Space and astronomy news
Every day meteoroids blast through our planet’s atmosphere to hit the ground as meteorites. A team of researchers in Italy traced twelve of them to progenitor asteroids that orbit in near-Earth space.
Continue reading “Researchers Match Up 12 Meteorites with the Near-Earth Asteroids They Came From”
With our continued failure to discover dark matter particles, it’s worth considering alternatives. While dark matter is the most widely supported model, the alternatives fall into two broad paths. One is that we should look to extended models of general relativity, such as conformal gravity. The other argues we should modify the very nature of Newtonian dynamics. The first approach tends to be popular with theorists since it focuses on an abstract theory in the same vein as Einstein’s original ideas. The second, often known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MoND, tends to be more popular with observational astronomers.
Continue reading “Evidence for Modified Gravity Found in the Motions of Binary Stars”
In March 2022, astronomers announced the discovery of the farthest known star via an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. They named it Earendel, after the old English name for “morning star”. Now, JWST’s Near-infrared Camera (NIRCam) and its NIRSpec spectrometer have taken a look at the same star and revealed more details about it.
Continue reading “JWST Turns its Gaze on the Farthest Known Star: Earendel”
Lately, plenty of ideas have been floating around for methods to mine the Moon. That is undoubtedly partly due to the growing enthusiasm for Artemis, NASA’s lunar exploration program, and its planned support for a long-term human presence on the Moon. But what would make the best technique to get valuable material off the lunar surface? How about zapping it with lightning? That is the idea behind a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts grant given to Dr. Amelia Grieg of the University of Texas at El Paso. And it seems to work.
Continue reading “We Could Get Material On The Moon By Shocking It With Lightning”
Virgin Galactic sent its first privately funded adventurers — and its first space sweepstakes winners — past the 50-mile space boundary today.
The tourists on the suborbital space trip known as Galactic 02 included Keisha Schahaff, who won two tickets in an online contest organized by the Omaze charity sweepstakes platform and a nonprofit group called Space for Humanity in 2021. She and her daughter, Anastatia Mayers, became the first mother-and-daughter duo to share a spaceflight, and the first spacefliers from the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda.
“I kind of feel like I was born in this life for this,” Schahaff, a wellness coach, told NBC’s “Today” show. Her daughter is a college student who aims to become an astrobiologist.
Jon Goodwin — an 80-year-old British adventurer who competed as a canoeist in the 1972 Olympics — also broke barriers on today’s Galactic 02 flight. In 2005, he was one of the first customers to reserve a spot with Virgin Galactic, back when the price was $200,000. Then, almost a decade ago, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Today he became only the second person with Parkinson’s to take a space trip. (The first was NASA shuttle astronaut Rich Clifford.)
Continue reading “Virgin Galactic Flies Its First Privately Funded Space Tourists”
Dark matter is one of the thorniest mysteries of modern cosmology. On the one hand, astronomers have gathered a wealth of supporting evidence through galaxy clustering statistics, gravitational lensing, and cosmic microwave background fluctuations, on the other hand, there are no particles in the standard model of particle physics that could account for dark matter, and we haven’t been able to detect its effect locally. It’s a solid theory where we just can’t seem to fully pin it down. That usually means we’re just a breakthrough away from confirming or overthrowing dark matter. The good news is that there are several projects searching for dark matter, and one of them, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, has just released a new result.
Continue reading “Astronomers Search for Dark Matter Annihilation at the Center of the Earth”
A recent study published in the journal Geology attempts to interpret the patterns of dunes, which are sand mounds frequently formed by aeolian (wind) processes and range in size from small ripples observed on beaches to massive structures observed in the desert. Specifically, the researchers focused on patterns of dune crestlines, which are the top of the dunes. Different dune crestline patterns might appear as mundane features, but their formations are often the result of a myriad of influences, including climate change, surface processes, and atmospheric phenomena.
Continue reading “Interpreting Dune Patterns: Insights from Earth and Mars”
Is humanity alone in the Universe? Is anyone out there? Where is everybody? And what happens if and when we make contact with them? These and other questions were the subjects of the 2023 Penn State SETI Symposium hosted by the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI) from June 19th-22nd, 2023. The event featured prominent speakers from various research fields and disciplines discussing the challenges, history, and future of SETI. In the great tradition established by Dr. Frank Drake, they also addressed key issues related to the search for intelligent life and what we might find someday.
The summit opened with a series of overviews, a review of the past year (since the last summit), and a presentation by Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau, a science historian and Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Her presentation, titled “Frank Drake and his Place in History,” provided a retrospective on the life and accomplishments of famed radio astronomer and SETI pioneer Dr. Frank Drake (for whom the Drake Equation is named), how he altered the character of the field, and how history will remember him.
Continue reading “Penn State SETI Symposium Opens with Commemoration of Dr. Frank Drake”
Exploration missions to the outer solar system are still sorely lacking, even though they were highly prioritized in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey from 2013-2022. In fact, many planets in the outer solar system have never even been orbited by a probe. For one in particular – Uranus – we must rely on data from Voyager 2, with instruments designed over 50 years ago, or Earth-based observations. Neither solution can genuinely understand the weird physics going on with this planet that is essentially lying on its side. And while there have been plenty of proposed mission architectures to go and look at it, it’s always fun to take a look at a new one when it pops up. A team from Stanford came up with a new concept called the Sustained CubeSat Activity Through Transmitter Electromagnetic Radiation (SCATTER). It was given a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts grant to develop the idea further. They released a paper a little while ago, and it’s worth digging into here.
Continue reading “We Could SCATTER CubeSats Around Uranus To Track How It Changes”
Nearly every galaxy in the universe contains a supermassive black hole. Even galaxies that are billions of light years away. This means supermassive black holes form early in the development of a galaxy. They are possibly even the gravitational seeds around which a galaxy forms. But astronomers are still unclear about just how these massive gravitational beasts first appeared.
Continue reading “Could This Supermassive Black Hole Only Have Formed by Direct Collapse?”