This colorful image of the globular star cluster Terzan 12 is a spectacular example of how dust in space affects starlight coming from background objects.
A globular star cluster is a conglomeration of stars, arranged in a spheroidal shape. Stars in globular clusters are bound together by gravity, with a higher concentration of stars towards the center. The Milky Way has about 150 ancient globular clusters at its outskirts. These clusters orbit around the galactic center, but far above and below the pancake-flat plane of our galaxy, like bees buzzing around a hive.
The location of this globular cluster, deep in the Milky Way in the constellation Sagittarius, means that it is shrouded in gas and dust which absorb and alter the starlight emanating from Terzan 12. The cluster is about 15,000 light-years from Earth. This location leaves a lot of room for intervening interstellar dust particles between us and the cluster to scatter blue light, causing only the redder wavelengths to come through to Earth. The interstellar dust clouds are mottled so that different parts of the cluster look redder than other parts along our line of sight.
The brightest red stars in the photo are bloated, aging giants, many times larger than our Sun. They lie between Earth and the cluster. Only a few may actually be members of the cluster. The very brightest hot, blue stars are also along the line of sight and not inside the cluster, which only contains aging stars.
Terzan 12 is one of 11 globular clusters discovered by the Turkish-Armenian astronomer Agop Terzan approximately a half-century ago. With its sharp vision, Hubble has revolutionized the study of globular clusters ever since its launch in 1990. Hubble observations have shed light on the relation between age and composition in the Milky Way galaxy’s innermost globular clusters.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, ESA/Hubble, Roger Cohen (RU)
Media Contacts:
Claire Andreoli NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD [email protected]
Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
Bethany Downer ESA/ESAHubble.org
By: Andrea Gianopoulos Originally published at NASA
The crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission will discuss their six-month science mission aboard the International Space Station during a news conference at 2:15 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Sept. 12, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission is seen inside the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, after splashing down off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, on Monday, Sept. 4, 2023. Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, left, NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg, second from left, NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen, second from right, and UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, right, returned to Earth after nearly six-months in space as part of Expedition 69 aboard the International Space Station.
Credits: NASA/Joel Kowsky
The event will air live on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. Watch online at:
https://www.nasa.gov/live
NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg and UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi will speak about their mission for the first time following their return to Earth. Fellow crew member Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev is unable to participate in the news conference due to travel.
To participate virtually, media must contact the newsroom at NASA Johnson no later than two hours before the start of the event by calling 281-483-5111 or emailing: [email protected]. To ask questions, reporters must dial into the news conference by 2:05 p.m. the day of the event. Questions also may be submitted on social media using #AskNASA.
Crew-6 returned to Earth aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft splashing down at 12:17 a.m., Sept. 4, off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, and flew back to Houston shortly afterward.
The four crewmates traveled 78,875,292 statute miles during 2,976 orbits around the Earth and approximately 186 days in orbit. It was the first spaceflight for Hoburg, Alneyadi, and Fedyaev, and the fourth for Bowen.
During the mission, Bowen and Hoburg completed two spacewalks, and Alneyadi became the first UAE astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. With 10 spacewalks throughout his missions, Bowen ties the record for most excursions by a U.S. astronaut, also held by four others. He ranks third on the all-time list for cumulative hours of spacewalking.
While aboard the station, Crew-6 contributed to hundreds of experiments and technology demonstrations, including conducting a student robotic challenge, studying plant genetic adaptations to space, and monitoring human health in microgravity to prepare for exploration beyond low Earth orbit and to benefit life on Earth. The crew released Saskatchewan’s first satellite, which tests a new radiation detection and protection system derived from Melanin that’s found in many organisms including humans.
Crew-6 spent about a week with the newly arrived crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 mission that docked to the station Aug. 27, handing over ongoing tasks, and introducing two first-time explorers to the orbital outpost. Both missions are part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Get the latest NASA space station news, images and features on Instagram, Facebook, and X.
There are a lot of considerations when you want to visualize data. It starts with what you want to say, that is what your objectives are, what the chart or graphics conveys. These are only some of the things you need to think about. But one of the objectives is to create both meaningful and beautiful charts. Here are some of the resources you should bookmark.
In this reference you will be able to choose an appropriate way to visualize your data by selecting from a category. An example use or use case and chart type will be shown.
