Neptune boasts some of the strangest weather in the solar system. The sun's eighth planet holds the record for the fastest winds observed on any world, with speeds cutting through the atmosphere upward of 1,100 miles per hour, or 1.5 times the speed of sound. Scientists still don't know exactly why its atmosphere is so tumultuous. Their latest glimpse of Neptune provided even more reason to be confused. From a report: The Hubble Space Telescope identified a storm in 2018, a dark spot some 4,600 miles across. Since that time, it appears to have drifted toward the equator but then swooped back up north, according to the latest Hubble observations. It also has a smaller companion storm, nicknamed Dark Spot Jr., that scientists think might be a chunk that broke off the main storm. These inky vortexes stand out against the dizzying cerulean blue of the planet, but while they're dazzling to see, their life spans are short, making them even more challenging to study.

This is not the first time Neptune's dark spots have behaved so strangely. When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet in 1989, (still the only spacecraft to do so) it observed two storms. One was the original Dark Spot, a large vortex about the size of the Earth. It too had a companion, a smaller, fast moving storm nicknamed Scooter. The first observed Dark Spot also seemed to move south and then back to the north. "When we were tracking the great dark spot with Voyager, we saw it oscillating up and down in longitude," said Heidi Hammel, a member of the imaging team of the Voyager 2 space probe and currently the vice president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. "We had enough time on Voyager, that we were able to track the feature for something like four to five months leading up to the flyby. That storm was huge, a big monster," as big as planet Earth.

schwit1 quotes Intelligent Living: Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company's chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it.

Plenty's climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically, hung from the ceiling. There are sun-mimicking LED lights shining on them, robots that move them around, and artificial intelligence (AI) managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light, and continually learning and optimizing how to grow bigger, faster, better crops. These futuristic features ensure every plant grows perfectly year-round. The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm.

Another perk of vertical farming is locally produced food. The fruits and vegetables aren't grown 1,000 miles away or more from a city; instead, at a warehouse nearby. Meaning, many transportation miles are eliminated, which is useful for reducing millions of tons of yearly CO2 emissions and prices for consumers. Imported fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so society's most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem.

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research(KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees. Phys.Org reports: On November 24 (Tuesday), the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KEF) announced that in a joint research with the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States, it succeeded in continuous operation of plasma for 20 seconds with an ion-temperature higher than 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the 2020 KSTAR Plasma Campaign. It is an achievement to extend the 8 second plasma operation time during the 2019 KSTAR Plasma Campaign by more than 2 times. In its 2018 experiment, the KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: about 1.5 seconds)

To re-create fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons are separated, and ions must be heated and maintained at high temperatures. In its 2020 experiment, the KSTAR improved the performance of the Internal Transport Barrier(ITB) mode, one of the next generation plasma operation modes developed last year and succeeded in maintaining the plasma state for a long period of time, overcoming the existing limits of the ultra-high-temperature plasma operation.

Astronomers behind the most extensive search yet for alien life are investigating an intriguing radio wave emission that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. From a report: The narrow beam of radio waves was picked up during 30 hours of observations by the Parkes telescope in Australia in April and May last year, the Guardian understands. Analysis of the beam has been under way for some time and scientists have yet to identify a terrestrial culprit such as ground-based equipment or a passing satellite. It is usual for astronomers on the $100m Breakthrough Listen project to spot strange blasts of radio waves with the Parkes telescope or the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, but all so far have been attributed to human-made interference or natural sources. The latest "signal" is likely to have a mundane explanation too, but the direction of the narrow beam, around 980MHz, and an apparent shift in its frequency said to be consistent with the movement of a planet have added to the tantalising nature of the finding. Scientists are now preparing a paper on the beam, named BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen, the project to search for evidence of life in space, the Guardian understands. The beam that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.2 light years from Earth, has not been spotted since the initial observation, according to an individual in the astronomy community who requested anonymity because the work is ongoing. "It is the first serious candidate since the 'Wow! signal'," they said.

