Space and astronomy news
A team of scientists has just published a paper announcing their discovery of a peculiar chemical in the cloudtops of Venus. As far as scientists can tell, this chemical, called phosphine, could only be produced by living processes on a planet like Venus. So the whole internet is jumping on this story.
But did they find signs of life? Or is there another explanation?
Continue reading “Did Scientists Just Find Signs of Life on Venus?”
One of the most important results of science is the negative result. If something doesn’t work or a hypothesis is disproven, often it’s not widely reported or disseminated. That is a shame. However, science is getting better at incorporating negative results into its reporting system, which has resulted in publications like the Journal of Negative Results, which covers biomedicine.
Unfortunately there isn’t a similar journal for Astronomy. At least not yet. But the field could really use one. There are plenty of disproven hypotheses that don’t see the light of day in academically peer reviewed publications. When it comes to topics like SETI, sometimes those negative results are extremely important, as it lends credence to one of the most important hypotheses out there – that we are alone in the universe. Papers that cover negative SETI results can be accepted into journals that otherwise might not accept a paper centered around not finding anything. That’s what happened recently when a team of astronomers from Australia and elsewhere used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) to search a patch of sky that included 10 million stars. The negative results was that they did not see a single sign of intelligent life anywhere in those 10 million stars.
Continue reading “Australian Telescope Just Scanned 10 million Stars For Any Sign of Extraterrestrial Signals. No sign.”
Welcome back to our Fermi Paradox series, where we take a look at possible resolutions to Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where Is Everybody?” Today, we examine the possibility that we haven’t heard from aliens because intelligent life only survives for so long.
In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project. According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: “Where is everybody?“
This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence. Since Fermi’s time, there have been several proposed resolutions to his question, which include the possibility that civilizations only have a “Brief Window” with which to communicate with the cosmos before going extinct.
Continue reading “Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” IX: What is the Brief Window Hypothesis?”
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has taken another step towards first light, projected for some time in 2022. Its enormous 3200 megapixel camera just took its first picture during lab testing at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The camera is the largest ever built, and its unprecedented power is the driving force behind the Observatory’s ten year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
Continue reading “Vera Rubin’s Monster 3200-Megapixel Camera Takes its First Picture (in the Lab)”
I wear glasses for astigmatism. But, as a stargazer with a visual impediment, turns out I’m in good company. The GREGOR telescope, a solar telescope located at the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands also suffered from an astigmatism that was recently corrected…to very stellar results.
Opened in 2012, GREGOR is part of a new generation of solar (Sun observing) telescopes. Before 2002, solar scopes were quite small in diameter; under one metre. The Sun is close, and VERY bright, so your telescope doesn’t need to be as wide as those used for deep-space imaging. GREGOR itself is 1.5m (compare that to some of the largest telescopes imaging distant faint objects like the Keck Observatory at 10m. But without the special filters/optics used by a solar scope, a regular telescope staring at the Sun would be destroyed by the Sun’s light). A telescope’s power is often related to its ability to magnify. But just like enlarging a low-resolution photo, the more you magnify, the fuzzier the image becomes (that’s why those scenes in crime shows where they yell ‘enhance!’ and a photo grows to reveal a criminal are not realistic). Ultimately, a telescope’s diameter provides the higher resolution photo. GREGOR is designed to take those high-resolution images of our local Star. How high resolution? Imagine being able to distinguish a 50km wide feature on the Sun from 140 million km away – basically the same as being able to read the text on a coin from a kilometre away.
The better our technologies get, the better we get at finding objects in space. That’s certainly true of Jupiter and its moons. Prior to Galileo, nobody knew the other planets had moons. Then in 1609/10, as he made improvements to his telescope, he aimed it at the gas giant and eventually found four moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Now those four natural satellites also bear his name: the Galilean moons.
Over the centuries since then, and especially in our digital age, astronomical tools and methods kept improving. In particular, wide-field CCD (Charge Coupled Devices) have led to an explosion of astronomical discoveries. In recent years, the confirmed number of Jovian moons has risen to 79. Now, a new study says that there may be 600 small irregular moons orbiting Jupiter.
Continue reading “Jupiter Probably Has 600 Small, Irregular Moons”
Black holes have been the subject of intense interest ever since scientists began speculating about their existence. Originally proposed in the early 20th century as a consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, black holes became a mainstream subject a few decades later. By 1971, the first physical evidence of black holes was found and by 2016, the existence of gravitational waves was confirmed for the first time.
This discovery touched off a new era in astrophysics, letting people know collision between massive objects (black holes and/or neutron stars) creates ripples in spacetime that can be detected light-years away. To give people a sense of how profound these events are, Álvaro Díez created the Black Hole Collision Calculator (BHCC) – a tool that lets you see what the outcome of a collision between a black hole and any astronomical object would be!
Continue reading “Behold! The Black Hole Collision Calculator!”
Whatever we grow up with, we think of as normal. Our single solitary yellow star seems normal to us, with planets orbiting on the same, aligned ecliptic. But most stars aren’t alone; most are in binary relationships. And some are in triple-star systems.
And the planet-forming disks around those three-star systems can exhibit some misshapen orbits.
Continue reading “The Strange, Misshapen Orbits of Planet-Forming Disks in a Triple-Star System”
It’s one of the stranger observations in ancient literature, and one of the earliest recorded tales of daytime astronomy.
A curious account comes to us from the 1st century AD Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, concerning the exploits of Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, who notes that:
“The Sun’s radiance makes the fix’d stars invisible in the daytime, although they are shining as much as in the night, which becomes manifest at a solar eclipse and also when the star is reflected in a very deep well.”
Continue reading “Astro-Challenge: Adventures in Daytime Astronomy”
Explaining the concept of a dust bunny to small children can be quite amusing. No, it’s not actually alive. It’s moving around because of really small currents of wind that we can’t even see. It’s mainly formed out of dead skin and spider webs. No, the spiders don’t actually eat the dead skin. Most of the time.
Now take that same concept of a bunch of particles stuck together, scale it up a few orders of magnitude, and put it in space. Though it’s still not alive, it would be blown by solar radiation rather than the winds. And instead of being made out of skin and spider webs, it could be made up of cometary dust particles. That is what scientists think our first detected visitor from another star might be – an interstellar dust bunny.
Continue reading “Okay, New Idea. Oumuamua is an Interstellar “Dust Bunny””