Space and astronomy news
You’ve done it. After years of effort and training, sacrifice, and pain, you become an astronaut and have finally set foot on Mars. Time to post your triumph on TikTok for that sweet social media cred. If only you can get a signal.
Continue reading “Extending Earth's Internet to Mars With Orbital Data Servers”
Every large galaxy in the nearby universe contains a supermassive black hole at its core. The mass of those black holes seems to have a relationship to the mass of the host galaxies themselves. But estimating the masses of more distant supermassive black holes is challenging. Astronomers extrapolate from what we know about nearby galaxies to estimate distant black hole masses, but it’s not a perfectly accurate measurement.
An astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Joseph Simon, recently proposed that there might be a better way to measure black hole mass, and his model indicates that early black holes may be much larger than other predictions suggest.
Continue reading “Early Black Holes Were Bigger Than We Thought”
Our solar system has had a chaotic past. Earth and the other planets are now in stable orbits, but while they were forming they experienced drastic location shifts. Jupiter was likely much closer to the Sun than it is now, and its shift not only shifted other planets but also cleared the solar system of debris, tossing much of it to the Oort Cloud.
Continue reading “There Could Be Captured Planets in the Oort Cloud”
It’s a strange, eerie-looking place. Carbon dioxide gas appears… and disappears in cycles and bursts throughout the year. It’s how our planet would look if we could detect carbon dioxide (CO2) with our eyes. Scientists at NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office made computer animations of its presence in our atmosphere. Those videos show an almost-alien view of Earth under the influence of this gas.
Earth is, in many ways, a water world. Around two-thirds of its surface is covered in water, and the oceans that provide that cover make up over 96% of all water on Earth, according to the US Geological Survey. Glaciers and ice caps make up another 1.74%, but groundwater is the third most plentiful source at 1.69% of all water available on Earth. That’s an astonishing 23.4 million cubic kilometers of the stuff, dwarfing the mere 176,000 cubic kilometers contained in all the lakes in the world. But that does not mean the total amount of groundwater is unlimited, and removing it can have a lasting impact on more than just the people who use it for bathing and drinking. A new study points to how humans pumping out groundwater impacts Earth’s rotation.
Continue reading “The Earth’s Rotational Pole has Shifted from All the Groundwater We’ve Pumped Out”
The first stars of the universe were very different than the stars we see today. They were made purely of hydrogen and helium, without heavier elements to help them generate energy in their core. As a result, they were likely hundreds of times more massive than the Sun. But some of the first stars may have been even stranger. In the early universe, dark matter could have been more concentrated than it is now, and it may have powered strange stellar objects known as dark stars.
Continue reading “Nancy Grace Roman Could Detect Supermassive Dark Stars”
Hot Jupiters are large gas planets that orbit their star closely. Unlike our Jupiter, which radiates more heat than it gets from the Sun, hot Jupiters get more heat from their star than from their interior. As a result, they can have a surface temperature of 1,000 K rather than the 160 K that Jupiter has. They are one of the more common types of exoplanets and the easiest type of exoplanet to discover.
Continue reading “A Brown Dwarf is Getting Hit With So Much Radiation it's Hotter Than the Sun”
ESA’s BepiColumbo continues its journey to Mercury by making another flyby … of Mercury! This is the third of six planned flybys of its destination planet, each of which gives the spacecraft a gravitational deceleration. Eventually, it’ll slow down enough to go into its final operational orbit.
In the most recent flyby on June 19, 2023, the spacecraft sped past the planet’s night side and took a series of images from 236 km (145 miles) above Mercury’s surface. From these 217 images, the BepiColumbo team created a movie of the flyby, which includes a 3D scene.
Continue reading “BepiColumbo Makes its Third Flyby of Mercury, Seeing the Planet's Night Side”
The war in Ukraine has taken a terrible toll, and the damage extends far from the shifting battle lines. In addition to the many soldiers and civilians who’ve died, over 2.5 million children have been displaced within the country. The war has also exacerbated the problems of orphaned children, who are especially vulnerable in urban areas where the fighting has been most intense. Ensuring these children and their families can get adequate food and medical care is always challenging. Ensuring they have access to education and counseling services so their lives are not severely interrupted is even more so.
But there’s also the need for inspiration and hope for the future, which becomes all the more important in times of war and displacement. This is the purpose of Earthlings Hub, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing astronomy and science education to refugee and orphan children in Ukraine. Founded in 2022 by members of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS), Earthlings Hub is made up of scientists, teachers, and psychologists working to provide students with access to scientific research, equipment, and an inquiry-based educational program that goes beyond the standard school curriculum.
Continue reading “Bringing the Gift of Hope to Ukrainian Kids through Astronomy”
We in the Milky Way Galaxy are pretty lucky to have a fairly quiet central supermassive black hole in Sgr A*. It’s not loud and bright like an active galactic nucleus. It appears to be active for brief periods before going to sleep. Two hundred years ago, it “woke up” for about a year and a half and had a bite to eat.
Continue reading “The Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole had a Burst of Activity 200 Years Ago. We Just Saw the Echo.”