This time a list of chart types is laid out in the home page. If you select a specific chart type, you’d be brought to a page with a detailed description on what this chart is used for, along with examples at the bottom. The neat thing about this, is that at the right side, you’d see the list of Function this chart type is for, and at the bottom are examples.
From the main page, a list of proejcts with charts are shown. Then these charts come together with actual data that can be filtered by function. From these examples you can take inspiration on what you want to try and convey with your chart or visualisation.
Another cool thing about this is that you can select the Programming language or tool that was used to generate these charts. From R, Python, tableau, d3.js, react, excel and others. These also have links to the actual project including the source code used.
Similar to the previous references, this time you could search for specific chart types using the search bar. Each chart or diagram gives some insights and sometimes weird remarks on some of these charts. Just take a look at “Scatter Pies” and see the comment they made on it. As what they say “Weird but (sometimes) useful charts”
A literal cheat sheet for visualisation. The charts can be filtered by Type and Visualisazation. This one offers detailed description on how to use specific charts. It also explains what these chart conveys, given specific patterns.
For the programmers, software engineer or those that just want their data to be visualised in a website. This is not really a cheat sheet or reference to decide which chart or visualisation to use, but a software library. It offers a wide array of available charts and step-by-step guide when building your own charts. It does require knowledge in programming.
The MIT-led Cosmic Explorer project aims to detect gravitational waves from the earliest universe.
Jennifer Chu | MIT News
Artist’s impression of a Cosmic Explorer observatory.
Credits:Image: Angela Nguyen, Virginia Kitchen, Eddie Anaya, California State University Fullerton; and courtesy of Cosmicexplorer.org
The search for space-shaking ripples in the universe just got a big boost. An MIT-led effort to build a bigger, better gravitational-wave detector will receive $9 million dollars over the next three years from the National Science Foundation. The funding infusion will support the design phase for Cosmic Explorer — a next-generation gravitational-wave observatory that is expected to pick up ripples in space-time from as far back as the early universe. To do so, the observatory’s detectors are planned to span the length of a small city.
The observatory’s conceptual design takes after the detectors of LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory that is operated by MIT and Caltech. LIGO “listens” for gravitational waves by measuring the timing of two lasers that travel from the same point, down two separate tunnels, and back again. Any difference in their arrival times can be a signal that a gravitational wave passed through the L-shaped detector. LIGO includes two twin detectors, sited in different locations in the United States. A similar set of detectors, Virgo, operates in Italy, along with a third, KAGRA, in Japan.
Together, this existing network of detectors picks up ripples from gravitational-wave sources, such as merging black holes and neutron stars, every few days. Cosmic Explorer, scientists believe, should bump that rate up to a signal every few minutes. The science coming out of these detections could provide answers to some of the biggest questions in cosmology.
MIT News checked in with Cosmic Explorer’s executive director, Matthew Evans, who is a professor of physics at MIT, and co-principal investigator Salvatore Vitale, associate professor of physics at MIT, about what they hope to hear from the earliest universe.
Q: Walk us through the general idea for Cosmic Explorer — what will make it a “next-generation” detector of gravitational waves?
Evans: Cosmic Explorer is in some sense a giant LIGO. The LIGO detectors are four kilometers long for each arm, and Cosmic Explorer will be 40 kilometers on a side, so 10 times larger. And the signal that we get from a gravitational wave is essentially proportional to the size of our detector, and that’s why these things are so big.
Bigger is better, up to a point. At some point, you’ve matched the length of the detector to the wavelength of the incoming gravitational waves. And then, if you continue making it bigger, there’s really diminishing returns in terms of scientific output. It’s also hard to find sites to build that large of a detector. When you get too big, the curvature of the Earth starts to become an issue because the detector’s laser beam has to travel in a straight line, and that’s less possible when a detector is so large that it has to curve with the Earth.
In terms of looking for possible sites, fortunately now, as opposed to in the 1980s when sites were being looked at for LIGO, there’s a lot of public data that’s available digitally. So we have already first versions of algorithmic searches that can search the U.S. for potential candidate sites. We’re looking for places which are kind of flat but also a little bowl-shaped in terms of altitude because that would avoid some excavation. And we’re looking for places that are not in the middle of cities or lakes, or in the mountains, and that aren’t too far from populated regions so that we could imagine getting scientists in and out. Our first go-around shows there are some potential candidates, especially in the western half of the U.S.
