Space.com reports: A rogue iceberg that drifted dangerously close to an Antarctic penguin population in 2020 and 2021 released billions of tons of fresh water into the ocean during its breakup.

A new study, based on satellite data, tracks the aftermath of the once-mighty iceberg A-68a, which held the title of world's largest iceberg for more than three years before shattering into a dozen pieces.... [T]he new research shows that the iceberg flooded the region with fresh water, potentially affecting the local ecosystem and providing yet another example of the effects of global warming on the oceans.

The research consulted data gathered by missions including Sentinel-1 (operated by European Space Agency, or ESA), Sentinel-3 (ESA), CryoSat-2 (ESA) and ICESat-2 (NASA), as well as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard two NASA satellites, Aqua and Terra. The satellite data shows that during the iceberg's three-month melting period in late 2020 and early 2021, the former A-68a flushed into the ocean about 162 billion tons (152 billion metric tonnes) of fresh water — equivalent to 61 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to a press release from United Kingdom study participant University of Leeds.
"Our ability to study every move of the iceberg in such detail is thanks to advances in satellite techniques and the use of a variety of measurements," said Tommaso Parrinello, CryoSat Mission Manager at the European Space Agency, in the press release.

The BBC reports that the "monster" iceberg "was dumping more than 1.5 billion tonnes of fresh water into the ocean every single day at the height of its melting."

At CES in Las Vegas this evening, Sony's Chairman, President and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida showed off a brand new prototype of its Vision S concept electric car, and announced that the Sony Group is starting a new division -- the Sony Mobility Inc -- which will start commercializing its electric vehicles. TechCrunch reports: On the CES stage during the Sony press conference, the company showed off its existing Sony Vision-S sedan, which was revealed at CES last year. This year, it also flexed a new model in the lineup, the Sony Vision-S SUV prototype. "The excitement we received after we showed off the Vision-S really encouraged us to further consider how we can bring creativity and technology to change the experience of moving from one place to another," said Yoshida, before revealing the new Vision-S SUV prototype. "This is our new Vision-S SUV. Vision-S has been developed on a foundation of safety, adaptability and entertainment. Safety has been our No. 1 priority in creating a comfortable mobility experience. That has not changed when building this SUV. A total of 40 sensors are installed inside and outside of the vehicle to monitor safety.

"In terms of adaptability, we have connectivity that enables us to build a vehicle that continuously evolves. It also makes it possible to personalize the cabin for each user. With 5G, it enables high speed, high capacity and low-latency connectivity between the in-vehicle system and the cloud. The Vision-S also evolves mobility as an entertainment space," said Yoshida. "The Vision-S also evolves mobility as an entertainment space, including gaming experience and audio. We have learned more about mobility through our exploration of Vision-S and through our partners who have supported this effort." There's been a lot of EV announcements today. Not only did GM reveal an electric version of the Chevy Silverado, but Chrysler announced plans to go all-electric by 2028, starting with the Airflow, "a concept crossover that appears to be close to ready for production," reports Ars Technica.

BMW also unveiled color-changing paint for its vehicles that relies on the E-ink electronic paper technology found in e-readers like the Kindle.

Just two weeks after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has opened its "eye" and returned its first images from space -- a major operational milestone for the spacecraft and DART team. Phys.Org reports: After the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees C in space, scientists and engineers at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, held their breath in anticipation. Because components of the spacecraft's telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious. On Tuesday, Dec. 7, the spacecraft popped open the circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera and, to everyone's glee, streamed back the first image of its surrounding environment. Taken about 2 million miles (11 light seconds) from Earth -- very close, astronomically speaking -- the image shows about a dozen stars, crystal-clear and sharp against the black backdrop of space, near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.

The DART navigation team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California used the stars in the image to determine precisely how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointed relative to the spacecraft. With those measurements in hand, the DART team could accurately move the spacecraft to point DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, that DART captured in another image on Dec. 10. Located in the constellation Auriga, the cluster of stars lies some 4,200 light years from Earth. Intentionally capturing images with many stars like M38 helps the team characterize optical imperfections in the images as well as calibrate how absolutely bright an object is -- all important details for accurate measurements when DRACO starts imaging the spacecraft's destination, the binary asteroid system Didymos.

