Tag: space

Voting from space … again

Rick Busdiecker1 Comment

Kate Rubins is headed to space in October and, while there, plans to vote in the US Presidential election from the International Space Station, for a second time. It turns out that astronauts have been voting from space for decades.

Rubins also cast her vote from the International Space Station during the 2016 election

Three other astronauts, who have filled out the paperwork, are expected to join Rubin on the Space Station in the final days before the election.

A team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston coordinates between each astronaut’s County Clerk and the "completed ballot is downlinked and delivered back to the County Clerk’s Office by e-mail to be officially recorded."

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Dark Matter as Black Holes redux

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Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

Stephen Hawking and Bernard Carr hypothesized that conditions close to the Big Bang would have produced primodial black holes, including some that were smaller than can be formed by collapsing stars, and some that are bigger than is easily explained by stellar collapse black holes combining over time.

And at some point, there was a school of thought that the unexplained "missing" mass in the universe might actually be caught up in black holes that we are not able to detect. This idea lost popularity, in the scientific community, as people explored ideas like Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) but after decades without seeing signs of the required fundamental particles, some are investigating the idea again. Some recent evidence from gravitational limits the possibilities, but some researchers remain hopeful that the explanation for the universe’s "missing" mass is tied to black holes rather than exotic particles.

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Life on Venus?

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The images used to create this view of Venus were acquired by the Mariner 10 craft on Feb. 7 and 8, 1974

This is kind of a big deal. It could mean just mean that there’s a smelly deadly gas out there, that can be created in ways that we don’t understand much. Yawn, right?

Of course, the excitement is that it could also mean that the gas came to be on Venus through means that we already understand … from life.

As Carl Sagan, who also hypothesized about ways for life to exist on Venus, said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". To be clear, humans have not discovered life on Venus … yet. But, this is evidence that might indicate that there’s life on Venus. Following up on that evidence will be a huge challenge, and we might well find life, or proof of past life, on Mars first.

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