Seekers Of The Cosmos

Wait! Are those continents where I left them?

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"We're going to be sending people down to the surface and they're going to be living on that surface and doing science," said Howard Hu, who leads the Orion lunar spacecraft program for NASA.

NASA successfully launched its powerful new Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket last week, sending the Orion spacecraft on its way towards the moon.

The launch, which had been repeatedly delayed, set NASA's Artemis missions in motion, the first major step towards putting humans back on the moon in almost 50 years.

Orion is uncrewed this time around, as it aims to test its ability to bring a capsule to the moon and back. But next time it is expected to take astronauts with it as it circles the celestial body.

If all goes well, the same spacecraft could then be used to put humans on the moon's surface, for the first time since 1972, including the first female astronaut.

The current plan is for the crew to land near the moon's south pole, where they will spend about a week looking for signs of water. If the precious liquid is found, it could be used to help fuel rockets on their way to Mars.

This would mean permanent human settlements would need to be built to support mining and scientific activities.

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#2030

Over time, steady progress is being made, and the hole is getting smaller. We see some wavering as weather changes and other factors make the numbers wiggle slightly from day to day and week to week. But overall, we see it decreasing through the past two decades. The elimination of ozone-depleting substances through the Montreal Protocol is shrinking the hole.

This map shows the size and shape of the ozone hole over the South Pole on October 5, 2022, when it reached its single-day maximum extent for the year.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens.

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Jonathan is estimated to have been born in 1832, which means he turned, 190 years old in 2022. To put that into context, Jonathan was born before Queen Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837.

He beat previous record-holder Tu'i Malila, a radiated tortoise (Astrochelys radiata) that lived to be at least 188 years old before dying in 1965.

If he was in fact born in 1832, Jonathan has lived through many historical events. To name only a few:

•President Andrew Jackson's second inauguration in 1833 and the inaugurations of 39 more United States presidents

• The first photograph of a person was snapped in 1838.

• The incandescent lightbulb was invented in 1878.

• The beginning and end of two World Wars.

• The first steps of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969.

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Opossums are our friends!

Opossums are famous for playing dead, so much so that almost everyone has heard the term "playing possum" in reference to this unique response to fear.

For opossums, playing dead is an involuntary response. When they are frightened, they are temporarily paralyzed, causing them to flop onto their sides, often with their tongues out and eyes in a fixed glaze.

These nocturnal creatures are mammals and the only marsupial that lives in the United States. Although considered a nuisance in some areas where their populations are high, opossums provide natural pest control. They kill and eat mice, rats and cockroaches, as well as snails, slugs and other garden pests. They are also resistant or partially resistant to snake venom, so they can help keep these animals at bay.

✏️: Super_Tmart/reddit

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Interesting visual about genetic similarities.

Credit: Medium-Comparison-34/reddit

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Astronomers have been leapfrogging each other into the past lately. Last week, a group using the Hubble Space Telescope announced they had discovered what could be the most distant and earliest star ever seen, nicknamed Earendel, which twinkled 12.9 billion years ago, only 900 million years after the Big Bang.

Now another international group of astronomers, pushing the limits of the biggest telescopes on Earth, say they have discovered what appears to be the earliest and most distant collection of starlight ever seen: a reddish blob usefully named HD1, which was pouring out prodigious amounts of energy only 330 million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers spotted HD1 during 1,200 hours of observation with the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, VISTA Telescope in Chile, the U.K. Infrared Telescope, and NASA's now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, then confirmed its distance with observations gathered by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The team will soon observe HD1 with the James Webb Space Telescope to further verify their calculations.

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"Moms: Keeping you humble since birth"

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Physics memes make me numb. Math memes make me number.

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Scientists detected Earendel with the help of a huge galaxy cluster, WHL0137-08, sitting between Earth and the newfound star. The gravitational pull of this enormous galaxy cluster warped the fabric of space and time, resulting in a powerful natural magnifying glass that greatly amplified the light from distant objects behind the galaxy, such as Earendel. This gravitational lensing has distorted the light from the galaxy hosting Earendel into a long crescent the researchers named the Sunrise Arc.

The rare way in which Earendel aligned with WHL0137-08 meant that the star appeared directly on, or extremely close to, a curve in spacetime that provided maximum brightening, causing Earendel to stand out from the general glow of its home galaxy. This effect is analogous to the rippled surface of a swimming pool creating patterns of bright light on the bottom of the pool on a sunny day—the ripples on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool floor.

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