Science Archives

August 1, 2024August 1, 2024 by Evan Gough

A New Model Explains How Gas and Ice Giant Planets Can Form Rapidly

Artist's impression of a young star surrounded by a protoplanetary disc made of gas and dust. According to new research, ring-shaped, turbulent disturbances (substructures) in the disk lead to the rapid formation of several gas and ice giants. Credit: LMU / Thomas Zankl, crushed eyes media

The most widely recognized explanation for planet formation is the accretion theory. It states that small particles in a protoplanetary disk accumulate gravitationally and, over time, form larger and larger bodies called planetesimals. Eventually, many planetesimals collide and combine to form even larger bodies. For gas giants, these become the cores that then attract massive amounts of gas over millions of years.

But the accretion theory struggles to explain gas giants that form far from their stars, or the existence of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

July 31, 2024July 31, 2024 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Uncover New Details in the Brightest Gamma Ray Burst Ever Detected

Artist's depiction of a powerful gamma ray burst. Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Kornmesser

In October 2022, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected an extraordinarily powerful Gamma Ray Burst (GRB). It still stands as the Brightest Of All Time (BOAT), and astronomers have been curious about it ever since.

New research has uncovered more details in the burst. What do they tell us about these forceful explosions?

July 30, 2024July 30, 2024 by Evan Gough

Can Geoengineering Protect Earth’s Icesheets?

This image shows the change in Greenland ice thickness in just one year, 2015. Almost ten years have passed, Greenland is still melting, and our GHG emissions are still rising. Is it time to use geoengineering to stall the melting? Image Credit: ESA/Planetary Visions.

It’s time to take a thorough, more serious look at using geoengineering to protect the planet’s icesheets, according to a group of scientists who have released a new report examining the issue. Glacial geoengineering is an emerging field of study that holds some hope for Earth’s diminishing glaciers and ice sheets.

July 29, 2024July 30, 2024 by Evan Gough

Astronauts’ Muscle Loss Mimics Age-Related Muscle Loss

Researchers grew muscle cells on tiny chips then sent them to the ISS to study them. Researchers hope to develop drugs to help astronauts combat muscle atrophy during space flight. Image Credit: NASA. CC BY-SA

One of the hazards astronauts must contend with is muscle loss. The more time they spend in a microgravity environment, the more muscle loss they suffer. Astronauts use exercise to counter the effects of muscle atrophy, but it’s not a perfect solution. Researchers want to develop drugs to help, and understanding the muscle-loss process in space is a critical first step.

July 24, 2024July 24, 2024 by Evan Gough

The Shelf Life of Many Medications Is Shorter Than A Round Trip To Mars

Color mosaic image of Mars, taken by the HRSC instrument aboard the ESA's Mars Express orbiter. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Michael)

Check any container of over-the-counter medicine, and you’ll see its expiration date. Prescription medicines have similar lifetimes, and we’re told to discard old medications rather than hold on to them. Most of them lose their effectiveness over time, and some can even become toxic. We’re discouraged from disposing of them in our wastewater because they can find their way into other organisms, sometimes with deleterious effects.

We can replace them relatively easily on Earth, but not on a space mission beyond Low Earth Orbit.

July 24, 2024July 24, 2024 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Have Tools That Can Help Detect Deepfake Images

This AI-generated image of the Pope in a puffer jacket went viral in 2023 and many were fooled into thinking it was real. It was generated with the AI tool Midjourney and was posted on Reddit by a user whose account is now gone. On the right is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae Galaxies. Image Credit: Midjourney/NASA/ESA

There’s a burgeoning arms race between Artificial Intelligence (AI) deepfake images and the methods used to detect them. The latest advancement on the detection side comes from astronomy. The intricate methods used to dissect and understand light in astronomical images can be brought to bear on deepfakes.

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024 by Evan Gough

Experimental Radar Technique Reveals the Composition of Titan’s Seas

This colorized mosaic from NASA's Cassini mission shows the most complete view yet of Titan's northern land of lakes and seas. Saturn's moon Titan is the only world in our solar system other than Earth that has stable liquid on its surface. The liquid in Titan's lakes and seas is mostly methane and ethane. New bistatic radar data from Cassini is revealing even more detail about Titan's hydrocarbon seas. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Agenzia Spaziale Italiana / USGS

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn generated so much data that giving it a definitive value is impossible. It’s sufficient to say that the amount is vast and that multiple scientific instruments generated it. One of those instruments was a radar designed to see through Titan’s thick atmosphere and catch a scientific glimpse of the moon’s extraordinary surface.

Scientists are still making new discoveries with all this data.

July 16, 2024July 16, 2024 by Evan Gough

Astronauts Struggle To Eat Their Space Food and Scientists Want to Know Why

Researchers in Australia used Virtual Reality to understand why food tastes bland to astronauts. Image Credit: Seamus Daniel, RMIT University. CC BY-SA

Astronauts sometimes struggle to consume enough nutritious food on the ISS because it tastes bland. But astronaut food is of high quality and designed to be palatable and to meet nutrition needs. What’s the problem?

July 5, 2024July 5, 2024 by Evan Gough

Black Holes Dominate Large Regions of Space, But They’re Mysterious

This image is from a black hole simulator. It shows a supermassive black hole, or quasar, surrounded by a swirling disk of material called an accretion disk. There are many unanswered questions about black holes and how they grow to be so massive. Simulations is one way of finding answers. Image Credit: Caltech/Phil Hopkins group

In the beginning, the Universe was all primordial gas. Somehow, some of it was swept up into supermassive black holes (SMBHs), the gargantuan singularities that reside at the heart of galaxies. The details of how that happened and how SMBHs accumulate mass are some of astrophysics’ biggest questions.

July 2, 2024July 2, 2024 by Evan Gough

Alpha Centauri Could Have a Super Jupiter in Orbit

This image of the sky around the bright star Alpha Centauri AB also shows the much fainter red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. The picture was created from pictures forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The blue halo around Alpha Centauri AB is an artifact of the photographic process, the star is really pale yellow in colour like the Sun. Image Credit: Digitized Sky Survey 2 Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani

The three-body problem is one of Nature’s thorniest problems. The gravitational interactions and resulting movements of three bodies are notoriously difficult to predict because of instability. A planet orbiting two stars is an example of the three-body problem, but it’s sometimes called a “restricted three-body problem.” In that case, there are some potential stable orbits for a planet.

A new study shows that the nearby Alpha Centauri AB pair could host a Super Jupiter in a stable orbit.