In Huntsville, Alabama, there is a room with green walls and a green ceiling. Dangling down the center is a fishing line attached to a motor mounted to the ceiling, which moves a procession of guns tied to the translucent line. From a report: The staff at Arcarithm bought each of the 10 best-selling firearm models in the U.S.: Rugers, Glocks, Sig Sauers. Pistols and long guns are dangled from the line. The motor rotates them around the room, helping a camera mounted to a mobile platform photograph them from multiple angles. "It's just like a movie set," said Arcarithm president and CEO Randy E. Riley. This process creates about 5,000 images of each gun floating ethereally. Arcarithm's computer programmers then replace the green backdrop with different environments, like fields, forests, and city streets. They add rain or snow or fog or sun. A program then randomly distorts the images. The result is 30,000 to 50,000 images of the same gun, from multiple angles, in different synthetic settings and of varying degrees of visibility.

The point of creating this vast portfolio of digital gun art is to feed an algorithm made to detect a firearm as soon as a security camera catches it being drawn by synthetically creating tens of thousands of ways each gun may appear. Arcarithm is one of several companies developing automated active shooter detection technology in the hopes of selling it to schools, hotels, entertainment venues and the owners of any location that could be the site of one of America's 15,000 annual gun murders and 29,000 gun injuries. Among the other sellers are Omnilert, a longtime vendor of safety notification software, and newcomers ZeroEyes, Defendry, and Athena Securities. Some cities employ a surveillance system of acoustic sensors to instantly detect gunshots. These companies promise to do one better and save precious minutes by alerting police or security personnel before the first shot is fired.

Long-time Slashdot reader BoredStiff writes: An energy Sankey diagram [where the width of arrows is proportional to flow rates] was published today by the University of Chicago, and shows the history of the American energy system in chart form, from 1800 to 2019.
The Atlantic explains: It is the first attempt to put so much information about U.S. energy history in one place. This particular Sankey diagram shows the inputs and outputs for the U.S. energy system, measured in watts per capita. The left side of the chart shows where energy is coming from (coal, natural gas, or petroleum) and the right side shows what it's being used for (transportation, agriculture, or home lighting and heating)...

[I]t has a lot to teach us about how the energy system got to be the way it is today — and how it might change, and be made to change, in the future... The half century from 1800 to 1850 saw the country devour biomass, most of it in the form of firewood and animal feed. In the 1870s, biomass gave way to the first fossil fuels: coal and, to a lesser extent, petroleum... By the 1910s, coal was dominant.... In the 1920s, it began to fade from the economy, replaced by natural gas, electricity, and — in the transportation sector — petroleum (in the form of gasoline). This was the age of cars and electrified Sun Belt suburbs — and it lasted 50 years, until the energy crisis of the 1970s arrived and capped energy use. Since 1973, per capita energy use hasn't increased.

In recent years, you can see natural gas driving out coal from the electricity sector. It was getting a handle on that change, actually, that led the project's leader to start working on it in the first place. "The changes that are happening in the electricity sector now — changes that are as large as any energy transition we've seen — are difficult to grasp... without animating the data," Elisabeth Moyer, an atmospheric-chemistry professor at the University of Chicago who created the project, told me...

Emily Grubert, an engineering professor at Georgia Tech, noted that nearly all of the transitions depicted were accidental or the result of market forces. It's possible that the transition to zero-carbon energy could be faster, she said, because it will be intentional.

hcs_$reboot shares a remarkable new theory from Larry M. Silverberg, an aerospace engineering professor at North Carolina State University (with colleague Jeffrey Eischen). They're proposing that matter is not made of particles (or even waves), as was long thought, but fragments of energy.

[W]hile the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to make incredibly accurate predictions about the universe, the rules break down at the largest and tiniest scales. Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was able to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox relating to inertia and gravity. But instead of improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the universe... Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave....