Chinese citizens lashed out online against billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Monday after China complained that its space station was forced to take evasive action to avoid collision with satellites launched by Musk's Starlink program. CNBC reports: The satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a division of Musk's SpaceX aerospace company, had two "close encounters" with the Chinese space station on July 1 and Oct. 21, according to a document submitted by China earlier this month to the U.N.'s space agency. "For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control," China said in a document published on the website of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. The complaints have not been independently verified.

In a post on China's Twitter-like Weibo microblogging platform on Monday, one user said Starlink's satellites were "just a pile of space junk," while another described them as "American space warfare weapons." SpaceX alone has deployed nearly 1,900 satellites to serve its Starlink broadband network, and is planning more. "The risks of Starlink are being gradually exposed, the whole human race will pay for their business activities," a user posting under the name Chen Haiying said on Weibo.

A rare look inside a fossilized dinosaur egg found in southern China has revealed an exquisitely preserved embryo -- and evidence suggesting that some of these prehistoric creatures had even more in common with modern birds than previously thought. From a report: Scientists said the embryo inside the egg, which was laid between 72 million to 66 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period, was that of a two-legged, feathered carnivore known as an oviraptorid. They said, in a paper about the discovery published Tuesday in the journal iScience, the embryo's curled body position -- with its back against the blunt end of the 7-inch-long egg and its head between its legs -- resembles that of bird embryos.

"This posture was previously not recognized in any dinosaur embryo," said Fion Waisum Ma, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Birmingham in England and a co-author of the paper. She said the posture suggests that the embryo had assumed a tucked position before hatching -- a behavior previously thought unique to birds. She called the newly described specimen "one of the best preserved dinosaur embryos ever found." In birds, tucking leaves the embryo with its right wing over its head and its beak pointing toward an air space at the egg's blunt end. That orientation helps direct the hatchling's head as it uses its beak to crack the eggshell and emerge.

"Failure to attain this posture would increase the chance of death, as the bird is less likely to break out of the egg successfully," Ms. Ma said. An inspection of the oviraptorid egg showed what appeared to be an air space between the embryo's spine and the egg's blunt end, according to the researchers. The specimen was among several fossils discovered about two decades ago in the Chinese city of Ganzhou but not recognized to be fossilized dinosaur eggs until 2015, when evaluated by an expert. A close examination of one of the eggs, which had fossilized after breaking, showed that it held the preserved oviraptorid embryo.

NASA is constantly tracking potentially dangerous asteroids in Earth's vicinity, and now a new tool allows anyone to explore their paths through the solar system. From a report: There are about 28,000 near-Earth asteroids and comets tracked by astronomers to make sure they don't pose a risk to our planet. The interactive tool allows anyone using it to zoom in on specific asteroids of interest in order to learn more about the objects and their orbits. Another feature of the tool allows users to see the next five close approaches of asteroids to Earth. "We were keen to include this feature, as asteroid close approaches often generate a lot of interest," Jason Craig, one of the developers of the tool, said in a statement. "The headlines often depict these close approaches as 'dangerously' close, but users will see by using Eyes just how distant most of these encounters really are."

"To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year..." according to an article from NASA:

"The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years," said Javier Roa Vicens, who led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL as a navigation engineer and recently moved to SpaceX. "It was based on some very smart mathematics: In under an hour, you could reliably get the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid over the next 100 years — an incredible feat."
But RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477), summarizes some new changes: For nearly 20 years, newly discovered asteroids had orbital predictions processed by a system called "Sentry", resulting in quick estimates on the impact risk they represent with Earth. Generally this has worked well, but several things in the future required updates, and a new system adds a number of useful features too.

The coming wave of big survey telescopes which will check the whole sky every few days is going to greatly increase the number of discoveries. That requires streamlining of the overall system to improve processing speed. The new system can also automatically incorporate factors which previously required manual intervention to calculate, particularly the effect of asteroid rotation creating non-gravitational forces on a new discovery's future orbit. Objects like asteroid Bennu (recently subject of a sampling mission) had significant uncertainty on their future path because of these effects. That doesn't mean that Bennu can possibly hit us in the next few centuries, but it became harder to say over the next few millennia. As NASA puts it:

Popular culture often depicts asteroids as chaotic objects that zoom haphazardly around our solar system, changing course unpredictably and threatening our planet without a moment's notice. This is not the reality. Asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the Sun.

But sometimes, those paths can come very close to Earth's future position and, because of small uncertainties in the asteroids' positions, a future Earth impact cannot be completely ruled out. So, astronomers use sophisticated impact monitoring software to automatically calculate the impact risk....

