Universe Today (Page 197)

There was a Secret Code in the Perseverance Parachute A secret coded message was hidden on the gigantic parachute used to land the Perseverance rover safely on the surface on Mars. And no, it wasn’t a clandestine message to the Martians. It was a message of inspiration for us humans. But it also came as a challenge. During a news briefing on February 22, Allen Chen, the entry, descent and landing lead for the mission revealed there was a secret message in the parachute. “In addition to enabling incredible science, we hope our efforts in our engineering can inspire others,” he said. “Sometimes we leaveRead More →

Cygnus X-1 was the First Black Hole Ever Found. New Measurements Show it’s Much More Massive Than Previously Believed In 1964 two Aerobee suborbital rockets were launched with the goal of mapping x-ray sources in the sky. Each rocket contained a directed Geiger counter, so that as the rocket rotated at the peak of its trajectory to measure the direction of x-ray sources. The project discovered eight x-ray sources, including a particularly bright one in the constellation Cygnus. It became known as Cygnus X-1. Cygnus X-1 as imaged by a balloon bourne telescope. Credit: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center As x-ray telescopes became more precise, itRead More →

Perseverance’s Landing … Seen From Orbit! The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has done it again. The imaging team was able to capture the Perseverance rover as it descended through the Martian atmosphere, hanging under its parachute. Stunning. Closeup view of the Mars 2020 descent stage streaking through Mars’ atmosphere on February 18, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. If you feel you’ve seen something like this before, you have. HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) also captured both the Curiosity rover in 2012 and the Phoenix lander in 2008, descending down to Mars. But that doesn’t lessen the accomplishment of capturing a tinyRead More →

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 for actual animal skeletons or something. Of course, that’s not the case. So what is Perseverance looking for? Scientists who study Mars hope that Perseverance will find fossilized evidence of ancient microbial life. Mars was once wet and warm a long time ago, and those conditions may have been rightRead More →

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 of hundreds of Gigahertz, and the VLA studies the fifty Gigahertz range, LOFAR captures radio signals below 250 Megahertz, which is in the range of the lowest radio frequencies that can be seen from Earth. Most low frequency radio sources are yet to be explored. Credit: de Gasperin, et alRead More →

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 of us. Each of the previous rover landings was amazing, too, but something feels different about Perseverance. Each mission to Mars has advanced our understanding, but Perseverance has a chance to actually find fossil evidence of ancient life. If it does find that evidence, it’ll be one of those eventsRead More →

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 the dinosaurs had launched a satellite into the furthest geostationary orbit – 36,000 km (23,000 miles) or higher — it might still be up there today. While we’ve *really* only launched satellites since 1957, those examples show how long objects can stay in orbit. With the growing problem of accumulatingRead More →

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 about an observed object in any other way.  To make up for the lack of ability to perform other tests in situ, scientists set up laboratory experiments with different environments and materials and compare the remote sensing data with the observed remote objects.  That is exactly what Jiacheng Liu, aRead More →

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 powered aircraft fly through its atmosphere.  Ingenuity has sent its first status report since landing on Mars. The signal, which arrived via the iconic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), reports on the state of the batteries of the helicopter as well as the operation of the base station, which, among otherRead More →

Protogalaxy Cluster Found When the Cosmic Fog Was Starting to Clear, When the Universe Was Just 750 Million Years Old Origin stories are a focus of many astronomical studies.  Planetary formation, solar system formation, and even galaxy formation have long been studied in order to understand how the universe came to be where it is today.  Now, a team of scientists from the Lyman Alpha Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization (LAGER) consortium have found an extremely early “protogalaxy” that was formed approximately 750 million years after the big bang.  Studying it can provide insights into that early type of galaxy formation and everything thatRead More →

Just Some of the Planets That TESS Has Found Nearby Ever since NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009, there has an explosion in the study of the extrasolar planets. With the retirement of Kepler in 2018, it has fallen to missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to pick up where its predecessor left off. Using observations from TESS, an international team of astronomers recently discovered three exoplanets orbiting a young Sun-like star named TOI 451. The research was led by Elisabeth R. Newton, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. She was joined by researchers from NASA JPL,Read More →

