Space and astronomy news
Comets are messy things. They scatter bits of dust as they travel through the solar system. If Earth happens to encounter one of those cometary dust trails, we get to see a meteor shower.
Continue reading “Comets Leave Dusty Trails That Surround the Solar System”
It’s been over 35 years since a spacecraft visited Uranus and Neptune. That was Voyager 2, and it only did flybys. Will we ever go back? There are discoveries waiting to be made on these fascinating ice giants and their moons.
But complex missions to Mars and the Moon are eating up budgets and shoving other endeavours aside.
A new paper shows how we can send spacecraft to Uranus and Neptune cheaply and quickly without cutting into Martian and Lunar missions.
Continue reading “Will We Ever Go Back to Explore the Ice Giants? Yes, If We Keep the Missions Simple and Affordable”
A team of astronomers has caught glimpses of gas giants forming around a very young star.
The nascent giants are having a chilling effect on their potential siblings.
Continue reading “Baby Gas Giants Cast Shadows on Their Siblings”
Today, Mars is colloquially known as the “Red Planet” on a count of how its dry, dusty landscape is rich in iron oxide (aka. “rust”). In addition, the atmosphere is extremely thin and cold, and no water can exist on the surface in any form other than ice. But as the Martian landscape and other lines of evidence attest, Mars was once a very different place, with a warmer, denser atmosphere and flowing water on its surface. For years, scientists have attempted to determine how long natural bodies existed on Mars and whether or not they were intermittent or persistent.
Another important question is how much water Mars once had and whether or not this was enough to support life. According to a new study by an international team of planetary scientists, Mars may have had enough water 4.5 billion years ago to cover it in a global ocean up to 300 meters (almost 1,000 feet) deep. Along with organic molecules and other elements distributed throughout the Solar System by asteroids and comets at this time, they argue, these conditions indicate that Mars may have been the first planet in the Solar System to support life.
Continue reading “Mars Once had Enough Water for a Planet-Wide Ocean 300 Meters Deep”
The Universe is over 13 billion years old, so a 12-year slice of that time might seem uneventful. But a timelapse movie from NASA shows how much can change in just over a decade. Stars pulse, asteroids follow their trajectories, and distant black holes flare as they pull gas and dust toward themselves.
Continue reading “NASA Provides a Timelapse Movie Showing How the Universe Changed Over 12 Years”
Astronomers believe that it can take 10 million years or more to build a planet like the Earth. But studies of protoplanetary disks show that they can only last 1 to 3 million years. How can planet formation finish if the material its made from disappears so quickly? A team of astronomers have proposed a solution: it’s a simple matter of bias in our observations.
Continue reading “Planet Formation Doesn’t Have to be a Rush job After all”
Where did the Moon come from?
The widely-accepted view is that the Moon is a result of an ancient collision between the young Earth and a Mars-sized planet named Theia about 4.5 billion years ago. The impact melted Earth and Theia and sent molten material into orbit around Earth, where it formed a rotating torus of molten rock. That rock eventually coalesced into the Moon. It’s called the Giant Impact Hypothesis, and isotopic evidence from Apollo moon rocks illustrates the link between Earth and its Moon.
Case closed?
Not so fast. There’ve always been problems with this hypothesis. Can a new study answer them?
Continue reading “The Moon Might be One Large Chunk that was Blasted Off the Earth Billions of Years Ago”
How great are wheels, really? Wheels need axles. Suspension. Power of some kind. And roads, or at least swaths of relatively flat and stable terrain. Then you need to maintain all of it. Because of their cost many civilizations across human history, who knew all about wheels and axles, didn’t bother using them for transportation. Another way to look at it – much of human technology mimics nature. Of the simple machines, levers, inclined planes, wedges, and even screws are observed in nature. Why not the wheel?
Continue reading “Robots Might Jump Around to Explore the Moon”
Earth is not just habitable, it’s unusually habitable. It’s rather wet for a planet so close to its Sun, it’s geologically active, and it has a stable orbit, all of which are necessary for life as we know it. But there are also secondary advantages, such as not being constantly bombarded by large asteroids, and having a rotational axis that is fairly stable. This is due in part thanks to the planet Jupiter. The giant planet has helped clear the solar system of asteroid debris and may have helped stabilize the orbits of the inner planets. So life is good. But a new study shows that if Jupiter had a different orbit, life could be even better.
Continue reading “If Jupiter's Orbit got Weirder, it Would Actually Make Earth More Habitable”
We have a pretty good idea of what lurks within our solar system. We know there isn’t a Mars-sized planet orbiting between Jupiter and Saturn, nor a brown dwarf nemesis heading our way. Anything large and fairly close to the Sun would be easily spotted. But we can’t rule out a smaller, more distant world, such as the hypothetical Planet 9 (or Planet 10 if you want to throw down over Pluto). The odds against such a planet existing are fairly high, and a recent study finds it even less likely.
Continue reading “Planet 9 is Running out of Places to Hide”