Tag: speeding
AI Is Speeding Up Astronomical Discoveries
The famous first image of a black hole just got two times sharper. A research team used artificial intelligence to dramatically improve upon its first image from 2019, which now shows the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy as darker and bigger than the first image depicted.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby slapped with speeding fine days after coronation
Speeding driver ignored dead-end sign before killing ‘beautiful’ couple by ploughing into concrete wall without braking
A SPEEDING driver killed a “beautiful couple” in a horror crash after he ignored a dead-end sign.
Kyle Khan, 26, and his wife Meesha Afzal, 22, died instantly when the vehicle they were passengers in ploughed into a wall near the M42.
Kyle Khan and Meesha Afzal died instantly in the horror crash near the M42[/caption]
Eidnun Liaquat killed the couple while speeding[/caption]
Eidnun Liaquat, who had previously admitted two charges of causing death by careless driving, was sentenced to 18 months suspended for two years.
The 28-year-old of Chirbury Grove, Northfield, was also banned from driving for three years and ordered to pay £1,500 costs.
Paul Spratt, prosecuting at Birmingham Crown Court, said of the victims: “They were two people in the prime of their young lives. They had hopes and aspirations which, sadly, will be unfulfilled.”
The accident happened at 1.50am on December 13, 2020, after the couple and Liaquat, who had been in Solihull, had spent the evening together.
About 20 minutes earlier a police officer had seen the Mercedes being driven by the defendant going in excess of the 30mph speed limit.
“Alcohol had been consumed and that might be the reason why Liaquat was driving,” said Mr Spratt.
He said the defendant had taken some cannabis but was below the legal limit.
“Quite how they ended up in that side road off the Warwick Road is not clear. The road was plainly a dead end.
“Had Liaquat observed signs that were available to him from the roundabout he would have known that.
“The road goes from a dual carriageway to a single track road. There is a solid concrete wall at the end.”
Mr Spratt said a witness had estimated that before the collision Liaquat had been travelling at between 30 and 40mph.
“There is no sign of braking as he approached the part of the road he should not have been on.”
Both Kyle and Meesha, who were both wearing seat belts, suffered “catastrophic” injuries as a result of the collision while Liaquat also sustained a broken left hip and chest injuries.
In passing sentence Judge Simon Drew KC said: “Ultimately this is a tragic case in which two young people lost their lives.”
He said what happened was at night and in wet conditions and continued: “You were driving down a road which was a dead-end. There were signs which clearly said so.
“Any careful and considerate driver would have seen these. The failure to realise that you were driving down a dead-end was a serious failure on your part and you were driving at speed.”
The judge said Liaquat was driving a car with three passengers and went on: “That increased the care that you needed to take, their lives were in your hands, literally.”
However, he said: “You are a man of positive good character and Kyle Khan was your best friend and Meesha was his wife.
“I accept that the impact upon you has been grave and your expressions of remorse are genuine and sincere.”
Graham Henson, defending, said: “Kyle Khan was his best friend. They were almost like brothers.
“The effect on the families of Kyle Khan and Meesha Afzal has been devastating and the effect on Liaquat has also been devastating.”
He said the defendant worked as a postman, did not have a great recollection of the accident and believed that he had braked.
Kyle’s mum Roshni Sajida Yousaf, 51, previously said the “beautiful couple” – who married in July 2017 – were the Romeo and Juliet of this century.”
“Kyle and Meesha were my life. It breaks my heart that I’ve lost two children as she (Meesha) was my daughter too,” she said.
The road was clearly marked as a dead-end[/caption]
Speeding NASA spacecraft snaps photos of the most mysterious asteroids around
NASA has blasted a spacecraft, traveling at speeds up to 92,000 mph, to the most mysterious asteroids in our solar system.
Called the Trojan asteroids, they are trapped in two swarms — one in front and one behind Jupiter. Crucially, astronomers say these curious space rocks are preserved relics of our early solar system. But we have no close views nor samples. That’s why the Lucy mission, named after the ancient remains of a famous fossilized human skeleton, aims to visit these asteroids, which likely are the smaller building blocks of our diverse planets, including Earth.
“If we want to understand ourselves, we have to understand these small bodies,” Hal Levison, a planetary scientist who leads the unprecedented mission to investigate the Trojans, told Mashable. “This is the first reconnaissance of the Trojan swarms.”
And though the Lucy spacecraft is still over 330 million miles from these asteroids, it still captured its first footage of the Trojans, which you can see just below amid a background of stars.
The mission to the mysterious asteroids
The Lucy mission will visit nine different Trojan asteroids over its 12-year mission, beginning in 2027.
Most of the endeavor will involve traveling to and around the Trojans in a serpentine, looping journey. The craft won’t take any samples, but will swoop in for some close fly-bys of the asteroids. In total, the mission will closely observe the rocks with a slew of different cameras for just around 24 hours. The craft, with vast distances to cover, will be hauling through space, and zooming by these objects.
“We’re not going to be able to blink,” Levison said.
“We’re not going to be able to blink.”
Planetary scientists suspect the Trojans got stuck around Jupiter billions of years ago, some 880 million years after the solar system formed. Before that, they likely roamed the distant icy fringes of our solar system, before an upheaval sent them hurtling near the gas giant Jupiter. That’s why they’re considered largely preserved solar system “fossils.”
Lucy’s powerful cameras, including a spectrometer that can see what these asteroids are composed of, will observe the rocks’ composition, mass, and geologic history. They’ll see how icy the Trojans are, and how different they are from each other.
Credit: Southwest Research Institute
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
Levison expects to be surprised by what Lucy beams back. The mission will give scientists unprecedented insight into how our solar system, and humble blue planet, evolved and matured into the eight-planet realm we see today.
“I can’t wait to see what mysteries the mission uncovers!” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
A speeding black hole is birthing baby stars across light years
Astronomers think they have discovered a supermassive black hole traveling away from its home galaxy at 4 million mph — so fast it’s not doing what it’s notorious for: sucking light out of the universe.
Quite the opposite, possibly. Rather than ripping stars to shreds and swallowing up every morsel, this black hole is believed to be fostering new star formation, leaving a trail of newborn stars stretching 200,000 light-years through space. Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomy professor at Yale University, said as the black hole rams into gas, it seems to trigger a narrow corridor of new stars, where the gas has a chance to cool.
How exactly it works, though, isn’t known, said van Dokkum, who led research on the phenomenon captured by NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope accidentally. A paper on the findings was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“What we’re seeing is the aftermath,” he said in a statement. “Like the wake behind a ship, we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole.”
Black holes are some of the most elusive things in outer space. The most common kind, a stellar black hole, is often thought to be the result of an enormous star dying in a supernova explosion. The star’s material then collapses onto itself, condensing into a relatively tiny area.
But how supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times more massive than the sun, form is even more mysterious. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe these behemoths lurk at the center of virtually all galaxies. Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations have bolstered the theory that supermassive black holes get their start in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly churned out, but scientists are still trying to get to the bottom of it.
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
“Like the wake behind a ship, we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole.”
Black holes don’t have surfaces, like on a planet or star. Instead, they have a boundary called an “event horizon“—it’s a point of no return. Generally, if anything swoops too close, it will fall in, never to escape the hole’s gravitational pull. But this weird black hole may be moving too fast to consume celestial objects as usual, defying the status quo.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope
The research team has suggested a possible theory: Maybe the runaway black hole is the result of a chain of events caused by three colliding supermassive black holes. One could have been stealing momentum from the other two and gotten ejected out of its host galaxy, while the other two shot off in the other direction. Evidence that might support this idea is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core.
Van Dokkum was looking for star clusters in a nearby galaxy when he noticed what appeared to be a little streak in his Hubble image. At first, he thought it was a cosmic ray causing an artifact in the photo. After further analysis at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, he and his team predicted it must be a train of young blue stars. The trail is almost half as bright as the host galaxy, indicating it is a hotbed of stellar action.
The scientists plan to confirm the black hole explanation with follow-up observations using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.