Universe Today

May 8, 2022May 8, 2022 by Brian Koberlein

A Supermassive Black Hole Just Flipped its Entire Magnetic Field

Artist illustration of the supermassive black hole in 1ES 1927+654 before the flare. Credit: NASA/Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet

Black holes are powerful cosmic engines. They provide the energy behind quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGNs). This is due to the interaction of matter with its powerful gravitational and magnetic fields.

Technically, a black hole doesn’t have a magnetic field on its own, but the dense plasma surrounding the black hole as an accretion disk does. As the plasma swirls around the black hole, the charged particles within it generate an electrical current and magnetic field. The direction of the plasma flow doesn’t change spontaneously, so one would imagine the magnetic field is very stable. So imagine the surprise of astronomers when they saw evidence that a black hole’s magnetic field had undergone a magnetic reversal.

May 8, 2022May 5, 2022 by Paul M. Sutter

Volcanoes May Have Killed Venus with a Runaway Greenhouse, and Almost the Earth Too

space dust telescope galaxy — Photo by Clive Kim on Pexels.com

Continue reading “Volcanoes May Have Killed Venus with a Runaway Greenhouse, and Almost the Earth Too”

May 7, 2022May 7, 2022 by Nancy Atkinson

This is a Dust Avalanche on Mars

HiRISE Spots Slope Streaks Fanning Out on Mars Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

For decades, scientists have observed dark landslides called slope streaks on Mars. First seen by the Viking orbiters in the 1970s, every orbiter mission since has observed them, but the mechanism behind the slope streaks has been hotly debated: could they be caused by water activity on the Red Planet, or are they the result of some sort of dry mechanics?

Turns out, the leading candidate is “dry.” But scientists with the Mars Odyssey mission have verified an additional culprit behind the slope streaks: carbon dioxide frost.

May 7, 2022May 7, 2022 by Allen Versfeld

Traveling the Solar System with Pulsar Navigation

A pulsar with its magnetic field lines illustrated. The beams emitting from the poles are what washes over our detectors as the dead star spins.

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found a way for travelers through the Solar System to work out exactly where they are, without needing help from ground-based observers on Earth. They have refined the pulsar navigation technique, which uses X-ray signals from distant pulsars, in a way similar to how GPS uses signals from a constellation of specialized satellites, to calculate an exact position .

May 7, 2022May 6, 2022 by Paul M. Sutter

What Does Micrometeoroid Damage do to Gossamer Structures Like Webb’s Sunshield?

Sunshield test unit on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is unfurled for the first time at Northrup Grumman. Credit: NASA

Tiny little bullets flood the solar system, each micrometeoroid a potential hazard. New research has found that the James Webb Space Telescope’s thin sunshields, and future inflatable spacecraft, may be at risk.

May 7, 2022May 7, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

A Giant Galaxy has been Unwinding its Neighbor for 400 Million Years

The interacting galaxy pair NGC 1512 and NGC 1510 take center stage in this image from the Dark Energy Camera, a state-of-the art wide-field imager on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Courtesy NOIRLab.

Sometimes you have to just sit back and marvel at a particularly gorgeous view of a galaxy interaction. When these giant space cities merge with each other, wild and crazy things happen—a sort of “Galaxies Gone Wild” scenario. Take this pair, for example. We see them locked together in a cosmic dance that has lasted for not quite a half-billion years. With each turn on the intergalactic dance floor, they change each other permanently. Eventually, they’ll combine to make one giant galaxy.

May 6, 2022May 6, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Lunar Samples Have Been in the Deep Freeze for 50 Years. NASA Finally has the Right Technology to Study Them Properly

Curators handling lunar rocks take extreme care to keep these materials from contamination as they work with them in cold boxes using gloves and protective gear. This frozen Apollo 17 sample is being studied in a nitrogen-purged glove box at NASA Johnson Space Flight Center. Courtesy NASA/Robert Markowitz.

Ever wonder what happened to all those collections of rocks and dust the Apollo astronauts brought back from the Moon? Some of those lunar samples were studied right away. Others made their way into a few museums and science centers and the desks of world leaders. Still others landed in storage at NASA Johnson’s Space Center in Houston. Some got stored at room temperature while others were put into a deep freeze. The idea was to preserve any traces of gases or water or possibly organic materials on them. Now, some of these lunar samples are at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where they’re under examination for the first time in 50 years using new techniques not available during the Apollo years.

May 6, 2022May 6, 2022 by Matt Williams

InSight Senses its two Biggest Marsquakes so far, Coming From the Opposite Side of the Planet

Artist's concept of InSight "taking the pulse of Mars". Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

On Nov. 26th, 2018, NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight) lander arrived on Mars. Since then, this robotic mission has been using its advanced suite of instruments to study Mars’ interior and geological activity to learn more about its formation and evolution. One of these is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), the lander’s primary instrument, which was deployed on the Martian surface less than a month after it arrived.

On August 25th, 2021, the mission detected a magnitude 4.2 and a magnitude 4.1 marsquake, the two largest seismic events recorded to date. These events (labeled S0976a and S1000a, respectively) were five times stronger than the previous largest event (a 3.7 marsquake in 2019) and the first that originated on the other side of the planet. The seismic wave data from these events could help scientists learn more about the interior of Mars, particularly its core-mantle boundary.

May 6, 2022May 6, 2022 by Alan Boyle

Why Believing in the Multiverse Isn’t Madness

"Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" — Doctor Strange is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness." (Marvel Entertainment)

What is the multiverse? The idea that the universe we inhabit is just one of many parallel universes gets a superhero shout-out in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” the latest movie based on Marvel comic-book characters.

And in the opinion of Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, giving some screen time to the multiverse isn’t such a bad thing — even if the plot has some horror-movie twists.

“I think it’s really good if some of these ideas are brought out in a variety of different ways,” Greene says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, which focuses on the realm where science and technology intersect with fiction and popular culture.

May 6, 2022May 5, 2022 by Paul M. Sutter

Scientists Create Molecules that can Follow Darwinian Evolution

photo of a turtle swimming underwater — Photo by Belle Co on Pexels.com

A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo have discovered a set of RNA molecules that are capable of replication and diversification. This potentially allows the molecules to undergo Darwinian evolution, pointing the way to a possible first step to life on Earth. As lead author Assistant Professor Ryo Mizuuchi said, “The results could be a clue to solving the ultimate question that human beings have been asking for thousands of years — what are the origins of life?”