Astronomy
Do You Know What Time It Is? If You're On Mars, Now You Do.
Ask someone on Earth for the time and they can give you an exact answer, thanks to our planet's intricate timekeeping system, built with atomic clocks, GPS satellites and high-speed telecommunications networks. Ask for the time on Mars and the answer gets much more complicated.
This Week's Sky at a Glance, December 19 – 28
We greet the winter solstice. Jupiter nears opposition. Will the two Dog Stars balance for you? And meet the House in the Hyades.
The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, December 19 – 28 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Putting data centres in space isn't going to happen any time soon
Putting data centres in space isn't going to happen any time soon
The US beat back bird flu in 2025 – but the battle isn’t over
The US beat back bird flu in 2025 – but the battle isn’t over
Quantum computers turned out to be more useful than expected in 2025
Quantum computers turned out to be more useful than expected in 2025
It’s Raining Magnetic 'Tadpoles' on the Sun
Getting close to things is one way for scientists to collect better data about them. But that's been hard to do for the Sun, since getting close to it typically entails getting burnt to a crisp. Just ask Icarus. But if Icarus had survived his close encounter with the Sun, he might have been able to see massive magnetic “tadpoles” tens of thousands of kilometers wide reconnecting back down to the surface of our star. Or maybe not, because he had human eyes, not the exceptionally sensitive Wide-Field imagers the Parker Solar Probe used to look at the Sun while it made its closest ever pass to our closest star. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters from Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors describes what they say on humanity’s closest brush with the Sun so far.
