Universe Today (Page 6)

It Takes a Supercomputer to Properly Simulate a Neutron Star’s Surface Neutron stars, the remains of massive stars that have imploded and gone supernova at the end of their life, can still create massive flares. These incredible bursts of energy release X-rays that propagate through space. It is a complex process to simulate but astronomers have turned to a supercomputer to help. Modelling the twisting magnetic fields, the interaction with gas and dust, the surface of flaring neutron stars has been revealed in incredible 3D. Throughout a stars life, the inward force of gravity is balanced by the outward pushing thermonuclear force. Stars like ourRead More →

Against all Odds. Japan’s SLIM Lander Survived a Second Lunar Night Upside Down You might remember the SLIM lunar lander that managed to land upside-down! The probe from the Japanese Space Agency has survived its second night on the Moon and returns a new photograph. Despite the solar panels pointing away from the Sun during the day it was still able to capture the image and transmit to Earth. All that while surviving the harsh -130C lunar night.  The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) sent SLIM (the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) back in January but the lightweight spacecraft landed completely wrong. Despite the wonkyRead More →

Radio Astronomy: Why study it? What can it teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has investigated the significance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, cosmochemistry, and meteorites, and how these scientific fields contribute to researchers and the public gain greater insight into our place in the universe and finding life beyond Earth. Here, will discuss the field of radio astronomy with Dr. Wael Farah, who is a research scientist at the SETI Institute, about how radio astronomy teaches us about the myriad of celestial objects that populate our universe, along with the benefits and challenges, finding life beyond Earth, andRead More →

The Search for the Perfect Coronagraph to Find Earth 2.0 Studying exoplanets is made more difficult by the light from the host star. Coronagraphs are devices that block out the star light and both JWST and Nancy Grace Roman Telescope are equipped with them. Current coronagraphs are not quite capable of seeing other Earths but work is underway to push the limits of technology and even science for a new, more advanced device. A new paper explores the quantum techniques that may one day allow us to make such observations.  Coronagraphs are devices that attach to telescopes and were originally designed to study the coronaRead More →

A Supermassive Black Hole with a Case of the Hiccups Can binary black holes, two black holes orbiting each other, influence their respective behaviors? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of more than two dozen international researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated how a smaller black hole orbiting a supermassive black hole could alter the outbursts of the energy being emitted by the latter, essentially giving it “hiccups”. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the behavior of binary black holes while producing new methods in finding moreRead More →

Meteorites: Why study them? What can they teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has explored the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, and cosmochemistry, and how this myriad of intricately linked scientific disciplines can assist us in better understanding our place in the cosmos and searching for life beyond Earth. Here, we will discuss the incredible research field of meteorites and how they help researchers better understand the history of both our solar system and the cosmos, including the benefits and challenges, finding life beyond Earth, and potential routes for upcoming studentsRead More →

China’s Relay Satellite is in Lunar Orbit On March 20th, China’s Queqiao-2 (“Magpie Bridge-2”) satellite launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Site LC-2 on the island of Hainan (in southern China) atop a Long March-8 Y3 carrier rocket. This mission is the second in a series of communications relay and radio astronomy satellites designed to support the fourth phase of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (Chang’e). On March 24th, after 119 hours in transit, the satellite reached the Moon and began a perilune braking maneuver at a distance of 440 km (~270 mi) from the lunar surface. The maneuver lasted 19 minutes, after which theRead More →

The Hubble Aims Its Powerful Ultraviolet Eye at Super-Hot Stars Some stars are so massive and so energetic that they’re a million times brighter than the Sun. This type of star dominated the early Universe, playing a key role in its development and evolution. The first of its kind are all gone now, but the modern Universe still forms stars of this type. These hot, blue stars emit powerful ultraviolet energy that the Hubble can detect from its perch in Low-Earth Orbit. In December 2023, astronomers completed a three-year survey of these hot stars. It’s one of the Hubble’s largest and most ambitious surveys. It’sRead More →

Search for Life on Mars Could Level-Up with MARSE Mission Concept A recent study presented at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) discusses the Mars Astrobiology, Resource, and Science Explorers (MARSE) mission concept and its Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device (SHIELD), which offers a broader and cheaper method regarding the search for—past or present—life on the Red Planet, specifically by using four rovers at four different landing sites across Mars’ surface instead of just one-for-one. This concept comes as NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers continue to tirelessly explore the surface of Mars at Gale Crater and Jezero Crater, respectively. Here, Universe TodayRead More →

The Milky Way’s Smallest, Faintest Satellite Galaxy Found The Milky Way has many satellite galaxies, most notably the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They’re both visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. Now astronomers have discovered another satellite that’s the smallest and dimmest one ever detected. It may also be one of the most dark matter-dominated galaxies ever found. The galaxy is called Ursa Major III / UNIONS 1 (UMa3/U1), and it contains very few stars. In fact, its luminosity is so low that it’s gone undetected until new, even though it’s in our neighbourhood. The discovery is in a new paper titledRead More →

