on objects in their vicinity. After consulting the Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3), a team of astronomers led by the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) recently observed a black hole in our cosmic backyard. As they describe in their study, this monster black hole is roughly twelve times the mass of our Sun and located about 1,550 light-years from Earth. Because of its mass and relative proximity, this black hole presents opportunities for astrophysicists.

#thecosmosnews By pumping groundwater, humans have shifted the distribution of the water on Earth enough to alter the planet’s tilt, a new study finds. Previous research estimated that, between 1993 to 2010, humans pumped more than 2 trillion tons of groundwater. That water flowed to cities and farms before emptying out to sea, raising global sea levels by around a quarter of an inch, the study suggested. New research finds evidence of this shift in the changing position of the Earth’s rotational pole — the point around which the planet spins. Comparing a computer model of the rotational pole with observed changes in its position, scientists found that the pole’s recent drift could not be fully explained without the effect of groundwater pumping. From 1993 to 2010, they determined, humans redistributed enough water to move the rotational pole roughly 31 inches. The findings were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “I’m very glad to find the unexplained cause of the rotation pole drift,” Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “On the other hand, as a resident of Earth and a father, I’m concerned and surprised to see that pumping groundwater is another source of sea-level rise.”

#thecosmosnews NASA Just Confirmed The Largest Comet Ever Detected, And It s Truly Gargantuan The largest comet ever discovered has been traveling towards the Sun for over 1 million years, and its gigantic scale shines a light on the mysterious objects that make up one of the biggest structures in our Solar System. In a new study, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm that the solid center of the giant comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is the largest comet nucleus ever detected. It measures a staggering 50 times larger than most known comets, at almost 140 kilometers wide (about 85 miles). However, that freakishly large size – or rather the apparent weirdness of it – might say more about us and our limited conception of comets than it does about anything else. C/2014 UN271 hails from the Oort Cloud: a gigantic, spherical scattering of icy objects proposed to surround the Sun at the deepest and most distant stretches of our Solar System (so far away, in fact, it s thought to extend at least a quarter of the way towards the next nearest star system, Alpha Centauri).

Dehydrated birds falling from sky in India amid record heatwave Rescuers in Gujarat state are picking up dozens of exhausted birds dropping daily as scorching heatwave dries out water sources. Rescuers in India’s western Gujarat state are picking up dozens of exhausted and dehydrated birds dropping every day as a scorching heatwave dries out water sources in the state’s biggest city, veterinary doctors and animal rescuers say. Large swaths of South Asia are drying up in the hottest summer in decades, prompting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to warn of rising fire risks. Doctors in an animal hospital managed by the non-profit Jivdaya Charitable Trust in Ahmedabad said they have treated thousands of birds in the last few weeks, adding that rescuers bring dozens of high flying birds such as pigeons or kites daily.

#thecosmosnews The job of NASA s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is simply surreal. Imagine traveling a thousand years back in time, then explaining to someone how future scientists will have a machine that detects alien worlds floating at distances beyond the capacity of human comprehension. That s TESS. Since 2018, this space-borne instrument has literally found thousands of exoplanets. We have eyes on one shaped like a rugby ball, another that seems covered in lava oceans and even an orb that rains glass -- sideways. On Wednesday, international scientists announced that one such foreign realm, dutifully hunted by TESS, may be covered in a blanket of life s elixir: water. I m not sure about you, but I m getting flashbacks to that scene in Interstellar where Cooper lands on a world with waves the size of skyscrapers. This possible "ocean world," according to the team s study, published this month in The Astronomical Journal, lives some 100 light-years away from Earth, orbiting within a binary star system nestled into the Draco constellation. Named TOI-1452 b, it is suspected to be about 70% larger than our planet, to be roughly five times as massive, to spin to the rhythm of seven Earth days and to have a temperature neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface.

#Thethecosmosnews The most famous time-travel paradox is the grandfather paradox - what happens if you travel back in time and kill your own grandfather? If you do, you cease to exist, but if you cease to exist then you never existed to kill your grandfather. The scientific consensus about time-travel paradoxes is that even if you were able to travel to the past you would not be able to do anything differently to what had already occurred, ensuring paradoxes do not occur. Dr Costa had demonstrated in earlier work that a limited amount of free will was possible if a person travelled to the past and assigned Mr Tobar the problem of developing the mathematical proofs further. “If there’s a wide variety of processes which can happen then this gives strong support to the argument that time travel is possible,” Mr Germaine Tobar said. “There is a lot of debate at the moment, a lot of physicists think closed time-like curves [where events from one point on a timeline affect things at a previous point in the timeline] can’t exist because of the possibility for these paradoxes. “No one has been able to show that these inconsistencies can be avoided, so we’ve found a lot of processes that are consistent.” The researchers use the example of someone travelling back in time to stop the current pandemic. Under the previous model, they would not be able to stop “patient zero” contracting the virus. They could under the new model outlined in the paper, but the pandemic would still occur through other means - a different person gets sick, the time traveller gets sick, or something else. Dr Costa said it was heady stuff to think about, and their equations were about proving logical consistencies, rather than a way to allow physical time travel. He said it was an important step to a greater understanding of how the universe worked. “This is quite a significant result. It’s all about a shift in perspective in how one considers the laws of the universe,” he said. “The standard position is to consider the laws of the universe as telling you what happens if you know what the system is at a given time, the laws tell you what it will be at a future time, which doesn’t allow for time travel. “The shift is having a new way to look at the laws of the universe in a way that is consistent with time travel.” Dr Costa said he expected the work to spark “a lot of discussion” in scientific circles, but believed it could shape how physicists thought about time travel into the future. “We still don’t have a complete understanding of the laws of the universe, especially in the realms where gravity plays an important role, we don’t know what the physics looks like,” he said. “So we can’t say that time travel is physically possible, but what we have shown is that it is not impossible.” The research has been published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

