If there’s one chemical that causes excitement in the search for biosignatures on other worlds, it’s methane. It’s not a slam dunk because it has both biotic and abiotic sources. But finding it in an exoplanet’s atmosphere means that planet deserves a closer look.
The JWST is taking a break from studying the distant Universe and has trained its infrared eye on the heart of the Milky Way. The world’s most powerful space telescope has uncovered some surprises and generated some stunning images of the Milky Way’s galactic center (GC.) It’s focused on an enormous star-forming region called Sagittarius C (Sgr C).
It’s wonderful to watch the fascination on people’s faces when you explain to them that studying distant objects in the Universe means looking back in time! Reach out to the furthest corners of the Cosmos and you can see objects so far away that the light left them long before our Solar System even existed. With the commissioning of the JWST the race was on to push the boundaries even further and hunt down the most distant galaxy in the Universe and maybe even the first galaxies to ever have formed.
I can remember it very well, although not actually sure when it was, back around 1995/1996 I think. I was, like most other keen stargazers very familiar with the sight of Saturn with rings and all. Indeed the view of Saturn with its rings was one of the first things I had ever seen through a telescope and it inspired me into a lifetime passion of exploring the night sky. Every 15 years though, the Earth passes through the plane of the rings and from Earth they seem to vanish. Now, an astronomer has used data taken during such ring plane crossings from the Cassini spacecraft to measure the transparency of the rings.
Exoplanets are definitely a bit of a hot topic at the moment. Throw in a sprinkling of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and you have the recipe for magic! I still cannot believe that we have discovered, yes actually discovered 5,539 exoplanets and there more being confirmed every day!The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992 and now over five and a half THOUSAND planets around other star systems are known! A team of astronomers have been exploring one in particular, the enigmatic WASP-107b using JWST and have made some incredible discoveries about its atmosphere.
While preparing for the threat of an asteroid strike might seem like a hypothetical exercise, it’s really not. The Solar System has calmed down a lot from earlier times when impacts were more frequent. But it is only a matter of time before an asteroid heads straight for Earth. The probability of an impact is not zero.
In the search for dark matter particles, there are two main approaches. The first is to look for particles that happen to decay naturally as they pass by. This typically involves neutrino observatories such as IceCube where a dark matter particle particle colliding with a nuclei might trigger a faint burst of light. So far this has turned up nothing. The second approach is to slam particles together in a particle accelerator. This approach has also failed to find dark matter particles, but there have been enough interesting hints that CERN is having a go. Their latest run is looking for what are known as dark photons.
Last year, astronomers warned that a large piece of debris was on a collision course with the Moon. Initially, they speculated that it was a SpaceX booster but later zeroed in on a Chinese Long March 3C rocket booster that launched the Chang’e 5 mission. When it did impact on March 4, 2022, astronomers noted a strange double crater.
After months of waiting, SpaceX made its second attempt at an orbital flight this past Saturday (November 18th). During their previous attempt, which occurred back in April, a fully-stacked Starship (SN24) and Super Heavy (BN7) prototypes managed to make it off the landing pad and reach an altitude of about 40 km (25 miles) above sea level. Unfortunately, the SN24 failed to separate from the BN7 booster a few minutes into the flight, causing the vehicle to fall into an uncontrolled tumble and forcing the ground teams to detonate the onboard charges.
Astrophysicists working with the JWST have found a surprising amount of metal in a galaxy only 350 million years after the Big Bang. How does that fit in with our understanding of the Universe?
When spacecraft land on the Moon, their exhaust strikes the powdery regolith on the lunar surface. The Moon has low gravity and no atmosphere, so the dust is thrown up in a huge plume. The dust cloud could possibly interfere with the navigation and science instruments or cause visual obstructions. Additionally, the dust could even be propelled into orbit, risking other spacecraft nearby.
If you’ve noticed a slowdown in Mars news lately, it’s because of the Sun. Or, rather, it’s because the Sun is temporarily blocking our “view” of the Red Planet, which is on the other side of the Sun from Earth, in what’s called “Mars Solar Conjunction.”
The rings of Saturn are some of the most well-known and captivating spectacles in the night sky, which are so large they can easily be observed with amateur telescopes or even a pair of high-powered binoculars. However, from time to time, Saturn’s rings “disappear” from view, a phenomenon known ring-plane crossing, with the rings being observed as a flat line running straight through the massive gas giant. Ring-plane crossing occurs approximately every 15 years and is slated to happen next in March 2025, with the rings slowly getting “larger” in the months afterwards before “disappearing” again in November 2025. But what causes ring-plane crossing?
Thanks to its infrared capabilities, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) allows astronomers to peer through the gas and dust clogging the Milky Way’s center, revealing never-before-seen features. One of the biggest mysteries is the star forming region called Sagittarius C, located about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. An estimated 500,000 stars are forming in this region that’s being blasted by radiation from the densely packed stars. How can they form in such an intense environment?
Humans on Mars will need oxygen, and Mars’ atmosphere is pretty anemic when it comes to the life-sustaining element. NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully extracted oxygen from CO2 in Mars’ atmosphere, but there are other ways to acquire it. There seem to be vast amounts of water buried under the Martian surface, and oxygen in the water is just waiting to be set free from its bonds with hydrogen.
To those familiar with optical telescopes, the idea of doing something to achieve higher resolution with their telescope may seem alien, if not, then practically impossible. A telescopes resolution is determined by among other things, its aperture – diameter of the thing that collects light (or electromagnetic radiation) and of course you can’t easily change that. Enter the team at ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array who have become the first to use the Band 10 receiver and extreme separation of the receivers to boosting its resolution so they can see detail equivalent of detecting a 10 meter long bus on the Moon!
In 2024, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper, the long-awaited orbiter mission that will fly to Jupiter (arriving in 2030) to explore its icy moon Europa. Through a series of flybys, the Clipper will survey Europa’s surface and plume activity in the hopes of spotting organic molecules and other potential indications of life (“biosignatures”). If all goes well, NASA plans to send a follow-up mission to land on the surface and examine Europa’s icy sheet and plumes more closely. This proposed mission is aptly named the Europa Lander.
Approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, the planets of the inner Solar System experienced many impacts from comets and asteroids that originated in the outer Solar System. This is known as the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) period when (according to theory) the migration of the giant planets kicked asteroids and comets out of their regular orbits, sending them hurtling towards Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. This bombardment is believed to have distributed water to the inner Solar System and maybe the building blocks of life itself.
Our view of the cosmos is always limited by the fact we are located within a galaxy filled with interstellar gas and dust. This is most dramatically seen in the central region of the Milky Way, which is filled with so much dust that it is sometimes referred to as the Zone of Avoidance. Within this zone, our observations of extragalactic objects are limited, but that is starting to change.
The ESO’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is perched high in the Chilean Andes. ALMA is made of 66 high-precision antennae that all work together to observe light just between radio and infrared. Its specialty is cold objects, and in recent years, it has taken some stunning and scientifically illuminating images of protoplanetary disks and the planets forming in them.
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