Universe Today

June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by David Dickinson

BepiColombo’s Second Mercury Flyby

BepiColombo’s stunning close pass by Mercury on Thursday provides a prelude of what’s to come.

Welcome (briefly) to Mercury, with a planetary flyby hinting at more to come. The joint European Space Agency/Japanese Aerospace Agency’s BepiColombo spacecraft treated us to just that on Thursday, June 23^rd, passing just 200 kilometers from the surface of the innermost world at 9:44 Universal Time (UT). During that brief encounter, BepiColombo got a brief glimpse of its final destination.

June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by Andy Tomaswick

If Bacteria Drink Kombucha, They Stand a Better Chance of Survival on Mars

Tea is useful for all kinds of things, including caffeinating plenty of writers worldwide. There are also many varieties of it, some of which advocates claim to have superpowers regarding the health benefits they grant. Kombucha is one of those – originally thought to have originated in China, it has become adopted worldwide in no small part because of innumerable, dubious “health benefits” of the drink. But now, scientists did find one potential health benefit, at least to bacteria – eating kombucha culture would help them survive on Mars.

June 23, 2022June 23, 2022 by Matt Williams

South Korea is now a Space-Faring Nation With the Orbital Launch of Their Homegrown Nuri Rocket

It looks like South Korea just joined the most exclusive club on the planet! With the launch of its Korea Satellite Launch Vehicle II (KSLV-II aka. the “Nuri” rocket) on June 21^st, the country became the latest nation to demonstrate its ability to build and launch its own rockets to space. This was the Nuri’s second launch attempt, which took place eight months after the first attempt failed to deliver a test satellite to orbit back. This time, the rocket managed to reach space and deliver a payload of satellites, making South Korea the eleventh nation to launch from its soil and the seventh to launch commercial satellites.

June 23, 2022June 23, 2022 by Andy Tomaswick

Do Ancient Coins Record the Supernova of 1054?

SN 1054 was one of the most spectacular astronomical events of all time. The supernova explosion eventually formed what is today known as the M1 – the Crab Nebula. But in 1054 AD, the year it occurred, it was an ultrabright star in the sky and one of only eight recorded supernovae in the history of the Milky Way. However, it was only noted by half of the literate world. Primarily written about in the East, especially in China, SN 1054 was almost wholly absent from the Western record. Except, potentially, for a subtle hint at it in the most unlikely of places – some Byzantine coins.

June 23, 2022June 23, 2022 by Matt Williams

64 Radio Telescopes Come Together to act as a Single Giant Observatory

Aerial image of the South African MeerKAT radio telescope, part of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). Credit: SKA

Located in the Northern Cape of South Africa, the MeerKAT telescope consists of 64 powerful radio antennas dedicated to probing the mysteries of the Universe. This facility is a precursor to the future Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO), which will consist of MeerKAT and the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) in South Africa and the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Australia. A primary aim of the SKAO is to understand the matter content of the Universe and what mechanisms are driving its evolution and expansion.

The best way to do this is to observe the structure of the Universe on the largest of scales, where astronomers can observe the distribution of galaxies, the nature of gravity, and the role of dark matter and dark energy. To this end, an international team of astronomers has combined the power of MeetKAT’s 64 radio telescopes to detect faint signatures of neutral hydrogen gas across cosmological scales. The resulting accuracy and sensitivity provide a demonstration of what the SKAO will be able to achieve in the near future.

June 23, 2022June 23, 2022 by Evan Gough

Plenty of Examples That Giant Galaxies Like the Milky Way Formed Through Mergers

The Universe’s giant galaxies pose a thorny problem for astronomers. The galaxies have grown large somehow, and the only things that can make a galaxy giant are probably other galaxies. So mergers must have played an important role.

Astronomers have known about galaxy mergers for a long time, but the process is still mysterious. A new study based on ten years of work presents observations and direct measurements of the galaxy merger process that remove some of the mystery.

June 22, 2022June 23, 2022 by Matt Williams

Chinese Astronomers Detect an Interesting (But NOT Alien) Signal With the FAST Radio Observatory

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) has just finished construction in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Credit: FAST

The 500-Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), (aka. Tianyan, “Eye of Heaven”), is the largest radio observatory in the world. Since the observatory became operational in January 2020, this facility has made significant contributions to radio astronomy and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In particular, the observatory has been instrumental in detecting Fast Radio Burts (FRBs) and other cosmic phenomena that could be (but probably aren’t) possible indications of extraterrestrial communications.

Last week, while sifting through FAST data, the China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group (CECRG) from Beijing Normal University revealed that they discovered several signals that might be artificial in origin (a possible indication of an advanced civilization). These signals consisted of narrow-band electromagnetic radio transmission and were considered one of the best candidates for an extraterrestrial signal. Ah, but there’s a snag. According to subsequent news releases, those radio transmissions were apparently from Earth!

June 22, 2022June 22, 2022 by Nancy Atkinson

This Tiny Dot is one of the Biggest, Most Active Galaxy Superclusters Ever Seen. It Was Already a Monster Shortly After the Big Bang

A false-color image of the far-infrared emission from a massive protocluster of galaxies (in the circle) dating from the epoch about 1.4 billion years after the big bang. Astronomers have completed deep optical and infrared observations of the complex and concluded that the star formation processes at work, although exceptionally active, generally seem to follow the same processes seen in our galaxy. Credit: NASA/ESA/Herschel; Miller et al.

A newly discovered supercluster of galaxies is so distant that astronomers say its light has been traveling for over twelve billion years to reach telescopes on Earth. But this cluster, named SPT2349 ?56 is gigantic, and so old that it is actually classified as a proto-cluster of galaxies, meaning it might be one of the earliest large clusters of galaxies in our Universe. It is also one of the most actively star-forming proto-clusters known.

June 22, 2022June 22, 2022 by Brian Koberlein

Another few Weeks of Observations Could Tell us if the Wow! Signal Repeats

A new study from the Center for Planetary Science claims that a comet may be responsible fr the famous Wow! Signal. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In the decades-long search for extraterrestrial intelligence, there has never been confirmed evidence of an alien signal. There have, however, been a few tantalizing mysteries. Perhaps the greatest of these is known as the Wow Signal.

June 22, 2022June 22, 2022 by Laurence Tognetti

Charon’s Red Cap at its North Pole? We Might Have an Answer

Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, started off as a beautiful, smooth red grape until someone came along, mostly peeled it, tried to smoosh it, then just gave up and walked away, leaving the poor moon to look like the absolute travesty that it is. Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly what happened, but Charon just looks like a mess and scientists want to know why. Never mind its smooshed equator, but what’s the deal with its red cap? Where did it come from and why is it red?