In 1840 an unassuming star in the Southern Hemisphere brightened suddenly. What had been a 5th magnitude star became so bright by 1843 that it was the second brightest star in the sky. The star, known as Eta Carinae, had been known to vary in brightness before, but this change was so sudden and so dramatic that it became known as the Great Eruption.
As students advance to higher and higher physics courses, they eventually learn that the simple Newtonian dynamics they learned about in early classes aren’t completely accurate models for understanding the universe. If things get too big or fast, they fall into the realm of relativity, or if they get too small, they get caught up in quantum mechanics. However, simple Newtonian dynamics does the trick for things ranging from how a baseball flies to how planets orbit the Sun.
The Parker Solar Probe is the little engine that just keeps going and going by the Sun. On September 27th, it made its 17th close approach and skimmed just 7.26 million kilometers (4.51 million miles) above the sun’s “surface” layer (called the photosphere).
On July 12th, 2022, in an event live-streamed from the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images were released! Among them was the most detailed image of SMACS 0723, showing galaxy clusters and the gravitational lenses they produced. These lenses allowed astronomers to see deeper into the cosmos and spot galaxies as they appeared less than one billion years after the Big Bang (ca. 13 billion years ago). Upon further examination, however, they noticed something rather surprising about these early galaxies: they were much larger than expected!
As of this month, astronomers have discovered 5,506 exoplanets orbiting other stars. That number is growing daily, and astronomers are hoping, among other things, to find Earth-like worlds. But will we know one when we see it? How might we be able to tell an Earth-like garden from a Venus-like pressure cooker from upwards of 40 light years away? Is JWST up to the challenge?
There’s always a need for new technologies or for novel uses of existing technologies to lower the cost of space exploration and extend our reach. Lightsails are a novel type of spacecraft that could eventually be our first visitors to nearby stars like the Alpha Centauri system. But they could be put to productive use right here in our Solar System.
What happens just before a massive star explodes as a supernova? To figure that out, astronomers need to look at very “young” supernovae across multiple wavelengths of light. That’s what happened when SN 2023ixf occurred in May 2023. It turns out its aging progenitor star blew off a solar mass worth of material just before it died. Now, the big question is: why?
Missions to the Moon, missions to Mars, robotic explorers to the outer Solar System, a mission to the nearest star, and maybe even a spacecraft to catch up to interstellar objects passing through our system. If you think this sounds like a description of the coming age of space exploration, then you’d be correct! At this moment, there are multiple plans and proposals for missions that will send astronauts and/or probes to all of these destinations to conduct some of the most lucrative scientific research ever performed. Naturally, these mission profiles raise all kinds of challenges, not the least of which is propulsion.
Solar panel technology has advanced significantly in recent years, to the point where solar energy is the fastest-growing renewable power source. The solar panels we have today are a by-product of those used in space. If you want to power a satellite or crewed spacecraft, there are only two ways: solar energy or nuclear power. Of the two, only solar energy isn’t limited by the amount of fuel you bring on board. As we contemplate traveling to other star systems, this raises the question: will solar panels work near other stars?
When New Horizons flew past Arrokoth in 2019, it revealed close-up images of this enigmatic Kuiper Belt Object for the first time. Astronomers are still studying all the data sent home by the spacecraft, trying to understand this two-lobed object, which looks like a red, flattened snowman.
Approximately 13.8 billion years ago, the greatest event in all of existence occurred that literally created existence itself. This event is known as the Big Bang, and it’s responsible for the estimated septillion number of stars that are scattered across the vast reaches of the unknown, including the one our small, blue world orbits. However, other than knowing that the Big Bang occurred, there is still a septillion amount of information we still don’t know about the greatest event in the history of existence.
Most of the spacecraft we send out into the Solar System are never meant to return. Time, space, and entropy overtake them, or else they’re purposely sent crashing to their doom at the end of their missions. But not OSIRIS-REx. Its mission was only a success when it returned to Earth with its rare cargo.
It appears that rogue planets – free floating worlds that aren’t gravitationally bound to a parent star – might be more common than we thought. New data from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed 540 (yes, that’s right) planetary-mass objects in the Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster.
One hundred years ago, we didn’t know there was anything outside of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Now we know that our puny planet Earth, and everything else, is part of a vast structure called the Cosmic Web. Its scale is difficult to comprehend in any concrete way, and the system’s complexity and magnitude brings our most powerful supercomputers to their knees.
As we began to discover hundreds, then thousands of exoplanets, we found that there were two types of worlds unlike anything in our solar system. The first are super-Earths. These worlds straddle the line between large rocky worlds like Earth and small gas planets like Neptune. The second are hot Jupiters. Large gas giants that orbit their star in a matter of days. While there may be a super-Earth lurking at the outer edge of our solar system, we know our Sun has no hot Jupiters. This is a little surprising since close-orbiting gas giants seem to be fairly common. But a new study could explain why our solar system has no planet Vulcan.
The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest star-forming regions in the sky, easily visible in a small telescope. But you’ve never seen anything like these new images from JWST. Researchers have created enormous mosaics of the region in both short and long-wavelength channels. An interactive interface from ESA allows you to zoom in and out of the image and switch between the views. You can see details in the stellar discs and outflows in the short-wavelength version, while the long-wavelength version reveals the network of dust and organic compounds.
On August 30th, 2023, on the 899th Martian day (sol 899) of its mission, NASA’s Perseverance rover spotted a dust devil while exploring the Jezero Crater. The images taken by one of the rover’s Navigation Cameras (NavCams) were used to make a video (shown below), which is composed of 21 frames taken four seconds apart and sped up 20 times. Similar to small, short-lived whirlwinds on Earth, these vertical columns of wind form when pockets of hot air near the surface rise quickly through cooler air above it. By studying them, scientists hope to learn more about Mars’ atmosphere and improve their weather models.
Although humans have flown to space for decades, the missions have primarily been in low-Earth orbit, with just a handful of journeys to the Moon. Future missions with the upcoming Artemis program aim to have humans living and working on the Moon, with the hopes of one day sending humans to Mars.
Twenty thousand years ago, a star in the constellation Cygnus went supernova. Like all supernovae, the explosion released a staggering amount of energy. The explosion sent a powerful shockwave into the surrounding space at half a million miles per hour, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
In 2009 a giant star 25 times more massive than the Sun simply…vanished. Okay, it wasn’t quite that simple. It underwent a period of brightening, increasing in luminosity to a million Suns, just as if it was ready to explode into a supernova. But then it faded rather than exploding. And when astronomers tried to see the star, using the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), Hubble, and the Spitzer space telescope, they couldn’t see anything.
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