We see Cosmic Explorer as “next-generation” in the sense that it will replace existing observatories. If we were to build two Cosmic Explorer observatories in the U.S., which is our reference concept, then we would presumably shut down the two LIGO observatories. That’s probably mid-2030s, depending on how funding goes. So, it’s still a ways in the future. But we believe it would change the name of the game in terms of the science we can do.
Q: And what might that science be? What new things could you see, and what big questions could it answer?
Vitale: It will allow us to see sources that are farther away. And by sources, I mean things that we are seeing today, such as black holes and neutron stars colliding. Now, with the sensitivity of LIGO, we can see sources in our backyard, cosmologically speaking — about one-and-a-half billion years ago. That seems far away, but compared to the size of the universe, which is about 13 to 14 billion years old, that’s pretty nearby. That means we are missing important steps of the history of the universe, one of which is “Cosmic Noon,” where most of the stars in the universe were formed. That’s when the universe was around 3 billion years old. It would be great to access sources which were formed around that time, because it would teach us a lot about how black holes and neutron stars come from stars.
Going beyond that, when the universe was about a billion years old, during the Epoch of Reionization — that’s when atoms were ionized and galaxies started to form — this is still too far for us to see. Cosmic Explorer would be sensitive to the mergers of black holes and neutron stars up to those distances, and even farther than that.
We’ll also be able to see sources in a much clearer and louder way. Today, LIGO might detect something with a signal-to-noise ratio of 30, where it’s pretty loud but hard to characterize. That same signal, coming through Cosmic Explorer, would have a signal-to-noise of 3,000. So, anything that requires really sensitive measurements, like testing if Einstein’s relativity is correct, which now we can do but with large uncertainties — that would be a more precise test with Cosmic Explorer.
Finally, many measurements get better the more sources you have. We think Cosmic Explorer could detect hundreds of thousands of black hole binaries and up to a million neutron star mergers per year.
Evans: Being able to detect more sources lets you detect objects that are in the corners of parameter space, which you wouldn’t otherwise detect — like very large spins of the black hole, or very high mass ratios. If you have hundreds of thousands of sources, you can detect these oddballs.
Q: What’s next for the project going forward?
Evans: Over the next three years, we’ll be doing a full, top-down design, where we pick all the parameters of the instrument and include the infrastructure that goes around it, like the vacuum system, and we end up doing architectural designs for the buildings. And all of this needs to lead to a cost estimate which is fairly sound, both for the construction and the preliminary design. By the end of the next design phase we will have to have identified sites and have solid architectural and infrastructural designs done, and the design of the instrument will be at the nuts-and-bolts level.
The environment in which we’re doing this is one that includes other next-gen detectors in development, such as the space mission, LISA, being run by the European Space Agency, and expected to launch mid-2030s. There is also the Einstein Telescope in Europe. All these groups are colleagues rather than competitors, who we anticipate working with. In this field, you get farther by working together. It’s kind of a global effort to build these next-generation gravitational wave detectors, and it’s global science.
London, UK. 6 September 2023. Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, is launching its first AI roadshow. The series of events and presentations will highlight how enterprises can make better use of their own data and make artificial intelligence (AI) use cases a reality.
Canonical AI Roadshow 2023
AI is at the forefront of a revolution across industries and in the way we work. The widespread availability and free-to-use models of generative AI tools has accelerated the adoption of the new technology and challenged enterprises to rethink their strategies in order to stay competitive in the market. AI has proven invaluable in removing the burden of performing repetitive tasks and reducing time spent on gathering information. In fact, the spectrum of use cases for generative AI in enterprises is extremely broad.
AI use cases gaining traction
McKinsey reports (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier#key-insights) that the technology’s impact on productivity is estimated to be up to $4.4 trillion. Industries like financial services, technology and life sciences have started reaping the benefits. AI is predicted to make a lasting difference in these sectors, with research and development in areas like DNA sequencing, real-time payments, and transaction monitoring. More popular applications, such as content generation, chatbots, and sentiment analysis, have also long been attractive to organisations.
While the use cases of generative AI are all the hype at the moment, predictive analytics are in a more advanced state of adoption. Countless applications have been rolled out and are in production. The area of sales operations, for example, has benefited from use cases related to customer targeting, churn prevention, and sales forecasting.
Challenges with enterprise AI adoption
Even though the impact of AI technology is evident, many businesses face a range of challenges with making the promise of AI a business reality. Notably, security and compliance concerns remain unaddressed and pose specific challenges to each enterprise. Organisations also need to be vigilant from an ethical perspective and avoid bias in their solutions. And finally, there is a significant skills gap in the market, with very few professionals that possess deep knowledge of generative AI, large language models (LLMs), or advanced machine learning (ML).
