Space and astronomy news
This new image from the Hubble Space Telescope looks like a series of smaller spiral galaxies are falling out of a larger and brighter galaxy. That’s just one of the many reasons this collection of galaxies belongs to the Arp-Madore catalogue of peculiar galaxies.
Continue reading “Hubble Sees a Random Collection of Galaxies, Perfectly Lined Up”
Light sail technology is a fascinating concept and a step change in rocket propulsion. It may not be big and impressive like the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle or the new Starship rocket but when it comes to travelling among the stars, light sails could just be the answer. And what better material to build the sails from then something that just makes me want to say it over and over again….I talk about photonics crystals. It’s sounds right out of a Star Trek episode but a new paper examines their feasibility.
Continue reading “Photonic Crystals Could Be Exactly What Breakthrough Starshot is Looking For”
The search for life is tied to the search for liquid water. That’s why astronomers are so keen on detecting rocky, Earth-like exoplanets in their stars’ habitable zones. In a habitable zone, a planet receives enough energy from its star to maintain liquid water on its surface, given the right atmospheric conditions.
But in our Solar System, we’ve found worlds with liquid water that are way beyond the habitable zone. Can we do the same in other solar systems?
Continue reading “17 Known Exoplanets Could Have Oceans of Liquid Water”
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is already making great strides in helping us to unravel the mysteries of the Universe. Earlier this year, hundreds of rogue planets were discovered in the Orion Nebula. The real surprise to this discovery was that 9% of the planets were paired up in wide binary pairs. To understand how this binary planets formed, astronomers simulated various scenarios for their formation.
Continue reading “What’s the Source of Binary Rogue Planets?”
The first stars of the Universe were monstrous beasts. Comprised only of hydrogen and helium, they could be 300 times more massive than the Sun. Within them, the first of the heavier elements were formed, then cast off into the cosmos at the end of their short lives. They were the seeds of all the stars and planets we see today. A new study suggests these ancient progenitors created more than just the natural elements.
Continue reading “Ancient Stars Could Make Elements With More Than 260 Nucleons”
The way astronomers study planets in our own solar system is surprisingly similar to the way they study exoplanets, despite the latter being orders of magnitude more distant. The key is spectroscopy – examining the wavelengths of light that reach a telescope from a planet’s atmosphere. Different molecules allow different wavelengths to pass through, creating unique patterns in the spectrum and giving scientists clues about the composition of an atmosphere.
Of course, for planets nearby, we can get more details by visiting them – but this is expensive and difficult – we haven’t visited Uranus since Voyager 2 in 1986, for example, so for all intents and purposes, studying Uranus today is done the same way as studying an exoplanet: with a telescope.
A recent review of planetary atmospheres, in our solar system and elsewhere, reveals the incredible complexity and diversity of weather in our solar system, and what we might expect to find around other stars – but also what we don’t yet understand about our near neighbours: there’s plenty of unknowns.
So let’s take a weather-watcher’s tour of the solar system:
Continue reading “Weather in the Solar System Can Teach Us About Weather on Exoplanets”
Communicating between species isn’t something that only has to take place between space-faring civilizations. There are plenty of species here on our home planet that communicate using a variety of sights, sounds, and smells. We’re only starting to unlock the secrets of how to understand and respond to these types of foreign languages. Researchers at the SETI Institute think that doing so might be a good test for whether we’ll be able to communicate with extraterrestrials if we ever get the chance to.
Continue reading “Trying to Communicate with Whales is Like Talking to Extraterrestrials”
A recent study presented this week at the 2023 meeting of the American Geophysical Union discusses observations of “hot Jupiters” from the NASA-funded CubeSat mission known as the Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE). Unlike most exoplanet-hunting telescopes, whose sizes are comparable to a small school bus, CUTE measures 36 centimeters (14 inches) in length, equivalent to the size of a cereal box. These findings come after members of the team, which consists of undergraduate and graduate students, published an overview paper about CUTE in The Astronomical Journal in January 2023 and results from CUTE observing WASP-189b in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in August 2023.
Continue reading “A Tiny Telescope is Revealing “Hot Jupiter” Secrets”
For more than 46 years, the Voyager 1 probe has been traveling through space. On August 25th, 2012, it became the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause and enter interstellar space. Since then, mission controllers have maintained contact with the probe as part of an extended mission, which will last until the probe’s radioisotopic thermoelectric generators (RTGs) finally run out. Unfortunately, the Voyager 1 probe has been showing its age and signs of wear and tear, which is unavoidable when you’re the farthest spacecraft from Earth.
This includes issues with some of the probe’s subsystems, which have been a bit buggy lately. For instance, engineers at NASA recently announced that they were working to resolve an error with the probe’s flight data system (FDS). This system consists of three onboard computers responsible for communicating with another of Voyager 1’s subsystems, known as the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). As a result, while the spacecraft can receive and execute commands sent from Earth, it cannot send any science or engineering data back.
Continue reading “Voyager 1 Has Another Problem With its Computer System”
In 1960, Dr. Frank Drake led the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiment at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In the more than sixty years that have since passed, astronomers have conducted multiple surveys in search of technological activity (aka. technosignatures). To date, Breakthrough Listen is the most ambitious SETI experiment, combining data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the Parkes Murriyang Telescope, the Automated Planet Finder, and the MeerKAT Radio Telescope and advanced analytics.
The program includes a survey of the one million closest stars to Earth, the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane, and the 100 closest galaxies to ours. In a recent paper, members of Breakthrough Listen presented the results of their radio technosignature search of the centers of 97 nearby galaxies observed by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. This search was one of the largest and broadest
searches for radio evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence ever undertaken, surveying trillions of stars at four frequency bands. Unfortunately, no compelling candidates were found.