Galaxy of Modern Science

  There are two kinds of sunspots on the sun right now amid solar cycle change:

Sun unleashes biggest flare since 2017. Is our star waking up in 2020?: On the upper left side of this image from May 29, 2020, from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory — shown here in the 171-angstrom wavelength, which is typically colorized in gold — one can see a spot of light hovering above the left horizon. This light emanates from solar material tracing out magnetic field lines that are hovering over a set of sunspots about to rotate over the left limb of the sun. (Image: © NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory/Joy Ng)   {Reader's Note: The purple coloured lines are not meant for reading.} The sun may be coming out of its slumber at long last. On Friday morning (May 29), our star fired off its strongest flare since October 2017, an eruption spotted by NASA's sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Sun biggest flare since 2017. Is our star waking up in 2020? Solar flares are bursts of radiation that originate from sunspots, temporary dark and relatively cool patches on

  4. Mysterious Alien objects spotted in deep space - 2020: There's something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they're unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before. (Mysterious Alien objects spotted in deep space - 2020) The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, or ORCs, for their shape and overall peculiarity. Astronomers don't yet know exactly how far away these ORCs are, but they could be linked to distant galaxies. All objects were found away from the Milky Way's galactic plane and are around 1 arcminute across (for comparison, the moon's diameter is 31 arcminutes). (Mysterious Alien objects spotted in deep space - 2020) In a new paper detailing the discovery, the astronomers offer several possible explanations, but none quite fits the bill for all four new ORC

  What stops us from getting to Mars any faster? Well it’s mainly the technology. Our technology isn’t advanced enough to get to Mars faster. The fastest time for getting to Mars, is about 39 days. This was the space craft that was designed to go to Pluto and explore it. It left the Earth at a whopping 36,000 mph. Of course, there is also this problem. The distance between two planets isn’t a straight line. Traveling through the farthest passing of Earth and Mars would involve a trip directly through the sun, while spacecraft must of necessity move in orbit around the solar system's star. Although this isn't a problem for the closest approach, when the planets are on the same side of the sun, there is yet another problem. The numbers also assume that the two planets remain at a constant distance; that is, when a probe is launched from Earth while the two planets are at the closest approach, Mars would remain the same distance away over the course of the 39 days it took the prob

Where is the major source of lithium in universe: Early in the Universe when temperatures were incredibly high, isotopes of hydrogen, helium, and lithium were synthesized in abundance. Hydrogen and helium are still incredibly abundant and make up nearly all of the mass in the Universe, though there is only about a third of the lithium-7 that we should see. There are a wide variety of explanations for why this might have happened, including some hypotheses involving hypothetical bosons known as axions, and others believe it is trapped in the core of stars, which our current telescopes and instruments can’t detect. However, there are currently no clear front running theories to explain this absence of lithium in the Universe. Detailed description: Lithium (from Greek: λίθος, romanized: lithos, lit. 'stone') is a chemical element with the symbol Li and atomic number 3. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Under standard conditions, it is the lightest metal and the lightest so

Why is there more matter than antimatter? According to our current understanding of particle physics, matter and antimatter are equal but opposite. When they meet, they should destroy one another and leave nothing left over, and most of those annihilations should have occurred early in the Universe. However, there was enough matter left over to make the billions and billions of galaxies, stars, planets, and everything else. Various explanations surround mesons, which are short-lived subatomic particles made of one quark and one antiquark. B-mesons decay more slowly than anti-B-mesons, which could have resulted in enough B-mesons surviving the interaction to create all of the matter in the Universe. Additionally, B-, D-, and K-mesons can oscillate and become antiparticles and then back again. Studies have suggested that mesons are more likely to assume the normal state, which may also be why regular particles outnumber antiparticles.

The U.S. government's search for unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is ongoing, and is part of a program called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAPTF) that operates under the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, according to recent Senate committee reports.  This agency appears to have assumed the responsibilities of another UFO-hunting Pentagon group that was purportedly disbanded in 2012; UAPTF's findings could be made public within the next six months, The New York Times reported on July 23. While the results of UAPTF's investigations are classified (for now, at least), a briefing delivered to Defense Department representatives in March by a former consultant for the UFO program mentioned retrievals from "off-world vehicles not made on this earth," the Times reported. Despite this claim, any evidence of alleged extraterrestrial technology has yet to be produced, according to the Times. UFOs, also sometimes called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)

Science is full of arcane terminology. Why use an easy-to-understand or evocative word when an opaque and overwrought phrase will do? But there are exceptions. Like “death roll.” If you grew up watching David Attenborough specials, you’ve probably heard the term over slow-motion footage of crocodiles tearing wildebeest apart. It means exactly what you think. The behavior is the powerful and violent twisting that wrenches limbs from sockets and muscle from bone when a crocodylian clamps onto a morsel and does its best impression of a washer on spin cycle. The process is so fascinating that the flashes of white teeth and red innards are deemed suitable for broadcast, even if momentarily. Do all crocs do this? American alligators, saltwater crocodiles, and Nile crocodiles have gotten a fair amount of press for the skill, but there are over 20 other living species. Not to mention the burgeoning ranks of fossilized snappers, including monsters like the 40 foot-long alligator relative Deinos

ou might imagine that in the midst of a global pandemic and all of its social and economic fallout that our minds would be laser-focused on immediate, Earthly woes. But apparently not entirely. A case in point is the recent virus-like spread of news headlines to the effect that there should be “at least 36 alien civilizations” in our galaxy. Not ten, not a thousand, or a billion, but 36. There you have it, three dozen other sets of intelligent life dotting our cosmic neighborhood, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it. It’s at times like these that you can almost hear the collective sigh from astronomers and astrobiologists who realize that they have to roll up their sleeves to gently, politely, carefully try to explain why these headlines are, shall we say, of the same nature as the matter that emanates from ruminant digestive systems Charting the development of civilizations as a simple function of the age of life on a planet seems positively ludicrous.   But I’m getting ahead of

Casimir force used to control and manipulate objects: A collaboration between researchers from the University of Western Australia and the University of California Merced has provided a new way to measure tiny forces and use them to control objects. The research, published today in Nature Physics, was jointly led by Professor Michael Tobar, from UWA's School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing and Chief Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and Dr. Jacob Pate from the University of Merced. Professor Tobar said  that the result is a new way to manipulate and control macroscopic objects in a non-contacting way, allowing enhanced sensitivity without adding loss. Once thought to be of only academic interest, this tiny force—known as the Casimir force—is now drawing interest in fields such as metrology (the science of measurement) and sensing. "If you can measure and manipulate the Casimir force on objects, then we gai