Melbourne-based developer xssfox has championed a unique "diagonal mode" for monitors by utilizing Linux's xrandr (x resize and rotate) tool, finding a 22-degree tilt to the left to be the ideal angle for software development on her 32:9 aspect ratio monitor. As Tom's Hardware notes, Linux is the "only OS to support a diagonal monitor mode, which you can customize to any tilt of your liking." It begs the question, could 2024 be the year of the Linux diagonal desktop? From the report: Xssfox devised a consistent method to appraise various screen rotations, working through the staid old landscape and portrait modes, before deploying xrandr to test rotations like the slightly skewed 1 degree and an indecisive 45 degrees. These produced mixed results of questionable benefits, so the search for the Goldilocks solution continued. It turns out that a 22-degree tilt to the left was the sweet spot for xssfox. This rotation delivered the best working screen space on what looks like a 32:9 aspect ratio monitor from Dell. "So this here, I think, is the best monitor orientation for software development," the developer commented. "It provides the longest line lengths and no longer need to worry about that pesky 80-column limit."

If you have a monitor with the same aspect ratio, the 22-degree angle might work well for you, too. However, people with other non-conventional monitor rotation needs can use xssfox's javascript calculator to generate the xrandr command for given inputs. People who own the almost perfectly square LG DualUp 28MQ780 might be tempted to try 'diamond mode,' for example. We note that Windows users with AMD and Nvidia drivers are currently shackled to applying screen rotations using 90-degree steps. MacOS users apparently face the same restrictions.

Andy Maxwell reports via TorrentFreak: As the crew of Artemis 2 prepare to become the first humans to fly to the moon since 1972, the possibilities of space travel are once again igniting imaginations globally. More than 92% of internet users who want to learn more about this historic mission and the program in general are statistically likely to use Google search. Behind the scenes, however, the ability to find relevant content is under attack. Blundering DMCA takedown notices sent by a company calling itself DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. claim to protect the rights of an OnlyFans/Instagram model working under the name 'Artemis'. Instead, keyword-based systems that fail to discriminate between copyright-infringing content and that referencing the word Artemis in any other context, are flooding towards Google. They contain demands to completely deindex non-infringing, unrelated content, produced by innocent third parties all over the world.

A recent deindexing demand dated December 13, 2022, lists DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. of Canada as the sender. The name of the content owner is redacted but the notice itself states that the company represents a content creator performing under the name Artemis. The notice demands the removal of 3,617 URLs from Google search. If successful, those URLs would be completely unfindable by more than 92% of the world's population who use that search engine. [...] At least 9 of the first 20 URLs in the notice demand the removal of non-infringing articles and news reports referencing the Artemis space program. None have anything to do with the content the sender claims to protect. [...]

Theories as to who might own and/or operate DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. aren't hard to find but the company does exist and is registered as a corporate entity in Canada. Registered at the same address is a company with remarkably similar details. BranditScan is a corporate entity operating in exactly the same market offering similar if not identical services. BranditScan has sent DMCA takedown notices to Google under three different notifier accounts.

Online retailer Zulily is shutting down. Writing on the company's homepage, an official said Zulily's leadership had "made the difficult but necessary decision to conduct an orderly wind-down of the business to maximize value for the companies' creditors." From a report: Launched in 2010 and based in Seattle, Zulily specialized in children's and women's apparel. It went public in 2013, and at one point was valued at approximately $9 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The retailer was long considered a staple of Seattle's tech scene, and in 2019 signed a multiyear sponsorship deal with the Major League Soccer team Seattle Sounders. More recently, Zulily became known for its aggressive advertising across social media platforms. Further reading: 'Office Space' Inspired Engineer's Theft Scheme, Police Say.

AstroForge, a private company, wants to mine a space rock, but it doesn't want the competition to find out which one. From a report: For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line. Sometime in the coming year, a spacecraft from AstroForge, an American asteroid-mining firm, may be launched on a mission to a rocky object near Earth's orbit. If successful, it will be the first wholly commercial deep-space mission beyond the moon. AstroForge, however, is keeping its target asteroid secret.

