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Space

SPACE: Astronomers May Have Found Something Traveling Faster Than Light (Sort Of)

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FTL travel - NASA

In a distant corner of the universe, something is traveling faster than light.  No, the laws of physics aren’t being violated: It’s still true that nothing can travel faster than light in the vacuum of empty space. But when light travels through matter, like interstellar gas or a soup of charged particles, it slow downs, meaning other matter might overtake it. And that may explain the weird symmetry in pulses of some of the most energetic light in the universe, called gamma-ray bursts.  These cryptic bursts — bright flashes of gamma-ray light that come from faraway galaxies — form when … Read more

Meat… in… Space!

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Meat in Space

For the first time ever, meat was created in space — but no animals were harmed in the making of this 3D bioprinted “space beef.” Aleph Farms, an Israeli food company, announced today (Oct. 7) that its experiment aboard the International Space Station resulted in the first-ever lab-grown meat in space. The company focuses on growing cultivated beef steaks, or growing an entire piece of real, edible meat out of just a couple of cells, in this case, bovine cell spheroids, in a lab. On the space station, the experiment involved growing a piece of meat by mimicking a cow’s … Read more

UFO Seekers Head to Thailand

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alien - pixabay

A hilltop in central Thailand is attracting UFO seekers who believe extraterrestrials hover above a huge Buddha statue, send telepathic communiques, walk across nearby sugarcane fields and use a crocodile-infested lake as a portal from their planets — Pluto and Loku. Though it may sound like science fiction, a small group of individuals claims messages from aliens arriving in spaceships include plenty of traditional religious teachings too — leading them to believe they are actually Buddhist. It’s all happening three hours by road or rail north from Bangkok in Nakhon Sawan — which translates to “City of Heaven.” Without all … Read more

Listen to the Sounds of Mars

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Insight Lander - NASA

Mars is full of subtle sounds and thanks to NASA’s InSight mission, we’re finally able to hear them. The stationary probe’s seismometer, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, is sensitive enough to pick up the most gentle of vibrations.  The seismometer has been listening out for earthquakes on Mars. Seismic activity can paint a picture of the interior of a planet and how it was formed, which is one of InSight’s main objectives for Mars. InSight landed on Mars in November 2018 and placed the seismometer on the Martian surface in February. But the Red Planet didn’t produce any sounds until April. And … Read more

SPACE: NASA is Mad at Elon Musk

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Starship MK1 - SpaceX

SpaceX has never flown a person into space in its Crew Dragon, its first crew-capable spacecraft. But already the company is showing off its much bigger, much shinier cousin: the Starship, built in Boca Chica, a coastal village at the southeastern tip of Texas, as part of a plan to carry giant crews into deep space. And NASA’s administrator is bristling. That’s because, even though the Crew Dragon — which consists of a capsule for carrying cargo and crew into space on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket — is still very much in the works, it’s well behind schedule. … Read more

SPACE: Three Black Holes Are About to Collide

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black holes - deposit photos

A rare trio of supermassive black holes has been caught in the act of coming together. Three of the light-gobbling monsters nuzzle shoulder to shoulder in SDSS J084905.51+111447.2, a system of three merging galaxies about 1 billion light-years from Earth, a new study reports. “We were only looking for pairs of black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system,” lead author Ryan Pfeifle, of George Mason University in Virginia, said in a statement. “This is the strongest evidence yet found for such a triple system of actively feeding supermassive black holes.” … Read more

SPACE: The Gassy Highway That Connects Everything

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nebula - pixabay

In the cold wilderness of space, galaxies huddle together around the campfires of stars and the assuring pull of supermassive black holes. Between these cozy clusters of galaxies, where empty space stretches on for millions of light-years all around, a faint highway of gas bridges the darkness. This gassy, intergalactic network is known in cosmological models as the cosmic web. Made of long filaments of hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, the web is thought to contain most (more than 60%) of the gas in the universe and to directly feed all of the star-producing regions in space. At … Read more

SPACE: Andromeda Is Coming For Us

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Andromeda - pixabay

Like most big galaxies, the Milky Way is a cold-blooded cannibal, with a history of gobbling up smaller galaxies in order to maintain its lovely spiral figure. But, a few billion years from now, our cosmic home could meet its match with an equally hungry neighbor called Andromeda. Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy to ours, is on a crash course to merge with the Milky Way about 4.5 billion years from now. How will the monstrous smash-up change the shapes of the participating galaxies? That’s anyone’s guess. But, given Andromeda’s size, astronomers know our neighbor is no slouch when it … Read more

Elon Musk Unveils the World’s First Starship

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spacex

Elon Musk has a Starship, and one day he expects it will help SpaceX reach other worlds. Standing beneath a towering Starship Mk1, a prototype for SpaceX’s massive reusable launch system, Musk laid out his plan for interplanetary travel at the company’s South Texas test site here on Saturday (Sept. 28) — the 11th anniversary of the first successful orbital launch of SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1. The new version of Starship (and its Super Heavy booster) will be able to carry up to 100 people to the moon, Mars or other destinations in space or around Earth, he … Read more

SPACE: Are Aliens Watching Us?

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aliens - pixabay

Picture this: A hundred million years ago, an advanced civilization detects strange signatures of life on a blue-green planet not so far away from their home in the Milky Way. They try sending signals, but whatever’s marching around on that unknown world isn’t responding. So, the curious galactic explorers try something different. They send a robotic probe to a small, quiet space rock orbiting near the life-rich planet, just to keep an eye on things. If a story like this played out at any moment in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history, it just might have left an archaeological record. At least, … Read more