Friday, June 14, 2024

4500 - Index of Reviews 4450 to 4500


            -  4450  -   Index of Reviews 4450  to 4500

            -     This index is of the 50 reviews from 4500 to 4550.  Indices of all previous reviews is available upon request.      Writing style is stocatto with each paragraph an idea and limited to a few pages in total.  Comments are always welcome.  See  https://jimdetrick@blogspot.net

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            ----------------------------------  4500  -   Index of Reviews 4450  to 4500

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            -    4450  -  CONSTELLATION  CASSIOPEIA  -  stars after explosion?  -   When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses in on itself and then explodes. It leaves behind a dense core where the protons and electrons are crushed into neutrons. It’s called a “neutron star”, and they’re the smallest and densest stellar objects in the Universe other than black holes.

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            -     4451 -  SUN   -  becomes a White Dwarf?  -   In a couple billion years, our Sun will be unrecognizable. It will swell up and become a    “red giant”, then shrink again and become a “white dwarf”. The inner planets aren’t expected to survive all the mayhem these transitions unleash, but what will happen to them? What will happen to the outer planets?

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            -     4452  -   MARS &  VENUS -  were they water worlds?   -    Evidence of ancient lake sediments at the base of Mars' Jezero crater offer new hope for finding traces of life in samples collected by NASA's Perseverance rover.  Perseverance touched down on Feb. 18, 2021 inside the Red Planet's 28-mile-wide Jezero Crater, which is believed to have once hosted a large lake and river delta.

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            -     4453  - ASTEROID  DISCOVERIES  -  how many are there?   The key to protecting Earth from being hit by asteroids is knowing where all these are. We have discovered over 27,000 overlooked asteroids in old telescope images.   Asteroids in our solar system had been overlooked in existing telescope images.

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            -     4454  -  ATOMS  become waves?-   For the first time ever, physicists have captured a clear image of individual atoms behaving like a wave.  The image shows sharp red dots of fluorescing atoms transforming into fuzzy blobs of wave packets and is a stunning demonstration of the idea that atoms exist as both particles and waves.  This concept is one of the cornerstones of “quantum mechanics”.

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            -      4455  -   SUPERCONDUCTIVITY  -  can we harness it? -   Last summer, 2023, commentators went wild for LK-99, an alleged room-temperature superconductor that seemed to foreshadow a wondrous age of perfectly efficient power lines and magnetically levitating trains.

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            -     4456  -  RING  NEBULA  -  interaction of three stars?  -    Southern Ring Nebula has an unexpected structure.   Submillimeter wavelength radio observations of the Southern Ring Nebula have identified that it's actually a double ring, shaped by the interactions of three stars.

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            -      4457  -  MERGING  BLACKHOLES  -   the center of galaxies?  -  The hearts of galaxies can force black holes to collide.  At the hearts of all large galaxies lie cosmic monsters called supermassive black holes, enormous voids that swirl around everything in the galaxies themselves.

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            -     4458  -   UNIVERSE  -  and Cosmic Inflation?  -  Our Universe arose in the aftermath of “cosmic inflation”, triggering the hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago that eventually gave rise to us. The Universe passed through many epochs, from free quarks and gluons to stable protons and neutrons to neutral atoms to stars, galaxies, planets, and more.

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            -     4459  -    EINSTEIN'S  COSMIC  INFLATION? - is there more to it?  -   Cosmic 'glitch' in gravity challenge Albert Einstein's greatest theory?  There is no denying the awesome predictive power of Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity, “general relativity”.  Yet, the theory still has inconsistencies when it comes to calculating its effect on vast distances. And new research suggests these inconsistencies could be the result of a "cosmic glitch" in gravity itself.

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            -     4460  -    DARK  ENERGY  and  DARK   MATTER?  -    20th-century astronomers discovered the first of two invisible continents while observing the motions of stars and galaxies. For outer stars to whip around the center of a galaxy as quickly as they do they must be held by the gravity of something invisible. The galaxy’s bright spiral would have to be a small seed sitting in the center of an unseen cloud of “dark matter.”

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            -     4461  -  METEORITES  -  messages from space?  -    Meteorites provide our best information about how the solar system formed and evolved. This includes planet formation. We also obtain information on astrophysics (stellar processes) through studies of pre-solar grains.

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            -     4462  -  GALAXY  BLACKHOLE  -  reveals magnetic fields?     A new view reveals magnetic fields around our galaxy’s giant blackhole.   Imagery from the 'Event Horizon Telescope' (EHT) traces the lines of powerful magnetic fields spiraling out from the edge of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and suggests that strong magnetism may be common to all supermassive black holes.

