Since Perseverance is Searching for Life, What Will it Be Looking for? You have to be careful what you say to people. When NASA or someone else says that the Perseverance rover will be looking for fossil evidence of ancient life, the uninformed may guffaw loudly. Or worse, they may think that scientists are looking […]
A map of 25,000 Supermassive Black Holes Across the Universe The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is a different kind of radio telescope. Although radio light has the longest wavelengths and lowest frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, much of radio astronomy has focused on the higher frequency end. Observatories such as ALMA study radio light at frequencies […]
Watch Perseverance Land on Mars. Mind…Blown NASA’s Perseverance rover is practically bristling with cameras. And those cameras were busy during the rover’s breathtaking descent to the Martian surface. Now NASA has released images and videos of the blessed event. Perseverance’s arrival and safe landing at Mars is an amazing accomplishment for NASA, and for all […]
Reclusive neutron star may have been found in famous supernova What remains of the star that exploded just outside our galaxy in 1987? Debris has obscured scientists’ view, but two of NASA’s X-ray telescopes have revealed new clues. phys.org Go to Source
Delayed radio flares from a tidal disruption event A team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) led by Dr. Assaf Horesh have discovered the first evidence of radio flares emitted only long after a star is destroyed by a black hole. Published in the periodical Nature Astronomy, the discovery relied upon ultra-powerful […]
How Long Will Space Junk Take to Burn Up? Here’s a Handy Chart If the Roman Empire had been able to launch a satellite in a relatively high Low Earth Orbit – say about 1,200 km (750 miles) in altitude – only now would that satellite be close to falling back to Earth. And if […]
Ultraluminous X-ray pulsar M51 ULX-7 inspected by researchers Using NASA’s Swift and Chandra space observatories, astronomers have investigated an ultraluminous X-ray pulsar known as M51 ULX-7. The study, detailed in a paper published February 16 on the arXiv pre-print server, sheds more light on the X-ray variability of this source. phys.org Go to Source
There’s Evidence That Mars Once Had an Atmosphere With Less Oxygen. A Possible Biosignature For Life? Remote sensing is only useful if scientists have an idea of what they are looking at. That knowledge is especially important for remote sensing applications on other planets, such as Mars, where it is extraordinarily difficult to collect information […]
Martian moons have a common ancestor Mars’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, have puzzled researchers since their discovery in 1877. They are very small: Phobos’s diameter of 22 kilometers is 160 times smaller than that of our moon, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of only 12 kilometers. “Our moon is essentially spherical, […]
The Mars Helicopter is Online and Getting Ready to Fly Earth is the only planet in the solar system with aircraft capable of sustained flight. Suppose the ground-breaking Ingenuity helicopter, currently stowed aboard the similarly spectacular Mars Perseverance rover, accomplishes its planned mission. In that case, Mars will become the second planet to have a […]
Big galaxies steal star-forming gas from their smaller neighbours Large galaxies are known to strip the gas that occupies the space between the stars of smaller satellite galaxies. phys.org Go to Source
NASA’s Swift helps tie neutrino to star-shredding black hole For only the second time, astronomers have linked an elusive particle called a high-energy neutrino to an object outside our galaxy. Using ground- and space-based facilities, including NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, they traced the neutrino to a black hole tearing apart a star, a rare […]
Binary stars are all around us, new map of solar neighborhood shows The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3-D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 light years of Earth—1.3 million of them. phys.org Go to Source
The Milky Way may be swarming with planets with oceans and continents like here on Earth Astronomers have long been looking into the vast universe in hopes of discovering alien civilisations. But for a planet to have life, liquid water must be present. The likelihood of that scenario has seemed impossible to calculate because it […]
Ghost particle from shredded star reveals cosmic particle accelerator Tracing back a ghostly particle to a shredded star, scientists have uncovered a gigantic cosmic particle accelerator. The subatomic particle, called a neutrino, was hurled towards Earth after the doomed star came too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of its home galaxy […]
Big data to model the evolution of the cosmic web The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has led an international team which has developed an algorithm called COSMIC BIRTH to analyze large scale cosmic structures. This new computation method will permit the analysis of the evolution of the structure of dark matter from the […]
Scientists claim that all high-energy cosmic neutrinos are born by quasars Scientists of the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (LPI RAS), the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Institute for Nuclear Research of RAS (INR RAS) have studied the arrival directions of astrophysical neutrinos with energies […]
Astronomers see star with dust disc that is being fed by surrounding material An international team of astronomers including Leiden scientists publishes the image of a young star with a surrounding dust disk that is still being fed from its surroundings. The phenomenon around the star SU Aur may explain why so many exoplanets are […]
Research reveals stellar kinematics of the galactic disc By using a sample of 118945 red giant branch (RGB) stars from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) and Gaia, Dr. Wu Yaqian from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) investigated the stellar kinematics of the galactic disc in […]
Image: Hubble views a baby star’s tantrums Herbig-Haro objects are some of the rarer sights in the night sky, taking the form of thin spindly jets of matter floating among the surrounding gas and stars. The two Herbig-Haro objects cataloged as HH46 and HH47, seen in this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, […]
