The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

Interstellar visitor ... (It is amazing how they figure out the source of these objects) ...

One meteor traveled quite a long way from home to visit Earth.

Researchers discovered the first known interstellar meteor to ever hit Earth, according to a recently released United States Space Command document. An interstellar meteor is a space rock that originates from outside our solar system – a rare occurrence.

This one is known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, and it crash-landed along the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014.

... The meteor’s high velocity is what initially caught Siraj’s eye.

The meteor was moving at a high speed of about 28 miles per second (45 kilometers per second) relative to Earth, which is moving at around 18.6 miles per second (30 kilometers per second) around the sun. Because researchers measured how fast the meteor was moving while on a moving planet, the 45 kilometers per second was not actually how fast it was going.

... He then mapped out the trajectory of the meteor and found it was in an unbound orbit, unlike the closed orbit of other meteors. This means that rather than circling around the sun like other meteors, it came from outside the solar system.

“Presumably, it was produced by another star, got kicked out of that star’s planetary system and just so happened to make its way to our solar system and collide with earth ...

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/13/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

A Neptunian mystery ... and a summer that lasts for decades! ...

Neptune just experienced an unexplained temperature shift

The most distant planet in our solar system has presented a new mystery.

Astronomers observing Neptune for the past 17 years with multiple ground-based telescopes tracked a surprising drop in the ice giant’s global temperatures, which was then followed by a dramatic warming trend at the planet’s south pole.

Neptune, which orbits the sun at a distance of 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers), experiences seasons like Earth does – they just last much longer. One year on Neptune lasts for about 165 Earth years, so a single season can last around 40 years. It’s been summertime in Neptune’s southern hemisphere since 2005.

Astronomers decided to track the planet’s atmospheric temperatures once the southern summer solstice occurred that year.

Nearly 100 thermal images of Neptune taken since then showed that much of Neptune gradually cooled, dropping by 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) between 2003 and 2018.

... Then, a dramatic warming event occurred at Neptune’s south pole between 2018 and 2020 and temperatures rose by 20 degrees Fahrenheit (11 degrees Celsius). This warm polar vortex completely reversed any cooling that occurred before.

This kind of polar warming has never been seen on Neptune until now.

... Frosty Neptune has an average of negative 340 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 220 degrees Celsius)

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/neptune-temperature-shifts-scn/index.html

And a moon mystery too! ...

Scientists come up with fresh take on moon mystery

The far side of the moon, which we can never see from our vantage point on Earth, looks surprisingly different than the orb we’re used to seeing in the night sky.

The near side we are so familiar with appears darker in places – the result of the vast ancient lava flows, called lunar mare – while the far side is covered in pock marks and craters but no mare.

Why the two sides of the moon are so different has long puzzled space scientists. However, a study published last week in the journal Science Advances has come up with a new explanation for this lunar mystery.

Researchers at Brown University studied the largest impact crater on the moon, known as the South Pole-Aitken basin (or SPA). Some 1,615 miles (2,600 kilometers) wide and five miles deep, it was formed by a massive space object that slammed into the moon – perhaps a wayward dwarf planet – when the solar system was being formed.

The researchers found that the impact that formed the basin would have created a massive plume of heat that spread the moon’s interior, according to the statement. That plume would have carried certain materials to the moon’s nearside, fueling the volcanism that created the volcanic plains.

“We know that big impacts like the one that formed SPA would create a lot of heat,” said Matt Jones, a doctoral candidate at Brown University and the study’s lead author, in a news release.

“The question is how that heat affects the Moon’s interior dynamics. What we show is that under any plausible conditions at the time that SPA formed, it ends up concentrating these heat-producing elements on the nearside.

“We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface.”
https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Apparently, this has never been observed in squid before (only octopi) ... and is just lovely to see ... and could (says the researcher) help with development of our Harry Potter invisibility cloaks! ...