[T]he researchers have made the impact monitoring system more robust, enabling NASA to confidently assess all potential impacts with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million.


The article includes videos explaining the future uncertainties on the orbits of potentially hazardous asteroids Bennu and Apophis.

"The International Space Station dodged a fragment of a decades-old rocket body early Friday morning," reports Space.com, "continuing a stretch of space debris threats to the orbiting laboratory." On Friday (Dec. 3) at around 3 a.m. EST (0800 GMT), a Russian cargo ship docked to the International Space Station fired for a little under three minutes to lower the facility's orbit and ensure that it would pass safely by the debris, according to statements from NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos....

In a tweet posted on Wednesday (Dec. 1), Roscosmos flagged the risk posed by the rocket fragment, which it said was estimated to pass as close as 3.4 miles (5.4 kilometers) to the space station. Just the day before the alert was posted, on Tuesday (Nov. 30), NASA had been forced to delay a spacewalk scheduled for later in the day due to concerns about debris. The agency has not specified what that debris represents, but NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron were able to conduct their excursion on Thursday (Dec. 2).
NASA identified Friday's debris was part of a 1994 U.S. Pegasus rocket, which later broke up in space 1996.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: U.S. Space Force's General David Thompson, the service's second in command, said last week that Russia and China are launching "reversible attacks," such as electronic warfare jamming, temporarily blinding optics with lasers, and cyber attacks, on U.S. satellites "every single day." He also disclosed that a small Russian satellite used to conduct an on-orbit anti-satellite weapon test back in 2019 had first gotten so close to an American one that there were concerns an actual attack was imminent.

Thompson, who is Vice Chief of Space Operations, disclosed these details to The Washington Post's Josh Rogin in an interview on the sidelines of the Halifax International Security Forum, which ran from Nov. 19 to 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. The forum opened just four days after a Russian anti-satellite weapon test involving a ground-launched interceptor, which destroyed a defunct Soviet-era electronic intelligence satellite and created a cloud of debris that presents a risk to the International Space Station (ISS). That test drew widespread condemnation, including from the U.S. government, and prompted renewed discussion about potential future conflicts in space.

"The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it's really an evolution of activity that's been happening for a long time," Thompson, told Rogin. "We're really at a point now where there's a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened." "Right now, Space Force is dealing with what Thompson calls 'reversible attacks' on U.S. government satellites (meaning attacks that don't permanently damage the satellites) 'every single day,'" according to Rogin. "Both China and Russia are regularly attacking U.S. satellites with non-kinetic means, including lasers, radio frequency jammers, and cyber attacks, he said." [...] Thompson's assertion that these kinds of attacks are occurring with extreme frequency is new. It underscores the rapid development and fielding by Russia and China, among others, of a wide variety of anti-satellite capabilities, something the U.S. military has called increasing attention to in recent years. "The Chinese are actually well ahead [of Russia]," Thompson told Rogin. "They're fielding operational systems at an incredible rate." "Thompson could not confirm or deny whether any American satellites had actually been damaged in a Russian or Chinese attack," the report adds. "[H]e told Rogin that even if such a thing had occurred, that very fact would be classified."

He did, however, provide new details about the incident in 2019 where a small Russian satellite released a projectile in one on-orbit anti-satellite weapon test. According to The Drive, "Russia's satellite had first got in very close to a U.S. 'national security satellite' and that 'the U.S. government didn't know whether it was attacking or not.'"

"It maneuvered close, it maneuvered dangerously, it maneuvered threateningly so that they were coming close enough that there was a concern of collision," Thompson said. "So clearly, the Russians were sending us a message."

If all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will launch early Wednesday morning "to test whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can nudge it into a different trajectory," reports The New York Times. "Results from the test, if successful, will come in handy if NASA and other space agencies ever need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and avert a catastrophic impact." From the report: The DART spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time (or 10:20 p.m. local time) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA plans to host a livestream of the launch on its YouTube channel starting at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site prompts a delay, the next opportunity for liftoff would be about 24 hours later.

After launching to space, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun before it crosses paths with Dimorphos, a football-field-size asteroid that closely orbits a bigger asteroid, called Didymos, every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Astronomers call those two asteroids a binary system, where one is a mini-moon to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target practice. DART's impact will happen in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, roughly 6.8 million miles away.

Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, formally called a kinetic impactor, will autonomously steer itself straight toward Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture and send back photos to Earth in real time until 20 seconds before impact. A tiny satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles from the asteroid to snap images every six seconds in the moments before and after DART's impact.

Satellite trackers have been working overtime to figure out just how much dangerous debris Russia created when it destroyed one of its own satellites early Monday -- and the picture they've painted looks bleak. Multiple visual simulations of Russia's anti-satellite, or ASAT, test show a widespread cloud of debris that will likely menace other objects in orbit for years. The Verge reports: It's going to take weeks or even months to fully understand just how bad the situation is, but early visualizations of the ASAT test created by satellite trackers show an extensive trail of space debris left in the wake of the breakup. The fragments appear like a dotted snake in orbit, stretching out and moving in roughly the same direction that Kosmos 1408 used to move around Earth. And there's one thing the visualizers agree on: this snake of debris isn't going anywhere anytime soon. "There will be some potential collision risk to most satellites in [low Earth orbit] from the fragmentation of Cosmos 1408 over the next few years to decades," LeoLabs, a private space tracking company in the US, wrote in a blog post.

Two visualizations created by the European Union's Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) network and space software company AGI reveal what likely happened in the first moment of impact when Russia's missile intercepted Kosmos 1408. They both show how the debris cloud grew instantly and spread throughout space. AGI's simulation also shows just how close the cloud comes to intersecting with the International Space Station, validating NASA's concerns and the agency's decision to have the astronauts shelter in place.

Another visualization created by Hugh Lewis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southampton specializing in space debris, shows just how widely the debris from Kosmos 1408 has spread out in space. Lewis explains that when Russia's missile hit the satellite, each of the fragments that were created got a little kick, sending them to higher and lower altitudes. Each piece is moving at a different speed depending on the height of its orbit. Lewis says that the cloud will continue to morph over time. The debris fragments in the lower orbits will fall to Earth and out of orbit more quickly, while the ones in higher orbits will stay in space much longer.

A new space mission to hunt for potentially habitable planets around Earth's closest neighbouring star system is under way. From a report: In a project with echoes of the 2009 film Avatar, an international collaboration of scientists in Australia and the US will search in the Alpha Centauri star system for earth-like planets that could sustain life. Alpha Centauri -- Earth's closest neighbouring star system -- consists of two sun-like stars, known as Alpha Centauri A and B, and a more distant red dwarf star. The Toliman mission, named after the ancient Arabic-derived name for the star system, will search for potential planets orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.

The Toliman telescope, which is under construction, is set to be launched into low-earth orbit in 2023. It seeks to discover new planets in the "Goldilocks orbit" -- at the right distance, so the planet is neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life. Project leader Prof Peter Tuthill, of the University of Sydney, said: "If we're looking for life as we know it, usually the gold standard is a planet where liquid water could be present at the surface of the planet â" so it's not like a frozen snowball, and it doesn't boil all the water up into the atmosphere." "We know that life has evolved at least once, around a sun-like star on an earth-like planet," Tuthill said. "We try to look for other examples that are as close to that configuration as possible."

alaskana98 writes: In a recent GQ magazine interview with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense's "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)," he claims that the much publicized "Tic-Tac" UAPs observed by the U.S. Navy have been flying in our skies for many decades: "I have in my possession official U.S. government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory."

He then goes on to state that he's even heard from pilots who suffered real-world health issues as a consequence of getting too close to the objects: "I've got to be careful, I can't speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, "Lue, it's really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days." Well, that's a sign of radiation. That's not a sunburn; it's a radiation burn."

Perhaps most bizarre is a revelation that those who got closest to the UAPs experienced a form of time dilation: "'You know, Lue, it's really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes' worth of fuel. How is that possible?' Well, there's a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment."

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but if these claims can be corroborated with evidence it would suggest that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of information that has yet to be revealed on these things. Perhaps the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) will drive future efforts to get a better idea (PDF) of what this phenomenon actually is.

Scientists have identified what appears to be a small chunk of the moon that is tracking the Earth's orbit around the Sun. From a report: The asteroid, named Kamo'oalewa, was discovered in 2016 but until now relatively little has been known about it. New observations suggest it could be a fragment from the moon that was thrown into space by an ancient lunar collision. Kamo'oalewa is one of Earth's quasi-satellites, a category of asteroid that orbits the Sun, but remains relatively close to the planet -- in this case about 9m miles away.

