Hydrogels Could Be Ideal Radiation Protection For Astronauts Hydrogel protection could be crucial for safe human space exploration. Space radiation: the threat is real. Credit: ESA It’s a key problem that will need to be addressed, if humans are to attempt deep-space, long duration missions. Not only is radiation exposure a dangerous health risk to humans, but it also poses a hazard to equipment and operating systems. Now, a team at Ghent University in Belgium are testing a possible solution: 3D printed hydrogels, which could provide deformable layers of water-filled protection. Water acts as a great radiation shield. Relatively dense, the hydrogen-laden H2O molecule canRead More →

To Probe the Interior of Neutron Stars, We Must Study the Gravitational Waves from their Collisions When massive stars reach the end of their life cycle, they undergo gravitational collapse and shed their outer layers in a massive explosion (a supernova). Whereas particularly massive stars will leave a black hole in their wake, others leave behind a stellar remnant known as a neutron star (or white dwarf). These objects concentrate a mass greater than the entire Solar System into a volume measuring (on average) just 20 km (~12.5 mi) in diameter. Meanwhile, the extreme conditions inside neutron stars are still a mystery to astronomers. InRead More →

The JWST Gives Us Our Best Image of Planets Forming Around a Star Planets are born in swirling disks of gas and dust around young stars. Astronomers are keenly interested in the planet formation process, and understanding that process is one of the JWST’s main science goals. PDS 70 is a nearby star with two nascent planets forming in its disk, two of the very few exoplanets that astronomers have directly imaged. Researchers developed a new, innovative approach to observing PDS 70 with the JWST and uncovered more details about the system, including the possible presence of a third planet. PDS 70 is an orangeRead More →

Gas motion in the Centaurus galaxy cluster challenges star formation assumptions Kokoro Hosogi, a physics student at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has achieved a rare honor for an undergraduate: her contributions are being recognized in a study published in the journal Nature. The researcher recently supported the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) studying celestial X-ray objects to help illuminate why gas at the core of the Centaurus galaxy cluster approximately 170 million light years away is not generating young new stars as rapidly as predicted, a discovery with important implications on the evolution of galaxy clusters. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

The Euclid Space Telescope Captures a Rare, Stunning Einstein Ring Sometimes, things across the vast Universe line up just right for us. The Einstein Ring above, like all Einstein Rings, has three parts. In the foreground is a distant massive object like a galaxy or galaxy cluster. In the background, at an even greater distance away, is a star or another galaxy. We’re the observers, the third part, and all three must be perfectly aligned for an Einstein Ring to appear. An Einstein Ring (ER) works by gravitational lensing. The massive foreground object has such powerful gravity that it bends space-time, which means the lightRead More →

Tiny Solar Jets Drive the Sun’s Fast and Slow Solar Wind Our Sun is a giant plasma windbag spewing a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind. This stream leaves the Sun at speeds around 400 to 800 kilometers per second and extends to the outer edge of the Solar System to about 125 astronomical units. Astronomers have long wondered about what feeds this powerful outflow. Recently the ESA Solar Orbiter spacecraft observed tiny plasma jets a few hundred kilometers wide, occurring across the Sun. Each one flashes for a brief instant above the solar surface. Just as a tiny stream expands toRead More →

First ultra-high-energy neutrino detected in deep-sea telescope An extraordinary event consistent with a neutrino with an estimated energy of about 220 PeV (220 x 1015 electron volts or 220 million billion electron volts), was detected on February 13, 2023, by the ARCA detector of the kilometer cubic neutrino telescope (KM3NeT) in the deep sea. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

A Blown-Glass Structure Could House Astronauts on the Moon Humanity will eventually need somewhere to live on the Moon. While aesthetics might not be the primary consideration when deciding what kind of habitat to build, it sure doesn’t hurt. The more pleasing the look of the habitat, the better, but ultimately, the functionality will determine whether or not it will be built. Dr. Martin Bermudez thinks he found a sweet synergy that was both functional and aesthetically pleasing with his design for a spherical lunar habitat made out of blown glass. NASA apparently agrees there’s potential there, as he recently received a NASA Institute forRead More →