See why color-changing squid could help with development of invisibility cloaks

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan have recorded squid changing their color to match the substrate for the first time.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/04/08/squid-changing-color-substrate-scn-lon-orig-tp.cnn/video/playlists/intl-latest-world-videos/

or video without the scientists' very interesting explanation about pigment and transparency, here:

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/04/08/squid-changing-color-substrate-scn-lon-orig-tp.cnn/video/playlists/intl-latest-world-videos/

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

This is perhaps robots gone wrong ... especially when one considers the price tag (currently about $150 US per month x 48 months) for this, admittedly, very cute little "LOVOT" ... although eccentric Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa (who bought himself a ticket to the ISS international space station) has bought in ...

Eccentric Japanese billionaire now betting that ‘emotional’ robots can heal your heart


Nearly two years before Japanese fashion titan Yusaku Maezawa embarked on his recent tourist visit to the International Space Station, he made global headlines for launching a worldwide search for a “life partner” to go to the moon with him.

In his online appeal for love, Maezawa, who was 44 at the time, said he hoped finding a companion would ease the “feelings of loneliness and emptiness” surging within him. A few months later, however, he abruptly called off this quest for a romantic partner due to unspecified personal reasons.

Now, it appears Maezawa is betting robots may be able to fill the hole in one’s heart.

The eccentric billionaire, who made his fortune through the Japanese e-commerce fashion site Zozotown, announced last month that his investment fund is buying Japanese robotics startup Groove X, which makes a product called Lovot, a combination of the words “love” and “robot.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The pet-sized companion robots aim to stir an “instinct to love” in its human customers, according to the company’s website, with potential use cases in nursing homes and with children. As the pandemic raged, the so-called “emotional” robots also found new purpose in providing companionship to those who have been forced to stay apart from others, according to the company.

The wide-eyed devices roll around on wheels and have more than 50 sensors to respond to stimuli from humans (whom it distinguishes via a thermal camera) through machine learning technology, according to the company. The robot is currently only available for sale in Japan. The price starts at $2,825 for a single device, plus a monthly service fee of approximately $80.

Groove X was founded in 2015 by CEO Kaname Hayashi, a SoftBank veteran who developed the humanoid robot Pepper. The firm received funding from the Japanese government and unveiled its first Lovot device to the local market in 2019. These robots don’t seek to provide any convenience or practical purpose. In fact, the company has previously described it as “not a useful robot.” The robot was “born for just one reason — to be loved by you,” the company said.

“I never imagined that a robot would heal me,” Maezawa said in a statement announcing his fund’s acquisition of Groove X. While the robot “can’t clean or do work,” Maezawa said he sees “big potential in a presence that can make people feel happy, particularly at this time,” alluding to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/08/tech/y...ove/index.html

https://youtu.be/hCxQ0_HcYHQ

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

That was some SPLASH ... but without that splash, perhaps mammals (like us) would not have had our day ...

Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-High Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans

When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago, it did not go gently into that good night. Rather, it blasted a nearly mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico that caused chaos throughout the world's oceans, new research finds.

The 9-mile-across (14 kilometers) space rock, known as the Chicxulub asteroid, caused so much destruction, it's no wonder the asteroid ended the dinosaur age, leading to the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction.

"The Chicxulub asteroid resulted in a huge global tsunami, the likes of which have not been seen in modern history," said lead researcher Molly Range, who did the research while getting her master's degree in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan.

... "We found that this tsunami moved throughout the entire ocean, in every ocean basin," Range said. In the Gulf of Mexico, water moved as fast as 89 mph (143 km/h), she found. Within the first 24 hours, the effects of the tsunami's impact spread out of the Gulf of Mexico and into the Atlantic, as well as through the Central American seaway (which doesn't exist anymore, but used to connect the Gulf to the Pacific).

After the initial nearly mile-high (1.5 km) wave, other huge waves rocked the world's oceans. In the South Pacific and North Atlantic, waves reached a whopping maximum height of 46 feet (14 m). In the North Pacific, they reached 13 feet (4 m). Meanwhile, the Gulf of Mexico saw waves as high as 65 feet (20 meters) in some spots and 328 feet (100 m) in others.

