Space and astronomy news
Jupiter’s moon Europa is a prime candidate in the search for life. The frozen moon has a subsurface ocean, and evidence indicates it’s warm, salty, and rich in life-enabling chemistry.
New research shows that the moon is pulling oxygen down below its icy shell, where it could be feeding simple life.
Continue reading “Europa Could be Pulling Oxygen Down Below the Ice to Feed Life”
When the James Webb Space Telescope aims at exoplanet atmospheres, it’ll use spectroscopy to identify chemical elements. One of the things it’s looking for is methane, a chemical compound that can indicate the presence of life.
Methane is a compelling biosignature. Finding a large amount of methane in an exoplanet’s atmosphere might be our most reliable indication that life’s at work there. There are abiotic sources of methane, but for the most part, methane comes from life.
But to understand methane as a potential biosignature, we need to understand it in a planetary context. A new research letter aims to do that.
Continue reading “It’s Not Conclusive, But Methane is Probably the Best Sign of Life on Exoplanets”
One of the key aspects of galactic evolution is star production. On a basic level, stars form within a galaxy’s gas and dust all the time, and where they form can help determine a galaxy’s shape and size. But there seems to be a sweet point when star production in a galaxy is particularly strong. Galaxies often have a period of rapid star production which then drops off. Astronomers are still trying to understand what causes this drop-off.
Continue reading “Supermassive Black Holes Shut Down Star Formation”
After much speculation and concern the past month whether Russia would allow a US astronaut to ride back to Earth in a Soyuz spacecraft, Mark Vande Hei and two cosmonauts landed safely in Kazakhstan on March 30.
Mostly lost amid the political tensions due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vande Hei quietly set a record for the longest single spaceflight by an American, at 355 days. Vande Hei eclipsed astronaut Scott Kelly’s seemingly more heralded long-duration mission on the International Space Station in 2015, when he and Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko spent 340 days in space. Cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov also spent 355 days on his first spaceflight, along with Vande Hei.
Continue reading “NASA Astronaut and Cosmonauts Land Safely Together in Kazakhstan”
A star that sounds as if it came from “The Lord of the Rings” now marks one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s farthest frontiers: The fuzzy point of light, known as Earendel, has been dated to a mere 900 million years after the Big Bang and appears to represent the farthest-out individual star seen to date.
Based on its redshift value of 6.2, Earendel’s light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, astronomers report in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. That distance mark outshines Hubble’s previous record-holder for a single star, which registered a redshift of 1.5 and is thought to have existed when the universe was 4 billion years old.
The newly reported record comes with caveats. First of all, we’re talking here about a single star rather than star clusters or galaxies. Hubble has seen agglomerations of stars that go back farther in time.
“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” lead author Brian Welch, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, said today in a news release. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.”
A close look at the arc turned up several bright spots, but the characteristics of the light coming from Earendel pointed to a high redshift, which translates into extreme distance. The higher the redshift, the faster the source of the light is receding from us in an ever-more-quickly expanding universe.
Continue reading “A New Record! Hubble Detects an Individual Star From a Time When the Universe Was Less Than a Billion Years Old”
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter snaps an amazing image, en route to its first close pass near the Sun.
You’ve never seen the Sun like this. Earlier this month, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter captured an amazing view of our host star.
The images were snapped on March 7th, as Solar Orbiter passed directly between the Earth and the Sun. There was an explicit reason for this, as the science team wanted to calibrate and compare the images with Earth-based and missions in Earth orbit, to include the Inouye solar observatory, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), located at the Lagrange (L1) Sun-Earth point.
Continue reading “ESA’s Solar Orbiter Takes a Ludicrously High Resolution Image of the Sun”
NASA’s Perseverance Rover is busy exploring Jezero Crater on Mars. Part of its mission is to collect samples for retrieval by a future mission. NASA and the ESA haven’t determined where the sample return mission will land yet.
That depends on the Perseverance mission and how it spends the rest of its time on Mars. But we know of one possible—albeit ambitious—landing spot: just west of Jezero Crater.
Continue reading “This is Where the Mars Sample Return Mission Could be Landing”
On Nov. 16th, 1974, the most powerful signal ever beamed into space was broadcast from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Peurto Rico. Designed by famed SETI researcher Frank Drake (creator of the Drake Equation) and famed science communicator Carl Sagan, the broadcast was intended to demonstrate humanity’s level of technological achievement. Forty-eight years later, the Arecibo Message remains the most well-known attempt to Message Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI).
To mark the occasion, an international team made of researchers led by Jonathan H. Jiang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has come up with a new signal! Known as The Beacon in the Galaxy (BITG) message, this updated signal combines aspects of the original Arecibo Message with every METI attempt made to date – like the Pioneer Plaques, the Voyager Golden Records, and the Evpatoria Transmission Messages (ETMs).
Continue reading “Astronomers Come up With a New Message to let the Aliens Know we’re Here”
The Milky Way is older than astronomers thought, or part of it is. A newly-published study shows that part of the disk is two billion years older than we thought. The region, called the thick disk, started forming only 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
Continue reading “Part of the Milky Way Is Much Older Than Previously Believed”
There are a lot of amazing things in our Universe and a black hole is one of the most unknown. We don’t know for certain what happens inside a black hole and even the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe is still being worked out. A group of physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have tackled this question and have come up with a possible solution to the mystery. The nature of dark matter may be resolved by their theory as well.
Continue reading “Supermassive Black Holes Could Have Formed Directly in the Early Universe”“The yet unanswered question of the nature of Dark Matter, and how primordial supermassive Black Holes could grow so fast in such a short amount of time are two pressing open questions in physics and astrophysics. Finding a common explanation for these observations is desirable and could provide us with insights into the inner workings of the Universe.”
Julia Gehrlein – Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory