Anonymous ID: dd214b Oct. 17, 2023, 6:26 a.m. No.19749872   🗄️.is 🔗kun

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Oct 16, 2023

 

Eclipse Rings

 

She knew everything but the question. She was well aware that there would be a complete annular eclipse of the Sun visible from their driving destination: Lake Abert in Oregon. She knew that the next ring-of-fire eclipse would occur in the USA only in 16 more years, making this a rare photographic opportunity. She was comfortable with the plan: that she and her boyfriend would appear in front of the eclipse in silhouette, sometimes alone, and sometimes together. She knew that the annular phase of this eclipse would last only a few minutes and she helped in the many hours of planning. She could see their friend who set up the camera about 400 meters away at the bottom of a ridge. What she didn't know was the question she would be asked. But she did know the answer: "yes".

 

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231016.html

 

Oct 17, 2023

 

PDS 70: Disk, Planets, and Moons

 

It's not the big ring that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming ring around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, that’s being talked about the most. Although the planet PDS 70c is a newly formed and, interestingly, similar in size and mass to Jupiter. It's the fuzzy patch around the planet PDS 70c that's causing the commotion. That fuzzy patch is thought to be a dusty disk that is now forming into moons and that had never been seen before. The featured image was taken in 2021 by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) of 66 radio telescopes in the high Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Based on ALMA data, astronomers infer that the moon-forming exoplanetary disk has a radius similar to our Earth's orbit, and may one day form three or so Luna-sized moons not very different from our Jupiter's four.

 

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?

Anonymous ID: dd214b Oct. 17, 2023, 6:49 a.m. No.19749943   🗄️.is 🔗kun

‘UFOS OVER GAZA’ RUMORS STEM FROM MYSTERIOUS BRIGHT LIGHTS IN THE SKY

Updated Tue 17 October 2023 8:01

 

The widespread speculations and unverified reports about UFOs and extraterrestrial lives continue to divide people on Earth, thanks to ufologists who have claimed time and again that aliens are coming for us. Now, a sighting allegedly captured over Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war has fueled an irrational fear among believers.

 

Multiple videos on TikTok have given rise to rumors that ‘UFOs’ were seen in the night sky over the weekend, but such an incident hasn’t been officially reported or confirmed.

 

The short clip allegedly filmed in Gaza shows the night sky brightened by multiple golden lights that appear one after the other.

 

They are stationary and the lights illuminating from what’s assumed to be an unidentified object intensify within seconds and continue to glow brightly.

 

The number of unverified objects differs in every video, with some depicting five of them placed in close proximity to one another, looking like a star cluster.

 

The origin of the videos isn’t clear as similar sightings are reported by different users. Authorities in Israel haven’t addressed the said incident at the time of writing.

 

Only a couple of days ago, another video alleging UFOs in Israel raised eyebrows. The footage in question is seemingly filmed in the evening and features multiple objects in the air being escorted by fighter jets.

 

The captions claimed the alleged incident occurred in Tel Aviv, but users quickly refuted it as only a CGI or an AI-generated clip.

 

https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2023/10/17/ufos-over-gaza-rumors-stem-from-mysterious-bright-lights-in-the-sky/

Anonymous ID: dd214b Oct. 17, 2023, 7:04 a.m. No.19749994   🗄️.is 🔗kun

AI just spotted its 1st supernova. Could it replace human explosion hunters?

Oct 16, 2023

 

Move over, human astronomers! Artificial intelligence (AI) could soon be doing your supernova hunting for you.

 

A new, fully automated machine-learning algorithm has successfully detected, identified and classified its first supernova  —  the first time this has been achieved with AI. The program, called Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot), could vastly accelerate the process of analyzing and classifying supernovas, its developers say.

 

Spotting supernovas currently depends on humans and computers working in conjunction, but BTSbot could cut us out of that equation. According to the BTSbot team, over the past six years alone, human astronomers have spent an estimated 2,200 hours visually inspecting and classifying supernova candidates. BTSbot could allow astronomers to redirect this effort and spend more time investigating the origins of these stellar explosions and modeling how they proceed.

 

"For the first time ever, a series of robots and AI algorithms have observed, then identified, then communicated with another telescope to finally confirm the discovery of a supernova," team leader Adam Miller, a professor of physics at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a statement. "This represents an important step forward as further refinement of models will allow the robots to isolate specific subtypes of stellar explosions.

 

"Ultimately, removing humans from the loop provides more time for the research team to analyze their observations and develop new hypotheses to explain the origin of the cosmic explosions that we observe," Miller added.

 

Supernovas: a needle in a cosmic haystack

 

Many supernovas occur when dying stars exhauts their fuel for nuclear fusion. Unable to support themselves against the inward push of gravity, these stars' cores collapse while their outer layers blast out as supernovas.

 

In the case of Type Ia supernovas, explosions are triggered when a stellar remnant called a white dwarf exists in a binary system and is stripping matter from its companion star. This influx of material causes white dwarfs to reignite and explode, destroying them entirely.

 

These supernova explosions can be so bright that they outshine the combined light of every star in the galaxy around them. Thanks to the vastness of space, however, even this incredible burst of light doesn't mean supernovas are easy to spot. Currently, robotic telescopes scan the night sky, capturing repeated images of the same patch of space, hoping to find a changing  —  or transient  —  object that wasn't in previous images.

 

"Automated software presents a list of candidate explosions to humans, who spend time verifying the candidates and executing spectroscopic observations," Miller said. "We can only definitively know that a candidate is truly a supernova by collecting its spectrum  —  the source's dispersed light, which reveals elements present in the explosion. There are existing robotic telescopes that can collect spectra, but this is also often done by humans operating telescopes with spectrographs."

 

To potentially remove humanity's role in these proceedings, Miller and his team developed BTSbot and trained the AI with over 1.4 million historical images from nearly 16,000 sources. These included confirmed supernovas and other explosive astronomical phenomena like the temporary flaring of stars, stars that are periodically variable stars and the flaring of galaxies.

 

Putting BTSbot to the test

 

In order to test their new AI tool, the researchers set about hunting for a newly spotted supernova candidate designated SN2023tyk, which is believed to be a Type Ia supernova located around 760 million light-years from Earth.

 

The supernova was found by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) robotic telescope on Oct. 3. As it searched ZTF data, BTSbot was able to identify SN2023tyk on Oct. 5, after which it collected the potential supernova's spectrum from the robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory, known as the SED machine (SEDM). Thus, through this automatic collaboration, SN2023tyk was classified as a Type Ia supernova. BSTbot didn't even need its human operators to get the word out, as this information was automatically shared with astronomers by the AI on Oct. 7.

 

"The simulated performance was excellent, but you never really know how that translates to the real world until you actually try it," Northwestern graduate student Nabeel Rehemtulla, who co-led the BTSbot technology development with Miller, said in the same statement.

 

https://www.space.com/artificial-intelligence-spots-first-supernova