Universe Today (Page 23)

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 →

Early Mars Climate was Complex, with Streams Flowing Intermittently for Millions of Years There’s overwhelming evidence that Mars was once wet and warm. Rivers flowed across its surface and carved intricate channel systems revealed by our orbiters. Expansive oceans even larger than Earth’s may have covered a third of its surface. Then something happened: Mars lost its atmosphere, cooled down, and surface water disappeared. But as our observations of Mars become more detailed, it’s looking like Mars didn’t lose its water in one cataclysmic episode. Deepening evidence shows that it lost its water gradually. The planet may have had recurring episodes of surface water thatRead More →

NASA Selects a Sample Return Mission to Venus In Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, the famous words “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” adorn the gates of hell. Interestingly enough, Dante’s vision of hell is an apt description of what conditions are like on Venus. With an average temperature of 450 °C (842 °F), atmospheric pressures 92 times that of Earth, and clouds of sulfuric acid rain to boot, Venus is the most hostile environment in the Solar System. It is little wonder why space agencies, going all the way back to the beginning of the Space Age, have had such aRead More →

Astronomers Have Mapped the Milky Way’s Magnetic Fields in 3D Our galaxy is filled with magnetic fields. They come not just from stars and planets, but from dusty stellar nurseries and the diffuse hydrogen gas of interstellar space. We’ve long known of this galactic magnetic field, but mapping it in detail has posed a challenge. Now a new study gives us a detailed 3-dimensional map of these fields, with a few surprises. Magnetic fields don’t emit light on their own, so we can’t simply scan the sky with optical telescopes to see where they are. Instead, we must look for ways in which magnetic fieldsRead More →

Reflectors in Space Could Make Solar Power More Effective Solar power is a booming industry right now as we all strive to run our lives with minimum carbon footprint. Solar is a relatively easy way to get clean electricity but of course we are limited to the hours then Sun is above the horizon. Solar panels in space have been muted before but the costs and technology to transmit power to Earth is prohibitive. An alternative approach has been explored by a team of engineers who have been looking at the possibility of deploying giant reflectors into space. They are a familiar site on housesRead More →

NASA Confirms that 2023 was the Hottest Year on Record After analyzing the temperature data from 2023, NASA has concluded that it was the hottest year on record. This will surprise almost nobody. If you live in one of the regions stricken by drought, forest fires, or unusually powerful weather, you don’t need NASA to confirm that the planet is warming. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies produced the analysis that led to this conclusion. They looked at temperature anomalies rather than strictly at temperatures. Temperature anomalies show how much hotter or colder than normal it is at a specific place and time. In thisRead More →

Engineers Finally Open OSIRIS-REx’s Sample Container We have all been there, had that one stubborn jar of jam that we just can’t open. Maybe you grab a rubber band or run it under warm water and its an easy fix but just imagine when the jar is a module from a $1.16 billion interplanetary probe! That’s what happened to NASA engineers when they were trying to recover samples from the OSIRIS-REx module  when they discovered the clamps had cold welded shut!  OSIRIS-REx is a NASA mission to retrieve a sample from asteroid Bennu and return it to Earth. The probe launched in September 2016 inRead More →

Astronomers Identify 164 Promising Targets for the Habitable Worlds Observatory Planning large astronomical missions is a long process. In some cases, such as the now functional James Webb Space Telescope, it can literally take decades. Part of that learning process is understanding what the mission will be designed to look for. Coming up with a list of what it should look for is a process, and on larger missions, teams of scientists work together to determine what they think will be best for the mission. In that vein, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and UC Riverside have released a paper describing a databaseRead More →

A Primordial Dark Matter Galaxy Found Without Stars There’s a galaxy out there without apparent stars but largely chock full of dark matter. What’s that you say? A galaxy without stars? Isn’t that an impossibility? Not necessarily, according to the astronomers who found it and are trying to explain why it appears starless. “What we do know is that it’s an incredibly gas-rich galaxy,” said Green Bank Observatory’s Karen O’Neil, an astronomer studying this primordial galactic object. “It’s not demonstrating star formation like we’d expect, probably because its gas is too diffuse.” O’Neil and a team of colleagues found this odd, seemingly starless object calledRead More →

Machine Learning Could Find all the Martian Caves We Could Ever Want The surface of Mars is hostile and unforgiving. But put a few meters of regolith between you and the Martian sky, and the place becomes a little more habitable. Cave entrances from collapsed lava tubes could be some of the most interesting places to explore on Mars, since not only would they provide shelter for future human explorers, but they could also be a great place to find biosignatures of microbial life on Mars. But cave entrances are difficult to spot, especially from orbit, as they blend in with the dusty background. ARead More →

Is K2-18b Covered in Oceans of Water or Oceans of Lava? In the search for potentially life-supporting exoplanets, liquid water is the key indicator. Life on Earth requires liquid water, and scientists strongly believe the same is true elsewhere. But from a great distance, it’s difficult to tell what worlds have oceans of water. Some of them can have lava oceans instead, and getting the two confused is a barrier to understanding exoplanets, water, and habitability more clearly. This brings us to K2-18b, a mini-Neptune orbiting a red dwarf (M dwarf) star about 134 light-years away. The Kepler Space Telescope found it in 2015. NASA’sRead More →

