Nuclear fusion is what separates stars from planets. Stars are massive enough to fuse hydrogen in their cores, while planets are not. But in between these two categories are brown dwarfs, which are massive enough to experience some nuclear fusion, just not hydrogen. The largest of them are hot and star-like. The smallest of them are barely warm enough to bake a pizza.
NASA recently selected a new science payload that will travel to the Moon through a series of robotic missions via the agency’s Artemis program. This instrument suite, known as the Dating an Irregular Mare Patch with a Lunar Explorer (DIMPLE), will have the task of studying the Ina Irregular Mare Patch, also known as Ina, which is a small depression that could provide insights into the Moon’s volcanic history. It was discovered using orbital images from the Apollo 15 crew, and despite several past studies, its origin remains unclear.
The search for life on Mars has been a long a confusing one. Inconclusive experiments abound, but one thing is certain – there is definitely organic material on the Red Planet. Now, a new study in Nature has confirmed that finding and showed just how complex that organic material actually is.
Satellites often offer new perspectives when they launch. Sometimes because of the location they are placed in – sometimes because of their instrumentation. A new satellite by a consortium of European companies and agencies now provides a new perspective on one of the most powerful and fleeting natural phenomena – lightning.
On July 14, 2023, at 2:35 pm Indian Standard Time (5:05 am EST), the Indian Space Resource Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched their Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, which is the primary spaceport of the ISRO. The goal of the mission is to put India’s first lander (Vikram) and rover (Pragyan) on the lunar surface and is scheduled to touch down on the Moon on August 23, 2023. This mission comes after the ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander crashed on the Moon on September 6, 2019, due to a last-minute guidance software glitch. While the ISRO indicated everything was going according to plan, they unexpectedly lost contact with the Vikram lander approximately 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles) above the lunar surface.
It’s easy to think of Earth as a water world, with its vast oceans and beautiful lakes, but compared to many worlds, Earth is particularly wet. Even the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn have far more liquid water than Earth. Earth is unusual not because it has liquid water, but because it has liquid water in the warm habitable zone of the Sun. And as a new study in Nature Communications shows, Earth could be even more unusual than we thought.
A recent study presented at the National Astronomy Meeting 2023 (NAM2023) examines a newly discovered planetary formation theory that challenges previous notions on how planets are formed in the disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars, also known as protoplanetary disks. Along with being presented at NAM2023, the study has also been submitted for peer-review to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and holds the potential to help scientists better understand not only how planets form, but how life could form on them, as well.
When the James Webb Space Telescope started collecting data, it gave us an unprecedented view of the distant cosmos. Faint, redshifted galaxies seen by Hubble as mere smudges of light were revealed as objects of structure and form. And astronomers were faced with a bit of a problem. Those earliest galaxies seemed too developed and too large to have formed within the accepted timeline of the universe. This triggered a flurry of articles claiming boldly that JWST had disproven the big bang. Now a new article in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society argues that the problem isn’t that galaxies are too developed, but rather that the universe is twice as old as we’ve thought. A whopping 26.7 billion years old to be exact. It’s a bold claim, but does the data really support it?
The 16th International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) will be held this year in Silesia, Poland on August 10-20, 2023. 265 students from 53 countries will take part in this annual competition that challenges select high school students from around the world in astronomical science.
Since 2019, Elon Musk and SpaceX have led the charge to create high broadband satellite internet services. As of May 2023, the Starlink constellation consisted of over 4,000 satellites operating in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and roughly 1.5 million subscribers worldwide. Several competitors began launching constellations years before Starlink began, and several companies have emerged since. This includes HughesNet, OneWeb, and Amazon’s Kuiper Systems. But Starlink’s latest challenger could be its most fearsome yet: a company in China backed by the Beijing government!
This summer has seen a violent outbreak of forest fires across Canada and North America. According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC), there were 911 active fires across the country on July 13th, nearly 600 of which were characterized as “out-of-control.” More than half of these active fires are taking place in the provinces of British Columbia, driven by a combination of unusual heat, dry lightning, and drought. The situation is becoming increasingly common thanks to rising global temperatures, diminished rainfall, changing weather patterns, and other related effects of Climate Change.
In our search for life on other worlds, the one we’ve most explored is Mars. But while Mars has the makings for possible life, it isn’t the best candidate in our solar system. Much better are the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which we know have liquid water. And of those, perhaps the best candidate is Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
A recent study published in Nature examines a volcanic hotspot that potentially exists beneath a feature on the Moon’s farside (the side facing away from the Earth) called the Compton-Belkovich Thorium Anomaly. Researchers led by the Planetary Science Institute collected data from the hotspot region using microwave instruments onboard the China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 orbiters and holds the potential to help scientists better understand the past volcanic processes on our nearest celestial neighbor, as surface evidence indicates lunar volcanic activity ceased between 3 to 4 billion years ago.
The Ariane 5 rocket, developed by Arianespace for the European Space Agency (ESA), has had a good run! The rocket series made its debut in 1996 and has been the workhorse of the ESA for decades, performing a total of 117 launches from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The many payloads it has sent to space include resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS), the BepiColombo probe, the comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE), and countless communication and science satellites.
When measuring distances in the Universe, astronomers rely on what is known as the “Distance Ladder” – a succession of methods by which distances are measured to objects that are increasingly far from us. But what about age? Knowing with precision how old stars, star clusters, and galaxies are is also paramount to determining how the cosmos has evolved. Thanks to a new machine learning technique developed by researchers from Keele University, astronomers may have established the first rung on a “cosmic age ladder.”
Astronomy is driven by data. We take spectra of distant galaxies, plot the temperatures and brightness of main sequence stars, and graph the gravitational chirps of merging black holes. All of this data allows us to understand the universe around us. We don’t need images to do that, just data. But we still capture images even when we already have the data. We value them for their wondrous beauty, and for the stories they tell. This is why to celebrate a year of gathering data the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) released a stunningly beautiful image that also tells a wondrous tale.
One of the most exciting success stories we’ve been able to report on repeatedly here at UT is that of the Ingenuity helicopter. Not only has it racked up several firsts for humanity, most notably the first powered flight of a craft on another planet, but it has provided both a new perspective and new scientific data to its operations team. It’s also consistently stayed ahead of its companion on the Red Planet – Perseverance, the rover it originally launched from. Sometimes, that causes a scary waiting period for the helicopter’s operations team.
Want to visit the most distant galaxy in the early Universe? Now you can via a fantastic visualization created from JWST observations of some of the most distant galaxies ever seen.
Recently astronomers have been able to associate two seemingly unrelated phenomena: an explosive event known as a fast radio burst and the change in speed of a spinning magnetar. And now new research suggests that the cause of both of these is the destruction of an asteroid by a magnetar.
Astronomers have found a very unusual exoplanet. It’s a Neptune-sized world that orbits its star every 19 hours, and it’s the brightest exoplanet ever discovered. They are still learning about this world, which is a challenge because at first glance the planet shouldn’t exist.
Dark energy may evolve in time, and it may even connect through a new force of nature with dark matter. And a researcher believes that we may have already seen evidence for this.
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