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Betelgeuse is acting wonky again.

The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness.

It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156 percent in April.

Currently, Betelgeuse is the 7th brightest star in the sky – up from its normal position as the 10th brightest

...

Betelgeuse is an uncommon type of star, even for a red giant. Once upon a time, it was an absolute monster: a blue-white O-type star, the most massive stellar weight class.

Stars of this mass range burn through their hydrogen stores more rapidly than lighter-weight stars; Betelgeuse is only about 8 to 8.5 million years old. Compare that to a star like the Sun, which at 4.6 billion years old, is only about halfway through its hydrogen-burning lifetime.

Betelgeuse changed its spectral type since it has almost run through its hydrogen reserves. It's now fusing helium into carbon and oxygen and has puffed out to a gargantuan size: about 764 times the size of the Sun and about 16.5 to 19 times its mass.

 

Eventually, it will run out of fuel to burn, go supernova, throw off its outer material, and its core will collapse into a neutron star.

The Great Dimming event saw the star decrease in brightness by a considerable amount, almost 25 percent. Astronomers scurried to figure out the cause; it turned out that cooling on Betelgeuse's surface caused a massive cloud of dust to condense on the star.

This cloud was subsequently ejected, partially obscuring Betelgeuse, causing it to appear to dim. Fairly normal behavior for a red giant star, scientists say; we just don't usually get such a front-row seat.

Before the Great Dimming, Betelgeuse also had brightness fluctuations on regular cycles. The longest of these cycles is around 5.9 years; another is 400 days. But it seems the Great Dimming has caused some changes in these fluctuations.

...

A new paper, led by astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, uploaded to preprint server arXiv, found that the 400-day cycle seems to have halved.

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Powerful Typhoon Mawar slams Guam with heavy rain and damaging winds

National Meteorological Centre of China has given the typhoon a super strong typhoon rating, with maximum winds of grade 17 or more at 62 m/s (about 223 km/h). It is also the longest typhoon to maintain super strong typhoon intensity since China's typhoon classification system began in 2006 - maintaining grade 17 wind and super strong typhoon all way long in the typhoon track forecast map.

Bad news for me is that the downdraft on the periphery of the typhoon and the subtropical high pressure will bring us temperatures of 35°C and possibly over 40°C apparent temperature here, with extremely high humidity attached.

Spoiler

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Edited by steve9728
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Chengdu Aircraft Design Institue of AVIC (the place where J-20 was designed from) has applied for a pretty strange patent: "A twin-engine tandem vertical take-off and landing aircraft" (CN219056579U):

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"The utility model patent belongs to the technical field of aircraft general design, and specifically relates to a twin-engine tandem vertical take-off and landing aircraft. It includes: fuselage, upper air inlet, front engine, manifold, left and right nozzle, abdominal air inlet rear engine and tail nozzle. The upper air inlet is set at the back of the aircraft. The tail of the upper air inlet is connected to the manifold inlet. The manifold is divided into two in a 'trouser leg shape'. The two outlets of the manifold are connected to the left and right nozzles respectively.  Front engine is provided at the rear of the cockpit. Abdominal inlet is provided at the jaw of the fuselage and is connected to the rear engine inlet through the abdominal inlet. The rear engine is connected to the tail nozzle at the rear and is provided at the rear of the fuselage. The tail nozzle is provided at the rear of the fuselage and is located between the two drogue tails"

"The patent uses two conventional engines in a tandem front-to-back layout, dividing the front part of the engine jet into two paths, and forming a "three-point support" type of lift with the rear vectoring nozzle to achieve vertical or short take-off. The two engines work simultaneously during flight, avoiding the previous situation where one engine was not working and there was ‘dead weight’. The three nozzles can be deflected for manoeuvring as required during flight." It also mentioned that the left, right, and rear nozzles can each be deflected at an angle between 0° and 90° as required to achieve manoeuvres in the air under the flight control system in conjunction with the aircraft rudders.

image.png

Need to be remind that is the patents doesn't mean particularly serious "I'm going to do this stuff from now on!", but rather "Hey guys, I got an idea". I feel a bit less serious about this to be honest:lol:

Edited by steve9728
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6 hours ago, steve9728 said:

Chengdu Aircraft Design Institue of AVIC (the place where J-20 was designed from) has applied for a pretty strange patent: "A twin-engine tandem vertical take-off and landing aircraft" (CN219056579U):

image.png

image.png

"The utility model patent belongs to the technical field of aircraft general design, and specifically relates to a twin-engine tandem vertical take-off and landing aircraft. It includes: fuselage, upper air inlet, front engine, manifold, left and right nozzle, abdominal air inlet rear engine and tail nozzle. The upper air inlet is set at the back of the aircraft. The tail of the upper air inlet is connected to the manifold inlet. The manifold is divided into two in a 'trouser leg shape'. The two outlets of the manifold are connected to the left and right nozzles respectively.  Front engine is provided at the rear of the cockpit. Abdominal inlet is provided at the jaw of the fuselage and is connected to the rear engine inlet through the abdominal inlet. The rear engine is connected to the tail nozzle at the rear and is provided at the rear of the fuselage. The tail nozzle is provided at the rear of the fuselage and is located between the two drogue tails"

"The patent uses two conventional engines in a tandem front-to-back layout, dividing the front part of the engine jet into two paths, and forming a "three-point support" type of lift with the rear vectoring nozzle to achieve vertical or short take-off. The two engines work simultaneously during flight, avoiding the previous situation where one engine was not working and there was ‘dead weight’. The three nozzles can be deflected for manoeuvring as required during flight." It also mentioned that the left, right, and rear nozzles can each be deflected at an angle between 0° and 90° as required to achieve manoeuvres in the air under the flight control system in conjunction with the aircraft rudders.

image.png

Need to be remind that is the patents doesn't mean particularly serious "I'm going to do this stuff from now on!", but rather "Hey guys, I got an idea". I feel a bit less serious about this to be honest:lol:

Well, English Electric Lightning had one engine atop the other, so this isn't entirely incredible...

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Starting from tomorrow, it will fly the Shanghai-Chengdu route.

Spoiler

77db44e7b744a0e638ac98f222d3164.jpg

After all, it is the first time for it, so the price is almost double that of other flights at the same time and same route

Edited by steve9728
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We have a new record - 17 people in space stations at same time!

ISS:

  • Soyuz MS-23: Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, Francisco Rubio
  • Crew-6: Stephen Bowen, Warren Hoburg, Sultan Al Neyadi, Andrey Fedyaev
  • AX-2:Peggy Whitson, John Shoffner, Ali AlQarni, Rayyanah Barnawi

CSS:

  • Shenzhou-15: Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming, Zhang Lu
  • Shenzhou-16: Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu, Gui Haichao

6 from CN, 5 from US, 3 from RU, 2 from SA, and 1 from AE

Picture1.png?format=750w

Source

917913706c6a968a5c1823df23a9845.jpg

Screenshot from CCTV's live

Edited by steve9728
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My poor Pioneer 10 :(

Fun fact: when I was in third grade, I destroyed my family computer by keeping Pioneer 10’s Wikipedia page open in honor of it 24/7.

It ran slowly for another six years or so so the damage wasn’t too bad.

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3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I meant the computer lol.

I, too. The computer was lagging due to slow connection. Like a web page, which is being loaded part-by-part.

Imagine, how old is the Pioneer web server...

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