News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
This weekend, an astronomer spotted a small asteroid just hours before the space rock crashed into Earth’s atmosphere and met its fiery demise. On Friday (March 11), astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky was observing the sky at the Piszkésteto Mountain Station, which is part of the Konkoly Observatory near Budapest in Hungary. During his observations, he spotted … Read more
On 11 March 2022, at around 9:20 pm UTC, a small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere. This is not unusual. Space rocks enter Earth’s atmosphere all the time. What makes this asteroid so amazing is that an astronomer spotted it before it made its rendezvous with atmospheric entry. It’s named 2022 EB5, and it’s only the … Read more
The Sun is continuing its rowdy behavior, with flares and coronal mass ejections almost every day since mid-January. That means the inevitable has happened: some of those eruptions have blasted in the general direction of Earth, which means we’re in for some solar storms. The Space Weather Prediction Center of the US National Oceanic … Read more
Just over four light-years away, our Solar System’s closest neighboring stars can be found. There’s red dwarf Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.2 light-years; and, just a little farther, at 4.37 light-years, a binary system of Sun-like stars – Alpha Centauri AB. We don’t yet know if there are any Earth-like worlds orbiting … Read more
Using a laser to strike rocks and a built-in microphone, NASA’s Perseverance rover has measured changes in the speed of sound on Mars due to temperature affecting the atmosphere Space 9 March 2022 By Alex Wilkins An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover NASA/JPL-Caltech The speed of sound on Mars has been measured for the first … Read more
When a rogue meteor careened through the atmosphere of Jupiter last year, it caught the attention of NASA’s Juno spacecraft in orbit around the giant planet. The brief and sudden flash in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere was spotted by NASA’s Juno spacecraft in April 2020. But, while the burst of light didn’t last long, it drew … Read more
On Feb. 4, 2022, SpaceX launched 49 satellites as part of Elon Musk‘s Starlink internet project, most of which burned up in the atmosphere days later. The cause of this more than US$50 million failure was a geomagnetic storm caused by the Sun. Geomagnetic storms occur when space weather hits and interacts with the … Read more
Gazing at the night sky can evoke a sense of wonder regarding humanity’s place in the Universe. But that’s not all it can evoke. If you’re knowledgeable about asteroid strikes like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, then even a fleeting meteorite can nudge aside your enjoyable sense of wonder. What if? Luckily, … Read more
Jupiter’s atmosphere has a strange composition, but it could be explained if the planet formed farther away from the sun than where it orbits today, a new study suggests. Scientists have known since NASA’s Galileo mission in the 1990s that the atmosphere of the largest planet of the solar system contains heavier chemical elements, elements … Read more
Hidden turbulent motion that takes place inside the atmosphere of the Sun can be accurately predicted by a newly developed neural network. Fed only temperature and vertical motion data collected from the surface of the solar photosphere, the AI model could correctly identify turbulent horizontal motion below the surface. This could help us to better … Read more