Universe Today (Page 196)

The Galápagos Islands From Space The Galápagos Islands hold an honored place in science history. I often wonder, if Charles Darwin could have seen this volcanic archipelago from this vantage point – a satellite view – how might have that aided or changed his research on evolution? This picture is from ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, which consists of two satellites which each carry a high-resolution camera, capable of taking pictures of Earth’s surface in 13 spectral bands. The mission is mainly used to track changes in the way land is being used and to monitor the health of the Earth’s vegetation. The Galápagos Islands areRead More →

What’s the Connection Between Stellar-Mass Black Holes and Dark Matter? Imagine you are a neutron star. You’re happily floating in space, too old to fuse nuclei in your core anymore, but the quantum pressure of your neutrons and quarks easily keeps you from collapsing under your own weight. You look forward to a long stellar retirement of gradually cooling down. Then one day you are struck by a tiny black hole. This black hole only has the mass of an asteroid, but it causes you to become unstable. Gravity crushes you as the black hole consumes you from the inside out. Before you know it,Read More →

Researchers Discover the Source of the Sun’s Most Dangerous High-Energy Particles Sometimes the sun spits out high-energy particles which slam into the Earth, potentially disrupting our sensitive electronics. New research has found that these particles originate in the plasma of the sun itself, and are trapped there by strong magnetic fields. When those fields weaken, the particles blast out. The sun constantly emits all sorts of nastiness, like ultraviolet radiation and a stream of solar wind particles. Sometimes it has violent episodes, releasing massive solar flares and coronal mass ejections. And sometimes it just launches a flurry of high-energy particles, made of mostly protons andRead More →

Fantastic Analysis of SN-10 Landing and Explosion by @DJSnM On March 3rd, 2021, SpaceX conducted a third high-altitude flight test with one of their Starship prototypes (SN10). This time around, the prototype managed to achieve an apogee of 10 km (6.2 mi), a controlled descent relying on nothing but its aerodynamic surfaces (the “belly-flop”), and even managed to land successfully. However, a few minutes after it stuck the landing, the SN10 exploded on the landing pad. Whereas the SN8 and SN9 explosions were attributed to problems that took place during engine reignition, the cause of the SN10 explosion was not as clear. Thankfully, astrophysicist andRead More →

Did Supermassive Black Holes Form Directly From Dark Matter? Supermassive black holes are just a little bit too supermassive – astronomers have difficulty explaining how they got so big so quickly in the early universe. So maybe it’s time for a new idea: perhaps giant black holes formed directly from dark matter. The biggest black holes in the universe are frighteningly big, topping out at over a hundred billion times more massive than the sun. To make things even more frightening, we see these kinds of monsters very early in the history of the universe, when our cosmos was only 800 million years old. ThisRead More →

Move Over, Electron: Rocket Lab Introduces Its New Neutron Rocket Peter Beck announces an addition to the Rocket Lab family, with the Neutron rocket. Private space launch company Rocket Lab revealed that it will go where it promised not to, both here on Earth and in space. Peter Beck, CEO for the American aerospace company Rocket lab made the announcement on Monday, March 1st, stating that the company will enter the medium-lift-to-orbit market, with the development of the Neutron rocket. This comes as the company also plans to go public and merge with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Vector Acquisition Cooperation to become Rocket LabRead More →

This Exoplanetary System Breaks all the Rules It’s just like a normal solar system…except completely backwards. When solar systems form, both the parent star and any planets come from the same molecular cloud. As the cloud collapses, it spins up from conservation of angular momentum, just like a figure skater pulling in their arms. The cloud maintains that spin as it flattens into a protoplanetary disk, and so the spin of the central star lines up with the direction of the orbits of its planets. Simple, right? But apparently the K2-290 system, discovered by Maria Hjorth and Simon Albrecht from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre atRead More →

How do you get Power into Your Lunar Base? With a Tower of Concrete Several Kilometers High It sounds like science fiction, but building an enormous tower several kilometers high on the Lunar surface may be the best way to harness solar energy for long-term Lunar exploration. Such towers would raise solar panels above obstructing geological features on the Lunar surface, and expand the surface area available for power generation. A successful future Moon-base of any size is going to require two key resources: water and power. Ever since evidence of frozen water ice was discovered in the depths of permanently shadowed craters near theRead More →

Apollo Rocks Reveal the Moon’s Early History During the Apollo Era, one of the most important operations conducted by astronauts was sample-returns, where lunar rocks were procured and brought back to Earth. The study of these rocks revealed a great deal about the composition, structure, and geological history of the Moon. This led to profound discoveries, including the presence of water on the Moon and the fact that both Earth and its only satellite formed together. Over time, scientists have taken advantage of new techniques and technology to conduct more in-depth analyses to learn more about the formation and evolution of the Moon. Recently, aRead More →

VY Canis Majoris is “Like Betelgeuse on Steroids” The disappearance of a star can take many forms.  It could go supernova.  It could turn into a black hole.  Or it could just fade away quietly.  Sometimes, the last of these is actually the most interesting to observe.  That is the case for one of the largest stars ever found – VY Canis Majoris, a red supergiant approximately 3840 light years away in the Canis Major constellation.   Researchers now believe it is periodically ejecting mass the equivalent to twice the mass of Jupiter as it works through its death throes.  By using Hubble, astronomers, led byRead More →

