sciencehabit writes: Type Ia supernovae, a bright and long-lasting brand of stellar explosion, play a vital role in cosmic chemical manufacturing, forging in their fireballs most of the iron and other metals that pervade the universe. The explosions also serve as "standard candles," assumed to shine with a predictable brightness. Their brightness as seen from Earth provides a cosmic yardstick, used among other things to discover "dark energy," the unknown force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Astronomers have long thought that the blasts come from white dwarfs, burnt out stars once like our Sun, reignited after stealing material from a companion red giant. But evidence is mounting that other mechanisms may be causing white dwarfs to explode, making their standard candle status a puzzle.

SpaceX launched its second Falcon 9 rocket in the span of just four days on Wednesday at 9:25 PM EDT (6:25 PM PDT). This one was carrying 60 more satellites for its Starlink constellation, which will bring the total currently in operation on orbit to 480. From a report: The launch took off from Florida, where SpaceX's first astronaut launch took place on Saturday for the final demonstration mission of its Crew Dragon to fulfill the requirements of NASA's Commercial Crew human-rating process. Today's launch didn't include any human passengers, but it did fly that next big batch of Starlink broadband internet satellites, as mentioned. Those will join the other Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, forming part of a network that will eventually serve to provide high-bandwidth, reliable internet connectivity, particularly in underserved areas where terrestrial networks either aren't present or don't offer high-speed connections. This launch included a test of a new system that SpaceX designed in order to hopefully improve an issue its satellites have had with nighttime visibility from Earth. The test Starlink satellite, one of the 60, has a visor system installed that it can deploy post-launch in order to block the sun from reflecting off its communication antenna surfaces. If it works as designed, it should greatly reduce sunlight reflected off the satellite back to Earth, and SpaceX will then look to make it a standard part of its Starlink satellite design going forward.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth on the eastern coast of modern Mexico, resulting in up to three quarters of plant and animal species living on the planet going extinct -- including the dinosaurs. Now, a team of researchers equipped with a supercomputer have managed to simulate the entire event, shedding light on the reasons that the impact led to a mass extinction of life. The simulations were carried out by scientists at Imperial College in London, using high performance computing (HPC) facilities provided by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The research focused on establishing as precise an impact angle and trajectory as possible, which in turn can help determine precisely how the asteroid's hit affected the surrounding environment.

Various impact angles and speeds were considered, and 3D simulations for each were fed into the supercomputer. These simulations were then compared with the geophysical features that have been observed in the 110-mile wide Chicxulub crater, located in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where the impact happened. The simulations that turned out to be the most consistent with the structure of the Chicxulub crater showed an impact angle of about 60 degrees. Such a strike had the strength of about ten billion Hiroshima bombs, and this particular angle meant that rocks and sediments were ejected almost symmetrically. This, in turn, caused a greater amount of climate-changing gases to be released, including billions of tonnes of sulphur that blocked the sun. The rest is history: firestorms, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes rocked the planet, and most species disappeared from the surface of the Earth. The 60-degree angle constituted "the worse-case scenario for the lethality of the impact" because it maximized the ejection of rock and therefore, the production of gases, the scientists wrote.

"The researchers carried out almost 300 3D simulations before they were able to reach their conclusions, which was processed by the HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 supercomputer located at the University of Leicester," adds ZDNet. "The 14,000-cores system, powered by Intel's Skylake chips, is supported by a 6TB server to accommodate large, in-memory calculations."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The moon visits one of the spring constellations this week by traveling through the faint constellation of Virgo, the virgin. On 1 and 2 June, our natural satellite will pass close to Virgo's only bright star, Spica. Memorise its position and then return in the days to come to pick out the constellation's other, fainter stars. Spica is one of the 20 brightest stars in the night sky, located at a distance of about 250 light years. A blue giant star, containing around 10 times the Sun's mass, it is more than 20,000 times more luminous than our star.

