Category Astronomy/Space

RainCube, due to fly in 2017, forced JPL’s engineers to get creative in order to squeeze an antenna into a CubeSat. Credit: Tyvak/Jonathan Sauder/NASA/JPL-Caltech Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-black-magic-earth-space.html#jCp

Black magic. That’s what radiofrequency engineers call the mysterious forces guiding communications over the air. These forces involve complex physics and are difficult enough to master on Earth. They only get more baffling when you’re beaming signals into space.Until now, the shape of choice for casting this “magic” has been the parabolic dish. The bigger the antenna dish, the better it is at “catching” or transmitting signals from far away. But CubeSats are changing that...

Visualization of the unstable accretion disk around a forming massive star. Credit: Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Tübingen University

“How do massive stars form?” is one of the fundamental questions in modern astrophysics, because these massive stars govern the energy budget of their host galaxies. Using numerical simulations, Professor Wilhelm Kley et al from Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Tübingen, with Dr. Vorobyov from Institute for Astrophysics, University of Vienna revealed new components of the formation of massive stars, already known from the formation process of low-mass and primordial stars.

The birth of massive stars is still a mystery to us, because these stars are embedded in an extremely dense medium of gas and dust...

The Crab Nebula seen in the optical by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Crab is an example of a pulsar wind nebula. Astronomers have modeled the detailed shape of another pulsar wind nebula to conclude, among other things, that the pulsar’s spin axis is pointed almost directly towards us. NASA/ Hubble Space Telescope

Neutron stars are the detritus of supernova explosions, with masses between 1 and several suns and diameters only tens of kilometers across. A pulsar is a spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field; charged particles in the field radiate in a lighthouse-like beam that can sweep past the Earth with extreme regularity every few seconds or less...

The red ellipses show the MMS orbit paths during the first and second phases of the mission. Each spacecraft uses GPS signals – which come from satellites situated along the green circle shown surrounding Earth — from the far side of Earth to track its position. Credits: NASA/MMS

NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, is breaking records. MMS now holds the Guinness World Record for highest altitude fix of a GPS signal. Operating in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth, the MMS satellites set the record at 43,500 miles above the surface. The four MMS spacecraft incorporate GPS measurements into their precise tracking systems, which require extremely sensitive position and orbit calculations to guide tight flying formations.

Earlier this year, MMS achieved the closest flying s...