Up At The Ranch And Beyond

[Star Tsar]

Spectrum.IEEE.org

China Grew Two Cotton Leaves On The Moon

Published 30th September 2019



The team behind a pioneering biological experiment sent to the lunar far side has released an image showing two green leaves grown on the moon.

The experiment began shortly after China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft made the first ever landing on the far side of the moon, on 3 January this year.

Cotton, arabidopsis and potato seeds, and fruit-fly eggs and yeast were all aboard the 2.6-kilogram mini biosphere, but only the cotton produced positive results.

Image processing has now shown that two cotton leaves had grown—rather than just one as initially thought—in what was the first biological growth experiment on the moon.

Read all about it here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/...es-on-the-moon

[Star Tsar]

CosmoQuest

Daily Space

Streamed & Published 30th September 2019

Dr Pamela Gay with your space & astronomy news for the past day.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GblLUeGR218

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Fraser Cain

Starship Takes Shape. Are We Months Away From A Fully Reusable Rocket System?

Streamed & Published 30th September 2019

On Saturday, September 28th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stood in front of an audience in Boca Chica, Texas, and presented the fully assembled SpaceX Starship, 50 meters tall and made from shiny stainless steel.

As part of his presentation, Musk showed off the history of the company’s developments so far and gave us an updated view of what Starship and its first stage Superheavy booster will look like when they’re fully operational.

It was actually a pretty short presentation, and there weren’t a lot of details. But he stuck around to answer questions from many space journalists, and we’ve got a much better idea about Starship and what happens next.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4FE_vGq3d7k

[Star Tsar]

APOD Podcast

Orion Rising Over Brazil

Published 30th September 2019

In today's image, we see the constellation of Orion rising as seen from Brazil. Since this part of Brazil is south of the equator, we see that Orion is inverted compared to what would be seen for an observer in the northern hemisphere.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CZkDUS-ufps

[Star Tsar]

Astrum

How Do We Know The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old?

Published 30th September 2019

How can scientists possibly know the age of the universe? Well, through a variety of factors, including redshift, the CMBR and more.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8qajY8SegNo

[Star Tsar]

PBS Space Time

How Many Universes Are There?

Published 30th September 2019

The universe is big, but it’s peanuts compared to the eternally inflating multiverse. But just how many universes are there? What are they like? And most importantly, what can they tell us about … aliens?

Imagine it: the observable part of our universe is 93 billion light years across, and that’s just a small fraction of the stuff created in our Big Bang. But in the eternal inflation picture, ours is just one among uncountable bubble universes. Bubbles that are continuously appearing and growing within a vastly larger spacetime that itself expands at an exponentially accelerating rate. A greater inflationary spacetime whose expansion never ends. We looked at the bizarre idea of eternal inflation in recent episodes – but we stopped short of exploring the full implications of this proposition. Those implications are, frankly, completely nuts. Some may also be true.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XglOw2_lozc

[Star Tsar]

Forbes.com

Astronomers Debate: How Many Habitable Planets Does Each Sun-Like Star Have?

Published 30th September 2019



In the quest for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look at worlds that are similar to the only success story we know of for certain: our planet Earth. Here at home, we inhabit a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere that orbits our star by rotating rapidly on its axis, with liquid water stably on its surface for billions of years. We have the right temperature and pressure at our surface for continents and liquid oceans, and the right raw ingredients for life to potentially arise.

We might not yet know how omnipresent or rare life actually is in our galaxy and Universe. Questions concerning the origin of life or the frequency of life evolving into a complex, intelligent or even technologically advanced civilization remain unanswered, as we lack that information. But exoplanet data? We've got plenty. That's why it's such a puzzle that astronomers can't agree on how many Earth-like planets each Sun-like star should possess.

Read all about it here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw.../#36df106e253a

[Star Tsar]

ScienceAlert.com

Astronomers Detect A 'Hot Jupiter' With A Staggering 18-Hour-Short Orbit

Published 1st October 2019



We have a new record. Perhaps 1,060 light-years away, a gas giant called NGTS-10b is whipping around its star so closely, it completes an entire orbit in just 18.4 hours.

That's nearly as close as the planet can get to the host star without being ripped apart by gravitational forces. But it will get closer.

Astronomers have estimated that the exoplanet is spiralling in towards the star, and will cross that ripping-apart point called the Roche limit in just 38 million years. It's utterly doomed.

Read all about it here: https://www.sciencealert.com/extreme...kneck-18-hours

Scientific paper

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.12424.pdf

[Star Tsar]

UFO Denmark

Richard Dolan | The New Face Of Disclosure

Published 30th September 2019

A presentation by Richard Dolan at UFO Denmark UFO Congress 2019.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ae1lTH11YBI

[Star Tsar]

Posted by Star Tsar (here)
The Richard Dolan Show

Dolan & Cameron | UFOlogy Unplugged | Part One

Streamed & Published 27th September 2019

Richard Dolan and Grant Cameron in Toronto on September 21, 2019, discussing many of the current issues affecting ufology, including Disclosure, TTSA, Davis-Wilson, Davis-Sarfatti, Kit Green, Hal Puthoff, and much more. Be sure not to miss the second part of this interview.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=K4kJ5qQUkk0

Grant & Richard in conclusion...