May 23rd marks the 25th anniversary of the day Sun Microsystems introduced Java to the world, notes InfoWorld.

Looking at both the present and the future, they write that currently Java remains popular "with enterprises even as a slew of rival languages, such as Python and Go, now compete for the hearts and minds of software developers." Java continues to rank among the top three programming languages in the most prominent language popularity indexes — Tiobe, RedMonk, and PyPL. Java had enjoyed a five-year stint as the top language in the Tiobe index until this month, when it was overtaken by the C language, thanks perhaps to the combination of C's wide use in medical equipment and the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, Java represents a huge ecosystem and source of jobs. There were an estimated nine million Java developers worldwide in 2017, according to Oracle. A recent search of jobs site Dice.com found nearly 12,000 Java-related jobs in the USA, compared to roughly 9,000 jobs in JavaScript and 7,600 in Python. Plus, Java has spawned an enormous ecosystem of tools ranging from the Spring Framework to application servers from companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle to the JavaFX rich media platform.

The developers behind Java — including Oracle and the broader OpenJDK community — have kept the platform moving forward. Released two months ago, Java 14, or Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, added capabilities including switch expressions, to simplify coding, and JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) Event Streaming, for continuous consumption of JFR data. Up next for Java is JDK 15, set to arrive as a production release in September 2020, with capabilities still being lined up for it. So far, the features expected include a preview of sealed classes, which provide more-granular control over code, and records, which provide classes that act as transparent carriers for immutable data. Also under consideration for Java is a plan dubbed Project Leyden, which would address "longterm pain points" in Java including resource footprint, startup time, and performance issues by introducing static images to the platform.

When Robin Frost called Verizon's customer support last month, she was connected with a rooster. At least that's what it sounded like. The Pennsylvania resident wanted to ask about a problem with the telecom company's app, but the agent on the line said she couldn't hear. Punctuating her words was "the sound of a very authentic, real-sounding rooster," Ms. Frost recalled. From a report: Thousands of call-center employees in the Philippines and India are working from home, often on the outskirts of urban areas or outside them, during their countries' coronavirus lockdowns. That has given cows and pigs -- but mainly roosters -- a chance to chime in. "It was funny but not funny, and also maddening, as I couldn't accomplish my task," Ms. Frost said. Stefaan Smith, 36, who lives outside Phoenix, had a similar encounter when he called a Sprint helpline in March. He wanted to defer billing on his account after a pizza-parlor job fell through and left him with no money in the bank.

"The crowing was so close," he said of what sounded like an angry rooster, though that wasn't the only animal present. "It was like right outside her window. You could hear her pigs grumbling and groaning." After follow-up calls, he received a $50 credit from the provider, he said. Call-center executives say roosters are tough to silence. Americans often make customer-service calls in the late afternoon and evening, just when the sun is rising over countries like the Philippines and the birds are at their loudest. That's when Junela Dumaya's job gets tricky. The 20-year-old works for Open Access BPO, a call center, and lives in a mountainous area a few hours' drive from the Philippine capital, Manila. Her neighbor's cow makes a racket in the mornings, as do her brother-in-law's chickens.

A Slashdot reader quotes MIT News: To closely observe an interstellar object (ISO) hurtling through space, time is of the essence. Richard Linares, an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, developed a concept for a "dynamic orbital slingshot for rendezvous with interstellar objects." He outlined his idea in a research proposal that was recently selected as a Phase 1 study in the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, which "funds innovative aerospace concepts that could enable and transform future missions...."

Linares envisions deploying a constellation of statites, or "static satellites" enabled by a solar sail constructed with just the right mass-to-area ratio to act as interstellar watchdogs along the edges of our solar system, lying in wait until roused by an ISO crossing our threshold. Once detected, the solar sail then enables the statite to switch gears quickly and spring into action. Since the statite has a velocity of zero, it is already in position for efficient trajectory. Once released, the stored energy in the solar sail would leverage the gravitational pull of the sun to slingshot the statite in a freefall trajectory towards the ISO, allowing it to catch up. If the timing is right, the statite could tag the ISO with a CubeSat armed with onboard sensors to orbit the ISO over an extended period of time, gathering important scientific data.