The Most Recent Volcanic Activity on the Moon? Just 100 Million Years ago Regions of the Moon known as irregular mare patches – formed by magma cooling from a volcanic eruption – have almost no big craters, indicating that they must be relatively young. By studying the distribution of craters within them, we can estimate when these regions were formed: no more than 100 million years ago. The Moon isn’t very active nowadays, and to be honest hasn’t been very active for a pretty long time. By studying the craters on the surface – specifically, how many there are and how big they are –Read More →

Astronomers Track a Neutrino Back to the Source. Where a Black Hole Tore Apart a Star Neutrinos are notoriously finicky particles.  Hundreds of trillions pass through a person’s body every second, yet they hardly seem to interact with anything (though they actually do a lot).  Even more hard to find are the “high energy” neutrinos that are believed to be formed as the outcome of some of the most violent events in the universe.  Now, researchers using NASA’s Swift telescope have found a high energy neutrino for the first time from one type of those ultra-violent events – a tidal disruption.  But something was aRead More →

New Supercomputer Simulations Will Help pin Down Inflation In the very earliest moments of the big bang, the universe experienced a period of rapid expansion known as inflation. That event planted the seeds that would eventually become galaxies and clusters. And now, a recent set of simulations is able to show us how that connection worked. When our universe was less than a second old, it grew more than a trillion, trillion times in size in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a microsecond. That landmark event, known as inflation, is largely a mystery to modern physics. Besides being pretty sure that itRead More →

Simulations of the Universe are Getting Better and Better at Matching Reality How can you possibly use simulations to reconstruct the history of the entire universe using only a small sample of galaxy observations? Through big data, that’s how. Theoretically, we understand a lot of the physics of the history and evolution of the universe. We know that the universe used to be a lot smaller, denser, and hotter in the past. We know that its expansion is accelerating today. We know that the universe is made of very different things, including galaxies (which we can see) and dark matter (which we can’t). We knowRead More →

Gliese 486b is a Hellish World With Temperatures Above 700 Kelvin In the past two and a half decades, astronomers have confirmed the existence of thousands of exoplanets. In recent years, thanks to improvements in instrumentation and methodology, the process has slowly been shifting from the process of discovery to that of characterization. In particular, astronomers are hoping to obtain spectra from exoplanet atmospheres that would indicate their chemical composition. This is no easy task since direct imaging is very difficult, and the only other method is to conduct observations during transits. However, astronomers of the CARMENES consortium recently reported the discovery of a hotRead More →

Dust in the Chixalub Crater Makes the Compelling Case That an Asteroid Wiped out the Dinosaurs 65 Million Years ago For decades scientists have believed that an asteroid impact event ended the era of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Now, analysis from the crater site itself seals the deal: the same elements that were deposited around the world from the impact have been found inside the crater itself. Anywhere you go on the Earth, if you dig down deep enough to the sedimentary layers that are 66 million years old, you find a curious layer much different than the rest. Perhaps the most curiousRead More →

Space Missions are Building Up a Detailed Map of the Sun’s Magnetic Field Solar physicists have been having a field day of late.  A variety of missions have been staring at the sun more intently ever before (please don’t try it at home).  From the Parker Solar Probe to the Solar Orbiter, we are constantly collecting more and more data about our stellar neighbor.  But it’s not just the big name missions that can collect useful data – sometimes information from missions as simple as a sounding rocket make all the difference.   That was the case for a group of scientists focused on the Sun’sRead More →

NASA is Considering a Radio Telescope on the Far Side of the Moon The University of Colorado Boulder and Lunar Resources Inc. have just won NASA funding to study the possibility of building a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon. The project, called FarView, would harvest building materials from the Lunar surface itself, and use robotic rovers to construct a massive, intricate network of wires and antennas across 400 square kilometers. When complete, FarView would allow radio astronomers to observe the sky in low-frequency radio wavelengths with unprecedented clarity. Radio telescopes work best in isolation. On Earth, if radio telescope operators wantRead More →

A Single Dust Devil on Mars Mars has a great combination of dust and wind. The result of that combination is often dust devils. The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured several dust devils in action, including this lonely whirling dust cloud traversing across a small crater on the Red Planet. A larger view of the a dust devil seen north of Antoniadi Crater on Mars by the HiRISE camera. Credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona. The orbiter’s main objective of this observation, the HiRISE science team said, was to track changes over time of the dunes north of Antoniadi Crater. While HiRISE often catches natureRead More →

Another Big Iceberg Just Broke off from Antarctica Glaciologists have been closely monitoring ice shelves in Antarctica for signs of cracks and chasms that indicate breakups. The loss of ice around the Earth’s polar regions is one of many consequences of climate change, which is leading to rising ocean levels and various feedback mechanisms. Recently, the ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite witnessed a giant iceberg breaking off from Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf on February 26th. The Copernicus Sentinel mission consists of two polar-orbiting satellites that rely on C-band synthetic aperture radar imaging to conduct Earth observations in all weather conditions. In recent years, it has beenRead More →