Space and astronomy news
11 million years ago, Mars was a frigid, dry, dead world, just like it is now. Something slammed into the unfortunate planet, sending debris into space. A piece of that debris made it to Earth, found its way into a drawer at Purdue University, and then was subsequently forgotten about.
Until 1931, when scientists studied and realized it came directly from Mars. What has it told them about the red planet?
Continue reading “What a Misplaced Meteorite Told Us About Mars”
Uranus is an oddball among the Solar System’s planets. While most planets’ axis of rotation is perpendicular to their orbital plane, Uranus has an extreme tilt angle of 98 degrees. It’s flopped over on its side, likely from an ancient collision. It also has a retrograde rotation, opposite of the other planets.
The ice giant also has an unusual relationship with the Sun that sets it apart from other planets.
Continue reading “Uranus is Getting Colder and Now We Know Why”
Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we all have a vivid image of the Crab Nebula emblazoned in our mind’s eyes. It’s the remnant of a supernova explosion Chinese astronomers recorded in 1056. However, the Crab Nebula is more than just a nebula; it’s also a pulsar.
The Crab Pulsar pulsates in an unusual ‘zebra’ pattern, and an astrophysicist at the University of Kansas thinks he’s figured out why.
Continue reading “The Strange Pulsar at the Center of the Crab Nebula”
In recent years, astronomers have developed techniques to measure the metal content of stars with extreme accuracy. With that capability, astronomers have examined sibling stars to see how their metallicity differs. Some of these co-natal stars have pronounced differences in their metallicity.
New research shows that stars engulfing rocky planets are responsible.
Continue reading “Up to a Third of Stars Ate Some of their Planets”
A stellar odd couple 700 light-years away is creating a chaotically beautiful display of colourful, gaseous filaments. The Hubble captured the pair, named R Aquarii, and their symbiotic interactions. Every 44 years the system’s violent eruptions blast out filaments of gas at over 1.6 million kilometers per hour.
Continue reading “It Takes Very Special Conditions to Create This Bizarre Stellar Spectacle”
The Daisy World model describes a hypothetical planet that self-regulates, maintaining a delicate balance involving its biogeochemical cycles, climate, and feedback loops that keep it habitable. It’s associated with the Gaia Hypothesis developed by James Lovelock. How can we detect these worlds if they’re out there?
By looking closely at information.
Continue reading “A New Way to Detect Daisy Worlds”
Will we ever understand how life got started on Earth? We’ve learned much about Earth’s long, multi-billion-year history, but a detailed understanding of how the planet’s atmospheric chemistry evolved still eludes us. At one time, Earth was atmospherically hostile, and its transition from that state to a planet teeming with life followed a complex path.
Continue reading “Lessons From Ancient Earth’s Atmosphere: From Hostile to Hospitable”
Filmmakers love New Zealand. Its landscapes evoke other worlds, which explains why so much of The Lord of the Rings was filmed there. The country has everything from long, subtropical sandy beaches to active volcanoes.
The country’s otherworldliness extends into its atmosphere, where a cloud nicknamed the “Taieri Pet” forms when conditions are right.
Continue reading “An Otherworldly Cloud Over New Zealand”
Eventually, every stellar civilization will have to migrate to a different star. The habitable zone around all stars changes as they age. If long-lived technological civilizations are even plausible in our Universe, migration will be necessary, eventually.
Could Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETIs) use stars themselves as stellar engines in their migrations?
Continue reading “A Spider Stellar Engine Could Move Binary Stars Halfway Across a Galaxy”
Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) can have billions of solar masses, and observational evidence suggests that all large galaxies have one at their centres. However, the JWST has revealed a foundational cosmic mystery. The powerful space telescope, with its ability to observe ancient galaxies in the first billion years after the Big Bang, has shown us that SMBHs were extremely massive even then. This contradicts our scientific models explaining how these behemoths became so huge.
How did they get so massive so early?
Continue reading “How Did Supermassive Black Holes Get So Big, So Early? They Might Have Had a Head Start”