How many of what kinds of stars live in other galaxies? It seems like a simple question, but it’s notoriously hard to pin down, because astronomers have such a difficult time estimating stellar populations in remote galaxies. Now a team of astronomers has completed a census of over 140,000 galaxies and found that distant galaxies tend to have heavier stars.
Auroras are some of Earth’s most spectacular natural phenomena. Travelers come from far and wide to see the incredible Northern Lights and wonder at their beauty. Once thought to be magical in nature, most science fans understand that the lights are formed by the solar wind interacting with our magnetosphere. But did you know they also make sounds?
NASA has struck deals with two commercial teams to provide the spacesuits destined for use when astronauts return to the moon by as early as 2025 — and there’s an extra twist that might have sounded alien to the Apollo moonwalkers more than a half-century ago. This time, NASA won’t own the suits.
Dark matter doesn’t really do much of anything in the present-day universe. But in the early days of the cosmos there may have been pockets of dark matter with high enough density that they provided a source of heat for newly forming stars. Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of “dark stars.”
One of the most interesting things we can learn from studying the planets and bodies of our Solar System is how much they have in common. Mars has polar ice caps and features that formed in the presence of water. Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, and composition and may have once been covered in oceans. And countless icy bodies in the Solar System experience volcanism and have active plate tectonics, except with ice and water instead of hot silicate magma. Another thing they have in common, which may surprise you, is sand dunes!
A team of astronomers studied two nearby globular clusters, 47 Tucanae and Omega Centauri, searching for signals produced by annihilating dark matter. Those the searches turned up empty, they weren’t a failure. The lack of a detection placed strict upper limits on the mass of the hypothetical dark matter particle.
Way back in the late 1980s, the Voyager 2 spacecraft visited Uranus and Neptune. During the flybys, we got to see the first close-up views of those ice giants. Even then, planetary scientists noticed a marked color difference between the two. Yes, they both sport shades of blue. But, if you look closely at Uranus, you see a featureless pale blue planet. Neptune, on the other hand, boasts interesting clouds, dark banding, and dark spots that come and go. They’re all set against a darker blue backdrop.
Two peculiar spiral galaxies are in the latest image release from the Hubble Space Telescope. The two galaxies, collectively known as Arp 303, are located about 275 million miles away from Earth. IC 563 is the odd-shaped galaxy on the bottom right while IC 564 is a flocculent spiral at the top left.
Now less than one year until the projected launch date, ESA’s JUICE mission is in the final phases of development. The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) is now fully built with all ten instruments integrated into the spacecraft bus. Next comes all-up testing in a full flight configuration.
In about 5 billion years, the Sun will leave the main sequence and become a red giant. It’ll expand and transform into a glowering, malevolent ball and consume and destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars. Can humanity survive the Sun’s red giant phase? Extraterrestrial Civilizations (ETCs) may have already faced this existential threat.
Solar sailing technology has been a dream of many for decades. The simple elegance of sailing on the light waves of the sun does have a dreamy aspect to it that has captured the imagination of engineers as well as writers. However, the practicalities of the amount of energy received compared to that needed to move useful payloads have brought those dreams back to reality. Now, a team led by Amber Dubill of John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and supported by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program is developing new solar sail architecture that might have already found its killer app – heliophysics.
Humans aren’t the only living things in place onboard the ISS. Bacteria, which has found a way to integrate itself into every biome on Earth, has also found a home in the aseptic microgravity of the space station high above it. Unfortunately, this poses a hazard to both the astronauts that live on the ISS and the station itself. But now, a team of researchers funded by ESA and the Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) think they have a solution – make the surfaces on the ISS antimicrobial.
Most of the stars in the Milky Way are single stars. But between one-third and one-half of them are binary stars. Can habitable planets form in these environments?
Utilizing tools for purposes they weren’t initially intended for is a strength of the astronomical community. Scrounging through data collected for one purpose and looking for hints of another seems to be a favorite pastime of many a professional astronomer. That tradition is alive and well, with a team reanalyzing the first few data sets from Gaia, ESA’s star cataloging explorer. They found hints of exoplanets, and it turns out the probe launched in 2013 is a much better planet hunter than initially thought.
Ever since astronomers found that Earth and the Solar System are not unique in the cosmos, humanity has dreamed of the day when we might explore nearby stars and settle extrasolar planets. Unfortunately, the laws of physics impose strict limitations on how fast things can travel in our Universe, otherwise known as Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Per this theory, the speed of light is constant and absolute, and objects approaching it will experience an increase in their inertial mass (thereby requiring more mass to accelerate further).
There’s a revolution underway in astronomy. In fact, you might say there are several. In the past ten years, exoplanet studies have advanced considerably, gravitational wave astronomy has emerged as a new field, and the first images of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have been captured. A related field, interferometry, has also advanced incredibly thanks to highly-sensitive instruments and the ability to share and combine data from observatories worldwide. In particular, the science of very-long baseline interferometry (VLBI) is opening entirely new realms of possibility.
Old computer systems have a lot of wacky ways to fail. Computers that are constantly blasted by radiation have even more wacky ways to fail. Combine those two attributes, and eventually, you’re bound to have something happen. It certainly seems to have with Voyager 1. The space probe, which has been in active service for NASA for almost 45 years, is sending back telemetry data that doesn’t make any sense.
Did this grow from the merger of little black holes to a giant supermassive object called Sagittarius A*? The network of radio observatories that made this image possible includes the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, co-owned and co-operated by ESO is a partner on behalf of its member states in Europe.
Our planet’s oceans generate tell-tale light signatures when sunlight reflects off them. Exoplanets with significant ocean coverage may do the same. Can we use the Earth’s reflectance signatures to identify other Earth-like worlds with large oceans?
On March 26th, the ESA’s Solar Orbiter made its closest approach to the Sun so far. It ventured inside Mercury’s orbit and was about one-third the distance from Earth to the Sun. It was hot but worth it.
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