Look out below: astronomers have discovered that a giant, fiery exoplanet called WASP-18b appears locked in a death spiral with its star.
The planet is about 10 times the size of Jupiter and appears to be very close to its star, according to the Associated Press. WASP-18 is so large that it’s triggering huge plasma tides on the star’s surface, the report said–which in turn are distorting the planet’s orbit. Even crazier: the planet orbits the star in less than one day.
Planet discovered Coel Hellier predicts in the article that within the next million years, the planet will spiral right into the star–which should be good for some spectacular fireworks. “It’s causing its own destruction by creating these tides,” Hellier said.
Like most exoplanets, astronomers discovered WASP-18 by monitoring variations in light from its star whenever the planet crossed in front of it. (Image credit: CARREAU/ESA/Nature)
A $79 million portion of NASA’s mission to the moon has run into trouble, after a crisis Saturday caused the agency’s lunar impactor spacecraft to burn through over half of its remaining propellant, Spaceflight Now reports. The anomaly occurred when the craft wasn’t in view from Earth, so it continued unnoticed for some time before ground-based antenna picked it up again.
Dan Andrews, the project manager for the Lunar Carter Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) craft, said that the probe burned through 309 pounds of maneuvering fuel while attempting to maintain its orientation in space–leaving precious little margin of error for the remainder of the mission.
“Our estimates now are if we pretty much baseline the mission, meaning just accomplish the things that we have to (do) to get the job done with full mission success, we’re still in the black on propellant, but not by a lot,” Andrews said in the report. The group traced the fault to a sensor that measures LCROSS’s attitude, which kicked over to the main star tracking system for backup and then used up more fuel than anticipated in the process. (Image credit: NASA)
A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit chef Wylie Dufresne at his restaurant wd~50, and he showed me his toys and the food that he makes with said toys.
Wylie Dufresne is one of the preeminent experimental chefs in America. He deconstructs the food that we’re familiar with and then, using tools and ingredients that are rarely seen in restaurant kitchens, builds them back up in near-unrecognizable forms. His amazing eggs benedict, for example, features deep fried cubes of hollandaise sauce and a little cylinder of egg yolk the texture of fudge.
So I was clearly excited to see where the magic happened in his kitchen, and I wasn’t disappointed. Over the course of this week I’ll be posting the videos I shot during my kitchen tour, starting with how Wylie uses liquid nitrogen. In it, he shows me how he uses the stuff to create perfectly spherical balls of ice cream surrounded by chocolate cookie crumbs. Because the microphone on the Flip video camera I used is about as good as the mic on a rotary phone, a transcript of the video is below.
What’s getting a lot of sway right now with urban chefs is liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen, much the same way you can a use hot oil to fry things at 375 degrees, with liquid nitrogen you can freeze things at about minus 275 degrees. And you know, people get excited because it’s so cold that when it’s exposed to the air it turns into a gas, which is a very Hollywood or rock and roll sort of thing.
[Pastry chef Alex] takes more or less sort of a cookie, he would kill me if I said this, but not all that far off from sort of an Oreo cookie, purees it, adds some fat to it, purees it into a liquid phase. Then they take ice cream, milk flavored ice cream. They pipe the milk ice cream into a bowl of liquid nitrogen. So it gets super frozen and from there they drop it into the liquid cookie and they roll it after that in cookie crumbs. And what happens is the ice cream is so cold it instantly sets a shell, even though its in a liquid, on the outside and then they can scoop it out and roll it in some crumbs. And then you get, you know, whatever they call those Dibs or Dabs that you get at the movies. This is a much better, much more high end version.
Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.
“Sub-orbital” commercial space flight? Bah, that’s nothing. According to Slashdot, a new international consortium called Excalibur Almaz Limited plans to launch genuine orbital space flights for commercial purposes, which would represent a significant step ahead of what other groups have already proposed.
The consortium will be a joint effort by the U.S., Russia, and Japan and looks to get underway by 2013. The group plans to use a formerly top-secret Soviet re-entry vehicle, called Almaz, to ferry research crews into orbit around Earth for week-long missions, the report said. For now, this is nothing aside from an announcement of intent, so Mr. Branson can rest easy for now. (Image credit: Excalibur Almaz)
Hold onto your hard drive: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been sending 461 gigabytes of images and other data back home every day, according to Slashdot. Interestingly, it’s using a 100 Mbps data pipe–specifically, a K-band transmitter called the Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier.
