Ansible offers starring roles for all in reworked Galaxy

The Uyuni project has released a new stable version of its eponymous free enterprise systems-management tool that supports SUSE distros as well as Red Hat (and its many relatives), Ubuntu, and Debian.

Named after the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the world's biggest salt flat, Uyuni is the open-source muscle behind SUSE's commercial enterprise fleet-management tool, SUSE Manager, and you can have a look at its latest emission, 2022.3, here.

Uyuni is a SUSE-backed fork of Spacewalk, which used to be the basis of Red Hat's enterprise-management tool, Satellite, up to version 5.

Nebulon has integrated its smartInfrastructure platform with Red Hat's Ansible software – including a set of modules that allow users to automate Nebulon infrastructure deployment and management by using Ansible Playbooks.

The Nebulon Ansible Collection, when combined with the firm's Nebulon ON cloud-based control plane used for management, is claimed to reduce operational overheads by up to 75 per cent compared with operating hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or traditional three-tier server infrastructure, according to Nebulon.

Nebulon's infrastructure platform is based on a PCIe card called the Services Processing Unit (SPU), which fits inside server nodes and controls all the storage drives in each node. Each SPU is linked to all the others in a cluster via dedicated Ethernet connections, effectively producing a kind of distributed storage area network (SAN) that is configurable via the cloud-hosted Nebulon ON control plane.

US scientists have discovered that black holes can create as well as destroy, as the observed hot gas emitted from such a void in a dwarf galaxy could have contributed to the birth of stars.

A paper in the science journal Nature reveals how observations made with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on Hubble revealed the inner secrets of galaxy Henize 2-10, a distance of around 9 megaparsecs or about 30 million light-years (a parsec being a measure of distance, not time, so sit down Han Solo, let's not go down that black hole).

Lead researcher and Montana State University Physics Department assistant professor Amy Reines found traces of an outflow or bridge of hot gas stretching 230 light-years from the massive black hole to a (relatively) nearby star nursery.

Astronomers have for the first time discovered what looks like a planet outside the Milky Way, judging by a study published this week in Nature.

Over 4,000 exoplanets have been spotted orbiting stars in our galaxy since the early 1990s when scientists confirmed the Solar System isn’t a unique formation.

Our Sun is just one star among the 100 billion or so stars in the Milky Way. Our galaxy, in turn, is just one among the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. It’s only natural to assume therefore that there must be exoplanets circling stars in other galaxies, too, though astronomers have never managed to find one so far away until now.

Never mind memory errors from radiation. Another deteriorating part of the decades-old Hubble Space Telescope has found itself in a jam. This time its camera unit is once again in the middle of a clash between scientists over whether or not the galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 contains any dark matter.

When DF2 was written up in a Nature paper in 2018, the study immediately raised eyebrows. The paper concluded the galaxy was devoid of dark matter. How could that be possible?

The mysterious substance is thought to be present in all galaxies, holding together glittering stars, swirls of dust and gas, and more, giving the galaxies structure and shape. Dark matter is a crucial component in theories of galactic formation, and finding a galaxy without this hidden stuff, or a very low quantity of it, breaks all the rules. DF2 was heralded as a significant oddball.

A neural network has helped astronomers catalog a whopping 27 million galaxies collected from one of the largest astronomical surveys probing the mysterious nature of dark energy.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) kicked off in 2013, and aims to snap galaxies and supernovae across an eighth of the Earth's night sky. Although that may not sound like much, the number of objects filling such a region of space – giving us a window onto the universe as far back as when it was just six billion years old, less than half of its age today – is staggering.

If we know the age of each of the galaxies we observe, and know where they are, we can better understand the workings and evolution of our universe. However, cataloging tens or hundreds of millions of galaxies by hand is largely infeasible.

Red Hat is integrating its Ansible automation platform and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

“We've known people use Ansible and OpenShift and Kubernetes together for years,” Red Hat senior manager Richard Henshall told The Register. “But here we get a bona fide integration between the two.” Typical uses would be to automate deploying system updates, configuring load balancers, or scaling server resources.

The integration is in technical preview. “We’ve got the initial plumbing working, so it’s exposed through Advanced Cluster Management (ACM),” said Henshall, referring to the company’s tool for controlling OpenShift clusters and applications.

Andromeda sports a ginormous halo of gas with a mass greater than 100 billion Suns that stretches from its outer edges up to two million light-years – a distance that reaches more than halfway to our own Milky Way galaxy.

If the structure was visible to the naked eye, it would appear three times the width of the Big Dipper, said NASA. The gas is made up of plasma and a large sprinkling of stardust shed from dead suns and supernovae. It’s split into two layers: the inner shell is lumpier and more dynamic, the outer shell is smoother and hotter.

“Understanding the huge halos of gas surrounding galaxies is immensely important,” said Samantha Berek, co-author of a paper into the thing [PDF] and an astrophysicist at Yale University.

Astronomers have spied a tiny galaxy with the lowest oxygen levels yet observed, a discovery made possible thanks to a machine-learning algorithm.

The galaxy, dubbed HSC J1631+4426, contains just 1.6 per cent of the total amount of oxygen locked in our Sun – the lowest levels yet seen, beating the previous record by just a smidgen.

These extremely metal-poor galaxies are rare; they tend to be small, formless dwarf galaxies that contain a small smattering of stars. The lack of heavier elements such as oxygen is a sign that the galaxy is still in its primordial stage.

Deep-learning software has singled out a group of 250 stars in the Milky Way that appear to have been born outside our galaxy. That's according to a research paper published this week in Nature Astronomy.

The oddballs, known collectively as Nyx, were described as a “vast stellar stream in the vicinity of the Sun,” by Lina Necib, first author of the paper [pre-print] and a postdoctoral scholar in theoretical physics at Caltech.

However, unlike our own star, these suns don’t look like they really belong in the Milky Way.