Universe Today (Page 3)

Here are the Next Three Total Solar Eclipses Coming Up Millions of people took a trip over to the US or Mexico to try and catch a glimpse of the 2024 total solar eclipse. Whether you took the trip or not, if you have since been bitten by the eclipse bug then there are three upcoming eclipses over the next couple of years. August 2026 sees an eclipse passing from Greenland, Iceland and Spain, 2027 sees an eclipse over North Africa and in 2028 Australia all be the place to be. With loads of possibilities for all locations, it’s time to get planning.  Many peopleRead More →

Finally, an Explanation for the Moon’s Radically Different Hemispheres Pink Floyd was wrong, there is no dark side to the Moon. There is however, a far side. The tidal effects between the Earth and Moon have caused this captured or synchronous rotation. The two sides display very different geographical features; the near side with mare and ancient volcanic flows while the far side displaying craters within craters. New research suggests the Moon has turned itself inside out with heavy elements like titanium returning to the surface. It’s now thought that a giant impact on the far side pushed titanium to the surface, creating a thinnerRead More →

How Much of Venus’s Atmosphere is Coming from Volcanoes? There’s a lot we don’t know about the planet nearest to us. Venus is shrouded in clouds, making speculation about what’s happening on its surface a parlor game for many planetary scientists for decades. But one idea that always seems to come up in those conversations – volcanoes. It’s clear that Venus has plenty of volcanoes – estimates center around about 85,000 of them in total. However, science is still unclear as to whether there is any active volcanism on Venus or not. A new set of missions to the planet will hopefully shed some lightRead More →

US Satellite Photographs a South Korean Satellite from Lunar Orbit In 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO.) Its ongoing mission is to map the lunar surface in detail, locating potential landing sites, resources, and interesting features like lava tubes. The mission is an ongoing success, another showcase of NASA’s skill. It’s mapped about 98.2% of the lunar surface, excluding the deeply shadowed regions in the polar areas. But recently, the LRO team’s skill was on display for another reason: it captured images of another satellite speeding over the lunar surface. The Republic of Korea, or what most of us call South Korea, launchedRead More →

Here’s the Total Solar Eclipse, Seen From Space On Monday, April 8th, people across North America witnessed a rare celestial event known as a total solar eclipse. This phenomenon occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth and blocks the face of the Sun for a short period. The eclipse plunged the sky into darkness for people living in the Canadian Maritimes, the American Eastern Seaboard, parts of the Midwest, and northern Mexico. Fortunately for all, geostationary satellites orbiting Earth captured images of the Moon’s shadow as it moved across North America. One such satellite was the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16 (GOES-16), partRead More →

If Europa has Geysers, They’re Very Faint In 2013, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted water vapour on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The vapour was evidence of plumes similar to the ones on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. That, and other compelling evidence, showed that the moon has an ocean. That led to speculation that the ocean could harbour life. But the ocean is obscured under a thick, global layer of ice, making the plumes our only way of examining the ocean. The plumes are so difficult to detect they haven’t been confirmed. The lead author of the paper presenting Hubble’s 2013 evidence is Lorenz Roth of Southwest ResearchRead More →

WISPR Team Images Turbulence within Solar Transients for the First Time NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has been in studying the Sun for the last six years. In 2021 it was hit directly by a coronal mass ejection when it was a mere 10 million kilometres from the solar surface. Luckily it was gathering data and images enabling scientists to piece together an amazing video. The interactions between the solar wind and the coronal mass ejection were measured giving an unprecedented view of the solar corona.  The Sun is a fascinating object and as our local star, has been the subject of many studies. There areRead More →

What Happens to Solar Systems When Stars Become White Dwarfs? In a couple billion years, our Sun will be unrecognizable. It will swell up and become a red giant, then shrink again and become a white dwarf. The inner planets aren’t expected to survive all the mayhem these transitions unleash, but what will happen to them? What will happen to the outer planets? Right now, our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old. It’s firmly in the main sequence now, meaning it’s going about its business fusing hydrogen into helium and releasing energy. But even though it’s about 330,000 times more massive than the Earth,Read More →

A Neutron Star Merged with a Surprisingly Light Black Hole Galactic collisions, meteor impacts and even stellar mergers are not uncommon events. neutron stars colliding with black holes however are a little more rare, in fact, until now, we have never observed one. The fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing detected gravitational waves from a collision between a black hole and neutron star 650 million light years away. The black hole was tiny though with a mass between 2.5 to 4.5 times that of the Sun.  Neutron stars and black holes have something in common; they are both the remains of a massive star that has reached theRead More →

The Seven Most Intriguing Worlds to Search for Advanced Civilizations (So Far) Sometimes, the easy calculations are the most interesting. A recent paper from Balázs Bradák of Kobe University in Japan is a case in point. In it, he takes an admittedly simplistic approach but comes up with seven known exoplanets that could hold the key to the biggest question of them all – are we alone? Dr. Bradák starts with a simple premise – there is a chance that life on Earth might have started via panspermia. There is also a case that panspermia was intention – an advanced civilization could theoretically have purposefullyRead More →

