Universe Today (Page 23)

Planetesimals Are Buffeted by Wind in their Nebula, Throwing Debris into Space Before planets form around a young star, the protosolar disk is populated with innumerable planetesimals. Over time, these planetesimals combine to form planets, and the core accretion theory explains how that happens. But before there are planets, the disk full of planetesimals is a messy place. The history of rocky objects smashing into each other is written in the craters scarring the surfaces of the planets and moons. But that’s the macro scale of the history. There’s more to planetesimals than their eventual accretion into planets. New research shows that these small bodiesRead More →

Solar Electric Propulsion Systems are Just What we Need for Efficient Trips to Mars There are many different ways to get to Mars, but there are always tradeoffs. Chemical propulsion, proven the most popular, can quickly get a spacecraft to the red planet. But they come at a high cost of bringing their fuel, thereby increasing the mission’s overall cost. Alternative propulsion technologies have been gaining traction in several deep space applications. Now, a team of scientists from Spain has preliminary studied what it would take to send a probe to Mars using entirely electric propulsion once it leaves Earth. Electric propulsion systems have severalRead More →

Satellite Data Shows US East Coast is Sinking Based on satellite imagery, geologists have determined major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, some areas as much as 2 to 5 millimeters (.08-0.2 inches) per year. Called subsidence, this sinking of land is happening at a faster rate than was estimated just a year ago. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, researchers say their analysis has far-reaching implications for community and infrastructure resilience planning, particularly for roadways, airport runways, building foundations, rail lines, and pipelines. These coastal areas, which include population centers such as New YorkRead More →

Hubble Shows That a Fast Radio Burst Came From a Giant Group of Galaxies Way back when the cosmos was only five billion years old, a powerful explosion happened in a group of young galaxies halfway across the Universe. It sent out a blast of radiation from one member of that distant galaxy group. On June 10, 2022, the Square Kilometer Array pathfinder telescope in Australia picked up a fast radio burst (FRB) emanating from the site. The Very Large Telescope in Chile confirmed its distance. Now, Hubble Space Telescope provides a look at the specific galaxy where the FRB originated. It’s kinda weird. Hubble’sRead More →

Chinese Rocket Lofts the Einstein Probe and its “Lobster Eyes” Any astronomical instrument dubbed “Lobster Eyes” is bound to grab attention. It’s actually unlike scientists to give anything creative names, take the big red coloured storm on Jupiter which resembles a spot…aka the Great Red Spot! Lobster Eyes is the name adtoped by the X-ray telescope that just been launched from China and will scan the sky looking for X-rays coming from high-energy transients.  The instrument, which is more properly called the Einstein Probe, is a collaboration between The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Max Planck Institute forRead More →

Impact Craters: Why study them and can they help us find life elsewhere? When we look at the Moon, either through a pair of binoculars, a telescope, or past footage from the Apollo missions, we see a landscape that’s riddled with what appear to be massive sinkholes. But these “sinkholes” aren’t just on the Moon, as they are evident on nearly every planetary body throughout the solar system, from planets, to other moons, to asteroids. They are called impact craters and can range in size from cities to small countries. Impact craters are caused by rocks ranging in size from dust particles to a fewRead More →

A Giant Star is Fading Away. But First, it Had an Enormous Eruption About 16,000 light-years away, a massive star experienced an unusual dimming event. This can happen in binary stars when one star passes in front of the other. It can also be due to intrinsic reasons like innate variability. But this star dimmed by as much as one-third, a huge amount. What happened? The star is named RW Cephei. It’s one of the largest stars we know of. Its radius is almost 1,000 times as large as the Sun’s. Put another way, it’s almost as large as Jupiter’s orbit. Many stars, maybe allRead More →

Another Example of a Fantastic Einstein Ring The most evocative astronomy images take us across space and time to stars and galaxies billions of light-years away. Nestled at the center of this one, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is a collection of three galaxies. They’re not all that close together, although they appear to be in this image. What’s fascinating about this image is that it’s a fine example of an Einstein gravitational ring—and its discovery was enabled by members of the public! Let’s examine this image in more detail. Start with the central point source of light. It’s a foreground galaxy called SDSSRead More →

The Youngest Planetary Disks Ever Seen How long does planet formation take? Maybe not as long as we thought, according to new research. Observations with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) show that planet formation around young stars may begin much earlier than scientists thought. These new results were presented at the American Astronomical Society’s 243rd Meeting. Cheng-Han Hsieh, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, presented the new observations. “ALMA’s early observations of young protoplanetary disks have revealed many beautiful rings and gaps, possible formation sites of planets,” he said. “I wondered when these rings and gaps started to appear in the disks.” Hsieh is referringRead More →

Astrobotic Confirms it Won’t be Landing on the Moon It’s a real shame that spaceflight is seen as routine by the world’s media.  In reality, our exploration of the Solar System is still in its infancy, problems are still seen and sadly missions do still fail. We are reminded of this with the recent launch of the Astrobotic Peregrine lander on Sunday. It was launched atop a Vulcan rocket but it soon became apparent that there was a problem with the lander propulsion system. A leak has been discovered and unfortunately there is insufficient fuel to support a soft landing on the Moon.  NASA hadRead More →