#thecosmosnews A bus-sized asteroid will pass close to Earth on Wednesday afternoon, passing well within the Moon’s orbit, and you can watch. Asteroid 2022 NF will make its closest approach of 55,300 miles to Earth on Thursday, 7 July, but the Virtual Telescope Project is offering a livestream tracking the asteroid’s path that launches at 4pm EDT Wednesday afternoon. Discovered on 4 July by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-Starrs telescope at Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii, the 22-foot diameter asteroid 2022 NF will not threaten Earth. But Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, has yet to plot the asteroid’s path out beyond 2022 in the lab’s small body database — asteroid 2022 NF orbits the Sun once every 3.7 years or so. It’s also not the only space rock to pass near Earth over the next six days, although it will pass the closest. Asteroid 2022 NE, a similarly sized space rock to 2022 NF, will make its closest pass by Earth on Wednesday, coming within 85,000 miles, according to JPL’s near Earth asteroid website. The airliner sized asteroid 2019 NW5 will then pass around 3.5 million miles from Earth on 10 July, the house-sized asteroid 2022 NH will pass within 1 million miles of our planet on 11 July and another bus-sized asteroid, 2015 OQ21, will pass 4.3 million miles from Earth on 12 July.

#thecosmosnews Ever wondered what it sounds like inside a black hole? Over the weekend, NASA shared audio of sound waves that astronomers had extracted from the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. The sounds were then amplified and mixed with other data to create this track: NASA clarified that it was not “intentionally made ominous, but the sound you hear is amplified a lot, and other sounds are interpreted from light data.” “One of the motivations to create such data sonifications is the desire to share the science with more people,” the space agency added. The black hole at the center of Perseus has been associated with sound since 2003 when astronomers discovered that pressure waves emitted from the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note, NASA explained in May when it first released the audio. The note is too low for humans to hear, at around 57 octaves below middle C. NASA resynthesized the sound waves into the range of human hearing by scaling them dozens of octaves above their true pitch. It also added more notes by translating astronomical data into sound.

#thecosmosnews Sun Throws 2,00,000 km-Long Fiery Filament Towards Earth; Its Remains Likely to Spark Geomagnetic Storm on October 7-8 The Sun has exploded and from it erupted 2,00,000 kilometers-long filament. Experts have said that the debris from the explosion could be headed toward Earth. As per SOHO observatories, a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) is emerging from the blast site and reports cited that data stream stopped before the full CME was visible. Yesterday, Oct. 4th, a 200,000-km long filament of magnetism in the sun s southern hemisphere erupted. Snapping like a rubber band, it hurled part of itself into space, Spaceweather.com report said. Debris from the blast might be heading for Earth. SOHO coronagraphs saw hints of a CME emerging from the blast site--but the data stream stopped before the full CME was visible. The missing data should arrive later today. Stay tuned for updates, it also added. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun s corona. They can eject billions of tons of coronal material and carry an embedded magnetic field (frozen in flux) that is stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength. Meanwhile, a behemoth sunspot AR3112 is poised to explode. NOAA forecasters estimate a 65% chance of M-flares and a 30% chance of X-flares today. Any eruptions will be geoeffective as the sunspot is almost directly facing Earth. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy and they can impact radio communications, electric power grids, and navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. On the other hand, geomagnetic storm is a major disturbance of Earth s magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.

#thecosmosnews China has started digging a borehole 11,100 metres in depth in the Tarim Basin, located deep within the Taklimakan Desert, which is the largest desert in China, according to a report by Xinhua. The purpose of the borehole is for scientific exploration, with researchers intending to find out what is deep within the surface of the Earth. The interior of the planet is challenging to study by scientists because of how remote and inaccessible it is. If successful, the effort will result in the deepest borehole in China, and the first one to exceed a depth of 10,000 metres. The hole is expended to pass through 10 layers of continental strata, going back to the Cretaceous period. However, this will not be the deepest artificial hole, which is a record held by the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, which reached a depth of 12,262 metres. The Al Shaheen Oil Well actually had a longer borehole in the pure distance, while not reaching the same depth, and measured 12,289 metres in length.

#thecosmosnews NASA has plans to power down its Voyager spacecraft after four-and-a-half decades – here s what you need to know. The US space agency s Voyager program consists of two robotic interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Initially, the two spacecraft, which were launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, headed into space to study Jupiter and Saturn. Their mission was only meant to last five years, however, the instruments have endured in deep space for nearly 45 years. And since their launch, the probes have traveled a remarkable 14.46 billion miles from Earth – further than any man-made object. However, now Nasa has announced that the Voyager program is coming to an end, as the two spacecraft are entering their very final phase. "We re at 44 and a half years, so we ve done 10 times the warranty on the darn things," Nasa physicist Ralph McNutt told Scientific American. By 2025, both vehicles, which run via radioisotope thermoelectric generators, are expected to run out of power. In the meantime, Nasa has been eliminating features to keep the machines operating until then. "Because of this diminishing electrical power, the Voyager team has had to prioritize which instruments to keep on and which to turn off," Nasa said on its Voyager webpage.

#thecosmosnews Update:LHCb discovers three new exotic particles The collaboration has observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”, which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles. Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments. Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks. But in the past two years, LHCb has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons. Two years ago, the collaboration discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two “open-charm” tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark. And last year it found the first-ever instance of a “double open-charm” tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark. The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark. The finding has a whopping statistical significance of 15 standard deviations, far beyond the 5 standard deviations that are required to claim the observation of a particle in particle physics.