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The DARKNESS Instrument Will Block Stars and Reveal Their Planets. 100 Million Times Fainter than the Star The hunt for planets beyond our Solar System has led to the discovery of thousands of candidates in the past few decades. Most of these have been gas giants that range in size from being Super-Jupiters to Neptune-sized planets. However, several have also been determined to be “Earth-like” in nature, meaning that they are rocky and orbit within their stars’ respective habitable zones. Unfortunately, determining what conditions might be like on their surfaces is difficult, since astronomers are unable to study these planets directly. Luckily, an international teamRead More →

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Hydrogen sulfide, the gas that gives rotten eggs their distinctive odor, permeates the upper atmosphere of the planet Uranus – as has been long debated, but never definitively proven. Based on sensitive spectroscopic observations with the Gemini North telescope, astronomers uncovered the noxious gas swirling high in the giant planet’s cloud tops. This result resolves a stubborn, long-standing mystery of one of our neighbors in space. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Artificial intelligence is giving scientists new hope for studying the habitability of planets, in a study from astronomers Chris Lam and David Kipping. Their work looks at so-called “Tatooines,” and uses machine learning techniques to calculate how likely such planets are to survive into stable orbits. The study is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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EPFL scientists have completed the fastidious task of analyzing 27 dwarf galaxies in detail, identifying the conditions under which they were formed and how they’ve since evolved. These small-scale galaxies are perfect for studying the mechanisms of new star formation and the very first steps in the creation of the universe. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Did You Know the Earth Has a Second Magnetic Field? Its Oceans Earth’s magnetic field is one of the most mysterious features of our planet. It is also essential to life as we know it, ensuring that our atmosphere is not stripped away by solar wind and shielding life on Earth from harmful radiation. For some time, scientists have theorized that it is the result of a dynamo action in our core, where the liquid outer core revolves around the solid inner core and in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotation. In addition, Earth’s magnetic field is affected by other factors, such as magnetizedRead More →

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Astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize in the last century that most of the matter in the universe was not visible. About 84 percent of the matter in the cosmos is dark matter, much of it located in halos around galaxies. It was dubbed dark matter because it does not emit light, but it is also mysterious: it is not composed of atoms or their usual constituents like electrons and protons. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Based on previously published data from the Gaia Mission, researchers at Heidelberg University have derived the conditions under which stars form. The Gaia satellite is measuring the three-dimensional positions and motions of stars in the Milky Way with unprecedented accuracy. Using these data, Dr. Jacob Ward and Dr. Diederik Kruijssen determined the positions, distances and speeds of a large number of young massive stars within 18 nearby loose stellar groupings. The researchers were able to demonstrate that there is no evidence whatsoever that these associations are expanding. They therefore could not have originated as a dense cluster and then expanded to their current size. PoweredRead More →

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The Challenges of an Alien Spaceflight Program: Escaping Super Earths and Red Dwarf Stars Since the beginning of the Space Age, humans have relied on chemical rockets to get into space. While this method is certainly effective, it is also very expensive and requires a considerable amount of resources. As we look to more efficient means of getting out into space, one has to wonder if similarly-advanced species on other planets (where conditions would be different) would rely on similar methods. Harvard Professor Abraham Loeb and Michael Hippke, an independent researcher affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory, both addressed this question in two recently–released papers. WhereasRead More →

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This Meteorite is One of the Few Remnants from a Lost Planet that was Destroyed Long Ago What if our Solar System had another generation of planets that formed before, or alongside, the planets we have today? A new study published in Nature Communications on April 17th 2018 presents evidence that says that’s what happened. The first-generation planets, or planet, would have been destroyed during collisions in the earlier days of the Solar System and much of the debris swept up in the formation of new bodies. This is not a new theory, but a new study brings new evidence to support it. The evidenceRead More →

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These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images compare two diverse views of the roiling heart of a vast stellar nursery, known as the Lagoon Nebula. The images, one taken in visible and the other in infrared light, celebrate Hubble’s 28th anniversary in space. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Musk Says that SpaceX will use a Giant Party Balloon to Bring an Upper Stage Back. Wait, what? When Elon Musk of SpaceX tweets something interesting, it generates a wave of excitement. So when he tweeted recently that SpaceX might be working on a way to retrieve upper stages of their rockets, it set off a chain of intrigued responses. SpaceX will try to bring rocket upper stage back from orbital velocity using a giant party balloon — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2018 SpaceX has been retrieving and reusing their lower stages for some time now, and it’s lowered the cost of launching payloadsRead More →

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Farewell Kepler. Welcome TESS At 6:51 EDT on Wednesday, April 18th, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It was carrying NASA’s TESS: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. From what we can tell, the mission went without a hitch, with the first stage returning to land on its floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean, and stage 2 carrying on to send TESS into its final orbit. This is a changing of the guard, as we’re now entering the final days for NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. It’s running out of fuel and already crippled by the loss of its reaction wheels. InRead More →

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Weekly Space Hangout: April 18, 2018: Kevin Gill: Art and Science from Juno and MRO Hosts: Fraser Cain (universetoday.com / @fcain) Dr. Paul M. Sutter (pmsutter.com / @PaulMattSutter) Dr. Kimberly Cartier (KimberlyCartier.org / @AstroKimCartier ) Dr. Morgan Rehnberg (MorganRehnberg.com / @MorganRehnberg & ChartYourWorld.org) Special Guests: Kevin Gill is a software engineer, planetary and climate data wrangler, and a science data visualization artist. Kevin will be discussing his work with Juno and MRO images. Check out his work at his Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/ and his tech blog Apoapsys: http://www.wthr.us/ Follow Kevin on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/kevinmgill and Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/apoapsys/ Announcements: If you would like to joinRead More →

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How to Listen to the Background Hum of Gravitational Waves From all the Black Holes Colliding into Each Other The first-ever detection of gravitational waves (which took place in September of 2015) triggered a revolution in astronomy. Not only did this event confirm a theory predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity a century before, it also ushered in a new era where the mergers of distant black holes, supernovae, and neutron stars could be studied by examining their resulting waves. In addition, scientists have theorized that black hole mergers could actually be a lot more common than previously thought. According to a new studyRead More →