Tuesday a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a special satellite — a state-of-the-art weather-watcher from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It will complete a series of four GOES-R satellite launches that began in 2016. Space.com drills down into how these satellites have changed weather forecasts: More than seven years later, with three of the four satellites in the series orbiting the Earth, scientists and researchers say they are pleased with the results and how the advanced technology has been a game changer. "I think it has really lived up to its hype in thunderstorm forecasting. Meteorologists can see the convection evolve in near real-time and this gives them enhanced insight on storm development and severity, making for better warnings," John Cintineo, a researcher from NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory , told Space.com in an email. "Not only does the GOES-R series provide observations where radar coverage is lacking, but it often provides a robust signal before radar, such as when a storm is strengthening or weakening. I'm sure there have been many other improvements in forecasts and environmental monitoring over the last decade, but this is where I have most clearly seen improvement," Cintineo said. In addition to helping predict severe thunderstorms, each satellite has collected images and data on heavy rain events that could trigger flooding, detected low clouds and fog as it forms, and has made significant improvements to forecasts and services used during hurricane season. "GOES provides our hurricane forecasters with faster, more accurate and detailed data that is critical for estimating a storm's intensity, including cloud top cooling, convective structures, specific features of a hurricane's eye, upper-level wind speeds, and lightning activity," Ken Graham, director of NOAA's National Weather Service told Space.com in an email. Instruments such as the Advanced Baseline Imager have three times more spectral channels, four times the image quality, and five times the imaging speed as the previous GOES satellites. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper is the first of its kind in orbit on the GOES-R series that allows scientists to view lightning 24/7 and strikes that make contact with the ground and from cloud to cloud. "GOES-U and the GOES-R series of satellites provides scientists and forecasters weather surveillance of the entire western hemisphere, at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales," Cintineo said. "Data from these satellites are helping researchers develop new tools and methods to address problems such as lightning prediction, sea-spray identification (sea-spray is dangerous for mariners), severe weather warnings, and accurate cloud motion estimation. The instruments from GOES-R also help improve forecasts from global and regional numerical weather models, through improved data assimilation." The final satellite, launching Tuesday, includes a new sensor — the Compact Coronagraph — "that will monitor weather outside of Earth's atmosphere, keeping an eye on what space weather events are happening that could impact our planet," according to the article. "It will be the first near real time operational coronagraph that we have access to," Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, told Space.com on the phone. "That's a huge leap for us because up until now, we've always depended on a research coronagraph instrument on a spacecraft that was launched quite a long time ago."

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Where is dark matter, the invisible masses which must exist to bind galaxies together? Stephen Hawking postulated they could be hiding in "primordial" black holes formed during the big bang, writes CNN. "Now, a new study by researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has brought the theory back into the spotlight, revealing what these primordial black holes were made of and potentially discovering an entirely new type of exotic black hole in the process." Other recent studies have confirmed the validity of Hawking's hypothesis, but the work of [MIT graduate student Elba] Alonso-Monsalve and [study co-author David] Kaiser, a professor of physics and the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT, goes one step further and looks into exactly what happened when primordial black holes first formed. The study, published June 6 in the journal Physical Review Letters, reveals that these black holes must have appeared in the first quintillionth of a second of the big bang: "That is really early, and a lot earlier than the moment when protons and neutrons, the particles everything is made of, were formed," Alonso-Monsalve said... "You cannot find quarks and gluons alone and free in the universe now, because it is too cold," Alonso-Monsalve added. "But early in the big bang, when it was very hot, they could be found alone and free. So the primordial black holes formed by absorbing free quarks and gluons." Such a formation would make them fundamentally different from the astrophysical black holes that scientists normally observe in the universe, which are the result of collapsing stars. Also, a primordial black hole would be much smaller — only the mass of an asteroid, on average, condensed into the volume of a single atom. But if a sufficient number of these primordial black holes did not evaporate in the early big bang and survived to this day, they could account for all or most dark matter. During the making of the primordial black holes, another type of previously unseen black hole must have formed as a kind of byproduct, according to the study. These would have been even smaller — just the mass of a rhino, condensed into less than the volume of a single proton... "It's inevitable that these even smaller black holes would have also formed, as a byproduct (of primordial black holes' formation)," Alonso-Monsalve said, "but they would not be around today anymore, as they would have evaporated already." However, if they were still around just ten millionths of a second into the big bang, when protons and neutrons formed, they could have left observable signatures by altering the balance between the two particle types. Professer Kaiser told CNN the next generation of gravitational detectors "could catch a glimpse of the small-mass black holes — an exotic state of matter that was an unexpected byproduct of the more mundane black holes that could explain dark matter today." Nico Cappelluti, an assistant professor in the physics department of the University of Miami (who was not involved with the study) confirmed to CNN that "This work is an interesting, viable option for explaining the elusive dark matter."

