Space and astronomy news
Astrophotography is a challenging art. Beyond the usual skill set of understanding things such as light exposure, color balance, and the quirks of your kit, there is the fact that stars are faint and they move.
Continue reading “Astronaut Don Pettit is Serious, He Rigged up Astrophotography Gear on the ISS”
We’ve already seen the success of the Ingenuity probe on Mars. The first aircraft to fly on another world set off on its maiden voyage in April 2021 and has now completed 72 flights. Now a team of engineers are taking the idea one step further and investigating ways that drones can be released from satellites in orbit and explore the atmosphere without having to land. The results are positive and suggest this could be a cost effective way to explore alien atmospheres.
Continue reading “Drone Test Flights Are Being Tested for Flights on Alien Worlds”
Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992, thousands more have been discovered. 40 light years away, one such system of exoplanets was discovered orbiting a star known as Trappist-1. Studies using the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed that one of the planets, Trappist-1 b has a crust that seems to be changing. Geological activity and weathering are a likely cause and if the latter, it suggests the exoplanet has an atmosphere too.
Continue reading “One of the Most Interesting Exoplanets Just Got Even More Interesting!”
Even if you knew nothing about astronomy, you’d understand that exploding stars are forceful and consequential events. How could they not be? Supernovae play a pivotal role in the Universe with their energetic, destructive demises.
There are different types of supernovae exploding throughout the Universe, with different progenitors and different remnants. The Zwicky Transient Facility has detected 100,000 supernovae and classified 10,000 of them.
Continue reading “Zwicky Classifies More Than 10,000 Exploding Stars”
It seems that we are completely alone in the universe. But simple reasoning suggests that there should be an abundance of alien civilizations. Maybe they’re all out there, but they are keeping their distance. Welcome to the zoo (hypothesis).
Continue reading “What is the Zoo Hypothesis?”
When it comes to our modern society and the many crises we face, there is little doubt that fusion power is the way of the future. The technology not only offers abundant power that could solve the energy crisis, it does so in a clean and sustainable way. At least as long as our supplies of deuterium (H2) and helium-3 hold up. In a recent study, a team of researchers considered how evidence of deuterium-deuterium (DD) fusion could be used as a potential technosignature in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Continue reading “A New Study Suggests How we Could Find Advanced Civilizations that Ran Out of Fusion Fuel”
Astronomers have spent decades trying to understand how galaxies grow so large. One piece of the puzzle is spheroids, also known as galactic bulges. Spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies have different morphologies, but they both have spheroids. This is where most of their stars are and, in fact, where most stars in the Universe reside. Since most stars reside in spheroids, understanding them is critical to understanding how galaxies grow and evolve.
New research focused on spheroids has brought them closer than ever to understanding how galaxies become so massive.
Continue reading “We Might Finally Know How Galaxies Grow So Large”
Imagine you’ve just gotten to Mars as part of the first contingent of settlers. Your first challenge: build a long-term habitat using local materials. Those might include water from the polar caps mixed with specific surface soils. They might even require some very personal contributions—your blood, sweat, and tears. Using such in situ materials is the challenge a team of Iranian engineers studied in a research project looking at local materials on Mars.
Continue reading “Building Concrete on Mars From Local Materials”
This past year saw some significant solar activity. This was especially true during the month of May, which saw more than 350 solar storms, solar flares, and geomagnetic storms. This included the strongest solar storm in 20 years that produced aurorae at far lower latitudes than usual and the strongest solar flare observed since December 2019. Given the threat they pose to radio communications, power grids, navigation systems, and spacecraft and astronauts, numerous agencies actively monitor the Sun’s behavior to learn more about its long-term behavior.
However, astronomers have not yet determined whether the Sun can produce “superflares” or how often they might occur. While tree rings and samples of millennia-old glacial ice are effective at records of the most powerful superflares, they are not effective ways to determine their frequency, and direct measurements of solar activity have only been available since the Space Age. In a recent study, an international team of researchers adopted a new approach. By analyzing Kepler data on tens of thousands of Sun-like stars, they estimate that stars like ours produce superflares about once a century.
Continue reading “New Research Indicates the Sun may be More Prone to Flares Than we Thought”
In 2018, NASA mission planners selected the Jezero Crater as the future landing site of the Perseverance rover. This crater was a natural choice, as it was once an ancient lake bed, as evidenced by the delta fan at its western edge. On Earth, these features form in the presence of flowing water that gradually deposits sediment over time. Combined with the fact that the Jezero Crater’s delta feature is rich in clays, this makes the region a prime target to search for biosignatures – evidence of past (and maybe present) life on Mars!
In recent news, NASA announced that the Perseverance rover had reached the top of Jezero Crater’s rim at a location the science team calls “Lookout Hill.” The rover spent the previous three and a half months climbing the rim, covering a distance of 500 vertical meters (1,640 vertical feet) and making science observations along the way. Now that it has crested the rim, Perseverance can begin what the mission team calls its “Northern Rim” campaign. Over the next year, the rover is expected to drive 6.4 km (4 mi) and visit up to four sites of interest where it will obtain geological samples.
Continue reading “NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reaches the Top Rim of the Jezero Crater”