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            -     4463  -   DARK  MATTER  -  could it be blackholes?   -    Tiny black holes left over from the Big Bang may be prime dark matter suspects.  Tiny black holes, created seconds after the birth of the universe, may survive longer than expected, reigniting a suspicion that primordial black holes could account for dark matter, the universe's most mysterious stuff.

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            -     4464  -   KEPLER'S  ORBIT  MATH  -  is still used today?    The story of how we understand planetary motion could not be told if it were not for the work of a German mathematician named Johannes Kepler.    Johannes Kepler died Nov. 15, 1630, at age 58. NASA's Kepler space telescope was named for him. The spacecraft launched March 6, 2009, and spent nine years searching for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in our region of the Milky Way

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            -      4465  -  SUNSPOTS  -  we had a big one this week?  -    The behemoth dark patch on the sun's surface has ballooned in recent days, May 10,2024, becoming one of the largest and most active sunspots seen this solar cycle.  “AR3664” caused the Space Weather Prediction Center to issue a warning of increased solar flare risk from the solar giant on Tuesday, May 7.

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            -     4466   -   DARK  ENERGY  -  expanding the Universe?   Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began with a rapid expansion we call the Big Bang. After this initial expansion, which lasted a fraction of a second, gravity started to slow the universe down. But the cosmos wouldn’t stay this way. Nine billion years after the universe began, its expansion started to speed up, driven by an unknown force that scientists have named “dark energy”.

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            -     4467   -  EARTH  -  earliest history?     Our Earth is the only life-supporting planet we know of, so it’s tempting to use it as a standard in the search for life elsewhere. But the modern Earth can’t serve as a basis for evaluating exoplanets and their potential to support life. Earth’s atmosphere has changed radically over its 4.5 billion years.

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            -     4468   -  STAR  EXPLOSIONS  -  how astronomers learn?   The tumultuous massive star, in the final year or so of its life, ejected large amounts of matter into space before going supernova.   This massive star that exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy in May appears to have unexpectedly lost one sun's worth of ejected mass during the final years of its life before going supernova.

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            -     4469   -    NORTHERN  LIGHTS  -     May 2024,  a huge solar flare sent a wave of energetic particles from the sun surging out through space.   The wave reached Earth, and people around the world enjoyed the sight of unusually vivid aurora in both hemispheres.  While the aurora is normally only visible close to the poles, this was spotted as far south as Hawaii in the northern hemisphere, and as far north as Mackay in the south.

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            -      4470   -     NUCLEAR  ENERGY  -   will it work?  In December 2022, after more than a decade of effort and frustration, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had set a world record by producing a fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed , a phenomenon known as “ignition”.

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            -     4471   -  EXPANDING  UNIVERSE  -    is it flat?   -    Our cosmic model of the universe, based on quantum mechanics and general relativity, deals with the geometry of the universe as influenced by matter and energy, which for most purposes is considered to be “flat”,  that is the same in all directions..

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            -     4472   -  KNOT  THEORY  ORBITS  -   what are they for?  -    When a spacecraft arrives at its destination, it settles into an orbit for science operations. But after the primary mission is complete, there might be other interesting orbits where scientists would like to explore. Maneuvering to a different orbit requires fuel, limiting a spacecraft’s number of maneuvers.

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            -      4473   -  OLDEST  STARS  -   may have been captured?  The oldest stars in the universe were found hiding near the Milky Way's edge, and they may not be alone.  Astronomers reanalyzed the chemical composition of three stars in the Milky Way's halo and found that they are between 12 and 13 billion years old. They may have also been stolen from other galaxies.

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            -     4474   -  ATOMS  -  have wave particle duality?  -   Atoms squished closer together than ever before, revealing seemingly impossible “quantum effects”.   Using a  laser technique, scientists have squished pairs of atoms closer together than ever before, revealing some truly mind-boggling quantum effects.

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            -     4475   -   PHOTON  -  what Einstein discovered.  -    Creating the Photon started with a simple experiment that was all the rage in the early 20th century. And as is usually the case, simple experiments often go on to change the world, leading Einstein himself to open the revolutionary door to the quantum world.

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            -     4476   -  DARK  MATTER  -   experiments to learn what is it?      Dark matter makes up over 80% of all matter in the universe, but scientists have never seen it.  We only assume it exists because, without it, the behavior of stars, planets and galaxies simply wouldn't make sense according to laws of gravity

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                 4477   -  BLACKHOLES  -  what have we learned?  -    James Webb Telescope detects most distant black hole merger to date.   Astronomers find evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the universe was only 740 million years old. This marks the most distant detection of a black hole merger ever obtained and the first time that this phenomenon has been detected so early in the universe.

