Universe Today (Page 26)

Falcon Heavy Launches Space Force’s Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Rocket launches seem to have become a bit mundane for many these days yet the odd launch captures peoples imagination. One such launch took place on 29th December when a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carried an uncrewed and autonomous craft into orbit. The configuration of the Falcon Heavy was such that the boosters landed safetly but the central booster was setup as expendable to carry the plane to its heighest altitude yet but its mission remains a mystery.  The Falcon Heavy lifted off from NASA’ Kennedy Space Centre on Friday morning at 01:07 GMT, its payload,Read More →

This Globular Cluster is Plunging Toward the Milky Way’s Centre Globular clusters (GCs) are spherical groups of stars held together by mutual gravity. Large ones can have millions of stars, and the stars tend to be older and have lower metallicity. The Milky Way contains more than 200 globulars, possibly many more, and most of them are in the galaxy’s halo, the outer reaches of the galaxy. But they’re not all in the halo, and astronomers are keen to find ones nearest the galactic centre. Now, researchers have found one GC that’s plunging toward the Milky Way’s Centre. Astronomers use globular clusters as a wayRead More →

Astronomers Test an Exoplanet Instrument on Jupiter The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has a high-resolution spectrograph called  ESPRESSO, designed specifically to detecting and characterize exoplanets. Astronomers recently ran a test with the instrument, studying the atmosphere and winds of Jupiter. They used a technique called Doppler velocimetry to measure the reflection of light from the Sun in the planet’s clouds, allowing for instantaneous measurement of the clouds’ wind speeds. The technique has also been used on Venus and will guide the future study of exoplanets. ESPRESSO is the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations.  The instrument combines the lightRead More →

Want to Find Life? See What’s Missing in an Atmosphere The world runs on carbon. Not just fossil-fuel-driven human society, but all life on Earth. Carbon-based organic molecules are a part of every living thing on Earth. Along with oxygen, nitrogen, and water, carbon is a necessary ingredient for life as we know it. So one way to look for life on other worlds could be to look for carbon in its atmosphere. But a new study shows that it’s actually a lack of carbon that could be the best clue to life on another world. One of the more common carbon molecules for terrestrialRead More →

Iron Snow Could Explain the Magnetic Fields at Worlds Like Ganymede Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, features a surprisingly strong magnetic field for its size. Tidal effects from Jupiter continually stretch and squeeze the moon, keeping its core warm and driving the magnetic field. But the exact geological processes occurring within the core are not fully understood. Now, a new experimental study has put one of the leading models of core dynamics to the test: the formation of crystalized ‘iron snow’. The iron snow theory is like a geological ‘weather model’ for a planetary core: it describes how iron cools and crystalizes near the upper edgeRead More →

China’s FAST Observatory is Playing a Key Role in the Search for Aliens Some years ago I rememeber running the SETI at Home screensaver and would watch it for hours to see if any peaks appeared naively thinking they might be signals from an alien civilisation! There is no doubt that the search for extraterrestrials (ET) has captivated the minds of many people across the years. The search has of course to date, been unsuccesful despite multiple observations that seem to suggest the conditions for life across the cosmos may actually be more common than we first thought. Now Chinese agencies are funding projects toRead More →

Ingenuity’s 69th Flight is its Farthest So Far When NASA decided to send the little Ingenuity rotorcraft to Mars on the belly of the Perseverance rover, they weren’t certain of success. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere. Mission planners hoped and planned for a total of five flights, enough for a technology demonstration. But now, as almost everyone knows, Ingenuity has wildly exceeded NASA’s initial expectations. NASA’s Ingenuity has racked up important milestones since it detached itself from the Perseverance Rover’s underbelly in April 2021 and got to work. On April 19th, 2021, it became the first aircraft toRead More →

Juno Makes its Closest Flyby of Io NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been getting closer and closer to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io with each recent orbit. Juno is in its 57th orbit of Jupiter, and on December 30th, Juno came to within 1500 km (930 miles) of Io’s surface. It’s been more than 20 years since a spacecraft came this close. The Galileo spacecraft travelled over the moon’s south pole in 2001, coming to within 181 km (112 miles.) Galileo showed us a lot about the nature of Io’s surface. But Juno is a different spacecraft with more modern instruments and cameras that will fly byRead More →

The Oldest Known Spiral Galaxy Has Ripples Like the Surface of a Pond Astronomers have detected pond-like ripples across the gaseous disk of an ancient galaxy. What caused the ripples, and what do they tell us about the distant galaxy’s formation and evolution? And whatever happened, how has it affected the galaxy and its main job: forming stars? This discovery concerns the oldest known spiral galaxy. It’s over 12 billion years old, and it’s called BRI 1335-0417. As the oldest known spiral, it holds an important place in our study of how galaxies form and evolve. According to scientists, the ripples in the disk ofRead More →

The Most Massive Neutron Stars Probably Have Cores of Quark Matter Atoms are made of three things: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Electrons are a type of fundamental particle, but protons and neutrons are composite particles made of up and down quarks. Protons have 2 ups and 1 down, while neutrons have 2 downs and 1 up. Because of the curious nature of the strong force, these quarks are always bound to each other, so they can never be truly free particles like electrons, at least in the vacuum of empty space. But a new study in Nature Communications finds that they can liberate themselves withinRead More →

Watch a Full Martian Day, From Dawn to Dusk On November 8th, NASA’s Curiosity Rover paused its incessant science work and just watched the day unfold on Mars. The rover used its black-and-white Hazard-Avoidance Cameras (Hazcams) to watch an entire 12-hour day on Mars as the shifting Sun cast shadows across the Martian landscape. NASA chose this day because of the Mars solar conjunction when the Sun interferes with communications with the Red Planet, meaning the rover doesn’t do any roving about. The timelapse comprises 25 frames from both the front and rear Hazcams. When the rover stays in one place, it works pretty wellRead More →

After all of This Time Searching for Aliens, Are We Stuck With The Zoo Hypothesis? In 1950, during a lunchtime conversation with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, famed physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question that launched a hundred (or more) proposed resolutions. “Where is Everybody?” In short, given the age of the Universe (13.8 billion years), the fact that the Solar System has only existed for the past 4.5 billion years, and the fact that the ingredients for life are everywhere in abundance, why haven’t we found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence by now? This came to be the basis of Fermi’s Paradox, whichRead More →

An Ancient Stone Found in Italy is an Accurate Map of the Night Sky You know how some constellations take a little bit of imagination to see?  Yes, Leo looks a bit like a lion and Orino a bit like a hunter but then we drift into the realms of powerful levels of imagination to be able to see Pegasus as a flying horse or Telescopium as a telescope! Even squinting or tilting your head really doesn’t make them visible. I found the same problem when looking at images of two stone disks discovered in Italy recently at the entrance to an ancient fort! TeamsRead More →

The Sun Just Blasted its Strongest Flare in 6 Years. Get Ready for Auroras While many of us were celebrating the end of 2023 and the coming of 2024, the Sun was having its own celebration blasting an X5.0 flare from sunspot region 3536. Records show this to be the most powerful flare seen since 10 September 2017 when an X8.2 flare erupted. The flare is expected to arrive around Jan 2 – EEK that’s today! Get your aurora watching kit out!  I live in the UK in a county called Norfolk.  It is a wonderful rural area with a coast line that faces theRead More →

Simulation Perfectly Matches What We See When Neutron Stars Collide There are many mysteries in the world of astronomy and a fair number relate to the processes during the end of the life of a super massive star. Throw in the complexity of collisions and you have a real head scracthing problem on your hands. In 2017 colliding neutron stars were detected and the data has allowed a new simulation to be tested with predictions beautifully matching observation. Neutron stars are stellar corpses no more than 10km or 20km across. They are thought to form when a supermassive star goes supernova at the end ofRead More →

You’ll Need all the Internet to Download the Full Resolution of this New Running Chicken Nebula Image Over 6,000 light-years from Earth, an open star cluster and its nebula cover a swathe of sky over 270 light-years across. It’s called the Running Chicken Nebula, and it’s more than just one object. The Running Chicken Nebula, also called IC 2944, also contains IC 2948, the brightest part of the Chicken, as well as several Bok Globules and smaller nebulae. The bright star Lambda Centauri is near the visual center of the Chicken but is actually much closer to Earth. This vast image spans 25 full MoonsRead More →

ESA’s Tiny Pinhole Thruster is Ready for Production.  Rocket propulsion technology has progressed leaps and bounds since the first weaponised rockets of the Chinese and Mongolian empires. They were nothing more than rocket powered arrows and spears but they set the foundations for our exploration of space. Liquid propellant, ion engines and solar sails have all hit the headlines as we strive for more efficient methods of travel but a team has taken the next leap with a palm sized thruster system that could boost future tiny space craft across the gulf of space. Palm sized thrusters are quite different to the gargantuan rockets weRead More →

How a Small Town in Japan Fiercely Defends its Dark Skies Light pollution ruins dark skies. It’s a scourge that ground-based observatories have to deal with in one form or another. Scientists used a small observatory in Japan to measure what changed when a nearby town improved its lighting practices. They also noted the challenges it still faces. Bisei Town lies in a semi-rural area in the southwestern part of Okayama Prefecture in Japan. It’s a designated dark sky place and the locals are adamant about keeping their view of the stars. However, they still have to contend with light pollution from other cities inRead More →

How Many Planets Could Be in the Kuiper Belt? A recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters investigates the potential existence of Mars-sized free-floating planets (FFPs)—also known as rogue planets, starless planets, and wandering planets—that could have been captured by our Sun’s gravity long ago and orbit in the outer solar system approximately 1,400 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. For context, the farthest known planetary body in the solar system is Pluto, which orbits approximately 39 AU from the Sun, and is also part of the Kuiper Belt, which scientists estimate extends as far out as 1,000 AU from the Sun. This studyRead More →

TRAPPIST-1c Isn’t the Exo-Venus We Were Hoping For. But Don’t Blame the Star A recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal uses computer models to investigate why the exoplanet, TRAPPIST-1c, could not possess a thick carbon dioxide (CO2) atmosphere despite it receiving the same amount of solar radiation from its parent star as the planet Venus receives from our Sun, with the latter having a very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. This study comes after a June 2023 study published in Nature used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to ascertain that TRAPPIST-1c does not possess a carbon dioxide atmosphere. Both studies come asRead More →