Latest news with #outerSpace
Associated Press
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Movie Review: 'The Bad Guys 2' boldly goes bigger but loses its charm along the way
The good news for fans of 'The Bad Guys' is the new sequel is stellar. But that's because a good portion is actually set in — are you kidding us? — outer space. 'The Bad Guys 2' has clearly lost its moorings. Returning director Pierre Perifel, writers Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen and the same voice cast have done what all sequels do these days — amp it all up like everyone is on molly, try to hit the same emotional notes and layer an insane plot with the fate of the world at stake. It's hard to watch a franchise drift so expensively and pointlessly in Earth's orbit. The gang is all back: Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf,Marc Maron as safe-cracker Mr. Snake, Craig Robinson as master-of disguise Mr. Shark, Anthony Ramos as Mr. Piranha and Awkwafina as hacker Ms. Tarantula. We left them in the last movie walking out of prison early after good behavior and trying to turn their back on bad-hood. It's not that easy since would-be employers these days want to know about gaps in their job experience — they were robbing banks, after all — workplace trust issues and salary expectations. No one wants to hire a bunch of ex-cons. 'Anyone who wants to change has to start somewhere,' Mr. Wolf, pushing the George Clooney-like charm offensive, begs one dubious interviewer. 'I'm just asking for a chance.' A life on the straight-and-narrow is hard for four of the former baddies, but not Maron — so perfectly cast as the grouchy, self-loathing snake. Now he spends his days doing Vinyasa yoga, listening to Sabrina Carpenter's 'Espresso,' telling people 'namaste' and sips wheatgrass kombucha with dandelion. He's even more irritating. Soon all five are caught in a series of traps and double-crosses by a new robbery crew — Danielle Brooks' lollipop-licking venomous snow leopard, Maria Bakalova's Bulgarian wild boar engineer and Natasha Lyonne's wry raven, using her same vocal tick as on 'Poker Face.' These dames have a plan to get very rich using a substance known as MacGuffinite, a clever — or lazy — joke on the object that everyone wants in a movie like this, which drives the plot. There's soon a trip to a Mexican wrestling festival and then a wedding needs crashing in order to gain control over a rocket owned by an Elon Musk-like billionaire — voice acted by Colin Jost — who runs the MoonX company. Then the rocket has to be stopped before a gadget aboard creates a '24-carat catastrophe.' The animation is amazingly kinetic and with no corners cut, from tiny bugs illuminated in a light beam at night to the bumpy way a truck moves on the highway. The franchise's love of vroooming and fishtailing Looney Tunes-like car chases stays intact, as does the wavy green air farts that emanate from Piranha. Based on Aaron Blabey's popular graphic book series, the first movie in 2022 drove hard into the nature of good and evil — like asking if DNA determines behavior — as our heroes whipsawed between heroic and villainous, to the glee of all the kiddies in the theater. 'We may be bad, but we're so good at it,' was the slogan. It was all nicely set against a zombie guinea pig uprising. This time the writers have just given up on what side of the ethical divide their anti-heroes are on. 'Are we bad again?' ask the confused piranha. Replies Mr. Wolf: 'I get it. We're all over the place.' Left unexplored is the concept of doing wrong for a greater good, and can being bad be excused if it stops a worse badness? 'What if the bad life was your best life?' asks one of the newcomers. (Another thing to chew on: If 'The Bad Guys 2' is a worse sequel, does that make 'The Bad Guys' good?) When we say the gang is all here, they're all here without any editing: Zazie Beetz returns as Gov. Diane Foxington, Alex Borstein comes back as the top cop and even the kitten from the first film meows in the second. So is Richard Ayoade as Professor Marmalade, the evil guinea pig who is now surprisingly swole and tatted up in prison. He threatens again to steal the show and may if there's a 'The Bad Guys 3.' (There's going to be a 'The Bad Guys 3.') The joy of 'The Bad Guys' was that it was a respectful send-up of the movies of Quentin Tarantino and caper flicks like 'Ocean's 11.' This time, the 'Fast & Furious' series gets mocked, as does 'Silence of the Lambs,' 'Men in Black' and maybe 'Moonraker,' which is now 46 years old. But the subversion is painfully flat now: The first film in the franchise would have laughed at one climactic line in the second: 'We've got one shot to save the world. Let's make it count!' The three new villains may be a touch too much for younger viewers — the violence seems darker and more volcanic this time — but there's a very loud soundtrack that includes Busta Rhymes, Sofi Tukker and Rag'n'Bone Man. So what does it all mean? It means the folks behind 'The Bad Guys 2' reunited for a shot to push the franchise into exciting areas, but — c'mon, everyone — they didn't make it count. 'The Bad Guys 2,' a Universal Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG for 'action/mild violence, rude humor, and language.' Running time: 104 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers discover strange solar system body dancing in sync with Neptune: 'Like finding a hidden rhythm in a song'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers have found that a weird space rock at the edge of the solar system is locked in a rhythmic dance with Neptune. The object, designated 2020 VN40, is part of a family of distant solar system objects called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 2020 VN40 is the first object discovered that orbits the sun once for every ten orbits Neptune makes. Considering that one Neptunian year lasts 164.8 Earth years, that means 2020 VN40 has one heck of a long year, lasting around 1,648 years or 19,776 months on Earth! The team behind this research