If so, NASA needs your help. They are tossing out a challenge to crowdsource the design of a starshade.
So, what this would do is block glare from stars, allowing a ground-based telescope to search for exoplanets. You know, one we have already built. This would be cheaper than another space telescope by a lot.
Details about the contest are here.
We're about to get hit by a fairly big one. It's not going to cause any damage.
However, if you are going anywhere unfamiliar today, you may want to get directions first. Today's storm is expected to cause some disruption to GPS systems, meaning your phone might not know where you are for a bit.
Be careful out there.
(And learn to read a map, dangit! I don't just say that because I'm a dinosaur!)
So, salicylic acid, which is the plant-based equivalent to aspirin, is produced by most plants. And now we know why.
Plants produce more salicylic acid when they are under environmental stress.
And we're starting to think plants may in fact feel pain.
So, plants evolved a natural chemical to regulate reactive oxygen species (things like sunburn) and now we copy it to treat our own stress-related aches and pains.
No, it's a magnetar, but it's fascinating. It's a fast radio burst...that's about 1,000 times longer/slower than average with a clear pattern.
The signal itself had a heartbeat inside it. It's from a long way away. And it's peculiarly consistent.
What is it? A magnetar or pulsar that is, for whatever reason, rotating much more slowly than average. One day we'll understand how these things work. One day...
Is intelligence a factor of absolute brain size? The crows say "Nope." How about brain/body ratio? Not really.
Turns out that what you need to be smart is...
...to take longer over developing your brain.
Intelligence is directly related to childhood. To an extended period of development dominated by play. It's true of the crows. It's true of parrots.
And the human brain takes over two decades to fully develop.
We still don't know everything, but if you're going to create an intelligent species, then it might be a reasonable assumption that it will have a long childhood.
Scientists have now done the math as to how much a passing star would need to perturb the solar system to destroy it.
0.1 percent if it nudged Neptune. Said star would have to pass within 23 billion miles of us (Proxima Centauri is 24.8 trillion miles away). And it would start a slow process that might take, uh...billions of years.
So, no, we're not all going to die and those disaster movies don't really work.
(Although there's still a plot bunny here...)
...but I can't stop staring at it.
The six pointed things are stars.
Every other dot or streak in that image is a galaxy. Don't try to rub the smudge near the center from your screen.
That smudge is caused by gravitational lensing. We are literally looking at gravitational lensing, which was theoretical not all that long ago.
The image is a test image. Remember the first Hubble Deep Field image? This is the same part of the sky, which is intentional.
It's 4.6 billion years old. This is fossil light. This is the universe as it was. Makes me wonder how many civilizations rose and fell before we even left our oceans.
Note that this image is all in the infrared, hence why everything is red and orange. It's been digitally processed to fall within the human visual range.
More images will be released in an hour or so. This is it.
The JWST is ready to do science.
