Nature Hub

    From BBC World News By  :- Sophie Hardach Edited by :- Amal Udawatta Getty Images As wind farms expand, some can accidentally "steal" each others' wind – causing worries over some countries' energy transition to net zero. As offshore wind farms are expanding around the world in the race to meet net zero climate targets, a worrying phenomenon is attracting growing attention: in some conditions, wind farms can "steal" each other's wind. "Wind farms produce energy, and that energy is extracted from the air. And the extraction of energy from the air comes with a reduction of the wind speed," says Peter Baas, a research scientist at Whiffle, a Dutch company specialising in renewable energy and weather forecasting. The wind is slower behind each turbine  within the wind farm  than in front of it, and also behind the wind farm as a whole, compared with in front of it, he explains. "This is called the wake effect." Simply put, as the spin...

     From :- Sky & Telescope    By :- Camille M. Carlisle   Edited by :- Amal Udawatta This 2-panel mosaic by  S&T  Gallery contributor Mark Germani  shows the Andromeda Galaxy, which lies approximately 2.5 million light-years away. Each of the two panels that make up this image consist of 7 hours of data. Germani also incorporated a small amount of hydrogen-alpha data from one of his previous images of this galaxy, so as to highlight the hydrogen-rich star formation regions (in pinkish-red).     A new analysis of Hubble and Gaia data suggests that our galaxy might survive an upcoming encounter with the Andromeda Galaxy unscathed. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the behemoths of the Local Group, the mini cluster in which we reside. They’re joined by roughly 100 smaller galaxies, including two large sidekicks: M33 (Andromeda’s buddy, the Triangulum Galaxy) and the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s close companion...

From :- Sky & Telescope   By :- David L. Chandler Edited by :- Amal Udawatta Image showing the current location of Pluto, Neptune, and 2017 OF 201 . Jiaxuan Li and Sihao Cheng A newly discovered object in the outer solar system, 2017 OF201, is the largest found in more than a decade. It was hiding in plain sight, lurking deep inside terabytes of publicly available data, some of which are more than a decade old. But this particular needle in a haystack — the first new dwarf planet in the outer solar system to be found in more than a decade — took months of computational work to ferret out from the mass of background stars and noise. The newfound object, which for now bears the unwieldy name of 2017 OF 201 , is approximately 700 kilometers (400 miles) wide and follows an extremely elliptical orbit around the Sun that takes an estimated 25,000 years to complete. Its size puts it in the category of dwarf planets, along with Pluto, the asteroid Ceres, and other objects. It’s on...