Moons and asteroids with a global ocean are tending to become relatively common objects in the Solar System. There have been at least nine and now ten with Saturn’s tiny (250 mile across Mimas). Give of the moon’s of Uranus are also likely having deep buried oceans. The presence of these long-lived global oceans is …
The Minor Planet Center has confirmed the addition of 28 newly discovered moons of Saturn. Saturn now has 117 moons and Jupiter has 95. Corey Powell notes that if we start counting all the chunks in the rings, the number could go into the thousands…or the trillions. Maybe it’s time for a formal definition of …
NASA has funded a phase 1 NIAC (NASA Innovation Advanced Concepts) study to get through about 24 miles (40 kilometers) of ice on Europa and other moons with liquid oceans. Jupiter’s satellite Europa almost certainly hides a global saltwater ocean beneath its icy surface. Chemistry at the ice surface and ocean-rock interface might provide the …
The Carnival of Space 639 is up at Urban Astronomer. Universe Today – The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Could Find More of Earth’s Transient Moons. Earth also has a population of what are known as “transient Moons”. These are a subset of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that are temporarily scooped up by Earth’s gravity and assume …
1. Universe Today – This Planet is so Metal. Iron and Titanium Vapour Found in the Atmosphere of an “Ultra-Hot Jupiter” An exoplanet is hot enough to turn metal into vapor. It is known as KELT-9b, a gas giant located 650 light-years from Earth that has atmospheric temperatures so hot – over 4,000 °C (7,232 …
Scientists at Cern have found a new way to unlock the secrets of antimatter. In a major technological advance, physicists shone a laser on trapped anti-atoms to detect whether they behaved any differently to atoms. The work could shed light on one of the enduring mysteries about antimatter. Although the Big Bang produced matter and …
The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This estimate is for continuous (unconventional) oil, …
A Chinese firm will start researching and developing a magnetic levitation (maglev) train that can run 600 km per hour, which would be faster than any other maglev train currently in operation. CRRC Corp Ltd, China’s largest rail transportation equipment maker, said it will build a maglev rail line no less than 5 km long …
Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo led the development of a new extensible wiring technique capable of controlling superconducting quantum bits, representing a significant step towards to the realization of a scalable quantum computer. “The quantum socket is a wiring method that uses three-dimensional wires based on spring-loaded …
New research provides a Rosetta Stone that translates the language of reinforcement learning to the quantum realm. It tackles sticky questions like what it means for a quantum agent to learn and how the history of a quantum agent’s interaction with its environment can be captured in a meaningful way. It also shows how a …
Self-driving cars have not fully arrived but fully automated parking garages have arrived. The 22 garages already are using automated systems to store and retrieve vehicles, and it’s starting to scale up. Ground is breaking soon on a parking structure for a mixed-use development in Oakland, California, and it is claimed to be the newest …