Universe Today (Page 20)

How Long Will Advanced Civilizations Try to Communicate With Us? Technosignature research is heating up, with plenty of papers speculating on the nature, and sometimes the longevity, of signals created by technically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. While we haven’t found any so far, that isn’t to say that we won’t, and a better understanding of what to look for would undoubtedly help. Enter a new paper by Amedeo Balbi and Claudio Grimaldi, two professors at the Universita di Roma Tor Vergata and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, respectively. They have taken a statistical model to the problem of understanding how old a technosignature might beRead More →

One of the Oldest Astrolabes Has Both Hebrew and Arabic Markings I always think of planispheres when I think of astrolabes! Navigators used these ancient devices (astrolabes not planispheres) to provide an accurate map of the stars in the sky. To use them you would match up the metal plates to the sky and you could calculate your location. Astrolabes date back to 220BC but one with Hebrew and Arabic markings was found and it is thought to have originated back in the 11th Century. Historian at Christ’s College, Cambridge, Dr Federica Gigante came across the astrolabe by chance in an image on the websiteRead More →

Drones Could Help Map the Lunar Surface with Extreme Precision Exploring the Moon has become increasingly more of a focal point lately, especially with a series of landers recently launched with various degrees of success. One of the difficulties those landers and any future human missions face is understanding the terrain they are landing on and potentially traversing in the case of a rover or human. To help fight this problem, a team of researchers from Switzerland has developed a drone concept that could help map out some of the more interesting, potentially hazardous areas to explore on the Moon. Mapping the Moon has alreadyRead More →

Perseverance is Keeping Track of the Big Picture While it’s Exploring Mars It’s always a real benefit to have scientists on the ground, able to use the wealth of their experience and ingenuity to ‘think on their feet’.  It is therefore always quite challenging to use space probes that to a degree need to be autonomous. This is certainly true of the NASA Perseverance Rover that has been drilling core samples that will one day (hopefully) be returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return mission. Until then, a team of Geologists have developed a technique to calculate the orientation of the coreRead More →

Now You Can See Exactly Where Hubble and JWST are Pointed Hubble and JWST are busily scanning the sky, sending home enormous amounts of data. They shift from target to target, completing the required observations. But have you ever wondered what those two space telescopes are doing right at this moment? Now, you can do just that at the new Space Telescope Live website. It will show you what each observatory is scanning, where the objects are in the sky, and what researchers hope to learn. You can even go back or forward in time and see what each telescope has been looking at inRead More →

Betelgeuse’s Surface is Boiling Furiously Of all the stars in the sky, betelgeuse must be among the most enigmatic. One of its many mysteries surrounds the speed of its rotation which is surprisingly fast for a supergiant star. If it were placed where the Sun was, then its photosphere (visible layer) would be out around the orbit of Jupiter and it would be moving at 5 km/s. A new study now hints that instead of high rotation, it may be that the surface is boiling so furiously that it has been mistakingly identified as fast rotation.  Betelgeuse is one of the first stars an amateurRead More →

Crew-8 Arrives at the ISS, Despite a Crack in the Capsule Space travel seems to be a fairly regular occurrence now with crews hopping up and down to the International Space Station. This week, another crew arrived on board a SpaceX Dragon capsule known as Endeavour.  On board were NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps along with cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. The ISS already had seven people on board so this brought the total crew to eleven. The launch almost got cancelled due to a crack in the hatch seal.  The construction of the International Space Station began in 1998 with the launchRead More →

Astronomers Find the Most Massive Pair of Supermassive Black Holes Ever Seen Supermassive black holes have been found at the heart of most galaxies but understanding how they have formed has eluded astronomers for some time. One of the most popular theories suggests they merge over and over again to form larger black holes. A recent discovery may support this however the pair of supermassive black holes are orbiting 24 light years apart and measure an incredible 28 billion solar masses making it the heaviest ever seen.  A black hole is a region of space within which the escape velocity is greater than the speedRead More →

What’s the Best Way to Pack for Space? Packing to go to space is a lot like getting ready for a plane ride with only a carry-on bag. You have to maximize the use of the space in your bag at the same time you want to make sure you have what you need. That’s the challenge astronauts face in the upcoming Artemis moon missions. So, NASA held a competition to figure out the best and most innovative ways to store cargo for the missions. The Lunar Gateway Cargo Packing and Storing challenge asked members of the public to come up with good ways toRead More →

Webb Sees a System That Just Finished Forming its Planets Nearly 5 billion years ago a region of gas gravitationally collapsed within a vast molecular cloud. At the center of the region, the Sun began to form, while around it formed a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust out of which Earth and the other planets of the solar system would form. We know this is how the solar system began because we have observed this process in systems throughout the galaxy. But there are details of the process we still don’t understand, such as why gas planets are relatively rare in our system. OurRead More →