As with any innovation, there can be a steep slope towards seeing a return on investment – even after overcoming these initial challenges. Canonical has been investing in tools dedicated to AI for over four years. The company has been focusing on the biggest challenges that companies face, from difficulties with setting up a working environment to determining the best path to scaling a project.
Canonical’s expanding big data and AI portfolio
Canonical is continuously growing its big data and AI tooling portfolio to provide customers with the latest tools and expertise. The company’s Charmed MLFlow solution, for example, enables professionals to perform experiment tracking during the development phase of the ML lifecycle. Charmed MLFlow is easy to set up and comes with integrations for tools like Jupyter Notebooks and MLOps platforms, such as Canonical’s Charmed Kubeflow. Canonical’s newly launched Charmed Spark is an open source solution that enables professionals to process streaming data at scale on any conformant Kubernetes environment, in the data centre or the cloud.
A global AI roadshow
The upcoming Canonical AI Roadshow, which kicks off on 19 September 2023, will showcase how Canonical technology can speed up companies’ AI journeys. A lineup of presentations, talks, interviews and case studies will focus on the latest trends in generative AI and the critical role of open source in driving innovation in this space. Canonical’s MLOps and Data Fabric solutions will be in the spotlight. The roadshow will also feature demos from industries like financial services and oil and gas.
Read more about the Canonical AI Roadshow (https://ubuntu.com/ai/roadshow) for a full lineup or book a meeting (https://calendly.com/andreea-munteanu-1/canonical-ai-roadshow?month=2023-08) with the team.
With a remarkable observational campaign that involved 12 telescopes both on the ground and in space, including three European Southern Observatory (ESO) facilities, astronomers have uncovered the strange behaviour of a pulsar, a super-fast-spinning dead star. This mysterious object is known to switch between two brightness modes almost constantly, something that until now has been an enigma. But astronomers have now found that sudden ejections of matter from the pulsar over very short periods are responsible for the peculiar switches.
This artist’s impression shows the pulsar PSR J1023+0038 stealing gas from its companion star. This gas accumulates in a disc around the pulsar, slowly falls towards it, and is eventually expelled in a narrow jet. In addition, there is a wind of particles blowing away from the pulsar, represented here by a cloud of very small dots. This wind clashes with the infalling gas, heating it up and making the system glow brightly in X-rays and ultraviolet and visible light. Eventually, blobs of this hot gas are expelled along the jet, and the pulsar returns to the initial, fainter state, repeating the cycle. This pulsar has been observed to switch incessantly between these two states every few seconds or minutes.
“We have witnessed extraordinary cosmic events where enormous amounts of matter, similar to cosmic cannonballs, are launched into space within a very brief time span of tens of seconds from a small, dense celestial object rotating at incredibly high speeds,” says Maria Cristina Baglio, researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi, affiliated with the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and the lead author of the paper published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
A pulsar is a fast-rotating, magnetic, dead star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation into space. As it rotates, this beam sweeps across the cosmos — much like a lighthouse beam scanning its surroundings — and is detected by astronomers as it intersects the line of sight to Earth. This makes the star appear to pulse in brightness as seen from our planet.
PSR J1023+0038, or J1023 for short, is a special type of pulsar with a bizarre behaviour. Located about 4500 light-years away in the Sextans constellation, it closely orbits another star. Over the past decade, the pulsar has been actively pulling matter off this companion, which accumulates in a disc around the pulsar and slowly falls towards it.
Since this process of accumulating matter began, the sweeping beam virtually vanished and the pulsar started incessantly switching between two modes. In the ‘high’ mode, the pulsar gives off bright X-rays, ultraviolet and visible light, while in the ‘low’ mode it’s dimmer at these frequencies and emits more radio waves. The pulsar can stay in each mode for several seconds or minutes, and then switch to the other mode in just a few seconds. This switching has thus far puzzled astronomers.
“Our unprecedented observing campaign to understand this pulsar’s behaviour involved a dozen cutting-edge ground-based and space-borne telescopes,” says Francesco Coti Zelati, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences, Barcelona, Spain, and co-lead author of the paper. The campaign included ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT), which detected visible and near-infrared light, as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner. Over two nights in June 2021, they observed the system make over 280 switches between its high and low modes.