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Jonathan O'Callaghan reports via Scientific American: Despite more than a century of efforts to show otherwise, it seems Albert Einstein can still do no wrong. Or at least that's the case for his special theory of relativity, which predicts that time ticks slower for objects moving at extremely high speeds. Called time dilation, this effect grows in intensity the closer to the speed of light that something travels, but it is strangely subjective: a passenger on an accelerating starship would experience time passing normally, but external observers would see the starship moving ever slower as its speed approached that of light. As counterintuitive as this effect may be, it has been checked and confirmed in the motions of everything from Earth-orbiting satellites far-distant galaxies. Now a group of scientists have taken such tests one step further by observing more than 1,500 supernovae across the universe to reveal time dilation's effects on a staggering cosmic scale. The researchers' findings, once again, reach an all-too-familiar conclusion. "Einstein is right one more time," says Geraint Lewis of the University of Sydney, a co-author of the study. In the paper, posted earlier this month on the preprint server arXiv.org, Ryan White of the University of Queensland in Australia and his colleagues used data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to investigate time dilation. For the past decade, researchers involved with DES had used the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to study particular exploding stars called Type 1a supernovae across billions of years of cosmic history. [...] Type 1a supernovae are keystone cosmic explosions caused when a white dwarf -- the slowly cooling corpse of a midsized star -- siphons so much material from a companion that it ignites a thermonuclear reaction and explodes. This explosion occurs once the growing white dwarf reaches about 1.44 times the mass of our sun, a threshold known as the Chandrasekhar limit. This physical baseline imbues all Type 1a supernovae with a fairly consistent brightness, making them useful cosmic beacons for gauging intergalactic distances. "They should all be essentially the same kind of event no matter where you look in the universe," White says. "They all come from exploding white dwarf stars, which happens at almost exactly the same mass no matter where they are." The steadfastness of these supernovae across the entire observable universe is what makes them potent probes of time dilation -- nothing else, in principle, should so radically and precisely slow their apparent progression in lockstep with ever-greater distances. Using the dataset of 1,504 supernovae from DES, White's paper shows with astonishing accuracy that this correlation holds true out to a redshift of 1.2, a time when the universe was about five billion years old. "This is the most precise measurement" of cosmological time dilation yet, White says, up to seven times more precise than previous measurements of cosmological time dilation that used fewer supernovae. [...] This particular supernova-focused facet of the Dark Energy Survey has concluded, so until a new dataset is taken, White's measurement of cosmological time dilation is unlikely to be beaten. "It's a pretty definitive measurement," says [Tamara Davis of the University of Queensland, a co-author of the paper]. "You don't really need to do any better." Jonathan O'Callaghan is an award-winning freelance journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics, commercial spaceflight and space exploration.

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Astronomers are observing the sudden awakening of a giant black hole in the constellation of Virgo. "Decades of observations found nothing remarkable about the distant galaxy in the constellation of Virgo, but that changed at the end of 2019 when astronomers noticed a dramatic surge in its luminosity that persists to this day," reports The Guardian. "Researchers now believe they are witnessing changes that have never been seen before, with the black hole at the galaxy's core putting on an extreme cosmic light show as vast amounts of material fall into it." From the report: The galaxy, which goes by the snappy codename SDSS1335+0728 and lies 300m light years away, was flagged to astronomers in December 2019 when an observatory in California called the Zwicky Transient Facility recorded a sudden rise in its brightness. The alert prompted a flurry of new observations and checks of archived measurements from ground- and space-based telescopes to understand more about the galaxy and its past behavior. The scientists discovered the galaxy had recently doubled in brightness in mid-infrared wavelengths, become four times brighter in the ultraviolet, and at least 10 times brighter in the X-ray range. What triggered the sudden brightening is unclear, but writing in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the researchers say the most likely explanation is the creation of an "active galactic nucleus" where a vast black hole at the centre of a galaxy starts actively consuming the material around it. Active galactic nuclei emit a broad spectrum of light as gas around the black hole heats up and glows, and surrounding dust particles absorb some wavelengths and re-radiate others. But it is not the only possibility. The team has not ruled out an exotic form of "tidal disruption event," a highly restrained phrase to describe a star that is ripped apart after straying too close to a black hole. Tidal disruption events tend to be brief affairs, brightening a galaxy for no more than a few hundred days, but more measurements are needed to rule out the process.