To put that in perspective, the largest modern wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere was a "measly" 78 feet (23.8 m) tall, which struck near New Zealand in May 2018, Live Science previously reported.

... There's evidence that supports the models, Range said. According to the second model, fast-moving water from the impact likely caused erosion and sediment disruption in South Pacific, North Atlantic and Mediterranean ocean basins.

In a separate study (which also has yet to be published), Moore examined sediment records across the ocean. His findings agree with the tsunami model, Range said.

... Of course, the giant tsunami wasn't the only event that did in the non-avian dinosaurs. The asteroid also triggered shock waves and sent a vast amount of hot rock and dust into the atmosphere, which rubbed together with so much friction that they started forest fires and cooked animals alive. These particles also hovered in the atmosphere and blocked the sun's rays for years, killing plants and the animals that ate them.

https://www.livescience.com/64426-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-caused-giant-tsunami.html

Grab your surfboards!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

This is NOT the same as the "most distant star" (named "Earendel") I posted about just a couple of days ago ... now, the most distant (and thus, oldest) galaxy ... or what they think is a galaxy ... In any case "the farthest object (and thus, oldest) in the known universe" ...

Hot on the heels of the discovery of “Earendel”—the most distant single star at 12.9 billion light-years distant—comes the announcement today that astronomers have now found the most distant galaxy.

Called HD1 and discovered by Japanese astronomers using a bevy of telescopes across the globe, this ultra-remote exists at a staggering 13.5 billion light-years away.

That’s a mere 300 million years after the “Big Bang” that is thought to have created the Universe.

...

That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness — about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies — and one of just-burgeoning lights as clumps of dust and gas were growing into their cosmic destinies.

"The first galaxies formed about a hundred million years after the Big Bang. They were a millionth of the mass of the Milky Way and much denser," study researcher and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Live Science in an email. "One way to think of them is as the building blocks in the construction project of present-day galaxies, like our own Milky Way." ...

... The researchers discovered HD1 in data collected over 1,200 hours of observation time using the Subaru Telescope, the VISTA Telescope, the U.K. Infrared Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. They were particularly looking at redshift, a phenomenon in which light waves stretch out or become redder as an object moves away from the observer. In this case, the redshift suggested HD1 was extremely distant. ... HD1 also seems to be growing at a feverish rate — about 100 stars each year, or at least 10 times the rate predicted for starburst galaxies that are known to produce stars at an extraordinarily high pace.

These stars were also more massive, brighter (in ultraviolet wavelengths) and hotter than younger stars, the researchers found.

As such, HD1 could be home to the universe's very first stars, called Population III stars; if that identity is verified, this would be the first observation of this type of star, the researchers said. There's also the possibility that HD1 is a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the sun.

To figure out HD1's true identity, the researchers can look for X-rays, which are emitted as material gets devoured by the gravity of a black hole. "If HD1 is a black hole, we should see X-ray emission from it. If we do not find X-rays, the emission must originate from massive stars," Loeb told Live Science.

Astronomers hope to find more of these early-universe structures with the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched Dec. 25, 2021 and will search for the oldest objects in the universe.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2022/04/07/meet-hd1-the-new-most-distant-galaxy-found-135-billion-years-back-in-time-and-close-to-the-big-bang/?sh=7b59f2f434f8

and

https://www.livescience.com/farthest-astronomical-object-ever-seen

The galaxy candidate HD1 is the farthest object in the universe



Gassho, J

STLh

[Tairin]

One small answer to the world's plastics problem could require us to make more vanilla pudding!



Gee, but what if the little beings get lose and start eating everything plastic!

Gassho, J

STLah

While it sounds promising your comment matches mine. Once such a solution is deployed how do we know it will only solve the problem we face and not create a cacophony of new ones?


Tairin
Sat today and lah

[Jundo]

One small answer to the world's plastics problem could require us to make more vanilla pudding!

