Latest news with #Earth-sized
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Scientists Are Stumped by Mysterious Pulsing 'Star'
ASKAP J1832 (in circle) captured by th Chandra X-Ray Observatory Credit - X-ray: NASA/CXC/ICRAR, Curtin Univ./Z. Wang et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/CalTech/IPAC; Radio: SARAO/MeerKAT; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk Something strange is going on 15,000 light years from Earth. Out at that distant remove, somewhere in the constellation Scutum, an unexplained body is semaphoring into space, blinking in both X-ray and radio frequencies once every 44 minutes in a way never seen by astronomers before. The object could be a white dwarf—an Earth-sized husk that remains after a star has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Or not. It could also be a magnetar—a neutron star with an exceedingly powerful magnetic field. Unless it's not that either. 'Astronomers have looked at countless stars with all kinds of telescopes and we've never seen one that acts this way,' said astronomer Ziteng Wang of Curtin University in Australia, in a statement that accompanied the May 28 release of a paper in Nature describing the object, for which he was lead author. 'It's thrilling to see a new type of behavior for stars.' So what exactly is the mysterious body—which goes by the technical handle ASKAP J1832—and how common is this species of object? ASKAP J1832 is by no means unique in the universe in sending out energy in steady flashes. Pulsars—rapidly spinning neutron stars—do too. But pulsars flash much faster than ASKAP J1832 does, on the order of milliseconds to seconds. In 2022, astronomers discovered a type of object known as a long-period transient, which, like ASKAP J1832, sends out flashes of radio waves on the order of tens of minutes. So far 10 such bodies have been found, but none identical to ASKAP J1832, which is the first to emit X-rays too. What's more, ASKAP J1832's emissions have changed over time. During one observation with NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory in February 2024, the object was prodigiously producing both X-rays and radio waves. During a follow-up observation six months later, the radio waves were 1,000 times fainter and no X-rays were detected. That was a puzzle. 'We looked at several different possibilities involving neutron stars and white dwarfs, either in isolation or with companion stars,' said co-author Nanda Rea of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, in a statement. 'So far nothing exactly matches up, but some ideas work better than others.' One of those ideas is the magnetar, but that doesn't fit precisely, due to ASKAP J1832's bright and variable radio emissions. The white dwarf remains a possibility, however in order to produce the amount of energy it does, ASKAP J1832 would have to be orbiting another body in a formation known as a binary system, and so far that second body hasn't been detected. Viewed from Earth, ASKAP J1832 appears to be located in a supernova remnant, a cloud of hot gas and high energy particles that remains after an aging star meets its explosive end. But the authors of the paper concluded that the remnant merely lies in the foreground of the observational field with ASKAP J1832 in the background, the way an earthly cloud can drift in the path of the sun. So for now, the object remains a riddle—one that will be investigated further. 'Finding a mystery like this isn't frustrating,' said co-author Tong Bao of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, in a statement. 'It's what makes science exciting.' Write to Jeffrey Kluger at
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Science
- Time Magazine
Scientists Are Stumped by Mysterious Pulsing ‘Star'
Something strange is going on 15,000 light years from Earth. Out at that distant remove, somewhere in the constellation Scutum, an unexplained body is semaphoring into space, blinking in both X-ray and radio frequencies once every 44 minutes in a way never seen by astronomers before. The object could be a white dwarf —an Earth-sized husk that remains after a star has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Or not. It could also be a magnetar —a neutron star with an exceedingly powerful magnetic field. Unless it's not that either. 'Astronomers have looked at countless stars with all kinds of telescopes and we've never seen one that acts this way,' said astronomer Ziteng Wang of Curtin University in Australia, in a statement that accompanied the May 28 release of a paper in Nature describing the object, for which he was lead author. 