[llama66]

No, because sound does not travel through space. The smell however will travel through space, destroying all it comes in contact with.

[DrCaleb]

$1:

SpaceX launches third batch of Starlink satellites

SpaceX on Monday launched its third batch of 60 mini-satellites into orbit, part of its plans to build a giant constellation of thousands of spacecraft that will form a global broadband internet system.

The cluster of 60 satellites separated successfully from a Falcon 9 rocket above the ocean between Australia and Antarctica an hour after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 9:19pm (0219 GMT Tuesday).

The satellite deployment, which was filmed live by a camera onboard the rocket, brings the total number of satellites that are part of the US company's Starlink network to just under 180.

But that figure could one day total 42,000, resulting in far more crowded skies, which has raised concerns among astronomers that they may one day threaten our view of the cosmos.

. . .

SpaceX says its satellite constellation will be operational for Canada and the northern US by next year.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-spacex-ba ... lites.html

[raydan]

Alone in a Crowded Milky Way

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... milky-way/

[DrCaleb]

$1:

The Milky Way's impending galactic collision is already birthing new stars



The outskirts of the Milky Way are home to the galaxy's oldest stars. But astronomers have spotted something unexpected in this celestial retirement community: a flock of young stars.

More surprising still, spectral analysis suggests that the infant stars have an extragalactic origin. The stars seemingly formed not from material from the Milky Way, but from two nearby dwarf galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds. Those galaxies are on a collision course with our own. The discovery suggests that a stream of gas extending from the galaxies is about half as far from crashing into the Milky Way as previously thought.

"This is a puny cluster of stars—less than a few thousand in total—but it has big implications beyond its local area of the Milky Way," says primary discoverer Adrian Price-Whelan, a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. (The cluster also bears his name: Price-Whelan 1.)

The newfound stars could reveal new insights into the Milky Way's history; they might, for example, tell if the Magellanic Clouds collided with our galaxy in the past.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-milky-imp ... thing.html

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Closest-ever fast radio burst makes some ideas on their origin less likely



Over a decade after their discovery, fast radio bursts remain an enigma. Often lasting less than a millisecond, the bursts release an incredible amount of energy in the radio frequencies, then go silent. In many cases, there's no indication of anything else happening near that location again, suggesting a catastrophic event that destroyed whatever produced it. But over time, a handful of repeating burst sites have been identified, allowing the galaxy of at least one source to be identified and a few inferences about its properties to be inferred.

But the identification of repeating sources hasn't cleared up as much of the mystery as we might hope. In fact, it has raised questions about whether repeating and lone events might be from entirely different sources.

On Monday, researchers described the closest repeating fast radio burst yet identified, as well as the identity of its host galaxy. And in analyzing the burst's behaviors, the scientists involved suggest that it favors a few existing ideas but should cause us to rethink a few others.

Hitting repeat

It's hard to characterize something that appears without warning, lasts for a few milliseconds at most, and then vanishes, never to be seen again. Still, scientists have managed to identify a few galaxies that seem to be in the same location as a one-shot fast radio burst. These tend to be older, massive elliptical galaxies or those that are rapidly forming stars. In contrast, the one repeating fast radio burst that has been located comes from a dwarf galaxy that isn’t forming many stars and hasn’t gone through multiple rounds of star birth and death. That, in part, led scientists to question whether one-shots and repeaters were from the same source.

Conveniently, a telescope originally designed to do something else happened to be very good at picking up fast radio bursts. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, was built in southern British Columbia to map the distribution of hydrogen across much of the sky. But it does so at radio frequencies and by imaging a broad area of the sky at once, making it perfect for picking up fast radio bursts. In fact, it managed to identify one while the instrument was still being calibrated.

Earlier this year, a team that formed to search for fast radio bursts announced that it had found eight new repeating sources, providing a substantial catalog to characterize. This week, the researchers described one of that list, FRB180916.J0158+65, in more detail. After picking up a total of four bursts, they were able to identify the galaxy it originated in, as well as the region within the galaxy

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01 ... ss-likely/

[raydan]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

$1:

The Milky Way's impending galactic collision is already birthing new stars

Brace for impact!

[herbie]

Hoping Elon is decent enough to put a couple of those satellites in northerly orbits.
Every fucking one is barely above the horizon and below the tree tops here...

[DrCaleb]

herbie herbie:

Hoping Elon is decent enough to put a couple of those satellites in northerly orbits.
Every fucking one is barely above the horizon and below the tree tops here...

The article states that Alaska and Canada will be fully covered in 2021.

raydan raydan:

Brace for impact!

If you think of star systems on this scale, it helps. If our sun were a grain of sand on a beach in Hawaii, the next nearest star is a grain of sand on the far side of the moon.

Lots and lots of empty space in between. Galactic collisions are more about the re-ordering of gravity than combining masses.

[raydan]

I read that a long time ago but...

...saying that there's little chance of a collision means there's still a chance.

[DrCaleb]

Same thing can be said of freeways.

There will be collisions. But the odds are, it won't be us.

[raydan]

The way we're driving this planet, I wouldn't be surprised if we did hit something.

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Newest Canadian astronauts graduate, ready to fly to the moon



Canada's two newest astronauts, Jenni Sidey-Gibbons and Joshua Kutryk, graduate today from NASA's astronaut basic training, making them officially eligible for space flight — and to possibly become the first Canadians on the moon.

Canadian Space Agency astronauts Sidey-Gibbons, who is from Calgary, and Kutryk, who is from Fort Saskatchewan, AB., have spent two years in Houston with 11 NASA astronaut candidates training in NASA's Artemis program. The program aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 and to be a stepping stone for sending humans to Mars.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/csa- ... -1.5421957

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Calgary researchers' Milky Way discovery a 'eureka' moment

When Russell Shanahan and Stephen Lemmer first stumbled across the giant magnetic field structure, they thought it was a mistake.

They were analyzing a completely different part of the Milky Way when something in a spiral arm stood out — 18,000 light-years from Earth.

"Our first emotion was skepticism because we thought we had done something wrong," Lemmer said.

Shanahan says they were analyzing three-dimensional images — the X and the Y of an image plane, and a third plane that displays frequencies. And the frequencies then show waves of magnetic fields interacting with plasma.

And in one corner of the galaxy, he says, they were picking up frequency signatures that were off the charts.

"We're theorizing that this compression of gas and this increasing magnetic field is going to be the initial processes to actually causing this gas and this dust to collapse and start forming stars," Shanahan said.

$1:

The red crosses mark radio sources for which the Faraday effect was measured. The size of the cross indicates the strength of the effect. (Jeroen Stil/University of Calgary)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ ... -1.5421487

[CharlesAnthony]

$1:

Now just imagine ....

NASA Admits It Needs Help Figuring Out What to Do With Astronaut Poop

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Final images from Cassini spacecraft




Researchers are busy analysing some of the final data sent back from the Cassini spacecraft which has been in orbit around Saturn for more than 13 years until the end of its mission in September 2017.

For the last leg of its journey, Cassini was put on a particularly daring orbit passing between Saturn and its rings which brought it closer to Saturn than ever before. This allowed scientists to obtain images of Saturn's ultraviolet auroras in unprecedented resolution.

The new observations are detailed in two new studies published in Geophysical Research Letters and JGR: Space Physics.

Saturn's auroras are generated by the interaction of the solar wind, a stream of energetic particles emitted by the Sun, with Saturn's rapidly rotating magnetic field. They are located in the planet's polar regions and known to be highly dynamic, often pulsating and flashing as different dynamic processes occur in the planet's plasma environment.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-images-ca ... craft.html