Universe Today (Page 24)

Two Giant Structures Have Been Found Billions of Light-Years Away The early universe, according to the Standard Model of Cosmology, ought to be a fairly homogenous place, with little structure or arrangement. In 2021, however, astronomers discovered a large pattern of galaxies forming a giant arc 3.3 billion light years across. Now, a second large-scale pattern has emerged. This time, it’s an enormous circle of galaxies, nicknamed the Big Ring. Together, the Giant Arc and the Big Ring present a challenge to the Standard Model, and may send cosmologists back to the drawing board. “The Big Ring and Giant Arc are the same distance fromRead More →

This Alien Landscape is Actually a Microscopic View of an Atomic Clock Navigation satellites couldn’t accomplish anything without extremely accurate clocks. But a regular clock won’t do. Only atomic clocks are accurate enough, and that’s because they tell time with electrons. Those atomic clocks wear out over time, and that’s what the image shows. The strange forms are reminiscent of penitentes, the unusual landscape features found in cold environments like the Atacama desert. They’re also found on Pluto, though they’re the size of skyscrapers there. This alien-looking landscape shows penitentes in the Atacama Desert. Penitentes are made of snow that’s sculpted by the Sun andRead More →

Half of this Exoplanet is Covered in Lava Astronomers working with TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) have discovered a planet that’s been left out in the Sun too long. Or at least half of it has. The newly discovered planet is tidally locked to its star, and one side is completely molten. The new planet was discovered orbiting a star named HD 63433. The star is young, only about 400 million years old, and it’s about the same mass and radius as the Sun. It’s also a G-type star like our Sun. The planet is named HD 63433 d, and it’s the third planet foundRead More →

The Meteorites That Made Earth Were Filled With Water According to the most widely accepted scientific theory, our Solar System formed from a nebula of dust and gas roughly 4.56 billion years ago (aka. Nebula Theory). It began when the nebula experienced gravitational collapse at the center, fusing material under tremendous pressure to create the Sun. Over time, the remaining material fell into an extended disk around the Sun, gradually accreting to form planetesimals that grew larger with time. These planetesimals eventually experienced hydrostatic equilibrium, collapsing into spherical bodies to create Earth and its companions. Based on modern observations and simulations, researchers have been tryingRead More →

Dark Matter Could Map the Universe’s Early Magnetic Fields We think of magnetic fields as a part of planets and stars. The Earth and Sun have relatively strong magnetic fields, as do more exotic objects such as neutron stars and the accretion disks of black holes. But magnetic field lines also run throughout galaxies, and even between the vast voids of intergalactic space. Magnetic fields are quite literally everywhere, and we aren’t entirely sure why. One idea is that faint magnetic fields formed during the earliest moments of the Universe. If that’s the case, we might be able to prove it through the distribution ofRead More →

A Self-Eating Engine Could Make Rockets More Efficient There can’t be many ideas that beat the crazy yet ingenious idea of a rocket engine that actually uses part of the fuselage for fuel! Typically a rocket will utilise multiple stages so that excess weight can be jetisoned allowing the rocket to be as efficient as possible. Now a team in Scotland is working on a rocket engine that actually consumes part of its body to use as fuel, reducing weight and providing even more thrust so that greater payloads can be used.  Rockets go back thousands of years from the earliest rocket propelled arrows usedRead More →

There are Mysteries at Venus. It’s Time for an Astrobiology Mission When scientists detected phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere in 2020, it triggered renewed, animated discussions about Venus and its potential habitability. It would be weird if the detection didn’t generate interest since phosphine is a potential biomarker. So people were understandably curious. Unfortunately, further study couldn’t confirm its presence. But even without phosphine, Venus’ atmosphere is full of chemical intrigue that hints at biological processes. Is it time to send an astrobiology mission to our hellish sister planet? While the phosphine discussion petered out pretty quickly, there are other, more long-lived indications that Venus’ atmosphereRead More →

Parker Solar Probe Skims the Sun on its 18th Flyby The fasted object ever made by humans has completed another milestone. The Parker Solar Probe recently celebrated the new year by completing its 18th flyby of the Sun. After launching in 2018, Parker has spent the last five years zooming in close to the Sun and then back out again. We’ve reported on its achievements at various points in its journey, such as taking pictures of Venus or finding comets. And it still has almost two years to go on its planned seven-year mission.  Over those seven years, mission planners have designed 24 perihelion eventsRead More →

Planetesimals Are Buffeted by Wind in their Nebula, Throwing Debris into Space Before planets form around a young star, the protosolar disk is populated with innumerable planetesimals. Over time, these planetesimals combine to form planets, and the core accretion theory explains how that happens. But before there are planets, the disk full of planetesimals is a messy place. The history of rocky objects smashing into each other is written in the craters scarring the surfaces of the planets and moons. But that’s the macro scale of the history. There’s more to planetesimals than their eventual accretion into planets. New research shows that these small bodiesRead More →

Solar Electric Propulsion Systems are Just What we Need for Efficient Trips to Mars There are many different ways to get to Mars, but there are always tradeoffs. Chemical propulsion, proven the most popular, can quickly get a spacecraft to the red planet. But they come at a high cost of bringing their fuel, thereby increasing the mission’s overall cost. Alternative propulsion technologies have been gaining traction in several deep space applications. Now, a team of scientists from Spain has preliminary studied what it would take to send a probe to Mars using entirely electric propulsion once it leaves Earth. Electric propulsion systems have severalRead More →