Much to our surprise, we discovered that there were only a limited number of ways to describe a concentration of energy that flows. Of those, we found just one that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow. We named it a fragment of energy... Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the math necessary to solve physics problems... More than 100 [years] ago, Einstein had turned to two legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift — or precession — in Mercury's orbit, and the tiny bending of light as it passes the Sun... In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got the same answers as those predicted by the theory of general relativity. We were stunned.

Our initial work demonstrated how a new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the enormous to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong. The fragment could be a single potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically — and update the way people think about the building blocks of the universe.

"NASA's twin Voyager probes keep making discoveries in interstellar space," reports Space.com The Voyager mission has detected a new type of "electron burst," which will provide insights into the mechanisms of flaring stars, a new study reports. The bursts occur when cosmic ray electrons — fast-moving particles from far beyond the solar system — are pushed by shock waves generated by solar eruptions. The electrons then accelerate further along cosmic magnetic field lines to incredible speed, study team members said.

"The idea that shock waves accelerate particles is not new," corresponding author Don Gurnett, professor emeritus in physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. "[But] we detected it in a new realm: the interstellar medium, which is much different than in the solar wind, where similar processes have been observed...."

Eventually, the magnetic field lines propel the cosmic rays to almost the speed of light — nearly 670 times faster than the solar shock waves that first pushed them. (The shock waves move at roughly 1 million mph, or 1.6 million kph, study team members said.)
The article marvels at the fact that the spacecraft are still sending back data regularly from 14 billion miles away, beyond the edge of our solar system, more than 43 years after they left earth. They even detected the original solar shock wave which caused the electron burst "up to a year after the event occurred.

"The wait time happened because the spacecraft are so far from the sun."

"A Mysterious Object Is Hurtling Towards Earth, and Scientists Don't Know What It Is," read Newsweek's headline on Monday, describing an object projected to pass 31,605 miles from earth. (One astronomer told them that was roughly 13% of the average distance between the earth and the moon).

But then a computer model calculated its past trajectories through space, according to the director for NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). "One of the possible paths for 2020 SO brought the object very close to Earth and the Moon in late September 1966," he said in a statement. "It was like a eureka moment when a quick check of launch dates for lunar missions showed a match with the Surveyor 2 mission."

On Wednesday NASA described how a team led by Vishnu Reddy, an associate professor/planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, tried to prove what they'd seen was a 54-year-old booster rocket: Through a series of follow up observations, Reddy and his team analyzed 2020 SO's composition using NASA's IRTF and compared the spectrum data from 2020 SO with that of 301 stainless steel, the material Centaur rocket boosters were made of in the 1960's. While not immediately a perfect match, Reddy and his team persisted, realizing the discrepancy in spectrum data could be a result of analyzing fresh steel in a lab against steel that would have been exposed to the harsh conditions of space weather for 54 years. This led Reddy and his team to do some additional investigation.

"We knew that if we wanted to compare apples to apples, we'd need to try to get spectral data from another Centaur rocket booster that had been in Earth orbit for many years to then see if it better matched 2020 SO's spectrum," said Reddy. "Because of the extreme speed at which Earth-orbiting Centaur boosters travel across the sky, we knew it would be extremely difficult to lock on with the IRTF long enough to get a solid and reliable data set."

However, on the morning of Dec. 1, Reddy and his team pulled off what they thought would be impossible. They observed another Centaur D rocket booster from 1971 launch of a communication satellite that was in Geostationary Transfer Orbit, long enough to get a good spectrum. With this new data, Reddy and his team were able to compare it against 2020 SO and found the spectra to be consistent with each another, thus definitively concluding 2020 SO to also be a Centaur rocket booster...
So what happens next? 2020 SO made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 1, 2020 and will remain within Earth's sphere of gravitational dominance — a region in space called the "Hill Sphere" that extends roughly 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet — until it escapes back into a new orbit around the Sun in March 2021.

As NASA-funded telescopes survey the skies for asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth, the ability to distinguish between natural and artificial objects is valuable as nations continue to explore and more artificial objects find themselves in orbit about the Sun.