A Solo Brown Dwarf Found With Auroras Astronomers have used JWST to find a brown dwarf with polar auroras like the Earth, or Jupiter. This is surprising because the brown dwarf, dubbed W1935, is a free-floating object, meaning it isn’t part of another star system. Therefore, there’s no solar wind available to generate any Northern Lights. Instead, the auroras are seemingly generated from methane emissions in the planet’s atmosphere, interacting with the interstellar plasma. Another theory is that it perhaps has an active but unseen moon contributing to the emissions. An artist’s depiction of the relative sizes of the Sun, a low-mass star, a brownRead More →

NASA is Pushing Back its Moon Landings to 2026 I wasn’t around for the Apollo program that took human beings to the Moon. I would have love to have seen it all unfold though. With NASAs Artemis program the opportunity will soon be with us again to watch humans set foot on another world, just not for the first time. Alas NASA announced on Tuesday that the Moon landings which form part of Artemis 3, have been pushed back one year to 2026.  The update from NASA came following a number of challenges to the Artemis project which aims to land humans back on theRead More →

These Iron Rings Around A Star Show Where Planets are Forming Researchers using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) have found three iron rings around a young star about 500 light-years away. The rings indicate that planets are forming. What can these rings tell us about how Earth and the other planets in our Solar System formed? One of the driving questions for humanity is how our home planet formed. Studying our Solar System has led to a partial understanding. Scientists piece together their understanding of our Solar System by studying Earth, examining asteroids, and exploring Mars and even meteorites that came from Mars.Read More →

1,500 New Type 1A Supernova Found as Part of the Dark Energy Survey Supernova explosions are fascinating because they’re so cataclysmic, powerful, and awe-inspiring. They’re Nature’s summer blockbusters. Humans have recorded their existence in ancient astronomical records and stone carvings, and in our age, with telescopes. Now, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has uncovered the largest number of Type 1A supernovae ever found with a single telescope. Finding large numbers of them is about more than just cataloguing these exploding stars. Type 1A supernovae serve as standard candles, reliable markers for determining astronomical distances. That means they can help us understand the expansion of theRead More →

Young Stars in the Outskirts of Galaxies Finally Have an Explanation Star formation is well understood when it happens in the populous centers of galaxies. From our vantage point on Earth, within the Milky Way, we see it happening all around us. But when newborn stars are birthed in the empty outskirts of galactic space, it requires a new kind of explanation. At the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Association yesterday, astronomers announced that they have observed, for the first time, the unique molecular clouds that give rise to star formation near the remote edges of galaxies. “We didn’t expect to find star formationRead More →

NASA Selects Bold Proposal to “Swarm” Proxima Centauri with Tiny Probes Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it mildly, interstellar exploration is a very daunting task. As we explored in a previous post, it would take between 1000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Alpha Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology). On top of that, there are numerous risks when traveling through the interstellar medium (ISM), not all of which are well-understood. Under the circumstances, gram-scale spacecraft that rely on directed-energy propulsion (aka. lasers)Read More →

The Debate Continues. Do Wide Binaries Prove or Disprove MOND? The term dark matter was coined back in 1933 and since then, the hunt for it has been well and truly on. However, the concept of dark matter was to describe anomalies from observation for example the rotation of spiral galaxies and the data from gravitational lensing. An alternative soljution is that our model of gravity is simply wrong, enter MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics. A new paper just published explores wide binary stars and looks to see if it supports the MOND model.  Study the rotational velocity of spiral galaxies at different distances from theRead More →

Can Alien Civilizations Detect Humanity? One of the fascinating things about being a human in this age is that we can do more than wonder about other life and other civilizations. We can actually look for them, although there are obvious limitations to our search. But what’s equally fascinating is that we can wonder if others can see us. Assuming that all civilizations who have begun to explore their surroundings are interested in finding other civilizations, then the question of who can detect who comes down to technology. It takes advanced technological tools to search for the technosignatures of other civilizations. It also takes technologyRead More →

JWST and Chandra Team Up for a Stunning View of Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A NASA’s long-lived Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with JWST for the first time, producing this incredibly detailed image of the famous supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. JWST first looked at the remnant in April 2023, and noticed an unusual debris structure from the destroyed star, dubbed the “Green Monster.” The combined view has helped astronomers better understand what this unusual structure is, plus it uncovered new details about the explosion that created Cas A. This new image also includes data from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. TheRead More →

The First Launch of ULA’s Vulcan Goes Smoothly, but there’s a Problem with its Lander Payload Space missions regularly test multiple new technologies in one go. It’s very common to have a single mission test out three or more new technologies, making them “flight-proven.” Unfortunately, that sometimes means that though one particular new technology, or even many of them, might succeed, one technology could work. At the same time, another one could fail, and that single failure might mean that several other technologies might never even get a chance for their day in the Sun. That seems to have happened with NASA’s first Commercial LunarRead More →