Universe Today (Page 25)

How a Small Town in Japan Fiercely Defends its Dark Skies Light pollution ruins dark skies. It’s a scourge that ground-based observatories have to deal with in one form or another. Scientists used a small observatory in Japan to measure what changed when a nearby town improved its lighting practices. They also noted the challenges it still faces. Bisei Town lies in a semi-rural area in the southwestern part of Okayama Prefecture in Japan. It’s a designated dark sky place and the locals are adamant about keeping their view of the stars. However, they still have to contend with light pollution from other cities inRead More →

How Many Planets Could Be in the Kuiper Belt? A recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters investigates the potential existence of Mars-sized free-floating planets (FFPs)—also known as rogue planets, starless planets, and wandering planets—that could have been captured by our Sun’s gravity long ago and orbit in the outer solar system approximately 1,400 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. For context, the farthest known planetary body in the solar system is Pluto, which orbits approximately 39 AU from the Sun, and is also part of the Kuiper Belt, which scientists estimate extends as far out as 1,000 AU from the Sun. This studyRead More →

TRAPPIST-1c Isn’t the Exo-Venus We Were Hoping For. But Don’t Blame the Star A recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal uses computer models to investigate why the exoplanet, TRAPPIST-1c, could not possess a thick carbon dioxide (CO2) atmosphere despite it receiving the same amount of solar radiation from its parent star as the planet Venus receives from our Sun, with the latter having a very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. This study comes after a June 2023 study published in Nature used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to ascertain that TRAPPIST-1c does not possess a carbon dioxide atmosphere. Both studies come asRead More →

Organic Molecules Come from the Universe’s Cold Places Life, as we all know, is based on chemistry. Prebiotic chemical building blocks existed on our planet for a long time before life arose. Astrobiology and cosmochemistry focus on the formation of those building blocks. They also look at the role each played in creating all the life forms we know today. For a long time, cosmo-chemists have known that organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are quite plentiful in the Universe. Scientists consider them plausible prebiotic building blocks that likely played an important role in the formation of life on Earth. What’s not as wellRead More →

NASA Tests Out 3D-printed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine! Looking to the future, NASA is investigating several technologies that will allow it to accomplish some bold objectives. This includes returning to the Moon, creating the infrastructure that will let us stay there, sending the first crewed mission to Mars, exploring the outer Solar System, and more. This is particularly true of propulsion technologies beyond conventional chemical rockets and engines. One promising technology is the Rotating Detonation Engine (RDE), which relies on one or more detonations that continuously travel around an annular channel. In a recent hot fire test at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,Read More →

The Early Universe Was Surprisingly Filled With Spiral Galaxies If we could travel far beyond our galaxy, and look back upon the Milky Way, it would be a glorious sight. Luminous spirals stretching from a central core, with dust and nebulae scattered along the spiral edges. When you think about a galaxy, you probably imagine a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, but spirals make up only about 60% of the galaxies we see. That’s because spiral galaxies only form when smaller galaxies collide and merge over time. Or so we thought, as a new study suggests that isn’t the case. The standard model ofRead More →

Mars is Surprisingly Volcanically Active Like many that grew up watching the skies, I have been captivated by the planets. Mars is no exception, with its striking red colour, polar caps and mysterious dark features. Many of the surface features have been driven by ancient volcanic activity but whether any geological activity moulds the terrain today is still subject to scientific debate.  A recent study however has revealed that Mars is surprisingly  active..even today! Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and has captivated our imagination for centuries. It’s often called the red planet due to the amount of iron oxide in the fineRead More →

JWST Sets a New Record, Sees Newly Forming Stars in the Triangulum Galaxy Our Milky Way bristles with giant molecular clouds birthing stars. Based on what we see here, astronomers assume that the process of star creation also goes on similarly in other galaxies. It makes sense since their stars have to form somehow. Now, thanks to JWST, astronomers have spotted baby stellar objects in a galaxy 2.7 million light-years away. That’s millions of light-years more distant than any previous observations of newly forming stars have reached. The targets of JWST’s observations are “young stellar objects” (YSOs) in the Triangulum Galaxy (M33). Astronomers used theRead More →

Why Quantum Mechanics Defies Physics The full, weird story of the quantum world is much too large for a single article, but the period from 1905, when Einstein first published his solution to the photoelectric puzzle, to the 1960’s, when a complete, well-tested, rigorous, and insanely complicated quantum theory of the subatomic world finally emerged, is quite the story. This quantum theory would come to provide, in its own way, its own complete and total revision of our understanding of light. In the quantum picture of the subatomic world, what we call the electromagnetic force is really the product of countless microscopic interactions, the workRead More →

NASA Astronauts are Trying Out the Starship Lunar Elevator As NASA continues to ramp up efforts for its Artemis program, which has the goal of landing the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface, two NASA astronauts recently conducted training with a replica of SpaceX’s Starship human landing system (HLS), albeit on a much smaller scale. Given that Starship is 50 meters (160 feet) tall, and the crew quarters are located near the top of Starship, the HLS will need an elevator with a basket to transport crew and supplies from the crew quarters down to the surface. The purpose of thisRead More →

