Tag "space"

An international team of astrophysicists has been studying the formation of strong electrostatic waves, ion holes, in the Earth's magnetotail and assessing their impact on space weather. They found that ion holes propagate oblique to the local magnetic field. The study's findings can contribute to a better understanding of processes in the Earth's magnetotail which affect space weather in the near-Earth plasma environment and the polar region. The paper is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

A team of Russian researchers from HSE University, the Russian Space Research Institute, and the Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism (Russian Academy of Sciences) has described the development of modulational instability of electromagnetic waves in dusty ionospheric plasma, which is caused by a high intensity of electromagnetic emissions. The researchers considered inelastic collisions of ionospheric plasma particles and formulated new tasks and applications to be addressed at a later stage. The results are published in the Physics of Plasmas journal.

An international team of Russian and Belgian researchers has found out that space travel has a significant impact on the brain: they discovered that cosmonauts demonstrate changes in  brain connectivity related to perception and movement. Some areas, such as regions in the insular and parietal cortices, work more synchronously with other brain areas after the space flight. On the other hand,  connectivity of some other regions, such as the cerebellum and vestibular nuclei,  decreases. The results of the study were published in Frontiers in Physiology.

The results of recent study conducted by the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the agency’s automatic interplanetary station, show the existence of a ‘permafrost’ near the poles of the Moon with a relatively high content of water ice (up to 5% by weight). It is believed that water ice could supply a life support system for the future Russian Lunar Station and that it could also produce hydrogen-oxygen fuel for flights into deep space.

Researchers from the Higher School of Economics and Space Research Institute (Russia) have calculated the main parameters that determine space weather close to the nearest Earth-like exoplanet, Proxima Centauri b. Such parameters include solar wind, as well as galactic and solar cosmic rays. The results of the research were published in Astronomy Letters.

The big scanning antenna at the Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory logs almost 90 GB of data every day. The data are usually processed by the astronomers manually. Vladimir Samodurov and Alexander Gorbunov, researchers at the HSE Faculty of Business and Management, decided to relieve the scholars from this hard work and give this job to neural networks. They shared the results of their work in the paper ‘Perspectives of intellectual processing of large volumes of astronomical data using neural networks’.