“We have discovered that the mode switching stems from an intricate interplay between the pulsar wind, a flow of high-energy particles blowing away from the pulsar, and matter flowing towards the pulsar,” says Coti Zelati, who is also affiliated with INAF.
While this discovery has unlocked the mystery of J1023’s strange behaviour, astronomers still have much to learn from studying this unique system and ESO’s telescopes will continue to help astronomers observe this peculiar pulsar. In particular, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile, will offer an unprecedented view of J1023’s switching mechanisms. “The ELT will allow us to gain key insights into how the abundance, distribution, dynamics, and energetics of the inflowing matter around the pulsar are affected by the mode switching behavior,” concludes Sergio Campana, Research Director at the INAF Brera Observatory and coauthor of the study.
The team is composed of M. C. Baglio (Center for Astro, Particle, and Planetary Physics, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE [NYU Abu Dhabi]; INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Merate, Italy [INAF Brera]), F. Coti Zelati (Institute of Space Sciences, Campus UAB, Barcelona, Spain [ICE–CSIC]; Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC), Barcelona, Spain [IEEC]; INAF Brera), S. Campana (INAF Brera), G. Busquet (Departament de Física Quànticai Astrofísica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; IEEC), P. D’Avanzo (INAF Brera), S. Giarratana (INAF – Istituto di Radioastronomia, Bologna, Italy [INAF Bologna]; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna, Italy [Bologna]), M. Giroletti (INAF Bologna; Bologna), F. Ambrosino (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Rome, Italy [INAF Roma]); INAF – Istituto Astrofisica Planetologia Spaziali, Rome, Italy; Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy), S.Crespi (NYU Abu Dhabi), A. Miraval Zanon (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, Rome, Italy; INAF Roma), X. Hou (Yunnan Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China; Key Laboratory for the Structure and Evolution of Celestial Objects, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China), D. Li (National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; Research Center for Intelligent Computing Platforms, Zhejiang Laboratory, Hangzhou, China), J. Li (CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China), P. Wang (Institute for Frontiers in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China), D. M. Russell (NYU Abu Dhabi), D. F. Torres (INAF Brera; IEEC; Institució Catalana de Recercai Estudis Avançats, Barcelona, Spain), K. Alabarta (NYU Abu Dhabi), P. Casella (INAF Roma), S. Covino (INAF Brera), D. M. Bramich (NYU Abu Dhabi; Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE), D. de Martino (INAF − Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Napoli, Italy), M. Méndez (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands), S. E. Motta (INAF Brera), A. Papitto (INAF Roma), P. Saikia (NYU Abu Dhabi), and F. Vincentelli (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain; Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain).
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) enables scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe for the benefit of all. We design, build and operate world-class observatories on the ground — which astronomers use to tackle exciting questions and spread the fascination of astronomy — and promote international collaboration for astronomy. Established as an intergovernmental organisation in 1962, today ESO is supported by 16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO’s headquarters and its visitor centre and planetarium, the ESO Supernova, are located close to Munich in Germany, while the Chilean Atacama Desert, a marvellous place with unique conditions to observe the sky, hosts our telescopes. ESO operates three observing sites: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its Very Large Telescope Interferometer, as well as survey telescopes such as VISTA. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. Together with international partners, ESO operates ALMA on Chajnantor, a facility that observes the skies in the millimetre and submillimetre range. At Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, we are building “the world’s biggest eye on the sky” — ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. From our offices in Santiago, Chile we support our operations in the country and engage with Chilean partners and society.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of ESO, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
Maria Cristina Baglio New York University Abu Dhabi and Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Tel: +97126287089 Email: [email protected] ; [email protected]
Francesco Coti Zelati Institute of Space Sciences Barcelona, Spain Tel: (+34) 937379788 430416 Email: [email protected]
Designers, it seems, have figured out one way to get people to read more: Make libraries more beautiful.
PEOPLE LOVE THEIR libraries. And when their governments put money toward them, they even love to visit them. A 2012 report by the Institute of Museum and Library Services found that when investment in libraries drops, as it has in the US since 2009, usage typically falls with it. But the inverse was also true; the more public funds libraries receive, the more people tend to use them.
Perhaps that’s because a good library is more than a repository for books—it’s a community resource. It may also explain the recent spate of high-design libraries (and bookstores) popping up around the globe. Many of them function not just as singular temples to the written word, but community centers, auditoria, concert halls, and public gardens. All of them are works of art in themselves. Here are ten of note.
