Space and astronomy news
Even though our Sun is now a solitary star, it still has siblings somewhere in the Milky Way. Stars form in massive clouds of gas called Molecular Clouds. When the Sun formed about five billion years ago, other stars would’ve formed from the same cloud, creating a star cluster.
How many other stars formed in the cluster?
Continue reading “How Many Stars Formed Together With the Sun in Our Stellar Nebula?”
In a recent study published in Nature Communications, an international team of researchers led by Stanford University used artificial intelligence (AI) to examine the formation of sand ripples and sand dunes of two distinct sizes on Mars. These formations might help scientists better understand Mars’ atmospheric history through examining the fossilized forms of these aeolian (windblown) structures using statistical analyses.
Continue reading “Mars Has Bizarre Dunes Thanks to its Low Atmospheric Pressure and Strange Winds”
It’s winter here on Earth, for those living in the northern hemisphere. This means snow, rain, colder temperatures, and all the other things we associate with “the festive season.” Much the same is true for Mars (aka. “Earth’s Twin”), which is also experiencing winter in its northern hemisphere right now. This means colder temperatures, especially around the polar regions where it can get as low as -123 °C (-190 °F), as well as ice, snow, frost, and the expansion of the polar ice caps – which are composed of both water ice and frozen carbon dioxide (“dry ice”).
While Mars does not experience snowfall the same way Earth does, seasonal change results in some very interesting phenomena. Thanks to the many robotic explorers NASA and other space agencies have sent to Mars in the past fifty years, scientists have been able to get a close-up look at these phenomena. These include the Viking orbiters and landers that studied the planet in the 1970s (with groundbreaking results) to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity), and the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers exploring the surface today.
Continue reading “Seen From Space: Sand Dunes on Mars Covered by Frost”
Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere does more than provide the foundation for complex life. The oxygen in the atmosphere is so reactive that it readily combines with other chemical elements. Together, they form important ores like iron oxides and manganese oxides found in the Earth’s crust. So, when rovers spotted manganese oxides on Mars, scientists interpreted them as clues to Mars’ earlier atmosphere: it must have contained oxygen.
But a new study puts the brakes on that idea.
Continue reading “Minerals Could Form on Mars Without an Oxygen-Rich Atmosphere”
Efforts to create a memorial celebrating the legacy of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played a pointy-eared alien named Spock on “Star Trek,” have shifted to warp speed nearly eight years after his death.
A six-figure contribution from Rich Miner, the co-founder of Android, is energizing the campaign to create an illuminated 20-foot-high sculpture depicting Spock’s famous “Live Long and Prosper” hand gesture. The sculpture would be placed at Boston’s Museum of Science, near the West End neighborhood where Nimoy grew up.
Nimoy’s daughter, Julie Nimoy, and her husband David Knight are working with the museum to hit a $500,000 fundraising goal for the project. Thanks to Miner’s contribution, Knight said that the stainless-steel monument, designed and created by sculptor David Phillips, could begin taking shape as early as this year.
Continue reading “Spock-tacular! Tech Pioneer Boosts Plan for Leonard Nimoy Memorial”
The second Moon race is in full swing, with the world’s two big superpowers angling to score a new set of firsts on the lunar surface. NASA’s Artemis program recently clocked up its first success with the splashdown of Orion, but China is looking to take the lead when it comes to setting up a fully-fledged lunar research station. One of the first steps in that process – figuring out where to put it. That is what a new paper attempts to quantify, and it comes up with a practical solution – the south pole.
Continue reading “China is Considering Where to Build a Lunar Research Station”
Microwaves are useful for more than just heating up leftovers. They can also make landing pads on other worlds – at least according to research released by a consortium of scientists at the University of Central Florida, Arizona State University, and Cislune, a private company. Their research shows how a combination of sorting the lunar soil and then blasting it with microwaves can create a landing pad for future rockets on the Moon – and save any surrounding buildings from being blasted by 10,000 kph dust particles.
Continue reading “Want to Build Structures on the Moon? Just Blast the Regolith With Microwaves”
Some of the most useful discoveries about distant objects take time to complete. For example, several generations of planetary scientists have been studying the clouds of Jupiter since the late 1970s. Their observations focused on the planet’s upper troposphere. The results show unexpected patterns in how the temperatures of Jupiter’s belts and zones change over time.
Continue reading “An Ongoing Study of Jupiter’s Cloudtops Has Been Going on for 40 Years”
Throughout the Solar System, planets and moons bear the scars of a past fraught with collisions. The Moon, Mercury, and Mars are so scarred from these impacts that craters overlap one another on their surfaces. Earth was subject to the same bombardment, though most of its impact scars disappeared over time due to active geology.
But some are still visible, and we know how catastrophic some of these impacts were for life.
Continue reading “Should Planetary Defence Take Center Stage?”
Water on the Moon has been a hot topic in the research world lately. Since its first unambiguous discovery back in 2008. Since then, findings of it have ramped up, with relatively high concentration levels being discovered, especially near the polar regions, particularly in areas constantly shrouded in shadow. Chang’e 5, China’s recent sample return mission, didn’t land in one of those permanently shadowed areas. Still, it did return soil samples that were at a much higher latitude than any that had been previously collected. Now, a new study shows that those soil samples contain water and that the Sun’s solar wind directly impacted that water.
Continue reading “The Solar Wind is Creating Water on the Surface of the Moon”