Despite being close in astronomical terms, the asteroid is about the size of a ferris wheel and about 4m times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. Consequently, the Earth's most powerful telescopes are needed to make observations. Using the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona, astronomers found the spectrum of reflected light from Kamo'oalewa closely matched lunar rocks from Nasa's Apollo missions, suggesting it originated from the moon. They had initially compared the light with that reflected off other near-Earth asteroids, but drawn a blank. "I looked through every near-Earth asteroid spectrum we had access to, and nothing matched," said Ben Sharkey, a PhD student at the University of Arizona and the paper's lead author.

"NASA scientists have just published a commentary article in Nature calling for a framework for reporting extraterrestrial life to the world," reports Cosmos magazine (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Tesseractic): "Our generation could realistically be the one to discover evidence of life beyond Earth," write NASA Chief Scientist James Green and colleagues. "With this privileged potential comes responsibility. As life-detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialogue about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated and has a high potential to be sensationalised..."

Green and colleagues argue that...we should reframe such a discovery, so it isn't presented as a single moment when aliens are announced to the world. Instead, it should be seen as a progressive endeavour, reflecting the process of science itself. "If, instead, we recast the search for life as a progressive endeavour, we convey the value of observations that are contextual or suggestive but not definitive and emphasise that false starts and dead ends are an expected part of a healthy scientific process," they write. This will involve scientists, technologists and the media talking to each other to agree firstly on objective standards of evidence for life, and secondly on the best way to communicate that evidence.

This, they say, should preferably be done now before a detection of life is made, rather than scramble to put it together in the aftermath.
"The team kickstarts the conversation by proposing a 'confidence of life detection' (CoLD) scale, which contains seven steps taking us from first exciting potential detection of life to definitive confirmation," Cosmos points out. (With the stages including the discoveries of unquestionable biosignatures, a habitable environment, and then corroborating evidence.) Cosmos argues that "This is an increasingly important conversation to have — because experts think that the odds aliens exist are high."

And they close their article by quoting NASA's team. "Whatever the outcome of the dialogue, what matters is that it occurs. In doing so, we can only become more effective at communicating the results of our work, and the wonder associated with it."

"A star located 60 million light years away went supernova last year, and astronomers managed to capture all stages of the stellar explosion using telescopes both on the ground and in space," reports Gizmodo.

Long-time Slashdot reader spaceman375 shared Gizmodo's report: This awesome display of astronomical power has yielded a dataset of unprecedented proportions, with independent observations gathered before, during, and after the explosion. It's providing a rare multifaceted view of a supernova during its earliest phase of destruction. The resulting data should vastly improve our understanding of the processes involved when stars go supernova, and possibly lead to an early warning system in which astronomers can predict the timing of such events.

"We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star," Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the leader of the investigation, explained in a press release. "This is a different situation, because we really know what's going on and we actually see the death in real time."

Of course, it took 60 million years for the light from this supernova to reach Earth, so it's not exactly happening in "real time," but you get what Foley is saying... Observations of circumstellar material in close proximity to the star were made by Hubble just hours after the explosion, which, wow. The star shed this material during the past year, offering a unique perspective of the various stages that occur just prior to a supernova explosion. "We rarely get to examine this very close-in circumstellar material since it is only visible for a very short time, and we usually don't start observing a supernova until at least a few days after the explosion," said Samaporn Tinyanont, the lead author of the paper, which is set for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. TESS managed to capture one image of the evolving system every 30 minutes, starting a few days before the explosion and ending several weeks afterward. Hubble joined in on the action a few hours after the explosion was first detected. Archival data dating back to the 1990s was also brought in for the analysis, resulting in an unprecedented multi-decade survey of a star on its way out...

In the press release, the researchers referred to SN 2020fqv as the "Rosetta Stone of supernovas," as the new observations could translate hidden or poorly understood signals into meaningful data.

Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has aced another test. From a report: Following nearly 3 decades of monitoring, researchers have detected a subtle shift in the orbit of the closest known star to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way -- and the movement matches Einstein's theory precisely. The star, known as S2, follows an elliptical 16-year orbit. It made a close approach -- within 20 billion kilometers -- to our black hole, Sagittarius A*, last year. If Isaac Newton's classic description of gravity holds true, S2 should then continue along exactly the same path through space as on its previous orbit. But it didn't. Instead, it followed a slightly diverging path, the axis of its ellipse shifting slightly, a team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope reports today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The phenomenon, known as Schwarzschild precession, would, in time, cause S2 to trace out a spirographlike flower pattern in space -- as general relativity predicts.