The secret space-rock mission is the latest in an emerging trend that astronomers and other experts do not welcome: commercial space missions conducted covertly. Such missions highlight gaps in the regulation of spaceflight as well as concerns about whether exploring the cosmos will continue to benefit all humankind. "I'm very much not in favor of having stuff swirling around the inner solar system without anyone knowing where it is," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. "It seems like a bad precedent to set." But for AstroForge, the calculation is simple: If it reveals the destination, a competitor may grab the asteroid's valuable metals for itself. "Announcing which asteroid we are targeting opens up risk that another entity could seize that asteroid," said Matt Gialich, AstroForge's chief executive.

"The iMessage connection software that powers Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud is now 100% open source," Beeper announced late this week. " Anyone who wants can use it or continue development."

But while Beeper says it's done trying to bring iMessage to Android, CNET reports that the whole battle was "deeply tied" to Apple's ongoing strategy to control the mobile market: The tide seems to be changing, however: Apple said last month it would be opening up its Messages app (likely due to European regulation) to work with the newer, more feature-rich texting protocol called RCS. This hopefully will lead to a more modern and secure messaging experience when texting between an iPhone and an Android phone, and lead away from the aging SMS and MMS standards. Unfortunately, green bubbles will continue to persist even if there might be little to no functional difference. While third-party apps like Nothing Chats attempted and ultimately failed to bring iMessage to Android, Apple will likely never release the app on Google's mobile operating system.

Until RCS is fully adopted, companies are creating services to allow access to iMessage via Android phones. Apple, for its part, has been quick to block apps like Beeper Mini, citing security concerns. This, however, is raising eyebrows from lawmakers regarding competition in the messaging space and Apple's tight control over the market...

Beeper in a December 21 blog post told users to grab a jailbroken iPhone and install a free Beeper tool that'll generate iMessage registration codes to keep the service operational. It's such a roundabout and potentially expensive way of trying to get iMessage on Android that it likely won't be worth it for most people. For those not willing to go out and jailbreak an iPhone, Beeper said in a now-deleted blog post that it would allow people to rent a jailbroken unit for a small monthly fee starting next year.

During a meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Kamala Harris said an international astronaut will land on the Moon during one of NASA's Artemis missions. "Today, in recognition of the essential role that our allies and partners play in the Artemis program, I am proud to announce that alongside American astronauts, we intend to land an international astronaut on the surface of the Moon by the end of the decade," Harris said. Ars Technica reports: Although the National Space Council is useful in aggregating disparate interests across the US government to help form more cohesive space policies, public meetings like the one Wednesday can seem perfunctory. Harris departed the stage soon after her speech, and other government officials read from prepared remarks during the rest of the event. Nevertheless, Harris' announcement highlighted the role the space program plays in elevating the soft power of the United States. It was widely assumed an international astronaut would eventually land on the Moon with NASA. Harris put a deadline on achieving this goal.

NASA has long included astronauts from its international partners on human spaceflight missions, dating back to the ninth flight of the space shuttle in 1983, when West German astronaut Ulf Merbold joined five Americans on a flight to low-Earth orbit. This was seen by US government officials as a way to foster closer relations with like-minded countries. The inclusion of foreign astronauts on US missions also repays partner nations who make financial commitments to US-led space projects with a high-profile flight opportunity for one of their citizens.

Among the international partners contributing to Artemis, it seems most likely a European astronaut would get the first slot for a landing with NASA. ESA funded the development of the service modules used on NASA's Orion spacecraft, which will ferry astronauts from Earth to the Moon and back. These modules provide power and propulsion for Orion. ESA is also developing refueling and communications infrastructure for the Gateway mini-space station to be constructed in orbit around the Moon.

A Japanese astronaut might also have a shot at getting a seat on an Artemis landing. Japan's government has committed to providing the life-support system for the Gateway's international habitation module, along with resupply services to deliver cargo to Gateway. Japan is also interested in building a pressurized rover for astronauts to drive across the lunar surface. In recognition of Japan's contributions, NASA last year committed to flying a Japanese astronaut aboard Gateway. Canada is building a robotic arm for Gateway, but a Canadian astronaut already has a seat on NASA's first crewed Artemis mission, albeit without a trip to the lunar surface.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit.