Published 30th September 2019

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qOBxp6udfvs

[Star Tsar]

Suspicious Observers | Space News | 1st October 2019 | Solar Shockwaves, Volcanoes Erupt, Cosmic News

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MqMqfXYMy58

[Star Tsar]

Space.com

SUV-Sized Asteroid Skims By Earth, Only 99K Miles Away - Orbit Animation

Published 1st October 2019

An estimated 16-foot (4.8m) asteroid, designated 2019 SM8, will skim by Earth on Oct. 1, 2019. At closest approach it will be roughly 99,000 miles away (159,325 km) away, closer than the moon.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sCy0nULO_aE

&

Tons Of Water In Asteroids Could Fuel Satellites & Space Exploration

Published 29th September 2019



When it comes to mining space for water, the best target may not be the moon: Entrepreneurs' richest options are likely to be asteroids that are larger and closer to Earth.

A recent study suggested that roughly 1,000 water-rich, or hydrated, asteroids near our planet are easier to reach than the lunar surface is. While most of these space rocks are only a few feet in size, more than 25 of them should be large enough to each provide significant water. Altogether, the water locked in these asteroids should be enough to fill somewhere around 320,000 Olympics-size swimming pools — significantly more than the amount of water locked up at the lunar poles, the new research suggested.

Read all about it here: https://www.space.com/water-rich-ast...tion-fuel.html

[Star Tsar]

Everyday Astronaut

A Conversation With Elon Musk About Starship

Published 1st October 2019

Tim Dodd: "After Elon Musk gave his presentation about the progress of SpaceX's Starship program, I had the opportunity to pick his brain just a little. In general I wanted to let him talk a lot and see where his mind went, but luckily for us aerospace enthusiasts, I got a little juicy extra bit of conversation at the end."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg

[Star Tsar]

Hubble Space Telescope

Emanuele Berti | Johns Hopkins University | Black Holes & Gravitational Waves

Published 1st October 2019

Black holes hold the key to some of the pressing mysteries in modern science. Whether in isolation or in binary systems, they are excellent laboratories to probe high-energy physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity. The detection of gravitational waves from binary mergers marked the dawn of a new era in astronomy, and planned space-based detectors will open a new observational window at low frequencies. Gravitational waves from compact binaries carry important information on their astrophysical formation mechanisms, and on the evolution of the universe as a whole. Join us for a discussion about how gravitational-wave detectors can not only advance our understanding of black hole formation and growth, but also search for potential “smoking guns” of new physics.

Presentation begins @ 15:14

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=w_5GBjaZPbc

[Star Tsar]

Institute For Advanced Study

Eiichiro Komatsu | Finding Gravitational Waves From The Early Universe

Published 1st October 2019

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) research told us a remarkable story: the structure we see in our Universe such as galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually ourselves originated from tiny quantum fluctuations generated in the early Universe. With the WMAP we have confirmed many of the key predictions of inflation including flatness and statistical homogeneity of our Universe, Gaussianity and adiabaticity of primordial density fluctuations, and a small but non-zero deviation from the scale-invariant spectrum of density fluctuations. Yet, the extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. The last prediction of inflation that is yet to be confirmed is the existence of primordial gravitational waves whose wavelength can be as big as billions of light years. To this end we have proposed to JAXA a new satellite mission called LiteBIRD, whose primary scientific goal is to find signatures of gravitational waves in the polarisation of the CMB. In this presentation we describe physics of gravitational waves from inflation including both the vacuum and sourced contributions (i.e., left and right hands of Einstein’s equation), the LiteBIRD proposal, as well as a sub-mm telescope in Chile called CCAT-prime that we are currently building.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bn5y-PjVk4Q

[Star Tsar]

Suspicious Observers | Space News | 2nd October 2019 | Sandstorm, Space Weather, Frankensquitos

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pfe0rjQaY4M

[Star Tsar]

NASA

NASA's Juno Prepares To Jump Jupiter's Shadow

Published 1st October 2019



Last night, NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter successfully executed a 10.5-hour propulsive maneuver — extraordinarily long by mission standards. The goal of the burn, as it's known, will keep the solar-powered spacecraft out of what would have been a mission-ending shadow cast by Jupiter on the spacecraft during its next close flyby of the planet on Nov. 3, 2019.

Read all about it here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nas...upiters-shadow

[Star Tsar]

American Meteor Society

Event #4770-2019 | Schiedam, Netherlands & Düren, Germany | 28th September 2019 @ 19:57 UT

Published 1st October 2019

Supporting Link: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/memb...vent/2019/4770

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L-4A50lndkU

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6T1MAkrU68c

[Star Tsar]

Nemesis Maturity

Transit Of Mercury Across The Sun - One Of The Rarest Astronomical Events Is Coming Up

Published 1st October 2019

As seen from Earth, only transits of the inner planets Mercury and Venus are possible. Planetary transits are far more rare than eclipses of the Sun by the Moon.

Our solar system's innermost planet, Mercury passes directly in front of the Sun on November 11, 2019.

Mark your calendar!
The rare transit begins at 12:35 UT ((7:35 a.m. EST) and lasts for almost six hours. People in every continent except Australia can see at least a portion of the crossing. In the USA, the best place to be is on the Atlantic coast, where the entire transit is visible. On the Pasific coast the transit will already be in progress at sunrise.

Warning!
Mercury covers only a tiny fraction of the Sun's surface, so staring at the Sun remains just as painful and dangerous as ever. But with a proper filter, the Transit of Mercury can be a marvelous experience.

Experts recommend using a telescope with a magnification of 50 to 100 times for witnessing the event.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sGlnNaSUECo

[Star Tsar]

Wired

Astronomer Explains How SETI Searches For Aliens

Published 1st October 2019

Is there any life beyond Earth? SETI Institute Director Emeritus Jill Tarter believes we will find that answer in the 21st century. Jill explains the science and logistics that goes into searching for extra-terrestrial life, and the reasons why there's still so much to explore.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UVlUy77d-MU