Jupiter’s Io stands apart from the Solar System’s other moons, with its numerous volcanoes and its surface dominated by lava flows. Io’s surface volcanism was confirmed in 1979 when the Voyager spacecraft imaged it, but its volcanic nature isn’t duplicated anywhere else in our system. Tidal heating is behind the moon’s eruptive nature, driven by Jupiter’s powerful gravity, and by resonance with other moons. But is there a magma ocean inside Io?
NASA’s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) slammed into asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, changing its orbital period. Ground and space-based telescopes turned to watch the event unfold, not only to study what happened to the asteroid, but also to help inform planetary defense efforts that might one day be needed to mitigate potential collisions with our planet.
One of the first observational tests of general relativity was that the path of light bends in the presence of mass. Not only refracts the way light changes direction as it enters glass or other transparent materials, but bends along a curved bath. This effect is central to a range of physical phenomena, from black holes to gravitational lensing to observations of dark matter. But because the effect is so tiny on human scales, we can’t study it easily in the lab. That could change in the future thanks to a new discovery using distorted photonic crystals.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has always been plagued by uncertainty. With only one habitable planet (Earth) and one technologically advanced civilization (humanity) as examples, scientists are still confined to theorizing where other intelligent life forms could be (and what they might be up to). Sixty years later, the answer to Fermi’s famous question (“Where is Everybody?”) remains unanswered. On the plus side, this presents us with many opportunities to hypothesize possible locations, activities, and technosignatures that future observations can test.
To understand the Universe, we need to understand the extreme processes that shape it and drive its evolution. Things like supermassive black holes (SMBHs,) supernovae, massive reservoirs of dense gas, and crowds of stars both on and off the main sequence. Fortunately there’s a place where these objects dwell in close proximity to one another: the Milky Way’s Galactic Center (GC.)
You’re an excited, spacefaring passenger strolling about a pressurized cabin approximately 30 kilometers (20 miles) above the Earth. Your trip is scheduled for six hours, and you’ve already consumed the world-class food and drinks to complement this awesome view from Spaceship Neptune, which is provided by Space Perspective, the World’s First Carbon-Neutral Spaceflight Experience Company. But now you’re three hours into your trip and you have to go to the bathroom. Don’t worry, that’s where the Space Spa comes in, which was recently unveiled as one of the many features offered by Space Perspective as part of its spaceflight experience. An important aspect is paying customers, which Space Perspective refers to as Explorers, will be able to catch the great view even while taking a break in the Space Spa, with Space Perspective posting detailed images of the Space Spa to its official X page.
Before this decade is out, NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era and build the necessary infrastructure to keep sending them back. And they will hardly be alone. Alongside NASA’s Artemis Program, the European Space Agency also plans to send astronauts to the Moon and establish a permanent habitat there (the Moon Village), while China and Russia are working towards creating the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Numerous commercial space companies will also be there to provide crew transportation, cargo, and logistical services.
Fast Radio Bursts are an astrophysical enigma. They are intense bursts of radio energy lasting anywhere from a fraction of a millisecond to a few seconds, typically with a frequency of around 1,400 MHz, and we still don’t know what causes them. They were first detected in 2007 but were initially so rare and short-lived that it was difficult to confirm they weren’t terrestrial in origin. With the inauguration of the CHIME telescope and other wide-field radio observatories, we started observing lots of them, which confirmed they were both astrophysical and mostly coming from outside our galaxy. Now one has been observed from a galaxy 8 billion light years away, and it could help us solve a cosmological mystery.
An object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth over 4 billion years ago, creating a cloud of debris that formed the Moon. When the Apollo astronauts landed on the lunar surface, they found and brought back Moon rocks that helped pinpoint when this event happened. Now, a new study of crystals in the lunar samples pushed that event back even further –about 40 million years earlier than previous estimates — setting the Moon’s formation to about 4.46 billion years old – not long after the Earth formed.
The ground shakes. Paintings tilt. Walls crack. Rubble may fall. On Earth, we understand how and where these events happen due to the discovery of plate tectonics – the continental crust’s creation, movement, and destruction. However, when astronauts placed seismometers on the lunar surface during NASA’s Apollo mission era, those instruments recorded quakes on the Moon. In the 1970s, the Viking landers also recorded quakes on the surface of Mars. Since neither of these worlds has plate tectonics, scientists set about collecting more data to understand the phenomena, which led to the recent NASA InSight lander. Now, a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters explains how the largest recorded seismic event on Mars provided evidence for a different sort of tectonic origin — the release of stress within the Martian crust.
Cataclysmic events happen in the Universe all the time. Black hole mergers, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and a whole host of others. Most of them happen in distant galaxies, so they pose no threat to us. But there are a few that could affect life on Earth, and a couple could even pose an existential threat. One of these threats is known as a kilonova.
In 2017, astronomers detected gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars for the first time: a kilonova. Enormous amounts of heavy metals were detected in the light from the explosion, and astronomers continued to watch the expanding debris cloud.
Pluto with a super-cryovolcano? Why not! All the elements are there, just not in the way we normally think of volcanoes. And, cryovolcanoes are the reason why Pluto’s surface looks the way it does. A recent research paper explains why Pluto could be the home of the latest supervolcano discovery in the Solar System.
Debris disks are quite common in the Universe. Young stars have protoplanetary disks from which planets form. Black holes have accretion disks that are the source of the galactic jets. Supernova remnants can form a disk around neutron stars. So what about white dwarfs?
A recent study published in Nature Astronomy examines the discovery of what astronomers are dubbing “ultra-fast radio bursts”, a new type of fast radio bursts (FRBs) that the team determined lasts for a mind-boggling ten millionths of a second or less. Traditionally, FRBs have been found to last only thousandths of a second, but this study builds on a 2021 study that hypothesized FRBs could possibly last for millionths of a second. This also comes after astronomers recently announced the discovery of the oldest and farthest FRB ever observed, approximately 8 billion light-years from Earth.
When it comes to the current era of space exploration, one of the most important trends is the way new technologies and processes are lowering the cost of sending crews and payloads to space. Beyond the commercial space sector and the development of retrievable and reusable rockets, space agencies are also finding new ways to make space more accessible and affordable. This includes NASA, which recently built and tested an aluminum rocket engine nozzle manufactured using their new Reactive Additive Manufacturing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (RAMFIRE) process.
When it comes to saber-rattling, few countries employ it as much as Russia does. During their ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the country’s leadership has repeatedly threatened to use atomic weapons. But the threats don’t stop there.
Mercury is the closest planet to our Sun, ranging from 46 million km (28.58 million mi) at perihelion to 69.82 million km (43.38 million mi) at aphelion. Because of its proximity, Mercury is strongly influenced by the steam of plasma constantly flowing from the Sun to the edge of the Solar System (aka. solar wind). Beginning with the Mariner 10 mission in 1974, robotic explorers have been sent to Mercury to measure how solar wind interacts with Mercury’s magnetic field to produce whistler-mode chorus waves – natural radio emissions that play a key role in electron acceleration in planetary magnetospheres.
On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around 8:52 that evening a photographic plate captured the light of three stars clustered together. At a magnitude of 15, they were reasonably bright in the image. At 9:45 pm the same region of sky was captured again, but this time the three stars were nowhere to be seen. In less than an hour they had completely vanished.
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