Space and astronomy news
A Chinese probe has delivered the first samples to be collected from the Moon in more than 40 years, and its mission isn’t done yet.
The Chang’e-5 sample return capsule floated down to the snowy plains of Inner Mongolia, capping an odyssey that began less than a month ago with the launch of a nine-ton spacecraft from south China’s Wenchang Space Launch Center.
Continue reading “China’s Chang’e-5 Probe Drops Off Moon Samples at the Climax of a Historic Mission”
The first-ever all-sky X-ray map of our galaxy, provided by the ESA’s eROSITA spacecraft, reveals two massive bubbles. These bubbles extend for up to 50,000 lightyears above and below the Milky Way, and are believed to be remnants of a massive outburst that occurred millions of years ago.
Continue reading “A second set of even larger bubbles has been found blasting out of the Milky Way’s center”
Distances in the solar system are vast, and it typically takes millions of years for small bodies to migrate from one orbit to another. But researchers recently discovered a “super highway”, where interactions among the planets are capable of sending comets and asteroids from Jupiter to Neptune in as little as a decade.
Continue reading “Gravitational interactions can drive comets and asteroids from Jupiter out to Neptune in just 10 years”
The solar system’s two massive gas giant planets pair up at dusk on December 21st, with a rare conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
A once-in-a-lifetime view is about to grace the dusk sky worldwide, closing out 2020 with one of the best astronomical events of the year.
Continue reading “Catch an Awe-Inspiring Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on December 21st”
As Einstein originally predicted with his General Theory of Relativity, gravity alters the curvature of spacetime. As a consequence, the passage of light changes as it encounters a gravitational field, which is how General Relativity was confirmed! For decades, astronomers have taken advantage of this to conduct Gravitational Lensing (GL) – where a distant source is focused and amplified by a massive object in the foreground.
In a recent study, two theoretical physicists argue that the Sun could be used in the same way to create a Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL). This powerful telescope, they argue, would provide enough light amplification to allow for Direct Imaging studies of nearby exoplanets. This could allow astronomers to determine if planets like Proxima b are potentially-habitable long before we send missions to study them.
Continue reading “If We Used the Sun as a Gravitational Lens Telescope, This is What a Planet at Proxima Centauri Would Look Like”
The world we see around us is built around quarks. They form the nuclei of the atoms and molecules that comprise us and our world. While there are six types of quarks, regular matter contains only two: up quarks and down quarks. Protons contain two ups and a down, while neutrons contain two downs and an up. On Earth, the other four types are only seen when created in particle accelerators. But some of them could also appear naturally in dense objects such as neutron stars.
Continue reading “Is There a way to Detect Strange Quark Stars, Even Though They Look Almost Exactly Like White Dwarfs?”
Rome was the world’s first mega-empire. At its height it stretched from Western Europe to the Middle East, and over 50 million souls lived within its borders. Some historians think that number could’ve been way higher, up to 100 million.
Rome got its start in the mid-8th century BC. It took centuries for that small city to grow into the Roman Empire, which reached its peak around AD 100. A well-known cliche reminds us how long that took.
But the Roman Empire also took centuries to fracture and dissolve.
Continue reading “Comet Records From 1240 Accurately Date When a Byzantine Princess Died”
Got clear skies? Then be sure to bundle up: the Geminid meteors—one of the best, sure-fire annual meteor showers—peaks this weekend… and near a New Moon, to boot.
Continue reading “Why 2020 is a Great Year for the Geminid Meteors”
General relativity is a profoundly complex mathematical theory, but its description of black holes is amazingly simple. A stable black hole can be described by just three properties: its mass, its electric charge, and its rotation or spin. Since black holes aren’t likely to have much charge, it really takes just two properties. If you know a black hole’s mass and spin, you know all there is to know about the black hole.
Continue reading “Black Holes Gain new Powers When They Spin Fast Enough”
Back in September, astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1) noticed an object in a distant orbit around Earth. Initially, the object (designed 2020 SO) was thought that be a near-Earth Asteroid (NEA). But based on the curious nature of it’s and the way solar radiation appeared to be pushing it off course, NASA scientists theorized that 2020 SO might be a spent rocket booster.
This was the tentative conclusion reached by staffers at the NASA Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA JPL. Specifically, they theorized that the object was the spent upper stage booster of the Centaur rocket that launched the Surveyor 2 spacecraft towards the Moon in 1966. This theory has since been confirmed thanks to new information provided by CNEOS and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF).
Continue reading “That’s no Asteroid, it’s a Rocket Booster”