The Sci Tech World

Astronomers around the world are trying to track down a small, fast-moving object that is zipping through our solar system. Is a comet? An asteroid? NASA’s not sure. The space agency doesn’t even know where it came from, but it’s not behaving like the local space rocks and that means it may not be from our solar system. If that’s confirmed, NASA says “it would be the first interstellar object to be observed and confirmed by astronomers.” “We have been waiting for this day for decades,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said in  a NASA news release . “It’s long been theorized that such objects exist — asteroids or comets moving around between the stars and occasionally passing through our solar system — but this is the first such detection. So far, everything indicates this is likely an interstellar object, but more data would help to confirm it.” NASA says astronomers are pointing telescopes on the ground and in space at the object to get that data. ...

Just in time for the culmination of this year's spooky season, NASA has debuted a playlist of sounds from space. And even though we know none of it is aliens, those noises are creepy as. From cacophonic plasma waves to eerie Saturn radio emissions and whispers caught off Jupiter's moons, this playlist of space sounds is weird, beautiful, and a little unpleasant at times. Now, these sounds are not actually captured using audio recorders, so we just have to make clear - if you were hanging out in Ganymede's orbit, this is not what you would hear. Instead, it's the output of data from when astronomers convert the readings captured by various space probes and instruments into audible sound waves. Thanks to NASA's Sound Cloud account, we can enjoy them too:Judging from this playlist, the creepiest planet in our Solar System appears to be the gas giant Jupiter and its numerous gigantic moons. For example, some haunting screeching and roaring was produced when Juno crossed...

Leonard Susskind also known as “the bad boy of physics”- due to his own tough struggle of childhood rebellion and his history of disagreements with Stephen Hawking and several others- has an ability for writing books that anybody can easily understand without needing any kind of degree in physics. “Classical Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum”, his last book, was a bestseller in the United States. Leonard Susskind teaches everything required to gain a basic understanding of modern physics. It was at Erhard’s residence in San Francisco in 1981 that Leonard Susskind and Stephen Hawking started their now notorious Black Hole War, which also turn out to be the title of Susskind’s subsequent book. Stephen Hawking made the spectacular claim that material which gets pulled into a black hole vanishes forever. If right, it would mean that the basic laws of the universe would have to be entirely rewritten. But from the point of view of a quantum theorist, like Leonard Susskind, this was somewhat...

There is a massive black hole with millions of times more mass than our sun is plunging towards Earth and will one day annihilate life as we know it. This particular black hole is coming towards us at 110 kilometres per second and is at the center of the Great Andromeda Galaxy – the Milky Way’s closest and much larger neighbor. At the center of the most known galaxies, there exist a supermassive black hole which stars spin around and helps keep everything in formation. But such is the powerful gravitational pull of the Milky Way and Andromeda that they are being drawn toward each other and will one day crash. Fraser Cain, publisher of space website Universe Today, wrote for  Phys.org : “There’s a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. And not just any black hole, it’s a supermassive black hole with more than 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun. It’s right over there, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. Located just 26,000 light-years away. And as we speak, it’s in ...

Quantum physicists in Oriol Romero-Isart's research group in Innsbruck show in two current publications that, despite Earnshaw's theorem, nanomagnets can be stably levitated in an external static magnetic field owing to quantum mechanical principles. The quantum angular momentum of electrons, which also causes magnetism, is accountable for this mechanism. Already in 1842, British mathematician Samuel Earnshaw proved that there is no stable configuration of levitating permanent magnets. If one magnet is levitated above another, the smallest disturbance will cause the system to crash. The magnetic top, a popular toy, circumvents the Earnshaw theorem: When it is disturbed, the gyrating motion of the top causes a system correction and stability is maintained. In collaboration with researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Munich, physicists in Oriol Romero-Isart's research group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Innsbruck University, and the Institut...

An odd space experiment has confirmed that, as quantum mechanics says, reality is what you choose it to be. Physicists have long known that a quantum of light, or photon, will behave like a particle or a wave depending on how they measure it. Now, by bouncing photons off satellites, a team has confirmed that an observer can make that decision even after a photon has made its way almost completely through the experiment—seemingly well past the point at which it would become either a wave or a particle. Such delayed-choice experiments might someday probe the fuzzy frontier between quantum theory and relativity, researchers say. Other researchers have demonstrated the same counterintuitive effect in the laboratory. But the new work shows that a photon’s nature remains undefined even over thousands of kilometers, says Philippe Grangier, a physicist at the Institute of Optics in Palaiseau, France, who collaborated on an earlier test. “It's a very nice experiment that demonstrates their ...

Star Trek is by now said to have encouraged a whole host of current devices from the iPad to the holodeck's 'virtual reality'. Now a very famous theoretical physicist says that even its teleporter is technically very much possible, and it could become an actuality before the end of the century. Professor Michio Kaku said that the several breakthroughs required to transport humans rapidly have already been made, and it's not far when we will be 'beaming' across the cosmos. Michio Kaku is a professor at City University in New York.  Dr Michio Kaku said “You know the expression "Beam me up Scotty"? We used to laugh at it. We used to laugh when someone talked about teleportation, but we don't laugh anymore. Quantum teleportation already exists [and] I think within a decade we will teleport the first molecule.” He also said that, as humans we have already achieved this at an atomic level,  reports  The Express.  The phenomenon is called quantum entangle...

Here’s something to think about: the  average adult human  is made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms, and most of them are hydrogen - the  most common element in the Universe , produced by the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The rest of those atoms were forged by ancient stars merging and exploding billions of years after the formation of the Universe, and a tiny amount can be attributed to cosmic rays - high-energy radiation that mostly originates from somewhere outside the Solar System. As astronomer Carl Sagan once said in an episode of  Cosmos : “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” To give you a better idea of where the ingredients for every living human came from, Jennifer A. Johnson, an astronomer at the Ohio State University, put together this new periodic table that breaks down all the elements according to ...

European Southern Observatory (ESO) officials have finally confirmed that they have discovered a new exoplanet candidate named Proxima b inside the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri - a red dwarf star in our closest neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri. style="display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-4840348800521327" data-ad-slot="2995026445"> This is gigantic news, because it means an Earth-like planet could lie just 4.2 light-years away from us, and has the potential to support life. Further research is needed to confirm the characteristics of its atmosphere and the possibility of liquid water on its surface, but the team already has plans on how to get us there.“Many exoplanets have been found and many more will be found, but searching for the closest potential Earth-analog and succeeding has been the experience of a lifetime for all of us,” team member Guillem Anglada-Escudé from Queen Mary Universit...

There are around 20 known supervolcanoes on Earth, with major eruptions occurring on average once every 100,000 years, according to the BBC resulting in mass starvation, with a prolonged volcanic winter potentially prohibiting civilization from having enough food for the current population. In 2012, adds the BBC, the United Nations estimated that food reserves worldwide would last 74 days. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Brian Cox said that "I came to the conclusion that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat." He proposes that the logical solution could simply be to cool a supervolcano down by extracting its heat. NASA estimates that if a 35% increase in heat transfer from the Yellowstone supervolcano --essentially a gigantic heat generator, equivalent to six industrial power plants--could be achieved from its magma chamber, it would no longer pose a threat. Six hundred thousand years ago there was a colossal explosion fro...