Once He Steps Down From Amazon, Jeff Bezos Will be Able to Focus his Energy on Blue Origin When it comes to the private aerospace sector (aka. NewSpace), some names stand out from the rest. The most obvious of these is SpaceX (the brainchild of Elon Musk and the leading source of innovation in commercial space) and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But what of Blue Origin, the private aerospace company created by Jeff Bezos in 2000? In recent years, Blue Origin has fallen behind the competition and missed out on several billion dollars worth of contracts.Read More →

Did a Comet Wipe out the Dinosaurs? About 66 million years ago a massive chunk of rock slammed into Earth in what is the modern-day Yucatan Peninsula. The impact extinguished about 75% of all life on Earth. Most famously, it was the event that wiped out the dinosaurs. While mainstream scientific thought has pointed to an asteroid as the impactor, a new research letter says it could’ve, in fact, been a comet. The Chicxulub impactor, as it’s known, excavated a crater 150 km (93 mi) in diameter and about 20 km (12 mi) deep. The impact had a devastating effect. There was a tsunami, globalRead More →

A new Approach Could Tease out the Connection Between Gravity and Quantum Mechanics In physics, there are two main ways to model the universe. The first is the classical way. Classical models such as Newton’s laws of motion and Einstein’s theory of relativity assume that the properties of an object such as its position and motion are absolute. There are practical limits to how accurately we can measure an object’s path through space and time, but that’s on us. Nature knows their motion with infinite precision. Quantum models such as atomic physics assume that objects are governed by interactions. These interactions are probabilistic and indefinite.Read More →

Perseverance has Landed. Here are its First Pictures From the Surface of Mars They’ve done it again. After a journey of nearly seven months, the Perseverance rover teams successfully guided their intrepid traveler to a pinpoint landing inside Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. And within minutes of the landing, Perseverance sent back two images from the front and rear Hazard Avoidance Cameras, revealing its surroundings on the Red Planet. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image of the area in front of it using its onboard Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A. This image was acquired on Feb. 18, 2021 (Sol 0)Read More →

Following the Jovian Moons Through 2021 Mutual Eclipse Season Watch as the Jovian moons perform a spectacular celestial dance in 2021. Wondering where all the planets have gone? With the the exception of Mars high in the dusk sky, all of the other naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn) are currently hiding low in the dawn… but that’s about to change. If you own a telescope, Jupiter is especially worth keeping an eye on in 2021. The reason is we’re entering in to mutual eclipse season for Jupiter’s major four Galilean moons, a fascinating time when the moons of Jove pass one inRead More →

We Could Find Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Their Air Pollution Upcoming telescopes will give us more power to search for biosignatures on all the exoplanets we’ve found. Much of the biosignature conversation is centred on biogenic chemistry, such as atmospheric gases produced by simple, single-celled creatures. But what if we want to search for technological civilizations that might be out there? Could we find them by searching for their air pollution? If a distant civilization was giving our planet a cursory glance in its own survey of alien worlds and technosignatures, they couldn’t help but notice our air pollution. Could we turn the tables on them?Read More →

Magnetic Fields Help Shape the Formation of New Planets In all of scientific modeling, the models attempting to replicate planetary and solar system formation are some of the most complicated.  They are also notoriously difficult to develop.  Normally they center around one of two formative ideas: planets are shaped primarily by gravity or planets are shaped primarily by magnetism.  Now a new theoretical model has been developed by a team at the University of Zurich (UZH) that uses math from both methodologies to inform the most complete model yet of planetary formation. Scale is the problem causing the dichotomy between magnetic and gravitational models.  AtRead More →

Juno Just Saw a Spacerock Crash Into Jupiter Timing is extraordinarily important in many aspects of astronomy.  If an astronomer or their instrument is looking the wrong way at the wrong time they could miss something spectacular.  Alternatively, there are moments when our instruments capture something unexpected in regions of space that we were searching for something else.  That is exactly what happened recently when a team of scientists, led by Rohini Giles at the Southwest Research Institute, saw an image of what is likely a meteor impacting Jupiter’s atmosphere.   The team collects data from the UVS, one of the instruments on Juno, NASA’s missionRead More →

The Largest Crater on the Moon Reveals Secrets About its Early History One of the oldest, deepest, and largest impact craters on the Moon provides a window into the history and makeup of our celestial companion, and needs to be studied in more detail, says a team of lunar scientists. The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the Moon formed from a gigantic impact about 4.3 billion years ago. Scientists say a more detailed analysis of this area will help refine the timeline of events in the Moon’s development, as well as help explain the dramatic differences between the lunar nearside and farside. In a new paper,Read More →