Universe Today (Page 4)

What’s the Earliest the Moon Could Have Formed? Astronomers are pretty sure they know where the Moon came from. In the early Solar System, a Mars-sized object dubbed Theia smashed into Earth. This cataclysmic collision knocked a huge mass of material into orbit, which coalesced and cooled into the Moon. But establishing exactly when this occurred is a difficult task. At the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 55) last month in The Woodlands, Texas, researchers proposed a new timeline of events that moves the giant impact earlier than previous predictions, at just 50 million years after the formation of the Solar System.Read More →

How Animal Movements Help Us Study the Planet Scientists have been underutilizing a key resource we can use to help us understand Earth: animals. Our fellow Earthlings have a much different, and usually much more direct, relationship with the Earth. They move around the planet in ways and to places we don’t. What can their movements tell us? Humanity has a fleet of satellites orbiting Earth that tell us all kinds of things about the planet. Satellites track temperature, CO2 emissions, rainfall, forest fires, drought, volcanic eruptions, etc. We know more about Earth than ever, and a lot of it is thanks to satellites. ClimateRead More →

Mapping Lava Tubes on the Moon and Mars from Space Sometimes, all you need for a new discovery is some creative math. That was the case for a new paper by Edward Williams and Laurent Montési of the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology. They released a brief paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last month that describes a mathematical way to estimate the size of a lava tube using only remote sensing techniques. A critical starting point was the discovery that the ridge height of a surface above a lava tube is proportional to the cube of the height of the lavaRead More →

A Robot Hopper to Explore the Moon’s Dangerous Terrain Intuitive Machines recently had a major breakthrough, successfully becoming the first non-governmental entity to land on the Moon in February. At least the landing was partially successful – the company’s Odysseus lander ended up on its side, though its instruments and communication links remained at least partially functional. That mission, dubbed IM-1, was the first in a series of ambitious missions the company has planned. And they recently released a paper detailing features of a unique hopping robot that will hitch a ride on its next Moon mission. Known as South Pole Hopper (or S.P. Hopper),Read More →

Inside a Week to Totality: Weather Prospects, Solar Activity and More Looking at prospects for eclipse day and totality. Have you picked out your site to observe the eclipse on April 8th? Next Monday, the shadow of the Moon crosses Mexico, the contiguous United States from Texas to Maine, and the Canadian Maritimes for the last time for this generation. And while over 30 million people live in the path of totality, millions more live within an easy day drive of the path. I’m expecting that many folks will decide to make a three-day weekend of it, and eclipse travel traffic will really pick upRead More →

Want to Leave the Solar System? Here’s a Route to Take The edge of the Solar System is defined by the heliosphere and its heliopause. The heliopause marks the region where the interstellar medium stops the outgoing solar wind. But only two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have ever travelled to the heliopause. As a result, scientists are uncertain about the heliopause’s extent and its other properties. Some scientists are keen to learn more about this region and are developing a mission concept to explore it. The heliosphere plays a critical role in the Solar System. The Sun’s heliosphere is a shield against incomingRead More →

Curiosity has Reached an Ancient Debris Channel That Could Have Been Formed by Water Like a pilgrim seeking wisdom, NASA’s MSL Curiosity has been working its way up Mt. Sharp, the dominant central feature in Gale Crater. Now, almost 12 years into its mission, the capable rover has reached an interesting feature that could tell them more about Mars and its watery history. It’s called the Gediz Vallis channel. Gediz Vallis channel appears to have been carved by ancient water. But if that’s the case, it happened billions of years ago. The channel has since filled with rock. Mt. Sharp’s upper regions are beyond Curiosity’sRead More →

Where Are All These Rogue Planets Coming From? There’s a population of planets that drifts through space untethered to any stars. They’re called rogue planets or free-floating planets (FFPs.) Some FFPs form as loners, never having enjoyed the company of a star. But most are ejected from solar systems somehow, and there are different ways that can happen. One researcher set out to try to understand the FFP population and how they came to be. FFPs are also called isolated planetary-mass objects (iPMOs) in scientific literature, but regardless of what name’s being used, they’re the same thing. These planets wander through interstellar space on theirRead More →

Extremophiles: Why study them? What can they teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has conducted some incredible examinations regarding a plethora of scientific fields, including impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, cosmochemistry, meteorites, and radio astronomy, and how these disciplines can help scientists and the public gain greater insight into searching for life beyond Earth. Here, we will discuss the immersive field of extremophiles with Dr. Ivan Paulino-Lima, who is a Senior Research Investigator at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer for Infinite Elements Inc., including why scientists study extremophiles, the benefits and challenges, finding lifeRead More →

It Takes a Supercomputer to Properly Simulate a Neutron Star’s Surface Neutron stars, the remains of massive stars that have imploded and gone supernova at the end of their life, can still create massive flares. These incredible bursts of energy release X-rays that propagate through space. It is a complex process to simulate but astronomers have turned to a supercomputer to help. Modelling the twisting magnetic fields, the interaction with gas and dust, the surface of flaring neutron stars has been revealed in incredible 3D. Throughout a stars life, the inward force of gravity is balanced by the outward pushing thermonuclear force. Stars like ourRead More →