Plastic-eating bacteria: Genetic engineering and environmental impact

Plastic-eating bacteria could help to one day tackle some of the 14 million tons of plastic that is offloaded into our oceans every year. Plastic pollution leads to severe impact on marine ecosystems and can affect human health. For example, once plastic enters the ocean it can suffocate and entangle animals, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Microplastics are also ingested by many marine species that are both preyed upon by other species and that we catch for food. Once ingested, microplastics can leach the toxic contaminants that have collected on their surface into the body of the organism that has consumed it, according to the IUCN.

...

However, in 2016 Japanese scientists made a remarkable discovery that could help tackle the world's plastic problem, according to the journal Science. Scientists collected plastic bottles outside a recycling facility, and discovered that a species of bacteria was "eating" its way through them. ... Although the discovery offers hope in the fight against mounting plastic, scientists caution that we are still years away from widespread commercial use. Similarly, PETase only decomposes PET plastic, there are six other plastic types that we are still unable to degrade using enzymes.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have been using E. coli bacteria to convert plastic into vanillin, the primary component of vanilla bean extract. Considering that the global demand for vanillin exceeded 40,000 tons (37,000 metric tonnes) in 2018 and 85% is made from chemicals taken from fossil fuels, using plastic could be an eco-friendly alternative situation, as Live Science has previously reported.

After degrading PET plastic into its basic monomers, researchers took the process one step further and converted one of those monomers, terephthalic acid, into vanillin through a series of chemical reactions. The resulting vanillin is believed to be fit for human consumption, though further investigation is needed.

https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria

Gee, but what if the little beings get lose and start eating everything plastic!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Hey, I thought that they got this done long ago! A 92% is only an A minus!

In any event, that last 8% really counts!

Scientists sequence the complete human genome for the first time

In 2003, the Human Genome Project made history when it sequenced 92% of the human genome. But for nearly two decades since, scientists have struggled to decipher the remaining 8%. Now, a team of nearly 100 scientists from the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium has unveiled the complete human genome -- the first time it's been sequenced in its entirety, the researchers say.

"Having this complete information will allow us to better understand how we form as an individual organism and how we vary not just between other humans but other species," Evan Eichler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Washington and the research leader, said Thursday. The new research introduces 400 million letters to the previously sequenced DNA -- an entire chromosome's worth. The full genome will allow scientists to analyze how DNA differs between people and whether these genetic variations play a role in disease.

"It turns out that these genes are incredibly important for adaptation," Eichler said. "They contain immune response genes that help us to adapt and survive infections and plagues and viruses. They contain genes that are ... very important in terms of predicting drug response."

Eichler also said that some of the recently uncovered genes are even responsible for making human brains larger than those of other primates, providing insight into what makes humans unique.

This remaining 8% of the human genome had stumped scientists for years because of its complexities. For one thing, it contained DNA regions with several repetitions, which made it challenging to string the DNA together in the correct order using previous sequencing methods.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/03/31/health...nce/index.html

GACTGassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Some other big science and technology announcements today besides Treeleaf's work on the 'JIZO 1' program ...

https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?19953-MAJOR-TREELEAF-ANNOUNCEMENT-Springing-into-Space

Hubble sees most distant star ever, 28 billion light-years away

he Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed the most distant single star it's ever observed, glimmering 28 billion light-years away. And the star could be between 50 to 500 times more massive than our sun, and millions of times brighter.

It's the farthest detection of a star yet, from 900 million years after the big bang. Astronomers have nicknamed the star Earendel, derived from an Old English words that means "morning star" or "rising light." A study detailing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

This observation breaks the record set by Hubble in 2018 when it observed a star that existed when the universe was around four billion years old. Earendel is so distant that the starlight has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us.

... "When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the Universe was less than a billion years old; only 6% of its current age. At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the Universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away." ...

https://us.cnn.com/2022/03/30/world/hubble-distant-star-image-scn/index.html

Morning star? Maybe that is the star where the Buddha came from after all!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Size is sometimes important ...