Comet Swan could deliver on the promise of a rare night sky show that Comet Atlas failed to provide. "Already, Swan could be visible to those with exquisitely dark skies and sharp eyes," reports CNET. "Others might also be able to spot it with binoculars." From the report: Astronomer Con Stoitsis said some predictions show the comet continuing to brighten in the coming days. "It should be an 'obvious' naked eye target in mid-May," he said on Twitter. The comet makes its closest pass by Earth on May 13 and comes nearest to the sun on May 27. There're a number of tools online -- TheSkyLive is a great place to start -- to help you find Comet Swan in the night sky. And, of course, the comet also has a Twitter account worth following.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Although tidal energy is still in its infancy, it could help to reduce Australia's dependence on fossil fuels... The island nation is only beginning to explore tidal power through a number of pilot projects. But this form of energy has one major advantage: its predictability. While the sun may not shine, or the wind may not blow, the sea moves in predictable tidal currents...

Among those harnessing this tidal potential is Sydney-based Mako Energy. The company makes underwater turbines ranging between two and four meters in diameter. One turbine operating in constantly flowing water can produce enough electricity to power up to 20 homes. Their design enables them to generate electricity even in slow-flowing water, meaning they could be used in rivers and irrigation canals as well as the ocean. "We're developing turbines at a scale where they can be deployed easily in remote communities, coastal businesses, island communities and resorts," Douglas Hunt, managing director of Mako Energy, told CNN Business...

So far, Mako's customers have predominantly been large industrial and government sites, but it wants to make its turbines accessible to energy customers big and small... "We want to contribute to an energy mix that is less reliant on fossil fuels, by empowering local businesses and communities to generate their own power from a predictable and abundant source that is hiding in plain sight — often flowing directly past communities," says Hunt.

The massive cosmic object lurks in a star system you can see with the naked eye. From a report: During winter in the Southern Hemisphere, a blue point of light in the constellation Telescopium gleams overhead. The brilliant pinprick on the sky, which looks like a bright star, is actually two stars in close orbit -- accompanied by the closest known black hole to Earth. The newly discovered black hole is about 1,011 light-years from our solar system in the star system HR 6819. Unveiled today in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the invisible object is locked in an orbit with two visible stars. It's estimated to be about four times the mass of the sun and roughly 2,500 light-years closer than the next black hole.

"It seems like it's been hiding in plain sight," says astronomer Kareem El-Badry, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in binary star systems but wasn't involved with the study. "It's a bright enough star [system] that people have been studying it since the 80s, but it seems like it's had some surprises." On a human scale, a thousand light-years is an immense distance. If a model of the Milky Way were scaled so that Earth and the sun were only a hair's width apart, HR 6819 would be about four miles away. But in the grand scheme of the galaxy, which is more than 100,000 light-years across, HR 6819 is quite close, and it suggests the Milky Way is littered with black holes. "If you find one that is very close to you, and you assume you're not special, then they must be out there everywhere," says lead study author Thomas Rivinius, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the breakup of Comet ATLAS, a.k.a. C/2019 Y4. "The telescope resolved roughly 30 fragments of the fragile comet on April 20 and 25 pieces on April 23," reports Phys.Org. From the report: The Hubble Space Telescope's new observations of the comet's breakup on April 20 and 23 reveal that the broken fragments are all enveloped in a sunlight-swept tail of cometary dust. These images provide further evidence that comet fragmentation is probably common and might even be the dominant mechanism by which the solid, icy nuclei of comets die. [...] Because comet fragmentation happens quickly and unpredictably, reliable observations are rare. Therefore, astronomers remain largely uncertain about the cause of fragmentation. One suggestion is that the original nucleus spins itself into pieces because of the jet action of outgassing from sublimating ices. As this venting is likely not evenly dispersed across the comet, it enhances the breakup. [...] Hubble's crisp images may yield new clues to the breakup. The telescope has distinguished pieces as small as the size of a house. Before the breakup, the entire nucleus may have been no more than the length of two football fields.

