Universe Today (Page 21)

The Early Universe Had Small Galaxies with Oversized Black Holes When doing the marketing for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA and the other telescope contributors liked to point out how it would open up the early universe to scrutiny. They weren’t exaggerating, and now scientific studies are starting to proliferate that show why. A new study published by authors from Harvard, the University of Arizona, and the University of Cambridge used three surveys produced by the JWST to analyze the supermassive black holes at the center of early galaxies. And they found they were much different than the one at the center ofRead More →

Hubble Sees a Bridge of Stars Connecting Two Galaxies The poetic-minded among us like to point out how Nature is a dance. If they’re right, then galaxies sometimes form unwieldy pairs. With the Hubble Space Telescope, we can spot some of these galactic pairs as they approach one another. Part of galactic evolution involves galactic interactions and mergers. When galaxies interact gravitationally, it can create streams of gas and dust that stretch for light-years. ARP 271 is one of the interacting pairs of galaxies imaged by Hubble. ARP 271 contains NGC 5427 and NGC 5426. The pair is about 130 million light-years distant and aboutRead More →

NASA’s JPL Lays Off Hundreds of Workers In a disheartening turn of events, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has announced that it’s laying off about 8% of its workforce. That means that about 530 JPL employees will be let go, along with about 40 employees of the Lab’s contractors. That sucks for the people being let go, but the bigger concern for the rest of us is what will happen to upcoming missions like Mars Sample Return (MSR)? These layoffs have nothing to do with the individuals affected or with JPL’s activities. It’s all budget wrangling, something that is a near-constant in a democracy. There’s onlyRead More →

Did the Galileo Mission Find Life on Earth? In the Fall of 1989, the Galileo spacecraft was launched into space, bound for Jupiter and its family of moons. Given the great distance to the king of planets, Galileo had to take a roundabout tour through the inner solar system, making a flyby of Venus in 1990 and Earth in 1990 and 1992 just to gain enough speed to reach Jupiter. During the flybys of Earth Galileo took several images of our planet, which astronomers have used to discover life on Earth. The idea of “discovering” life on Earth in the 21st century might seem aRead More →

NASA Gives Dreamchaser the Shakedown It’s been a while since NASA has had a spaceplane on the launchpad but this now feels closer than ever again. Their new prototype cargo spaceplane known as Dream Chaser is now undergoing vibration and vacuum testing at the Neil Armstrong test facility. The tests sound a little strange perhaps but on launch and during re-entry it will most definitely experience shaking during these phases of the flights.  The Dream Chaser spaceplane has been designed to attach to the top of a conventional Vulcan Centaur rocket and land like a plane. Its propulsion is to be a cluster of propaneRead More →

The Comet vs. the Eclipse: 12P/Pons-Brooks Heads Towards Perihelion in April Comet 12P Pons-Brooks takes center stage this Spring. Something is definitely up with the 12th periodic comet in the catalog. We’re talking about Comet 12P Pons-Brooks, set to reach the first of two perihelia for the 21st century this Spring. And the timing couldn’t be better, as the comet will also sit near the Sun just two weeks prior during the total solar eclipse of April 8th 2024, spanning the North American continent from the southwest to the northeast. If the comet over-performs—a long shot, but multiple outbursts in 2023 suggest it just might—weRead More →

Gravitationally Lensed Supernovae are Another Way to Measure the Expansion of the Universe Supernova are a fascinating phenomenon and have taught us much about the evolution of stars. The upcoming Nancy Grace Roman telescope will be hunting the elusive combination of supernovae in a gravitational lens system. With its observing field 200 times that of Hubble it stands a much greater chance of success. If sufficient lensed supernovae are found then they could be used to determine the expansion rate of the Universe.  Supernova are stellar corpses, the remains of supermassive stars that have reached the end of their lives. The events mark one ofRead More →

Chickpeas Grown in Lunar Regolith Are Stressed but Reach Maturity A recent preprint investigates how chickpeas have been successfully grown in lunar regolith simulants (LRS), marking the first time such a guideline has been established not only for chickpeas, but also for growing food for long-term human space missions. This study was conducted by researchers from Texas A&M University and Brown University and holds the potential to develop more efficient methods in growing foods using extraterrestrial resources, specifically with NASA’s Artemis program slated to return humans to the lunar surface in the next few years. From Dust To Seed: A Lunar Chickpea Story https://t.co/qhCSMxheTe #astrobiologyRead More →

Perseverance Gives Us One Last Look at the Damaged Ingenuity Helicopter Well I consider that a success; the first aircraft on another world surpassed all expectations. Ingenuity, the helicopter that has been buzzing around on Mars has finally reached the end of its life after a total of 72 flights on the red planet. In a wonderful piece of computer imagery, Simeon Schmauß took a number of images of Ingeniuty from Perseverance and stiched them together into a mosaic and upscaled to provide a human eye view.  The groundbreaking voyage of the Ingenuity helicopter commenced on February 18, 2021, upon its arrival on Mars. ThisRead More →

Could Forests Become Ultrahigh Energy Neutrino Detectors?  I really don’t know how to introduce this article. Neutrinos are elementary particles and are electrically neutral. They are produced by numerous cosmological events. Trees, well, we all know what they are and in a recent paper, scientists believed it may be possible to use entire forests as neutrino detectors! I was a bit sceptical when I read the paper but its an interesting concept and certainly trees have been used as broadband antennae so perhaps, well its a fascinating concept. Neutrinos have often been referred to as the ‘ghost particle’ due to their inability to interact withRead More →

