Space and astronomy news
New research suggests that our best hopes for finding existing life on Mars isn’t on the surface, but buried deep within the crust.
Continue reading “Where’s the Most Promising Place to Find Martian Life?”
Entanglement is perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics. On its surface, entanglement allows particles to communicate over vast distances instantly, apparently violating the speed of light. But while entangled particles are connected, they don’t necessarily share information between them.
Continue reading “Can Entangled Particles Communicate Faster than Light?”
Meet the brown dwarf: bigger than a planet, and smaller than a star. A category of its own, it’s one of the strangest objects in the universe.
Continue reading “What Makes Brown Dwarfs So Weird?”
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, with roughly 400 active volcanoes regularly ejecting magma into space. This activity arises from Io’s eccentric orbit around Jupiter, which produces incredibly powerful tidal interactions in the interior. In addition to powering Io’s volcanism, this tidal energy is believed to support a global subsurface magma ocean. However, the extent and depth of this ocean remains the subject of debate, with some supporting the idea of a shallow magma ocean while others believe Io has a more rigid, mostly solid interior.
In a recent NASA-supported study, an international team of researchers combined data from multiple missions to measure Io’s tidal deformation. According to their findings, Io does not possess a magma ocean and likely has a mostly solid mantle. Their findings further suggest that tidal forces do not necessarily lead to global magma oceans on moons or planetary bodies. This could have implications for the study of exoplanets that experience tidal heating, including Super-Earths and exomoons similar to Io that orbit massive gas giants.
Continue reading “New Research Suggests Io Doesn’t Have a Shallow Ocean of Magma”
The star HD 65907 is not what it appears to be. It’s a star that looks young, but on closer inspection is actually much, much older. What’s going on? Research suggests that it is a resurrected star.
Continue reading “The Mysterious Case of the Resurrected Star”
Astrophotography is a challenging art. Beyond the usual skill set of understanding things such as light exposure, color balance, and the quirks of your kit, there is the fact that stars are faint and they move.
Continue reading “Astronaut Don Pettit is Serious, He Rigged up Astrophotography Gear on the ISS”
Even if you knew nothing about astronomy, you’d understand that exploding stars are forceful and consequential events. How could they not be? Supernovae play a pivotal role in the Universe with their energetic, destructive demises.
There are different types of supernovae exploding throughout the Universe, with different progenitors and different remnants. The Zwicky Transient Facility has detected 100,000 supernovae and classified 10,000 of them.
Continue reading “Zwicky Classifies More Than 10,000 Exploding Stars”
It seems that we are completely alone in the universe. But simple reasoning suggests that there should be an abundance of alien civilizations. Maybe they’re all out there, but they are keeping their distance. Welcome to the zoo (hypothesis).
Continue reading “What is the Zoo Hypothesis?”
Astronomers have spent decades trying to understand how galaxies grow so large. One piece of the puzzle is spheroids, also known as galactic bulges. Spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies have different morphologies, but they both have spheroids. This is where most of their stars are and, in fact, where most stars in the Universe reside. Since most stars reside in spheroids, understanding them is critical to understanding how galaxies grow and evolve.
New research focused on spheroids has brought them closer than ever to understanding how galaxies become so massive.
Continue reading “We Might Finally Know How Galaxies Grow So Large”
Imagine you’ve just gotten to Mars as part of the first contingent of settlers. Your first challenge: build a long-term habitat using local materials. Those might include water from the polar caps mixed with specific surface soils. They might even require some very personal contributions—your blood, sweat, and tears. Using such in situ materials is the challenge a team of Iranian engineers studied in a research project looking at local materials on Mars.
Continue reading “Building Concrete on Mars From Local Materials”