We Owe Our Lives to the Moon Life appeared on Earth through a series of lucky coincidences, and that luck started with our Moon. None of the other planets of the inner solar system have significant moons. Space is lonely around Mercury and Venus. Mars does have two small moons, Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Despair, befitting companions for the God of War), but those are simply captured asteroids, lassoed in the not-too-distant past and doomed to eventually come close enough to their unloving parent to be torn to shreds by gravitational forces. In fact, no other planet in the solar system – or anyRead More →

Top Astronomy Events for 2024 Astronomy 2024 features the final total solar eclipse for the CONUS until 2044, and much more. It’s finally time. On April 8th, 2024, the umbral shadow of the Moon crosses the United States for the second time in less than seven years. It’s a big deal, for sure. But there’s lots more in store for astronomy 2024. Here’s our annual Universe Today rundown for top skywatching events to watch for in astronomy 2024, coming to a sky near you. Astronomy 2024: The Year in Brief The turn of the calendar sees us just over three months out from the AprilRead More →

Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity Missions focusing on small bodies in the solar system have been coming thick and fast lately. OSIRIS-Rex, Psyche, and Rosetta are all examples of projects that planned or did rendezvous with a small body in the solar system. But one of their biggest challenges is understanding the gravity of these bodies – which was especially evident when Philae, Rosetta’s lander, had a hard time staying on the surface of its intended comet. A new idea from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory could help solve that problem – by bouncing smallRead More →

How Supersymmetry Saved String Theory String theory, like most revolutions, had humble origins. It started all the way back in the 1960’s as an attempt to understand the workings of the strong nuclear force, which had only recently been discovered. Quantum field theory, which had been used successfully to explain electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, wasn’t seeming to cut it, and so physicists were eager for something new. A group of physicists took a formalism developed (and later abandoned) by quantum godfather Werner Heisenberg and expanded it. In that expansion they found mathematical structures that repeated themselves in spacetime: the first strings. Unfortunately thisRead More →

Using Smart Materials To Deploy A Dark Age Explorer One of the most significant constraints on the size of objects placed into orbit is the size of the fairing used to put them there. Large telescopes must be stuffed into a relatively small fairing housing and deployed to their full size, sometimes using complicated processes. But even with those processes, there is still an upper limit to how giant a telescope can be. That might be changing soon, with the advent of smart materials – particularly on a project funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) that would allow for a kilometer-scale radio telescopeRead More →

The Atmosphere of an Exoplanet Reveals Secrets About Its Surface As astronomers have begun to gather data on the atmospheres of planets, we’re learning about their compositions and evolution. Thick atmospheres are the easiest to study, but these same thick atmospheres can hide the surface of a planet from view. A Venus-like world, for example, has such a thick atmosphere making it impossible to see the planet’s terrain. It seems the more likely we are to understand a planet’s atmosphere, the less likely we are to understand its surface. But that could change thanks to a new study in the Monthly Notices of the RoyalRead More →

NASA Tightbeams a Cat Video From 31 Million Kilometers Away NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) has been responsible for maintaining contact with missions venturing beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since 1963. In addition to relaying communications and instructions, the DSN has sent breathtaking images and invaluable science data back to Earth. As missions become more sophisticated, the amount of data they can gather and transmit is rapidly rising. To meet these growing needs, NASA has transitioned to higher-bandwidth radio spectrum transmissions. However, there is no way to increase data rates without scaling the size of its antennas or the power of its radio transmitters. ToRead More →

Watch 14 Years of Gamma-Ray Observations in This Fascinating NASA Video The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, named in honor of noted physicist Enrico Fermi, has been in operation for almost a decade and a half, monitoring the cosmos for gamma rays. As the highest-energy form of light, these rays are produced by extremely energetic phenomena – like supernovae, neutron stars, quasars, and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). In honor of this observatory’s long history, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center has released a time-lapse movie that shows data acquired by the Fermi Space Telescope between August 2008 and August 2022. The movie shows gamma rays with energies above 200Read More →

Questions Remain on Chinese Rocket That Created an Unusual Double Crater on the Moon In November, we reported how an impact on the Moon from a Chinese Long March rocket booster created an unusual double crater. For a single booster to create a double crater, some researchers thought there must have been an additional – perhaps secret – payload on the forward end of the booster, opposite from the rocket engines. But that may not necessarily be the case. Other researchers feel the extra mass wasn’t anything secretive, but possibly an inert structure such as a payload adapter added to the rocket to support theRead More →

Ouch. Canadarm2 Took a Direct Hit From a Micrometeorite Living in space comes with risks. For astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), those risks occasionally make themselves intrusively apparent. Earlier this month, European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen snapped a photo of the Canadarm2, in which damage from a micrometeorite impact is clearly visible. “The hole was made in 2021, where a 1 mm object, traveling at over 25,000 km/h relative to the Space Station hit the robotic arm. Fortunately, no critical components were damaged,” said Mogensen on social media. The impact punched through the arm’s thermal blanket and impacted the boom. The roboticRead More →