It’s a 13-inch long tube that uses electrodes in a vacuum tube to amplify microwave signals, the report said. L-3 Communications Electron Technologies and NASA’s Glenn Research Center built the device in tandem. 100 Mbps doesn’t sound all that impressive on paper, since wired Ethernet has had that for years–until you release the data is traveling almost 240,000 miles. Suddenly FiOS doesn’t seem all that fast.
(Want the latest LRO news and images? Head over to NASA’s dedicated landing page for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.)
Back in 2004, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft passed right by Comet Wild 2’s nucleus and collected samples of the dense gas and dust material surrounding the icy center; two years later, a capsule containing those samples separated from the craft and returned to Earth.
Now scientists have discovered a fundamental building block for life–glycine–in those samples, according to NASA. “The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare,” said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which co-funded the research.
It’s taken this long because researchers spent two years developing the tools necessary to analyze the tiny sample, and to rule out (via isotopic analysis) that the glycine was from Earth and somehow contaminated the samples. (Image credit: NASA/Stardust rendering)
The Hubble Space Telescope has amazed the public with thousands of images over the past two decades. That’s partly due to its location in orbit, away from the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere that make stars twinkle–pretty, but a royal pain for doing science.
Now a new crop of ground-based telescopes will employ a new cancellation mechanism to counter the twinkling of stars and other unwanted “seeing” effects, as they’re called. As CNN reports, the telescopes will show what the universe was like when it was just a few hundred million years old and emerging from a period of total darkness after the Big Bang.
“[We’ll be] looking at the first generation of stars forming in the universe, which is kind of a cool idea: The time when the lights went on in the universe. There was no light before that time,” said Daniel Fabricant, associate director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in the report.
It’s been a long time coming: NASA has completed the first new test rocket in over a quarter century, in an effort to replace the aging Space Shuttle fleet, according to Space.com.
The new Ares I rockets will eventually take humans back to the moon; this first one will launch on October 31st in a maiden test flight designed to show that the rocket is capable of carrying astronauts inside an Orion spacecraft into orbit. Ares I is a two-stage rocket that consists of a solid-fueled first stage and a larger, liquid-fueled upper stage, the report said.
The rocket stands at 327 feet high, which is about 14 stories taller than a launch-ready shuttle with all rockets attached, according to the article.
NASA plans to retire the shuttle fleet by 2011, replace them with a system of Ares rockets and Orion craft by 2015, and return astronauts to the moon by 2020.
IBM is already making a beeline to 28nm process technology, but it looks like the train may deviate a bit before it even reaches the bottom. Reportedly, the company responsible for PowerPC, the original business laptop and all sorts of underground things that we’ll never comprehend is now looking to use DNA as a model for crafting the world’s next great processor. DNA origami, as it’s so tactfully called, can supposedly provide a cheap framework “on which to build tiny microchips,” with IBM research manager Spike Narayan proclaiming that this is “the first demonstration of using biological molecules to help with processing in the semiconductor industry.” Sir Spike also noted that “if the DNA origami process scales to production-level, manufacturers could trade hundreds of millions of dollars in complex tools for less than a million dollars of polymers, DNA solutions, and heating implements.” The actual process still seems murky from here, but we’re told to expect real results within ten years. Which should be just in time for the robot apocalypse to really hit its stride — awesome.
Astronomers have discovered a planet in another solar system 1,000 light years away that orbits its star opposite from the way the star rotates, making it the only planet ever discovered to do so.
The system was discovered by the UK’s Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory, according to Space.com. It’s also turning out to be quite a curiosity among the 350+ extrasolar planets known to date. The running theory is that the planet, dubbed WASP-17, had a close encounter with a larger one–and the resultant gravitational interaction slung WASP-17 onto its strange course.
“I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about,” said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery, in the article. “I think it’s extremely exciting. It’s fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away. There’s always theory, but there’s nothing like an observation to really prove it.” (Image credit: NASA/Extrasolar planet artist rendering)
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