Astronomers May Have Just Discovered the First Moon Beyond Our Solar System

We have the strongest evidence yet for a moon orbiting a planet outside of our solar system. This moon — if it exists — would be about the size of Neptune, which makes it kind of an oddball. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the nearly 4,000 exoplanets we’ve found outside of our solar system so far, it’s that there’s a lot of variation out there. So why not expect some strange exomoons in the bunch?

Playing with Light

This possible exomoon — it still needs to be confirmed — orbits a planet 8,000 light-years away from us. The planet is known as Kepler-1625b, and a paper based on the research was published in the journal Science Advances. How astronomers found its moon is a little complicated.

Often, scientists find distant planets by looking at a pattern of brightening and dimming as the planet passes in front of its star. So how about a moon?

There are two pieces of evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope that suggest a moon is lurking nearby. First is the variation of light. Over 19 long hours, Hubble observed the planet passing across its star. About 3.5 hours after the planet went by, there was a second and smaller dimming. As lead author David Kipping of Columbia University suggested in a statement, this variation suggests “a moon trailing the planet like a dog following its owner on a leash.”

The second piece of evidence deals with the timing of the planetary “transit” (the time when the planet passed across the star), which varied wildly from what astronomers expected. The Kepler space telescope had been watching Kepler-1625b for four years, so the astronomers had a good idea of how it should behave.

Hubble discovered that the planet passed across its parent star about 1.25 hours earlier than scheduled. This often happens when a planet has a moon in orbit around it, because it causes the planet to wobble from its predicted location in space. “An extraterrestrial civilization watching the Earth and moon transit the sun would note similar anomalies in the timing of Earth’s transit,” said Kipping, who is also a well-regarded exoplanet researcher.

The astronomers caution that more evidence is needed to confirm this exomoon. For example, we might be looking not at a moon, but at a second planet in the same star system. But then again, maybe not. After all, the Kepler telescope didn’t find any evidence for a second planet in its four years of work, so why should Hubble in 19 hours?

Artists’ impression of the exoplanet Kepler-1625b transiting the star with the candidate exomoon in tow.

Dan Durda

Artists’ impression of the exoplanet Kepler-1625b with its large hypothesized moon. The pair have similar mass and radius ratio to the Earth-Moon system but scaled up by a factor of 11.

Dan Durda

Why So Big?

This Neptune-sized moon, if it exists, seems unimaginably large. Neptune is an incredible four times larger in diameter than our own planet. Further, Neptune has 13 confirmed moons of its own! How can a distant solar system have a moon so ginormous that it’s the size of a gas-giant planet?

Well, strange planets are nothing new, so we wouldn’t expect less of a distant moon, would we? Other solar systems have “hot Jupiters,” which are Jupiter-sized gas giants that orbit right next to their star. In our solar system, we only have small, rocky worlds in that zone, so it’s a little hard to imagine a planet like Jupiter ending up there. Other solar systems also have exotic exoplanets such as super-Earths, which are rocky worlds bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune. We don’t know of any super-Earths in our own solar system.

And here’s the other thing to remember: The moon is probably Neptune-sized, but it’s puny compared to the mass of its parent planet. The moon is likely about 1.5 percent the mass of the planet it’s orbiting around. Relatively speaking, that’s the same mass difference between the Earth and our own moon, even though both this exoplanet and this exomoon are much larger.

Could aliens be living on this moon and planet? Sadly, the answer is “unlikely.” The planet and moon do lie inside of the star’s “habitable zone,” where water could exist on a rocky planet’s surface. Unfortunately, the moon is gaseous and way too big to host life as we know it — which means it’s likely the same sad situation for life on the planet.

Still, life or not, this possible exomoon might be one of the top scientific discoveries of 2018. All we need to do is get it confirmed. Shall we get started?

