Universe Today (Page 198)

Quantum Theory Proposes That Cause and Effect Can Go In Loops Causality is one of those difficult scientific topics that can easily stray into the realm of philosophy.  Science’s relationship with the concept started out simply enough: an event causes another event later in time.  That had been the standard understanding of the scientific community up until quantum mechanics was introduced.  Then, with the introduction of the famous “spooky action at a distance” that is a side effect of the concept of quantum entanglement, scientists began to question that simple interpretation of causality. Now, researchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the UniversityRead More →

Perseverance Will Make Sure it has a Safe Landing To casual observers, landing a rover on Mars can seem kind of like old news, believe it or not. Especially after all of NASA’s successes. But many are likely not aware of the so-called ‘Mars Curse.‘ The fact is, many of the spacecraft that attempt to land there fail and crash. Next to run the gauntlet of the Mars Curse is NASA’s Perseverance rover. It’ll attempt its long-awaited landing at Jezero Crater on February 18th. The people at NASA have given the Perseverance rover some finely-tuned tools to get it to the Martian surface safely andRead More →

Possible Super-Earth in the Habitable Zone at Alpha Centauri Astronomers using a new technique may have not only found a super-Earth at a neighbouring star, but they may also have directly imaged it. And it could be nice and cozy in the habitable zone around Alpha Centauri. It’s much easier to see giant planets than Earth-size planets. No matter which detection method is being used, larger planets are simply a larger needle in the cosmic haystack. But overall, astronomers are very interested in planets that are similar to Earth. And finding them is much more difficult. We thought we’d have to wait for the ultra-powerfulRead More →

It’s Starting to Look Like Super-Earths Really are Just Great big Terrestrial Planets We’ve learned a thing or two about exoplanets in the past several years. One of the more surprising discoveries is that our solar system is rather unusual. The Sun’s worlds are easily divided into small rocky planets and large gas giants. Exoplanets are much more diverse, both in size and composition. The Sun’s planets can be divided into gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn, gas dwarfs such as Neptune and Uranus, and terrestrial worlds like Earth and Mars. But many exoplanets fall into a new category known as super-Earths. Super-Earths fillRead More →

Three Storms Have Dumped Snow on Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea The words “snow” and “Hawai’i” are not often mentioned in the same paragraph – or even on the same vacation. But snow does fall in Hawai’i almost every year, and 2021 has seen a deep cold front drop snow on the summits of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the Big Island at least three times in the past few weeks – as well as on Haleakala on Maui. This means there are currently in snowcaps on Hawai’i’s three tallest mountains. In this image from February 6, 2021, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) onRead More →

Super-Earth Conditions Simulated in the Lab to Discover if They’re Habitable Deep inside planet Earth, there is a liquid outer core and a solid inner core that counter-rotate with each other. This creates the dynamo effect that is responsible for generating Earth’s planetary magnetic field. Also known as a magnetosphere, this field keeps our climate stable by preventing Earth’s atmosphere from being lost to space. So when studying rocky exoplanets, scientists naturally wonder if they too have magnetospheres. Unfortunately, until we can measure an exoplanet’s magnetic fields, we are forced to infer their existence from the available evidence. This is precisely what researchers at theRead More →

InSight is Going to Try and “Hear” Perseverance Land on Mars From 3,452 km Away Now that the UAE’s Hope spacecraft and China’sTianwen-1 have successfully reached the Red Planet, next up is NASA’s Perseverance rover, set to land on February 18th. Ten operational spacecraft are currently in orbit or on the surface of Mars, ready to welcome the new rover. But one spacecraft in particular, the InSight lander, will be listening closely for Perseverance’s dramatic entry, descent and landing – a.k.a. the Seven Minutes of Terror. Scientists will be using InSight’s specialized instruments to, hopefully, pick up the sounds of Perseverance’s arrival. Usually, these instrumentsRead More →

Here’s the Best Place for Explorers to Harvest Martian Ice Water ice, especially any located in the sub-surface, has long been a focal point of Mars exploration efforts. Reasons abound as to why – from the need to grow plants to the need to create more rocket fuel to blast off the planet for a round trip.  Most of that effort has focused on the poles of the planet, where most of the water ice has been found.   Unfortunately, these extreme latitudes are also difficult locations for manned missions, due to their slack of sunlight and extremely low temperatures.  Now, a team from the PlanetaryRead More →

February 7th Was the Start of a New Year on Mars Happy New Year – from Mars.  It’s always mind expanding to think about the passage of time from other perspectives than the ones we are most familiar with.  So let’s celebrate that our slightly colder red cousin completed another spin around the sun.  The 36th Martian year began on February 7th, with a noticeable lack of fireworks or people singing Auld Lang Syne.   Despite the lack of festivities on the planet’s surface (maybe Curiosity could play Auld Lang Syne to itself?), the planet’s friends at ESA put together a bulleted list of some funRead More →

A New Technique to Find Cold Gas Streams That Might Make up the Missing (Normal) Matter in the Universe Where is all the missing matter? That question has plagued astronomers for decades, because the Universe looks emptier than it should, given current theories about its makeup. Most of the Universe (70%) appears to be composed of Dark Energy, the mysterious force which is causing the Universe’s rate of expansion to increase. Another 25% of the Universe is Dark Matter, an unknown substance which cannot be seen, but has been theorized to explain the otherwise inexplicable gravitational forces which govern the formation of galaxies. That leavesRead More →

