Space and astronomy news
Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest planetary body in the Asteroid Belt. For a long time, scientists thought it was born in the outer solar system and then migrated to its present position. Some evidence for that origin lies in extensive surface deposits of ammonium-rich materials on the Cerean surface.
Continue reading “Actually, Ceres Might Have Formed in the Asteroid Belt After All”
Billions of dollars of observatory spacecraft orbit around Earth or in the same orbit as our planet. When something wears out or goes wrong, it would be good to be able to fix those missions “in situ”. So far, only the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has enjoyed regular visits for servicing. What if we could work on other telescopes “on orbit”? Such “fixit” missions to other facilities are the subject of a new NASA paper investigating optimal orbits and trajectories for making service calls on telescopes far beyond Earth.
Continue reading “There Could be a Way to Fix Spacecraft at L2, Like Webb and Gaia”
In 2003, strange features on Mars’s surface got scientists’ “spidey senses” tingling when they saw them. That’s when unusual “anareiform terrain” landforms appeared in images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They’ve returned each year, spreading across the southern hemisphere surface.
Continue reading “Scientists Recreate Mars Spiders in the Lab”
Galaxy collisions are foundational events in the Universe. They happen when two systems mingle stars in a cosmic dance. They also cause spectacular mergers of supermassive black holes. The result is one very changed galaxy and a singular, ultra-massive black hole.
Continue reading “Two Supermassive Black Holes on a Collision Course With Each Other”
When you walk across your lawn or down the street, you move on the surface of a surprisingly layered world. Some of those layers are rock, others are molten. A surprising amount of water is mixed into those layers, as well. It turns out that most planets have more of it “deep down” than we imagined.
Continue reading “There’s More Water Inside Planets Than We Thought”
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.
Continue reading “The Surprising Source of Radiation Coming From Black Holes”
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?
Continue reading “Dark Matter Could Have Driven the Growth of Early Supermassive Black Holes”
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.
Continue reading “A New Test Proves How to Make the Event Horizon Telescope Even Better”
Warp drives have a long history of not existing, despite their ubiquitous presence in science fiction. Writer John Campbell first introduced the idea in a science fiction novel called Islands of Space. These days, thanks to Star Trek in particular, the term is very familiar. It’s almost a generic reference for superliminal travel through hyperspace. Whether or not warp drive will ever exist is a physics problem that researchers are still trying to solve, but for now, it’s theoretical.
Continue reading “What if you Flew Your Warp Drive Spaceship into a Black Hole?”
When neutron stars dance together, the grand smash finale they experience might create the densest known form of matter known in the Universe. It’s called “quark matter, ” a highly weird combo of liberated quarks and gluons. It’s unclear if the stuff existed in their cores before the end of their dance. However, in the wild aftermath a neutron-star merger, the strange conditions could free quarks and gluons from protons and neutrons. That lets them move around freely in the aftermath. So, researchers want to know how freely they move and what conditions might impede their motion (or flow).
Continue reading “Neutron Star Mergers Could Be Producing Quark Matter”