 

Written by Elizabeth Howell October 3, 2018

Electromagnetic Field Within you

Every once in a while, you might encounter a metaphysically-minded person who tells you that your aura is weak and that you need healing. Maybe they’ll even tell you that all humans have an electromagnetic field that they need to maintain if they’re going to stay happy and healthy. Would you be surprised to learn that they’re sort of right? Emphasis on sort of — your energy isn’t amber or any other color, but without it, you wouldn’t be able to touch anything, ever.

peshkov / iStock / Getty Images Plus

If There’s a Field, There’s a Way

So you probably know that you’re made up of cells, and those cells are made up of atoms. And maybe you also know that atoms are mostly empty space. Here’s a quick primer. An atom is an unbelievably tiny particle of matter with an unbelievably tiny nucleus inside it. How tiny? Well, if you blew that nucleus up to the size of a marble, the farthest electrons to orbit it would be about a football field away (roughly 360 feet, or 109 meters). Depending on the atom, between one and 118 electrons would fill a sphere with that enormous radius. That’s a whole lot of empty space in each atom. So why don’t atoms pass right through each other? For that matter, why doesn’t everything pass through everything else?

It’s because each atom is surrounded by an electric field. But this field isn’t produced by the electrons’ negative charges repelling each other. It’s a far more complicated exchange of energy.

The Electron Slide

Electrons don’t smoothly orbit a nucleus the way they do in the classic image. Instead, they exist as a cloud of quantum probabilities, each on certain energy levels at set distances from the nucleus. An electron can jump from one energy level, or orbital, to another, but doing so requires an exchange of energy. Additionally, the Pauli exclusion principle states that any one orbital of an atom can only contain one electron at a time. That means that when two objects get very close to each other, their electrons begin a coordinated dance.

In an enthusiastic Quora answer later published on Forbes, physics grad student Jack Fraser gave an explanation of how this dance of electrons prevents anything from ever actually touching anything else, beginning with the intriguing sentence, “I want you to imagine me punching you hard, in the nose.” In this face-punching scenario, the electrons of the atoms in his fist are pushed into the space of the electrons of the atoms in your nose. But the face electrons are already occupying the lower-energy orbits closer to their atoms’ respective nuclei. That means that if the fist electrons are going occupy the electric cloud of the face atoms, they’ll have to hop into a higher-energy orbital farther from the center.

But the energy needed to force all those electrons out of their orbitals needs to come from somewhere, and it’s a whole lot more than the human body can muster. So instead, the atoms repel each other. “This repulsion obviously then causes a chain reaction with all the other atoms in your face,” writes Fraser. “They all repel in unison from my fist (that’s why your nose doesn’t atomize into trillions of atoms!).” But what’s most incredible of all? The fist and the face never technicallytouch during the entire interaction.

“Not only is it possible that the human body creates EM [electromagnetic] fields — it is the only way you can possibly exist as a coherent entity!” Fraser concludes. “You are an electric field — a giant electric field which holds your atoms together, and which uses other electric fields to talk to other bits of yourself.” With that kind of reality-based phenomenon, who needs auras?

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Can’t get enough bizarre quirks of the laws of physics? In “Mind = Blown,” Matthew Santoro discovers all the weird and wacky facts the world has to offer (it’s free with your trial membership to Audible). We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase through that link, Curiosity will get a share of the sale.

Written by Reuben Westmaas August 16, 2018

Wi-Charge Can Charge Your Phone

One quick and easy way to induce anxiety is to misplace your phone charger. You’re stressed out just thinking about it right now, we know. What if instead of dealing with your wiry bundles and ports and mats and plugs and cords, you could just…walk into a room? That’s basically how Wi-Charge works.

Look Ma, No Cords!

Wi-Charge might not quite signal the death of the wired plug phone charger, but it surely aims to disrupt that need a bit. The device itself looks something like a smoke detector on the ceiling. As long as your phone, tablet, laptop, wireless speakers, etc. are in view of the Wi-Charge, you’ll get the juice. It’s technology they call “line-of-sight.” Initially, Wi-Charge will rely on dongles plugged into your device in order to transmit power, but internally installed receivers would remove that hassle.

The product isn’t commercially available yet, but the first phase will roll out in early 2018. You won’t be able to install one of these suckers in your home just yet. Wi-Charge is making its debut in commercial spaces, which, considering the panic and stress of a dying phone while on-the-go, might be more helpful anyway.

