Astronomy Archives

January 23, 2020January 23, 2020 by Evan Gough

Rosetta Saw the Building Blocks of Life on Comet 67P

Comet 67P as seen by Rosetta on 7 July 2015. By ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0-igo, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41733207

Why is there so little nitrogen in Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P)? That’s a question scientists asked themselves when they looked at the data from the ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft. In fact, it’s a question they ask themselves every time they measure the gases in a comet’s coma. When Rosetta visited the comet in 2014, it measured the gases and found that there was very little nitrogen.

In two new papers published in Nature Astronomy, researchers suggest that the nitrogen isn’t really missing at all, it’s just hidden in the building blocks of life.

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020 by Evan Gough

The Evidence is Leaning More and More Towards an Asteroid Ending the Dinosaurs

What an asteroid hitting the Earth might look like. Image credit: NASA/Don Davis.

Which camp are you in: volcanoes? Or asteroids?

When it comes to the extinction of the dinosaurs, science has whittled it down to those two possibilities. The asteroid strike has been the leading candidate for quite some time now, but those darn volcanoes refuse to stand down.

A new study is presenting even more evidence that it was the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and not volcanoes.

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020 by Evan Gough

Betelgeuse is Continuing to Dim! It’s Down to 1.506 Magnitude

Betelgeuse was the first star directly imaged -- besides our own Sun, of course. Image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Ronald Gilliland (STScI), NASA and ESA

Betelgeuse keeps getting dimmer and everyone is wondering what exactly that means. The star will go supernova at the end of its life, but that’s not projected to happen for tens of thousands of years or so. So what’s causing the dimming?

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020 by David Dickinson

A Twilight Tryst: Venus Meets Neptune in the Dusk Sky

Never seen Neptune? It’s time you should, and this weekend offers a fine time to try, as the faintest planet in the solar system approaches the brightest in the dusk sky, for a splendid conjunction of the pair.

January 20, 2020January 20, 2020 by Evan Gough

China’s 500-Meter FAST Radio Telescope is Now Operational

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) has just finished construction in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Credit: FAST

The world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope is officially open for business according to Xinhua, China’s official state-run media. The FAST Radio Telescope saw fist light in 2016 but has been undergoing testing and commissioning since then. FAST stands for Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope.

January 20, 2020January 24, 2020 by Matt Williams

SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Nails In-Flight Abort Test! Next Stop, the ISS!

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced plans on Feb. 27, 2017 to launch a commercial crew SpaceX Dragon to beyond the Moon and back with two private astronauts in 2018 using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launching from the Kennedy Space Center. Credit: SpaceX

At Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, during the morning hours this past Sunday (Jan, 19th), SpaceX conducted the final uncrewed test of their Crew Dragon space capsule. This was the all-important in-flight abort test, the purpose of which was to validate the crew capsule’s escape capabilities in the event of an unexpected emergency during launch.

The event, which was live-streamed by NASA TV, was a complete success and saw the Crew Dragon successfully separate from its Falcon 9 launcher before being retrieved at sea. With this test complete, NASA and SpaceX will be moving forward with the first crewed mission. Known as Crew Demo-2, this mission will see two astronauts launched aboard the Crew Dragon to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year.

January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 by Matt Williams

More Mysterious Space Blobs Have Been Found Near the Center of the Milky Way

Artist’s impression of G objects, with the reddish centers, orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The black hole is represented as a dark sphere inside a white ring (above the middle of the rendering). Credit: Jack Ciurlo

At the center of our galaxy lies a region where roughly 10 million stars are packed into just 1 parsec (3.25 light-years) of space. At the center of this lies the supermassive black hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A*, which has a mass of over 4 million Suns. For decades, astronomers have been trying to get a better look at this region in the hopes of understanding the incredible forces at work and how they have affected the evolution of our galaxy.

What they’ve found includes a series of stars that orbit very closely to Sagittarius A* (like S1 and S2), which have been used to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. And recently, a team from UCLA’s Galactic Center Orbits Initiative detected a series of compact objects that also orbit the SMBH. These objects look like clouds of gas but behave like stars, depending on how close they are in their orbits to Sagittarius A*.

January 17, 2020January 17, 2020 by Evan Gough

A Mysterious Burst of Gravitational Waves Came From a Region Near Betelgeuse. But There’s Probably No Connection

Gravitational waves are caused by calamitous events in the Universe. Neutron stars that finally merge after circling each other for a long time can create them, and so can two black holes that collide with each other. But sometimes there’s a burst of gravitational waves that doesn’t have a clear cause.

January 17, 2020January 17, 2020 by David Dickinson

ESA Recruits Amateur Astronomers Ahead of Hera Asteroid Mission

The European Space Agency is looking to recruit amateur astronomers to help characterize possible secondary targets for the upcoming Hera asteroid rendezvous mission.

January 16, 2020January 16, 2020 by Evan Gough

An Asteroid has been Found that Orbits the Sun Closer than Venus

2020 AV2 orbits entirely within the orbit of Venus. Image Credit: Bryce Bolin/Caltech

Astronomers at Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) have discovered an asteroid that orbits inside Venus. Though other asteroids have a portion of their orbit inside Venus’, this is the first one with an orbit that is completely inside Venus’ orbit. The new object is named 2020 AV2.