Universe Today (Page 462)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will Inspect the Atmospheres of Distant Gas Giants The James Webb Space Telescope is like the party of the century that keeps getting postponed. Due to its sheer complexity and some anomalous readings that were detected during vibration testing, the launch date of this telescope has been pushed back many times – it is currently expected to launch sometime in 2021. But for obvious reasons, NASA remains committed to seeing this mission through. Once deployed, the JWST will be the most powerful space telescope in operation, and its advanced suite of instruments will reveal things about the Universe that haveRead More →

Enter the Red Planet: Our Guide to Mars Opposition 2018 A dusty view of Mars from July 11th as Mars opposition 2018 nears. Image credit and copyright: Waskogm. Have you checked out Mars this season? Mars reaches opposition on July 27th at 5:00 Universal Time (UT) shining at magnitude -2.8 and appearing 24.3” across—nearly as large as it can appear, and the largest since the historic opposition of 2003. We won’t have an opposition this favorable again until September 15th, 2035. Mars starts this week near the +4th magnitude star Psi Capricorni, loops westward through retrograde briefly into the astronomical constellation of Sagittarius the ArcherRead More →

NASA’s Juno Mission Spots Another Possible Volcano on Jupiter’s Moon Io When the Juno spacecraft arrived in orbit around Jupiter in 2016, it became the second spacecraft in history to study Jupiter directly – the first being the Galileo probe, which orbited Jupiter between 1995 and 2003. With every passing orbit (known as a perijove, which take place every 53 days), the spacecraft has revealed more about Jupiter’s atmosphere, weather patterns, and magnetic environment. In addition, Juno recently discovered something interesting about Jupiter’s closest orbiting moon Io. Based on data collected by its Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, Juno detected a new heat sourceRead More →

Breakthrough Starshot is Now Looking for the Companies to Build its Laser-Powered Solar Sails to Other Stars In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner established Breakthrough Initiatives, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In April of the following year, he and the organization be founded announced the creation of Breakthrough Starshot, a program to create a lightsail-driven “wafercraft” that would make the journey to the nearest star system – Proxima Centauri – within our lifetime. In the latest development, on Wednesday May 23rd, Breakthrough Starshot held an “industry day” to outline their plans for developing the Starshot laser sail. DuringRead More →

Are There Enough Chemicals on Icy Worlds to Support Life? For decades, scientists have believed that there could be life beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Since that time, multiple lines of evidence have emerged that suggest that it is not alone. Indeed, within the Solar System, there are many “ocean worlds” that could potentially host life, including Ceres, Ganymede, Enceladus, Titan, Dione, Triton, and maybe even Pluto. But what if the elements for life as we know it are not abundant enough on these worlds? In a new study, two researchers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics (CfA) sought to determineRead More →

Astro Challenge: Spotting 4 Vesta at its Best for Decades The brave new world of 4 Vesta, courtesy of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCAL/MPS/DLR/IDA Up for a challenge? Planetary action is certainly heating up this summer: Jupiter passed opposition last month, Saturn does so in June, and Mars reaches favorable viewing next month. And with dazzling Venus in the west and Mercury to joining it starting in late June, we’ll soon have all of the naked eye classical planets in the evening sky. Now, I want to turn your attention towards a potential naked eye object, one you’ve probably never seen: asteroid 4 Vesta. VestaRead More →

Globular Clusters Might not be as Old as Astronomers Thought. Like, Billions of Years Younger Globular clusters have been a source of fascination ever since astronomers first observed them in the 17th century. These spherical collections of stars are among the oldest known stars in the Universe, and can be found in the outer regions of most galaxies. Because of their age and the fact that almost all larger galaxies appear to have them, their role in galactic evolution has remained something of a mystery. Previously, astronomers were of the opinion that globular clusters were some of the earliest stars to have formed in theRead More →

Language in the Cosmos II: Hello There GJ273b The ‘Language in the Cosmos’ symposium Three times in October, 2017 researchers turned a powerful radar telescope near Tromsø, Norway towards an invisibly faint star in the constellation Canis Minor (the small dog) and beamed a coded message into space in an attempt to signal an alien civilization. This new attempt to find other intelligent life in the universe was reported in a presentation at the ‘Language in the Cosmos’ symposium held on May 26 in Los Angeles, California. METI International sponsored the symposium. This organization was founded to promote messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) as aRead More →

Join Fraser and Dr. Paul Sutter to Tour Costa Rica in March, 2019 Got any holiday plans in March, 2019? Why don’t you join me and Dr. Paul Sutter for a trip to Costa Rica. I’ve been to Costa Rica once before, and I was amazed by the amount of wildlife and biodiversity of this amazing country – I can’t wait to go back. In the daytime we saw hummingbirds, toucans, macaws and all kinds of monkeys. At night the jungles come alive with sights and sounds if you’re brave enough to explore them. There’s so much history around every corner, and the night skiesRead More →

An Asteroid was Discovered Just Hours Before it Exploded over Africa On Saturday, June 2nd, skywatchers in Botswana reported an extremely bright fireball in the sky. A 2-meter-sized spacerock smashed into the atmosphere going 17 kilometers per second, disintegrated high in the atmosphere, and briefly lit up the landscape. BREAKING NEWS!! ??An #asteroid just hit Earth’s atmosphere, sparking a fireball over the southern African nation of Botswana at 12:44 p.m. EDT while hurtling down at a whopping 38,000 mph ? That’s 10 miles every second, but don’t worry, it burned up in the atmosphere (phew) pic.twitter.com/T5gGR1OHJN — Link Institute (@LinkObservatory) June 5, 2018 This kindRead More →

Okay, Last Year’s Kilonova Did Probably Create a Black Hole In August of 2017, another major breakthrough occurred when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected waves that were believed to be caused by a neutron star merger. Shortly thereafter, scientists at LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope were able to determine where in the sky this event (known as a kilonova) occurred. This source, known as GW170817/GRB, has been the target of many follow-up surveys since it was believed that the merge could have led to the formation of a black hole. According to a new study by a team thatRead More →

Pluto has “Sand Dunes”, but Instead of Sand, it’s Grains of Frozen Methane In July of 2015, the New Horizons mission made history when it conducted the first flyby in history of Pluto. In the course of conducting its flyby, the probe gathered volumes of data about Pluto’s surface, composition, atmosphere and system of moons. It also provided breathtaking images of Pluto’s “heart”, its frozen plains, mountain chains, and it’s mysterious “bladed terrain”. These strange features showed people for the first time how radically different the surface of Pluto is from Earth and the other planets of the inner Solar System. But strangely, they alsoRead More →

Language in the Cosmos I: Is Universal Grammar Really Universal? The METI Symposium The symposium How could you devise a message for intelligent creatures from another planet? They wouldn’t know any human language. Their ‘speech’ might be as different from ours as the eerie cries of whales or the twinkling lights of fireflies. Their cultural and scientific history would have followed its own path. Their minds might not even work like ours. Would the deep structure of language, its so called ‘universal grammar’ be the same for aliens as for us? A group of linguists and other scientists gathered on May 26 to discuss theRead More →

Engineers Propose a Rocket that Consumes Itself as it Flies to Space When it comes to the new era of space exploration, one of the primary focuses has been on cutting costs. By reducing the costs associated with individual launches, space agencies and private aerospace companies will not only be able to commercialize Low Earth-Orbit (LEO), but also mount far more in the way of exploration missions and maybe even colonize space. Several methods have been proposed so far for reducing launch costs, which include reusable rockets and single-stage-to-orbit rockets. However, a team of engineers from the University of Glasgow and the Ukraine recently proposedRead More →

Clearly a Fan. Jeff Bezos Himself Announced that Amazon was Picking up The Expanse At Comic-Con 2015, fans of space opera and science fiction were treated to their first glimpse of The Expanse, the miniseries adaptation of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s novels. Needless to say, the reaction was magnificent, and is perhaps best up by IO9’s Lauren Davis, who penned a review of the trailer titled, “The Expanse Is the Show We’ve Been Wanting Since Battlestar Galactica. It was therefore a bit of a blow when recently, the Syfy network announced that the third season (which is currently airing) would be the show’s last. ReactionRead More →

What are the Chances that the Next Generation LSST Could Find New Planets in the Solar System? In the past few decades, thanks to improvements in ground-based and space-based observatories, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting neighboring and distant stars (aka. extrasolar planets). Strangely enough, it is these same improvements, and during the same time period, that enabled the discovery of more astronomical bodies within the Solar System. These include the “minor planets” of Eris, Sedna, Haumea, Makemake, and others, but also the hypothesized planetary-mass objects collectively known as Planet 9 (or Planet X). In a new study led by the Lowell Observatory, aRead More →