In late 1957, the US Navy’s Vanguard rocket was primed to launch the world’s first artificial satellite. But, on the morning of Oct. 4, the Soviet Union struck first and lobbed a small metal ball into orbit that Moscow Radio called Sputnik (“Fellow Traveler”). That “Sputnik Moment” had a profound impact on the nascent Space … Read more
LITTLETON, Colorado — A university-led lunar orbiter designed to pinpoint the location of ice or liquid water trapped in rocks on the moon’s surface is nearly ready for takeoff. The Lunar Trailblazer is slated to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than Feb. 26 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It … Read more
NASA has ordered a pause on all work by key planetary and astrophysics science committees due to recent executive orders by President Donald Trump. In a series of memos sent from NASA headquarters late Friday (Jan. 31), the space agency directed the leaders of at least 10 planetary science assessment and analysis groups that cover … Read more
The moon may still be geologically active, judging from the way the lunar far side is wrinkling as the moon contracts. At least, that’s what planetary scientists who have discovered 266 lunar “wrinkle ridges,” say, as all of these ridges appear to have formed during the past 160 million years in the rare volcanic plains … Read more
Hardware and software The following list summarizes the key hard- and software components used for acquiring the results. Laser: neoLASE neoMOS, 50 kHz–20 MHz, M2 = 1.15, 10 ps Laser power infrared: P = 41.3 W@1MHz, P = 28.1W@100kHz, green: P = 17W@1MHz, P = 11W@100kHz Receive telescope 1: Contraves, Cassegrain, d = 0.5 m, for monostatic setup Receive telescope 2: ASA, Ritchey-Chretien, d = 0.8 m, for bistatic setup Transmit telescope: Contraves, d1 = 0.07 m, monostatic … Read more
Astronomers may have inadvertently complicated the mystery of how strange “roasting marshmallow” planets form. Using the Gemini South telescope, researchers found that the “hot and puffy” ultra-hot Jupiter planet WASP-121b may have formed closer to its star than previously believed, challenging what we know about how planets form. Since the discovery of the first planet … Read more
We will follow the toy model provided in Ref.22. The infinitesimal line element ds, whose coefficients determine the metric of the spacetime, in a Friedman–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker universe is given by Refs.23,24,25,26,27,28,29: $$\begin{aligned} ds^2=dt^2-a^2(t)dx^2, \end{aligned}$$ (1) where a(t) is the scale factor, which only depends on time. We can make a change of variables to conformal time, … Read more
During the overnight hours of Feb. 5-6, the moon will pass through the famous Pleiades star cluster while one day past its half-lit first quarter phase. This will actually be the third time in the past four months that the moon has interacted with this famous star pattern in what is known as an occultation. … Read more
Scientists have discovered that some supermassive black holes rotate much more rapidly than expected. The discovery came as the result of a new form of “black hole archeology” that links black hole spins to the gas and dust they have consumed to grow over 7 billion years of cosmic history. The findings, courtesy of the … Read more
In what follows we provide additional details on a number of aspects of our analysis that we have omitted in the main text for compactness. These refer to the approach followed for the selection of the golden EOSs, the numerical techniques employed to simulate the binaries and extract the GW signal, and a number of … Read more