Universe Today (Page 498)

This Asteroid Broke In Half, and Then Both Halves Grew Tails Like Comets In the 18th and 19th centuries, astronomers made some profound discoveries about asteroids and comets within our Solar System. From discerning the true nature of their orbits to detecting countless small objects in the Main Asteroid Belt, these discoveries would inform much of our modern understanding of these bodies. A general rule about comets and asteroids is that whereas the former develop comas or tails as they undergo temperature changes, the latter do not. However, a recent discovery by an international group of researchers has presented another exception to this rule. AfterRead More →

Rise of the Super Telescopes: The Large Synoptic Telescopes We humans have an insatiable hunger to understand the Universe. As Carl Sagan said, “Understanding is Ecstasy.” But to understand the Universe, we need better and better ways to observe it. And that means one thing: big, huge, enormous telescopes. In this series we’ll look at 6 of the world’s Super Telescopes: The Giant Magellan Telescope The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope The Thirty Meter Telescope The European Extremely Large Telescope The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope The James Webb Space Telescope The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope While the world’s other Super Telescopes rely on huge mirrors to doRead More →

Astronomy Cast Ep. 432: Geoglogic Ages of Mars – From Wet and Wild to Desolate Desert Today, Mars is a desolate wasteland, with dusty red rocks and sand stretching out to the horizon. But billions of years ago, it was a vastly different world. It was blue, with oceans, rivers, lakes, and maybe life? Let’s tell the story of geology on Mars, and we got from that world to the one we see today. Visit the Astronomy Cast Page to subscribe to the audio podcast! We usually record Astronomy Cast as a live Google+ Hangout on Air every Friday at 1:30 pm Pacific / 4:30Read More →

Weekly Space Hangout – March 3, 2017: Dr. Alan Stern of New Horizons Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Special Guest: Dr. Alan Stern is the Principal Investigator on the New Horizons mission. He will be joining us today to update everyone on what we now know about Pluto now that all of the New Horizons data have been received. Guests: Kimberly Cartier ( KimberlyCartier.org / @AstroKimCartier ) Paul M. Sutter (pmsutter.com / @PaulMattSutter) Dave Dickinson (www.astroguyz.com / @astroguyz) Their stories this week: Eclipse MegaMovie SpaceX Plans to Orbit the Moon in 2018 The Moon occults Aldebaran ALMA explains spirals around a star Next-gen U.S. dark matterRead More →

Catch ‘The Great American Occultation’ of Aldebaran Saturday Night The Moon nearing Aldebaran on February 5th, 2017. Image credit and copyright: Chris Lyons. Ever watch the Moon cover up a star? There’s a great chance to see just such an event this coming weekend, when the waxing gibbous Moon occults (passes in front of)  the bright star Aldebaran for much of North America on Saturday night, March 4th. Shining at magnitude +0.85, Aldebaran is the brightest star that lies along the Moon’s path in the current epoch, and is one of four +1st magnitude stars that the Moon can occult. The other three are Regulus, AntaresRead More →

Curiosity Watches a Dust Devil Go Past The left side of this 360-degree panorama from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the long rows of ripples on a linear shaped dune in the Bagnold Dune Field on the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp. The rover’s Navigation Camera recorded the component images of this mosaic on Feb. 5, 2017. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Tis a season of incredible wind driven activity on Mars like few before witnessed by our human emissaries ! Its summer on the Red Planet and the talented scientists directing NASA’s Curiosity rover have targeted the robots cameras so proficiently that they have efficiently spotted aRead More →

NASA Proposes A Magnetic Shield to Protect Mars’ Atmosphere This week, NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD) hosted a community workshop at their headquarters in Washington, DC. Known as the “Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop“, this event ran from February 27th to March 1st, and saw scientists and researchers from all over the world descend on the capitol to attend panel discussions, presentations, and talks about the future of space exploration. One of the more intriguing presentations took place on Wednesday, March 1st, where the exploration of Mars by human astronauts was discussed. In the course of the talk, which was titled “A Future Mars EnvironmentRead More →

When Galaxies Collide, Stars Suffer the Consequences When galaxies collide, the result is nothing short of spectacular. While this type of event only takes place once every few billion years (and takes millions of years to complete), it is actually pretty common from a cosmological perspective. And interestingly enough, one of the most impressive consequences – stars being ripped apart by supermassive black holes (SMBHs) – is quite common as well. This process is known in the scientific community as stellar cannibalism, or Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs). Until recently, astronomers believed that these sorts of events were very rare. But according to a pioneering studyRead More →

Some Active Process is Cracking Open These Faults on Mars. But What is it? Mars has many characteristics that put one in mind of Earth. Consider its polar ice caps, which are quite similar to the ones in the Arctic and Antarctic circle. But upon closer examination, Mars’ icy polar regions have numerous features that hint at some unusual processes. Consider the northern polar ice cap, which consists predominantly of frozen water ice, but also a seasonal veneer of frozen carbon dioxide (“dry ice”). Here, ice is arranged in multicolored layers that are due to seasonal change and weather patterns. And as images taken byRead More →

Volcanic Hydrogen Gives Planets a Boost for Life Whenever the existence of an extra-solar planet is confirmed, there is reason to celebrate. With every new discovery, humanity increases the odds of finding life somewhere else in the Universe. And even if that life is not advanced enough (or particularly inclined) to build a radio antenna so we might be able to hear from them, even the possibility of life beyond our Solar System is exciting. Unfortunately, determining whether or not a planet is habitable is difficult and subject to a lot of guesswork. While astronomers use various techniques to put constraints on the size, mass,Read More →

