RSSfeeds (Page 37)

Should We Send Humans to Mars? Universe Today has explored the potential for sending humans to Europa, Venus, Titan, and Pluto, all of which possess environmental conditions that are far too harsh for humans to survive. The insight gained from planetary scientists resulted in some informative discussions, and traveling to some of these far-off worlds might be possible, someday. In the final installment of this series, we will explore the potential for sending humans to a destination that has been the focus of scientific exploration and science folklore for more than 100 years: Mars aka the Red Planet. Dr. Jordan Bretzfelder, who is a PostdoctoralRead More →

How Did Life Get Started on Earth? Atmospheric Haze Might Have Been the Key A recent study accepted to The Planetary Science Journal investigates how the organic hazes that existed on Earth between the planet’s initial formation and 500 million years afterwards, also known as Hadean geologic eon, could have contained the necessary building blocks for life, including nucleobases and amino acids. This study holds the potential to not only help scientists better understand the conditions on an early Earth, but also if these same conditions on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, could produce the building blocks of life, as well. Here, Universe Today discusses thisRead More →

Six Planets Found Orbiting an Extremely Young Star The field of exoplanet study continues to grow by leaps and bounds. As of the penning of this article, 5,572 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 4,150 systems (with another 10,065 candidates awaiting confirmation. Well, buckle up because six more exoplanets have been confirmed around TOI-1136, a Sun-like star located roughly 276 light-years from Earth. This star is less than 700 million years old, making it relatively young compared to our own (4.6 billion years). This system will allow astronomers to observe how systems like our own have evolved with time. The six-planet system was confirmed byRead More →

Betelgeuse. Before, During and After the Great Dimming When a prominent star in the night sky suddenly dims, it generates a lot of interest. That’s what happened with the red supergiant star Betelgeuse between November 2019 and May 2020. Betelgeuse will eventually explode as a supernova. Was the dimming a signal that the explosion was imminent? No, and new research helps explain why. Headline writers couldn’t resist the supernova angle, even though that explanation was never very likely. Eventually, it became clear that ejected dust from the star caused the dimming. New research based on observations before, during, and after the Great Dimming Event (GDE)Read More →

Even Early Galaxies Grew Hand-in-Hand With Their Supermassive Black Holes Within almost every galaxy there is a supermassive black hole. This by itself implies some kind of formative connection between the two. We have also observed how gas and dust within a galaxy can drive the growth of galactic black holes, and how the dynamics of black holes can both drive star formation or hinder it depending on how active a black hole is. But one area where astronomers still have little information is how galaxies and their black holes interacted in the early Universe. Did black holes drive the formation of galaxies, or didRead More →

Astrobiology: Why study it? How to study it? What are the challenges? Universe Today has proudly examined the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, and exoplanets, and what they can teach scientists and the public about finding life beyond Earth. Impact craters both shape these planetary surfaces and hold the power to create or destroy life, and we learned how exoplanets are changing our views of planetary formation and evolution, including how and where we might find life in the cosmos. Here, we will discuss how these disciplines contribute to the field responsible for finding life beyond Earth, known as astrobiology. We will discussRead More →

Webb Directly Images Two Planets Orbiting White Dwarfs In several billion years, our Sun will become a white dwarf. What will happen to Jupiter and Saturn when the Sun transitions to become a stellar remnant? Life could go on, though the giant planets will likely drift further away from the Sun. Stars end their lives in different ways. Some meet their end as supernovae, cataclysmic explosions that destroy any orbiting planets and even sterilize planets light-years away. But only massive stars explode like that. Our Sun is not massive enough to explode as a supernova. Instead, it’ll spend time as a red giant. The redRead More →

The Aftermath of a Recent Galactic Merger NGC 4753 is a prime example of what happens after a galactic merger. It looks like a twisted mess, with dust lanes looping around the massive galactic nucleus. Astronomers long wondered what happened to this galaxy, and with a sharp new image created by the Gemini South telescope, they can finally explain its tortured past. Officially, NGC 4753 is classified as a “peculiar” galaxy due to its odd appearance. But, like other survivors of galactic mergers and acquisitions, it has probably had several “shapes” throughout its history. Most galaxies are classified as spirals, ellipticals, lenticulars, and irregulars. ForRead More →

Feast Your Eyes on 19 Face-On Spiral Galaxies Seen by Webb If you’re fascinated by Nature, these images of spiral galaxies won’t help you escape your fascination. These images show incredible detail in 19 spirals, imaged face-on by the JWST. The galactic arms with their multitudes of stars are lit up in infrared light, as are the dense galactic cores, where supermassive black holes reside. The JWST captured these images as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) programme. PHANGS is a long-running program aimed at understanding how gas and star formation interact with galactic structure and evolution. One ofRead More →

A Magnetohydrodynamic Drive Could Lead to Fuel Stations on Mars Within the next fifteen years, NASA, China, and SpaceX plan to send the first crewed missions to Mars. In all three cases, these missions are meant to culminate in the creation of surface habitats that will allow for many returns and – quite possibly – permanent human settlements. This presents numerous challenges, one of the greatest of which is the need for plenty of breathable air and propellant. Both can be manufactured through electrolysis, where electromagnetic fields are applied to water (H2O) to create oxygen gas (O2) and liquid hydrogen (LH2). While Mars has ampleRead More →

The Seeming Impossibility of Life The number of near misses, false starts, and legitimate disasters that have befallen our species since the day we took our first upright steps all those generations ago is too large to count and could honestly take up this entire book. I’ll give us humans this much, though: we’re survivors, through and through. We are, to put it bluntly, remarkable. There is nothing in this cosmos that even begins to approach anything resembling the complexity of the human brain. There is no other world that we have discovered, within our solar system or without, that can support the dizzying arrayRead More →

Water Vapor Found in the Atmosphere of a Small Exoplanet A recent study published in The Astrophysucal Journal Letters discusses the detection of water within the atmosphere of GJ 9827 d, which is a Neptune-like exoplanet located approximately 97 light-years from Earth, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and is the smallest exoplanet to date where water has been detected in its atmosphere. This study was conducted by an international team of researchers and holds the potential to identify exoplanets throughout the Milky Way Galaxy which possess water within their atmospheres, along with highlighting the most accurate methods to identify the water, as well. ForRead More →

The Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observatory LISA Gets the Green Light The science of studying gravitational waves just got a big boost thanks to the European Space Agency. Its science program committee just approved the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna—affectionately known as LISA—for official planning and building. That means gravitational wave astronomers will take their next steps to capture information about gravity waves from space. LISA—or something like it—has been on the drawing boards since the 1980s. The current LISA observatory was proposed about a decade later and scientists flew a “pathfinder mission” to test out its principal design. Now, it’s going to be a full-fledged setRead More →