In August of 2016, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that they had discovered an exoplanet orbiting in neighboring Proxima Centauri. Based on Radial Velocity measurements (aka. Doppler Photometry), the discovery team estimated that the planet was roughly the same size and mass as Earth and orbited with Proxima Centauri’s Circumsolar Habitable Zone (HZ). In 2020, this planet was confirmed by follow-up observations.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells us that matter and energy bend and warp the fabric of spacetime. Indeed, this bending and warping is exactly what we experience as the force of gravity, since the deformations in spacetime instruct matter how to move. This bending doesn’t just apply to matter, but also to light.
Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It’s also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall to -140 C (-220 F) at the poles. But it wasn’t always a dry, barren, freezing, inhospitable wasteland. It used to be a warm, wet, almost inviting place, where liquid water flowed across the surface, filling up lakes, carving channels, and leaving sediment deltas.
The number of planets discovered beyond our Solar System has grown exponentially in the past twenty years, with 4,919 confirmed exoplanets (and another 8,493 awaiting confirmation)! Combined with improved instruments and data analysis, the field of study is entering into an exciting new phase. In short, the focus is shifting from discovery to characterization, where astronomers can place greater constraints on potential habitability.
The neutrino is perhaps one of the most annoying kinds of particles in all of physics. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of the neutrino to explain why the nuclear beta decay reaction appeared to violate conservation of energy and momentum. He thought that a tiny, invisible particle may carry off the extra energy and momentum.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk delivered a long-awaited, live-streamed update on his plans for launching the world’s most powerful rocket, with the spotlighted backdrop of a freshly stacked Starship and Super Heavy booster standing on the launch pad at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas.
A renewed era of space exploration is upon us, and many exciting missions will be headed to space in the coming years. These include crewed missions to the Moon and the creation of permanent bases there. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, there are multiple proposals for crewed missions to Mars and beyond. This presents significant challenges since a one-way transit to Mars can take six to nine months. Even with new propulsion technologies like nuclear rockets, it could still take more than three months to get to Mars.
The Parker Solar Probe’s mission is to study the Sun. But the spacecraft’s instruments have nabbed some pretty impressive data on Venus, as it uses the planet for gravity assists in its ever-shrinking solar orbit.
In the winter of 1609 Galileo Galilei pointed his newly built astronomical telescope at the planet Jupiter, and saw that the mighty planet was joined by smaller points of light. Over the course of the next few months he watched as four points of lights danced around the planet.
Trying to piece together the appearance of life on Earth is a little like looking through a kaleidoscope. There are competing theories for where Earth’s water came from, and there’s incomplete evidence for how the Moon formed and what role it played in life’s emergence. There are a thousand other questions, each with competing answers. Sometimes, contradictory research is published within days of each other.
An event horizon is the ultimate wall. It’s a boundary that separates one region of the universe from another. This separation is so complete that with event horizons it becomes utterly impossible for events on one side of the boundary to ever interact with or influence anything on the other side.
While black holes might always be black, they do occasionally emit some intense bursts of light from just outside their event horizon. Previously, what exactly caused these flares had been a mystery to science. That mystery was solved recently by a team of researchers that used a series of supercomputers to model the details of black holes’ magnetic fields in far more detail than any previous effort. The simulations point to the breaking and remaking of super-strong magnetic fields as the source of the super-bright flares.
Uranus and Neptune are similar planets in many ways. Both are ice giant worlds, both have atmospheres rich in methane, and both have a bluish color. But while Uranus has a pale blue-green hue, Neptune has a deep blue color. But why? Why would two planets so similar in size and composition appear so different? According to a recent study, the answer lies in their aerosols.
The Moon has orbited Earth since the Solar System’s early days. Anyone who’s ever spent time at the ocean can’t fail to notice the Moon’s effect. The Moon drives the tides even in the world’s most remote inlets and bays. And tides may be vital to life’s emergence.
Eccentricity is a measure of how circular an orbit is. An eccentricity of 0 means that the orbit a perfect circle. Anything between 0 and 1 is an elliptical orbit. An eccentricity of exactly 1 gives a parabola, which isn’t much or an orbit at all, but rather an escape trajectory. Finally, a value greater than 1 is an orbit with the shape of a hyperbola, which is also an escape trajectory.
The Moon is sure to be a hotspot of economic activity as human commercial endeavors start to expand into space. Not only is it a ball of resources with a relatively small gravity well, but it also happens to be our nearest neighbor. But to unlock that potential, companies will have to build up an infrastructure that will allow for the exploitation of those resources. Enter Quantum Space, a new start-up from a group of heavy-hitting space experts looking to help make that potential a reality – by building a robotic spaceport around the moon.
Billions of years ago, Mars was a much different place than it is today. During the same period when life was first emerging on Earth, Mars had a thicker atmosphere, warmer surface temperatures, and flowing water on its surface. Evidence of this warmer, wetter past is preserved on the planet’s surface today in the form of river channels, lakebeds, alluvial fans, and sedimentary deposits. When this period began, and how long it lasted, remains the subject of much debate for scientists.
Although meteorites are known to fall all over the world, the environment and unique processes in Antarctica make them somewhat easier to find on the pristine, snowy landscape. Still, collecting meteorites in Antarctica is physically grueling and hazardous work.
Dark matter has long been a mystery to astronomers, in no small part because it is so hard to measure directly. Its influence is plain when looking at its gravitational effects on objects such as far away galaxies, but measuring that influence directly has proved much trickier. But now, a team of scientists thinks they have a way to measure the influence of dark matter directly – all it would require is a specialized probe that sits really far away from Earth for a while.
Our galaxy hosts loads of binary stars. So much so that the majority of all stars in the galaxy are members of a binary system. Astronomers can only find most binary systems through intense scrutiny, either by having a telescope big enough to reveal two or more stars where we once thought there was only one, or by using spectroscopy to notice the wiggling motion of one star caused by the orbit of a hidden companion.
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