Here are some recent stories of interest.
—Royal Observatory of Belgium: “Dust Played a Major Role in Dinosaur Demise“
Fine dust from pulverized rock generated by the Chicxulub impact likely played a dominant role in global climate cooling and the disruption of photosynthesis following the event. This is suggested by a new study published in Nature Geoscience, in which researchers Cem Berk Cenel, Özgür Karatekin and Orkun Temel of the Royal Observatory of Belgium contributed.
—Express: “Astronomers Trying to Unravel Mystery of Three Stars that Suddenly Disappeared from Sky“
A team of Spanish astronomers is leading the investigation into one of stargazing’s most perplexing mysteries. Three bright stars photographed in the night sky above southern California in 1952 vanished just an hour later. Generations of scientists have sought to explain the rare phenomenon over the past half-century, but nothing has yet convinced the community. Researchers at the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB) in Madrid tried to solve the riddle of the “triple transient” that has “remained absent from telescope exposures for 71 years” in a new paper published online.
—Sci.News: “New Study Sets Clearer Bounds on Search for Technosignatures from Extraterrestrial Intelligences“
A stable-frequency transmitter with relative radial acceleration to a receiver will show a change in received frequency over time, known as a ‘drift rate.’ For a transmission from an exoplanet, astronomers must account for multiple components of drift rate: the exoplanet’s orbit and rotation, the Earth’s orbit and rotation, and other contributions. Understanding the drift rate distribution produced by exoplanets relative to Earth, can help scientists constrain the range of drift rates to check in a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to detect radio technosignatures, and help them decide validity of signals-of-interest, as they can compare drifting signals with expected drift rates from the target star. In a new study, University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Megan Grace Li and colleagues modeled the drift rate distribution for over 5,300 confirmed exoplanets, using parameters from the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
Our Awesome Universe 