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  Home arrow News arrow News from Space arrow golf balls, black holes and dark energy

 
golf balls, black holes and dark energy | Print |  E-mail
Written by staff   
Wednesday, 22 November 2006

>fore
The latest International Space Station spacewalk will feature Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin hitting a golf ball into space from the docking compartment.

Is it because the golf ball got stuck there and is hindering station operations? Or are they trying to get rid of extra weight?
Nah, it's just an ad, silly! The shot is a publicity stunt set up the the Russians to promote a new line of golf clubs by Element 21, a Canadian Golf club manufacturer.

At least the balls are nonstandard, being extremely lightweight at only 1 gram each.
NASA officials estimate the golf balls will deorbit safely in two to three days.

>fast and furious

If a regular black hole isn't formidable enough for you, how about one that spins at a rate of 950 revolution per second? Space.com reports that a group of scientists using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer recently calculated the spin rate of three black holes and found that GRS1915+105, which has 14 times the mass of the Sun, rotates faster than any known black hole.

>dark energy
Five billion years ago, the evolution of the cosmos changed, and the expansion of the universe suddenly increased. One theory credits some kind of antigravity force or "dark energy."

A recent New York Times article cites research showing that this dark energy may have always been present, and may be the cosmological constant that Einstein once imagined.

The scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to prospect for supernovas and dark energy far out in space or back in time. The new results are based on observations of 23 supernovas that are more than eight billion years in the past, before dark energy came to dominate the cosmos.

 
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