Plasma Thruster Could Dramatically Cut Down Flight Times to the Outer Solar System I just finished the most recent season of The Expanse – my current favourite Sci-Fi series. Unlike most of my other go-to Sci-Fi, The Expanse’s narrative is (thus far) mainly contained to our own Solar System. In Star Trek, ships fly about the galaxy at Faster-Than-Light speeds giving mention to the many light years (or parsecs *cough* Star Wars) travelled to say nothing of sublight journeys within solar systems themselves. The distances between stars is huge. But, for current-day Earthling technology, our Solar System itself is still overwhelmingly enormous. It takes yearsRead More →

A New Supernova Remnant Found from an Exploding White Dwarf Star Astronomers have spotted the remnant of a rare type of supernova explosion. It’s called a Type Iax supernova, and it’s the result of an exploding white dwarf. These are relatively rare supernovae, and astronomers think they’re responsible for creating many heavy elements. They’ve found them in other galaxies before, but this is the first time they’ve spotted one in the Milky Way. According to a new paper, the object is a Type Iax supernova, an exploding white dwarf that helps seed the Universe with heavy elements critical for life. Its name is Sgr ARead More →

Emirates Mars Mission Arrives at the Red Planet Today! On July 19th, 2020, the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) – aka. Al Amal (“Hope” in Arabic) – launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on its way to Mars. This mission, the first interplanetary effort to be mounted by an Arab nation, is being carried out by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in collaboration with a number of research institutions internationally. When Hope reaches Mars tomorrow (Feb. 9th, 2021), it will spend the next two years gathering vital science data on Mars’ atmosphere. The arrival will beRead More →

If Dark Matter is Made of Sterile Neutrinos, a new Survey has Narrowed Down What to Look for We don’t know what dark matter is. We do know what it isn’t, and that’s a problem. Matter is made of elementary particles, from the quarks and electrons that make up atoms and molecules, to primordial neutrinos spread throughout the cosmos. But none of the known elementary particles can comprise dark matter, so what is it? The periodic table of elementary particles. Credit: Public Domain, via Wikipedia Several ideas have been proposed, from Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), to hypothetical particles known as axions, to tiny blackRead More →

Nearby Ancient Dwarf Galaxies Have a Surprising Amount of Dark Matter Around the Milky Way, there are literally dozens of dwarf galaxies that continue to be slowly absorbed into our own. These galaxies are a major source of interest for astronomers because they can teach us a great deal about cosmic evolution, like how smaller galaxies merged over time to create larger structures. Since they are thought to be relics of the very first galaxies in the Universe, they are also akin to “galactic fossils.” Recently, a team of astrophysicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) observed one of the most ancient of theseRead More →

Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids Offer Surprises Even Before NASA’s Lucy Mission has a Chance to Visit Them. A new study out this month suggests that Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids may be more peculiar than previously thought. The Trojan asteroids are rocky objects which orbit the Sun just ahead of and just behind the gas giant, in gravitational sweet spots known as Lagrange points. The swarm ahead of Jupiter, known as the L4 (Greek) group, is slightly larger than the L5 (Trojan) swarm behind, but until now, astronomers believed that there was otherwise little differentiation between the two swarms. The paper released this month appears to change that.Read More →

What Are Extrasolar Planets? For countless generations, human beings have looked out at the night sky and wondered if they were alone in the Universe. With the discovery of other planets in our Solar System, the true extent of the Milky Way galaxy, and other galaxies beyond our own, this question has only deepened and become more profound. And whereas astronomers and scientists have long suspected that other star systems in our galaxy and the Universe had orbiting planets of their own, it has only been within the last few decades that any have been observed. Over time, the methods for detecting these “extrasolar planets”Read More →

What’s Causing Those Landslides on Mars? Maybe Underground Salt and Melting Ice Changes in Mar’s geography always attract significant scientific and even public attention.  A hope for signs of liquid water (and therefore life) is likely one of the primary driving forces behind this interest.  One particularly striking changing feature is the Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) originally found by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Now, scientists at the SETI Institute have a modified theory for where those RSLs might develop – a combination of water ice and salt just under the Martian surface. According to the SETI team, led by Senior Research Scientist Janice Bishop,Read More →

Electrons Can Get Accelerated to Nearly the Speed of Light As They Interact With the Earth’s Magnetosphere Electrons serve many purposes in physics.  They are used by some particle accelerators and they underpin our modern world in the silicon chips that run the world’s computers.  They’re also prevalent in space, where they can occasionally be seen floating around in a plasma in the magnetospheres of planets.  Now, a team from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) lead by Drs Hayley Allison and Yuri Shprits have discovered that those electrons present in the magnetosphere can be accelerated up to relativistic speeds, and that could potentiallyRead More →

Astronomers Can Predict When a Galaxy’s Star Formation Ends Based on the Shape and Size of its Disk A galaxy’s main business is star formation. And when they’re young, like youth everywhere, they keep themselves busy with it. But galaxies age, evolve, and experience a slow-down in their rate of star formation. Eventually, galaxies cease forming new stars altogether, and astronomers call that quenching. They’ve been studying quenching for decades, yet much about it remains a mystery. A new study based on the IllustrisTNG simulations has found a link between a galaxy’s quenching and its stellar size. About 10 billion years ago, the Universe wasRead More →