Space and astronomy news
A slender partial lunar eclipse bookends the final eclipse season of 2023.
Checking out the October Hunter’s Full Moon this coming weekend? This Full Moon is also special, as it features the final eclipse of 2023. The eclipse is a partial lunar, and occurs on the night of Saturday/Sunday, October 28th/29th.
Continue reading “Catch a ‘Pac-Man’ Partial Lunar Eclipse for Europe and Africa This Weekend”
Quick: Name a woman scientist.
Chances are the name you came up with is Marie Curie, the physicist and chemist who won two Nobel Prizes more than a century ago for the discoveries she and her husband Pierre made about radioactivity.
But who else? In a new book titled “Her Space, Her Time,” quantum physicist Shohini Ghose explains why women astronomers and physicists have been mostly invisible in the past — and profiles 20 researchers who lost out on what should have been Nobel-level fame.
“This issue around having low representation of women in physics is something that’s common all around the world,” Ghose says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And I’ve certainly faced it in my own experiences as a physicist growing up. I really didn’t know of any woman physicist apart from Marie Curie.”
Before this decade is out, NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era and build the necessary infrastructure to keep sending them back. And they will hardly be alone. Alongside NASA’s Artemis Program, the European Space Agency also plans to send astronauts to the Moon and establish a permanent habitat there (the Moon Village), while China and Russia are working towards creating the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Numerous commercial space companies will also be there to provide crew transportation, cargo, and logistical services.
All of this will happen in the Moon’s southern polar region, a topographically complex region characterized by craters, permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), and undulating slopes. This terrain could prove difficult for crews conducting extravehicular activities (EVAs) away from landing sites and habitats. In a recent study, an international team of researchers used data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to create a detailed atlas of the region that accounts for all the traverses and descents. This atlas could prove very useful for mission planners as they select landing sites for future exploration.
Continue reading “Lunar Astronauts Will Need Easy Walking Trails Around the Moon's South Pole”
The ground shakes. Paintings tilt. Walls crack. Rubble may fall. On Earth, we understand how and where these events happen due to the discovery of plate tectonics – the continental crust’s creation, movement, and destruction. However, when astronauts placed seismometers on the lunar surface during NASA’s Apollo mission era, those instruments recorded quakes on the Moon. In the 1970s, the Viking landers also recorded quakes on the surface of Mars. Since neither of these worlds has plate tectonics, scientists set about collecting more data to understand the phenomena, which led to the recent NASA InSight lander. Now, a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters explains how the largest recorded seismic event on Mars provided evidence for a different sort of tectonic origin — the release of stress within the Martian crust.
Continue reading ““The Big One”: The Most Powerful Marsquake Ever Detected”
Cataclysmic events happen in the Universe all the time. Black hole mergers, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and a whole host of others. Most of them happen in distant galaxies, so they pose no threat to us. But there are a few that could affect life on Earth, and a couple could even pose an existential threat. One of these threats is known as a kilonova.
Continue reading “How Close is Too Close to a Kilonova?”
On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around 8:52 that evening a photographic plate captured the light of three stars clustered together. At a magnitude of 15, they were reasonably bright in the image. At 9:45 pm the same region of sky was captured again, but this time the three stars were nowhere to be seen. In less than an hour they had completely vanished.
Continue reading “In 1952, A Group of Three “Stars” Vanished. Astronomers Still Can’t Find Them”
Earth is our only example of a habitable planet, so it makes sense to search for Earth-size worlds when we’re hunting for potentially-habitable exoplanets. When astronomers found seven of them orbiting a red dwarf star in the TRAPPIST-1 system, people wondered if Earth-size planets are more common around red dwarfs than Sun-like stars.
But are they? Maybe not.
Continue reading “Do Red Dwarfs or Sunlike Stars Have More Earth-Sized Worlds?”
When it comes to Mars and our ongoing efforts to understand that planet’s ancient habitability, evidence is so far elusive. But scientists have an idea where the evidence is likely hiding: in sediments.
New research shows that an ancient mud lake is a good place to explore.
Continue reading “If There Was Ever Life on Mars, this Ancient Mud Lake is the Perfect Place to Look”
The birth of a star is a spectacular event that plays out behind a veil of gas and dust. It’s a detailed process that takes millions of years to play out. Once a star leaves its protostar stage behind and begins its life of fusion, the star’s powerful radiative output blows the veil away.
But before then, astrophysicists are at a disadvantage.
Continue reading “This Dark Nebula Hides an Enormous Star”
Cosmic rays are a fascinating and potentially hazardous phenomenon. These high-energy particles typically consist of protons that have been stripped of their electrons and accelerated to nearly the speed of light. When these rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere, an enormous amount of secondary particles known as an “air shower” results. Ordinarily, these showers are a source of frustration for astronomers since they leave “tracks” on telescope images that obscure the celestial objects (asteroids, stars, galaxies, exoplanets, etc.) being observed.
However, a research team from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and Osaka Metropolitan University has found a new application for these energetic particles. Using a novel method, they could observe these extensive cosmic-ray air showers with unprecedented precision. The key to their method is the Subaru Prime Focus Camera (Suprime-Cam) mounted on the Subaru Telescope atop the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. This method and the team’s findings could provide a new method for studying the Universe’s most energetic particles.
Continue reading “Air Showers Ruin Astrophotos, but They Could be a New Method for Studying the Universe”