Space and astronomy news
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.
Continue reading “Juno Sees a Brand New Volcano on Io”
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.”
Continue reading “High Resolution Images Show Bubbling Gas on the Surface of Another Star”
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.
Continue reading “A Swarm of Robots to Explore Mars’ Valles Marineris”
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.
Continue reading “Space Stations Get Pretty Moldy. How Can We Prevent it?”
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.
Continue reading “Projecting what Earth will Look Like 1000 years from now Could Assist in the Search for Advanced Civilizations”
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.
Continue reading “Two Supermassive Black Holes on a Collision Course With Each Other”
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.
Continue reading “The Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Might Have Formed 9 Billion Years Ago”
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!
Continue reading “Starliner Comes Home Empty”
We recently reported on the successful deployment of the solar sail of the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) technology demonstration mission. That huge achievement advances one of the most important technologies available to CubeSats – a different form of propulsion. But getting there wasn’t easy, and back in May, a team of engineers from NASA’s Langley Research Center who worked on ACS3 published a paper detailing the trials and tribulations they went through to prepare the mission for prime time. Let’s take a look at what they learned.
Continue reading “What Did We Learn From Manufacturing the ACS3 Solar Sail Mission?”
An ancient passerby may have visited the Sun and inadvertently helped shape the Solar System into what it is today. It happened billions of years ago when a stellar drifter came to within 110 astronomical units (AU) of our Sun. The effects were long-lasting and we can see evidence of the visitor’s fleeting encounter throughout the Solar System.
Continue reading “A Stellar Flyby Jumbled Up the Outer Solar System”