Discovery
Australia unveils telescope: Australia has unveiled a new radio telescope in the remote outback that will give the world a vastly improved view of the sun and much faster warnings on massive solar storms.
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope will detect flares on the sun’s surface that could damage communication satellites, electricity power grids and GPS navigation systems, director Steven Tingay said Saturday.
Tingay said large solar flares produced an eruption of particles that could wreck havoc on satellites, and also created strong magnetic fields. “The telescope will be able to detect when those flares take place,” he told AFP.
Tingay said the goal was to predict the trajectory of potentially damaging debris and use this information to allow the reorientation of satellites or the shut down of communications systems that could be in its path. (AFP) Ancient palace ruins unearthed: China has unearthed the ruins of an ancient palace near the tomb of the country’s first emperor that was already famed for its terracotta soldiers, state media said on Saturday.
The discovery is the latest at the mausoleum, which dates back more than two millennia and became one of the greatest modern archaeological finds after a peasant digging a well stumbled upon the lifesize warriors in 1974.
The palace “is the largest complex ever found at the cemetery”, the Xinhua news agency said, citing Sun Weigang, a researcher at the archeology institute of northern Shaanxi province where the site is located.
Qin Shihuang, a ruler during the Qin dynasty (221-207 BC), presided over China’s unification and declared himself its first emperor.
Based on its foundations, the palace is believed to extend 690 by 250 meters (2,300 by 820 feet), nearly a quarter of the size of Beijing’s iconic Forbidden City, Xinhua said, citing Sun.
The Forbidden City located at the heart of the capital served as an imperial palace for the Ming and Qing dynasties from the 14th through the early 20th century.
The tomb-side palace “showed emperor Qin Shihuang’s wish to continue to live in imperial grandeur even during his afterlife”, Sun said.
The emperor ordered the building of the terracotta soldiers that surround the mausoleum in the hopes they would follow him into the afterlife.
As many as 6,000 are believed to stand in the largest of three pits at the site, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)under it’s director Irina Bokova, which declared the army a World Heritage Site in 1987. (AFP) Astronomers report startling find: Astronomers are reporting a find that challenges traditional theories as to how rocky planets — such as Earth — are formed.
Besides Earth, our solar system has three other rocky planets: Mercury, Venus and Mars. They have a solid surface and core of heavy metals, and differ from planets that are large spinning bodies of gas, like Jupiter or Saturn.
The new findings suggest rocky planets may be even more common in the universe than previously thought. The research was presented Friday in the Astrophysical Journal of Letters.
The astronomers used a cutting-edge telescope called ALMA, on a mountaintop 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) high in the remote desert of northern Chile. (AFP)