thinks that 2020 VN40's ponderous orbital dance with Neptune may have come about when it was temporarily snared by the gravity of the ice giant planet. Thus, this discovery could help researchers better understand the dynamics of bodies at the edge of the solar system. "This is a big step in understanding the outer solar system," team leader Rosemary Pike from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement. "It shows that even very distant regions influenced by Neptune can contain objects, and it gives us new clues about how the solar system evolved." The orbital rhythm of 2020 VN40 was discovered in data from the Large inclination Distant Objects (LiDO) survey. LiDO uses the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with backup from the Gemini Observatory and the Walter Baade Telescope to search the outer solar system for weird objects. In particular, LiDO specializes in hunting TNOs with orbits that take them far above and below the orbital plane of Earth around the sun. These are regions of the solar system that have thus far only been sparsely explored by astronomers. "It has been fascinating to learn how many small bodies in the solar system exist on these very large, very tilted orbits," LiDO team member and University of Regina researcher Samantha Lawler said. The highly tilted path of 2020 VN40 finds it at an average distance from the sun equivalent to 140 times the distance between Earth and our star. However, the most interesting element of the orbit of 2020 VN40 is its resonance with the orbit of Neptune. Other bodies rhythmically aligned with Neptune make their closest approaches to the sun, their perihelion, when Neptune is at its greatest distance from our star, or its aphelion. Defying this trend, 2020 VN40 is at perihelion when Neptune is also close to the sun. That's if one were looking at it from above the solar system, with the tilt of 2020 VN40 meaning that this TNO and Neptune are not actually close together; the TNO is actually far below the solar system. This also separates 2020 VN40 from other resonant TNOs, which tend to stay within the plane of the solar system when they make close approaches to the sun. "This new motion is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we knew," team member and University of California Santa Cruz scientist Ruth Murray-Clay said. "It could change how we think about the way distant objects move." Related Stories: — Astronomers discover a cosmic 'fossil' at the edge of our solar system. Is this bad news for 'Planet 9'? — Icy asteroids help the James Webb Space Telescope uncover Neptune's history —Messenger comets might be why Earth has life, asteroid Ryugu samples suggest Revealing the orbital strangeness of 2020 VN40 suggests that solar system objects with highly tilted orbits can adopt novel and unexpected types of movement. The hunt is now on for more bodies like 2020 VN40, with the newly operating Vera C. Rubin Observatory set to play a key role in this investigation. "This is just the beginning," team member and Planetary Science Institute researcher Kathryn Volk said. "We're opening a new window into the solar system's past." The 2020 VN40 results were published on July 7 in The Planetary Science Journal. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers discover a cosmic 'fossil' at the edge of our solar system. Is this bad news for 'Planet 9'?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers have discovered a massive new solar system body located beyond the orbit of Pluto. The weird elongated orbit of the object suggests that if "Planet Nine" exists, it is much further from the sun than thought, or it has been ejected from our planetary system altogether. The strange orbit of the object, designated 2023 KQ14 and nicknamed "Ammonite," classifies it as a "sednoid." Sednoids are bodies beyond the orbit of the ice giant Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), characterized by a highly eccentric (non-circular) orbit and a distant closest approach to the sun or "perihelion." The closest distance that 2023 KQ14 ever comes to our star is equivalent to 71 times the distance between Earth and the sun. The sednoid is estimated to be between 136 and 236 miles (220 and 380 kilometers) wide. That makes it 45 times wider than the height of Mount Everest. This is just the fourth known sednoid, and its orbit is currently different from that of its siblings, though it seems to have been stable for 4.5 billion years. However, the team behind the discovery, made using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey, thinks that all four sednoids were on similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago. That implies something dramatic happened out at the edge of the solar system around 400 million years after its birth. Not only does the fact that 2023 KQ14 now follows a unique orbit suggest that the outer solar system is more complex and varied than previously thought, but it also places limits on a hypothetical "Planet Nine" theorized to lurk at the edge of the solar system. "The fact that 2023 KQ14's current orbit does not align with those of the other three sednoids lowers the likelihood of the Planet Nine hypothesis," team leader Yukun Huang of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan said in a statement. "It is possible that a planet once existed in the solar system but was later ejected, causing the unusual orbits we see today." Hello 2023 KQ14. Goodbye Planet Nine? 2023 KQ14 was first spotted in the wide field of view of the Subaru Telescope, located on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, in observations collected during March, May, and August 2023. The sednoid was confirmed using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope during follow-up observations performed in July 2024. This data was combined with archival data from other observatories, allowing astronomers to reconstruct the orbit of 2023 KQ14 over the past 19 years. But this is a celestial body that likely formed as the planets of the solar system