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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers Find a Record-Breaking Star That’s Nearly as Old as The Universe

    May 18, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

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    Artist’s impression of the first stars. (Wise, Abel, Kaehler (KIPAC/SLAC))

    Another ancient star has been found lurking in the Milky Way. Around 35,000 light-years away, a red giant star named SMSS J160540.18–144323.1 was found to have the lowest iron levels of any star yet analysed in the galaxy.

    This means that it’s one of the oldest stars in the Universe, probably belonging to the second generation of stars after the Universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago.

    “This incredibly anaemic star, which likely formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang has iron levels 1...

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    Breakthrough study of Perplexing Stellar Pulsations

    May 17, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Sound waves bouncing around inside a star cause it to expand and contract, which results in detectable brightness changes. This animation depicts one type of Delta Scuti pulsation — called a radial mode — that is driven by waves (blue arrows) traveling between the star’s core and surface. In reality, a star may pulsate in many different modes, creating complicated patterns that enable scientists to learn about its interior.
    Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

    Astronomers have detected elusive pulsation patterns in dozens of young, rapidly rotating stars thanks to data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)...

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    What’s Mars made of?

    May 15, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    (left) line graphs on a white background and (right) grey textured rectangles on a black background
    Sound velocity measurements. Pulsed waves propagate through samples at the speed of sound. © 2020 Nishida et al.

    Researchers simulate the core of Mars to investigate composition and origin. Earth-based experiments on iron-sulfur alloys thought to comprise the core of Mars reveal details about the planet’s seismic properties for the first time. This information will be compared to observations made by Martian space probes in the near future. Whether the results between experiment and observation coincide or not will either confirm existing theories about Mars’ composition or call into question the story of its origin.

    Mars is one of our closest terrestrial neighbors, yet it’s still very far away – between about 55 million and 400 million kilometers depending on where Earth and Mars ...

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    Powerful new AI Technique Detects and Classifies Galaxies in Astronomy image data

    May 14, 2020, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    A Hubble Space Telescope image of a region in the Hubble Legacy Fields includes a large disk galaxy (above). The image next to it shows the Morpheus morphological classification results for the same region. (Image credits: NASA/STScI and Ryan Hausen)

    Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a powerful new computer program called Morpheus that can analyze astronomical image data pixel by pixel to identify and classify all of the galaxies and stars in large data sets from astronomy surveys.

    Morpheus is a deep-learning framework that incorporates a variety of artificial intelligence technologies developed for applications such as image and speech recognition...

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