Space

While the  presence of liquid water on Mars  remains an ongoing topic of intense interest, we know that there is plenty of water ice adorning the Red Planet - and boy can it ever look amazing, as new images from the European Space Agency's Mars Express attest. The Mars orbiter has obtained a stunning view of a feature called the Korolev crater, an 81.4-kilometre (50.6-mile) diameter crater  just south  of the  Olympia Undae  dunes circling the northern polar cap. The crater is filled almost to the brim with pristine ice year-round. Like Earth, Mars does have seasons. And like Earth, the warmer seasons result in receding ice. But Korolev crater, created by a massive impact sometime in Mars's distant past, and named for Soviet rocket engineer  Sergei Korolev , is a bit of an oddball. It's a type of geological feature known as a 'cold trap', and that's exactly what it sounds like. The floor of the crater is very deep, just over 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) below the ri

If you go to the Innovation Center for US Dairy's website, their top frequently asked question is: "Does chocolate milk come from brown cows?".  They answer it  clearly and politely: "Actually, chocolate milk – or any flavored milk for that matter – is white cow’s milk with added flavoring and sweeteners". Unfortunately, this message does not appear to be sinking in with the American public, as a survey commissioned by the Center has found that a whopping 7 percent of Americans still think that chocolate milk comes directly out of a brown cow. If you multiply that, that's 16.4 million people nationwide who think that chocolate milkshake could potentially be drunk directly from a cow's udder,  Food and Wine  reports. The nationally representative survey gets more alarming. Forty-eight percent of respondents admitted they weren't sure where chocolate milk comes from. If this is true across the nation generally, that would be an astounding 154,272,000 p

China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) made an important advance by achieving a stable 101.2-second steady-state high confinement plasma, setting a world record in long-pulse H-mode operation on the night of July 3rd. The obtained high confinement mode features edge-localized modes (ELMs) with small perturbation amplitude under the condition of low-momentum injection with pure RF (LHCD, ICRF, ECRH) wave heating, and an actively cooled ITER-like monoblock tungsten divertor. With effective control of the divertor target heat load and tungsten impurity influx, and the center chord average electron density maintained at > 50% of the Greenwald density limit, EAST achieved a fully non-inductive, current-driven, steady-state plasma with a confinement enhancement factor H98y2 greater than 1.1 for more than 100 seconds. All the plasma parameters, including recycling, and particle and heat fluxes, reached a truly steady state after 20 seconds—the wall saturation tim

An international team of astronomers has discovered the furthest object ever detected in the Solar System. Nicknamed “Farout”, it’s a small round object with a pinkish hue located 17.95 billion kilometers (11.15 billion miles) from the Sun. The color is common in ice-rich objects. Its official designation is 2018 VG18 and it is 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter. It's the first object discovered further than 100 astronomical units (AU) from our star, with 1 AU being the Earth-Sun distance. Farout is at a distance of 120 AU, significantly further out than dwarf planet Eris, which is at 96 AU. Pluto, by comparison, is at 34 AU. The object was discovered in images taken with the Japanese Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii on November 10. Follow-up observations to confirm the distance were conducted in December from Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. “All that we currently know about 2018 VG18 is its extreme distance from the Sun, its approximate diameter, and its color,” co

NASA's got a whole new plan. It wants boots on the Moon in 10 years and on Mars in 20. Give or take. On Wednesday, the space agency  announced  its detailed National Space Exploration Plan to achieve the President's lofty goals set out in his December 2017 Space Policy Directive-1. Those bold plans include: planning a new Moon landing, long-term human deployment on and around the Moon, reassertion of America's leadership in space, strengthening private space companies, and figure out how to get American astronauts to the surface of Mars. There are a lot of unknowns built into the plan, not the least of which is whether or not scientists can figure out a way to keep astronauts safe from the many hazards of space. Those smarties at NASA took that into account when detailing expected timelines for completing each goal in the 21-page report - from low Earth orbit (LEO), to cislunar space and then on Mars.   (NASA) Indeed, the timeframe within which NASA expects to reach key mil

Theoretical physics often lifts the sanctions we set on our own imaginations. Whether it's exploring the  possibility of warp drives  or understanding the  rate of the Universe's expansion , we are quick to explore the unknown on our chalkboards until our tech is ready for our ideas. In a similar deep-dive into the theoretical, a Norwegian professor argues in the journal  Acta Astronautica  for the of  possibility of photon rockets  that can reach 99.999 percent of the speed of light (300,000 km/s [186,000 mph]). The paper asserts that, while humanity can't do it anytime soon, we could potentially build a spacecraft that falls just short of the ultimate speed limit sometime in the future when the necessary technology is feasible. Espen Gaarder Haug  is a professor of quantitative finance at the Norwegian University School of Life Sciences who believes that the math in contemporary physics isn't too distant from the math in quantitative finance. This background gave Haug

Cosmos” is  returning to the National Geographic Channel and Fox . The networks have ordered a second season of the science documentary television series, which is a follow-up to the 1980s series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” with Carl Sagan. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of the Emmy Award-nominated “Star Talk,” returns as host of the series, scheduled to premiere globally in Spring 2019. The announcement was made at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Saturday. The series hails from executive producer, writer, and director Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and one of the writers on the original 1980s series. She and Steven Soter, another writer from the original show, won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming in 2014 for the show’s first season. Seth MacFarlane, Brannon Braga, and Jason Clark also serve as executive producers. It will be produced by Cosmos Studios, the Ithaca, NY-based company Druyan co-founded in 2000, and Fuzzy Door

