Space and astronomy news
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”
Getting places in space quickly has been the goal of propulsion research for a long time. Rockets, our most common means of doing so, are great for providing lots of force but extraordinarily inefficient. Other options like electric propulsion and solar sailing are efficient but offer measly amounts of force, albeit for a long time. So scientists have long dreamed of a third method of propulsion – one that could provide enough force over a long enough time to power a crewed mission to another star in a single human lifetime. And that could theoretically happen using one of the rarest substances in the universe – antimatter.
Continue reading “Antimatter Propulsion Is Still Far Away, But It Could Change Everything”
Exomoons are a hot topic in the science community, as none have been confirmed with astronomers finding new and creative ways to identify them. But while astronomers have searched for exomoons orbiting exoplanets around single stars like our Sun, could exomoons exist around exoplanets orbiting binary stars? This is what a recent study submitted to The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from Tufts University investigated the statistical likelihood of exomoons orbiting exoplanets with two stars, also known as circumbinary planets (CBPs). This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand methods needed for identifying exomoons in a variety of exoplanetary systems.
Continue reading “Could Planets Orbiting Two Stars Have Moons?”
What was the Milky Way like billions of years ago? One way we can find out is by looking at the most distant galaxies in the observable Universe. Seeing those far galaxies is one goal of the James Webb Space Telescope. It has revealed some surprising facts about early galaxies, and now it is starting to reveal the story of our own.
Continue reading “Webb Weighs an Early Twin of the Milky Way”
Neutron stars are so named because in the simplest of models they are made of neutrons. They form when the core of a large star collapses, and the weight of gravity causes atoms to collapse. Electrons are squeezed together with protons so that the core becomes a dense sea of neutrons. But we now know that neutron stars aren’t just gravitationally bound neutrons. For one thing, neutrons are comprised of quarks, which have their own interactions both within and between neutrons. These interactions are extremely complex, so the details of a neutron star’s interior are something we don’t fully understand.
Continue reading “Do the Fastest Spinning Pulsars Contain Quark Matter?”