Category Astronomy/Space

How to spot Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn etc and the annual Perseid meteor shower. Tonight, notice the 2 outer stars in the bowl of the Big Dipper – Dubhe and Merak. They always point to Polaris, the North Star. To find the Dipper at this time of year, look toward the NW in the evening. Once you’ve found it – after locating Polaris – look more carefully at the second star from the end of the Big Dipper’s handle. If your sky is dark enough, and your eyesight is good, you’ll see that this star, Mizar, has a nearby companion, called Alcor.

Arabian stargazers referred to Mizar and Alcor as the “horse and rider.” These stars are a good test of the night’s viewing conditions: if you can’t see Alcor, there might be thin clouds up there.

These two stars are what’s ...

Binary black holes recently discovered by the Ligo-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang. Primordial black hole binaries were discussed extensively in the 1990s. However, interest in them waned when observations implied that their number was limited

New scenario from Japan offers clues about the early universe. Binary black holes recently discovered by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang. If further data support this observation, it could mark the first confirmed finding of a primordial black hole, guiding theories about the beginnings of the universe.

In February, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration announced the first successful detection of gravitational waves...

The vibration absorbing lattice in a vision of the future. It could be used one day in rockets. Credit: 3Dsculptor / Shutterstock / Jung-Chew Tse

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a lattice structure capable of absorbing a wide range of vibrations while also being useful as a load-bearing component – eg, in propellers, rotors and rockets. It can absorb vibrations in the audible range, which are the most undesirable in engineering applications. Vibrations from the propellers or rotors in propeller aircraft and helicopters can make the flight bumpy and loud, and also lead to increased fatigue damage of the aircraft and its components. A new 3D lattice structure developed by ETH scientists could now expand the possibilities of vibration absorption.

Led by Chiara Daraio, Professor of Me...

With the help of supercomputer SKIF Cyberia, the scientists simulated the nuclear explosion of an asteroid 200 meters in diameter in such a way that its irradiated fragments do not fall to the Earth.

Dept of Celestial Mechanics and Astrometry NII PMM of Tomsk state university (Russia) and colleagues from St. Petersburg State University, Keldysh Research Center, and Research Institute Sirius are developing measures to protect the Earth from potentially dangerous celestial bodies. With the help of supercomputer SKIF Cyberia, the scientists simulated the nuclear explosion of an asteroid 200 meters in diameter in such a way that its irradiated fragments do not fall to the Earth.

“The way we propose to eliminate the threat from space is reasonable to use in case of the impossibility of the soft...