Space and astronomy news
There’s no question that young solar systems are chaotic places. Cascading collisions defined our young Solar System as rocks, boulders, and planetesimals repeatedly collided. A new study based on chunks of asteroids that crashed into Earth puts a timeline to some of that chaos.
Continue reading “The Early Solar System was Total Mayhem”
June 2022 offers early risers the chance to trace out the naked eye planets, from Mercury to Saturn.
Sometimes, the Universe offers up an illustration of a ready-made science lesson. Just such an alignment occurs this month, as all of the naked eye planets are in order, from innermost Mercury to outermost Saturn.
Continue reading “See All Naked Eye Planets This Month… in Order”
What do two guys from Ohio, the GAIA mission, a worldwide network of ground-based telescopes, machine learning, and citizen scientists all have to do with each other? Thanks to this interesting combo of people and computers, astronomers now have more than 116,000 new variable stars to study. Until now, they knew of about 46,000 of these stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. They had observed maybe 10,000 or so in other galaxies. The discovery gives astronomers even more chances to study variables and understand why they behave the way they do.
Continue reading “Astronomers Find 116,000 New Variable Stars”
Astronomy is progressing rapidly these days, thanks in part to how advances in one area can contribute to progress in another. For instance, improved optics, instruments, and data processing methods have allowed astronomers to push the boundaries of optical and infrared to gravitational wave (GW) astronomy. Radio astronomy is also advancing considerably thanks to arrays like the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, which will join with observatories in Australia in the near future to create the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).
In particular, radio astronomers are using next-generation instruments to study phenomena like Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and neutron stars. Recently, an international team of scientists led by the University of Manchester discovered a strange radio-emitting neutron star with a powerful magnetic field (a “magnetar”) and an extremely slow rotational period of 76 seconds. This discovery could have significant implications for radio astronomy and hints at a possible connection between different types of neutron stars and FRBs.
Continue reading “A Pulsar has Been Found Turning so Slowly Astronomers Didn't Even Think it was Possible: Once Every 76 Seconds”
How many of what kinds of stars live in other galaxies? It seems like a simple question, but it’s notoriously hard to pin down, because astronomers have such a difficult time estimating stellar populations in remote galaxies. Now a team of astronomers has completed a census of over 140,000 galaxies and found that distant galaxies tend to have heavier stars.
Continue reading “The Stars in Other Galaxies are Generally Heavier Than the Milky Way’s Stars”
Dark matter doesn’t really do much of anything in the present-day universe. But in the early days of the cosmos there may have been pockets of dark matter with high enough density that they provided a source of heat for newly forming stars. Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of “dark stars.”
Continue reading “Dark Stars: The First Stars in the Universe Could Have Been Powered by Annihilating Dark Matter”
One of the most interesting things we can learn from studying the planets and bodies of our Solar System is how much they have in common. Mars has polar ice caps and features that formed in the presence of water. Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, and composition and may have once been covered in oceans. And countless icy bodies in the Solar System experience volcanism and have active plate tectonics, except with ice and water instead of hot silicate magma. Another thing they have in common, which may surprise you, is sand dunes!
According to a new study by researchers from Monash University and the University of Pennsylvania, multiple planets in our Solar System have sand dunes on their surfaces – just in different forms! These features further indicate that the mechanisms for dune formation are ubiquitous throughout the Solar System. These findings could lead to new methods for assessing the surface conditions of planets and moons and could have significant implications for future robotic and crewed missions to study them up-close.
Continue reading “Compare Sand Dunes Across the Solar System, From Venus to Pluto”
A team of astronomers studied two nearby globular clusters, 47 Tucanae and Omega Centauri, searching for signals produced by annihilating dark matter. Those the searches turned up empty, they weren’t a failure. The lack of a detection placed strict upper limits on the mass of the hypothetical dark matter particle.
Continue reading “Could we Detect Dark Matter’s Annihilation Within Globular Clusters?”
In about 5 billion years, the Sun will leave the main sequence and become a red giant. It’ll expand and transform into a glowering, malevolent ball and consume and destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars. Can humanity survive the Sun’s red giant phase? Extraterrestrial Civilizations (ETCs) may have already faced this existential threat.
Could they have survived it by migrating to another star system without the use of spaceships?
Continue reading “Civilizations Don’t Even Need Space Ships to Migrate From Star System to Star System”
Most of the stars in the Milky Way are single stars. But between one-third and one-half of them are binary stars. Can habitable planets form in these environments?
New research shows that habitable planets could exist around binary stars, but they would form differently than worlds around single stars.
Continue reading “Planets in Binary Systems Could be Habitable, But They’d Form Differently”