Space Stuff

A recently released NASA report warns that the U.S. has forgotten the power of the sun, creating a technological society susceptible like never before to massive infrastructure damage from solar storms.

The study, carried out for NASA by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, doesn’t predict some new solar or environmental disaster. Instead, it studies the effects of the sun’s normal, cyclical behavior upon modern technology.

Professor Daniel Baker is director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and chaired the panel that prepared the report.

“Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents,” writes Baker in a statement released with the report, “the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems.”

According the report, the U.S. has grown so dependent on modern technologies without respect of what the sun can and has done, that it’s risking major communications, finance, transportation, government and even emergency services meltdowns.

Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.

Of course, sound waves can’t travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can’t very efficiently. But radio waves can.

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There is “something new and interesting going on in the universe,” said Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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“The universe really threw us a curve,” Kogut said. “Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted.”

Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

[…]

For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.