Universe Today (Page 20)

The Maximum Mass of a Neutron Star is 2.25 Solar Masses When stars grow old and die, their mass determines their ultimate fate. Many supermassive stars have futures as neutron stars. But, the question is, how massive can their neutron stars get? That’s one that Professor Fan Yizhong and his team at Purple Mountain Observatory in China set out to answer. It turns out that a non-rotating neutron star can’t be much more than 2.25 solar masses. If it was more massive, it would face a much more dire fate: to become a black hole. To figure this out, the team at Purple Mountain lookedRead More →

Could Earth Life Survive on a Red Dwarf Planet? Even though exoplanet science has advanced significantly in the last decade or two, we’re still in an unfortunate situation. Scientists can only make educated guesses about which exoplanets may be habitable. Even the closest exoplanet is four light-years away, and though four is a small integer, the distance is enormous. That doesn’t stop scientists from trying to piece things together, though. One of the most consequential questions in exoplanet science and habitability concerns red dwarfs. Red dwarfs are plentiful, and research shows that they host multitudes of planets. While gas giants like Jupiter are comparatively rareRead More →

Webb Continues to Confirm That Universe is Behaving Strangely Over a century ago, astronomers Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaitre independently discovered that the Universe was expanding. Since then, scientists have attempted to measure the rate of expansion (known as the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant) to determine the origin, age, and ultimate fate of the Universe. This has proved very daunting, as ground-based telescopes yielded huge uncertainties, leading to age estimates of anywhere between 10 and 20 billion years! This disparity between these measurements, produced by different techniques, gave rise to what is known as the Hubble Tension. It was hoped that the aptly named Hubble Space TelescopeRead More →

NASA is Fixing its Link to Voyager 1 Voyagers 1 and 2 were, to put it simply, incredible. They were true explorers and unveiled many mysteries of the outer Solar System, revealing the outer planets in all their glory. Communication with Voyager 1 has until recently been possible, slow but possible. More recently however, it has been sending home garbled data rendering communication to all intents impossible although messages can still be sent. Engineers at NASA have narrowed the problem down to an onboard computer, the Flight Data System (FDS). A dump of the entire memory of the FDS has now been received so thatRead More →

The Cosmic Neutrino Background Would Tell Us Plenty About the Universe Readers of Universe Today are probably already familiar with the concept of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Its serendipitous discovery by a pair of radio astronomers at Bell Labs is the stuff of astronomical legend. Over the past decades, it has offered plenty of insights into the Big Bang and the origins of our universe. But there is another, less well-known background signal that could be just as revolutionary – or at least we think there is. The Cosmic Neutrino Background (CvB) has been posited for years but has yet to be found, primarilyRead More →

Mars Was Hiding Another Giant Volcano Olympus Mons is well known for being the largest volcano in the Solar System. It’s joined on Mars by three other shield volcanoes; Ascraeus, Pavonis and Arsia but a recent discovery has revealed a fifth. Provisionally called Noctis volcano, this previously unknown Martian feature reaches 9,022 metres high and 450 kilometres across. Its presence has eluded planetary scientists because it has been heavily eroded and is on the boundary of the fractured maze-like terrain of Noctis Labyrinthus.  Mars seems to like shield volcanoes. They are a type of volcano that have a broad gently sloping profile and are generallyRead More →

It’s Time for Jupiter’s Annual Checkup by Hubble Each year, the Hubble Space Telescope focuses on the giant planets in our Solar System when they’re near the closest point to Earth, which means they’ll be large and bright in the sky. Jupiter had its photos taken on January 5-6th, 2024, showing off both sides of the planet. Hubble was looking for storm activity and changes in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The images are part of OPAL, the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program. These yearly images provide a long-time baseline of observations of the outer planets, helping to understand their atmospheric dynamics and evolution as gas giants. Jupiter’sRead More →

This is a 1.3 Gigapixel Image of a Supernova Remnant Stars more massive than the Sun blow themselves to pieces at the end of their life. Usually leaving behind either a black hole, neutron star or pulsar they also scatter heavy elements across their host galaxy. One such star went supernova nearly 11,000 years ago creating the Vela Supernova Remnant. The resultant expanding cloud of debris covers almost 100 light years and would be twenty times the diameter of the full Moon. Astronomers have recently imaged the remnant with a 570 megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) creating a stunning 1.3 gigapixel image.  The Vela supernovaRead More →

Nancy Grace Roman will Map the Far Side of the Milky Way The Galaxy is a collection of stars, planets, gas clouds and to the dismay of astronomers, dust clouds. The dust blocks starlight from penetrating so it’s very difficult to learn about the far side of the Galaxy. Thankfully the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman telescope has infrared capability so it can see through the dust. A systematic survey of the far side of the Milky Way is planned to see what’s there and could discover billions of objects in just a month.  The Nancy Grace Roman telescope (NGRt) has been named after NASA’s inauguralRead More →

Another Hycean Planet Found? TOI-270 d Hycean planets may be able to host life even though they’re outside what scientists consider the regular habitable zone. Their thick atmospheres can trap enough heat to keep the oceans warm even though they’re not close to their stars. Astronomers have found another one of these potential hycean worlds named TOI-270 d. The word hycean is a portmanteau of ‘hydrogen’ and ‘ocean’ and it describes worlds with surface oceans and thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres. Scientists think that they may be common around red dwarfs and that they could be habitable, although any life that exists on a hycean world wouldRead More →