'It's thrilling to see a new type of behavior for stars.' So what exactly is the mysterious body—which goes by the technical handle ASKAP J1832—and how common is this species of object? ASKAP J1832 is by no means unique in the universe in sending out energy in steady flashes. Pulsars —rapidly spinning neutron stars—do too. But pulsars flash much faster than ASKAP J1832 does, on the order of milliseconds to seconds. In 2022, astronomers discovered a type of object known as a long-period transient, which, like ASKAP J1832, sends out flashes of radio waves on the order of tens of minutes. So far 10 such bodies have been found, but none identical to ASKAP J1832, which is the first to emit X-rays too. What's more, ASKAP J1832's emissions have changed over time. During one observation with NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory in February 2024, the object was prodigiously producing both X-rays and radio waves. During a follow-up observation six months later, the radio waves were 1,000 times fainter and no X-rays were detected. That was a puzzle. 'We looked at several different possibilities involving neutron stars and white dwarfs, either in isolation or with companion stars,' said co-author Nanda Rea of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, in a statement. 'So far nothing exactly matches up, but some ideas work better than others.' One of those ideas is the magnetar, but that doesn't fit precisely, due to ASKAP J1832's bright and variable radio emissions. The white dwarf remains a possibility, however in order to produce the amount of energy it does, ASKAP J1832 would have to be orbiting another body in a formation known as a binary system, and so far that second body hasn't been detected. Viewed from Earth, ASKAP J1832 appears to be located in a supernova remnant, a cloud of hot gas and high energy particles that remains after an aging star meets its explosive end. But the authors of the paper concluded that the remnant merely lies in the foreground of the observational field with ASKAP J1832 in the background, the way an earthly cloud can drift in the path of the sun. So for now, the object remains a riddle—one that will be investigated further. 'Finding a mystery like this isn't frustrating,' said co-author Tong Bao of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, in a statement. 'It's what makes science exciting.'
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Science
- Indian Express
Scientists uncover new details about Uranus' atmosphere, strange seasons
Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, owes its pale blue-green in colour to its atmosphere which absorbs the red wavelengths of sunlight, according to a new study. The study was published by a research group comprising scientists from the University of Arizona in the US as well as other institutions. It sheds light on the atmospheric composition and complex dynamics governing the mystery planet. The researchers were able to provide new information about Uranus after analysing images of the planet captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope over the last 20 years. The Hubble images of Uranus were taken between 2002 and 2022. As per the study, Uranus' atmosphere is primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, along with small amounts of methane as well as minute quantities of water and ammonia. Uranus is located between Saturn and Neptune. As the seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus remains one of the least understood planets in our solar system which is why the new research study may be significant. Scientists who authored the study also provided more information about seasonal changes on the planet. Unlike other planets, Uranus' axis of rotation is nearly parallel to its orbital plane. It is likely that Uranus collided with an Earth-sized object, which might be the reason why it is said to be rotating in an 'overturned' position. As a result, it takes 84 years for the planet to complete one revolution around the Sun. This means that the surface of the planet gets sunshine for 42 years and the next 42-year-period is dark. Over the course of the 20-year-long study, researchers were able to observe only a part of the seasonal change of Uranus' atmosphere. The research builds on existing information about Uranus, like the fact that the planet is composed mainly of water and ammonia ice. It is approximately 51,000 kilometres in diameter, making Uranus four times bigger than the Earth with a mass that is 15 times greater than that of Earth's. Uranus also has 13 rings and 28 moons. NASA's Voyager 2 is the only space probe mission that has explored the planet by conducting a flyby in January 1986. However, the group of scientists behind the new study said that they will continue to observe Uranus and gather more information on seasonal changes in its polar regions.
Time of India
19-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
Will universe end far earlier than expected?
For most of the past generation, astronomy textbooks treated the cosmos as practically immortal. Students learned that after the last red dwarf flickered out, after the final black hole evaporated, darkness would stretch on for a number written with more than a hundred zeros. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now New research led by a group at Radboud University in the Netherlands asks us to erase most of those zeros. Their calculations show that the universe could finish its drawn-out fade after 'only' ten to the power of seventy-eight years. That still dwarfs every human timescale, yet within cosmology it represents a surprisingly quick goodbye. The revision starts with 's famous idea that are not completely black. According to , they emit tiny amounts of energy, lose mass, and eventually disappear. The Dutch team wondered whether any extremely dense, gravitationally bound object might share that fate. They applied the same mathematics to white dwarfs, which are the hot, Earth-sized cores that remain when sun-like stars exhaust their fuel. A white dwarf appears solid and inert, but the new paper argues that quantum fluctuations at its surface allow particles to leak away. Over unimaginableperiodse the entire star would evaporate, just as slowly and inevitably as a lake dries under the desert sun. Once white dwarfs are allowed to vanish, every late-stage forecast of must be compressed. Traditional models pictured those stellar remnants cooling into lightless 'black dwarfs' that wander the void forever. Take them out of the script, and the slowest actors exit much earlier, chopping hundreds of orders of magnitude from the final curtain call. Suddenly, the last sparks of matter are gon, not long after the last black hole, and the universe slides into an empty quantum haze with shocking speed—at least by cosmic accounting. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now While theorists digested that prospect, another group studying the large-scale expansion of space introduced a second, equally dramatic possibility. Data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument hint that dark energy, the mysterious force pushing galaxies apart, may itself be fading. If future surveys confirm the trend, the outward rush could eventually stall, reverse, and race toward a catastrophic 'Big Crunch. ' Such a collapse would end everything far sooner than either the black-hole timetable or the newly shortened evaporation clock. The evidence is still thin, but the mere suggestion stirs debate and underscores how fragile our grandest predictions remain. None of these scenarios changes life on Earth. Our Sun will still swell into a red giant in about five billion years. Long before any deep-time physics matters, continents will shift, oceans will boil, and perhaps our descendants or their machines will have moved elsewhere. Yet cosmologists care deeply because the ultimate fate of the universe tests whether quantum theory and gravity truly mesh. A single adjustment in the equations can shrink eternity, proving that seemingly untouchable numbers are only as sturdy as the assumptions beneath them. So, will the cosmos end in a graceful fade after ten to the seventy-eighth years, or will dark energy flip the sign on gravity and pull everything back in a fiery finale? No one knows yet. What the new work makes clear is that our picture of 'forever' is still a draft, and every fresh observation has the power to shorten or lengthen the longest story ever told.
Time of India
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Everything we know about upcoming features in Light No Fire
Image via: Hello Games Hello Games wants to venture into new territory, with Light No Fire promising an open-world, fantasy-themed adventure of seamless planetary scale involving exploration, survival, and pursuit. Light No Fire, under wraps for over five years with a surprise reveal, might well turn into one of the studio's biggest and most ambitious projects ever. A world as wide as Earth While the world does have a slew of open world games with enormous maps to flaunt, with Light No Fire, one has gone even further and procedurally generated an Earth-sized planet. And then this is really not about scale alone. It has to do with density, variety, and true potential for discovery. From mountains towering high and climbable down to the depths of the ocean, where hidden life forms intermingle, every spot in this fantasy world has been made accessible. EVERYTHING You Need To Know About Light No Fire In 2025 So Far!! Interesting plot by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Trending in in 2025: Local network access control [Click Here] Esseps Learn More Undo One of the more exciting reveals has to do with the varied creatures one can ride across the world. From goat-like land mounts to dragon-like creatures of the air worthy of saddling, it was also hinted in the trailer that more peculiar methods await, including a splendidly cunning baffling bird. The mounts are not mere aesthetic flourishes; they underpin the core of the freedom of movement and exploration that the game strives to present. Flying over immense plains, gliding down cliffs, and dashing through dense woods atop a beast sure adds to the emergent sandbox-style gameplay. Features: Survival, Crafting, and Combat While gaining the headline for the exploration, Hello Games are not neglecting your traditional mechanics. The players will suffer through some survival, gather resources, and build their own shelter or outposts. The building system is likely to make a return reminiscent of No Man's Sky, but now with a fantasy-based twist. Naturally, combat factors into the player experience as well. The gameplay footage is filled with sequences of sword and bow-wielding characters engaging in battles against foes, strongly suggesting the existence of both melee and ranged combat. The presence of staves points towards either magic or blunt combat, although details remain sparse on the nature of the magic system or skill upgrades. Should magic indeed be confirmed on the horizon, it could inject a promising layer of strategic depth into the already grounded survival loop. Light No Fire Official Reveal Trailer From Hello Games | The Game Awards 2023 Even at that scale, Light No Fire is not a lonely journey. The multiplayer experience lies baked into the game's DNA. Hello Games envisions co-op adventures to have friends climb peaks, find devious secrets, and build wicked settlements. This journey-turned-aftermath-half-exploration competition kind of community discovery does not commonly occur on a scale this large. Get IPL 2025 match schedules , squads , points table , and live scores for CSK , MI , RCB , KKR , SRH , LSG , DC , GT , PBKS , and RR . Check the latest IPL Orange Cap and Purple Cap standings.
