Space and astronomy news
Consumption and disintegration.
Next time you want to be the life of the party—if you’re hanging out with cool nerds that is—just drop that phrase into the conversation. And when they look at you quizzically, just say that’s the eventual fate of the Solar System.
Then adjust your cravat and take another sip of your absinthe.
Continue reading “In the Far Future, Stellar Flybys Will Completely Dismantle the Solar System”
Planetary system formation is a process that involves astounding and complex forces. Humans have only just started trying to understand what goes on in this extraordinarily important phase of the development of new worlds. As such, we are continuing to make new discoveries and come up with better models that better fit the observations that our instruments are able to collect.
The most recent of those improved models was announced by a research team at the University of Warwick. A paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters explores possible reasons for why there is a lack of spiral structures in newly formed protoplanetary discs. Their answer is a simple one: massive planets that form on the outside of the disc might be disrupting the spiral formation.
Continue reading “Spiral-shaped Planetary Disks Should Be More Common. Giant Planets Might Be Disrupting Their Formation”
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.” – Carl Sagan “The Demon-Haunted World.”
Learning about the Universe, I’ve felt spiritual moments, as Sagan describes them, as I better understand my connection to the wider everything. Like when I first learned that I was literally made of the ashes of the stars – the atoms in my body spread into the eternal ether by supernovae. Another spiritual moment was seeing this image for the first time:
Ten billion years ago the young Milky Way survived a titanic merger with a neighboring galaxy, eventually consuming the whole thing. Now, remnants of that fossil galaxy still swim in our galaxy’s core – and astronomers have discovered that almost a third of the Milky Way’s current population came from that dismantled rival.
Continue reading “A third of the stars in the Milky Way came from a single merger 10 billion years ago”
Astronomers have to be extra clever to map out the invisible dark matter in the universe. Recently, a team of researchers have improved an existing technique, making it up to ten times better at seeing in the dark.
Continue reading “A new way to map out dark matter is 10 times more precise than the previous-best method”
There’s no real reason most of us need to know what the Moon will look like on any particular day at any particular hour next year. No reason other than intellectual curiosity, that is. So if you have a healthy supply of that, then you’ll enjoy NASA’s latest contribution to staring at the internet and wondering where the time went.
Continue reading “Every Year NASA Simulates Our View of the Moon for the Upcoming 12 Months. Here’s 2021, Hour by Hour”
Over the last few years, astronomers have observed distant solar systems in their early stages of growth. ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) has captured images of young stars and their disks of material. And in those disks, they’ve spotted the tell-tale gaps that signal the presence of growing young planets.
As they ramped up their efforts, astronomers were eventually able to spot the young planets themselves. All those observations helped confirm our understanding of how young solar systems form.
But more recent research adds another level of detail to the nebular hypothesis, which guides our understanding of solar system formation.
Continue reading “Astronomers See a Newly Forming Planetary Disk That’s Continuing to Feed On Material from its Nebula”
Everyone loves lasers. And the only thing better than a bunch of lasers is a bunch of lasers on one of the world’s (soon to be) largest telescopes, the E-ELT. Well, maybe a bunch of lasers on a time-travelling T. Rex that appears in your observatory and demands to know the locations and trajectories of incoming asteroids. That might be better. For the dinosaurs; not for us.
Continue reading “A New Artist’s Illustration of the Extremely Large Telescope. So Many Lasers”
A penumbral lunar eclipse in the early morning hours of November 30th marks the start of the last eclipse season for 2020.
Howling at the Moon Sunday night? Sunday night into Monday morning November 30th features not only the penultimate Full Moon for 2020, but the final lunar eclipse of the year, with a penumbral eclipse of the Moon.
Continue reading “Catch Monday Morning’s Subtle Lunar Eclipse”
For only the second time in history, astronomers have discovered a new, natural-origin, minimoon orbiting the Earth. The minimoon, known as 2020CD3 (CD3 for short), was first discovered by Kacper Werizchos and Teddy Pruyne using data from the Catalina Sky Survey. Once CD3’s orbit was determined to be geo-centric, Queens University Belfast Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Dr. Grigori Fedorets assembled a team of 23 astronomers worldwide to make careful observations of the object to determine its identity. Based on the team’s findings, a paper was published on November 24, 2020, in the Astronomical Journal, characterizing the minimoon.
Continue reading “Here’s what we know about Earth’s new minimoon”