The disintegrating ATLAS comet is currently located inside the orbit of Mars, at a distance of approximately 145 million kilometres from Earth when the latest Hubble observations were taken. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth on 23 May at a distance of approximately 115 million kilometres, and eight days later it will skirt within 37 million kilometres of the Sun. You can view an animation of Hubble's observations on YouTube.

CNBC reports: Microsoft is working with a consortium of pharmaceutical companies to recruit people who have recovered from Covid-19 to donate their plasma, which could be used in treatments for the disease. To help get the word out, the company is launching a chatbot, which it refers to as its "plasmabot," to lead people through a series of questions to determine if they're a candidate to donate plasma. The plasmabot, which goes live this weekend, will also provide information about the procedure and direct them to a nearby site where they can safely make the donation...

In a blog post, Microsoft says there are two possible approaches with collected plasma: Make transfusions directly available to those who are battling the virus, or incorporate the antibodies to help develop a medicine. Microsoft's head of research Peter Lee said the company is supporting the efforts of a plasma alliance formed by companies like Octapharma, Takeda, CSL Behring and others. That project kicked off in late March, and counts the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among its advisors.

After conducting its own research into the approach, Lee said he believes it has the "potential to save lives." So the company is setting aside computing resources and other infrastructure, as well as engineering talent. It is also promoting the plasmabot through a website, and it's search, web and social channels.

Microsoft is getting behind the effort now because plasma of recovered patients is only useful for a limited time. "There's a window from onset of symptoms that lasts from 21 to about 56 days," said Lee.
Meanwhile, a Florida newspaper reports that the Mayo Clinic is also coordinating its own study with a network of hospitals across America to "gauge the effectiveness" of plasma treatments.

puddingebola shares a report from ESO: Observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity. This long-sought-after result was made possible by increasingly precise measurements over nearly 30 years, which have enabled scientists to unlock the mysteries of the behemoth lurking at the heart of our galaxy.

Located 26,000 light-years from the Sun, Sagittarius A* and the dense cluster of stars around it provide a unique laboratory for testing physics in an otherwise unexplored and extreme regime of gravity. One of these stars, S2, sweeps in towards the supermassive black hole to a closest distance less than 20 billion kilometers (one hundred and twenty times the distance between the Sun and Earth), making it one of the closest stars ever found in orbit around the massive giant. [...] Most stars and planets have a non-circular orbit and therefore move closer to and further away from the object they are rotating around. S2's orbit precesses, meaning that the location of its closest point to the supermassive black hole changes with each turn, such that the next orbit is rotated with regard to the previous one, creating a rosette shape. General Relativity provides a precise prediction of how much its orbit changes and the latest measurements from this research exactly match the theory. This effect, known as Schwarzschild precession, had never before been measured for a star around a supermassive black hole.

A team of transatlantic scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, has discovered an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting in its star's habitable zone, the area around a star where a rocky planet could support liquid water. Phys.Org reports: Scientists discovered this planet, called Kepler-1649c, when looking through old observations from Kepler, which the agency retired in 2018. While previous searches with a computer algorithm misidentified it, researchers reviewing Kepler data took a second look at the signature and recognized it as a planet. Out of all the exoplanets found by Kepler, this distant world -- located 300 light-years from Earth -- is most similar to Earth in size and estimated temperature.

