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Astronomy and space

Astronomy and space

Celebrating cosmic-ray pioneer Bibha Chowdhuri, Super Mario gets an ionizing boost, new planetoid is Farfarout

19 Feb 2021 Hamish Johnston
Bibha Chowdhuri Poster

This edition of the Red Folder is going out of this world to celebrate the three missions arriving at Mars this month: United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe, China’s Tianwen-1 Mars probe and the US’s Perseverance rover.

One thing that space missions have to contend with is damage to equipment from cosmic rays. Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics has just issued a downloadable poster of the cosmic-ray pioneer Bibha Chowdhuri in its Forces of Nature series that celebrates women who have changed science.

Born in Kolkata, India in 1913, Chowdhuri began her pioneering work on cosmic rays while doing a MSc at the University of Calcutta. She then moved to the UK where she did a PhD at the University of Manchester with the future Nobel laureate Patrick Blackett. There Chowdhuri did research on air showers of radiation, which are created when a high energy cosmic ray collides with a molecule in the upper atmosphere.

Chowdhuri returned to India after completing her PhD and worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as well as the Physical Research Laboratory and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. She died in 1991.

Staying on the topic of cosmic rays, an article in TheGamer claims that a player called DOTA_Teabag gained a boost from a wayward ionizing particle from space while playing the video game Super Mario 64. In 2013, the player was launched high into the air for no apparent reason, gaining significant advantage.

Flipping a bit

After the event, gamers around the world tried to work out how DOTA_Teabag did it, but to no avail – until now. A gamer called pannenkoek12 has shown that boost could have occurred if one specific bit in the byte that defines the player’s height was flipped at a precise moment in the game. And how could that happen? Well, the speculation is that a particle from space just happened to zap the game hardware, flipping the bit.

Farfarout” is the name of what astronomers at the University of Hawaii believe is the most distant object observed in the Solar System. The planetoid is four times the distance from the Sun as Pluto and was first spotted in 2018. Now, after careful observations the team is confident about the object’s orbit, which puts Farfarout beyond the previous record holder “Farout” – which was also discovered in 2018 by the same team.

Farfarout takes about 1000 years to orbit the Sun , which is why it took several years to pin down its orbit.

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