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2 months ago | 
snexplores.org | Stephen Ornes |Trisha Muro |Emily Sohn
Some endings are easy to predict. Throw a ball in the air and it will fall back down. Run off a diving board and you’ll land in a pool. Stick a thumbtack in a balloon and it’ll pop. But forecasting something as big and complex as the end of the universe? That’s not even a little easy. People have been making predictions about the end of everything since the start of civilization. Scientists have been chasing this question for hundreds of years.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
phys.org | Trisha Muro |NSF's NOIRLab
Quasars are extremely luminous galactic cores where gas and dust falling into a central supermassive black hole emit enormous amounts of light. Due to their exceptional brightness, these objects can be seen at high redshifts, i.e., large distances.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Trisha Muro
It took three years and two teams of astronomers, but scientists managed to uncover the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the …
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
snexplores.org | Maria Temming |Trisha Muro
atom: The basic unit of a chemical element. Atoms are made up of a dense nucleus that contains positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons. The nucleus is orbited by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. Big Bang: The rapid expansion of dense matter and space-time that, according to current theory, marked the origin of the universe. It is supported by astronomers’ current understanding of the composition and structure of the universe.
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May 7, 2024 | 
snexplores.org | Bethany Brookshire |Sid Perkins |Trisha Muro
aluminum: A metallic element, the third most abundant in Earth’s crust. It is light and soft, and used in many items from bicycles to spacecraft. ampere: A rate of electrical current equal to one coulomb per second. attention: The phenomenon of focusing mental resources on a specific object or event. battery: A device that can convert chemical energy into electrical energy. ceramic: A hard but brittle material made by firing clay or some other non-metal-based mineral at a high temperature.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
snexplores.org | Katie Grace Carpenter |Carolyn Gramling |Trisha Muro
ATM: An abbreviation for automated teller machine. It is a stand-alone machine communicates with banks over the Internet. Depending on the ATM unit, some just dispense cash from a person’s account or from a line of credit offered to them by a credit-card company. Others accept cash deposits and give read-outs of how much money an individual has in a checking or savings account.
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Apr 22, 2024 | 
snexplores.org | Adam Mann |Skyler Ware |Lisa Grossman |Trisha Muro
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is raising big questions about the early universe. In its first images, JWST captured what appeared to be huge galaxies in the ancient universe. In fact, those galaxies looked much too big to fit scientists’ current theory of how the universe grew up. This has raised some concerns that the history of the early universe needs to be rewritten. But a new look at old data from the Hubble Space Telescope tells another story.
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Nov 6, 2023 | 
snexplores.org | Stephen Ornes |Trisha Muro
acidification: A process that lowers the pH of a solution. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it triggers chemical reactions that create carbonic acid. alkaline: An adjective that describes a chemical that produces hydroxide ions (OH-) in a solution. These solutions are also referred to as basic — as in the opposite of acidic — and have a pH above 7. ammonia: A colorless gas with a nasty smell. Ammonia is a compound made from the elements nitrogen and hydrogen.
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Oct 27, 2023 | 
openmindmag.org | Trisha Muro
My favorite coffee shop keeps a sign behind the espresso machine: “Is Mercury in retrograde?” The barista uses a flip-style “yes/no” just below to indicate each day’s status. I’ve noticed that her greetings tend to be more along the lines of, “Be careful out there!” when the sign says yes versus, “Hey, enjoy the gorgeous day!” when the sign says no. I instinctually roll my eyes at that sign. Her cappuccino is the best in town, though, so I keep coming back.
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Aug 16, 2023 | 
snexplores.org | Trisha Muro |Nikk Ogasa
astronomy: The area of science that deals with celestial objects, space and the physical universe. People who work in this field are called astronomers. axis: (in mathematics) The line to the side or bottom of a graph. It is labeled to explain the graph’s meaning and the units of measurement. constellation: Patterns formed by prominent stars that appear to lie close to each other in the night sky.
