Category Astronomy/Space

Australian Telescope finds No Signs of Alien Technology in 10 Million Star Systems

Dipole antennas of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in Mid West Western Australia. Credit: Dragonfly Media.

A radio telescope in outback Western Australia has completed the deepest and broadest search at low frequencies for alien technologies, scanning a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars. Astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to explore hundreds of times more broadly than any previous search for extraterrestrial life.

The study, published today in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, observed the sky around the Vela constellation. But in this part of the Universe at least, it appears other civilisations are elusive, if they exist.

The research was conducted by CSIRO astronomer Dr Chenoa Tremblay a...

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Geologic Age of Finsen Crater on Far Side of the Moon found to be 3.5 billion years

Geologic age of Finsen Crater on far side of the moon found to be 3.5 billion years
Context map of Chang’e-4 landing site. Credit: AIR

The absolute model age (AMA), or geologic age of Finsen crater on the moon’s far side is determined to be about 3.5 billion years (Ga) based on crater counting method, according to a study published in Icarus.

The study was conducted by a research team led by Prof. Di Kaichang from the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Sciences, Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Based on this model age, the regolith growth rate at the Chang’e-4 landing site and the crater degradation rate within Finsen crater have also been estimated.

China’s Chang’e-4 probe, including a lander and a rover, successfully touched down the floor of Von Kármán crater within the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) bas...

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Peculiar Planetary System Architecture around 3 Orion Stars explained

New observations of GW Orionis, a triple star system with a peculiar inner region, revealed that this object has a warped planet-forming disk with a misaligned ring. The image on the right is from the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, which allowed astronomers to see, for the first time, the shows this ring casts on the rest of the disk. This helped the researchers figure out the 3D shape of the ring and the overall disk. The left panel shows an artistic impression of the disk’s inner region, including the ring, which is based on the 3D shape reconstructed by the team. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada, Exeter/Kraus et al.

The discovery that our galaxy is teeming with exoplanets has also revealed the vast diversity of planetary systems out there a...

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An unexpected -Origin story for a Lopsided Black hole merger

black holes merging

Researchers suggest a novel process to explain the collision of a large black hole and a much smaller one. A lopsided merger of two black holes may have an oddball origin story, according to a new study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere.

The merger was first detected on April 12, 2019 as a gravitational wave that arrived at the detectors of both LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), and its Italian counterpart, Virgo. Scientists labeled the signal as GW190412 and determined that it emanated from a clash between two David-and-Goliath black holes, one three times more massive than the other. The signal marked the first detection of a merger between two black holes of very different sizes.

Now the new study, published today in the journal Physical Review...

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