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            -      4478   -   LIGHT  PHOTONS  -  how were they discovered?   Einstein’s discovery of photons would be just one result in the growing awareness of the microscopic, quantum world.    It was the first to claim that an entity in nature (in this case, the radiation of Maxwell discovered) was really made of quantum particles.  That is photons.

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            -     4479   -    EUCLID  TELESCOPE -  will it discover Dark Energy?  -     Europe's Euclid space telescope may see into the dark universe and may put Einstein's famous theory of general relativity into question.  There is a problem with our understanding of the universe: It doesn't make sense if we account only for the matter and energy that we can see, measure or detect.

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            -     4480   -    DAYTIME  TELESCOPES  -  really?  -    Stargazing in broad daylight using a multi-lens telescope will change how we do astronomy?   Astronomers at Macquarie University have pioneered a new technique for observing celestial objects during the day, potentially allowing around-the-clock astronomy.

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            -     4481   -   EINSTEIN'S  -  theory of relativity?  -    Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity has been borne out in the real world, measured in eclipses, distorted galaxies and even the universe's structure.  General Relativity (GR), is the “theory of gravity” first cooked up by Albert Einstein in a feat that took him seven years to complete.  It provided amazing insights into how the world works.

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            -      4482   -    FREE  FLOATING  PLANETS  -   how many are there?  -   Over 5,000 planets have been found orbiting other star systems. One of the satellites hunting for them is “TESS,” the “Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite”. Astronomers using TESS think they are made a  surprising discovery; their first free-floating, or rogue, planet.

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            -    4483   -    PLANETS  -   8 or is it now 5,000?  -    The hunt for new exoplanets continues. On May 23rd, 2024,  scientists published the NASA TESS-Keck Catalog, an effort to publicly release over 9,000 radial velocity measurements collected by NASA’s space-based Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

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            -     4484   -   EARTH'S  MAGNETIC  FIELD  -  what caused it?  -    The image of an atom, with electrons swarming around a central nucleus bulging with protons and neutrons, is as iconic in our perception of science.   Exploring the fundamental forces that govern our world, posing questions along the way that seek to explain how the delicate balance of positive and negative charges paved the way for gravity to shape our universe.

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            -      4485   -   SUPERNOVAE  -    close to home?  -   Before exploding, this star puffed out a sun's worth of mass.  The tumultuous massive star, in the final year or so of its life, ejected large amounts of matter into space before going supernova.   The star exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy in May, 2023.  It unexpectedly lost approximately one sun's worth of ejected mass during the final years of its life before going supernova.

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            -      4486  -   SUPERNOVAE  1987A  -  what are the string of pearls?  -      Astronomers finally have an explanation for the “String of Pearls” in Supernova 1987a.  Not long after the explosion of Supernova 1987a, astronomers were making predictions about how it might look in a few years.

            -      4487  -  JAMES  WEBB  -  sees the first stars?  -     Using the James Webb Space Telescope, University of Copenhagen researchers have become the first to see the formation of three of the earliest galaxies in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago.

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            -     4488  -     RARE  EARTH  METALS  -  how did they get here?  -   Before exploding, this star puffed out a sun's worth of mass.  This supernova could prove to be a lynchpin in our understanding of massive star deaths.   The massive star, in the final year or so of its life, ejected large amounts of matter into space before going supernova.

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            -     4489  -   EINSTEIN  -   how did he get so smart?  -    Albert Einstein was arguably the most famous scientist of the 20th century. Most people are familiar with his iconic E=mc^2 equation, but his life and work encompassed so much more than that. For instance, the brilliant physicist actually won the Nobel Prize for very different work. From his humble beginnings as a patent clerk to the offer to run a small country (that he turned down).

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            -    4490  -     BLACKHOLE   DISCOVERIES  -  we keep learning more?  -    Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted both the existence of black holes and gravitational waves, both of which continued to be scrutinized throughout the 20th century, which includes what’s called the “golden age of general relativity” during the 1960s and 1970s.

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            May 1, 2024             Index of Reviews 4450 to 4500                              4500                                                                                              ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            -----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

            ---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com ----- 

            --  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews

            ---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

            --------------------- ---  Friday, June 14, 2024  ---------------------------

 

 

           

 

                                                              4500  -   Index of Reviews 4450  to 4500                 6

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May 22, 2024                            4472

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--------  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com ----- 

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Friday, June 14, 2024  ---------------------------------

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

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