Universe Today

April 17, 2023April 17, 2023 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Find a Planet Using Gaia Data

Artist view of a Jupiter-like exoplanet. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger

The ESA’s Gaia mission is our most accurate star-measuring spacecraft. It’s busy mapping the positions and radial velocities of one billion stars in the Milky Way. The mission’s goal is to create a representative map of the galaxy’s stellar population with unprecedented accuracy. The mission has released 3 sets of data since its inception, leading to many discoveries.

Now a team of astronomers has found an exoplanet with help from Gaia, an unintended result of the ambitious mission.

April 17, 2023April 17, 2023 by Matt Williams

How Many Intergalactic Radio Stations Are Out There?

The Stephans Quintet captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA

It has been over sixty years since Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues mounted the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) survey. This was known as Project Ozma, which relied on the “Big Ear” radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Greenbank, West Virginia, to look for signs of radio transmissions in Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Despite the many surveys conducted since then, no definitive evidence of technological activity (i.e., “technosignatures”) has been found.

This naturally raises the all-important question: are we going about the business of SETI wrong? Instead of looking for technosignatures within our galaxy, as all previous SETI surveys have done, should we look for activity beyond our galaxy (from possible Type II and Type III civilizations)? This premise was explored in a recent paper led by researchers from the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. Using data from the largest SETI project to date, Breakthrough Listen, the team looked for potential radio technosignatures from extragalactic sources.

April 17, 2023April 17, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

ESA's Juice is On Its Way to Visit Jupiter's Moons

ESA’s Juice mission lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on April 14, 2023 to begin its eight-year journey to Jupiter, where it will study in detail the gas giant planet’s three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

A new era of exploration at Jupiter’s moons began last week with the launch of the European Space Agency’s Juice, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. This mission will visit three of Jupiter’s largest moons — Europa, Callisto and Ganymede — to investigate whether they could be potentially habitable, a question that’s been highly debated since the first evidence of subsurface oceans on these moons was seen by the Galileo mission in the 1990s.

April 17, 2023April 17, 2023 by Laurence Tognetti

The Moon is the Best Place to Transport Rocket Fuel

Artist depiction of future lunar astronauts. (Credit: NASA)

When astronauts return to the Moon in the next few years, the plan is to have them stay for good while establishing a permanent outpost on Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. Like all space missions, a lunar outpost will require fuel for long-term sustainability, but would it be better to mine fuel on the Moon or get fuel resupply from the Earth? This is what a team of researchers led by Bocconi University in Italy hope to address as they addressed the best option in terms of deriving fuel from either the Earth or the Moon.

April 15, 2023April 18, 2023 by Anton Pozdnyakov

JUICE Launched to Jupiter, AI Helping Astronomy, Terran-1 Is No More

JUICE launches to Jupiter and its moons. A new JWST image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Machine learning cleans up the Universe, and improves images of a black hole’s event horizon. Terran 1 is dead, long live Terran R.

April 15, 2023April 15, 2023 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

NASA Plans Threaten the Future of New Horizons

Since its last flyby, of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, the New Horizons mission has been exploring objects in the Kuiper Belt as well as performing heliospheric and astrophysical observations. Courtesy: Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute//Roman Tkachenko

The New Horizons mission currently flying through the Kuiper Belt could be facing an unexpected change of plans. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is soliciting input on turning the spacecraft into a heliospheric science probe. The agency wants to do it much sooner than mission planners intended. If that happens, it will stop further planned planetary exploration of objects in that distant regime of the Solar System.

April 14, 2023April 14, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Artificial Intelligence Produces a Sharper Image of M87’s Big Black Hole

The new PRIMO reconstruction of the black hole in M87. This is based on a newly "cleaned-up" image from the Event Horizon Telescope. (Credit: Lia Medeiros et al. / ApJL, 2023)

Astronomers have used machine learning to sharpen up the Event Horizon Telescope’s first picture of a black hole — an exercise that demonstrates the value of artificial intelligence for fine-tuning cosmic observations.

The image should guide scientists as they test their hypotheses about the behavior of black holes, and about the gravitational rules of the road under extreme conditions.

April 14, 2023April 14, 2023 by Matt Williams

Twinkling Stars Supply the Dust That Leads to Life

Artist’s impression of the star in its multi-million year long and previously unobservable phase as a large, red supergiant. Credit: CAASTRO / Mats Björklund (Magipics)

When low to medium-mass stars exhaust their supply of hydrogen, they exit their main sequence phase and expand to become red giants – what is known as the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase. Stars in this phase of their evolution become variable (experiences changes in brightness) to shed their outer lays, spreading dust throughout the interstellar medium (ISM) that is crucial to the development of planetary nebulas and protoplanetary systems. For decades, astronomers have sought to better understand the role Red Giant stars play.

Studying interstellar and protoplanetary dust is difficult because it is so faint in visible light. Luckily, this dust absorbs light and radiates brightly in the infrared (IR), making it visible to IR telescopes. Using archival data from now-retired Akari and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) missions, a team of Japanese astronomers conducted the first long-period survey of dusty AGBs and observed that the variable intensity of these stars coincides with the amount of dust they produce. Since this dust plays an important role in the formation of planets, this study could shed light on the origins of life.

April 14, 2023April 7, 2023 by Paul M. Sutter

We Might be able to Find Evidence for Modified Gravity…in the Earth

Artist's impression of Earth's interior structure. Credit: Argonne National Labs

Testing the possibility of models of gravity different from general relativity may be closer to home than we think. A team of researchers has proposed that we might be able to use seismic motions in the Earth itself to test for modified gravity.

April 13, 2023April 13, 2023 by Matt Williams

What Can Be Done to Help Astronaut Vision in Space?

Astronauts Kate Rubins (left) and Jeff Williams (right) looking out of the ISS' cupola at a SpaceX Dragon supply spacecraft. Until recently, the effects of long-duration missions on eyesight was something of a mystery. Credit: NASA

Spaceflight takes a serious toll on the human body. As NASA’s Twin Study demonstrates, long-duration stays in space lead to muscle and bone density loss. There are also notable effects on the cardiovascular, central nervous, and endocrine systems, as well as changes in gene expression and cognitive function. There’s also visual impairment, known as Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS), which many astronauts reported after spending two months aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This results from increased intracranial pressure that places stress on the optic nerve and leads to temporary blindness.

Researchers are looking for ways to diagnose and treat these issues to prepare for future missions that will involve long-duration stays beyond Earth and transits in deep space. A cross-disciplinary team of researchers led by the University of Western Australia (UWA) has developed a breakthrough method for measuring brain fluid pressure that could reduce the risk of SANS for astronauts on long-duration spaceflights. This research could have applications for the many efforts to create a human presence on the Moon in this decade and crewed missions to Mars in the next.