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More space news!


tkdguy

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This month's Scientific American has three space-related articles. The lead story is about the proposed inference of Planet X. The article notes that even the astronomers who propose Planet X are cautious, because there's a long history of similar inferred bodies that turned out not to exist. It's worth searching for Planet X, but it's far from a sure thing.

 

The issue also has a brief report on observation of the curious "Jellyfish" galaxies, and a reminiscence by comet-hunter David Levy (of Shoemaker-Levy 9 famE).

 

Apart from space, Michael Shermer's "Skeptic" column, "Afterlife for Atheists," reported on research to cryopreserve brains in hopes the information in the synapses -- the connectome -- can be used to reconstruct the personality later. Shermer finds the proposal interesting, but is far from convinced.

 

Dean Shomshak

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The tech paper about this is here. It may not be behind the subscriber wall; the page says "free article". Since my workstation is on the site license for the journal, I can't reliably tell whether that's really open or not without going home, which won't happen for a few hours.

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Yeah, the evidence looks quite convincing for detection of gravitational waves from a black hole merger, detected last September 14. A 29 solar mass black hole merged with a 36 solar mass black hole, about 1.3 billion years ago (i.e., 1.3 billion light years away), forming a 62 solar mass single black hole. 3 solar masses was converted into gravitational waves energy and radiated away over about 20 milliseconds.

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