For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.

NASA has successfully beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video from a record-setting 19 million miles away. The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, as it is called, is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming HD video from deep space to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit. From a NASA press release: The [15-second test] video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system's maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent "live" to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.

The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA's Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet's greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche's orbital path, Palomar's telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater's heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. There's also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. "Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," said Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL. "In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL's DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology -- everyone loves Taters."

Using a "recently refurbished" telescope array, SETI scientists performed 541 hours of additional observations — and found 35 new "Fast Radio Bursts" (or FRBs). SciTechDaily reports: All 35 FRBs were found in the lower part of the frequency spectrum, each with its unique energy signature. "This work is exciting because it provides both confirmation of known FRB properties and the discovery of some new ones," said the SETI Institute's Dr. Sofia Sheikh, NSF MPS-Ascend Postdoctoral Fellow and lead author. "We're narrowing down the source of FRBs, for example, to extreme objects such as magnetars, but no existing model can explain all of the properties that have been observed so far. It has been wonderful to be part of the first FRB study done with the Allen Telescope Array — this work proves that new telescopes with unique capabilities, like the Allen Telescope Array, can provide a new angle on outstanding mysteries in FRB science."

The detailed findings, recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), showcase the intriguing behaviors of FRBs. These mysterious signals exhibit downward frequency drifting, a connection between their bandwidth and center frequency, and changes in burst duration over time. The team also observed something that had never been reported before: there was a noticeable drop in the center frequency of bursts over the two months of observation, revealing an unexpected cosmic slide-whistle...

No clear pattern was found, highlighting the unpredictability of these celestial phenomena.
SETI says its Allen Telescope Array (or ATA) was custom-built for SETI searches, "thanks to the interest and benevolence of many donors, including technologists Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and Nathan Myhrvold (former Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft)." The Allen Telescope Array offers SETI scientists access to an instrument seven days a week, and permits the search of several different targets (usually nearby star systems) simultaneously. This can result in a speed-up of SETI searches by a factor of at least 100.

Of the 15,000 satellites humans have sent into space, "just over half are still functioning," reports CNN. "The rest, after running out of fuel and ending their serviceable life, have either burned up in the atmosphere or are still orbiting the planet as useless hunks of metal" — scattering "an aura of space junk around the planet."

"One way to start tackling the problem would be to stop producing more junk — by refueling satellites rather than decommissioning them once they run out of power." "Right now you can't refuel a satellite on orbit," says Daniel Faber, CEO of Orbit Fab. But his Colorado-based company wants to change that... "The lack of fuel creates a whole paradigm where people design their spacecraft missions around moving as little as possible. That means that we can't have tow trucks in orbit to get rid of any debris that happens to be left. We can't have repairs and maintenance, we can't upgrade anything. We can't inspect anything if it breaks. There are so many things we can't do and we operate in a very constrained way. That's the solution we're trying to deliver...."

Orbit Fab has no plans to address the existing fleet of satellites. Instead, it wants to focus on those that have yet to launch, and equip them with a standardized port — called RAFTI, for Rapid Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface — which would dramatically simplify the refueling operation, keeping the price tag down. "What we're looking at doing is creating a low-cost architecture," says Faber. "There's no commercially available fuel port for refueling a satellite in orbit yet. For all the big aspirations we have about a bustling space economy, really, what we're working on is the gas cap — we are a gas cap company." Orbit Fab, which advertises itself with the tagline "gas stations in space," is working on a system that includes the fuel port, refueling shuttles — which would deliver the fuel to a satellite in need — and refueling tankers, or orbital gas stations, which the shuttles could pick up the fuel from. It has advertised a price of $20 million for on-orbit delivery of hydrazine, the most common satellite propellant.