Dokk1 Library, Schmidt Hammer Lassen
ADAM MØRK
The Dokk1 library recently won the prize for best public library of 2016, and it’s easy to see why. The 323,000 square-foot library, the largest in Scandinavia, is situated next to the river in Aarhus, Denmark. The building is made from a stack of polygons, giving it a hard, geometric facade. While inside, the space is airy, with windows that overlook the city’s harbor. An unexpected, artistic bonus: The bell that hangs above the central staircase is connected to the local hospital—it rings every time a child is born.
Lawrence Public Library, by Gould Evans
MIKE SINCLAIR
Lawrence’s new library has the bones of its old. Originally built in 1972, architects at Gould Evans recently gutted the library and renovated it to be more modern and tech-forward. While observing visitors, the architects realized people naturally gathered in the locations with the most natural lighting. This led to them to create reading room with floor-to-ceiling windows.
Yangzhou Zhongshuge, by X+Living
SHAO FENG ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Walking into the Yangzhou Zhangshuge bookstore in Zhen Yuan, China is like walking through a river filled with books. The architects say that’s intentional; the building is supposed to evoke the feeling of water, a nod to its riverside location. Hard and paperback tomes line the curved, backlit shelves, which reflect onto the dark mirrored floor, creating a tunnel effect. It’s just the right amount of trippy.
Beyazit Library, by Tabanlioglu Architects
TABANLIOGLU ARCHITECTS
The Beyazit State Library in Istanbul isn’t a new building. In fact, it was originally built in 1506, and served as a soup kitchen and inn before it became the state library in the late 19th century. Turkish architecture studio Tabanlioglu Architects recently renovated the space, preserving its bones while adding minimalist modern touches, like tinted glass boxes that hold rare manuscripts. It’s a stunning mix of old and new.
Vennesla Library, by Helen & Hard Architects
EMILE ASHLEY
Norway’s Vennesla library looks like a portal to outer space. A series of 27 arching ribs hugs the ceiling, creating a skeleton for the building. Each rib has an integrated light that lends the cream interior and ethereal glow, while the base of the beam flows into a reading nook. Each rib contains sound absorbing materials to ensure the space is extra quiet.
Bodø Library, by DRDH
DAVID GRANDORGE
The new Bodø Public Library in Norway is also a cultural center, featuring a three-auditorium concert hall in addition to its 68,000-square feet of dedicated reading space. The white concrete building sits on the plot of a former bus station, and a row of floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the city’s harbor.
Chicago Public Library, by SOM
HEDRICH BLESSING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Chicago’s new Chinatown library branch has no sharp edges. The pebble-shaped building is wrapped in glass and marked by solar-shading fins that are meant to reduce heat and glare. The library’s curvy, three-sided shape is built around feng shui principles and designed to align with the avenues outside the building. Inside, the two-story structure is centered around a light-filled atrium.
Birmingham Library, by Mecanoo
MECANOO
From the outside, the Birmingham library in England looks like a brutalist structure wrapped in metal lace. But the building’s vast interior—it’s 312,000 square feet—is filled with bright primary colors and clean lines. The building is home to more than 400,000 books housed on multiple floors, each of which features a cantilevered balcony overlooking a “book rotunda.”
Halifax Library, by Schmidt Hammer Lassen
ADAM MØRK
Halifax’s flagship library (there are 13 others) is 156,000-square feet of imposingly piled glass. Situated in the city’s downtown, the building’s four glass boxes stack, twist, and cantilever to create a stunning building block effect.__ On top of the building is a rooftop garden for enjoying warm Nova Scotia summers. __Inside, the library’s reading room converts to a concert hall.
Conarte Library, by Anagrama
CAROGA
Mexican design studio Anagrama designed a cozy reading nook inside this Monterrey bookstore to encourage visitors to linger and read. The sea foam blue walls shine through a latticed wood bookshelf that turns the space into a brightly colored cocoon. Stairs cut through the middle of the dome, while padded seats on either side afford comfortable reading spots. It’s visually striking, and clever, use of space.
As the International Space Station orbited 261 miles above Earth on Aug. 29, 2023, one of the space station’s external high-definition cameras captured Hurricane Idalia in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Idalia made landfall over the Big Bend region of Florida on the morning of Aug. 30, 2023, as a category 3 storm. Winds measured 205 kilometers (125 miles) per hour as the storm reached land. Watch an animation of the storm’s wind field.
