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Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA's Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light curves for evidence of exoplanets by simultaneously fitting for these systematics and the transit signals of interest. This method is more computationally expensive than standard search algorithms but we demonstrate that it can be efficiently implemented and used to discover transit signals. We apply this method to the full Campaign 1 dataset and report a list of 36 planet candidates transiting 31 stars, along with an analysis of the pipeline performance and detection efficiency based on artificial signal injections and recoveries. For all planet candidates, we present posterior distributions on the properties of each system based strictly on the transit observables.
Every massive galaxy has a black hole at its center, and the heftier the galaxy, the bigger its black hole. But why are the two related? After all, the black hole is millions of times smaller and less massive than its home galaxy.
An alien star passed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have discovered.
No other star is known to have approached this close to us.
An international team of researchers says it came five times closer than our current nearest neighbour - Proxima Centauri.
The object, a red dwarf known as Scholz's star, cruised through the outer reaches of the Solar System - a region known as the Oort Cloud.
Scholz's star was not alone; it was accompanied on its travels by an object known as a brown dwarf. These are essentially failed stars that lacked the necessary mass to get fusion going in their cores.
The findings are published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Observations of the dim star's trajectory suggest that 70,000 years ago this cosmic infiltrator passed within 0.8 light years of the Sun. By comparison, Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away.
The education ministry, which controls the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, represents the largest share of the total 2015 space budget at 182 billion yen, a 19 percent rise from the present year. This includes a 5.5 billion yen increase, to 12.5 billion yen, for development of the H-3 rocket to replace the nation’s current workhorse, the reliable but expensive H-2A, in 2020.
The JAXA budget also includes money for three new projects: a next-generation data relay satellite to cope with growing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance traffic; an advanced optical imaging satellite that will carry a ballistic missile early warning sensor as a hosted payload in cooperation with the Ministry of Defense; and an effort to develop a new line of 150-kilogram multipurpose satellites that can be rapidly built and adapted to a range of missions.
The new photos are the best yet, showing two faces of Ceres as the Texas sized body rotates to reveal a pockmarked world, heavily crated and featuring multiple bright “white spots” that have mystified the scientists and public alike.
Scientists are keenly interested in Ceres as it may harbor an ocean of liquid water as large in volume as the oceans of Earth below a thick icy mantle despite its small size – and thus could be a potential abode for life.
I asked Russell if the white spots could be patches of surface water ice?
“There are team members who favor this!” Russell replied.
-------Now on the final leg of its journey to distant Pluto the New Horizons spacecraft has been able to spot not only the dwarf planet and its largest moon Charon, but also two of its much smaller moons, Hydra and Nix – the latter for the very first time!
The animation above comprises seven frames made of images acquired by New Horizons from Jan. 27 to Feb. 8, 2015 while the spacecraft was closing in on 115 million miles (186 million km) from Pluto. Hydra is noted by a yellow box and Nix is in the orange. (See a version of the animation with some of the background stars and noise cleared out here.)
What’s more, these images have been released on the 85th anniversary of the first spotting of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ.
Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.
New images taken by the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter have provided a fresh look at a region believed to be hiding large volumes of water ice just beneath the surface – something that could serve as a water source for future manned missions to the Red Planet.
Two NASA astronauts are safely back inside the International Space Station today (Feb. 20) after successfully completing the first of three scheduled spacewalks planned to prep the outpost for the arrivals of commercial spacecraft carrying astronauts in the coming years.
Barry "Butch" Wilmore, commander of Expedition 42, and flightengineer Terry Virts successfully completed three scheduled tasks and an extra "get ahead" task during today's spacewalk, with no problems. The two astronauts ventured out of the station at about 8:00 a.m. EST (1300 GMT). They reentered the orbiting outpost just after 2:30 p.m. EST (1930 GMT). Wilmore and Virts are scheduled to perform two more spacewalks in the next eight days.
COCOA BEACH, Fla. — The extraterrestrial seas of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, provide an ideal world for a robotic submarine to explore, and a team of scientists is working on an innovative mission concept that could make that vision a reality.
A submarine on Titan would open up the lakes and rivers of liquid methane and ethane that cover the cloudy Saturn moon to exploration. In a NASA video of the Titan Sub mission concept, the robotic submarine sails the Kraken Mare, the largest northern sea on Titan. That alien sea is nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide and 1,000 feet deep (300 meters).
China's space program is catching up with that of the United States and Washington must invest in military and civilian programs if it is to remain the world's dominant space power, a congressional hearing heard on Wednesday.
Experts speaking to Congress's U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said China's fast advances in military and civilian space technology were part of a long-term strategy to shape the international geopolitical system to its interests and achieve strategic dominance in the Asia-Pacific.
They also reflect an enthusiasm for space exploration which in the United States has faded since the Apollo Program which landed Americans on the moon in 1969, they said.
