Before we get to Mars, we’re going to have to practice. And develop radical leaps in technology, but also practice. A Mars mission will be utterly unlike anything attempted by humanity. We’re talking about a group of settlers, maybe as few as an initial team of four, traveling over a hundred million miles away from home to a literally alien environment, one that is so hostile to life that nothing lives there, and turn it into a home.
In November 2019, Japan's Hayabusa 2 mission departed the asteroid Ryugu after 1.5 years of observations. It had successfully collected a sample from the near-Earth object and in December 2020, the spacecraft returned the valuable sample to Earth. If its mission had ended there, it would've been deemed one of the most successful and challenging missions ever conducted.
K2-18b is a sub-Neptune about 124 light-years away from Earth first detected in 2015. Follow-up research found water vapour in its atmosphere, indicating that it could be a water planet, or what is called a 'hycean planet'. Hycean planets have thick hydrogen atmospheres and deep, global or near-global oceans. Or so scientists thought.
Exoplanet surveys are useful for more than just astrobiology or increasing the tally of known planets in other solar systems. They can also help us understand the evolution of planetary systems themselves. That’s what a new paper from researchers led by astronomers at the University of Geneva and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics attempts to do - by looking at a large population of “exo-Neptunes” they are attempting to understand the intricacies of how planetary systems are formed.
In a recent discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected a massive stellar eruption measuring eight light-years across. This outflow, known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), is located about 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of the Milky Way. Based on an analysis by an international team of astronomers, this outflow appears to be coming from a newly forming star (a proto-star). It is moving at relativistic speeds (hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour), and its size and strength indicate it is a rare phenomenon.
You know, if you take away the lack of air and water, the weaker Sun, the lower gravity, and the toxic soil, Mars isn’t all that bad of a place to live. And there are certainly worse places to live, like, I don’t know, Ohio (I’m allowed to say that because I grew up there). But there’s been a big push in the past two decades to not just go to Mars and visit, like we did with the Moon fifty years ago, but to stay there. Put down roots. Establish ourselves. Build a colony or a settlement.
78 million years ago, a 1.6 km asteroid slammed into what is now Finland, creating a crater 23 km (14 mi) wide and 750 km deep. The catastrophic impact created a fractured hydrothermal system in the shattered bedrock under the crater. There's evidence from other impact structures that in the aftermath of a collision, life colonized the shattered rock and heated water that flowed through it. But determining when the colonization happened is challenging.
When considering the unnamed major features of all the moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system there are still a lot of places out there that need proper names. That means the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the non-governmental body responsible for naming astronomical objects, has its work cut out for them. Recently they tackled a relatively easy challenge by approving a series of names on the asteroid Donaldjohnson, the first and only target of NASA’s Lucy mission in the main asteroid belt. With those names come a whole new way to talk about one of the asteroids that humanity has studied most closely thus far.
When the ESA launched the Gaia spacecraft in 2013, it didn't generate the same fanfare as the launch of other missions like the JWST, or first light from telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory. That's largely because Gaia doesn't capture gorgeous images of celestial objects like other telescopes. Instead, Gaia was an astrometry mission.
Whenever astronomers detect something new moving through our region of space, like an interstellar object or an unusual asteroid, somebody somewhere claims it could be an alien interstellar space probe. It's like one of those laws about human behaviour—Godwin's Law for example—that should probably have its own name.
We don't realize it, but Earth is subjected to a constant cosmic rain of material. The vast majority of it is tiny micrometeors that burn up in the atmosphere, up to 100 tons per day by some estimates. But sometimes, much larger objects strike Earth. The most notable is probably the Chicxulub impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs and left a massive crater, now buried.
There are plenty of theories about what dark matter is and how it might be gravitationally affecting the universe. However, proving those theories out is hard since it hardly ever interacts with anything, especially on “small” scales like galaxies. So when a research team claims to have found evidence for dark matter in our own galaxy, it's worth taking a look at how. A new paper from Dr. Surkanya Chakrabati and her lab at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) does just that. They found evidence for a dark matter “sub-halo” in the galactic neighborhood, by looking at signals from binary pulsars.
Three data releases from the recently retired Gaia spacecraft show that far-flung parts of the Milky Way are connected by families of stars born in clusters. Some continue to travel the galaxy together, while others appear wildly dispersed, sometimes as chains of related stars. One cluster is even trying to escape the Milky Way. The Gaia data show that open clusters (in particular) and the star formation regions from which they spring are interconnected across the Galaxy, populating the Milky Way in ways astronomers are just now beginning to understand.
One possibility to explain the constants of nature is that there’s more than one universe. That we live in a multiverse, with each different universe “sampling” different values of the constants. There are a few extremely hypothetical ideas in physics that can lead to the multiverse. One is through the concept of eternal inflation, where the very early universe never ended its period of rapid expansion, and that different portions of the overall multiverse pinched off, so to speak, to create their own bubble universes.
Blue Origin is committed to making a permanent human presence in space a reality. To this end, they have developed the New Shepard and New Glenn rockets to send payloads to orbit, and aim to create super-heavy launch vehicles to reach the Moon (New Armstrong and Blue Origin) and beyond. Another focus has been on developing systems that will enable In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) in extraterrestrial environments, which is essential for making space sustainable. This includes their Blue Alchemist ISRU system, which recently completed its Critical Design Review (CDR).
What are the constants of nature? What do they do? What do they tell us…and what do they not tell us?
Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered that volcanic activity on Mars between 3 and 4 billion years ago likely released unusual forms of sulphur gases that could have trapped heat and maintained liquid water on the planet's surface. This finding, published in Science Advances, offers a fresh perspective on how Mars might have supported early life.
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