The New York Times reports: Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by "an explosion." She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock said 11:35 p.m.

At first, Hamilton thought that a tree had fallen on her house. But, no, all the trees were there. She called 911 and, while on the phone with an operator, noticed a large charcoal gray object between her two floral pillows.

"Oh, my gosh," she recalled telling the operator, "there's a rock in my bed."

A meteorite, she later learned.

The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man's fist had barely missed Hamilton's head, leaving "drywall debris all over my face," she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it captivated the internet and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.

"It just seems surreal," Hamilton said in an interview Wednesday. "Then I'll go in and look in the room and, yep, there's still a hole in my ceiling. Yep, that happened."
The Times reports that Peter Brown, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, places the odds of a meteor crashing into someone's bed at 1 in 100 billion.

"In our new paper, published in Nature, we report the discovery of the first known exoplanet to survive the death of its star without having its orbit altered by other planets moving around -- circling a distance comparable to those between the Sun and the Solar System planets," writes one of the study's authors, Dimitri Veras, in an article for The Conversation. From the report: This new exoplanet, which we discovered with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, is particularly similar to Jupiter in both mass and orbital separation, and provides us with a crucial snapshot into planetary survivors around dying stars. A star's transformation into a white dwarf involves a violent phase in which it becomes a bloated "red giant," also known as a "giant branch" star, hundreds of times bigger than before. We believe that this exoplanet only just survived: if it was initially closer to its parent star, it would have been engulfed by the star's expansion. When the Sun eventually becomes a red giant, its radius will actually reach outwards to Earth's current orbit. That means the Sun will (probably) engulf Mercury and Venus, and possibly the Earth -- but we are not sure.

Jupiter, and its moons, have been expected to survive, although we previously didn't know for sure. But with our discovery of this new exoplanet, we can now be more certain that Jupiter really will make it. Moreover, the margin of error in the position of this exoplanet could mean that it is almost half as close to the white dwarf as Jupiter currently is to the Sun. If so, that is additional evidence for assuming that Jupiter, and Mars, will make it. So could any life survive this transformation? A white dwarf could power life on moons or planets that end up being very close to it (about one-tenth the distance between the Sun and Mercury) for the first few billion years. After that, there wouldn't be enough radiation to sustain anything. [...]

The new white dwarf exoplanet was found with what is known as the microlensing detection method. This looks at how light bends due to a strong gravitational field, which happens when a star momentarily aligns with a more distant star, as seen from Earth. The gravity from the foreground star magnifies the light from the star behind it. Any planets orbiting the star in the foreground will bend and warp this magnified light, which is how we can detect them. The white dwarf we investigated is one-quarter of the way towards the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, or about 6,500 light years away from our Solar System, and the more distant star is in the centre of the galaxy.

A spacecraft bound for the planet Mercury will take a first look at the target tonight, when it makes its first-ever flyby of the small rocky world during an incredibly close encounter tonight. Space.com reports: The mission, called BepiColombo, is a joint project of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It is only the second mission in history sent to orbit Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet of the solar system. BepiColombo's flyby tonight (Oct. 1) will bring the spacecraft within just 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the surface of Mercury, the closest the probe will ever get to the planet during its mission. The first images from the encounter are expected to reach Earth early Saturday (Oct. 2) and will be the first close images of Mercury's scorched surface since the end of NASA's Messenger orbiter mission in 2015.

BepiColombo will make its closest approach to Mercury at 7:34 p.m. EDT (2334 GMT) today (Oct.1), ESA said in a statement. The spacecraft will then continue on its winding trajectory around the sun. This close pass is one of nine gravity-assist flybys, maneuvers that use the gravity of celestial bodies to adjust a spacecraft's trajectory, that BepiColombo needs to perform before it can enter its target orbit around the planet. This flyby, however, will take the spacecraft even closer to the scorched planet's surface, than its ultimate scientific orbit of 300 to 930 miles (480 to 1,500 kilometers). The $750 million BepiColombo mission will be able to make measurements of the environment around the planet and take images with its black and white 'selfie' cameras, which provide a 1024 by 1024 pixel resolution (comparable to an early-2000s flip phone.) [...] After tonight's close pass, it will take four more flybys of Mercury by BepiColombo before the spacecraft is in the correct position to finally enter the planet's orbit, which is set to happen in 2025.