Thermal Modeling of a Pulsed Plasma Rocket Shows It Should Be Possible To Create One We’ve reported on a technology called pulsed plasma rockets (PPRs) here at UT a few times. Several research groups have worked on variations of them. They are so popular partly because of their extremely high specific impulse and thrust levels, and they seemingly solve the trade-off between those two all-important variables in space exploration propulsion systems. Essentially, they are an extremely efficient propulsion methodology that, if scaled up, would allow payloads to reach other planets in weeks rather than months or years. However, some inherent dangers still need to beRead More →

Civilizations Could Time Their Communications Based on the Movement of a Single Star The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been ongoing for decades at this point. Despite that, we have yet to find any rock-hard evidence of a signal from an alien civilization. When asked about this, experts point out just how little of the overall signal space we’ve analyzed. A signal could be coming from anywhere in the sky, at any frequency, and might not be continuous. Constraining the “search space” could help us find a signal faster, but what could we use to constrain it? It’s hard to think like an alien intelligence,Read More →

The ESA’s Mars Rover Gets a New Map Rosalind Franklin, the ESA’s Mars rover, is scheduled to launch no sooner than 2028. Its destination is Oxia Planum, a wide clay-bearing plain to the east of Chryse Planitia. Oxia Planum contains terrains that date back to Mars’ Noachian Period, when there may have been abundant surface water, a key factor in the rover’s mission. Rosalind Franklin’s primary mission mirrors that of NASA’s Perseverance rover: to search for fossil evidence of life. To do that, both rovers are equipped with a suite of powerful instruments. They both have sampling drills, but Franklin’s drill wins the tale ofRead More →

Astronomers Catch a Supernova Explode Almost in Realtime Catching a supernova in action is tricky business. There is no way to predict them, and they don’t occur very often. Within the Milky Way they only occur about once a century, and the last one was observed in 1604. Of course, supernovae occur in other galaxies too, but you still have to get lucky to catch them as they explode. But that’s what happened last year, according to a new paper released in Nature this week. Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki, observing a nearby galaxy named Messier 101 (colloquially known as the Pinwheel Galaxy), recognized thatRead More →

Neutron Stars are Jetting Material Away at 40% the Speed of Light It’s a well known fact that black holes absorb anything that falls into them. Often before material ‘vanishes’ inside it forms into an accretion disk around them. Like the progenitor stars, the black holes have powerful magnetic fields and these can generate jets that blast away from the black hole. A similar process occurs in neutron stars that are orbiting other stars and recent observations holes have shown that some material in the jets travel at speeds 35-40% the speed of light.  The European Space Agency launched the International Gamma Ray Astrophysics LaboratoryRead More →

Lunar Night Permanently Ends the Odysseus Mission On February 15th, Intuitive Machines (IM) launched its first Nova-C class spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. On February 22nd, the spacecraft – codenamed Odysseus (or “Odie”) – became the first American-built vehicle to soft-land on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. While the landing was a bit bumpy (Odysseus fell on its side), the IM-1 mission successfully demonstrated technologies and systems that will assist NASA in establishing a “sustained program of lunar exploration and development.” After seven days of operation on the lunar surface, Intuitive MachinesRead More →

Webb Joins the Hunt for Protoplanets We can’t understand what we can’t clearly see. That fact plagues scientists who study how planets form. Planet formation happens inside a thick, obscuring disk of gas and dust. But when it comes to seeing through that dust to where nascent planets begin to take shape, astronomers have a powerful new tool: the James Webb Space Telescope. In the past few years, we’ve been getting tantalizing looks at the protoplanetary disks around young stars. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, is responsible for that. It’s imaged many of these disks around young stars, including the telltale gaps where planetsRead More →

This Supernova Lit Up the Sky in 1181. Here’s What it Looks Like Now Historical astronomical records from China and Japan recorded a supernova explosion in the year 1181. It was in the constellation Cassiopeia and it shone as bright as the star Vega for 185 days. Modern astronomers took their cue from their long-gone counterparts and have been searching for its remnant. But it took them time to find it because they were looking for the wrong thing. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses in on itself and then explodes. It leaves behind a dense core where the protons andRead More →

Hubble Sees a Star About to Ignite We know how stars form. Clouds of interstellar gas and dust gravitationally collapse to form a burst of star formation we call a stellar nursery. Eventually, the cores of these protostars become dense enough to ignite their nuclear furnace and shine as true stars. But catching stars in that birth-moment act is difficult. Young stars are often hidden deep within their dense progenitor cloud, so we don’t see their light until they’ve already started shining. But new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have given us our earliest glimpse of a shiny new star. You can see thisRead More →

This Black Hole is a Total Underachiever Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you’re an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the Sun. At least the quasar H1821+643 doesn’t have parents to be disappointed in it. But its underachievement could shed light on how quasars, a potent type of black hole, can come to influence entire clusters of galaxies, as described in a new paper from researchers at the University of Nottingham and Harvard. Using X-ray data from the Chandra observatory, the researchers looked closely at H1821+643 and decided it influenced its local environment much less than expected. Granted, aRead More →