Against all Odds. Japan’s SLIM Lander Survived a Second Lunar Night Upside Down You might remember the SLIM lunar lander that managed to land upside-down! The probe from the Japanese Space Agency has survived its second night on the Moon and returns a new photograph. Despite the solar panels pointing away from the Sun during the day it was still able to capture the image and transmit to Earth. All that while surviving the harsh -130C lunar night.  The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) sent SLIM (the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) back in January but the lightweight spacecraft landed completely wrong. Despite the wonkyRead More →

Radio Astronomy: Why study it? What can it teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has investigated the significance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, cosmochemistry, and meteorites, and how these scientific fields contribute to researchers and the public gain greater insight into our place in the universe and finding life beyond Earth. Here, will discuss the field of radio astronomy with Dr. Wael Farah, who is a research scientist at the SETI Institute, about how radio astronomy teaches us about the myriad of celestial objects that populate our universe, along with the benefits and challenges, finding life beyond Earth, andRead More →

The Search for the Perfect Coronagraph to Find Earth 2.0 Studying exoplanets is made more difficult by the light from the host star. Coronagraphs are devices that block out the star light and both JWST and Nancy Grace Roman Telescope are equipped with them. Current coronagraphs are not quite capable of seeing other Earths but work is underway to push the limits of technology and even science for a new, more advanced device. A new paper explores the quantum techniques that may one day allow us to make such observations.  Coronagraphs are devices that attach to telescopes and were originally designed to study the coronaRead More →

A Supermassive Black Hole with a Case of the Hiccups Can binary black holes, two black holes orbiting each other, influence their respective behaviors? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of more than two dozen international researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated how a smaller black hole orbiting a supermassive black hole could alter the outbursts of the energy being emitted by the latter, essentially giving it “hiccups”. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the behavior of binary black holes while producing new methods in finding moreRead More →

Meteorites: Why study them? What can they teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has explored the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, and cosmochemistry, and how this myriad of intricately linked scientific disciplines can assist us in better understanding our place in the cosmos and searching for life beyond Earth. Here, we will discuss the incredible research field of meteorites and how they help researchers better understand the history of both our solar system and the cosmos, including the benefits and challenges, finding life beyond Earth, and potential routes for upcoming studentsRead More →

China’s Relay Satellite is in Lunar Orbit On March 20th, China’s Queqiao-2 (“Magpie Bridge-2”) satellite launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Site LC-2 on the island of Hainan (in southern China) atop a Long March-8 Y3 carrier rocket. This mission is the second in a series of communications relay and radio astronomy satellites designed to support the fourth phase of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (Chang’e). On March 24th, after 119 hours in transit, the satellite reached the Moon and began a perilune braking maneuver at a distance of 440 km (~270 mi) from the lunar surface. The maneuver lasted 19 minutes, after which theRead More →

The Hubble Aims Its Powerful Ultraviolet Eye at Super-Hot Stars Some stars are so massive and so energetic that they’re a million times brighter than the Sun. This type of star dominated the early Universe, playing a key role in its development and evolution. The first of its kind are all gone now, but the modern Universe still forms stars of this type. These hot, blue stars emit powerful ultraviolet energy that the Hubble can detect from its perch in Low-Earth Orbit. In December 2023, astronomers completed a three-year survey of these hot stars. It’s one of the Hubble’s largest and most ambitious surveys. It’sRead More →

Search for Life on Mars Could Level-Up with MARSE Mission Concept A recent study presented at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) discusses the Mars Astrobiology, Resource, and Science Explorers (MARSE) mission concept and its Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device (SHIELD), which offers a broader and cheaper method regarding the search for—past or present—life on the Red Planet, specifically by using four rovers at four different landing sites across Mars’ surface instead of just one-for-one. This concept comes as NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers continue to tirelessly explore the surface of Mars at Gale Crater and Jezero Crater, respectively. Here, Universe TodayRead More →

The Milky Way’s Smallest, Faintest Satellite Galaxy Found The Milky Way has many satellite galaxies, most notably the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They’re both visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. Now astronomers have discovered another satellite that’s the smallest and dimmest one ever detected. It may also be one of the most dark matter-dominated galaxies ever found. The galaxy is called Ursa Major III / UNIONS 1 (UMa3/U1), and it contains very few stars. In fact, its luminosity is so low that it’s gone undetected until new, even though it’s in our neighbourhood. The discovery is in a new paper titledRead More →

Thermal Modeling of a Pulsed Plasma Rocket Shows It Should Be Possible To Create One We’ve reported on a technology called pulsed plasma rockets (PPRs) here at UT a few times. Several research groups have worked on variations of them. They are so popular partly because of their extremely high specific impulse and thrust levels, and they seemingly solve the trade-off between those two all-important variables in space exploration propulsion systems. Essentially, they are an extremely efficient propulsion methodology that, if scaled up, would allow payloads to reach other planets in weeks rather than months or years. However, some inherent dangers still need to beRead More →