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PHYS ORG Astronomy News Posts

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The Orionid meteor shower is coming. Here's how and when to watch

The Orionids—one of two major meteor showers caused by remnants from Halley's Comet—will peak this week, though a large moon will dim visibility until after it sets late at night.

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Aurora supercomputer powers two of the largest cosmological simulations to date

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have completed two of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed. Each simulation modeled the evolution of 13.4 trillion dark matter particles across a region 28.6 billion light-years wide.

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Water as we've never known it: Physicists test water beyond Earth-like conditions

Water isn't always as it seems. Under extreme conditions, such as those found on other planets, it has been discovered to change its atomic structure, giving it the means to alter its appearance and other properties.

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Using eyedrops in space—wearable patch offers a new approach

Applying eyedrops is difficult in space, where there is almost no gravity. A KAIST research team has developed a wearable patch that delivers eyedrops to the eye without relying on gravity. The research team was led by Professor Ki-Hun Jeong from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, in collaboration with a research team led by Professor Se Joon Woo from Seoul National University Bundang Hospital. The paper is published in the journal Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical.

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'Terror of kings': Why the 1066 appearance of Halley's Comet terrified the medieval world

A sequence on the Bayeux Tapestry shows King Harold alongside a crowd gazing at the sky, beneath the embroidered caption Isti mirant stella ("those people marvel at the star"). Above Harold sits Halley's Comet, with ghostlike invasion boats in the border below—a Norman framing of Harold as a doomed usurper whose betrayal invited destruction.

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Rare solar radiation storm gives scientists clearest picture yet of flight risks

The most comprehensive data set ever collected from Earth's atmosphere during a solar radiation event has highlighted the importance of better-coordinated radiation monitoring for aviation safety, according to new research led by the University of Surrey.

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A magnetar can be born when two neutron stars touch

All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields. The typical magnetic field of a neutron star is about 100,000 times stronger than the strongest magnetic fields we can create on Earth. But about 1% of neutron stars have even stronger magnetic fields. Known as magnetars, their magnetic fields can be 1,000 times stronger than a regular magnetic field. They are a likely cause of powerful transient events such as soft gamma-ray repeaters and fast radio bursts. A new study looks at how magnetars might form. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

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SpaceX turns a profit after a string of losses as its satellite and computer leasing businesses soar

SpaceX reported a bigger quarterly profit than expected Tuesday as its satellite communications operations and its business of leasing computing power to other companies boomed.

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Astronomers uncover the engine behind the most powerful stellar flares in the Kepler field

A new study led by researchers at the Konkoly Observatory of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences (HUN-REN CSFK) in Budapest has revealed what makes a distant red giant star the most explosively active in the entire Kepler field—and the answer lies in a surprisingly subtle interplay between a close stellar companion, vast dark starspots and a highly efficient internal magnetic dynamo.

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Reexamined Viking 2 signal reveals possible marsquake from region active decades later

Earthquakes and the seismic waves they generate provide some of the best clues to Earth's interior. To extend that success to other worlds, scientists placed seismometers on the Apollo missions to the moon and on the Viking Mars landers, which reached Mars in 1976. Though the Apollo detectors proved a resounding success, Viking's results on Mars were less clear: Viking 1's seismometer failed to deploy properly, and Viking 2 recorded only two ambiguous events.

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Hubble observations challenge supernova winds' role in cosmic reionization

An international team of researchers, including members from the University of Michigan, has revealed surprising results that could rewrite our understanding of a key transition in the early universe.

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NASA's CASALS instrument bridges gaps in 3D maps of Earth's surface

A team of researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has developed a new instrument designed to eliminate blind spots between lines of lidar data on Earth's surface. Built with support from NASA's Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), the Concurrent Artificially-intelligent Spectrometry Lidar System (CASALS) could help researchers map the features of Earth's surface in detail. Rather than mechanically steering a laser with moving mirrors, CASALS steers light using wavelength itself, generating a continuous, 3D swath of the ground below.

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Are 'mega-Earths' real? Stellar activity may explain these oversized rocky worlds

A new study suggests that some of the heaviest rocky planets ever reported may not be as heavy as they look. These so-called 'mega-Earths,' rocky planets weighing more than about 10 Earths, could be an illusion created by activity on their host stars. The paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Oct. 8.

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Curtain-like plasma structures explain solar jets' apparent spinning in simulations

An international team of scientists from the University of Sheffield and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, led by a postdoctoral research fellow from the University of Newcastle, Australia, has discovered that solar jets called spicules, which are 6–8 Mm long, take the form of warped, denser plasma sheets like pleated drapery.

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There should be black holes in our neighborhood. Can we find them?

Scientific estimates show that there should be between about 100 million and 1 billion stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way. But they aren't easy to locate. They're not like supermassive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of galaxies. Those are usually easy to spot for different reasons.

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