Astronomers Rule Out One Explanation for the Hubble Tension Perhaps the greatest and most frustrating mystery in cosmology is the Hubble tension problem. Put simply, all the observational evidence we have points to a Universe that began in a hot, dense state, and then expanded at an ever-increasing rate to become the Universe we see today. Every measurement of that expansion agrees with this, but where they don’t agree is on what that rate exactly is. We can measure expansion in lots of different ways, and while they are in the same general ballpark, their uncertainties are so small now that they don’t overlap. ThereRead More →

Webb Blocks the Star to See a Debris Disk Around Beta Pictoris You think you know someone, then you see them in a slightly different way and BAM, they surprise you. I’m not talking about other people of course, I’m talking about a fabulous star that has been studied and imaged a gazillion times. Beta Pictoris has been revealed by many telescopes, even Hubble to be home to the most amazing disk. Enter James Webb Space Telescopd and WALLOP, with its increased sensitivty and instrumentation a new, exciting feature emerges.  Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star in the southern constellation Pictor. It is aRead More →

A Hot Jupiter With a Comet-Like Tail About 164 light-years away, a Hot Jupiter orbits its star so closely that it takes fewer than four days to complete an orbit. The planet is named WASP-69b, and it’s losing mass into space, stripped away by the star’s powerful energy. The planet’s lost atmosphere forms a trail that extends about 560,000 km (350,000 miles) into space. Scientists know that stars can strip mass from planets that get too close. It’s called mass loss, and it’s driven by extreme UV (EUV) and/or X-ray energy from a star and by the stellar wind. It’s not a rare phenomenon, evenRead More →

NASA Selects New Technology to Help Search for Life on Mars The day when human beings finally set foot on Mars is rapidly approaching. Right now, NASA, the China National Space Agency (CNSA), and SpaceX have all announced plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet “by 2040”, “in 2033”, and “before 2030”, respectively. These missions will lead to the creation of long-term habitats that will enable return missions and scientific research that will investigate everything from the geological evolution of Mars to the possible existence of past (or even present) life. The opportunities this will create are mirrored only by the challenges they willRead More →

Gigantic Galaxy Clusters Found Just Before They’re Awash in Star Formation One of the central factors in the evolution of galaxies is the rate at which stars form. Some galaxies are in a period of active star formation, while others have very little new stars. Very broadly, it’s thought that younger galaxies enter a period of rapid star formation before leveling off to become a mature galaxy. But a new study finds some interesting things about just when and why stars form. The study looked at a type of galactic cluster known as Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs), which are the largest and brightest galaxy clustersRead More →

Why Serious Scientists Are Mesmerized by the Multiverse The multiverse may be a cool (and convenient) concept for comic books and superhero movies, but why do scientists take it seriously? In a new book titled “The Allure of the Multiverse,” physicist Paul Halpern traces why many theorists have come to believe that longstanding scientific puzzles can be solved only if they allow for the existence of other universes outside our own — even if they have no firm evidence for such realms. It’s easy to confuse the hypotheses with the hype, but Halpern says there’s a huge difference between the multiverse that physicists propose andRead More →

Shhh, NASA Reveals its New Quiet Supersonic Aircraft The term space plane conjurs up all sorts of images and NASA, with their new X-59 (even the name sounds mysterious) they have definitely not dissapointed. Their new quiet supersonic aircraft has been designed to minimise the sonic boom it creates when it crosses the speed of sound. It will fly at 1.4 times the speed of sound and is set for its maiden flight later this year.  The plane is the result of a joint project between NASA and Lockheed Martin and it has a simple yet ambitious aim. The dream is to revolutionise air travelRead More →

China Tests an All-Solid Rocket China has a rich history in rocketry. It’s even found its place into Chinese legends with the wonderful tale of Wang Tu, who allegedly strapped himself to a chair adorned with rockets to experiment with rocket flight. The story goes that he launched and was never seen again! More recently however, a Chinese company has claimed to have launched the ‘World’s most powerful solid rocket’ capable of producing 600 tonnes of thrust and carrying 6,500kg into low Earth orbit.  The earliest rockets were made using solid propellants, typically materials like gunpowder. The predecessors to modern rockets were used in warfareRead More →

Since Interstellar Objects Crashed Into Earth in the Past, Could They Have Brought Life? On October 19th, 2017, astronomers with the Pan-STARRS survey detected an interstellar object (ISO) passing through our Solar System for the first time. The object, known as 1I/2017 U1 Oumuamua, stimulated significant scientific debate and is still controversial today. One thing that all could agree on was that the detection of this object indicated that ISOs regularly enter our Solar System. What’s more, subsequent research has revealed that, on occasion, some of these objects come to Earth as meteorites and impact the surface. This raises a very important question: if ISOsRead More →