Month: March 2022

Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Of all the amazing and varied phenomena in the cosmological zoo, black holes are among the most mysterious. They are zombies—the all-devouring corpses of dead stars, made of trillions of tons of stellar ash compressed into an infinitely dense point called a "singularity." The gravity exerted by the singularity is so intense that it warps space-time, preventing even light from escaping.

In many ways, to look at a black hole is to look at the future of our Universe because there will come a time—many trillions of trillions of years from now, but inevitable nonetheless—where all the sky's stars will have gone out, and black holes will be the Universe's main attraction, still gobbling down any remaining free clumps of matter and acting as the only sources of light left. And perhaps most creepily of all, if proton decay turns out to be a thing, this future black hole era will be how our cosmos spends the majority of its life—dark, silent, and forbiddingly empty.

Enlarge / NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei flashes a thumbs-up shortly after landing on Wednesday. (credit: NASA)

After more than a month of speculation, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei did in fact return to Earth inside a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday, on the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan.

The landing of the small descent module was nominal, with clear skies in Kazakhstan a couple of hours before local sunset. Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov emerged first from the vehicle, followed by Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov, and then finally Vande Hei, who soon donned a pair of sunglasses and flashed a thumbs-up at the camera.

Dubrov and Vande Hei both flew a 355-day mission, having launched to the International Space Station on April 9, 2021. For Vande Hei, this set a US duration record for a single spaceflight. A Russian cosmonaut, Valeri Polyakov, holds the global record for such a mission, having spent 437 days on the Mir space station in the mid-1990s.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Sky Mavis tracking down the hackers behind the $600+ million breach.

Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis today announced a massive breach of its Ronin cryptocurrency sidechain. An attacker used "hacked private keys" to break through Ronin's validator network, Sky Mavis says, transferring 173,600 ETH (worth approximately $594 million at current rates) and $25.5 million in USDC stablecoin as part of one of the largest breaches in the history of cryptocurrency.

To understand the nature of that breach, let us take you on a crash course in the short history of Axie Infinity and the complex web of crypto standards and technologies that helped allow the exploit to happen.

So you can, like, make money by playing a game?

Axie Infinity has been cited as one of the early success stories in so-called blockchain gaming. Such games use decentralized protocols to track ownership of certain in-game items and generally lets players have some control over the resale of those items.

Enlarge / Data from SARAO's MeerKAT radio telescope data (green) showing the odd radio circles, is overlaid on optical and near infrared data from the Dark Energy Survey. (credit: J. English (U. Manitoba)/EMU/MeerKAT/DES(CTIO))

Astronomers have been puzzling over the nature and origin of rare, mysterious radio circles in space ever since the objects were first discovered in 2019. Now, the high-resolution MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa has captured one such circle in much greater detail, offering some helpful clues about this rare phenomenon. The image and accompanying analysis appeared in a preprint on arXiv, and the paper has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The discovery arose from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, which aims to take a census of radio sources in the sky. Several years ago, Ray Norris, an astronomer at Western Sydney University and CSIRO in Australia, predicted that the EMU project would make unexpected discoveries. He dubbed them "WTFs." Norris admitted in a 2020 piece for The Conversation that he expected those discoveries would arise from machine learning analysis, given the vast amounts of data involved. "But these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing," he wrote.

One pair of eyeballs belonged to Anna Kapinska, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). While browsing through new radio astronomy data collected by CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, Kapinska noticed several strange shapes that didn't seem to resemble any known type of object. Following Norris' nomenclature, she labeled them as possible WTFs. One of those, per Norris, "was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke ring."