In 2018, the company launched two testbeds to the International Space Station to test the interfaces, the pumps and the plumbing. In 2021 it launched Tanker-001 Tenzing, a fuel depot demonstrator that informed the design of the current hardware. The next launch is now scheduled for 2024. "We are delivering fuel in geostationary orbit for a mission that is being undertaken by the Air Force Research Lab," says Faber. "At the moment, they're treating it as a demonstration, but it's getting a lot of interest from across the US government, from people that realize the value of refueling." Orbit Fab's first private customer will be Astroscale, a Japanese satellite servicing company that has developed the first satellite designed for refueling. Called LEXI, it will mount RAFTI ports and is currently scheduled to launch in 2026.

According to Simone D'Amico, an associate professor of astronautics at Stanford University, who's not affiliated with Orbit Fab, on-orbit servicing is one of the keys to ensuring a safe and sustainable development of space... "The development of space infrastructure and the proliferation of space assets is reaching a critical volume that is not sustainable anymore without a change of paradigm."
"In 10 or 15 years, we'd like to be building refineries in orbit," CEO Faber tells CNN, "processing material that is launched from the ground into a range of chemicals that people want to buy: air and water for commercial space stations, 3D printer feedstock minerals to grow plants. We want to be the industrial chemical supplier to the emerging commercial space industry."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Scientists have long viewed Saturn's moon Enceladus, which harbors an ocean beneath its thick, icy shell, as one of the best places to search for life beyond Earth. Now, a new analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017, has uncovered intriguing evidence that further supports the idea of Enceladus as a habitable ocean world.

Enceladus initially captured the attention of scientists in 2005 because plumes of ice grains and water vapor were observed rising through cracks in the moon's ice shell and releasing into space. The spacecraft flew through the plumes and "sampled" them, with data suggesting the presence of organic compounds within the plumes, some of which are key for life. The latest data analysis of Cassini's flybys of Enceladus revealed the detection of a molecule called hydrogen cyanide that's toxic to humans but crucial to processes driving the origin of life. What's more, the team also found evidence to support that Enceladus' ocean has organic compounds that provide a source of chemical energy that could potentially be used as powerful fuel for any form of life...

The combination of these elements together suggested a process called methanogenesis, or the metabolic creation of methane, may be at play on Enceladus. Scientists suspect methanogenesis may have also played out on early Earth, contributing to the origin of life. But the new research indicates more varied and powerful chemical energy sources are occurring within Enceladus' ocean... Now, the study authors want to investigate how diluted the organic compounds are within the subsurface ocean because the dilution of these compounds could determine whether Enceladus could support life. In the future, astronomers hope to send a dedicated mission to investigate Enceladus, which could provide a definitive answer as to whether life exists in the ocean world.
"Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions," accoding to one of the study's lead authors.

"Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved."

In 2020 a NASA spacecraft visited the asteroid Bennu. In October it returned to earth with a sample. Monday scientists got their first data about it at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union — which is a truly big deal.

"Before Earth had biology, it had chemistry," writes the Washington Post. "How the one followed from the other — how a bunch of boring molecules transformed themselves into this special thing we call life — is arguably the greatest unknown in science." The mission's top scientist, Dante Lauretta... showed slides with a long list of intriguing molecules, including carbon-based organics, in the grains and pebbles retrieved from Bennu. They will shine light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system and "maybe — still early phase — maybe insights into the origin of life." This analysis has only just started. The team has not yet released a formal scientific paper. In his lecture, Lauretta cited one interesting triangular, light-colored stone, which he said contained something he'd never seen before in a meteorite. "It's a head-scratcher right now. What is this material?" he said.

In an interview after the lecture, Lauretta said almost 5 percent of the sample is carbon. "That is a very carbon-rich sample — the richest we have in all our extraterrestrial material. ... We're still unraveling the complex organic chemistry, but it looks promising to really understand: Did these carbon-rich asteroids deliver fundamental molecules that may have gone on to contribute to the origin of life...?"

