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Jeff Bezos is all set to blast off aboard his aerospace company Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle for a suborbital flight today (July 20). The space flight will comprise a history-making all-civilian crew. The launch of the 11-minute journey to space is planned from a desert site in West Texas, US. If all goes as planned, New Shepard will blast off at 6:30am CDT (5pm IST) from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility located around 20 miles (32km) outside Van Horn in Texas, US. Bezos’ space trip comes nine days after Richard Branson’s space voyage aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity.

Jeff Bezos’ space flight: How to watch live

Blue Origin announced on its Twitter handle that viewers can tune into the live broadcast from the Blue Origin website or its YouTube channel. The livestreaming will start at 6:30am CDT, or 5pm IST for viewers in India. You can also watch the launch below:

New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall (18.3m) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. The spaceflight company has tweeted an image of the crew after the completion of their training.

Bezos also did a round of televised interviews ahead of the launch. “People keep asking if I’m nervous. I’m not really nervous, I’m excited. I’m curious. I want to know what we’re going to learn,” Bezos said.

Bezos will be joined by his younger brother Mark Bezos, 82-year-old Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. Jeff Bezos had reffered to Mark Bezos as his “best friend” on his Instagram post announcing the journey to space. Funk was the first female flight instructor at a US military base and the first woman to become an air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. Daemen became the last member to join the crew as the initial auction winner, whose name had not been made public, dropped out due to unspecified “scheduling conflicts.” According to Blue Origin, his addition means that the flight is set to include the oldest and the youngest person ever to go to space.

Jeff Bezos’ flight comes nine days after the British billionaire businessman Richard Branson travelled to space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity rocket for its pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico. Bezos is due to fly higher — 62 miles (100km) for Blue Origin compared to 53 miles (86km) for Virgin Galactic.


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Jasmin Jose is a sub-editor at Gadgets 360. She has directed investigative documentaries, PSAs, and video features covering arts, culture, science, and general news in the past.  She believes in the power of the Internet and is constantly looking out for the next new technology that is going to transform life on earth. When not doing things news, she can be found reading fiction, physics or philosophy, plucking berries, or talking cinema. Write to her at jasminj@ndtv.com or get in
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Hubble finds missing globular cluster in Milky Way’s crowded stellar halo

A striking new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has shed light on an underexplored gatekeeper of our galactic neighbours’ achievements and tragedies. Adorned with multi-hued stars, the spherical cluster glitters amid the expanse of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. This type of globular cluster is a very dense grouping of stars — about the same mass as 100,000 suns — that orbit all around the centre of their galaxy. Stars in a cluster are typically roughly the same age, as they formed from the same collapsing gas cloud. In this new view, stars show up in temperatures indicated in red and blue colours: red for colder and blue for hotter stars.

Hubble Maps Forgotten Star Cluster ESO 591-12 to Uncover Milky Way’s Ancient Stellar Secrets

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The ESO 591-12 data are part of an ongoing study to improve knowledge of the formation and evolution of globular clusters in the galaxy’s bulge and halo. These star clusters are cosmic fossils that have preserved cosmic conditions from the primordial universe. Their work helps build a fuller narrative of the evolution of the Milky Way and how it has changed over billions of years.

This new image is a further example of how advanced space-based observing facilities are helping astronomers to excavate the contents of the dark and dusty skeleton cloaking the Milky Way and sculpt a better understanding of not only the universe’s evolution but also that of our cosmic home.
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Massive stars shed extreme mass before collapsing into black holes

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Massive stars shed extreme mass before collapsing into black holes

New research indicates that the most monstrously huge stars — those more than 100 times as massive as the sun — shed at least 20 times more matter before they collapse than previously thought to do so as they cool off to become black holes. These stars blow off a significant portion of their outer layers in quite powerful stellar winds over the brief but intense course of their lives, leaving behind low masses at the end. One benefit of this extreme mass loss is that it can account for observed strangeness in stars such as those in the Tarantula Nebula, providing new information on stellar evolution, black hole formation, and sources of gravitational waves.

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For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who’sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.


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Astronomers Capture First-Ever Image of a Dead Star That Exploded Twice in Rare Supernova Event

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Astronomers Capture First-Ever Image of a Dead Star That Exploded Twice in Rare Supernova Event

For the first time, a team of astronomers has captured a clear image of a white dwarf star that exploded not just once, but twice, as a Type Ia supernova — a “double-detonation” that scientists hadn’t thought possible until now. The extraordinary observation could revise our long-held notions of how stars die, suggesting that some stars can explode as supernovas without ever crossing the Chandrasekhar limit, the minimum mass normally thought necessary for such an explosion. The astronomers employed the Very Large Telescope’s MUSE instrument to zoom in on the four-century-old supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5, which sits 60,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado, revealing evidence of two separate blasting catastrophes in its construction.

First Visual Proof Shows White Dwarfs Can Explode Twice Without Reaching Chandrasekhar Limit

As the researchers report on July 2 in Nature Astronomy, the team found a distinctive “fingerprint” in the debris of SNR 0509-67.5 in the Large Magellanic Cloud that the models predicted. White dwarfs—which are the dead stage of sun-like stars—usually blow up into Type Ia supernovas after they hit the Chandrasekhar limit by stealing matter from a neighbouring star.

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“This physical proof of a double-detonation not only helps solve a long-standing mystery of what causes these explosions, but it represents the most visually compelling evidence for this origin.” Priyam Das, University of New South Wales, team leader and author.

Something is happening to Type Ia supernovas, the “standard candles” used to measure cosmic distances, because their brightness doesn’t fluctuate. But they have long mystified scientists with how they explode. Until this discovery, an explosion white dwarf that didn’t surpass the Chandrasekhar limit was only considered in theory.

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