What the Oldest Fossil on Earth Means for Finding Life on Mars Scientists have found evidence that life existed on Earth much earlier than previously thought and they say this discovery has implications for life springing up on other planets, particularly Mars. Fossils of microscopic bacteria were discovered in Quebec, Canada in the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, a formation which contains some of the oldest sedimentary rocks in the world. Scientists estimate the fossils are at least 3.7 billion years old, and could be as old as 4.28 billion years. This is hundreds of millions of years older than previously found specimens. “The most exciting thingRead More →

Rise of the Super Telescopes: The European Extremely Large Telescope We humans have an insatiable hunger to understand the Universe. As Carl Sagan said, “Understanding is Ecstasy.” But to understand the Universe, we need better and better ways to observe it. And that means one thing: big, huge, enormous telescopes. In this series we’ll look at 6 of the world’s Super Telescopes: The Giant Magellan Telescope The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope The 30 Meter Telescope The European Extremely Large Telescope The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope The James Webb Space Telescope The European Extremely Large Telescope The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is an enormous ‘scope beingRead More →

7 Questions For 7 New Planets NASA’s announcement last week of 7 new exoplanets is still causing great excitement. Any time you discover 7 “Earth-like” planets around a distant star, with 3 of them “potentially” in the habitable zone, it’s a big deal. But now that we’re over some of our initial excitement, let’s look at some of the questions that need to be answered before we can all get excited again. What About That Star? The star that the planets orbit, called Trappist-1, is a Red Dwarf star, much dimmer and cooler than our Sun. The three potentially habitable planets—TRAPPIST-1e, f, and g— getRead More →

How Far is Mercury from the Sun? Mercury is famously known for being a scorching hot world. On the side that is facing towards the Sun, conditions can get pretty molten, reaching temperatures of up to 700 K (427 °C; 800°F) in the equatorial region. The surface is also airless, in part because any atmosphere it could generate would be blown away by solar wind. Hardly surprising, considering it is the closest planet to our Sun. But just how close is it? On average, it’s slightly more than one-third the distance between Earth and the Sun. However, its orbital eccentricity is also the greatest ofRead More →

So it Begins, Red Dragon Delayed 2 Years to 2020 Artists concept for sending SpaceX Red Dragon spacecraft to land propulsively on Mars as early as 2020. Credit: SpaceX KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – With so many exciting projects competing for the finite time of SpaceX’s super talented engineers, something important had to give. And that something comes in the form of slipping the blastoff of SpaceX’s ambitious Red Dragon initiative to land the first commercial spacecraft on Mars by 2 years – to 2020. The Red Dragon launch postponement from 2018 to 2020 was announced by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell during a prelaunch pressRead More →

UFO Visualizations Show the Trends in Alien Spotting. Saucers Are Down, Lights Are Up When it comes to conspiracy theories and modern preoccupations, few things are more popular than unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and alien abductions. For over half a century, there have been rumors, reports, and urban legends about aliens coming to Earth, dabbling with our genetics, and conducting weird (and often invasive) experiments on our citizens. And while opinions on what drives this popular phenomenon tend to differ (some say hysteria, others that it is media-driven), a few things are clear. For one, sightings appear to take place far more in the UnitedRead More →

Finally, the Missing Link in Planetary Formation! The theory of how planets form has been something of an enduring mystery for scientists. While astronomers have a pretty good understanding of where planetary systems comes from – i.e. protoplanetary disks of dust and gas around new stars (aka. “Nebular Theory“) – a complete understanding of how these discs eventually become objects large enough to collapse under their own gravity has remained elusive. But thanks to a new study by a team of researchers from France, Australia and the UK, it seems that the missing piece of the puzzle may finally have been found. Using a seriesRead More →

You Can’t See the Great Wall of China From Space, But You Can See Their Giant Solar Farm – While the Great Wall of China is not readily visible from space (we debunked that popular myth here) there are several other human-built structures that actually can be seen from space. And that list is growing, thanks to the large solar farms being built around the world. The solar farm with the current distinction of being the largest in the world — as of February 2017 – is the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in China. These new images from NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite show the farm’sRead More →

Rise of the Super Telescopes: The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope We humans have an insatiable hunger to understand the Universe. As Carl Sagan said, “Understanding is Ecstasy.” But to understand the Universe, we need better and better ways to observe it. And that means one thing: big, huge, enormous telescopes. In this series we’ll look at 6 of the world’s Super Telescopes: The Giant Magellan Telescope The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope The 30 Meter Telescope The European Extremely Large Telescope The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope The James Webb Space Telescope The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope The OWL (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) was a gargantuan telescope proposed by the EuropeanRead More →

Join the Eclipse MegaMovie 2017 Chronicling the August Total Solar Eclipse The November 2012 total solar eclipse as seen from Australia. The Eclipse Megamovie project hopes to capture a similar extended view. Image credit and copyright: Alan Dyer/Amazing Sky Photography. Ready for the “Great American Eclipse?” We’re now less than six months out from the long-anticipated total solar eclipse spanning the contiguous United States from coast-to-coast. And while folks are scrambling to make last minute plans to stand in the path of totality on Monday, August 21st 2017, a unique project named the Eclipse Megamovie 2017 seeks seeks to document the view across the entireRead More →