This space dirt has astrobiological import, though. By looking at prebiotic chemistry on Bennu, scientists will have a better idea what they are looking at if and when they find suspicious molecules elsewhere in the solar system, such as on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus. "This is almost the perfect laboratory control from non-biological chemistry," Glavin said. "This better prepares us for our search for life on Mars, or Europa or Enceladus — places that might have had life at one point."
Space.com quotes Lauretta as saying "We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the early solar system, which is exactly what we were hoping when we first conceived this mission almost 20 years ago."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare on Thursday, resulting in two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists said it was the biggest flare since 2017. Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, said the government's Space Weather Prediction Center.

Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, directed at Earth. The eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun, according to the center. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun. The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025.

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos candidly acknowledged Blue Origin's slow progress (compared to SpaceX). From a report: "Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago," he said. "I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to."

How is Blue Origin going to speed up?

"We're going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry," he said. "We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind."

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is, once again, having trouble transmitting any scientific or systems data back to Earth. "The 46-year-old spacecraft is capable of receiving commands, but a problem seems to have arisen with the probe's computers," reports Space.com. Slashdot readers quonset and ArchieBunker shared the news. From the report: Voyager 1's flight data system (FDS), which collects onboard engineering information and data from the spacecraft's scientific instruments, is no longer communicating as expected with the probe's telecommunications unit (TMU), according to a NASA blog post on Dec. 12. When functioning properly, the FDS compiles the spacecraft's info into a data package, which is then transmitted back to Earth using the TMU. Lately, that data package has been "stuck," the blog post said, "transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros." Voyager's engineering team traced the problem back to the FDS, but it could be weeks before a solution is found. In May 2022, Voyager 1 experienced transmitting issues for several months before a workaround was found. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 experienced an unplanned "communications pause" earlier this year after a routine sequence of commands triggered a 2-degree change in the spacecraft's antenna orientation. This prevented it from receiving commands or transmitting data back to Earth until NASA fixed the issue a week later.

Amazon, which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean. From a report: The technology will enable a satellite to deliver data to a cruise ship, say, even if the spacecraft isn't in range of an Amazon ground station connected to the internet. Instead, the laser will pass the request on to another satellite that has a clear view of a ground station.

The two prototype satellites successfully tested the technology, which is officially called optical inter-satellite links, Amazon said on Thursday. "If you're going to serve maritime customers, air customers, you have got to be able to get data up to your satellites," said Rajeev Badyal, who leads Amazon's Project Kuiper internet-from-space initiative. "And in the middle of the ocean, it's difficult if not impossible" to install ground stations.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Grunge music: a source of validation for a generation of disaffected youth. And a surprising source of scientific inspiration for Earl Bellinger of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. While listening to Soundgarden's 1994 hit Black Hole Sun 2 years ago, he contemplated a curious question: Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? A new study by Bellinger and colleagues suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. Astronomers could detect these trapped black holes by the vibrations they cause on the star's surface. And if there's enough of them out there, they could function as the mysterious dark matter that holds the universe together.

The researchers found that the black holes would sink to the star's core where hydrogen atoms undergo fusion to produce heat and light. At first, very little would happen. Even a dense stellar core is mostly empty space. The most microscopic of the black holes would have a hard time finding matter to consume and its growth would be extremely slow, Bellinger says. "It could take longer than the lifetime of the universe to eat the star." But larger ones, roughly as massive as the asteroid Ceres or the dwarf planet Pluto, would get bigger on timescales of only a few hundred million years. Material would spiral onto the black hole, forming a disk that would heat up through friction and emit radiation. Once the black hole was about as massive as Earth, it would produce significant amounts of radiation, shining brightly and churning up the star's core like pot of boiling water. "It will become a black hole -- powered object rather than fusion-powered object," says study co-author Matt Caplan, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University. He and his colleagues have dubbed these entities "Hawking stars."

The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite has spotted about 500 such anomalously cool giant stars, known as red stragglers, Bellinger says. To figure out whether these might actually be hiding a black hole, he says, astronomers could tune in to the particular frequencies at which the stars vibrate. Because a Hawking star would churn throughout its interior, rather than just in the topmost layers like an ordinary red giant, it would be expected to thrum with a particular combination of frequencies. Such waves can be detected in the way the star's light pulses and throbs. Bellinger is applying for funding to study the known red stragglers and see whether any display the characteristic vibrations of a black hole. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

A beta version of the Xbox Cloud Gaming app is now available for the Meta Quest headsets, allowing you to stream hundreds of Xbox games with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. The Verge reports: The beta app is available from the Meta Quest Store, and you'll simply need to pair a supported Bluetooth controller to start playing. You can use an Xbox controller (that supports Bluetooth), a PS4 one, or even Nintendo's Switch Pro controllers. Support for PS5 controllers is "coming in the future," according to Meta.

