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The Primordial Black Hole Saga: Part 1 – The Dark Matter Mystery Do I really need to go over the evidence for dark matter again? Okay, fine, for those of you in the back who weren’t paying attention the first time. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Inspired by Schools of Fish, This Magnetic Material Swarms to Eat Carbon Dioxide Removing, or “scrubbing”, carbon dioxide from the air of confined spaces is a critical component of any life support system on a spacecraft or submarine. However, modern day ones are energy intensive, requiring temperatures of up to 200℃ to operate. So a research lab led by Dr. Hui He at Guangxi University in China has developed what they call “micro/nano reconfigurable robots” (MNRM) to scrub CO2 from the air much more efficiently. Their work is described in a new paper in Nano-Micro Letters. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Researchers at SwRI May Have Solved the Mystery of Uranus’ Radiation Belts Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists believe they may have resolved a 39-year-old mystery about the radiation belts around Uranus. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Russia Loses Launch Capability After Accident at Baikonur Cosmodrome A severe accident at the Baikonur Cosmodrome involving a wrecked maintenance cabin has indefinitely delayed Russia’s ability to launch crewed missions and payloads to the International Space Station (ISS). Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Did Asteroids Invent Gum Billions of Years Ago? What is “gum”? Most people have probably never considered this question, and might answer something like a chewy material you can put in your mouth. But, to a scientist they might answer something like “nitrogen-rich polymeric sheets”, because precisely defining the chemistry of a material is important to them. Or at least, that’s what they called a type of organic material found in the sample collected of the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. But more informally, scientists have taken to calling it “space gum”, and the process it formed under is making some of them questionRead More →

Dust In A Telescope’s Eye Could Blind It To Earth 2.0 Hot exozodiacal dust can thwart our efforts to detect exoplanets. It causes what’s called coronagraphic leakage, which confuses the light signals from distant stars. The Habitable Worlds Observatory will face this obstacle, and new research sheds light on the problem. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Historic May 2024 Gannon Solar Storm Compressed Earth’s Plasmasphere A powerful geomagnetic superstorm is a once a generation event, happening once every 20-25 years. Such an event transpired on the night of May 10/11, 2024, when an intense solar storm slammed into the Earth’s protective magnetic sheath. Now, a recent study shows just how intrusive that storm was, and how long it took for the Earth’s plasma layer took to recover. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

China Outlines Future Plans in New Video, Including Finding Earth 2.0 A video that appeared on CGTN’s Hot Take details four missions that China will be sending to space in the coming years, including a survey telescope that will search for Earth 2.0. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

SPHERE Shows Us How Our Solar System Isn’t Much Different Than Others Observations with the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s VLT revealed the presence of debris rings similar to structures in our Solar System. SPHERE found rings similar to the Kuiper Belt and the Main Asteroid Belt. Though individual asteroids and comets can’t be imaged, these debris rings infer that other solar systems have architectures similar to ours. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Scientists and Senators are Excited About the Sugars Found in the OSIRIS-REx Samples It’s been over two years since the samples from Bennu gathered by OSIRIS-REx were returned to Earth. But there’s still plenty of novel science coming out of that 121.6 g of material. Three new papers were released recently that describe different aspects of that sample. One in particular, from Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan and their co-authors, has already attracted plenty of attention, including from US Senator (and former astronaut) Mark Kelly. It shows that all of the building blocks for early life were available on the asteroid – raisingRead More →

Long Ago, Mars Had Massive Watersheds — Now Finally Mapped What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the Red Planet’s watery past? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds. UniverseRead More →

Why Scientists Are Studying Mayonnaise in Space Scientists have launched COLIS, a special laboratory aboard the International Space Station designed to study how everyday materials like sunscreens, mayonnaise, and medications behave in near zero gravity. Researchers discovered that gravity influences the long term stability of soft matter far more dramatically than previously understood, affecting how these materials age and restructure at the molecular level. This research could fundamentally improve how we design everything from controlled release drugs to self assembling materials, demonstrating that understanding materials in space offers unexpected benefits for life on Earth. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →