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Eclipse to cast ‘deep’ shadow across southern Washington state

Michael Allen
Michael Allen

Parts of Washington state will be treated to an extraordinary show during what NASA is calling the “Great American Eclipse” on Aug. 21, even though the sun won’t completely disappear. As the total eclipse cuts a swath across neighboring Oregon and Idaho, some locations in the state will enjoy a “deep partial eclipse,” said astronomer Michael Allen of Washington State University.

“With most of the sun obscured by the moon, it will get partially dark,” he said, similar to very early in the morning. “The stars won’t come out, but for about two minutes, daylight will definitely be dimmer.”

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WSU News

The surface of Mars is probably too toxic for bacteria to survive

 

Dirk Schulze-Makuch
Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Mars is not a very welcoming place. It’s cold, there’s hardly any atmosphere, and its bombarded with deep space radiation. Even the soil wants to kill you; as the Phoenix lander confirmed in 2009, the Martian regolith is laced with perchlorates—chlorine-based compounds that, when heated up, can rip apart organic materials, like cells and their building blocks.

To try to find out exactly what those perchlorates might do to Martian microorganisms, researchers at the University of Edinburgh pitted bacteria against this compound in a battery of tests. What they found does not bode well for the search for life on Mars: Under Mars-like conditions, the perchlorates were indeed toxic to the microbes.

“We knew before that any life would have an incredibly hard time to survive on the surface, and this study experimentally confirms that,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

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Popular Science

Ripples in spacetime: Science’s 2016 Breakthrough of the Year

LIGO Hanford Observatory

Washington State University researchers and adjunct faculty were part of the international research team that discovered gravitational waves in 2016. Science Magazine recently named the discovery its 2016 Breakthrough of the Year. The achievement fulfilled a prediction made 100 years ago by Albert Einstein and capped a 40-year quest to spot the ripples in spacetime.

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Science Magazine

Ask Dr. Universe: What color are our stars?

George Newman
George Newman

Just the other night, I grabbed my binoculars and looked up to the starry sky. At first the stars looked white, but when I looked closer I noticed some appeared more blue and red.

I was curious to find out exactly what color they were, so I visited my friend George Newman. He’s a physics and astronomy instructor at Washington State University.

He said that a star mostly emits the kinds of light that our eyes see as red or blue.

“The thing that determines which color they give off most is their temperature,” he said.

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Dr. Universe

Physicists to do super-cool research in space

Peter Engels
Peter Engels

Washington State University and NASA scientists are set to begin an investigation into the strange world of quantum physics on the International Space Station.

WSU physicists Peter Engels and Maren Mossman are part of a team studying the behavior of atoms laser-cooled to temperatures just a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the point where they behave like one wave of discrete particles.

Their research will be the start of a new chapter in the study of quantum physics that could eventually help in the development of ultrapowerful quantum computers and a wide variety of advanced sensors for taking measurements of quantities such as gravity, rotations and magnetic fields.

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WSU News