Astronomers will continue to observe this particular relic from the early Space Age until it's gone.

China successfully powered up its "artificial sun" nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, state media reported Friday, marking a great advance in the country's nuclear power research capabilities. Phys.Org reports: The HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China's largest and most advanced nuclear fusion experimental research device, and scientists hope that the device can potentially unlock a powerful clean energy source. It uses a powerful magnetic field to fuse hot plasma and can reach temperatures of over 150 million degrees Celsius, according to the People's Daily -- approximately ten times hotter than the core of the sun. Located in southwestern Sichuan province and completed late last year, the reactor is often called an "artificial sun" on account of the enormous heat and power it produces. They plan to use the device in collaboration with scientists working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor -- the world's largest nuclear fusion research project based in France, which is expected to be completed in 2025.

The programming language JavaScript emerged 25 years ago and has grown to become one of the most important pieces of the web and browser applications we use today. From a report: JavaScript is the go-to language for front-end development and has spawned Microsoft's Typescript, a superset of JavaScript with a stronger optional type system for developers that compiles to JavaScript when run in the browser. Both JavaScript and TypeScript conform to ECMAScript, the standard for JavaScript and node.js, the runtime for running applications outside of the browser thanks to Google's powerful V8 JavaScript engine. JavaScript's impact on the web cannot be understated. Tech giants have thrown their weight behind the language. Besides Google's V8, there are open source projects like React from Facebook and Angular from Google, which help spread web applications across smartphones and desktop. After Netscape and Sun Microsystems -- where Java was hatched in May 1995 by James Gosling -- announced JavaScript in December 1995, Microsoft promoted Visual Basic (VB) as a standard for creating web applications using VB Script for its Internet Explorer browser. Oracle would go on to buy Sun Microsystems in 2008 largely to get its hands on Java and its huge development ecosystem. The press release about its launch from 25 years ago.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Dec. 2 was the 25th anniversary of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint project from NASA and the European Space Agency. To celebrate, the agencies released a dramatic, nearly 50-minute-long video showing the sun blasting out solar material from 1998 through 2020. The SOHO spacecraft constantly stares at the sun, recording its every whim. It's spectacular and mesmerizing. "What becomes clear as the sun turns and years pass and background stars whirl by, is how constant the stream of material is that is blasted in all directions -- the solar wind," ESA said in a statement on Wednesday. "This constant wind is interrupted only by huge explosions that fling bows of material at vast speeds, filling the solar system with ionized material and solar radiation."

NBC News calls it "the ghostly signal that reveals the engine of the universe." Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares their report: In research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists reported that they've made the first detection of almost-ethereal particles called neutrinos that can be traced to carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion, known as the CNO cycle, inside the sun. It's a landmark finding that confirms theoretical predictions from the 1930s, and it's being hailed as one of the greatest discoveries in physics of the new millenium. "It's really a breakthrough for solar and stellar physics," said Gioacchino Ranucci of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), one of the researchers on the project since it began in 1990.

The scientists used the ultrasensitive Borexino detector at the INFN's Gran Sasso particle physics laboratory in central Italy — the largest underground research center in the world, deep beneath the Apennine Mountains, about 65 miles northeast of Rome. The detection caps off decades of study of the sun's neutrinos by the Borexino project, and reveals for the first time the main nuclear reaction that most stars use to fuse hydrogen into helium... Scientists calculate that the CNO cycle is the primary type of fusion in the universe. But it's hard to spot inside our relatively cool sun, where it accounts for only 1 percent of its energy...

Ranucci said the Borexino detector has spent decades measuring neutrinos from the sun's main proton-proton chain reaction, but detecting its CNO neutrinos has been very difficult — only about seven neutrinos with the tell-tale energy of the CNO cycle are spotted in a day. The discovery required making the detector ever more sensitive over the last five years, Ranucci said, by shielding it from outside sources of radioactivity so that the inner chamber of the detector is the most radiation-free place on Earth.

Amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero, one of the founders of The Exoplanets Channel, has found a small amount of evidence for a source of the notorious Wow! signal. Phys.Org reports: Back in 1977, astronomers working with the Big Ear Radio Telescope -- at the time, situated in Delaware, Ohio -- recorded a unique signal from somewhere in space. It was so strong and unusual that one of the workers on the team, Jerry Ehman, famously scrawled the word Wow! on the printout. Despite years of work and many man hours, no one has ever been able to trace the source of the signal or explain the strong, unique signal, which lasted for all of 72 seconds. Since that time, many people have suggested the only explanation for such a strong and unique signal is extraterrestrial intelligent life.

In this new effort, Caballero reasoned that if the source was some other life form, it would likely be living on an exoplanet -- and if that were the case, it would stand to reason that such a life form might be living on a planet similar to Earth -- one circling its own sun-like star. Pursuing this logic, Caballero began searching the publicly available Gaia database for just such a star. The Gaia database has been assembled by a team working at the Gaia observatory run by the European Space Agency. Launched back in 2013, the project has worked steadily on assembling the best map of the night sky ever created. To date, the team has mapped approximately 1.3 billion stars. In studying his search results, Caballero found what appears to fit the bill -- a star (2MASS 19281982-2640123) that is very nearly a mirror image of the sun -- and is located in the part of the sky where the Wow! signal originated. He notes that there are other possible candidates in the area but suggests his candidate might provide the best launching point for a new research effort by astronomers who have the tools to look for exoplanets. Caballero shared his findings via arXiv.

Ars Technica glimpsed a possible future at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory: a solar simulator "that can shine with the intensity of 20 Suns..."

"They think it could be the key to interstellar exploration." "It's really easy for someone to dismiss the idea and say, 'On the back of an envelope, it looks great, but if you actually build it, you're never going to get those theoretical numbers,'" says Benkoski, a materials scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory and the leader of the team working on a solar thermal propulsion system. "What this is showing is that solar thermal propulsion is not just a fantasy. It could actually work."

In 2019, NASA tapped the Applied Physics Laboratory to study concepts for a dedicated interstellar mission. At the end of next year, the team will submit its research to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Heliophysics decadal survey, which determines Sun-related science priorities for the next 10 years... In mid-November, [APL's] Interstellar Probe researchers met online for a weeklong conference to share updates as the study enters its final year. At the conference, teams from APL and NASA shared the results of their work on solar thermal propulsion, which they believe is the fastest way to get a probe into interstellar space.

The idea is to power a rocket engine with heat from the Sun, rather than combustion. According to Benkoski's calculations, this engine would be around three times more efficient than the best conventional chemical engines available today. "From a physics standpoint, it's hard for me to imagine anything that's going to beat solar thermal propulsion in terms of efficiency," says Benkoski. "But can you keep it from exploding...?" If the interstellar probe makes a close pass by the Sun and pushes hydrogen into its shield's vasculature, the hydrogen will expand and explode from a nozzle at the end of the pipe. The heat shield will generate thrust. It's simple in theory but incredibly hard in practice.

A solar thermal rocket is only effective if it can pull off an Oberth maneuver, an orbital-mechanics hack that turns the Sun into a giant slingshot. The Sun's gravity acts like a force multiplier that dramatically increases the craft's speed if a spacecraft fires its engines as it loops around the star... The big takeaway from his research, says Dean Cheikh, a materials technologist at NASAâ(TM)s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is there's a lot of testing that needs to be done on heat shield materials before a solar thermal rocket is sent around the Sun. But it's not a deal-breaker. "Additive manufacturing is a key component of this, and we couldn't do that 20 years ago. Now I can 3D-print metal in the lab."

Thelasko shares a report from Forbes: In a major milestone, the New Zealand-based launch company Rocket Lab has successfully recovered an orbital-class rocket after parachuting it back to Earth from near-space -- only the second company in history ever to do so. Yesterday, Thursday, November 20 at 9.20 P.M. Eastern Time, the company's two-stage Electron rocket lifted off from the company's launch site on the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island.

