Newsclipping from recent space and tech articles from around the web, some of them really interesting.
Nearby neutron star collision could cause calamity on Earth. But if it doesn’t, the event itself could be very important for the detection of the gravitational waves. “A long time ago in a galaxy far away — NGC 4993, to be exact — two neutron stars collided and created a spectacular light show. After billions of years spent slowly circling each other, in their last moments the two degenerate stars spiralled around each other thousands of times before finally smashing together at a significant fraction of light-speed, likely creating a black hole. The merger was so violent it shook the universe, emitting some 200 million suns’ worth of energy as perturbations in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves.” Read the whole story here.
Next Mars Rover will have 23 ‘Eyes’. When NASA’s Mars Pathfinder touched down in 1997, it had five cameras: 2 on a mast that popped up from the lander, and three on NASA’s first rover, Sojourner. Now, we are at… 23! Have a look at what they look like. The article explains in more details.
Nasa Is Building Its Most Advanced Machine Ever To Hunt For Life On Saturn’s Icy Moon Enceladus. “As scientists have learned more about our solar system, they’ve realized our best bet for finding life in the neighbourhood is buried in ice-covered oceans. But those ice shells make them difficult to study, which is why NASA is investing in state-of-the-art technology to understand what’s happening beneath the surface of these potentially habitable places, like Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.” More on this here.
ALMA Discovers Cold Dust Around Nearest Star. And this is really exciting. “The ALMA Observatory in Chile has detected dust around the closest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri. These new observations reveal the glow coming from cold dust in a region between one to four times as far from Proxima Centauri as the Earth is from the Sun. The data also hint at the presence of an even cooler outer dust belt and may indicate the presence of an elaborate planetary system. These structures are similar to the much larger belts in the Solar System and are also expected to be made from particles of rock and ice that failed to form planets.” I suggest reading it all.
Steph, are neutron stars old stars in the throes of dying?
It’s what remains after a (huge) star goes supernova… they’re incredibly dense stars, and powerful source of waves. 🙂
Are they hot or cold?
For all we know by observation, very hot (which is not that surprising, considering their density).