Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
We also have a growing library of space science talks featuring Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astrophysicist Sean Carroll and more.
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8 posts tagged Harvard
Runaway Planets Zoom at a Fraction of Light Speed |
Seven years ago, astronomers boggled when they found the first runaway star flying out of our galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour. The discovery intrigued theorists, who wondered: If a star can get tossed outward at such an extreme velocity, could the same thing happen to planets?
New research shows that the answer is yes. Not only do runaway planets exist, but some of them zoom through space at a few percent of the speed of light — up to 30 million miles per hour.
“These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in our galaxy. If you lived on one of them, you’d be in for a wild ride from the center of the galaxy to the Universe at large,” said astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“Other than subatomic particles, I don’t know of anything leaving our galaxy as fast as these runaway planets,” added lead author Idan Ginsburg of Dartmouth College. continue reading
Planets With Double Suns Are Common |
Astronomers using NASA’s Kepler mission have discovered two new circumbinary planet systems — planets that orbit two stars, like Tatooine in the movie Star Wars. Their find, which brings the number of known circumbinary planets to three, shows that planets with two suns must be common, with many millions existing in our Galaxy.
“Once again, we’re seeing science fact catching up with science fiction,” said co-author Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The work was published online in the journal Nature and presented by lead author William Welsh (San Diego State University) at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The two new planets, named Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b, are both gaseous Saturn-size planets. Kepler-34b orbits its two Sun-like stars every 289 days, and the stars themselves orbit each other every 28 days. Kepler-35b revolves around a pair of smaller stars (80 and 89 percent of the Sun’s mass) every 131 days, and the stars orbit one another every 21 days. Both systems reside in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, with Kepler-34 located 4,900 light-years from Earth and Kepler-35 at a distance of 5,400 light-years.
Circumbinary planets have two suns, not just one, and due to the orbital motion of the stars, the amount of energy the planet receives varies greatly. This changing energy flow could produce wildly varying climates. continue reading
NASA’s Chandra Finds Nearest Pair of Supermassive Black Holes |
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon.
The black holes are located near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago.
“If this galaxy wasn’t so close, we’d have no chance of separating the two black holes the way we have,” said Pepi Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that appears in this week’s online issue of the journal Nature. “Since this galaxy was right under our noses by cosmic standards, it makes us wonder how many of these black hole pairs we’ve been missing.” continue reading
Newly Merged Black Hole Eagerly Shreds Stars
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A galaxy’s core is a busy place, crowded with stars swarming around an enormous black hole. When galaxies collide, it gets even messier as the two black holes spiral toward each other, merging to make an even bigger gravitational monster.
Once it is created, the monster goes on a rampage. The merger kicks the black hole into surrounding stars. There it finds a hearty meal, shredding and swallowing stars at a rapid clip. According to new research by Nick Stone and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), upcoming sky surveys might offer astronomers a way to catch a gorging black hole “in the act.”
Before the merger, as the two black holes whirl around each other, they stir the galactic center like the blade of a blender. Their strong gravity warps space, sending out ripples known as gravitational waves. When the black holes merge, they emit gravitational waves more strongly in one direction. That inequality kicks the black hole in the opposite direction like a rocket engine.
“That kick is very important. It can shove the black hole toward stars that otherwise would have been at a safe distance,” said Stone.
“Essentially, the black hole can go from starving to enjoying an all-you-can-eat buffet,” he added. read more
Electric wands could allow future firefighters to extinguish flames with a wave of the hand, recent experiments suggest
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a team from Harvard University’s Whitesides Research Group has shown that electric fields can snuff out fires too—potentially reducing water damage as well as environmental threats posed by fire retardants.
The scientists connected a thin wire to a 600-watt amplifier—roughly as powerful as a high-end car stereo and about as big as a file cabinet—plugged into the wall.
The “wand” system generated an electric field with the strength of a million volts per meter, “approximately the field necessary to generate a spark in dry air,” said chemist Ludovico Cademartiri, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
Whenever the researchers brought the electric wand close a burner emanating thin jets of fire up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) tall, the flames almost instantly went out.
Despite it’s almost Harry Potter-level power, though, the firefighting wand is said to be quite safe. Its electric frequency, voltage, and current “are not sufficient to create health issues in a healthy person,” Cademartiri said.
Future versions may be even more benign. A wand using only a tenth of the experiment’s wattage could do nearly as good a job, Cademartiri speculated—making the wand system potentially portable in some future iteration.
(via lickystickypickywe)
// A new Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Messier 82, or M82, shows the result of star formation on overdrive. M82 is located about 12 million light years from Earth and is the nearest place to us where the conditions are similar to those when the Universe was much younger with lots of stars forming.
M82 is a so-called starburst galaxy, where stars are forming at rates that are tens or even hundreds of times higher than in a normal galaxy. The burst of star birth may be caused by a close encounter or collision with another galaxy, which sends shock waves rushing through the galaxy. In the case of M82, astronomers think that a brush with its neighbor galaxy M81 millions of years ago set off this torrent of star formation. M82 is seen nearly edge-on with its disk crossing from about 10 o’clock to about 4 o’clock in this image from Chandra (where low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are colored red, green, and blue respectively.) Among the 104 point-like X-ray sources in the image, eight so far have been observed to be very bright in X-rays and undergo clear changes in brightness over periods of weeks and years. This means they are excellent candidates to be black holes pulling material from companion stars that are much more massive than the Sun. Only a handful of such binary systems are known in the Local Group of galaxies containing the Milky Way and M31. Chandra observations are also important in understanding the rapid rate at which supernovas explode in starburst galaxies like M82. When the shock waves travel through the galaxy, they push on giant clouds of gas and dust, which causes them to collapse and form massive stars. These stars, in turn, use up their fuel quickly and explode as supernovas. These supernovas produce expanding bubbles of multimillion-degree gas that extend for millions light years away from the galaxy’s disk. These bubbles are seen as the large red areas to the upper right and lower left of the image. read moreChandra Images Torrent of Star Formation
// With advances in nanostructured devices, lower operating temperatures, and the use of an abundant fuel source and cheaper materials, a group of researchers led by Shriram Ramanathan at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are increasingly optimistic about the commercial viability of the technology. Ramanathan, an expert and innovator in the development of solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), says they may, in fact, soon become the go-to technology for those on the go. Electrochemical fuel cells have long been viewed as a potential eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuels — especially as most SOFCs leave behind little more than water as waste. read moreMethane-Powered Laptops? Materials Scientists Unveil Tiny, Low-Temperature Methane Fuel Cells
In a study appearing in the journal PLoS ONE, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) scientists describe finding mathematical patterns underlying the way individuals unconsciously distribute their preferences regarding approaching or avoiding objects in their environment. These patterns appear to meet the strict criteria used to determine whether something is a scientific law and, if confirmed in future studies, could potentially be used to guide diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorder. read more‘Law-Like’ Mathematical Patterns in Human Preference Behavior Discovered