Satellite Data Shows US East Coast is Sinking Based on satellite imagery, geologists have determined major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, some areas as much as 2 to 5 millimeters (.08-0.2 inches) per year. Called subsidence, this sinking of land is happening at a faster rate than was estimated just a year ago. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, researchers say their analysis has far-reaching implications for community and infrastructure resilience planning, particularly for roadways, airport runways, building foundations, rail lines, and pipelines. These coastal areas, which include population centers such as New YorkRead More →

Hubble Shows That a Fast Radio Burst Came From a Giant Group of Galaxies Way back when the cosmos was only five billion years old, a powerful explosion happened in a group of young galaxies halfway across the Universe. It sent out a blast of radiation from one member of that distant galaxy group. On June 10, 2022, the Square Kilometer Array pathfinder telescope in Australia picked up a fast radio burst (FRB) emanating from the site. The Very Large Telescope in Chile confirmed its distance. Now, Hubble Space Telescope provides a look at the specific galaxy where the FRB originated. It’s kinda weird. Hubble’sRead More →

Chinese Rocket Lofts the Einstein Probe and its “Lobster Eyes” Any astronomical instrument dubbed “Lobster Eyes” is bound to grab attention. It’s actually unlike scientists to give anything creative names, take the big red coloured storm on Jupiter which resembles a spot…aka the Great Red Spot! Lobster Eyes is the name adtoped by the X-ray telescope that just been launched from China and will scan the sky looking for X-rays coming from high-energy transients.  The instrument, which is more properly called the Einstein Probe, is a collaboration between The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Max Planck Institute forRead More →

Impact Craters: Why study them and can they help us find life elsewhere? When we look at the Moon, either through a pair of binoculars, a telescope, or past footage from the Apollo missions, we see a landscape that’s riddled with what appear to be massive sinkholes. But these “sinkholes” aren’t just on the Moon, as they are evident on nearly every planetary body throughout the solar system, from planets, to other moons, to asteroids. They are called impact craters and can range in size from cities to small countries. Impact craters are caused by rocks ranging in size from dust particles to a fewRead More →

A Giant Star is Fading Away. But First, it Had an Enormous Eruption About 16,000 light-years away, a massive star experienced an unusual dimming event. This can happen in binary stars when one star passes in front of the other. It can also be due to intrinsic reasons like innate variability. But this star dimmed by as much as one-third, a huge amount. What happened? The star is named RW Cephei. It’s one of the largest stars we know of. Its radius is almost 1,000 times as large as the Sun’s. Put another way, it’s almost as large as Jupiter’s orbit. Many stars, maybe allRead More →

Another Example of a Fantastic Einstein Ring The most evocative astronomy images take us across space and time to stars and galaxies billions of light-years away. Nestled at the center of this one, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is a collection of three galaxies. They’re not all that close together, although they appear to be in this image. What’s fascinating about this image is that it’s a fine example of an Einstein gravitational ring—and its discovery was enabled by members of the public! Let’s examine this image in more detail. Start with the central point source of light. It’s a foreground galaxy called SDSSRead More →

The Youngest Planetary Disks Ever Seen How long does planet formation take? Maybe not as long as we thought, according to new research. Observations with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) show that planet formation around young stars may begin much earlier than scientists thought. These new results were presented at the American Astronomical Society’s 243rd Meeting. Cheng-Han Hsieh, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, presented the new observations. “ALMA’s early observations of young protoplanetary disks have revealed many beautiful rings and gaps, possible formation sites of planets,” he said. “I wondered when these rings and gaps started to appear in the disks.” Hsieh is referringRead More →

Astrobotic Confirms it Won’t be Landing on the Moon It’s a real shame that spaceflight is seen as routine by the world’s media.  In reality, our exploration of the Solar System is still in its infancy, problems are still seen and sadly missions do still fail. We are reminded of this with the recent launch of the Astrobotic Peregrine lander on Sunday. It was launched atop a Vulcan rocket but it soon became apparent that there was a problem with the lander propulsion system. A leak has been discovered and unfortunately there is insufficient fuel to support a soft landing on the Moon.  NASA hadRead More →

A Solo Brown Dwarf Found With Auroras Astronomers have used JWST to find a brown dwarf with polar auroras like the Earth, or Jupiter. This is surprising because the brown dwarf, dubbed W1935, is a free-floating object, meaning it isn’t part of another star system. Therefore, there’s no solar wind available to generate any Northern Lights. Instead, the auroras are seemingly generated from methane emissions in the planet’s atmosphere, interacting with the interstellar plasma. Another theory is that it perhaps has an active but unseen moon contributing to the emissions. An artist’s depiction of the relative sizes of the Sun, a low-mass star, a brownRead More →

NASA is Pushing Back its Moon Landings to 2026 I wasn’t around for the Apollo program that took human beings to the Moon. I would have love to have seen it all unfold though. With NASAs Artemis program the opportunity will soon be with us again to watch humans set foot on another world, just not for the first time. Alas NASA announced on Tuesday that the Moon landings which form part of Artemis 3, have been pushed back one year to 2026.  The update from NASA came following a number of challenges to the Artemis project which aims to land humans back on theRead More →