Artemis I prepares for its final test ahead of launch

The first NASA mission to the moon since 1972 is ready for its most crucial test to date. The 322-foot-tall (98-meter-tall) Artemis I rocket stack, including NASA's mega SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, will begin the wet dress rehearsal Friday. The test is expected to last through Sunday. The results of the test will determine when the uncrewed Artemis I will launch on a mission that goes beyond the moon and returns to Earth. This mission will kick off NASA's Artemis program, which is expected to return humans to the moon and land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface by 2025.

... Once the rocket has been loaded with more than 700,000 gallons (3.2 million liters) of propellant, the teams on Sunday will go through all of the steps toward launch."Liquid hydrogen is at a negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 268 degrees Celsius), liquid oxygen is negative 273 (negative 169 degrees Celsius), so it's very cold substances," said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development at NASA Headquarters during the news conference. "I used to participate in this back in the Shuttle Program and it's like watching a ballet. You've got pressure, volume and temperature. And you're really kind of working all those parameters to have a successful tanking operation."

https://youtu.be/tYEScppA5o8

It is nice when we build rockets that don't carry bombs.

So, the Saturn 5 was just a big kerosene heater!



Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Not a planet any more, but still interesting ...

Pluto has giant ice volcanoes that could hint at the possibility of life

Images of Pluto captured by NASA's New Horizons mission have revealed a new surprise: ice volcanoes.

The spacecraft performed a flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons in July 2015, and the insights gathered then are still rewriting nearly everything scientists understand about Pluto. Pluto was relegated to dwarf planet status in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union created a new definition for planets, and Pluto didn't fit the criteria.

The dwarf planet exists on the edge of our solar system in the Kuiper Belt, and it's the larger of the many frozen objects there orbiting far from the sun. The icy world, which has an average temperature of negative 387 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 232 degrees Celsius), is home to mountains, valleys, glaciers, plains and craters. If you were to stand on the surface, you would see blue skies with red snow.

... "We found a field of very large icy volcanoes that look nothing like anything else we have seen in the solar system," said study author Kelsi Singer, senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. ... "This means Pluto has more internal heat than we thought it would, which means we don't fully understand how planetary bodies work," she said. ... "The icy material was probably more of a slushy mix of ice and water or more like toothpaste while it flowed out of a volcanic vent onto the surface of Pluto," Singer said. "It is so cold on the surface of Pluto that liquid water cannot remain there for long. In some cases, the flow of material formed the massive domes that we see, as well as the lumpy terrain found everywhere in this region."

... Pluto once had a subsurface ocean, and finding these ice volcanoes could suggest that the subsurface ocean is still present -- and that liquid water could be close to the surface. Combined with the idea that Pluto has a warmer interior than previously believed, the findings raise intriguing questions about the dwarf planet's potential habitability.
"There are still a lot of challenges for any organisms trying to survive there," Singer said. "They would still need some source of continual nutrients, and if the volcanism is episodic and thus the heat and water availability is variable, that is sometimes tough for organisms as well."

https://us.cnn.com/2022/03/29/world/pluto-ice-volcanoes-scn/index.html

https://youtu.be/_sbswkA7gRE

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

I also have some "bulges" that increase with age ...

The Milky Way's 'thick disk' is 2 billion years older than scientists thought

The thick disk began forming stars just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

... In the new study, scientists inferred the ages of roughly 250,000 stars in the Milky Way using brightness, positional and chemical composition data gathered by two powerful telescopes: the European Space Agency's (ESA) orbiting Gaia observatory, and the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) in China. ...

... The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy measuring about 105,000 light-years across, but not all parts of that spiral are uniform in thickness, composition or stellar density.

Near the center of our galaxy is an enormous bulge of stars (and probably a supermassive black hole whose gravity holds the galaxy together). Rippling out on either side of that bulge is the galaxy's disk, which is made of two main sections.

