Scientists from Australia have set a world record for the most stable transmission of a laser signal through the atmosphere. The team combined Aussie phase stabilisation technology with advanced self-guiding optical terminals to effectively eliminate atmospheric turbulence, an advance which could help test Einstein s theory of general relativity.
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IMAGE: Top left and the bottom right are Google Earth satellite images of the Brumadinho tailings dam taken before and after the collapse on 25 January 2019. Top right and bottom. view more
Credit: Google Earth
One of Brazil s worst environmental disasters - a dam collapse that also killed more than 200 people - could have been foreseen with the right monitoring technology, according to a new study by the University of Nottingham and Durham University.
The high-profile catastrophe took place on 25 January 2019 at a tailings dam near the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine, close to the town of Brumadinho, in Minas Gerais state, south-east Brazil.
Scientists have combined NASA data and cutting-edge image processing to gain new insight into the solar structures that create the Sun s flow of high-speed solar wind, detailed in new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal. This first look at relatively small features, dubbed plumelets, could help scientists understand how and why disturbances form in the solar wind.
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IMAGE: Artistic rendition of the exoplanet WASP-107b and its star, WASP-107. Some of the star s light streams through the exoplanet s extended gas layer. view more
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser.
The core mass of the giant exoplanet WASP-107b is much lower than what was thought necessary to build up the immense gas envelope surrounding giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, astronomers at Université de Montréal have found.
This intriguing discovery by Ph.D. student Caroline Piaulet of UdeM s Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) suggests that gas-giant planets form a lot more easily than previously believed.
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IMAGE: The giant flare, cataloged as GRB 200415A, reached detectors on different NASA spacecraft at different times. Each instrument pair established its possible location in different swaths of the sky, but. view more
Credit: NASA s Goddard Space Flight Center and Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona
On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on several NASA and European spacecraft. Now, multiple international science teams conclude that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar located in a neighboring galaxy.
This finding confirms long-held suspicions that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) - cosmic eruptions detected in the sky almost daily - are in fact powerful flares from magnetars relatively close to home.