For the other Astronuts out there

Tell you in 18 Sextrillion years...

 

A bit of a misnomer IMO calling a process that last that long. The radioactive decay is almost instantaneous. For essentially all of an element to decay you need multiple half lives depending on what you consider "essentially all" it can be quite a few I'd suggest more than 10. Sounds like they've seen one atom decay which if you have enough atoms is hardly unexpected.

 

Glad they explained what the "Neptunian Desert" was.
"Astronomers have found an exoplanet so rare that they have deemed it "The Forbidden Planet," according to a new study.
Technically known as NGTS-4b, the planet is three times the size of Earth and 20% smaller than Neptune. It's also hotter than Mercury with a temperature of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. And the planet has its own atmosphere.
An international team of astronomers used the Next-Generation Transit Survey observing facility to spot the small rogue planet.
Its mass is 20 Earth masses and it whips around its star in a full orbit every 1.3 days. A study detailing the planet published Monday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The announcement comes on the heels of last week's discovery of 18 Earth-sized exoplanets."
'Forbidden Planet' found by astronomers in Neptunian Desert - CNN

 

NASA chooses NT for world-first launch

Video | news.com.au — Australia’s #1 news site

 

Royal Australian Mint releases coin celebrating 50 year anniversary of moon landing

Amazing feature on new Australian coin

 

Believe the US mint is doing likewise-
Apollo 11 50th Anniversary
So is this British company-
The brand new 50th Anniversary Moon Landing Silver-plated Proof coin

 

"Unearthed": love the hyperbole.
"A nine-mile (15km) wide crater caused by a meteorite collision has been unearthed off the coast of north west Scotland.
The space rock, which was more than half a mile across (1.5km), created 'Britain's biggest meteorite crater in history' 1.2 billion years ago.
It was caused by a 13 billion ton meteorite that crashed near the town of Ullapool - part way across The Minch towards Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides.
The object was travelling at more than 40,000 miles per hour (65,000kph) and struck the Earth with the force of 940 million Hiroshima bombs.
This left a crater beneath the North Atlantic that lay buried deep under the sea floor - and which remains submerged to this day.
Scientists from the University of Oxford first discovered evidence of the ancient strike eleven years ago and have now finally pinpointed its precise location.
It lies under the Minch, the rough sea that separates Lewis in the Outer Hebrides from the far Highlands of Scotland, between 9.3 and 12.4 miles (15 and 20km) west of a remote part of the beach.
They first found evidence that a structure lies between the Western Isles and mainland Scotland back in 2008."
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7123401/Scientists-crater-biggest-meteorite-collision-history-Scotland.html

 

1.5 km is almost a mile. Amazing what a rock can do.

 

"Scientists have, for the first time, pinpointed the source of a mysterious one-off pulse of cosmic energy known as a fast radio burst.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have perplexed researchers for years, appearing as fleeting signals from the distant universe that can’t yet be explained definitively.
It’s thought that these brief flashes may come from black holes or neutron stars, though some have even speculated they may be of alien origin.
While scientists recently were able to trace the origin of a repeating FRB, which pulsed numerous times over a span of months, finding the source of a single burst that lasts less than a millisecond is far more challenging.
In a remarkable breakthrough, an Australian-led team with the Gemini South telescope in Chile says they’ve traced a single FRB to a galaxy roughly 3.6 billion light-years away.
‘It is especially challenging to pinpoint FRBs that only flash once and are gone,’ says Keith Bannister of Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who led the Australian team.
The one-off FRB, known as FRB 180924, was spotted in September 2018 using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.
This radio telescope array has 36 antennas working together as a single instrument to scour the skies for FRBs.
By calculating the minute differences in the amount of time light reaches each of the 36 antennas, the team says it was able to trace the burst back to its home.
‘From these tiny time differences — just a fraction of a billionth of a second — we identified the burst’s home galaxy,’ said team member Adam Deller, of Swinburne University of Technology.
The team then further analyzed the distance and other characteristics using Gemini South telescope, along with the W.M. Keck Observatory and European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).
‘The Gemini South data absolutely confirmed that the light left the galaxy about 4 billion years ago,’ said Nicolas Tejos of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, who led the Gemini observations.
‘When we managed to get a position for FRB 180924 that was good to 0.1 arcsecond, we knew that it would tell us not just which object was the host galaxy, but also where within the host galaxy it occurred,’ said Deller.
‘We found that the FRB was located away from the galaxy’s core, out in the ‘galactic suburbs.”’
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7189661/Scientists-trace-origin-mysterious-fast-radio-burst-time.html

 

.Cos I'm a bit of a vampire I get to catch things other folks miss. Last night while out with the dog after 1am, I was lucky enough to catch these noctilucent clouds, they can only be seen around the Summer solstice because of the angle the Sun hits them. They're reckoned to be at around 200,000 feet up.