This newly revealed world is only 1.06 times larger than our own planet. Also, the amount of starlight it receives from its host star is 75% of the amount of light Earth receives from our Sun -- meaning the exoplanet's temperature may be similar to our planet's as well. But unlike Earth, it orbits a red dwarf. Though none have been observed in this system, this type of star is known for stellar flare-ups that may make a planet's environment challenging for any potential life. There is still much that is unknown about Kepler-1649c, including its atmosphere, which could affect the planet's temperature. Current calculations of the planet's size have significant margins of error, as do all values in astronomy when studying objects so far away. But based on what is known, Kepler-1649c is especially intriguing for scientists looking for worlds with potentially habitable conditions.

Long-time Slashdot reader joemite shared Wired's report about a small town of Basalt Vista, Colorado, where homeowners like Katela Escobar are testing highly scaleable "advanced power grid technologies that could turn every home into an appendage of a decentralized power plant."

Basalt Vista is designed to be an all-electric community that produces as much power as it uses. Each home comes outfitted with an electric vehicle charger in the garage, a large battery pack in the basement, and a roof covered with solar panels. The homes are linked together as a microgrid, a self-contained electricity distribution network that can operate independently of the regional electric grid. Their energy systems work together to balance the energy load across the neighborhood — the solar panels harvest energy, plugged in EVs can store electricity as needed, and large battery packs can supply power when the sun isn't shining.

But what makes Basalt Vista's microgrid unique is that it autonomously allocates power. There's an internet-connected control box in the basement of each home running experimental software that continuously optimizes electricity distribution across the microgrid and the flow of energy to and from the larger regional grid. When one home produces more energy than it needs, it can autonomously make the decision to redistribute it to its neighbors or store it for later... Basalt Vista is a testbed for a so-called "virtual power plant," a network of self-optimizing energy resources that unbundles the centralized utility and distributes it across the grid... [T]hey aggregate and control distributed energy sources so they can perform the functions of a large centralized power plant — generating and storing electricity — for the wider grid. This virtual power plant could serve as an antidote to the inherent variability of renewable energy systems by efficiently matching supply and demand across widely-distributed electricity producers and consumers.

For now, the technology exists in the basements of Escobar and her neighbors at Basalt Vista. But if the experiment is successful, it may one day control power for millions of other families.

NASA has selected a lunar-crater radio telescope idea to receive funding through its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the agency announced on Tuesday. The Phase I award goes to projects in very early stages of development. CNET reports: Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the mind behind the moon dream. Making it happen would require sending robots to the far side of the moon and using the machines to deploy a wire mesh over a crater. Bandyopadhyay's proposal lists the benefits of locating a telescope on the far side of the moon, including that "the moon acts as a physical shield that isolates the lunar-surface telescope from radio interferences/noises from Earth-based sources, ionosphere, Earth-orbiting satellites, and sun's radio-noise during the lunar night."

The moon telescope project is one of 23 concepts that received part of a $7 million investment through NIAC. The Phase I award consists of $125,000 to fund a nine-month study of the idea. Other concepts include investigating solar sails, lunar landing pads and a robotic explorer for Saturn's moon Enceladus. NASA pointed out that these projects will mostly require a decade or more of technology development, and that they are not official NASA missions.

Houseparty, a video conferencing desktop and mobile application, said it would pay a $1 million bounty to anyone who could unmask the entity behind what the company described as "a paid commercial smear campaign." From a report: The company's apparent anger comes after Houseparty has been at the center of media reports published yesterday by three British tabloids. The Sun, the Express, and Mirror Online reported on Monday on a large number of Houseparty users claiming they had social media accounts hacked and taken over after installing the video conferencing app on their smartphones. Users reported having Netflix, eBay, Instagram, Snapchat, and Spotify accounts taken over; however, very few were able to provide details about what really happened. Houseparty officials feel they're now being defamed unjustly in a game of dirty politics.

Mars was once covered by oceans, but lost its atmosphere over time, according to Gina DiBraccio, a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN mission.