were taking shape around the infant sun around 4.6 billion years ago. Thus, astronomers were keen to retell the story of its orbit for much longer than two decades. To do this, Huang and their FOSSIL team colleagues turned to the computer cluster operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan to perform complex numerical simulations. This revealed the orbital stability of 2023 KQ14 for 4.5 billion years and the implications of that steady orbit. "2023 KQ14 was found in a region far away where Neptune's gravity has little influence," team member and planetary scientist Fumi Yoshida said. "The presence of objects with elongated orbits and large perihelion distances in this area implies that something extraordinary occurred during the ancient era when 2023 KQ14 formed. "Understanding the orbital evolution and physical properties of these unique, distant objects is crucial for comprehending the full history of the solar system." Related Stories: — New kind of pulsar may explain how mysterious 'black widow' systems evolve — Hear 'black widow' pulsar's song as it destroys companion —Astronomers discover origins of mysterious double hot Jupiter exoplanets: 'It is a dance of sorts' Yoshida added that, at present, the Subaru Telescope is one of the only telescopes on Earth capable of making a discovery like that of 2023 KQ14."I would be happy if the FOSSIL team could make many more discoveries like this one and help draw a complete picture of the history of the solar system," Yoshida concluded. The team's research was published on Monday (July 14), in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Scientists found a possible new dwarf planet — it could spell bad news for Planet 9 fans
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A potential new dwarf planet has been discovered in the outer reaches of the solar system, and its existence poses the greatest challenge yet to the hypothesis that a ninth planet lurks far from the sun. "We were very excited to discover 2017 OF201 because it was not expected at all," study leader Sihao Cheng of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, told "It's very rare to discover an object both large and with an exotic orbit." "The object's aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the sun – is more than 1,600 times that of the Earth's orbit," Cheng explained in a statement. "Meanwhile its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth's orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit." We're learning more and more about the outer solar system. Beyond Neptune is the Kuiper Belt; a ring of icy cometary nuclei and planetesimals dominated by Pluto and Charon. The Kuiper Belt begins about 30 astronomical units (AU) from the sun (one AU is the distance of Earth from the sun), its inner edge guarded by Neptune, and extends out to 50 AU. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is currently exploring the Kuiper Belt. Meanwhile, the twin Voyager spacecraft have already sped through the Kuiper Belt and have entered a realm called the Scattered Disk, which is thought to go all through way out to more than 1,000 AU and is home to icy bodies on highly elongated and highly inclined orbits. These objects were literally scattered in the region through gravitational interactions with Neptune, and have had their orbits further modified via torques induced by the gravity of passing stars, or the "galactic tide" (the overall gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy). Beyond the Scattered Disk is the Oort Cloud, which is an immense volume of space that possibly stretches up to a light-year from the sun and is the source of long-period comets. However, much about the Scattered Disk is still unknown, and besides those long-period comets that venture this way every now and then, no Oort Cloud object has ever been seen — they are too far away and too small. This is why every discovery of a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) on a greatly elongated orbit is vital for piecing together the mystery of the outer solar system. Around 5,000 TNOs have been discovered until now, but the latest discovery may be one of the most important. Known as 2017 OF201, it is currently 90.5 AU away from the sun, but its orbit brings it as close as 4.14 billion miles (6.66 billion kilometers) from our star and as far away as a whopping 157 billion miles (244 billion kilometers). from the sun. For the vast majority of its 24,256-year orbit, 2017 OF201 is too far away to be seen with current telescopes; it could only be discovered because its last perihelion came in 1930, and that it's still relatively close. The object's last perihelion also came, coincidentally, during the same year that Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto with a 13-inch (330mm) telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Would it have been possible for Tombaugh to have also found 2017 OF201? Probably not — at magnitude +20.1, this object would have been four magnitudes fainter than Pluto, and it is even fainter today. Fortunately, telescopic technology has come a long way in the past 95 years, with deep surveys that can capture the passage of a faint object. For example, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has identified about 800 TNOs — and that's even though DES is ostensibly a cosmological survey. In the same vein, Cheng, along with Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang of Princeton University, have been scrutinizing observations made by the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) on the Victor M. Blanco 13-foot (4-meter) telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. They discovered 2017 OF201 in archive data going back to 2017 from DECaLS, and also spotted it in old data dating from 2011–12 captured by the 11.7-foot) (3.58-meter) Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea. Based on its brightness and its expected albedo of 0.15 (meaning it would reflect just 15% of the sunlight incident upon it), Cheng's team calculated that 