Named 'Return to Sender', the mission lofted 30 satellites into a sun-synchronous orbit 500 kilometers above the surface of Earth -- the most satellites ever flown on an Electron rocket. Of the satellites launched, 24 were small communications satellites called "SpaceBees" from the California-based company Swarm Technologies. The others included a space junk removal test, a maritime observation satellite, and an earthquake investigation satellite -- while a small gnome also made its way to space for charity. The launch was especially notable, however, for Rocket Lab's recovery efforts. Shortly after the launch, the first stage of the rocket descended back to Earth under parachute, falling into the ocean where it was then recovered by a waiting ship several hours later. Rocket Lab's plan is to catch its smaller rockets with a helicopter as they fall from space under a parachute. At some point, possibly next year, the first helicopter recovery will be attempted.

"First, the company says it wants to perform a few more splashdown tests in the ocean like this one, to check everything is nominal," reports Forbes. "If all goes well, however, SpaceX quite soon might not be the only private company that's able to launch, recover, and re-launch its own rockets."

Amanda Jane Hughes, Lecturer, Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering at University of Liverpool Stefania, and Soldini Lecturer in Aerospace Engineering at University of Liverpool, write: A space-based solar power station could orbit to face the Sun 24 hours a day. The Earth's atmosphere also absorbs and reflects some of the Sun's light, so solar cells above the atmosphere will receive more sunlight and produce more energy. But one of the key challenges to overcome is how to assemble, launch and deploy such large structures. A single solar power station may have to be as much as 10 kilometres squared in area -- equivalent to 1,400 football pitches. Using lightweight materials will also be critical, as the biggest expense will be the cost of launching the station into space on a rocket. One proposed solution is to develop a swarm of thousands of smaller satellites that will come together and configure to form a single, large solar generator. In 2017, researchers at the California Institute of Technology outlined designs for a modular power station, consisting of thousands of ultralight solar cell tiles. They also demonstrated a prototype tile weighing just 280 grams per square metre, similar to the weight of card.

Recently, developments in manufacturing, such as 3D printing, are also being looked at for this application. At the University of Liverpool, we are exploring new manufacturing techniques for printing ultralight solar cells on to solar sails. A solar sail is a foldable, lightweight and highly reflective membrane capable of harnessing the effect of the Sun's radiation pressure to propel a spacecraft forward without fuel. We are exploring how to embed solar cells on solar sail structures to create large, fuel-free solar power stations. These methods would enable us to construct the power stations in space. Indeed, it could one day be possible to manufacture and deploy units in space from the International Space Station or the future lunar gateway station that will orbit the Moon. Such devices could in fact help provide power on the Moon. The possibilities don't end there. While we are currently reliant on materials from Earth to build power stations, scientists are also considering using resources from space for manufacturing, such as materials found on the Moon.

Researchers with NASA's New Horizons say they've finally been able to determine if space is truly black. The group has posted their work online, and it will soon appear ini the Astrophysical Journal. NPR reports: New Horizons was originally designed to explore Pluto, but after whizzing past the dwarf planet in 2015, the intrepid spacecraft just kept going. It's now more than four billion miles from home -- nearly 50 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth is. That's important because it means the spacecraft is far from major sources of light contamination that make it impossible to detect any tiny light signal from the universe itself. Around Earth and the inner solar system, for example, space is filled with dust particles that get lit up by the Sun, creating a diffuse glow over the entire sky. But that dust isn't a problem out where New Horizons is. Plus, out there, the sunlight is much weaker.

To try to detect the faint glow of the universe, researchers went through images taken by the spacecraft's simple telescope and camera and looked for ones that were incredibly boring. Then they processed these images to remove all known sources of visible light. Once they'd subtracted out the light from stars, plus scattered light from the Milky Way and any stray light that might be a result of camera quirks, they were left with light coming in from beyond our own galaxy. They then went a step further still, subtracting out light that they could attribute to all the galaxies thought to be out there. And it turns out, once that was done, there was still plenty of unexplained light.

