Universe Today

December 6, 2022December 6, 2022 by Evan Gough

Will We Ever Go Back to Explore the Ice Giants? Yes, If We Keep the Missions Simple and Affordable

Uranus and Neptune are begging to be visited, but expensive missions to visit them may never be approved. Image Credits: (L) By NASA – http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA18182, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121128532. (R) By Justin Cowart – https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/29347980845/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82476611

It’s been over 35 years since a spacecraft visited Uranus and Neptune. That was Voyager 2, and it only did flybys. Will we ever go back? There are discoveries waiting to be made on these fascinating ice giants and their moons.

But complex missions to Mars and the Moon are eating up budgets and shoving other endeavours aside.

A new paper shows how we can send spacecraft to Uranus and Neptune cheaply and quickly without cutting into Martian and Lunar missions.

December 6, 2022December 7, 2022 by Seth Lockman

A new Hubble Image Reveals a Shredded Star in a Nearby Galaxy

The latest composite image of supernova remnant DEM L 190, released in November 2022. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Kulkarni, Y. Chu

The Hubble Space Telescope, to which we owe our current estimates for the age of the universe and the first detection of organic matter on an exoplanet, is very much doing science and still alive. It’s latest masterpiece remixes an old hit – apparently a growing trend in space science as well as space music.

December 6, 2022December 6, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Evidence of a Megatsunami on Mars

Mars panorama of an plain scoured by an ancient megatsunami. The image comes from Viking 1. Courtesy NASA.

Things were pretty wet back on Mars about three and a half billion years ago. You wouldn’t know that by looking at the planet today. But, would you believe a megatsunami happened there? It turns out that not one, but two of these rogue waves happened there some 3.4 billion years ago.

December 6, 2022December 6, 2022 by Andy Tomaswick

Not Just Stars. Gaia Mapped a Diverse and Shifting Universe of Variable Objects

We’ve reported on Gaia’s incredible data-collection abilities in the past. Recently, it released DR3, its latest data set, with over 1.8 billion objects in it. That’s a lot of data to sift through, and one of the most effective ways to do so is through machine learning. A group of researchers did just that by using a supervised learning algorithm to classify a particular type of object found in the data set. The result is one of the world’s most comprehensive catalogs of the type of astronomical object known as variables.

December 6, 2022December 6, 2022 by David Dickinson

Mars at Opposition 2022: The Full Moon Occults Mars Wednesday Night

A rare event transpires Wednesday night, as the Full Moon occults Mars near opposition.

Have you checked out Mars lately? The Red Planet currently rides high to the east at dusk, rising as the Sun sets. We call this opposition season, the biannual span when Mars passes closest to the Earth and offers observers optimal views of the planet. Mars opposition 2022 is special however, as three events converge in one night: Mars at opposition, the Moon reaches Full, and the Moon occults (passes in front of) Mars, all on the evening/morning of Wednesday/Thursday, December 7th/8th.

December 5, 2022December 5, 2022 by Scott Alan Johnston

Construction Begins on the Square Kilometer Array

Artist's Impression of SKA-Low. credit: SKAO/DISR

At twin ground-breaking ceremonies today in South Africa and Australia, project leaders formally marked the start of construction on what will be the largest radio telescope ever built. Dubbed the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO) – referring to the total area the antennas and dishes will cover when complete – the telescope is not a single detector but rather a collection of them, connected across two continents using a technique known as interferometry (the same technique used by the Event Horizon Telescope, which took the first ever photograph of a black hole in 2019).

December 5, 2022February 8, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

SOFIA Fails to Find Phosphine in the Atmosphere of Venus, But the Debate Continues

The spectral data from SOFIA overlain atop this image of Venus from NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft is what the researchers observed in their study, showing the intensity of light from Venus at different wavelengths. If a significant amount of phosphine were present in Venus’s atmosphere, there would be dips in the graph at the four locations labeled “PH3,” similar to but less pronounced than those seen on the two ends. Credit: Venus: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Spectra: Cordiner et al.

The on-again, off-again detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus appears to be off-again – for now. The latest study, based on data from the SOFIA telescope, reveals that the flying observatory didn’t see any signs of phosphine. According to the results, if there is any phosphine present in Venus’s atmosphere at all, it’s a maximum of about 0.8 parts per billion, much smaller than the initial estimate.

However, the team that made the initial detection of phosphine, which was announced in 2020, disagrees with the researchers’ interpretation of the SOFIA data.

December 5, 2022December 5, 2022 by Evan Gough

Hubble Spots Two Open Clusters. One is Also an Emission Nebula

The open cluster NGC 1858, seen in this Hubble image, contains stars of different ages. Image Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Gilmore (University of Cambridge); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Open star clusters are groups of stars in loosely-bound gravitational associations. The stars are further apart than the stars in their cousins, the globular clusters. The weak gravity from the loose clusters means open clusters take on irregular shapes. They usually contain only a few thousand stars.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of two clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

December 5, 2022December 5, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Ground Telescopes can Adapt to Satellite Megaconstellations if They get Accurate Telemetry Data

starlink satellite streaks — An image of the NGC 5353/4 galaxy group made with a telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, USA on the night of Saturday 25 May 2019. The diagonal lines running across the image are trails of reflected light left part of a Starlink satellite constellation.

The growing population of communication satellites such as Starlink and OneWeb is posing challenges for Earth-based astronomy facilities. Since such constellations will not be going away soon, astronomers want to find ways to work around the issue.

It’s not going to be easy, considering that thousands and thousands of low-Earth satellites (LEOsats) could potentially be placed in low-Earth orbit in the next few years. So, what are the solutions?

December 5, 2022December 5, 2022 by Evan Gough

Want to Colonize Space? Unleash the Power of Microbes

Researchers at Penn State University are developing a way to use microbes to turn human waste into food on long space voyages. Image: Yuri Gorby, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — Microbes play a critical role on Earth. Understanding how they react to space travel is crucial to ensuring astronaut health. Credit: Yuri Gorby, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

If space colonization is in our future, we’ll have to use the resources available there. But we won’t be able to bring our established industrial methods and processes from Earth into space. Transporting heavy mining machinery to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else in space is not feasible. And each of those environments is wildly different from Earth. We’ll need novel approaches to solve all of the problems facing us, and the approaches will have to be sustainable.

Terrestrial microbes are the foundation of Earth’s biosphere, and they could play an outsized role in space colonization.