Category Astronomy/Space

NASA Flies Drones Autonomously for Air Taxi research

An Alta-8 small Unmanned Aircraft System testbed vehicle flies above NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Flying beyond visual line of sight from observers on the ground required special approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA. Credit: NASA / Bowman

Researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia recently flew multiple drones beyond visual line of sight with no visual observer. The drones successfully flew around obstacles and each other during takeoff, along a planned route, and upon landing, all autonomously without a pilot controlling the flight. This test marks an important step towards advancing self-flying capabilities for air taxis.

“Flying the vehicles beyond visual line of sight, where neither the vehicle nor the airsp...

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Astronomers Detect New Pulsar Wind Nebula and its Associated Pulsar

Astronomers detect new pulsar wind nebula and its associated pulsar
Composite image of the Galactic plane region and Potoroo, with the red layer showing the ASKAP total intensity image at 1368 MHz, and the green and blue layers representing WISE infrared images at 12 µm and 22 µm respectively. Known Galactic SNRs are indicated by red circles (Green, 2019, 2022), while known Galactic HII regions are marked by green circles (Anderson et al., 2014). The box highlights the section of deep interest. The inset is the ASKAP zoomed-in image showing Potoroo where a red cross marks the position of the X-ray source, while a red dashed line is Potoroo’s axis of symmetry, which corresponds to the tail length studied in this paper. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2312.06961

Astronomers from the Western Sydney University in Australia and elsewhere repor...

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Why the Universe might be a Hologram

Why the universe might be a hologram
The colored circle represents the hologram, out of which the knotted optical vortex emerges.
Credit: University of Bristol

A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an intriguing holographic connection between gravity in a three-dimensional universe and quantum physics on the universe’s two-dimensional boundary. This correspondence is at this stage, even a quarter century after Maldacena’s discovery, just a conjecture.

A statement about the nature of the universe that seems to be true, but one that has not yet been proven to actually reflect the reality that we live in. And what’s more, it only has limited utility and application to the real universe.

Still, even the mere appearance of the correspondence is more than suggestive...

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Researchers Study a Million Galaxies to find out how the Universe Began

fig2
Visualization of how the “different” primordial fluctuations of the universe lead to the different spatial distribution of dark matter. The central figure (common to both the upper and lower rows) shows the fluctuations in the reference Gaussian distribution. The color gradation (blue to yellow) corresponds to the value of the fluctuation at that location (low to high density regions). The left and right figures show fluctuations that deviate slightly from the Gaussian distribution, or are non-Gaussian. The sign in parentheses indicates the sign of the deviation from Gaussianity, corresponding to a negative (-) deviation on the left and a positive (+) deviation on the right. The top row is an example of isotropic non-Gaussianity...
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