After splashing down safely in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida early Monday morning, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 completed the agency’s sixth commercial crew rotation mission to the International Space Station. The international crew of four spent 186 days in orbit.
Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, left, NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, second from left, NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen, second from right, and UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, right, are seen inside the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft onboard the SpaceX recovery ship MEGAN shortly after having landed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, Monday, Sept. 4, 2023. Bowen, Hoburg, Alneyadi, and Fedyaev are returning after nearly six-months in space as part of Expedition 69 aboard the International Space Station.
Credits: NASA/Joel Kowsky
NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, as well as UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, returned to Earth at 12:17 a.m. EDT. Teams aboard SpaceX recovery vessels retrieved the spacecraft and its crew. After returning to shore, the crew will fly to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“After spending six months aboard the International Space Station, logging nearly 79 million miles during their mission, and completing hundreds of scientific experiments for the benefit of all humanity, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 has returned home to planet Earth,” said Administrator Bill Nelson. “This international crew represented three nations, but together they demonstrated humanity’s shared ambition to reach new cosmic shores. The contributions of Crew-6 will help prepare NASA to return to the Moon under Artemis, continue onward to Mars, and improve life here on Earth.”
The Crew-6 mission lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST March 2, 2023, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About 25 hours later, Dragon docked to the Harmony module’s space-facing port. On May 6, the crew completed a port relocation maneuver to the Earth-facing port ahead of the arrival of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft carrying new solar arrays, science investigations, and supplies to the orbiting laboratory. The crew undocked from the space station at 7:05 a.m. Sunday, to begin the trip home.
Bowen, Hoburg, Alneyadi, and Fedyaev traveled 78,875,292 miles during their mission, spent 184 days aboard the space station, and completed 2,976 orbits around Earth. The Crew-6 mission was the first spaceflight for Hoburg, Alneyadi, and Fedyaev. Bowen has logged 227 days in space over four flights.
Throughout their mission, the Crew-6 members contributed to a host of science and maintenance activities and technology demonstrations. Bowen conducted three spacewalks, joined by Hoburg for two, and Alneyadi for one, preparing the station for and installing two new IROSAs (International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays) to augment power generation for the station.
The crew contributed to hundreds of experiments and technology demonstrations, including assisting a student robotic challenge, studying plant genetic adaptations to space, and monitoring human health in microgravity to prepare for exploration beyond low Earth orbit and to benefit life on Earth. The astronauts released Saskatchewan’s first satellite which tests a new radiation detection and protection system derived from melanin, found in many organisms, including humans.
This was the fourth flight of the Dragon spacecraft, which was named Endeavour by retired NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on its first voyage for the agency’s SpaceX Demonstration Mission 2. The spacecraft will return to Florida for inspection and processing at SpaceX’s refurbishing facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, where teams will inspect the spacecraft, analyze data on its performance, and prepare it for its next flight.
The Crew-6 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and its return to Earth follows on the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7, which docked to the station Aug. 27, beginning another long-duration science expedition.
The goal of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation to and from the International Space Station and low Earth orbit, which maximizes research time and increases opportunities for discovery aboard humanity’s microgravity laboratory and testbed for exploration, including helping NASA prepare for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Learn more about NASA’s Commercial Crew program at:
NASA will provide coverage of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission return to Earth from the International Space Station, beginning with hatch closure coverage live at 5 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Sept. 3. The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to undock from the space station no earlier than 7:05 a.m., to begin the journey home.
Four Expedition 69 flight engineers aboard the International Space Station pose for a portrait in the pressure suits they will wear when they relocate the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour crew ship from the Harmony module’s space-facing port to Harmony’s forward port on Saturday May 6, 2023.
Credits: NASA
The return and related activities will stream live on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website at:
https://www.nasa.gov/live
NASA and SpaceX are targeting 12:17 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 4, for a splashdown that will wrap up a nearly six-month science mission for NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Following the conclusion of Dragon’s departure from the station, NASA coverage of Crew-6’s return will continue audio only, and full coverage on NASA TV will resume at the start of the splashdown broadcast. Real-time audio between Crew-6 and flight controllers on NASA’s Mission Audio stream will remain available.
The Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, will undock, depart the space station, and return important and time-sensitive research to Earth. The spacecraft will splash down at one of seven targeted landing zones in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 return coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change due to weather and station operations):