What a Swarm of Probes Can Teach Us About Proxima Centauri B You’ve likely heard of the Breakthrough Starshot (BTS) initiative. BTS aims to send tiny gram-scale, light sail picospacecraft to our neighbour, Proxima Centauri B. In BTS’s scheme, lasers would propel a whole fleet of tiny probes to the potentially water-rich exoplanet. Now, another company, Space Initiatives Inc., is tackling the idea. NASA has funded them so they can study the idea. What can we expect to learn from the effort? Proxima b may be a close neighbour in planetary terms. But it’s in a completely different solar system, about four light-years away. ThatRead More →

Measuring the Atmospheres of Other Worlds to See if There are Enough Nutrients for Life Life on Earth depends on six critical elements: Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous, and Sulfur. These elements are referred to as CHNOPS, and along with several trace micronutrients and liquid water, they’re what life needs. Scientists are getting a handle on detecting exoplanets that might be warm enough to have liquid water on their surfaces, habitability’s most basic signal. But now, they’re looking to up their game by finding CHNOPS in exoplanet atmospheres. We’re only at the beginning of understanding how exoplanets could support life. To grow our understanding, weRead More →

Does the Rise of AI Explain the Great Silence in the Universe? Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started. Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter? The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that theyRead More →

If We Want to Visit More Asteroids, We Need to Let the Spacecraft Think for Themselves Missions to asteroids have been on a tear recently. Visits by Rosetta, Osirix-REX, and Hayabusa2 have all visited small bodies and, in some cases, successfully returned samples to the Earth. But as humanity starts reaching out to asteroids, it will run into a significant technical problem – bandwidth. There are tens of thousands of asteroids in our vicinity, some of which could potentially be dangerous. If we launched a mission to collect necessary data about each of them, our interplanetary communication and control infrastructure would be quickly overwhelmed. SoRead More →

Testing a Probe that Could Drill into an Ice World I remember reading about an audacious mission to endeavour to drill through the surface ice of Europa, drop in a submersible and explore the depths below. Now that concept may be taking a step closer to reality with researchers working on technology to do just that. Worlds like Europa are high on the list for exploration due to their potential to harbour life. If technology like the SLUSH probe (Search for Life Using Submersible Head) work then we are well on the way to realising that dream.  The search for life has always been somethingRead More →

What Could We Build With Lunar Regolith? It has often been likened to talcum powder. The ultra fine lunar surface material known as the regolith is crushed volcanic rock. For visitors to the surface of the Moon it can be a health hazard, causing wear and tear on astronauts and their equipment, but it has potential. The fine material may be suitable for building roads, landing pads and shelters. Researchers are now working to analyse its suitability for a number of different applications. Back in the summer of 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first visitors from Earth to set foot on the Moon. Now,Read More →

The World’s Largest Digital Camera is Complete. It Will Go Into the Vera Rubin Observatory The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, formerly the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), was formally proposed in 2001 to create an astronomical facility that could conduct deep-sky surveys using the latest technology. This includes a wide-field reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter (~27.5-foot) primary mirror that relies on a novel three-mirror design (the Simonyi Survey Telescope) and a 3.2-megapixel Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) imaging camera (the LSST Camera). Once complete, Rubin will perform a 10-year survey of the southern sky known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). While construction onRead More →

Roman Will Learn the Ages of Hundreds of Thousands of Stars Astronomers routinely provide the ages of the stars they study. But the methods of measuring ages aren’t 100% accurate. Measuring the ages of distant stars is a difficult task. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope should make some progress. Stars like our Sun settle into their main sequence lives of fusion and change very little for billions of years. It’s like watching middle-aged adults go about their business during their working lives. They get up, drive to work, sit at a desk, then drive home. But what can change over time is their rotationRead More →

The First Atmospheric Rainbow on an Exoplanet? When light strikes the atmosphere all sorts of interesting things can happen. Water vapor can split sunlight into a rainbow arc of colors, corpuscular rays can stream through gaps in clouds like the light from heaven, and halos and sundogs can appear due to sunlight reflecting off ice crystals. And then there is the glory effect, which can create a colorful almost saint-like halo around objects. Like rainbows, glories are seen when facing away from the light source. They are often confused with circular rainbows because of their similarity, but glories are a unique effect. Rainbows are causedRead More →

Webb Sees a Galaxy Awash in Star Formation Since it began operations in July 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has fulfilled many scientific objectives. In addition to probing the depths of the Universe in search of galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang, it has also provided the clearest and most detailed images of nearby galaxies. In the process, Webb has provided new insight into the processes through which galaxies form and evolve over billions of years. This includes galaxies like Messier 82 (M82), a “starburst galaxy” located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Also known as theRead More →