Universe Today

October 30, 2022October 30, 2022 by Laurence Tognetti

Will Enceladus finally answer, ‘Are we alone?’

We recently examined how and why the planet Mars could answer the longstanding question: Are we alone? There is evidence to suggest that it was once a much warmer and wetter world thanks to countless spacecraft, landers, and rovers having explored—and currently exploring—its atmosphere, surface, and interior. Here, we will examine another one of Saturn’s 83 moons, an icy world that spews geysers of water ice from giant fissures near its south pole, which is strong evidence for an interior ocean, and possibly life. Here, we will examine Enceladus.

October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

InSight Felt the Ground Shake From a Meteorite Impact on Mars

Insight detected earthquake caused by impact that crated this crater. — Boulder-sized blocks of water ice lie around an crater blasted out by a meteoroid on December 24, 2021. NASA's InSight lander measured the earthquake the impact caused. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.

The Mars InSight lander might be nearing the end of its life on the Red Planet, but its scientific data are still shaking up the planetary science community. That’s because it detected another Marsquake on December 24, 2021. It was a major shaker and generated surface waves that rippled across the crust of the planet. The data from that quake allowed science team members to get a better idea of the Martian crust’s structure.

October 29, 2022October 30, 2022 by Laurence Tognetti

Another Reason Red Dwarfs Might Be Bad for Life: No Asteroid Belts

In a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) investigated the potential for life on exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars, also known as red dwarfs, which are both smaller and cooler than our own Sun and is currently open for debate for their potential for life on their orbiting planetary bodies. The study examines how a lack of an asteroid belt might indicate a less likelihood for life on terrestrial worlds.

October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Another Version of the Pillars of Creation from Webb

The hits just keep on streaming back to Earth from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This time, arriving to help celebrate Hallowe’en, data from the MIRI mid-infrared instrument onboard JWST shows another view of the Pillars of Creation. Thousands of stars are embedded in those pillars, but many are “invisible” to MIRI.

October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Brian Koberlein

Not Just Gold. Colliding Neutron Stars Forge Strontium, Lanthanum, and Cerium

Artist’s conception of a neutron star merger. This process also creates heavy elements. Credit: Tohoku University

In the beginning, there was hydrogen and helium. Other than some traces of things such as lithium, that’s all the matter the big bang produced. Everything other than those two elements was largely produced by astrophysical rather than cosmological processes. The elements we see around us, those that comprise us, were mostly formed within the hearts of stars. They were created in the furnace of stellar cores, then cast into space when the star died. But there are a few elements that are created differently. The most common one is gold.

October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Anton Pozdnyakov

Monster Black Hole Found Near Earth, Starlink Hacked, Early Life Killed Mars

There’s a monster black hole in our backyard (astronomically speaking). Life could survive underground on Mars for hundreds of millions of years. Starlink was hacked and now works as GPS. Bad news for Arecibo.

October 28, 2022October 28, 2022 by Evan Gough

The Most Devastating Solar Storms in History are Scoured Into Tree Rings

Scientists study tree rings because they retain a record of climatic events and changes. They also record the Sun's activity. Image Credit: Rbreidbrown/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Trees are like sentinels that preserve a record of shifting climates. Their growth rings hold that history and dendrochronology studies those rings. Scientists can determine the exact ages of trees and correlate their growth with climatic and environmental changes.

But they also record the effects of more distant changes, including the Sun’s activity.

October 28, 2022October 28, 2022 by Matt Williams

NASA Announces the Team who'll be Studying UFO Data. It's a Pretty Impressive List

UFO encounter video — Cockpit video shows an anomalous aerial encounter in 2015. Credit: U.S Navy Video

In June, NASA announced that it had commissioned an independent study team to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) from a scientific perspective. Last week, NASA announced the members of the independent team that will study observed events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or natural phenomena. These sixteen individuals, a collection of scientists and researchers from premier institutions across the U.S., will analyze all possible data sources that could help NASA and other agencies learn more about this phenomenon.

October 28, 2022October 28, 2022 by Brian Koberlein

JWST Sees the Same Galaxy From Three Different Angles Thanks to a Gravitational Lens

This illustration shows how gravitational lensing works. The gravity of a large galaxy cluster is so strong, it bends, brightens and distorts the light of distant galaxies behind it. The scale has been greatly exaggerated; in reality, the distant galaxy is much further away and much smaller. Credit: NASA, ESA, L. Calcada

One of the great tragedies of the night sky is that we will never travel to much of what we see. We may eventually travel to nearby stars, and even distant reaches of our galaxy, but the limits of light speed and cosmic expansion make it impossible for us to travel beyond our local group. So we can only observe distant galaxies, and we can only observe them from our home in the universe. You might think that means we can only see one face of those galaxies, but thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope that isn’t entirely true.

October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

NASA is Mapping Giant Clouds of Methane Released by “Super-Emitters” Across the World

Methane super-emitters — This image shows a methane plume 2 miles (3 kilometers) long that NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation mission detected southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is much more effective at trapping hea... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Everybody’s heard of methane. It’s a major part of the atmosphere in places like Uranus and Neptune. On Earth, it’s also part of our atmosphere, where it works to warm things up. Some of it gets there from natural causes. But, a lot of it comes from industrial super-emitters and other human-caused processes. That’s not good because too much methane works, along with other greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide, or CO₂) to “over warm” our atmosphere.