Space and astronomy news
NASA’s Lucy mission hits the jackpot on its very first asteroid flyby earlier this week.
Welcome to Dinkinesh. NASA’s Lucy mission flew past its first target of Wednesday, November 1st, and turned up a surprise: 152830 Dinkinesh (meaning ‘marvelous’ in the Amharic language) is not one asteroid, but two (!)
Continue reading “Lucy Completes its First Flyby… and Discovers a Bonus Asteroid”
In about one year from now, the European Space Agency will launch its Hera mission. Its destination is the asteroid Didymos, and it’ll be the second human spacecraft to visit the 390-meter chunk of rock. NASA’s DART mission crashed a kinetic impactor into Didymos’ tiny moonlet Dimorphos as a test of planetary defence.
Hera will perform a follow-up investigation of the binary asteroid to measure the size and morphology of the impact crater on Dimorphos. To help it along, it’s taking two tiny CubeSats that will land on Dimorphos.
Continue reading “ESA’s Hera Mission is Bringing Two Cubesats Along. They’ll Be Landing on Dimorphos”
Jupiter has gone pastel!
Check out this ultra-cool image of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This is a color composite picture of Jupiter seen in ultraviolet, which reveals different features in Jupiter’s atmosphere. One feature that stands out is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — it is blue in this image!
Continue reading “Jupiter Looks Bizarre in Hubble's New Ultraviolet Image”
NASA’s Kepler mission ended in 2018 after more than nine years of fruitful planet-hunting. The space telescope discovered thousands of planets, many of which bear its name. But it also generated an enormous amount of data that exoplanet scientists are still analyzing.
Now, a team of researchers has shed new light on a seven-planet system in Kepler’s ocean of data.
Continue reading “Old Data from Kepler Turns Up A System with Seven Planets”
Discovered early this year, Comet C/2023 H2 Lemmon may approach naked eye brightness this month.
A comet discovered earlier this year is performing above expectations, and is currently well-placed in the dusk sky. We’re talking about Comet C/2023 H2 Lemmon, moving up the charts now at magnitude +8 and brightening.
Continue reading “Comet H2 Lemmon Brightens in Early November Ahead of Expectations”
Dark matter is a powerful cosmological model, but it isn’t without its problems. In addition to our inability to detect dark matter particles, one issue deals with the number of dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. According to the most popular models of dark matter, galaxies should be surrounded by clumps of dark matter within their dark matter halo. Since regular matter tends to gather around dark matter, that means the Milky Way should be surrounded by dwarf galaxies. While there are several known dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way, there are fewer than predicted by dark matter simulations. But perhaps there are many more dwarf galaxies we just haven’t noticed because they are made mostly of dark matter.
Continue reading “A Dwarf Galaxy That's Almost All Dark Matter”
When a giant meteor crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, the impact pulverized cubic kilometers of rock and blasted the dust and debris into the Earth’s atmosphere. It was previously believed that sulfur from the impact and soot from the global fires that followed drove a global “impact winter” that killed off 75% of species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.
A new geology paper says that the die-off was additionally fueled by ultrafine dust created by the impact which filled the atmosphere and blocked sunlight for as long as 15 years. Plants were unable to photosynthesize and global temperatures were lowered by 15 degrees C (59 F).
Continue reading “Devastating Clouds of Dust Helped End the Reign of the Dinosaurs”
Lava tubes and chambers attract a lot of attention as potential sites for bases on the Moon and Mars. They provide protection from radiation, from temperature swings, and even from meteorites. They beg to be explored.
Continue reading “A Collapsed Martian Lava Chamber, Seen From Space”
Humans are born wonderers. We’re always wondering about the next valley over, the next horizon, what we’ll understand next about this vast Universe that we’re all wrapped up in.
In 2015, we finally detected our first long-awaited and long-theorized gravitational wave from the distant merger of two stellar mass black holes. But now we want to know more, and only better detectors can feed our appetite.
Continue reading “Next Generation Gravitational Wave Observatories Could Detect 100-600 Solar Mass Black Hole Mergers”
Astronomers have found plenty of white dwarf stars surrounded by debris disks. Those disks are the remains of planets destroyed by the star as it evolved. But they’ve found one intact Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a white dwarf.
Are there more white dwarf planets? Can terrestrial, Earth-like planets exist around white dwarfs?
Continue reading “White Dwarfs Could Support Life. So Where are All Their Planets?”