One side of the disk – the "thin disk" – contains most of the stars we can see from Earth, mixed in with clouds of star-forming gas. The "thick disk," meanwhile, is about twice the height of the thin disk, but has a much smaller radius and only contains a small fraction of the stars we can see in the sky, according to ESA. This part of the Milky Way is also thought to be much older — devoid of gas, and done with its star-forming days. ...

In their new study, the researchers looked at stars throughout the Milky Way, focusing on a specific type of star called a subgiant. These are stars that have stopped generating energy in their cores, and are slowly transforming into red giants (enormous stars that are on their way to collapsing into white dwarfs). The subgiant phase is a relatively brief period of stellar evolution, which means astronomers can estimate the ages of these stars with more accuracy, according to the researchers.

Because older stars tend to glow in a specific range of brightness and contain lower metal content (that is, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) than younger stars, the team was able to date their sample of stars by running data from both telescopes through a computer simulation. The researchers found that stars in the galaxy's thick disc were indeed much older than the stars seen elsewhere — and surprisingly, those stars were billions of years older than previous studies suggested.

According to the researchers, this discovery could rewrite the history of our galaxy. The age differences between stars in the thin and thick disks suggest that our galaxy formed in two discrete phases. First, 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang, star formation began in the thick disk. This star formation accelerated greatly about 2 billion years later when a dwarf galaxy called the Gaia Sausage collided with our young galaxy, kicking off the second phase of galactic evolution. During this second phase, the thick disk rapidly filled up with stars, while the first wave of star formation began in the thin disk. ...
https://www.livescience.com/milky-way-thick-disc-age

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Anyone watching STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, Season 4, probably already knows what this is! (NO SPOILERS please! I am only on Episode 4. So far, Season 4 is excellent, by the way!):

There is a new kind of mystery object in space, and after capturing their best image yet, astronomers are one step closer to understanding these celestial oddballs.

... Astronomers found the odd radio circles using the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, operated by Australia's national science agency CSIRO, or Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, two years ago.

These space rings are so massive that they measure about a million light-years across -- 16 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers believe it takes the circles 1 billion years to reach their maximum size, and they are so large that the objects have expanded past other galaxies.

... Initially, astronomers thought the circles could be galactic shock waves or even the throats of wormholes, among a whole host of ideas. Now, researchers have narrowed down a range of theories to three.

The odd radio circles could be remnants of a huge explosion at the center of a galaxy, not unlike what happens when two supermassive black holes merge together.

Second, they might be powerful jets pumping out energetic particles from the galactic center.

Or, the third possibility is that they could be the result of a starburst shock wave triggered by the birth of stars in a galaxy.

... "We know ORCs are rings of faint radio emissions surrounding a galaxy with a highly active black hole at its centre, but we don't yet know what causes them, or why they are so rare," said study coauthor Ray Norris, a professor at the Western Sydney University and CSIRO, in a statement.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/03/24/world/...scn/index.html

Data from the MeerKAT telescope (green) showing the odd radio circles is overlaid on optical and near-infrared data from the Dark Energy Survey.

DMA Anomaly from Star Trek Discovery, Season 4 ...

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Webb Update ... like looking at yourself in the mirror ...

The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) has released its first sharp image and it is a doozy — a spectacular view of a twinkling orange star that is focused with such sharpness that it pushes the limits of the laws of physics.

The image shows that the telescope's 18 separate mirrors are now accurately aligned and acting as one, and the photo is even better than scientists hoped it would be, NASA officials said in a statement.

The Webb team released the photograph of the Milky Way star, designated 2MASS J17554042+6551277 and located roughly 2,000 light-years away, Wednesday (March 16). It was taken with a red filter to maximize the visual contrast between the star and the blackness of space, while dozens of other stars and distant galaxies can be seen in the background.

... According to BBC News, the image shows that the optical systems of the new space telescope are now working better than the scientists and engineers had hoped. ... "The engineering images that we see today are as sharp and as crisp as the images that Hubble can take but are at a wavelength of light that is totally invisible to Hubble," ...

https://www.livescience.com/james-we...its-of-physics

Gassho, J

STLah