Universe Today

January 17, 2023February 7, 2023 by Matt Williams

New Nuclear Rocket Design to Send Missions to Mars in Just 45 Days

Artist's concept of a Bimodal Nuclear Thermal Rocket in Low Earth Orbit. Credit: NASA

We live in an era of renewed space exploration, where multiple agencies are planning to send astronauts to the Moon in the coming years. This will be followed in the next decade with crewed missions to Mars by NASA and China, who may be joined by other nations before long. These and other missions that will take astronauts beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the Earth-Moon system require new technologies, ranging from life support and radiation shielding to power and propulsion. And when it comes to the latter, Nuclear Thermal and Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NTP/NEP) is a top contender!

NASA and the Soviet space program spent decades researching nuclear propulsion during the Space Race. A few years ago, NASA reignited its nuclear program for the purpose of developing bimodal nuclear propulsion – a two-part system consisting of an NTP and NEP element – that could enable transits to Mars in 100 days. As part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program for 2023, NASA selected a nuclear concept for Phase I development. This new class of bimodal nuclear propulsion system uses a “wave rotor topping cycle” and could reduce transit times to Mars to just 45 days.

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023 by Evan Gough

A Black Hole is Savoring its Meal, Feeding on the Same Star Over and Over Again

This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star, being devoured and torn to shreds by a supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Something extraordinary happens about every 10,000 to 100,000 years in galaxies like the Milky Way. An unwary star approaches the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the galaxy’s center and is torn apart by the SMBH’s overpowering gravity. Astronomers call the phenomenon a tidal disruption event (TDE.)

Usually, a TDE spells doom for the star as its gas is torn away into the black hole’s accretion ring, causing a bright flaring visible for hundreds of millions of light years. But researchers have found one black hole that’s playing with its food.

January 17, 2023January 11, 2023 by Paul M. Sutter

Using the Shadows of Clusters to Measure the Universe

Artist's impression of a quasar and a relativistic jet emanating from the center. Credit: NASA

Astronomers have begun using a sophisticated suite of simulations, an advanced machine learning model of the formation of galaxy clusters, and an exotic relationship between galaxies to understand the origins of dark matter and dark energy.

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023 by Evan Gough

Worlds Bustling With Plantlife Should Shine in a Detectable Wavelength of Infrared

Artist's rendering of a super-Earth-type exoplanet, TOI 1452 b. Credit: Benoit Gougeon, Université de Montréal.

Future historians might look back on this time and call it the ‘exoplanet age.’ We’ve found over 5,000 exoplanets, and we’ll keep finding more. Next, we’ll move beyond just finding them, and we’ll turn our efforts to finding biosignatures, the special chemical fingerprints that living processes imprint on exoplanet atmospheres.

But there’s more to biosignatures than atmospheric chemistry. On a planet with lots of plant life, light can be a biosignature, too.

January 16, 2023January 16, 2023 by Laurence Tognetti

NASA’s Psyche Mission is Back on. It’ll Launch Towards its Metal Asteroid Target Later This Year

A June 2020 artist illustration of NASA's Psyche spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University)

NASA’s Psyche mission is back on track for launch and is now scheduled for a potential October 2023 launch date, according to an October 2022 statement from NASA. This comes after missing its originally planned launch date between August and October of 2022, and becoming subject to an independent review board, whose results were announced in November 2022.

January 16, 2023July 28, 2023 by Matt Williams

A Hybrid Fission/Fusion Reactor Could be the Best way to get Through the ice on Europa

This reprocessed colour view of Jupiter’s moon Europa was made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In the coming years, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will send two robotic missions to explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. These are none other than NASA’s Europa Clipper and the ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which will launch in 2024, and 2023 (respectively). Once they arrive by the 2030s, they will study Europa’s surface with a series of flybys to determine if its interior ocean could support life. These will be the first astrobiology missions to an icy moon in the outer Solar System, collectively known as “Ocean Worlds.”

One of the many challenges for these missions is how to mine through the thick icy crusts and obtain samples from the interior ocean for analysis. According to a proposal by Dr. Theresa Benyo (a physicist and the principal investigator of the lattice confinement fusion project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center), a possible solution is to use a special reactor that relies on fission and fusion reactions. This proposal was selected for Phase I development by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which includes a $12,500 grant.

January 16, 2023January 11, 2023 by Paul M. Sutter

How did Dimorphos Form?

NASA's DART spacecraft is due to collide with the smaller body of the Didymos binary asteroid system on Sept. 26th, 2022. Credit: ESA

The otherwise unremarkable double asteroid of Didymos and Dimorphos made headlines as the target of NASA’s successful Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission. With new details about the system emerging, astronomers have put together a hypothesis of how this strange double asteroid came to be.

January 16, 2023January 18, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

Why Does the Butterfly Nebula Look Like This?

The Butterfly Nebula, as see by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

The Butterfly Nebula is changing, and astronomers are puzzled as to why these changes are occurring. Observations of this planetary nebula show dramatic changes in the butterfly’s ‘wings’ in just 11 years.

“I’ve been comparing Hubble images for years and I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Bruce Balick, a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Washington.

January 15, 2023January 15, 2023 by Scott Alan Johnston

Cosmic Noon was Billions of Years ago, When Many Galaxies Were Filled With Star-Forming Nebulae Like This

You’re looking at NGC 346, a star cluster 210 light years away that is energetically pumping out brand new stars from a dense cloud of gas and dust. Between 10 and 11 billion years ago, nearly all galaxies in the Universe underwent an era of intense star formation similar to what we see in NGC 346. This flurry of stellar birth is poetically nicknamed cosmic noon. Since then, star formation in the Universe has gradually dwindled, though it still blazes away in small pockets. By studying NGC 346 and other clusters like it, we can learn more about the era of cosmic noon and the evolution of galaxies.

To that end, researchers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam infrared camera at NGC 346 last year, and they announced their preliminary findings at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting on January 11, 2023.

January 15, 2023January 15, 2023 by Laurence Tognetti

Many of the World’s Greatest Observatories Suffer from Some Light Pollution

Night sky in the African country of Namibia. (Credit: Fabio Falchi; Licence Type: Attribution (CC BY 4.0))

In a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an international team of researchers examined the levels of light pollution at astronomical observatories from around the world to better understand how artificial light is impacting night sky observations in hopes of taking steps to reduce it. But how important is it to preserve the scientific productivity of astronomical observatories from the dangers of light pollution, as noted in the study’s opening statement?