Many of us dream of living on other planets, but are two things we'll need before it can actually happen: money and raw materials. Now some companies say they have a solution to this problem. They'll mine asteroids for valuable metal ores, and for basic resources like water that we'll need once we're far from Earth.
Lucky for us, the cosmos is packed with the raw materials we need and crave. Scattered across our galaxy are trillions upon trillions of space rocks, filled with the water, precious metals, and other raw materials we'll need to fuel our cosmic diaspora.
Mining asteroids is not just a dream—several enterprising companies are already getting the jump on it. Still, the technological barriers are immense, and we're just beginning to come to grips with the social and political implications of a space-based civilization. Here's what we already know—and need to know—about the industry that could make it happen.
How Asteroid Mining Could Pay for Our First Space Colony
Many of us dream of living on other planets, but are two things we'll need before it can actually happen: money and raw materials. Now some companies say they have a solution to this problem. They'll mine asteroids for valuable metal ores, and for basic resources like water that we'll need once we're far from Earth.
Lucky for us, the cosmos is packed with the raw materials we need and crave. Scattered across our galaxy are trillions upon trillions of space rocks, filled with the water, precious metals, and other raw materials we'll need to fuel our cosmic diaspora.
Mining asteroids is not just a dream—several enterprising companies are already getting the jump on it. Still, the technological barriers are immense, and we're just beginning to come to grips with the social and political implications of a space-based civilization. Here's what we already know—and need to know—about the industry that could make it happen.
The losertrians would shit when we do! Short sighted fucks.
Two of the teams competing for the prestigious Google Lunar XPRIZE have announced a partnership, bringing them one step closer to landing on the moon. The HAKUTO team’s rover will hitch a ride on the Astrobotic Griffin lander when it sets off in the second half of 2016.
The Aragoscope: Ultra-High Resolution Optics at Low Cost starts from 1 hour into the video.
The goal is to create space telescopes with hundreds of meters of diameter.
The Aragoscope diffracts light into collection areas. A fraction of the light is collected. A hundred meter aragoscope with many 3 millimeter to one centimeter of width the diffracting rings would collect the light of a one meter telescope. The diffracting rings are a few microns across.
(AP)—Russia's space agency expects the International Space Station to stay in orbit through 2024, and plans to create its own space outpost with its segment of the station after that.
The Falcon 9 rocket uses 10 Merlin engines on every mission — nine standard Merlin 1D powerplants on the launcher’s first stage and a single modified Merlin 1D optimized for firing outside the atmosphere on the second stage.
If you’re a purist, the 100th flight of a Merlin 1D engine on the Falcon 9’s booster stage will come this weekend with the launch of two communications spacecraft for Eutelsat and Asia Broadcast Satellite — a mission currently targeted for no sooner than Feb. 27.
Accounting for Merlin 1D flights in all its variants, the 100th unit of the engine flew Feb. 11 when a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral with NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory.
NASA’S Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter has taken a deep dive into the Martian atmosphere. The first of a series of five planned deep-dip maneuvers by the unmanned spacecraft, its purpose was to gather information about the lower limits of the upper regions of the Red Planet's atmosphere.
Dwarf planet Ceres continues to puzzle scientists as NASA's Dawn spacecraft gets closer to being captured into orbit around the object. The latest images from Dawn, taken nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers) from Ceres, reveal that a bright spot that stands out in previous images lies close to yet another bright area.
"Ceres' bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Using its ion propulsion system, Dawn will enter orbit around Ceres on March 6. As scientists receive better and better views of the dwarf planet over the next 16 months, they hope to gain a deeper understanding of its origin and evolution by studying its surface. The intriguing bright spots and other interesting features of this captivating world will come into sharper focus.
"The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres. This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us," said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany.
Russia will continue using the International Space Station (ISS) until around 2024 and is planning to build its own orbital outpost using the existing ISS modules, Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said Tuesday.
"The configuration of a multi-purpose lab module, a docking module and a scientific-energy module allows us to build an orbital station to ensure Russia's access to outer space," Roscosmos Science and Technology Board said in a statement.
In addition, Russia will actively study the Moon using robotic equipment in the next decade with the goal of sending manned missions to the Earth's satellite around 2030, the board said.
President Cristina Fernandez’s government has said the project is part of China’s plans to reach the moon in 2020.
The satellite station under construction in southern Neuquen province is China’s first outside the country for its space exploration programme.
It will be used for monitoring and downloading data through an antenna with a 35-metre diameter.
It is expected to cost US$300 million and will be operational next year.
According to a new study published in the British journal "Nature" on Thursday, the quasar is 12 billion times the masses of the Sun and 430 trillion times brighter than the Sun.
The black hole, which is 12.8 billion light years from Earth, was first spotted through a 2.4 meter telescope in Lijiang in southwest China's Yunnan Province and its existence was confirmed by follow-up studies in the United States and Chile.