Webb Sees a Surprisingly Active Galaxy When the Universe Was Only 430 Million Years Old Unlocking the mysteries of the early Universe is one of the JWST’s primary endeavours. Finding and examining some of the first galaxies is an important part of its work. One of the Universe’s first galaxies is extraordinarily luminous, and researchers have wondered why. It looks like the JWST has found the answer. The galaxy at issue is named GN-z11, and it existed when the Universe was less than half a billion years old. The Hubble first spotted it in 2016, with help from the Spitzer Space Telescope. At the time,Read More →

Juno Measures How Much Oxygen is Being Produced by Europa If the periodic table listed the elements in order of their importance to life, then oxygen might bully its way to the top. Without oxygen, Earth’s complex life likely would not exist. So when scientists detect oxygen on another world, they turn their attention to it. During Juno’s ambitious mission to the Jovian system, it performed some flybys and observations of some of the Jovian moons. One of those moons, Europa, is a prime target in the search for life because of its subsurface ocean. It became an even more important target when scientists realizedRead More →

The LIFE Telescope Passed its First Test: It Detected Biosignatures on Earth. We know that there are thousands of exoplanets out there, with many millions more waiting to be discovered. But the vast majority of exoplanets are simply uninhabitable. For the few that may be habitable, we can only determine if they are by examining their atmospheres. LIFE, the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, can help. The search for biosignatures on potentially habitable exoplanets is heating up. The JWST has successfully gathered some atmospheric spectra from exoplanet atmospheres, but it has a lot of other jobs to do and observing time is in high demand. ARead More →

Massive Stars Have the Power to Shape Solar Systems Stars shape their solar systems. It’s true of ours, and it’s true of others. But for some massive stars, their power to shape still-forming systems is fateful and final. In their youth, stars are surrounded by a rotating mass of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk. Planets form in these disks, and the process can take millions of years. But stars have different masses and different radiation outputs that affect how planets form, or if they form at all. New research examines how the powerful UV radiation from massive stars affects planet formation in disks.Read More →

Grabbing Samples from the Surface of Mars As if the Mars Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity Drone were not exciting enough then the next step in this audacious mission takes it to a whole new level. Mars Sample Return Mission is to follow along, collect and return the samples collected by Perseverance back to Earth. However the status of Mars Sample Return is uncertain as engineers are still working on technology to retrieve the samples. The current challenge is the gripper arm that will collect the samples and stow them safely and securely before transportation without damaging them.  Mars, known as the “Red Planet,” is theRead More →

Astronomers Can See the Impact Site Where an Asteroid Crashed Into a White Dwarf Nothing is immortal. Everything has a finite existence, including the stars themselves. How a star dies depends on several factors, most importantly their mass. For the Sun, this means that in several billion years it will swell to a red giant as it churns through the last of its nuclear fuel. The core that remains will then collapse to become a white dwarf. Of course, the Sun is home to several planets, including Earth. What of their fate? What of ours? According to a recent study, the Sun’s death might consumeRead More →

Curiosity Rover is Climbing Through Dramatic Striped Terrain on Mars Just about every day we here on Earth get a breathtaking picture of Mars’s terrain sent back by a rover. But, the view from space can be pretty amazing, too. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) just sent back a thought-provoking picture of Curiosity as it makes its way up a steep ridge on Mount Sharp. The rover is a tiny black dot in the center of the image, which gives a good feeling for what MRO’s HiRISE camera accomplished. For scale, the rover is about the size of a dinner table, sitting in a regionRead More →

A Giant Gamma-Ray Bubble is a Source of Extreme Cosmic Rays Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are one of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe and something that astronomers have been studying furiously to learn more about their origins. In recent years, astronomers have set new records for the most powerful GRB ever observed – this includes GRB 190114C, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2019, and GRB 221009A, detected by the Gemini South telescope in 2022. The same is true for high-energy cosmic rays that originate from within the Milky Way, whose origins are still not fully understood. In a recent study, members ofRead More →

New Study Addresses how Lunar Missions will Kick up Moondust. Before the end of this decade, NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era. But this time, through the Artemis Program, it won’t be a “footprints and flags” affair. With other space agencies and commercial partners, the long-term aim is to create the infrastructure that will allow for a “sustained program of lunar exploration and development.” If all goes according to plan, multiple space agencies will have established bases around the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which will pave the way for lunar industries and tourism. For humans toRead More →

How Warm Are the Oceans on the Icy Moons? The Ice Thickness Provides a Clue. Scientists are discovering that more and more Solar System objects have warm oceans under icy shells. The moons Enceladus and Europa are the two most well-known, and others like Ganymede and Callisto probably have them too. Even the dwarf planet Ceres might have an ocean. But can any of them support life? That partly depends on the water temperature, which strongly influences the chemistry. We’re likely to visit Europa in the coming years and find out for ourselves how warm its ocean is. Others on the list we may neverRead More →