Cracking Wireless Power

In August 2017, the product received approval from the FDA. Yes, that FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. Anything transmitted over the air has to comply with safety and commercial regulations, which is usually overseen by the FCC. For example, radio frequency waves that help Bluetooth and Wi-Fi work are FCC-approved.

Wi-Charge, however, needed the go-ahead from the FDA. This product uses infrared beams to pump up your phone battery, making Wi-Charge the first company to achieve the power/range/safety level required for a commercial wireless power solution. Because the FCC doesn’t deal in infrared beams, the FDA was needed to ensure this technology is safe for people to be around.

It’s taken years for Wi-Charge to get to this point, and it keeps inching closer to reality. “The speed of charging and range have been improved, but are roughly the same as before. Range can reach up to 10 meters indoors, and power is up to three to four watts per device,” Ori Mor, Wi-Charge’s co-founder and vice president of research and development, told Digital Trends. “The speed of charging is slower than cable charging, but since the charging happens in the background without you even knowing, there’s no need for fast charging.”

Written by Joanie Faletto September 15, 2017

“How Will the Universe End?”- Possibilities –

There are plenty of ideas as to how the universe began, but how will it end? Chances are it won’t go on existing for eternity. Billions of years after we’re gone (if we’re lucky), what exactly will happen to the stars and galaxies we know? Here are four possibilities — some scarier than others.

ClaudioVentrella / iStock / Getty Images Plus

Closing Time

We know the universe won’t last forever because we can look back in time and see how it’s changed. Because it takes time for light to travel from distant galaxies to our telescopes, the light we receive is already old — billions of years old, in some cases. That means that if those telescopes can reach far enough into the universe, we can see the way the universe was billions of years ago. What we see is that galaxies used to be closer together than they are today, and everything has been moving away from everything else faster and faster as time has gone on.

That’s one piece of evidence that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Scientists aren’t sure what the mysterious force is that’s causing this, but they’ve given it a name: dark energy, which is some sort of substance or field that exerts a sort of reverse gravity. It pushes while gravity pulls. But the universe can’t go on expanding forever. Something’s gotta give, and when it does, it’ll likely happen in one of these ways.

Heat Death

An expanding cloud of smoke eventually dissipates into nothingness, and that’s exactly what will happen to our universe if it succumbs to heat death. If there’s enough dark energy in the universe, it will cause everything to keep moving farther and farther away from everything else. Galaxies will no longer be visible to each other and new stars will stop forming. Eventually, the atomic particles that make up everything will decay into subatomic particles, and those subatomic particles will move so far away from each other that they can no longer interact.

The universe will be dark, cold, and motionless, which is why this scenario is also called “The Big Freeze.” In fact, the “heat” part is solely in reference to the fact that it’s the result of entropy, not the temperature that would result. This is the most likely fate for our universe.

The Big Crunch

We assume that dark energy has pretty much leveled off to become a constant force. But what if it hasn’t? If dark energy were to weaken to a point where it couldn’t counteract the force of gravity, the opposite would happen. In the Big Crunch, the expansion of the universe eventually reverses. Galaxies would get closer and closer together, eventually colliding with each other and collapsing under the force of their own gravity. All of the matter in the universe would fall in on itself until everything went back to the way it began: as a singularity, an infinitely dense speck. Given what we know about dark energy, the chances of a Big Crunch are fortunately slim.

The Big Rip

In the heat death of the universe, dark energy is more or less constant. In the Big Crunch, it weakens. In the Big Rip, dark energy gets stronger over time, making it so galaxies not only move away from each other but start expanding from within. Galaxies, stars, and planets would be ripped apart, and eventually, dark energy would become so powerful that it would tear apart molecules and atoms.

“If the Big Rip is coming, it’s not coming for a very long time,” said theoretical astrophysicist Katie Mack in a talk at the NECSS conference in July. “We have at least 120 billion years before we have to worry about this. So you can rest easy — it’ll be a while.”

