Astronomy

News and articles regarding the astronomical world.

Wednesday will see the launch of the first crewed space flight from the US into orbit in almost a decade

Researchers explore Quantum Computing to possibly discover COVID-19 treatments

Quantum Computing is no doubt an emerging field, which combines both Quantum Mechanics and Machine Learning. However, no one would have ever imagined that such a field, which probably has no connection to medicine, is being used to find treatment methods of COVID-19 virus. Pennsylvania State University Researchers led by Swaroop Ghosh, the Joseph R. and Janice M. Monkowski Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering believe that this method could find a drug much quickly. The funding from Penn State Huck Institutes of Life Sciences is supporting their work.

In high-energy particle collisions we study the smallest known constituents of matter. According to our best knowledge of physics, these constituents have mass only because of the way they interact with a unique quantity which permeates all of space. This quantity, like practically everything else in the strange world of the very small, is a quantum field.

Saturn Rings

Saturn's rings – and moons – might be younger than the dinosaurs

We determined Saturn’s gravitational field by reconstruction of Cassini’s trajectory during the Grand Finale, using a coherent microwave link between Earth tracking stations and the spacecraft. Range-rate measurements were obtained from the Doppler shift of a carrier signal sent from the ground at 7.2 GHz (X-band) and retransmitted back to Earth by Cassini’s onboard transponder at 8.4 GHz. An auxiliary downlink at Ka-band (32.5 GHz) was also recorded.

NASA has shortlisted four proposals for its next astrophysics missions, due for launch in 2025. The agency has funding to fly two of them, and the four will now each receive funds for a nine-month period of technical study. The two missions will be chosen next year.

Galaxy clusters are among the largest structures in the universe, containing thousands of individual galaxies, dark matter and hot gas. At the heart of the Ophiuchus cluster there is a large galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole with a mass equivalent to 10 millions suns.

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint Nasa and European Space Agency (ESA) mission, is set to be launched from Cape Canaveral just after 4am UK time on Monday morning, and will reach its vantage point above the planetary plane by the end of 2021.

Image: 'Pale Blue Dot' revisited

The picture, named “The Pale Blue Dot” was obtained on 14th February, 1990, moments before the camera and the several other instruments of the Voyager were powered off for conservation of battery, since the probe wouldn’t make a close flyby past any other objects during their lifetime.

Blue Sky along a body of water

Why is the sky blue?

As we are human beings, we all are curious – an intrinsic behavior that is associated with us. As any curious being would be, we are also very aware of our environment and the changes that happen to it- we are very good at noticing changes that we even have developed many models and theories …

Why is the sky blue? Read More »