How Does the Cosmic Web Drive Galaxy Evolution? Galaxies experience a long strange trip through the cosmic web as they grow and evolve. It turns out that the neighborhoods they spend time in on the journey change their evolution, and that affects their star formation activity and alters their gas content. Astronomer Gregory Rudnick of the University of Kansas has a grant to follow that galactic growth trail and figure out just how the trip alters the evolution of a galaxy. These giant stellar cities are spread throughout the Universe, said Rudnick, explaining that they tend to cluster together into large conglomerations. Hundreds of thousandsRead More →

A Black Hole Has Cleared Out Its Neighbourhood We can’t see them directly, but we know they’re there. Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) likely dwell at the center of every large galaxy. Their overwhelming gravity draws material toward them, where it collects in an accretion disk, waiting its turn to cross the event horizon into oblivion. But in one galaxy, the SMBH has choked on its meal and spit it out, sending material away at high speeds and clearing out the entire neighbourhood. We’ve known there’s something at the heart of large galaxies since the early 1960s when astronomers discovered an unexplained radio source at theRead More →

Dust Ruins Another Way of Measuring Distance in the Universe Astronomers have many ways to measure the distance to galaxies billions of light years away, but most of them rely upon standard candles. These are astrophysical processes that have a brightness we can calibrate, such as Cepheid variable stars or Type Ia supernovae. Of course, all of these standard candles have some inherent variability, so astronomers also look for where our assumptions about them can lead us astray. As a case in point, a recent study in The Astrophysical Journal shows how galactic dust can bias distance observations. The study compares two slightly different waysRead More →

Astronomers See 18 Examples of Stars Getting Torn Apart by Black Holes Black holes have always held a special fascination for me ever since I was a geeky kid looking up at the stars. Their intense forces are the stuff of science fiction and can tear a star to pieces. This process is violent and can send bursts of electromagnetic radiation across the Cosmos. A paper recently published announces the discovery of 18 new tidal events just like this, doubling the number of identified shredded stars.  Black holes are the remains of massive stars that have reached the end of their lives. During the mainRead More →

NASA Continues Testing its New Lunar Spacesuits NASA’s Artemis mission objective is among other things, to get human beings back to the Moon. Much of the attention of late has been focussed on the rocket technology to get the astronauts there but as we progress from Artemis I to Artemis II – which aims to take a crew around the Moon and back before Artemis III lands them on the lunar surface – attention is shifting on the spacesuits the crew will wear. The new suits, built by Axiom Space are designed to provide the mobility and protection required on the surface and now, NASARead More →

Some Young Planets Are Flattened Smarties, not Spheres. One of contemporary astronomy’s most pressing questions concerns planet formation. We can see more deeply than ever into very young solar systems where planets are taking shape in the disks around young stars. But our view is still clouded by all the gas and dust in these young systems. The picture of planet formation just got cloudier with the discovery that some young planets are shaped like flattened candies rather than spheres. There are two main theories for planet formation, and they both start with stars. Stars are born in giant molecular clouds of hydrogen. Due toRead More →

Space Force Chooses its First “Guardian” to go to Space Although the U.S. Space Force is tasked with military operations in regards to space, they’ve never actually sent one of their own into orbit. This week, the agency announced that Col. Nick Hague will launch to the International Space Station in August 2024 to pilot the Crew-9 mission, as part of SpaceX’s ninth crew rotation to the ISS for NASA. He’ll join two NASA astronauts and a cosmonaut on the trip to space and then work as a flight engineer, spending six months on the station doing research and operations activities. “The core of ourRead More →

Astronomers Measure the Mass of the Milky Way by Calculating How Hard it is to Escape If you want to determine your mass, it’s pretty easy. Just step on a scale and look at the number it gives you. That number tells you the gravitational pull of Earth upon you, so if you feel the number is too high, take comfort that Earth just finds you more attractive than others. The same scale could also be used to measure the mass of Earth. If you place a kilogram mass on the scale, the weight it gives is also the weight of Earth in the gravitationalRead More →

NASA’s Juno Probe Makes Another Close Flyby of Io The Juno spacecraft has revealed some fascinating things about Jupiter since it began exploring the system on July 4th, 2016. Not only is it the first robotic mission to study Jupiter up close while orbiting it since the Galileo spacecraft, which studied the gas giant and its satellites from 1995 to 2003. Juno is also the first robotic explorer to look below Jupiter’s dense clouds to investigate the planet’s magnetic field, composition, and structure. The data this has produced is helping scientists address questions about how Jupiter formed and the origins of the Solar System. SinceRead More →

NASA is One Step Closer to Deploying Fission Reactors on the Moon What’s the most important thing you need to live and work on the Moon? Power. For NASA’s upcoming Artemis program, getting power to lunar bases is a top priority. That’s why the agency created its Fission Surface Power Project. The idea is to develop concepts for a small nuclear fission reactor to generate electricity on the lunar surface. The project just finished its initial phase (which began in 2022), which consisted of three $5 million contracts to commercial partners to develop fission reactor designs. NASA selected Lockheed Martin in Bethesda, MD, Westinghouse ofRead More →