“I said ‘far out!’ when I discovered it, and it’s a very far out object,” said astronomer Scott Shepard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, as  quoted  by  New Scientist.  The tiny planet is called 2018 VG18 — later nicknamed “Farout” by the team that discovered it — and it’s about 3.5 as far away as Pluto, some 18 billion kilometers (11.2 billion miles) away. That’s more than 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun — and about the same distance as Voyager 2, the NASA probe that launched in 1977 and  reached interstellar space this month . Farout was spotted by the Japanese Subaru telescope in Hawaii on November 10 by Shepard and several colleagues,  according to a statement  on Carnegie Institution for Science’s website. So far, Farout is still deeply mysterious. But one aspect already attracting scientific interest is its unusual orbit. Farout orbits at an unusual angle, along with other so-called  “trans-Neptunian objects.”   There’s been a lot of speculation in

An Italian astronomer explains that a supermassive black hole have masses millions or billions times greater than that of our host star, and have grown to vast magnitude by engulfing matter and merging with other black holes. In a recent TED-Ed video, called “Could the Earth be swallowed by a black hole?” Fabio Pacucci, a Yale Postdoctoral Associate, explicate that a supermassive black hole is more like a “cosmic vacuum cleaner with infinite capacity”, eating everything in its way due to the strong gravitational field. Pacucci says: “Nothing, not even light, can move fast enough to escape a black hole’s gravitational pull once it passes a certain boundary, known as the event horizon. The black hole is millions or billions times greater than that of our Sun and has an event horizon that could span billion of kilometres” You can watch the video below:

It's been decades since the United States dropped the first atomic bomb. Since then, the exponential increase of the destructive power of nuclear weapons is almost unimaginable. Here's how powerful nuclear weapons have become.

Tonight, look up at the night sky and you just might be lucky enough to see a bright, blurry ball with a visible greenish-gray shade. That  greenish-gray shade  object  is a comet that orbits between the Sun and Jupiter will make its nearest approach to Earth in centuries. And this all will be happening right on the heels of this year’s most beautiful meteor shower of 2018. Tony Farnham, is a research scientist in the astronomy department at the University of Maryland. He appeared on Saturday morning after a long night observing the comet at the Discovery Channel Telescope. Discovery Channel Telescope is located about 40 miles southeast of Flagstaff, Ariz. Tony Farnham said “The fuzziness is just because it’s a ball of gas basically,”  “You’ve got a one-kilometer solid nucleus in the middle, and gas is going out hundreds of thousands of miles.” The Green Comet 46P appears green due to the gases it emits light. The ball of gas and dust, also called as the “Christmas comet,” was nickname

Sean Carroll  is a physicist at Caltech. His research includes theoretical physics and astrophysics, especially cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. He has published several research papers dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, violations of Lorentz invariance, extra dimensions, topological defects, cosmic microwave background anisotropies, causality violation, black holes, and the cosmological constant problem. He is currently focused on origin of the universe and the arrow of time, including the roles of inflation, baby universes, and quantum gravity. In his recent video by Techinsider, he explains what existed before Big Bang and it actually means. So watch and learn:

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has shared some astonishing new footage of their latest fly-bys of Mars. Some recent flybys have revealed new images of avalanches currently forming on Mars.  These flybys have helped scientists developing new and more accurate theories about Mar’s and its past. Learn more about this in the video above.

In August this year, NASA launched its Parker Solar Probe. Parker Solar Probe flew exceedingly  close to the Sun . Its current path has brought it within 15 million miles from the Sun’s surface. It is also moving at 213,200 miles per hour, which is the fastest any spacecraft made by human beings has ever traveled. It is, at the moment, far closer than the planet Mercury. Just a day ago it sent back a glimpse of what the Sun’s surface and outermost region looks like from the current distance of the spacecraft. “Parker is an exploration mission — the potential for new discoveries is huge,” says Nour Raouafi, Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University. Fortunately,  NASA has some informative explanation  about what exactly we are looking at. The photo displays a so-called coronal streamer traveling towards the “east limb of the Sun.” And that a relatively big white section in the center? That’s actually Jupiter, in the background. Here’s the picture in its full g

Dinosaurs could potentially walk among us in real life soon as the paleontologist who inspired the original Jurassic Park movie has announced a research project to bring the extinct creatures back to life. Dr. Jack Horner says scientists are only 5 to 10 years away from genetically engineering dinosaurs into existence. According to a report by PEOPLE, Horner is working with scientists at Harvard and Yale, looking to the closest living relatives of dinosaurs in the hopes of reverse-engineering them. “Of course, birds are dinosaurs," Horner said. "So we just need to fix them so they look a little more like a dinosaur." Horner and his team will reportedly begin with the modern day chicken, which is widely considered a direct descendant of the massive beasts that once dominated the earth. Horner has consulted on all four Jurassic Park films. In a behind the scenes interview from the first movie in the franchise, writer Michael Crichton confessed that the hero, Dr. Alan Grant

Throughout the years, we have learned that mankind has drastically changed planet Earth. If all the ice melted on Earth, it would DRAMATICALLY reshape our planet’s continents and would result in the flooding of major cities around the globe. Scientists estimate that there are more than 5 million CUBIC miles of ice on Earth. Many researchers agree that it would take around 5,000 years for all the ice to melt. If this were to occur, it would DRAMATICALLY reshape our planet’s continents and would result in the flooding of major cities around the globe. Scroll down to the bottom if you want to watch “ What The World Will Look Like Once ALL The Ice Melted ” video! However, if we continue to add the amount of carbon to the atmosphere, we could easily create and ICE-FREE planet. As National Geographic reports, this would result in an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58. According to reports, sea levels have drastically risen in the last decade and at