With all of humanity’s telescopic eyes on the sky, it’s rare for an asteroid to take us by surprise. But that’s what happened this morning in the sky over the Philippines. Only hours after it was detected, it burned up in a bright flash above the island of Luzon.
Between Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the Moon, there is a region of space measuring 384,400 km (238,855 mi) wide known as Cislunar space. In the coming decades, multiple space agencies will send missions to this region to support the development of infrastructure that will lead to a permanent human presence on the Moon. This includes orbital and surface habitats, landing pads, surface vehicles, technologies for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), and other elements that will enable the long-term exploration and development of the lunar surface.
Black holes are by their very nature, challenging to observe and difficult to spot. It’s usually observations of the accretion disk that reveal properties of the hidden black hole. There is often enough material within the accretion disk to make them shine so brightly that they can often be among the brightest objects in space. A wonderful image has been released which shows the highest resolution simulation of a black hole accretion disk ever created.
The Moon has been a source of interest of late largely due to the focus on getting humans back to the Moon. Future human explorers though will likely be there to stay in permanent lunar bases. Making this a reality means it is of vital importance to harvest materials from the Moon and water is just one of them. Recently, ESA Announced they have secured a ride to the Moon for their Prospect package in 2027. It consists of a drill and tiny laboratory that will hunt for water and other volatiles, paving the way for human exploration.
Where on Earth did life originate, and where else could it occur? A comprehensive answer is most likely a long way off. But it might depend on how many suitable sites for abiogenesis there are on different worlds.
As part of the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), NASA contracted with commercial space partners to develop crew-capable spacecraft to restore domestic launch capability to U.S. soil. In addition to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle, which was validated in 2020 and has been transporting crews to the International Space Station (ISS) ever since. Concurrently, Boeing developed the CT-100 Starliner, which has suffered a seemingly endless string of technical issues and delays. After undergoing a long checklist of fixes, the Starliner completed its first orbital flight test (OFT-1) in May 2022.
Black holes are famous for sucking in everything that crosses their event horizons, including light. So, why do astronomers see energetic radiation coming from the environment of a black hole in an X-ray binary system? It’s a good question that finally has an answer.
In the contemporary Universe, massive galaxies are plentiful. But the Universe wasn’t always like this. Astronomers think that galaxies grew large through mergers, so what we see in space is the result of billions of years of galaxies merging. When galaxies merge, the merger can feed large quantities of gas into their centers, sometimes creating a quasar.
In July 2020, China’s Tianwen-1 mission arrived in orbit around Mars, consisting of six robotic elements: an orbiter, a lander, two deployable cameras, a remote camera, and the Zhurong rover. As the first in a series of interplanetary missions by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), the mission’s purpose is to investigate Mars’s geology and internal structure, characterize its atmosphere, and search for indications of water on Mars. Like the many orbiters, landers, and rovers currently exploring Mars, Tianwen-1 is also searching for possible evidence of life on Mars (past and present).
Cosmologists have long hypothesized that the conditions of the early universe could have caused the formation of black holes not long after the Big Bang. These ‘primordial black holes’ have a much wider mass range than those that formed in the later universe from the death of stars, with some even condensed to the width of a single atom.
Watching the Olympics recently and the amazing effort of the hammer throwers was a wonderful demonstration of the radial velocity method that astronomers use to detect exoplanets. As the hammer spins around the athlete, their body and head bobs back and forth as the weight from the hammer tugs upon them. In the same way we can detect the wobble of a star from the gravity of planets in orbit. Local variations in the stars can add noise to the data but a team of researchers have been studying the Sun to help next-generation telescopes detect more Earth-like planets.
Our Sun is one of the most fascinating objects in the universe and photographing it with specialized equipment to capture its splendor and beauty has become increasingly more common around the world. This is most evident with the work obtained by renowned astrophotographer, Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy), who owns Cosmic Background Studios in Florence, Arizona.
The Standard Model describes how the Universe has evolved at large scale. There are six numbers that define the model and a team of researchers have used them to build simulations of the Universe. The results of these simulations were then fed to a machine learning algorithm to train it before it was set the task of estimating five of the cosmological constants, a task which it completed with incredible precision.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) keeps finding supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the early Universe. They’re in active galactic nuclei seen only 500,000 years after the Big Bang. This was long before astronomers thought they could exist. What’s going on?
There are four fundamental forces in the Universe; strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity. Quantum theory explains three of the four through the interaction of particles but science has yet to discover a corresponding particle for gravity. Known as the ‘graviton’, the hypothetical gravity particle is thought to constitute gravitational waves but it hasn’t been detected in gravity wave detector. A new experiment hopes to change that using an acoustic resonator to identify individual gravitons and confirm their existence.
The term ‘habitable zone’ is a broad definition that serves a purpose in our age of exoplanet discovery. But the more we learn about exoplanets, the more we need a more nuanced definition of habitable.
Want a clear view of a supermassive black hole’s environment? It’s an incredible observational challenge. The extreme gravity bends light as it passes through and blurs the details of the event horizon, the region closest to the black hole. Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) just conducted test observations aimed at “deblurring” that view.
As it’s name suggests, dark matter is dark! That means it’s largely invisible to us and only detectable through its interaction with gravity. One of the leading theories to explain the stuff that makes up the majority of the matter in the Universe are WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. They are just theories though and none have been detected. An exciting new experiment called LUX-ZEPLIN has just completed 280 days of collecting data but still, no WIMPs have been detected above 9 Gev/c2. There are plans though to narrow the search.
When the James Webb Space Telescope provided astronomers with a glimpse of the earliest galaxies in the Universe, there was some understandable confusion. Given that these galaxies existed during “Cosmic Dawn,” less than one billion years after the Big Bang, they seemed “impossibly large” for their age. According to the most widely accepted cosmological model—the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model—the first galaxies in the Universe did not have enough time to become so massive and should have been more modestly sized.
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