New Australian telescope, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is set to find more than 700,000 GALAXIES that have never been seen before.
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ASKAP will start scanning southern skies in 2013 as a forerunner to the massive Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be shared between Australia-New Zealand and Southern Africa.
Dr Duffy said two ASKAP surveys, WALLABY and DINGO, would examine galaxies to study hydrogen gas -- the fuel that forms stars -- and how those galaxies had changed in the last 4 billion years, allowing us to better understand how our own galaxy, the Milky Way, grew.
“We put him in an MRI scanner and while he is in the scanner we ask him to imagine doing certain things in his mind . . . for example, we ask him to imagine using his arms. Scott is unable to use his arms in reality but it turns out he is perfectly able to imagine moving his arms. And we can pick that up on the scanner and we can tell he’s doing what we ask him to do,” Owen said.
Scientists close to flipping switch on dark matter experiment deep in South Dakota
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Scientists hoping to detect dark matter deep in a former South Dakota gold mine have taken the last major step before flipping the switch on their delicate experiment and say they may be ready to begin collecting data as early as February.
What's regarded as the world's most sensitive dark matter detector was lowered earlier this month into a 70,000-gallon (264,971 litre) water tank nearly a mile (1.6 kilometres) beneath the earth's surface, shrouding it in enough insulation to hopefully isolate dark matter from the cosmic radiation that makes it impossible to detect above ground.
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Scientists know dark matter exists by its gravitational pull but, unlike regular matter and antimatter, it's so far been undetectable. Regular matter accounts for about 4 per cent of the universe's mass, and dark matter makes up about 25 per cent. The rest is dark energy, which is also a mystery.
As described in Bill Bryson's most excellent book "A short history of nearly everything":
"Where Earth is the size of a pea, and the solar system were drawn to scale, Jupiter would be a thousand feet from a pea-sized Earth and Pluto would be a mile and a half. You wouldn't be able to see Pluto because it would be about the size of a bacterium. Scale matters."
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I’m always amazed these sportscasters and announcers can call the game with McDavid’s **** in their mouths all the time.
__________________ https://www.reddit.com/r/CalgaryFlames/
I’m always amazed these sportscasters and announcers can call the game with McDavid’s **** in their mouths all the time.
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I don't follow a lot of space news, but this has surprised me. I had no idea the possibility was even there for Mercury to have water/ice.
It's been suspected for a long time that Mercury at least one time had water and that's a big reason they built the messenger probe...to hopefully find it. Water is very abundant in the cosmos, scientist's suspect billions of planets in our own galaxy have water...tough part is finding them.
I wish I was born 40 years later, The next 50 years is going to be exciting.
It's been suspected for a long time that Mercury at least one time had water and that's a big reason they built the messenger probe...to hopefully find it. Water is very abundant in the cosmos, scientist's suspect billions of planets in our own galaxy have water...tough part is finding them.
I wish I was born 40 years earlier, The next 50 years is going to be exciting.
Does that mean if part of Mercury is hot, and the shaded part is cold, could there be a thin habitable zone in between? I realize that atmosphere and pressure play a role, but in theory, would part of Mercury be temperate enough for survival?
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
Does that mean if part of Mercury is hot, and the shaded part is cold, could there be a thin habitable zone in between? I realize that atmosphere and pressure play a role, but in theory, would part of Mercury be temperate enough for survival?
It orbits the Sun once in about 88 Earth days, completing three rotations about its axis for every two orbits.
Due to its near lack of an atmosphere to retain heat, Mercury's surface experiences the steepest temperature gradient of all the planets, ranging from a very cold 100 K at night to a very hot 700 K during the day.
The surface temperature of Mercury ranges from 100 K to 700 K[45] due to the absence of an atmosphere and a steep temperature gradient between the equator and the poles. The subsolar point reaches about 700 K during perihelion then drops to 550 K at aphelion.[46] On the dark side of the planet, temperatures average 110 K.[47] The intensity of sunlight on Mercury’s surface ranges between 4.59 and 10.61 times the solar constant (1,370 W·m−2).[48]
Although the daylight temperature at the surface of Mercury is generally extremely high, observations strongly suggested that ice (frozen water) existed on Mercury. The floors of deep craters at the poles are never exposed to direct sunlight, and temperatures there remain below 102 K; far lower than the global average.[49] Water ice strongly reflects radar, and observations by the 70 m Goldstone telescope and the VLA in the early 1990s revealed that there are patches of very high radar reflection near the poles.[50] While ice is not the only possible cause of these reflective regions, astronomers believe it is the most likely.[51]
The icy regions are believed to contain about 1014–1015 kg of ice,[52] and may be covered by a layer of regolith that inhibits sublimation.[53] By comparison, the Antarctic ice sheet on Earth has a mass of about 4×1018 kg, and Mars' south polar cap contains about 1016 kg of water.[52] The origin of the ice on Mercury is not yet known, but the two most likely sources are from outgassing of water from the planet’s interior or deposition by impacts of comets.[52]
