Space News & Blog Articles

(This is Part 3 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 and Part 2.)

An ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet orbiting a young A-type star gave scientists using the Gemini South telescope a look at how both a star and its hot planet can have similar chemical compositions. The team, led by Arizona State University graduate student Jorge Antonio Sanchez, took spectra of the planet, called WASP-189b, using the Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph instrument on loan from McDonald Observatory in Texas. The observations measured the abundance of magnesium compared to silicon in the hot planet's atmosphere and allowed the team to compare it to the makeup of its parent star.

Even a modest telescope reveals the breathtaking Saturnian ring system that has captivated astronomers for four centuries, a world so alien in its beauty that first time observers often struggle to believe what they are seeing is real. But Saturn's rings are just the beginning. Beneath that iconic silhouette lies a planet of extraordinary extremes, a gas giant eleven times wider than Earth, spinning so fast that a single day lasts barely ten hours, and wrapped in a magnetic field so powerful it dominates a region of space millions of kilometres in every direction.

We have been searching for signals from other civilisations for over sixty years. Radio telescopes on Earth have swept the sky, listened patiently, and found nothing but silence. It is a search that demands extraordinary sensitivity and that is the problem, Earth and our very existence itself is getting in the way.

Space is full of objects that push the boundaries of imagination, but few do it quite as effectively as a black hole. At its simplest, a black hole is a region of space where gravity has become so overwhelmingly powerful that nothing, no matter, no light, nothing can escape its grip. They form when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse catastrophically inward, crushing an enormous amount of mass into an extraordinarily small space. The result is an object so dense that it warps the very fabric of space and time around it.

When India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter released the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) into the Shackleton crater on the Moon, they confirmed something scientists had speculated about for decades. The Moon, an airless and vacuum-desiccated body, has abundant sources of water ice around its poles! Located in the many craters that litter the region, these permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) prevent this water from being exposed to sunlight, which would cause it to sublimate and be lost into space.