Starship Reaches Orbit on SpaceX’s Third Test but Breaks Up on Re-Entry After falling short in its first two attempts, SpaceX got its Starship super-rocket to an orbital altitude today during the launch system’s third integrated flight test. Now it just has to work on the landing.  Today’s test marked a major milestone in SpaceX’s effort to develop Starship as the equivalent of a gigantic Swiss Army knife for spaceflight, with potential applications ranging from the deployment of hundreds of Starlink broadband satellites at a time to crewed odysseys to the moon, Mars and beyond. The 396-foot-tall (120-meter-tall) rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facilityRead More →

NASA and Boeing Release New Rendering of their X-66 Sustainable Experimental Airliner Climate change is arguably the single greatest threat facing the world today. According to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), average global temperatures are set to increase between 1.5 and 2 °C (2.7 to 3.6 °F) by mid-century. To restrict global temperatures to an increase of 1.5 C and avoid the worst-case scenarios, the nations of the world need to achieve net zero emissions by then. Otherwise, things will get a lot worse before they get better, assuming they ever do. This means transitioning toRead More →

Webb Sees a Star-Forming Region Blowing Vast Bubbles Star birth is a messy and chaotic event. Some of the process remains well hidden behind clouds of gas and dust that make up star-forming regions. However, part of it happens in wavelengths of light we can detect, such as visible light and infrared. It’s an intricate process that the Webb telescope (JWST) can study in detail. Recently this infrared-sensitive space observatory zeroed in on a portion of a star-forming region called NGC 604 in the Triangulum galaxy and returned a pair of amazing images. The telescope’s Near-infrared Camera (NIRCam) image shows gas bubbles, and tendrils andRead More →

What Can We Learn Flying Through the Plumes at Enceladus? In the next decade, space agencies will expand the search for extraterrestrial life beyond Mars, where all of our astrobiology efforts are currently focused. This includes the ESA’s JUpiter ICy moon’s Explorer (JUICE) and NASA’s Europa Clipper, which will fly past Europa and Ganymede repeatedly to study their surfaces and interiors. There’s also NASA’s proposed Dragonfly mission that will fly to Titan and study its atmosphere, methane lakes, and the rich organic chemistry happening on its surface. But perhaps the most compelling destination is Enceladus and the lovely plumes emanating from its southern polar region.Read More →

NASA Announces its 2025 Budget. Lean Times Ahead. Space flight is an expensive business and that money has to come from somewhere. The White House has just released their budget for fiscal year 2025. What does that mean for NASA?, they will get $25.4 billion, the same as it received last year but $2 billion less than it requested. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the constraints come from a debt ceiling agreement that limits non-defence spending. Alas the $2 billion deficit means NASA will need to cut costs from various missions. Nelson went on to put the blame squarely on a small handful of peopleRead More →

A 790,000 Year-Old Asteroid Impact Could Explain Seafloor Spherules Our solar system does not exist in isolation. It formed within a stellar nursery along with hundreds of sibling stars, and even today has the occasional interaction with interstellar objects such as Oumuamua and Borisov. So it’s reasonable to presume that some interstellar material has reached Earth. Recently Avi Loeb and his team earned quite a bit of attention with a study arguing that it had found some of this interstellar stuff on the ocean seabed. But a new study finds that the material has a much more local origin. The original study is based onRead More →

Ultrablack Coating Could Be Ideal for Telescopes If you, like me, have dabbled with telescope making you will know what a fickle friend light can be. On one hand you want to capture as much as you can (but only from the object, not from nearby lights) and want to reflect or refract it to the point of observation or study.  What you most certainly don’t want is stray light to be bounced around inside the telescope so components (except the mirror!) are sprayed as black as possible. Unfortunately black paints tend to be quite susceptible to damage and struggle to cope with the harshRead More →

Are Andromeda and the Milky Way Already Exchanging Stars? I often drag out the amazing fact that the Andromeda Galaxy, that faint fuzzy blob just off the corner of the Square of Pegasus, is heading straight for us! Of course I continue to tell people it won’t happen for a few billion years yet but a recent study suggests that we are already seeing hypervelocity stars that have been ejected from Andromeda already. It is just possible that the two galaxies have already started to exchange stars long before they are expected to merge.  We tend to think of stars as stationery objects in theRead More →

Colliding Neutron Stars are the Ultimate Particle Accelerators Gamma-ray telescopes observing neutron star collisions might be the key to identifying the composition of dark matter. One leading theory explaining dark matter it that is mostly made from hypothetical particles called axions. If an axion is created within the intensely energetic environment of two neutron stars merging, it should then decay into gamma-ray photons which we could see using space telescopes like Fermi-LAT. About 130 million years ago, a pair of neutron stars collided violently. The powerful gravitational waves from the impact radiated outwards at the speed of light, followed shortly after by a tremendous flashRead More →

This is Europa Clipper’s Version of the Golden Record The Voyager spacecraft carried on board a plethora of scientific instruments but attached to the side was a golden record. The sounds of Earth were recorded upon it. Now, another mission is going to be carrying a message out into space. The Europa Clipper mission will launch in October and it will carry a plaque with images, illustrations and messages. There will be more than 2.6 million names and the word for ‘water’ converted into waveform from 103 languages.  I think Captain James T Kirk would be proud of NASA for boldly going. This time withRead More →