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Hera Probe Heads Off to See Aftermath of DART’s Asteroid Impact The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft is on its way to do follow-up observations of Dimorphos, two years after an earlier probe knocked the mini-asteroid into a different orbital path around a bigger space rock. Scientists say the close-up observations that Hera is due to make millions of miles from Earth, starting in 2026, will help them defend our planet from future threats posed by killer asteroids. “Hera’s ability to closely study its asteroid target will be just what is needed for operational planetary defense,” Richard Moissl, who heads ESA’s Planetary Defense Office, saidRead More →

Primordial Holes Could be Hiding in Planets, Asteroids, and Here on Earth Small primordial black holes (PBHs) are one of the hot topics in astronomy and cosmology today. These hypothetical black holes are believed to have formed soon after the Big Bang, resulting from pockets of subatomic matter so dense that they underwent gravitational collapse. At present, PBHs are considered a candidate for dark matter, a possible source of primordial gravitational waves, and a resolution to various problems in physics. However, no definitive PBH candidate has been observed so far, leading to proposals for how we may find these miniature black holes. Recent research hasRead More →

The Milky Way Might be Part of an Even Larger Structure than Laniakea If you want to pinpoint your place in the Universe, start with your cosmic address. You live on Earth->Solar System->Milky Way Galaxy->Local Cluster->Virgo Cluster->Virgo Supercluster->Laniakea. Thanks to new deep sky surveys, astronomers now think all those places are part of an even bigger cosmic structure in the “neighborhood” called The Shapley Concentration. Astronomers refer to the Shapley Concentration as a “basin of attraction”. That’s a region loaded with mass that acts as an “attractor”. It’s a region containing many clusters and groups of galaxies and comprises the greatest concentration of matter inRead More →

Webb Detects Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen Perodixe on Pluto’s moon Charon The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed magnificent things about the Universe. Using its sophisticated infrared optics, it has peered deeper into space (and farther back in time) than any observatory to date, gathering data on the first galaxies to form in our Universe. It has also obtained spectra from exoplanets, revealing things about the chemical composition of their atmospheres. In addition, Webb has provided some stunning views of objects within our Solar System, like Jupiter and its auroras, Saturn’s rings and moons, and Neptune and its satellites. Recently, a team led byRead More →

The GALAH Fourth Data Release Provides Vital Data on One Million Stars in the Milky Way. For the past ten years, Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) has been investigating star formation, chemical enrichment, migration, and mergers in the Milky Way with the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). Their work is part of the GALactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) project, an international collaboration of more than 100 scientists from institutes and universities worldwide. These observations have led to the highest spectral resolution multi-dimensional datasets for over a million stars in the Milky Way. Previous GALAH data releases have ledRead More →

The Sun Unleashes its Strongest Flare This Cycle Yesterday the Sun released a huge solar flare, and it’s heading toward Earth! It’s nothing to worry about since it’s nowhere near as large as the Carrington Event of 1859, but it is large enough to give us some amazing aurora. Large solar flares happen periodically. Quite literally, because the Sun goes through an 11-year cycle of lower and higher activity. Right now the Sun is near the maximum of a cycle, so we see lots of sunspots and flares. When astronomers first studied the cycle they could only measure the number of sunspots at a givenRead More →

What’s the Best Material for a Lunar Tower? Physical infrastructure on the Moon will be critical to any long-term human presence there as both America and China gear up for a sustained human lunar presence. Increasingly, a self-deploying tower is one of the most essential parts of that physical infrastructure. These towers can hold numerous pieces of equipment, from solar panels to communications arrays, and the more weight they can hold in the lunar gravity, the more capable they become. So it’s essential to understand the best structural set-up for these towers, which is the purpose of a recent paper by researchers at North CarolinaRead More →

What Does a Trip to Mars Do to the Brain? It’s not long before a conversation about space travel is likely to turn to the impact on the human body. Our bodies have evolved to exist on Earth with a constant force of 1G acting upon them but up in orbit, all of a sudden that force is apparently lacking. The impact of this is well known; muscle loss and reduction in bone density but there are effects of spaceflight. Cosmic radiation from the Galaxy has an impact on cognition too, an effect that has recently been studied in mice! When an object like theRead More →

Gravitational Lens Confirms the Hubble Tension We’ve known the Universe is expanding for a long time. The first solid paper demonstrating cosmic expansion was published by Edwin Hubble in 1929, based on observations made by Vesto Slipher, Milton Humason, and Henrietta Leavitt. Because of this, the rate of cosmic expansion is known as the Hubble constant, or Hubble parameter, H0. From this parameter, you can calculate things such as the age of the Universe since the Big Bang, so knowing the value of H0 is central to our understanding of modern cosmology. Early on, the measured value of the Hubble parameter varied widely. Hubble’s initialRead More →

Could a New Sungrazer Comet Put on a Show at the End of October? Could this be the next great comet? To be sure, these words have been said lots of times before. In a clockwork sky, how comets will perform is always the great wildcard. Comets from Kohoutek to ISON have failed to live up to expectations, while others like W3 Lovejoy took us all by surprise. But a discovery this past weekend has message boards abuzz, as an incoming sungrazer could put on a show right around Halloween. Anatomy of a Sungrazer The discovery comes to us from the prolific Asteroid Terrestrial-impact LastRead More →