Universe Today (Page 22)

Venus’ Clouds Contain Sulfuric Acid. That’s Not a Problem for Life. A recent study published in Astrobiology investigates the potential habitability in the clouds of Venus, specifically how amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, could survive in the sulfuric acid-rich upper atmosphere of Venus. This comes as the potential for life in Venus’ clouds has become a focal point of contention within the astrobiology community in the last few years. On Earth, concentrated sulfuric acid is known for its corrosivity towards metals and rocks and for absorbing water vapor. In Venus’ upper atmosphere, it forms from solar radiation interacting with sulfur dioxide,Read More →

Vera Rubin Will Help Us Find the Weird and Wonderful Things Happening in the Solar System The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is something special among telescopes. It’s not built for better angular resolution and increased resolving power like the European Extremely Large Telescope or the Giant Magellan Telescope. It’s built around a massive digital camera and will repeatedly capture broad, deep views of the entire sky rather than focus on any individual objects. By repeatedly surveying the sky, the VRO will spot any changes or astronomical transients. Astronomers call this type of observation Time Domain Astronomy. When the VRO spots something transient in the nightRead More →

This is the Oldest Black Hole Ever Seen There’s an incredibly ancient black hole out there that’s challenging astronomers to explain how it could exist only 400 million years after the Big Bang. It’s at the heart of a galaxy called GN-z11. Astronomers using JWST saw evidence of it gobbling up that galaxy, which is one way a black hole can grow. In JWST observations, GN-z11 appears to be about 13.4 billion light-years away and is about 100 times smaller than the Milky Way Galaxy. Yet, it has a very bright nucleus, which tells us there’s a black hole at its heart. An accretion diskRead More →

Private Axiom Mission 3 is Off to the Space Station A few decades ago, the idea of private individuals travelling to the International Space Station was as much science fiction as a time travelling police box.  Yet here we are, in 2024 and a crew of four private astronauts are on board the ISS. The team will spend about two weeks undertaking various experiments, commercial activities and outreach tasks.  Axiom Space was founded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini and Kam Ghaffarian. Their goal, to arrange private missions into space, chiefly the ISS but they are also developing spacesuits for NASA’s future missions to the Moon.Read More →

Now We Know Why Starship’s Second Flight Test Failed SpaceX is often in the headlines, unfortunlatey its not always good news. On 18th November we saw the second of the Starship and SuperHeavy booster get off the launchpad successfully, it failed before reaching orbit. In a recent event, Elon Musk explained how a fuel venting near the end of the burn was responbie but entirely avoidable next time! The Starship and SuperHeavy booster are an impressive combination. Standing at over 120 metres tall together they are one of the most powerful and versatile rocket systems ever built. It can produce 16,700,000 pound force of thrustRead More →

The Next Generation LIFE Telescope Could Detect Some Intriguing Biosignatures The Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE) project is an ambitious plan to build a space telescope with four independent mirrors. The array would allow the individual mirrors to move closer or farther apart, similar to the way the Very Large Array (VLA) does with radio antennas. LIFE is still early in its planning stage, so it would likely be decades before it is built, but already the LIFE team is looking at ways it might discover life on other worlds. Much of this focuses on the detection of biogenic molecules in exoplanet atmospheres. Earlier studiesRead More →

Life on Earth Uses Water as a Solvent. What are Some Other Options for Life as We Don’t Know it? There is a vast menagerie of potentially habitable worlds in the cosmos, which means the Universe could be home to a diversity of life beyond what we can imagine. Creatures built on silicon rather than carbon, or organisms that breathe hydrogen instead of oxygen. But regardless of how strange and wondrous alien life may be, it is still governed by the same chemistry as life on Earth, and that means it needs a chemical solvent. On Earth that solvent is water (H2O). Water dissolves someRead More →

Future Mars Helicopters Could Explore Lava Tubes The exploration of Mars continues, with many nations sending robotic missions to search for evidence of past life and learn more about the evolution of the planet’s geology and climate. As of the penning of the article, there are ten missions exploring the Red Planet, a combination of orbiters, landers, rovers, and one helicopter (Ingenuity). Looking to the future, NASA and other space agencies are eyeing concepts that will allow them to explore farther into the Red Planet, including previously inaccessible places. In particular, there is considerable interest in exploring the stable lava tubes that run beneath theRead More →

Japan’s Moon Lander Touches Down, But Power Problem Mars Its Mission Japan has become the fifth nation to land a functioning robot on the moon, but the mission could fall short of complete success due to a problem with the lander’s power-generating solar cells. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was launched along with an X-ray space telescope called XRISM from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center in early September — and after weeks of in-space maneuvers, SLIM touched down today at 1520 GMT (10:20 a.m. ET Jan. 19, or 12:20 a.m. JST Jan. 20). The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency reported that the landing wasRead More →

What Future Propulsion Technologies Should NASA Invest In? Researchers consistently complain about how difficult it is to fund breakthrough research. Most funding agencies, especially governmental ones, think funding incremental, evolutionary technological steps is the way to go, as it has the most significant immediate payback. But longer-term, higher-risk research is necessary to provide those incremental steps 20-30 years in the future. And in some cases, they are required to underpin completely new things that other researchers want to do. That is the case with space propulsion systems. Current mature technologies, mainly derived from chemical rockets, cannot provide the necessary force to allow for a gravitationalRead More →