 

Been a while, so here's a new 'un-
"Never-seen-before bursts of magnetic energy on Mars have puzzled astronomers, whose space rover has gained fresh insights into the mysterious Red Planet.
The magnetometer fixed to the cutting-edge NASA InSight spacecraft detected a bizarre jump in pulsations on the surface of the planet at nighttime.
Since November 2018, the InSight capsule has been harvesting information from the Red Planet - including recording the ferocity of so-called 'Marsquakes' and taking the temperature of its upper crust.
Scientists have not yet determined the causes behind the sudden magnetic pulses, which were 20 times stronger than previous observations.
However the baffling aspect of these most recent findings was the clockwork-like frequency of the midnight pulses.
The InSight lander is currently placed on Mars's equator. On Earth's equator, no such pulses are ever recorded."
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7488729/Mysterious-Mars-nighttime-pulses-baffle-scientists.html

 

NASA scientist says ‘we’re close’ to huge reveal about life on Mars — and humanity ‘isn’t prepared’ for it

World ‘not prepared’ for Mars life

Speak for yourself! This would do nothing but vindicate me...im "prepared" for it mate...how patronizing...

 

Might need more Guinness to get me head round this one-
"Giant molecules can be in two places at once, thanks to quantum physics.
That's something that scientists have long known is theoretically true based on a few facts: Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave — even large particles, even bacteria, even human beings, even planets and stars. And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once. Physicists call this phenomenon "quantum superposition," and for decades, they have demonstrated it using small particles.
But in recent years, physicists have scaled up their experiments, demonstrating quantum superposition using larger and larger particles. Now, in a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Nature Physics, an international team of researchers has caused molecule made up of up to 2,000 atoms to occupy two places at the same time.
To pull off the double-slit experiment for big things, the researchers built a machine that could fire a beam of molecules (hulking things called "oligo-tetraphenylporphyrins enriched with fluoroalkylsulfanyl chains," some more than 25,000 times the mass of a simple hydrogen atom) through a series of grates and sheets bearing multiple slits. The beam was about 6.5 feet (2 meters) long. That's big enough that the researchers had to account for factors like gravity and the rotation of the Earth in designing the beam emitter, the scientists wrote in the paper. They also kept the molecules fairly warm for a quantum physics experiment, so they had to account for heat jostling the particles.
But still, when the researchers switched the machine on, the detectors at the far end of the beam revealed an interference pattern. The molecules were occupying multiple points in space at once.
It's an exciting result, the researchers wrote, proving quantum interference at larger scales than had ever before been detected."
www.livescience.com/2000-atoms-in-two-places-at-once.html?fbclid=IwAR33zA1C4sxrIs7KBGJF8UdLW0hX_epGQLc8F68QVFFINfL55PSO8z7oAC0

 

And another article in the same week! But why are they just revealing it now if it happened in 1995?
"A NASA scientist has questioned whether Albert Einstein’s theories over space were inaccurate after the Hubble telescope recorded an object travelling five times the speed of light.
Einstein was the theoretical physicist behind the theory of relativity, one of the two key pillars for the foundation of modern physics. Within his special relativity theory, the German-born genius set the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second, of which nothing can travel faster. However, scientists are now questioning this after it was revealed NASA’s Hubble telescope had spotted thousands of objects travelling over five times this speed in a distant galaxy.
The phenomenon, which was captured by scientists Robert Williams in 1995, was spotted in the galaxy known as Messier 87.
The astronomer, who served as the Director of Space Telescope Science Institute from 1993 to 1998 laid bare the details of the encounter during “NASA’s Unexplained Files” series."
www.express.co.uk/news/science/1187112/nasa-news-albert-einstein-wrong-theory-relativity-hubble-telescope-messier-87-spt