Space and astronomy news
Will we ever understand life’s origins? Will we ever be able to put our finger on the exact moment and circumstances that lead to living matter? Will we ever pinpoint the spark? Who knows.
But what we can do is find out how widespread the conditions for life are and how widespread the molecular constituents for life are.
Continue reading “Even More Complex Organic Molecules Have Been Found in a Protoplanetary Disc. Was Life Inevitable?”
In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be feeling very powerful after today’s topic: the quasar!
Continue reading “Astronomy Jargon 101: Quasar”
We’ve all seen the gorgeous images and videos of coronal loops. They’re curved magnetic forms that force brightly glowing plasma to travel along their path. They arch up above the Sun, sometimes for thousands of kilometres, before reconnecting with the Sun again.
But a new study says that some of what we’re seeing aren’t loops at all. Instead, they’re a type of optical illusion. Do we know the Sun as well as we think we do?
Continue reading “Coronal Loops Might Not Be Loops At All”
Astronomers discovered the first exoplanets in 1992. They found a pair of them orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12 about 2300 light-years from the Sun. Two years later they discovered the third planet in the system.
Now a team of astronomers are trying to duplicate that feat by searching 800 known pulsars for exoplanets.
Continue reading “Astronomers Scan 800 Pulsars to See If Any of Them Have Planets”
One thousand light-years away is pretty close for a black hole. When researchers discovered a black hole at that distance in 2019, it caught the attention of other astronomers and other interested people. It was the first black hole-hosting stellar system to be seen with the naked eye.
But new research shows that it isn’t there.
Continue reading “It Turns out, the “Closest Black Hole” System Doesn’t Contain a Black Hole At All”
The fields of extrasolar planet studies and astrobiology have come a long way in recent years. To date, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 4,935 exoplanets in 3,706 star systems, with another 8,709 candidates awaiting confirmation. With so many planets to study, next-generation instruments, and improved data analysis, the focus is transitioning from discovery to characterization. With the James Webb Space Telescope now deployed, these fields are about to advance much farther!
In particular, scientists anticipate that the characterization of planetary atmospheres may lead to the discovery of “biosignatures” – signs we associate with life and biological processes. The challenge will be how to recognize signatures that don’t conform to “life as we know it.” In a recent study, researchers from the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University (ASU) investigate possible tools for searching for life “as we don’t know it.”
Continue reading “How to Search for Life as we Don’t Know it”
When two neutron stars collide, it creates a kilonova. The event causes both gravitational waves and emissions of electromagnetic energy. In 2017 the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave observatories detected a merger of two neutron stars about 130 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 4993. The merger is called GW170817, and it remains the only cosmic event observed in both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.
Astronomers have watched the expanding debris cloud from the kilonova for years. A clearer picture of what happens in the aftermath is emerging.
Continue reading “The Expanding Debris Cloud From the Kilonova Tells the Story of What Happens When Neutron Stars Collide”
Gazing at the night sky can evoke a sense of wonder regarding humanity’s place in the Universe. But that’s not all it can evoke. If you’re knowledgeable about asteroid strikes like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, then even a fleeting meteorite can nudge aside your enjoyable sense of wonder. What if?
Luckily, planetary defence is at the top of mind for some scientists and engineers. One of those scientists is Professor Philip Lubin from the University of California Santa Barbara. Lubin is developing his idea called PI-Terminal Defense for Humanity. The PI stands for Pulverize It, and Lubin thinks pulverizing an incoming impactor into tiny pieces is our best bet to protect ourselves from an asteroid on short notice.
Continue reading “Last-Minute Defense Against an Asteroid That Could Obliterate it Before Impact”
In perfect viewing conditions, with good eyesight and clear, dark skies, the average person can see between 2,500 and 5,000 stars in the night sky. Add a telescope to the mix, and the number of visible objects in the sky explodes exponentially. For example, in 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope famously pointed its mirrors at a tiny piece of empty space – about 1/12th the size of the Moon – and revealed three thousand new objects crammed into that little area, most of them distant galaxies, offering a glimpse of the past stretching back to the early Universe. The astounding implication of the Hubble Deep Field image was that there are still billions of objects out there yet unseen by human eyes (or telescopes). Since then, the process of surveying deep space has been a massive ongoing undertaking, using all the tools available to us, from visible light telescopes like Hubble to infrared and radio telescopes. In a new data dump last week, a major radio sky survey, LOFAR, has revealed over a million new, never before seen objects in the night sky.
Continue reading “Comprehensive Sky Survey Finds Over a Million New Objects”
The planets in our Solar System all rotate on axes that roughly match the Sun’s rotational axis. This agreement between the axes of rotation is the typical arrangement in any system in space where smaller objects orbit a larger one.
But in one distant binary system, the large central object has an axis of rotation tilted about 40 degrees compared to its smaller satellite. This situation is even more strange because the main body isn’t a star but a black hole.
Continue reading “Astronomers Find a Black Hole That was Somehow Pushed Over Onto its Side”