Finally, Let’s Look at the Asteroid Treasure Returned to Earth by OSIRIS-REx NASA’s OSIRIS-REx delivered its precious cargo to Earth on September 24th, 2023. The sample from asteroid Bennu is contained inside the spacecraft’s sampling head, and it’s in safe hands at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Two stubborn fasteners delayed the opening of the sampling head, but they’ve been removed, and now we can see inside. What looks like unremarkable dirt is primordial asteroidal material that’s billions of years old, a natural treasure trove that eager scientists can’t wait to begin studying. The head and its sample are in the hands of theRead More →

Is this the Lightest Black Hole or Heaviest Neutron Star? About 40,000 light-years away, a rapidly spinning object has a companion that’s confounding astronomers. It’s heavier than the heaviest neutron stars, yet at the same time, it’s lighter than the lightest black holes. Measurements place it in the so-called black hole mass gap, an observed gap in the stellar population between two to five solar masses. There appear to be no neutron stars larger than two solar masses and no black holes smaller than five solar masses. Astronomers working in the Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT (TRAPUM) collaboration found the object named PSR J0514-4002E inRead More →

Astronomers See Massive Stars Forming Together in Multiple Star Systems All stars form in giant molecular clouds of hydrogen. But some stars are extraordinarily massive; the most massive one we know of is about 200 times more massive than the Sun. How do these stars gain so much mass? Part of the answer is that they form in multiple star systems. Astronomers have thought for a long time that massive stars are born in multiple stellar systems. They form as twins, triplets, quadruplets, or even larger sibling groups. Massive stars, defined as stars with more than eight stellar masses, are the progenitors of supernovae, neutronRead More →

Early Galaxies Looked Nothing Like What We See Today Talk to anyone about galaxies and it often conjurs up images of spiral or elliptical galaxie. Thanks to a survey by the James Webb Space Telescope it seems the early Universe was full of galaxies of different shapes. In the first 6 billion years up to 80% of the galaxies were flat, surfboard like. But that’s not it, there were others like pool noodles too, yet why they looked so different back then is a mystery. Galaxies were  first identified back in the 17th Century by French astronomer Charles Messier. He was a comet hunter whoRead More →

M87*’s Event Horizon Image. One Year Later Fifty-five million light years from Earth there is a massive elliptical galaxy known as Messier 87, or M87 for short. It was cataloged by Charles Messier in the 1700s, along with 102 other fuzzy objects in the sky that were definitely not comets. It was confirmed to be a galaxy in the early 1900s, and by the mid-twentieth century, it was known to be a powerful radio source. But these days it is most widely known for the supermassive black hole deep in its core. Called M87*, it is the first black hole directly observed by astronomers. TheRead More →

This Strange-Looking Galaxy is Actually Two. And They’re Merging This strange-looking galaxy seems to be a spiral with a long tidal tail stretching away. It’s known as Arp 122, and it’s actually not just one galaxy, but two separate galaxies. NGC 6040 is the warped spiral galaxy seen edge-on, while LEDA 59642 is the round, face-on spiral. The two are colliding about 540 million light-years from Earth, and it gives us a preview of the Milky Way’s future collision with Andromeda. This image was taken by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope What will Arp 122 look like when the merger is complete? We’ll try toRead More →

The Ice Sheet on Mars is Even Thicker Than Previously Believed Maybe Mars isn’t as dry as we thought. ESA’s Mars Express has revealed new details about a region near Mars’ equator that could contain a massive deposit of water ice several kilometers deep. If it is indeed ice, there is enough of it in this one deposit that if melted, water would cover the entire planet up to 2.7 meters (almost 9 feet) deep. But ice is just one explanation for the unusual features detected by the orbital spacecraft. Another is that this is a giant pile of dust several kilometers deep — althoughRead More →

A Biocatalytic Reactor for Detoxifying Water on Mars! Mars is the next frontier of human space exploration, with NASA, China, and SpaceX all planning to send crewed missions there in the coming decades. In each case, the plans consist of establishing habitats on the surface that will enable return missions, cutting-edge research, and maybe even permanent settlements someday. While the idea of putting boots on Martian soil is exciting, a slew of challenges need to be addressed well in advance. Not the least of which is the need to locate sources of water, which consist largely of subsurface deposits of water ice. Herein lies anotherRead More →

The JWST Solves the Mystery of Ancient Light The very early Universe was a dark place. It was packed with light-blocking hydrogen and not much else. Only when the first stars switched on and began illuminating their surroundings with UV radiation did light begin its reign. That occurred during the Epoch of Reionization. But before the Universe became well-lit, a specific and mysterious type of light pierced the darkness: Lyman-alpha emissions. Even though the early Universe was too dark for light to travel through the opaque gas that dominated it, astronomers have still detected some Lyman-alpha lines prior to the lights coming on in theRead More →

Planetary Surfaces: Why study them? Can they help us find life elsewhere? Universe Today recently explored the importance of studying impact craters and what they can teach us about finding life beyond Earth. Impact craters are considered one of the many surface processes—others include volcanism, weathering, erosion, and plate tectonics—that shape surfaces on numerous planetary bodies, with all of them simultaneously occurring on Earth. Here, we will explore how and why planetary scientists study planetary surfaces, the challenges faced when studying other planetary surfaces, what planetary surfaces can teach us about finding life, and how upcoming students can pursue studying planetary surfaces, as well. So,Read More →