There are a variety of display sizes for an immersive VR environment to stream Xbox games in or even an Xbox-themed virtual space on the latest Quest 3 and Pro headsets that takes advantage of full-color passthrough.

For the first time, scientists have discovered nuclear fission occurring amongst the stars, supporting the idea that neutron stars create "superheavy" elements when they collide, which then break down via nuclear fission to birth rare elements. Space.com reports: Nuclear fission is basically the opposite of nuclear fusion. While nuclear fusion refers to the smashing of lighter elements to create heavier elements, nuclear fission is a process that sees energy released when heavy elements split apart to create lighter elements. Nuclear fission is pretty well known, too. It's actually the basis of energy-generating nuclear power plants here on Earth -- however, it had not been seen occurring amongst the stars before now.

The team of researchers led by North Carolina State University scientist Ian Roederer searched data concerning a wide range of elements in stars to discover the first evidence that nuclear fission could therefore be acting when neutron stars merge. These findings could help solve the mystery of where the universe's heavy elements come from. Scientists know that nuclear fusion is not just the primary source of energy for stars, but also the force that forges a variety of elements, the "heaviest" being iron.

The evidence of nuclear fission discovered by [Matthew Mumpower, research co-author and a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory] and the team comes in the form of a correlation between "light precision metals," like silver, and "rare earth nuclei," like europium, showing in some stars. When one of these groups of elements goes up, the corresponding elements in the other group also increases, the scientists saw. The team's research also indicates that elements with atomic masses -- counts of protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus -- greater than 260 may exist around neutron star smashes, even if this existence is brief. This is much heavier than many of the elements at the "heavy end" of the periodic table. "The only plausible way this can arise among different stars is if there is a consistent process operating during the formation of the heavy elements," Mumpower said. "This is incredibly profound and is the first evidence of fission operating in the cosmos, confirming a theory we proposed several years ago."

"As we've acquired more observations, the cosmos is saying, 'hey, there's a signature here, and it can only come from fission.'"

The research was published in the journal Science.

Meghan Bartels reports via Scientific American: Some sky watchers this month will witness Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and best-known stars in the sky, nearly disappear. Mere seconds later -- despite astronomers' hopes that the star will meet its explosive end someday soon -- it will return, shining just as brightly as ever. Betelgeuse's brief blip of obscurity will mark a cosmic coincidence: an asteroid will block the star from view over a thin strip of Earth's surface. Scientists are hailing this celestial alignment as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion that, they hope, will permit them to glimpse Betelgeuse's ever changing surface of hot and cold patches in the best resolution to date. The opportunity comes courtesy of a sizable asteroid called Leona, which astronomers first spotted in 1891. On its own, Leona is just another space rock cluttering up the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But at 8:17 P.M. ET on December 11 Leona will slip directly between Earth and Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star that, unlike the asteroid, has been recognized by countless generations of humans around the world. [...]

To understand how special the event is, consider the total solar eclipse that will occur in April 2024. During the climax of the eclipse, viewers across a narrow strip of Earth's surface will see the moon pass directly in front of the sun. Because the two bodies appear as the same size in our sky, the moon will entirely block the visible disk of the sun and expose the faint, wispy halo called the corona, a layer of our home star's atmosphere that scientists otherwise cannot see from Earth. Similarly, the roughly 40-mile-wide Leona appears in the sky as about the same size as the enormous but very distant Betelgeuse. This will allow the asteroid to block all or most of the star's light when the two bodies perfectly align. But whereas Earth experiences a total solar eclipse every 18 months or so, occultations of bright stars such as Betelgeuse are extremely rare, occurring less than once a century [...].