2017 OF201 is probably about 435 miles (700 kilometers)) across. This would make it the second largest object found on such an elongated orbit. Although it is substantially smaller than Pluto, which is 1,477 miles (2,377 km) across, 2017 OF201 is nevertheless large enough to be classified as a dwarf planet. However, 2017 OF201's existence contradicts the Planet Nine hypothesis, based on our best guess as to Planet Nine's orbit. Planet Nine is a concept that was introduced in 2016 by Caltech astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin to explain a perceived clustering of the orbits of many extreme TNOs. The gravity of Planet Nine, which is speculated to be a super-Earth or modest ice giant, would be influencing the orbits of extreme TNOs — or so the hypothesis goes. Yet, the orbit of 2017 OF201 is not clustered with the others. "Many extreme TNOs have orbits that appear to cluster in specific orientations, but 2017 OF201 deviates from this," Jiaxuan Li said in the statement. In our e-mail interview with Cheng, he laid out the repercussions that this could have for the existence of Planet Nine's orbit. "Planet Nine does allow for extreme TNOs to have unclustered orbits, but those orbits are not stable," he said. The timescale in which Planet Nine would render 2017 OF201's orbit unstable, and kick it out of the solar system, is in the region of 100 million years. However, the process of placing 2017 OF201 in its current orbit, through gravitational interactions with Neptune that pushed 2017 OF201 out of the Kuiper Belt — followed by nudges from the galactic tide — takes billions of years. It's possible that 2017 OF201 has only recently arrived in its current orbit, which would mean Planet Nine might not have had time to disrupt its orbit yet. "One important thing is to see if the orbit of our object is stable," Cheng said. "I think, based on analytical criteria, our object is at the boundary between stable and unstable, so further investigation with more comprehensive simulations is needed to definitively rule out the Planet Nine hypothesis." Related Stories: — Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart — Hubble Telescope discovers a new '3-body problem' puzzle among Kuiper Belt asteroids — 2nd Kuiper Belt? Our solar system may be much larger than thought Intriguingly, 2017 OF201 is probably not alone in the outer solar system. It's purely by chance that it happens to be close enough to be detectable — for 99% of its 24,256-year orbit it is too far away to be seen. "2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable," said Cheng. "The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbits and size; they are just too far away to be detectable now. Just think of that: There could be hundreds of dwarf planets in the outermost reaches of the solar system. "Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system," said Cheng. A pre-print of a paper describing the discovery is available on arXiv.
Asharq Al-Awsat
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Asharq Al-Awsat
North Korea Says US Missile Shield Plans Risk ‘Nuclear War' in Space
North Korea slammed on Tuesday US President Donald Trump's "Golden Dome" missile shield plan as a "very dangerous" threat that could spark nuclear war in space, state media said. Trump announced new details and initial funding for the missile shield system last week, calling it "very important for the success and even survival of our country". The initiative faces significant technical and political challenges, according to analysts, and could come at a hefty price tag. In a statement shared by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Pyongyang's foreign ministry slammed the "very dangerous 'threatening initiative' aimed at threatening the strategic security of the nuclear weapons states". The United States is "hell-bent on the moves to militarize outer space," the foreign ministry said. "The US plan for building a new missile defense system is the root cause of sparking off global nuclear and space arms race by stimulating the security concerns of nuclear weapons states and turning... outer space into a potential nuclear war field," it added. Washington -- Seoul's key security ally -- has in recent years ramped up joint military exercises and increased the presence of strategic US assets, such as an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered submarine, in the region to deter the North. Pyongyang has repeatedly declared itself an "irreversible" nuclear weapons state and routinely denounces joint US-South Korea drills as rehearsals for invasion. Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told AFP that Pyongyang saw Trump's "Golden Dome" as a threat. "The North's strong reaction suggests it views the Golden Dome as capable of significantly weakening the effectiveness of its nuclear arsenal, including its ICBMs," he said. "If the US completes its new missile defense program, the North will be forced to develop alternative means to counter or penetrate it," he added. - China, Russia modernizing weapons - China has also expressed strong concerns about Washington's Golden Dome plan, accusing the United States of undermining global stability. Beijing is closing the gap with Washington when it comes to ballistic and hypersonic missile technology, while Moscow is modernizing its intercontinental-range missile systems and developing advanced precision strike missiles, according to a 2022 Pentagon review. The Kremlin has said Trump's initiative would require consultations with Russia but was otherwise a "sovereign matter" for the United States, softening its tone after also previously slamming the idea as destabilizing. The plan's Golden Dome name stems from Israel's Iron Dome air defense system, which has intercepted thousands of short-range rockets and other projectiles since it went into operation in 2011. The United States faces various missile threats from adversaries, but they differ significantly from the short-range weapons that Israel's Iron Dome is designed to counter.
