NASA’s VERITAS Mission Breathes New Life In a win for planetary scientists, and planetary geologists in particular, it was announced at the recent 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas earlier this month that NASA’s VERITAS mission to the planet Venus has been reinstated into NASA’s Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) budget with a scheduled launch date of 2031, with the unofficial announcement coming on the first day of the conference, March 11, 2024, and being officially announced just a few days later. This comes after VERITAS experienced a “soft cancellation” in March of last year when NASA revealed its FY24 budget, providing VERITASRead More →

Life Might Be Difficult to Find on a Single Planet But Obvious Across Many Worlds If we could detect a clear, unambiguous biosignature on just one of the thousands of exoplanets we know of, it would be a huge, game-changing moment for humanity. But it’s extremely difficult. We simply aren’t in a place where we can be certain that what we’re detecting means what we think or even hope it does. But what if we looked at many potential worlds at once? It’s assumptions that plague us. Every chemical we detect in an exoplanet atmosphere, even with the powerful JWST, is accompanied by a setRead More →

Brown Dwarf Pairs Drift Apart in Old Age The only thing worse than drifting through space for an eternity is doing it alone. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope show that brown dwarfs that once had companions suffer that fate. Binary brown dwarfs that were once bound to each other tend to drift apart as time passes. Brown dwarfs are one of Nature’s genre-busters. They refuse to be pigeonholed into our definitions. They’re neither stars nor planets and are sometimes referred to as failed stars. They gathered too much mass to be called planets but not enough to be called stars. They live in aRead More →

Dwarf Galaxies Could be the Key to Explaining Dark Matter If you have a view of the southern celestial sky, on a clear night you might see two clear smudges of light set off a bit from the great arch of the Milky Way. They are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and they are the most visible of the dwarf galaxies. Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies that typically cluster around larger ones. The Milky Way, for example, has nearly two dozen dwarf galaxies. Because of their small size, they can be more significantly affected by dark matter. Their formation may even have been triggeredRead More →

An Asteroid Found Sharing the Orbit of Mars Astronomers discovered another asteroid sharing Mars’ orbit. These types of asteroids are called trojans, and they orbit in two clumps, one ahead of and one behind the planet. But the origins of the Mars trojans are unclear. Can this new discovery help explain where they came from? There are now 14 known Mars Trojans and the name of the newest one is 2023 FW14. They’re in two groups, one 60 degrees ahead and one 60 degrees behind Mars. These are the Lagrange 4 and Lagrange 5 points. Most of the Mars trojans are at the L5 point,Read More →

The Sound of an Interstellar Meteor Might Have Just Been a Rumbling Truck A 2023 expedition to the Pacific Ocean, searching for debris from a suspected extraterrestrial object, may have been looking in the wrong place. A new look at the infrasound data used to locate the point of impact suggests that they may have been confused by the rumblings of a truck driving past. On 14 January 2018, a space rock hit the Earth’s atmosphere off the coast of Papua New Guinea. It was detected by what are mysteriously described as “US Government Sensors”, and given the catalogue entry “CNEOS 2014-01-08”. Based on theRead More →

Europe Has Big Plans for Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, is a gleaming beacon that captivates our intellectual curiosity. Its clean, icy surface makes it one of the most reflective objects in the entire Solar System. But it’s what’s below that ice that really gets scientists excited. Under its icy shell is an ocean of warm, salty water, and the ESA says investigating the moon should be a top priority. Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon. It’s only about 500 km (300 miles) in diameter. But despite its small size, it may harbour a buried ocean containing 15 million cubic km of water. (Earth hasRead More →

SMOS and Swarm team up to spot huge solar storm The sun erupted over the weekend, flinging electromagnetic radiation towards Earth, even illuminating skies with spectacular aurora borealis. For the first time, ESA’s unlikely space weather duo of SMOS and Swarm tracked the severe solar storm—which warped Earth’s magnetic field. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Tiniest ‘starquakes’ ever detected At a distance of 11.9 light years, Epsilon Indi (ε Indi) is an orange dwarf star (also known as a K dwarf) with 71% of the sun’s diameter. An international team, led by Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) researcher Tiago Campante, studied this star with the ESPRESSO spectrograph, mounted at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), and detected the tiniest “starquakes” ever recorded. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Image: Hubble spots the Spider Galaxy This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the gauzy-looking celestial body UGC 5829, an irregular galaxy that lies about 30 million light-years away. Despite the lack of observations of this relatively faint galaxy, UGC 5829 has a distinct and descriptive name: the Spider Galaxy. Perhaps its distorted galactic arms with their glowing, star-forming tips hint at the clawed legs of an arachnid. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Hubble sees new star proclaiming its presence with cosmic light show FS Tau is a multi-star system made up of FS Tau A, the bright star-like object near the middle of the image, and FS Tau B (Haro 6-5B), the bright object to the far right that is partially obscured by a dark, vertical lane of dust. These young objects are surrounded by the softly illuminated gas and dust of this stellar nursery. The system is only about 2.8 million years old, very young for a star system. Our sun, by contrast, is about 4.6 billion years old. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Why scientists are making space data into sounds When you travel somewhere where they speak a language you can’t understand, it’s usually important to find a way to translate what’s being communicated to you. In some ways, the same can be said about scientific data collected from cosmic objects. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Modeling M87’s jet: Why do black hole jets shine and pierce the cosmic sky? An international team led by Dr. Yuan Feng from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has investigated the validity of the two main models of black hole jets by calculating the radiation predicted by these models and comparing it with observations of the M87 jet, and found that the “extraction of black hole rotational energy” model accurately predicted the observed jets, while the “extraction of accretion disk rotational energy” model struggled to explain the observational results. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Hot post-asymptotic giant branch star discovered in globular cluster ESO 37-1 Astronomers have discovered a new post-asymptotic giant branch (PAGB) star in a Galactic globular cluster known as ESO 37-1 (or E3 for short) and derived its fundamental parameters. The finding is reported in a research paper published March 19 on the preprint server arXiv. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Parker Solar Probe Was Blasted by Coronal Mass Ejections 28 Times in 4 Years NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) was launched on August 12, 2018, with the goal of becoming the first spacecraft to touch the Sun while teaching us more about our host star than any spacecraft or solar instrument in human history. Now, a recent study submitted to The Astrophysical Journal discusses the incredible data that PSP collected on coronal mass ejections (CMEs) over a four-year period. This study holds the potential to help scientists and the public better understand the CMEs and how they contribute to space weather. Here, Universe Today speaksRead More →