Vacuum Decay

While the last three scenarios wouldn’t occur for billions of years, vacuum decay could happen at any moment. It’s based on the nature of something called the Higgs field, which permeates our universe and varies in strength based on its potential. You can think of its potential like water in a waterslide. The higher up the waterslide you go, the more energy the water has. When it reaches the very lowest energy possible — say, into the pool at the bottom — you’d call that the vacuum state. Here’s the problem: There are two possibilities for the vacuum state of the universe. It might be a true vacuum, in which case the energy of the Higgs field really is the lowest it can go. We’re chilling out in the pool at the bottom of the slide. But it also might be a false vacuum, in which case there’s another lower-energy state we don’t know about — the pool happens to have a giant bathtub plug, and pulling it can make all of the water rush into an even lower state.

If an event with enough energy occurs in the universe at any time, it could pull that plug. Even more alarming, it could happen without any prodding at all: Quantum particles have the ability to “tunnel” through a barrier, whether from one side of a wall to another or from one vacuum state to another, so random quantum fluctuations could do this too.

“That would be bad,” Mack said, “because the true vacuum has different constants of nature than the false vacuum. Constants of nature are things like the charge of the electron or the mass of the particles or even the strength of gravity sometimes. So if you take the molecules that you’re made of and put them into a true vacuum state, those molecules don’t hold together anymore. Total destruction.”

All it would take is one lone particle flitting off to somewhere it shouldn’t, and reality would cease to exist. Sweet dreams!

What does dark energy do? https://rumble.com/v4g4w5-s2-ep5-what-does-dark-energy-really-do.html

Written by Ashley Hamer August 3, 2018

The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved

The area of ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda known as the Bermuda Triangle is the source of much mystery. Over the centuries, reports of ships and planes vanishing without a trace have haunted the public consciousness, leading the zone to be nicknamed “The Devil’s Triangle.” Suggested causes for these mysterious disappearances run the gamut from strange natural phenomena to underwater alien bases, but there’s a more basic question to ask: do more crafts really disappear in the Bermuda Triangle than in any similarly trafficked area? For decades, we’ve known that the answer is no.

In 1975, journalist Larry Kusche published the book “The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved.” In it, he reexamined as many Bermuda Triangle incidents from 1840 to 1973 as possible, including those in publications by other writers. One such writer was the man who might be considered the father of the legend, Charles Berlitz, who in 1974 wrote The Bermuda Triangle, the first book to suggest that something strange was going on in the area. Kusche found that most of the writers’ stories were just repeated from other publications without any fact checking, and of them all, Charles Berlitz may have been the worst offender: “If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red,” Benjamin Radford quoted Kusche as writing, “the chance of it being some other color is almost a certainty.” So what did Kusche find? In some cases, there’s no record of the ship in question ever existing. In others, the ships and planes were real but their “mysterious disappearances” were during bad storms—storms that the writer usually failed to mention. Still other incidents took place far away from the area. This isn’t to say there are no disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, but it’s important to remember that the zone is heavily traveled by both ships and planes, so the odds are good that more crafts will sink or crash in that area than in a less trafficked one. So the next time you hear that someone has “solved” a mystery, take a step back and ask whether there was any mystery in the first place. Explore the legends of the Bermuda Triangle in the videos below.

The Truth About the Bermuda Triangle: https://youtu.be/R-KBDzDkjQc

The Bermuda Triangle | CLASSIC | @ConspiracyStuff: https://youtu.be/O1d95T5ZGLo

Written by Curiosity Staff November 2, 2016

Reading Technique to Boost Your Memory and Learning Speed

The scene is not an unfamiliar one: You end your study session Sunday night knowing everything there is to know about Napoleon Bonaparte. But Monday morning when that exam slides onto your desk, all you can recall is the llama scene from Napoleon Dynamite. Eat the food, Tina! Turns out an impossibly easy study hack that could’ve saved the day was right under your nose the whole time. Literally.

So Long, Flash Cards

In December 2017, a study from the University of Waterloo delivered a face-palmingly simple learning technique. Hope you’re sitting down for this one: If you want to remember something, read it out loud. Mind. Blown. The researchers found that speaking what you read aloud helps to get it into your long-term memory. Easy as that.

Keep It Simple, Student

This study hack works due to something the researchers dubbed the “production effect,” or the fact that actually producing the words you read with your voice has a big impact on memory. Reading out loud lets you visually and audibly receive the information at the same time. “This study confirms that learning and memory benefit from active involvement,” psychologist and co-author of the study Colin MacLeod said in a statement. “When we add an active measure or a production element to a word, that word becomes more distinct in long-term memory, and hence more memorable.”

