Universe Today

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024 by David Dickinson

Book Review: Is Earth Exceptional?

A new book looks at the latest scientific insights versus a key question in astronomy and space science.

It’s tough to answer a scientific question, with a just data point of one. How special are we, and how common (or rare) is the story of how life arose on the Earth in the grander drama of the cosmos?

A new book out this week entitled Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life by Mario Livio and Jack Szostak looks at the scientific state of answering this key question. The book offers a sweeping view of the nascent science of astrobiology, a multi-disciplinary field melding biology, chemistry, astronomy and more.

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Are Claims of Alien Visitation Causing a Problem to Society?

I’ve been an avid stargazer for a fair few decades now and not once have I seen anything that makes me believe we are being visited by aliens! My own experiences aside, there’s no evidence of alien visitations but it seems much of the population believes anything that they cannot immediately identify in the sky MUST be ailens. A new paper suggests there are costs associated with increasing claims such as disctractions to government programs and background noise that hampers science communication. How on Earth should we deal with it? If debunking doesn’t work, then maybe its time for a scientific investigation.

September 11, 2024September 11, 2024 by Evan Gough

Juno Sees a Brand New Volcano on Io

These are JunoCam images of Jupiter's moon Io from its 3 February 2024 encounter. The first two images show Io illuminated by Jupiter-shine, and the rest are lit up by sunlight. The new volcano was captured in the second image in the sequence. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.

Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanic body in the Solar System. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been getting closer and closer to Io in the last couple of years, giving us our first close-up images of the moon in 25 years.

Recent JunoCam images show a new volcano that appeared sometime after the Galileo spacecraft visited the region.

September 11, 2024September 11, 2024 by Nancy Atkinson

High Resolution Images Show Bubbling Gas on the Surface of Another Star

Astronomers have captured a sequence of images of a star other than the Sun in enough detail to track the motion of bubbling gas on its surface. The images of the star, R Doradus, were obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This panel shows three of these real images, taken with ALMA on 18 July, 27 July and 2 August 2023. The giant bubbles — 75 times the size of the Sun — seen on the star’s surface are the result of convection motions inside the star. The size of the Earth’s orbit is shown for scale. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/W. Vlemmings et al.

Although stars are enormous, they’re extremely far away, and appear as point sources in telescopes. Usually, you never get to see more than a pixel. Now astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to resolve details on the surface of the star R Doradus and track its activity for 30 days. The images revealed giant, hot bubbles of gas 75 times larger than the entire Sun. R Doradus is 350 times larger than our Sun, but only 180 light-years away.

“This is the first time the bubbling surface of a real star can be shown in such a way,“ said Wouter Vlemmings, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and lead author of the study, in a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “We had never expected the data to be of such high quality that we could see so many details of the convection on the stellar surface.”

September 11, 2024September 11, 2024 by Evan Gough

A Swarm of Robots to Explore Mars’ Valles Marineris

This image of Mars' Valles Marineris, the 'Grand Canyon of Mars' is a mosaic of 102 Viking Orbiter images. The Tharsis volcanoes are visible to the west. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mars is known for its unique geological features. Olympus Mons is a massive shield volcano 2.5 times taller than Mt. Everest. Hellas Planitia is the largest visible impact crater in the Solar System. However, Mars’ most striking feature is Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the Solar System.

This fascinating geological feature begs to be explored, and a team of German researchers think that a swarm of robots is best suited to the task.

September 11, 2024September 11, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Space Stations Get Pretty Moldy. How Can We Prevent it?

Ask any property inspector, and they’ll tell you one of the maxims of their profession – where there’s moisture, there’s mold. That relationship also holds true for the International Space Station. The interior climate on the ISS is carefully controlled, but if thrown out of whack, potentially dangerous mold could sprout overnight. A new paper by researchers at The Ohio State University explains why – and provides some insights into how we might prevent it if it does happen.

September 11, 2024September 11, 2024 by Matt Williams

Projecting what Earth will Look Like 1000 years from now Could Assist in the Search for Advanced Civilizations

Earth’s immature biosphere and mature biosphere stages. The mature biosphere stage was only possible once photosynthetic organisms created feedback with Earth’s non-biological processes, oxygenating the atmosphere and creating an ozone layer. Image Credit: University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is regularly plagued by the fact that humanity has a very limited perspective on civilization and the nature of intelligence itself. When it comes right down to it, the only examples we have to go on are “life as we know it” (aka. Earth organisms) and human civilization. On top of that, given the age of the Universe and the time life has had to evolve on other planets, it is a foregone conclusion that any advanced life in our galaxy would be older than humanity. Luckily, this presents an opportunity to develop and test theoretical frameworks in the field.

To paraphrase Freeman Dyson, if we can conceive of a concept (and the physics are sound), an advanced species will likely have built it already. In this respect, imagining where humanity will be centuries or eons from now could provide potential “technosignatures” to look for. In a recent paper, a team from the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center modeled a series of scenarios that attempt to predict what humanity’s “technosphere” could look like 1,000 years from now. Their research could have implications for future SETI studies.

September 10, 2024September 10, 2024 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Two Supermassive Black Holes on a Collision Course With Each Other

An artist's concept of what two merging supermassive black holes might look like. Each one is surrounded by an accretion disk of hot gas and material streaming away via jets. CourtesyNASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Galaxy collisions are foundational events in the Universe. They happen when two systems mingle stars in a cosmic dance. They also cause spectacular mergers of supermassive black holes. The result is one very changed galaxy and a singular, ultra-massive black hole.

September 10, 2024September 10, 2024 by Evan Gough

The Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Might Have Formed 9 Billion Years Ago

This is the first image of Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. A reanalysis of EHT data by NAOJ scientist suggests its accretion disk may be more elongated than shown in this image. Image Credit: EHT

Large galaxies like ours are hosts to Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs.) They can be so massive that they resist comprehension, with some of them having billions of times more mass than the Sun. Ours, named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is a little more modest at about four million solar masses.

Astrophysicists have studied Sgr A* to learn more about it, including its age. They say it formed about nine billion years ago.

September 10, 2024September 10, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Starliner Comes Home Empty

Boeing’s Starliner touches down at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 12:01 a.m. EDT Saturday, Sept. 7, completing the agency’s Crew Flight Test. Photo credit: NASA

The Boeing Starliner module has been plagued with issues despite what seemed to be the dawning of a new commercial space giant. The module detached from the International Space Station on 7 September but without its crew! Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams journeyed to the ISS in June this year in what was supposed to be a mission lasting just a week. They are still there! Just a few days ago, their module returned under remote control while they stay in orbit until February!