Astronomers unveil spectro-polarimetric properties of X-ray binary GX 9+1 Using the X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) and Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), Indian astronomers have observed an X-ray binary system known as GX 9+1. Results of the observational campaign, presented in a paper published Feb. 4 on the arXiv pre-print server, shed more light on the spectro-polarimetric properties of this system. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Astronomers uncover details of pulsar M53A’s spin and motion Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) and by analyzing archival Arecibo Observatory data, astronomers have investigated a distant pulsar designated PSR B1310+18A. Results of the new study, published on the arXiv preprint server, deliver important insights into the properties of this object. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

A Lunar Map for the Best Places to Get Samples How can a geologic map of a lunar impact crater created billions of years ago help future human and robotic missions to the lunar surface? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers produced arguably the most in-depth, comprehensive, and highest resolution geologic maps of Orientale basin, which is one of the largest and oldest geologic structures on the Moon. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners develop sample return missions that could place absolute ages onRead More →

Temperamental Stars are Messing With Our Exoplanet Efforts We have the transit method to thank for the large majority of the exoplanets we’ve discovered. When an exoplanet transits its star, the dip in starlight tells astronomers that a planet is present. Analyzing the light can tell them about the planet’s size and atmospheric properties. However, a star’s surface isn’t always uniformly heated. There can be hotter, brighter spots and colder, dimmer spots that change over time. New research says these temperamental stars are distorting our understanding of exoplanets. The number of confirmed exoplanets is approaching 6,000. Astronomers want to understand these planets better in allRead More →

A New Study Reveals How Dark Matter Dominated the Early Universe During the 1970s, while probing distant galaxies to determine their mass, size, and other characteristics, astronomers noticed something interesting. When examining the rate at which these galaxies rotated (their rotational curves), they found that the outer parts were rotating faster than expected. In short, their behavior suggested that they were far more massive than they appeared to be. This led to the theory that in addition to stars, gas, and dust, galaxies were surrounded by a “halo” of mysterious, invisible mass – what came to be known as Dark Matter (DM). It was famedRead More →

A Jumping Robot Could Leap Over Enceladus’ Geysers Locomotion makes things move, and certain forms of locomotion make them move better than others. Those more effective types of locomotion change depending on the environment, which is even more true for space exploration. Methods that might work well on Earth or even other planets, such as helicopters, might be utterly useless on others. But, specialized forms of locomotion abound, and the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) phase I grants for this year include a closer look at one such specialized form – jumping. The Legged Exploration Across the Plume (LEAP) program would utilize a speciallyRead More →

JWST Finds the Smallest Asteroids Ever Seen in the Main Belt The JWST was never intended to find asteroids. It was built to probe some of our deepest, most demanding questions about the cosmos: how the first stars formed, how galaxies have evolved, how planets like ours take shape, and even how life originated. However, it’s first and foremost a powerful infrared telescope and its unrivalled infrared prowess is helping it contribute to another important goal: defending Earth from dangerous asteroids. Humanity doesn’t want to share the dinosaurs’ fate. About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub impact wiped them out. An asteroid 10 to 15Read More →

Supercomputer simulations of giant radio galaxy formation challenge current theoretical models Enabled by supercomputing, University of Pretoria (UP) researchers have led an international team of astronomers that has provided deeper insight into the entire life cycle (birth, growth and death) of giant radio galaxies, which resemble “cosmic fountains”—jets of superheated gas that are ejected into near-empty space from their spinning supermassive black holes. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Material from Alpha Centauri is Already Here The appearance of the Interstellar Objects (ISOs) Oumuamua and Comet Borisov in 2017 and 2019, respectively, created a surge of interest. What were they? Where did they come from? Unfortunately, they didn’t stick around and wouldn’t cooperate with our efforts to study them in detail. Regardless, they showed us something: Milky Way objects are moving around the galaxy. We don’t know where either ISO came from, but there must be more—far more. How many other objects from our stellar neighbours could be visiting our Solar System? The Alpha Centauri (AC) star system is our nearest stellar neighbour andRead More →