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It's one of Saturn's 146 moons — just 310 miles in diameter (or 498 kilometers). Yet the European Space Agency plans to send a robot on a one-billion mile trip to visit it. Why? Because astronomers have discovered Enceladus "possesses geysers that regularly erupt from its surface and spray water into space," reports the Guardian: Even more astonishing, these plumes contain complex organic compounds, including propane and ethane. "Enceladus has three key ingredients that are considered to be essential for the appearance of life," said astronomer Professor Michele Dougherty of Imperial College London. "It has got liquid water, organic material and a source of heat. That combination makes it my favourite moon in the whole solar system." A panel of expert scientists have now recommended the Saturn moon for an ESA mission by 2040, according to the article, "with the aim of either landing on the moon or flying through the geysers spraying water and carbon chemicals from its surface into space. Preferably, both goals would be attempted, the panel added." It will be tricky. Dougherty warns that Enceladus "is small with weak gravity, which means you will need a lot of fuel to slow it down so that it does not whiz past its target into deep space. That is going to be a tricky issue for those designing the mission." But Dougherty has a special interest, as the principal investigator for the magnetometer flown on the Cassini mission that studied Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017. "At one point, Cassini passed close to Enceladus and our instrument indicated Saturn's magnetic field was being dragged round the moon in a way that suggested the little moon had an atmosphere," said Dougherty. Cassini's managers agreed to direct the probe to take a closer look and, in July 2005, the spaceship swept over the moon's surface at a height of 173km — and detected significant amounts of water vapour. "It was wonderful," recalls Dougherty. Subsequent sweeps produced even greater wonders. Huge geysers of water were pictured erupting from geological fault lines at the south pole. The only other body in the solar system, apart from Earth, possessing liquid water on its surface had been revealed. Finally came the discovery of organics in those plumes and Enceladus went from being rated a minor, unimportant moon to a world that is now set to trigger the expenditure of billions of euros and decades of effort by European astronomers and space engineers. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader thephydes for sharing the article.

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Have scientists discovered infrared radiation, evidence of waste heat generated by the energy-harvesting star-surrounding spheres first proposed by British American physicist Freeman Dyson? CNN reports: [A] new study that looked at 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that seven candidates could potentially be hosting Dyson spheres — a finding that's attracting scrutiny and alternate theories... Using historical data from telescopes that pick up infrared signatures, the research team looked at stars located within less than 1,000 light-years from Earth: "We started with a sample of 5 million stars, and we applied filters to try to get rid of as much data contamination as possible," said lead study author Matías Suazo, a doctoral student in the department of physics and astronomy of Uppsala University in Sweden. "So far, we have seven sources that we know are glowing in the infrared but we don't know why, so they stand out...." Among the natural causes that could explain the infrared glow are an unlucky alignment in the observation, with a galaxy in the background overlapping with the star, planetary collisions creating debris, or the fact that the stars may be young and therefore still surrounded by disks of hot debris from which planets would later form... An earlier study, published in March and using data from the same sources as the new report, had also found infrared anomalies among a sample dataset of 5 million stars in our galaxy. "We got 53 candidates for anomalies that cannot be well explained, but can't say that all of them are Dyson sphere candidates, because that's not what we are specifically looking for," said Gabriella Contardo, a postdoctoral research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, who led the earlier study. She added that she plans to check the candidates against Suazo's model to see how many tie into it. "You need to eliminate all other hypotheses and explanations before saying that they could be a Dyson sphere," she added. "To do so you need to also rule out that it's not some kind of debris disk, or some kind of planetary collision, and that also pushes the science forward in other fields of astronomy — so it's a win-win." Both Contardo and Suazo agree that more research is needed on the data, and that ultimately they could turn to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope for more information, as it is powerful enough to observe the candidate stars directly. However, because of the lengthy, competitive procedures that regulate use of the telescope, securing access might take some time. CNN adds that "A May 23 paper published in response to the one by Suazo and his colleagues suggests that at least three of the seven stars have been 'misidentified' as Dyson spheres and could instead be 'hot DOGs' — hot dust-obscured galaxies — and that the remaining four could probably be explained this way as well." But "As for Dyson himself, if he were still alive, he also would be highly skeptical that these observations represent a technological signature, his son George argued: 'But the discovery of new, non-technological astronomical phenomena is exactly why he thought we should go out and look.' "

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The Pentagon announced the first winners of its $5.6 billion National Security Space Launch program, with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin securing a spot for the first time alongside Elon Musk's SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA). These companies will compete for contracts through mid-2029 under the program's Phase 3, which is expected to include 90 rocket launch orders. CNBC reports: Under the program, known as NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1, the trio of companies will be eligible to compete for contracts through mid-2029. ULA and SpaceX have already been competing for contracts under the previous Phase 2 edition of NSSL: In total, over five years of Phase 2 launch orders, the military assigned ULA with 26 missions worth $3.1 billion, while SpaceX got 22 missions worth $2.5 billion. Blue Origin, as well as Northrop Grumman, missed out on Phase 2 when the Pentagon selected ULA and SpaceX for the program in August 2020. But with Phase 3, the U.S. military is raising the stakes -- and widening the field -- on a high-profile competition for Space Force mission contracts. Phase 3 is expected to see 90 rocket launch orders in total, with a split approach of categories Lane 1 and Lane 2 to allow even more companies to bid.

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