Carnival of Space 331

The Carnival of Space 331 is up at Photos to Space.

NASA’s Chandra Xray telescope has been looking at its first exoplanet and found that the planet appeared three times larger in Xray than when viewed in optical light

NASA’s Chandra Xray telescope, orbiting the Earth at a speed of 1.7 kilometers per second, has been pointed at an exoplanet for the first time, giving astronomers their first glimpse of another world at Xray wavelengths. They not only found that the Jupiter sized world has a thick atmosphere, but also discovered a previously undiscovered star orbiting in the same system.

Arxiv – Transit observations of the Hot Jupiter HD 189733b at X-ray wavelengths

Julian Sonner, a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led research showing that when two of these quarks are created, string theory creates a wormhole linking the quarks.

You can’t get entangled without a wormhole. MIT physicist finds the creation of entanglement simultaneously gives rise to a wormhole.

what enables particles to communicate instantaneously — and seemingly faster than the speed of light — over such vast distances? Earlier this year, physicists proposed an answer in the form of “wormholes,” or gravitational tunnels. The group showed that by creating two entangled black holes, then pulling them apart, they formed a wormhole — essentially a “shortcut” through the universe — connecting the distant black holes.

Now an MIT physicist has found that, looked at through the lens of string theory, the creation of two entangled quarks — the building blocks of matter — simultaneously gives rise to a wormhole connecting the pair.

The theoretical results bolster the relatively new and exciting idea that the laws of gravity holding together the universe may not be fundamental, but arise from something else: quantum entanglement.

Nextbigfuture – Using the powerful­ eye of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. The presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds.

Nextbigfuture – SpaceX plans to begin testing components of a methane-fueled engine called Raptor at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi early 2014. SpaceX will perform these tests at Stennis’ E-2 test facility, which will require an upgrade to accommodate the full Raptor engine — a closed-loop methane-oxygen concept SpaceX is working on for missions to deep space. The upgrades would be funded by SpaceX, NASA and the Mississippi Development Authority. SpaceX’s Raptor engine is designed to generate more than 661,000 pounds of thrust in a vacuum. The current Raptor concept “is a highly reusable methane staged-combustion engine that will power the next generation of SpaceX launch vehicles designed for the exploration and colonization of Mars,” Shanklin said. “The Raptor engine currently in development is the first in what we expect to be a family of engines.

Nextbigfuture – Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) successfully completed its first geostationary transfer mission, delivering the SES-8 satellite to its targeted 295 x 80,000 km orbit. Falcon 9 executed a picture-perfect flight, meeting 100% of mission objectives. Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at 5:41 PM Eastern Time. Approximately 185 seconds into flight, Falcon 9’s second stage’s single Merlin vacuum engine ignited to begin a five minute, 20 second burn that delivered the SES-8 satellite into its parking orbit. Eighteen minutes after injection into the parking orbit, the second stage engine relit for just over one minute to carry the SES-8 satellite to its final geostationary transfer orbit. The restart of the Falcon 9 second stage is a requirement for all geostationary transfer missions.

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