In fact, the amount of light coming from mysterious sources was about equal to all the light coming in from the known galaxies, says Marc Postman, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. So maybe there are unrecognized galaxies out there, he says, "or some other source of light that we don't yet know what it is." [...] So where does the light come from? Perhaps, he says, there are far more small, faint dwarf galaxies and other faint regions on the outskirts of galaxies that instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope can't detect and so scientists just aren't aware of them. Or, maybe there's more dust out there interfering with the measurements than scientists expected. Or perhaps there's a more exotic explanation -- some unknown phenomenon out in the universe that creates visible light. It's even possible it's something associated with dark matter, a mysterious form of matter that exerts a gravitational pull on visible matter but has never been seen directly.

A group of astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin has revived an idea shelved by NASA to build a lunar liquid-mirror telescope on the moon to study the first stars in the universe. "The team, led by NASA Hubble Fellow Anna Schauer, will publish their results in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal," reports Phys.Org. From the report: These first stars formed about 13 billion years ago. They are unique, born out of a mix of hydrogen and helium gasses, and likely tens or 100 times larger than the Sun. New calculations by Schauer show that a previously proposed facility, a liquid mirror telescope that would operate from the surface of the Moon, could study these stars. Proposed in 2008 by a team led by Roger Angel of The University of Arizona, this facility was called the Lunar Liquid-Mirror Telescope (LLMT). NASA had done an analysis on this proposed facility a decade ago, but decided not to pursue the project. According to Niv Drory, a senior research scientist with UT Austin's McDonald Observatory, the supporting science on the earliest stars did not exist at that point. "This telescope is perfect for that problem," he said.

The proposed lunar liquid-mirror telescope, which Schauer has nicknamed the "Ultimately Large Telescope," would have a mirror 100 meters in diameter. It would operate autonomously from the lunar surface, receiving power from a solar power collection station on the Moon, and relaying data to satellite in lunar orbit. Rather than coated glass, the telescope's mirror would be made of liquid, as it's lighter, and thus cheaper, to transport to the Moon. The telescope's mirror would be a spinning vat of liquid, topped by a metallic -- and thus reflective -- liquid. (Previous liquid mirror telescopes have used mercury.) The vat would spin continuously, to keep the surface of the liquid in the correct paraboloid shape to work as a mirror. The telescope would be stationary, situated inside a crater at the Moon's north or south pole. To study the first stars, it would stare at the same patch of sky continuously, to collect as much light from them as possible. The team is proposing that the astronomical community revisit the shelved plan for a lunar liquid-mirror telescope, as a way to study these first stars in the universe.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earthlings are lucky to live near a relatively stable Sun, which has enabled life on our planet to emerge and thrive over the past four billion years. While many worlds in our galaxy might contain the right ingredients to support life, though, a lot of them could be stuck with a more volatile star that prevents them from becoming -- or remaining -- habitable. To get a better grip on which types of star systems might be most likely to host aliens, a pair of scientists at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Center for Space Science have observed space weather around nearly 500 stars, according to a study published on Sunday in the journal Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. The results suggest that planets subjected to occasional but intense flares are probably more hospitable to life than worlds that receive a constant flux of radiation and low-energy flares, which blows their protective atmospheres away. Planetary habitability "is one of the most important concepts in exoplanet science" and "is defined as the zone around a star in which a planet is able to sustain liquid water on its surface," said research scientist Dimitra Atri and graduate student Shane Carberry Mogan, both at NYUAD, in the study. "While this approach is useful to identify potentially hospitable planets around stars, it fails to take into account the damaging aspect of stellar activity on such planets," the pair added. "The main goal of this paper is to understand how stellar luminosity and flares can lead to atmospheric escape on [habitable zone] planets on long time-scales and how these losses impact planetary habitability."