Is the same thing happening to Uranus? The magnetic bubble surrounding the giant gas planet may be siphoning its atmosphere off into space, reports Digital Trends: Uranus's atmospheric loss is driven by its strange magnetic field, the axis of which points at an angle compared to the axis on which the planet spins. That means its magnetosphere wobbles as it moves, which makes it very difficult to model. "The structure, the way that it moves," DiBraccio said, "Uranus is really on its own." Due to the wobbling of the magnetosphere, bits of the atmosphere are drained away in what are called plasmoids — bubbles of plasma which pinch off from the magnetic field as it is blown around by the Sun. Although these plasmoids have been seen on Earth and on some other planets, they had never been observed on Uranus before the recent analysis of old Voyager 2 data.
Interestingly, the theory comes from a new analysis of 30-year-old data gathered by the Voyager 2 space probe -- long before it reached the edge of our solar system.

A reader quotes Science News: Astronomers have long known that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-shaped disk of stars that houses the sun, is some 120,000 light-years across. Beyond this stellar disk is a disk of gas. A vast halo of dark matter, presumably full of invisible particles, engulfs both disks and stretches far beyond them. But because the dark halo emits no light, its diameter is hard to measure. Now, Alis Deason, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England, and her colleagues have used nearby galaxies to locate the Milky Way's edge...

To find the Milky Way's edge, Deason's team conducted computer simulations of how giant galaxies like the Milky Way form. In particular, the scientists sought cases where two giant galaxies arose side by side, like the Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest giant neighbor, because each galaxy's gravity tugs on the other. The simulations showed that just beyond the edge of a giant galaxy's dark halo, the velocities of small nearby galaxies drop sharply. Using existing telescope observations, Deason and her colleagues found a similar plunge in the speeds of small galaxies near the Milky Way. This occurred at a distance of about 950,000 light-years from the Milky Way's center, marking the galaxy's edge, the scientists say.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It might be stating the obvious, but your car's headlights are a safety device, and not all headlights are created equal. For a while, carmakers have been fitting powerful LED headlights to their high-end offerings, but more often than not, their cheaper cars -- and particularly cheaper trim levels -- get saddled with much-weaker illumination. But sometimes a commuter wants to see more of where they're going when the sun goes down. Eventually, they go looking for a solution, starting with their local automotive parts store. But stuffing aftermarket LED headlight bulbs into OEM housings designed for conventional halogen units results in dangerous glare for oncoming drivers. While LEDs can deliver more intense light at a higher end of the spectrum, most aftermarket units also create a hazardous condition.

The major brick-and-mortar auto parts stores know this, which is why they tend to shy away from aftermarket H11 LED bulbs, other than ones clearly marked for use in fog lamps or "for off-road use only." It's a different world online, with off-brand H11 LED bulb listings on Amazon, eBay, and Walmart websites failing to carry the same prominent warnings. [...] Do your lighting research before you make your next vehicle purchase. Headlamp technology has typically been bundled with the trim level. The base model would get fitted with reflector headlamps, with projectors offered in the mid-range and higher trim levels. Adaptive headlights have been the preserve of the top trim levels. All that means that less-expensive vehicles are often stuck with reflectors across the range in America. (IIHS recently changed its testing rules and will now only give its coveted Top Safety Pick+ to models that offer the best headlights across all trim levels.) "While halogen filaments deliver 360-degree illumination, LED bulbs typically emit light with a pair of back-to-back 180-degree planes," writes Daniel Gray for Ars Technica. "When LED alignment gets skipped, oncoming drivers are blinded, as are drivers ahead of them in traffic. Poorly aimed headlamps are especially bothersome with pickup trucks and SUVs due to the vehicle height."

Make sure to do your homework if you choose to install aftermarket LEDs. "Find a reputable manufacturer and domestic retailer. Buy based on quality, not price. The optimal LED replacement bulbs mimic OEM halogen filament bulbs as closely as possible. The worst bulbs are a stab in the eyes. And don't skip alignment -- take your time and do it right."