SpaceX has Given up Trying to Catch Rocket Fairings. Fishing Them out of the Ocean is Fine If there is one driving force in the commercial space industry it is economics. The whole concept of reusable booster rocket emphasizes the importance of getting launch costs down. SpaceX, the company leading the charge in trying to […]
When Stars Get Too Close to Each Other, They Cast Out Interstellar Comets and Asteroids In October 2017, humanity caught its first-ever glimpse of an interstellar object – a visitor from beyond our solar system – passing nearby the Sun. We named it Oumuamua, and its unusual properties fascinated and confounded astronomers. Less than two […]
You Thought Black Hole Event Horizons Looked Strange. Check out Binary Black Hole Event Horizons One of the strangest predictions of general relativity is that gravity can deflect the path of light. The effect was first observed by Arthur Eddington in 1919. While the bending effect of the Sun is small, near a black hole […]
Astronauts Will Soon be Getting a Space Fridge, Keeping Everything Cold in Zero-G One of the least known of NASA’s funding mechanisms is the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. This program, required by the Baye-Doyle Act of 1980, earmarks a piece of every US Federal agency’s budget (including NASA) for the development of small […]
Citizen Scientists Discover a new Feature in Star Formation: “Yellowballs” AI is often touted as being particularly good at finding patterns amongst reams of data. But humans also are extremely good at pattern recognition, especially when it comes to visual images. Citizen science efforts around the globe leverage this fact, and recent results released from […]
Biden Administration is Looking for a 6.3% Increase in NASA’s Budget for 2022 Space research, like much else in capitalist societies, is driven by funding. The biggest source of that funding for that space research is usually the US government. Which is why, when US presidents release their budget proposals, the space community takes notice. […]
On the pulse of pulsars and polar light Faced with the tragic loss of the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico and the often prohibitive cost of satellite missions, astronomers are searching for savvy alternatives to continue answering fundamental questions in physics. phys.org Go to Source
A new super-Earth detected orbiting a red dwarf star In recent years there has been an exhaustive study of red dwarf stars to find exoplanets in orbit around them. These stars have effective surface temperatures between 2400 and 3700 K (over 2000 degrees cooler than the Sun), and masses between 0.08 and 0.45 solar masses. […]
Fast radio bursts shown to include lower frequency radio waves than previously detected Since fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first discovered over a decade ago, scientists have puzzled over what could be generating these intense flashes of radio waves from outside of our galaxy. In a gradual process of elimination, the field of possible explanations […]
Video: Mapping the radio sky The Very Large Array can’t image a big section of sky all at once. Instead, it must scan the sky over time. phys.org Go to Source
NASA rocket to survey the solar system’s windshield Eleven billion miles away—more than four times the distance from us to Pluto—lies the boundary of our solar system’s magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun’s magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible cobweb, fizzles to nothing. Interstellar space begins. phys.org Go to Source
Surprise twist suggests stars grow competitively A survey of star formation activity in the Orion Nebula Cluster found similar mass distributions for newborn stars and dense gas cores, which may evolve into stars. Counterintuitively, this means that the amount of gas a core accretes as it develops, and not the initial mass of the core, […]
Ground-Based Lasers Could Push Space Debris off Collision-Course Orbits Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) are finding new uses for the laser-based technology that sharpens telescope imagery – called adaptive optics – and it just might help mitigate the world’s growing space debris problem. Purpose-built lasers could give derelict satellites a slight ‘push’ of […]
New NASA visualization probes the light-bending dance of binary black holes A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun’s mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas—called an accretion disk—that […]
Researchers identify five double star systems potentially suitable for life Almost half a century ago the creators of Star Wars imagined a life-sustaining planet, Tatooine, orbiting a pair of stars. Now, 44 years later, scientists have found new evidence that that five known systems with multiple stars, Kepler-34, -35, -38, -64 and -413, are possible […]
Baked meteorites yield clues to planetary atmospheres In a novel laboratory investigation of the initial atmospheres of Earth-like rocky planets, researchers at UC Santa Cruz heated pristine meteorite samples in a high-temperature furnace and analyzed the gases released. phys.org Go to Source
Famous fast radio burst FRB20180916B just barely lets itself be captured Two international teams of astronomers (with significant Dutch involvement) have published two scientific papers with new information about the famous fast radio burst FRB20180916B. In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they measured the radiation from the bursts at the lowest possible […]
#106 – April 2021 Part 2 The Discussion: The ‘Wiltshire Audio Anomaly’ 20% off the book Vera Rubin – A Life for US listeners using url: hup.harvard.edu/exhibits/HX7578 @StargazerRob’s alternative astrophotographer of the year award Listeners’ emails The News: April Fools research papers Commemorating 60 years since Yuri Gagarin’s 1st Spaceflight An update on @NASA’s Mars […]
If you Want to Move an Asteroid, you Need the Right Kind of Nuclear Explosion Using nuclear devices to deflect or disrupt an asteroid. Sounds a bit crazy, no? Maybe a little too Hollywood? And yet, detonating nukes in space may be necessary someday for the sake of planetary defense. In order for this method […]
Finding Oxygen on an Alien World Doesn’t Always Mean There’s Life There We now know the universe is filled with planets. By one estimate, there are more than 20 billion Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone. But how many of them are likely to have life? And how would we know if they do? Unless […]
