U.S. Shoots Down High-Altitude Object Over Alaska – The New York Times
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The object was “octagonal” with strings hanging off and no discernable payload, according to the official and another source briefed on the matter. While the U.S. has no indication that the object had surveillance capabilities, that has not been ruled out yet.
Why have so many flying objects been spotted in the last week? The Washington Post says the Chinese spy balloon and subsequently-spotted objects “have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday.”
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.
“We basically opened the filters,” the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary….
The official said the current U.S. assessment is the objects are not military threats.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday that an “unidentified object” had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet over Canadian airspace on his orders…. “Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object,” Trudeau said on Twitter….
A statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the object shot down on Saturday was first noticed over Alaska on Friday evening. Two F-22 fighter jets “monitored the object” with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard, Ryder’s statement said, “tracking it closely and taking time to characterize the nature of the object.”
“Monitoring continued today as the object crossed into Canadian airspace, with Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joining the formation to further assess the object. A U.S. F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory using an AIM 9X missile,” his statement added….
It is not clear what the object is or whether it is related to the spy balloon shot down last week or the unidentified object shot down over Alaska on Friday.
“Saturday’s incident follows the downing of another unidentified object on Friday over Alaska, and the shoot-down of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4 by a US F-22 fighter jet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rings are special, dazzling rarities in our solar system. Now, astronomers have found that an extremely distant world — beyond even Pluto’s orbit — is encircled with unusual rings.
Scientists reported that the frigid dwarf planet Quaoar, a round body that doesn’t quite meet all the definitions of a planet, has a system of rings enduring at an impressively far distance away from Quaoar. The detection is unexpected, because researchers didn’t think rings could survive at a relatively far distance from the celestial body they orbit. (This distance is detailed below.)
Astronomers still have questions about how such rings form and endure.
“Everyone learns about Saturn’s magnificent rings when they’re a child, so hopefully this new finding will provide further insight into how they came to be,” Vik Dhillon, one of the study’s authors and a scientist at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, said in a statement. The researchers published their research in the journal Nature on Feb. 8.
No, there’s no clear image of Quaoar and its (presumably glorious) rings. These relatively small objects are just dots in even our most powerful telescopes. Quaoar is some 4 billion miles away and, at about 690 miles across, half the size of Pluto — also a dwarf planet.
Yet clever astronomers sleuthed out the rings. They used the world’s largest optical telescope (a telescope that views visible light), the 34-foot-wide Gran Telescopio CANARIAS in the Canary Islands off of Spain, and mounted a specialized camera (the HiPERCAM) to the gargantuan instrument. As Quaoar transited through space, the camera was sensitive enough to detect the dwarf planet blocking light as it passed in front of a distant star. Astronomers saw two “dips in light,” one before and one after Quaoar passed through the light. This is “indicative of a ring system around Quaoar,” explains a press release from the University of Sheffield.
Astronomers can count, using just two hands, the number of solar system objects that have known rings: Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, famously Saturn, and two smaller objects called Chariklo and Haumea. And now Quaoar.
Yet, unlike Quaoar, these other rings exist pretty close to their parent object. At such a close distance, strong forces from the nearby objects stop the rings from fusing together and forming moons. Previously, scientists thought rings couldn’t exist out past a distance of three “planetary radii” — relative to whatever object or planet the rings are orbiting. For example, Saturn’s brilliant rings are found within this distance, known as the “Roche Limit.” But Quaoar’s rings are quite unusual. Compared to Saturn, these rings are located twice as far away, at over seven planetary radii.
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“It was unexpected to discover this new ring system in our solar system, and it was doubly unexpected to find the rings so far out from Quaoar, challenging our previous notions of how such rings form,” said the astronomer Dhillon.
Indeed, we can expect the unexpected in our diverse solar system. After all, our cosmic neighborhood is teeming with surprises.
This story was originally published on Feb. 8 and has been updated with more information about the ringed-object Quaoar.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After twelve cheap ‘n’ cheerful hidden object games about finding bees in pretty pictures, the developer behind the I Commissioned Some Bees series has moved onto concealing a new animal: rabbits. Today they launched I Commissioned Some Bunnies, where once again they have commissioned artists to draw pictures with hidden animals to find. Still a big fan of that casual descriptive naming scheme. And yup, the pictures are nice, and the rabbits are hidden, and I’m happy to have spent £3 on it.
When a spacecraft dramatically parachutes down to a distant world, debris will inevitably litter the landing site. NASA has documented the diverse debris scattered by the 2021 landing of its high-tech Perseverance rover, including a strange-looking ball of tangled, “spaghetti”-like material, which the space agency believes they’ve identified.
NASA suspects the tangled detritus — which stirred intrigue on the internet — is a piece of netting (called “Dacron netting”) that is used in thermal blankets to protect the spacecraft from extreme temperatures and conditions, like when plunging through the Martian atmosphere at some 12,000 mph.