Universe Today (Page 201)

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 →

A New Radar Instrument Will Try To Fill the Void Left By Arecibo Observational astronomy is dependent on its data, and therefore also dependent on the instruments that collect that data.  So when one of those instruments fails it is a blow to the profession as a whole.  The collapse of the Arecibo Telescope last year after it was damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017 permanently deprived the radio astronomy world of one of its primary observational tools. Now a team at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) hopes to upgrade an existing telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to replace theRead More →

What Looked Like Phosphine On Venus Might Actually Just Be Sulfur Dioxide There’s nothing like a good old fashioned science fight.  When the discovery being challenged is one of the most public and intriguing of the last year, it’s bound to be even more interesting.  A team of scientists, led by Andrew Lincowski and Victoria Meadows at the University of Washington (UW), and involving members from a variety of NASA labs and other universities, has challenged the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus that was first announced last year.  Their explanation is much simpler: it was most likely sulfur dioxide, one of theRead More →

Dark Energy Survey Finds Hundreds of New Gravitational Lenses It’s relatively rare for a magical object from fantasy stories to have a analog in real life.  A truly functional crystal ball (or palantir) would be useful for everything from military operations to checking up on grandma. While nothing exists to be able to observe the mundanities of everyday life, there is something equivalent for extraordinarily far away galaxies: gravitational lenses.  Now a team led by Xiaosheng Huang from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and several universities around the world have published a list of more than 1200 new gravitational lensing candidates. Gravitational lenses occur whenRead More →

SLS Will be Tested Again in About 3 Weeks In November of 2021, NASA will embark on a new era of space exploration as they make the inaugural launch of the Space Launch System (SLS). When it enters service, this booster will be the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V, which took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. This is fitting since the SLS will be the rocket returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024 (as part of Project Artemis). To get the SLS ready for its first launch, NASA has been running the Core Stage through a series of tests designed to testRead More →

Astronomers are now Finding Planetary Disks Around the Smallest, Least Massive Stars Astronomers have been watching planetary systems form around sun-like stars for decades. And now, new observations with the ALMA telescope reveal the same process playing out around the smallest, but most common, stars in galaxy. The smallest stars in the universe, red dwarf stars, are known to have planetary systems, as shown by the famous examples of Proxima b and the TRAPPIST-1 system. But to date, astronomers have never seen one of these stars in the process of actually forming those planets. But also to date, astronomers haven’t had ALMA, currently one ofRead More →

Every Challenge Astronauts Will Face on a Flight to Mars In 1972, the Space Race officially ended as NASA sent one last crew of astronauts to the surface of the Moon (Apollo 17). This was the brass ring that both the US and the Soviets were reaching for, the “Moonshot” that would determine who had supremacy in space. In the current age of renewed space exploration, the next great leap will clearly involve sending astronauts to Mars. This will present many challenges that will need to be addressed in advance, many of which have to do with simply getting the astronauts there in one piece!Read More →