Space

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/701222

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SpaceX could lose contract for Artemis 3 astronaut moon-landing mission, acting NASA chief says: 'The problem is, they're behind'

Speaking as someone who doesn't lose their mind whenever Elon Musk is involved, I think this is a good thing. Not only are they behind, but a **lot** has changed since the contract was awarded too.

A black hole that was eaten by a star seems to have gotten revenge by consuming the star from the inside, producing a gamma-ray burst spotted about 9 billion light-years from Earth.

The burst, called GRB 250702B, was first spotted by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in July. Such bursts are bright flashes caused by jets fired out from energetic events, such as massive stars collapsing into black holes or neutron stars merging, and they usually last no more than a few minutes.

GRB 250702B, however, lasted for 25,000 seconds – or about 7 hours – making it the longest-known gamma-ray burst. Scientists had struggled to explain it, but Eliza Neights at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US and her colleagues now suggest an unusual and rare possibility.

Meanwhile the Tiangong space station began construction in 2021 and has been continuously crewed since June 2022. It currently has capacity for six people, and via UNOOSA-organized cooperation has plans to host experiments from 17 countries including Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Spain. The first non-Chinese person to travel there will likely be from Pakistan. (The US would be welcome too but Congress currently prohibits NASA from participating.)

...The research team at Cardiff University took a bold step toward understanding the quantum nature of gravity by setting new limits on the existence of very high-frequency gravitational waves...

“Our experiment is trying to answer the question of whether space-time is ‘quantized’,” Abhinav Patra, MSc, a doctoral student in the university’s Gravity Exploration Institute and lead author of the study, stated. “Modern physics treats space and time not as two separate things, but as a single physical entity.”

By correlating data from two independent interferometers, the team ruled out certain high-frequency gravitational waves that might be predicted by quantum theories of gravity.

This correlation method allowed them to isolate potential signals from random noise and effectively filter out local disturbances like seismic vibrations or thermal fluctuations...