“Say the information that you want to remember out loud and you’ll have a higher likelihood of remembering it,” MacLeod told Inc. “Yes, it’s that simple!” And he’s not kidding. His study tested four methods of learning written information, including reading silently, hearing someone else read, listening to a recording of yourself reading, and reading aloud in real time. The winning method was — drumroll please! — reading aloud in real time, which gave participants between a five and fifteen percent boost in learning speed. Wish you knew that one in school, right?

While we’re at it, here’s another tip for getting the most out of your studying: Be deliberate. Reading out loud is one thing, but be clear about what you’re about to study and why. A study published in April 2017 by a Stanford research fellow explains how a deliberate studying technique can get As out of B+ students. According to Patricia Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, having students focus on how they plan to use their study time is what shows real results.

Written by Joanie Faletto January 24, 2018

The 3 Things to Do to Boost Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence isn’t your ticket for acing the SATs, but it is what will shape you into a functional, sympathetic, well-adjusted human adult. EQ, as it’s casually called, is the ability to identify and manage your emotions and the emotions of others. If all you know is “happy,” “sad,” and “angry,” then buckle up for an EQ crash course. You’ll feel some feels and thank us later.

Can You Feel It?

EQ is the underrated, outcast sibling constantly overshadowed by the book-smart IQ. But it shouldn’t be. In 2016, Fast Company called EQ one of the fastest growing job skills, and that hiring managers value it more than IQ. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, emotional intelligence will be one of the top 10 job skills in 2020. What’s all the hubbub over being emotionally in-tune? People with EQ better understand and sympathize with others, making them better, more thoughtful team players.

Boosting your EQ may mean stepping outside your comfort zone a bit. For example, until recently, a long-held assumption stated that all emotions fell into one of six larger emotion buckets: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust.

According to a 2017 study by University of California Berkeley researchers, that’s pretty far from reality. The researchers identified not six, but 27 distinct emotions. Take note, because here they are: amusement, awkwardness, adoration, admiration, joy, awe, craving, aesthetic appreciation, calmness, entrancement, nostalgia, confusion, anxiety, fear, horror, disgust, sexual desire, romance, anger, pain, sadness, surprise, relief, excitement, interest, satisfaction, and boredom. Wow, the movie “Inside Out” was woefully incomplete.

Emotionally 1,2, 3

Now that you understand the importance of EQ, let’s dive into how we can make the world a more emotionally intelligent place, shall we? Neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett laid out three steps to boosting your intelligence in her book “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.” Here they are, summed up in neat packages:

1. Recognize a wide array of emotions. This something Barrett calls “emotional granularity.” If all you’re able to identify is “me happy” and “me sad,” all you’ll ever feel is happiness or sadness. Once you give the 27 emotions (and more! Why not?) the credit they deserve, you’ll begin exploring the granularity of the feels. In Barrett’s words, “your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses.” That’s a good thing.

2. Learn new words for specific emotions. Norwegians have a word for the intense joy of falling in love: “forelsket.” If you’re thinking that that is just a fancy way to say ecstatic, consider this. Would you equate “regret” with “heartache”? Of course not. Yet both of those words roll up into “sadness.” Once you learn new words for specific emotions, you can keep expanding your emotional granularity.

Barrett writes, “You’ve probably never thought about learning words as a path to greater emotional health, but it follows directly from the neuroscience of construction. Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget, and your body budget determines how you feel. Therefore, the more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your predicting brain can calibrate your budget to your body’s needs. In fact, people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness.”

3. Create new emotions. Who says you can’t? If you don’t have a word for a certain feeling you experience, naming it can make it real, thus expanding your emotional granularity even further. Where does it end?! Words are constructed: all words. Listen to your body when you notice the feels; don’t necessarily depend on a dictionary to tell you what’s happening.

Want to continue improving your EQ? Check out Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.” We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase through that link, Curiosity will get a share of the sale.

 

Written by Joanie Faletto September 25, 2017