Space and astronomy news
Selfies have become ubiquitous everywhere – even Mars. Now, the Tianwen 1 orbiter is getting into the spirit with a selfie taken high up in Martian orbit.
Continue reading “China Releases a Selfie-Stick Video of Tianwen-1 Above Mars”
Engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope are in the midst of an intricate, three-month-long process of aligning the telescope’s 18 separate mirror segments to work together as one giant, high-precision 6.5-meter (21.3-foot) primary telescope mirror.
This process, called phasing, began in early February and includes seven different steps, which goes from taking the mirrors’ initial placements after they were deployed to doing a “coarse” and then “fine” alignment, and then making sure the mirror works with all four of Webb’s instruments and their various fields of view.
Continue reading “Here’s Exactly how Engineers Are Aligning JWST’s Segmented Mirrors”
A recent study looked at stellar streams hidden in Gaia data, to uncover evidence of an ancient remnant dubbed Pontus.
Our home galaxy the Milky Way is a monster with a ravenous past. In its estimated 12 billion years of existence, our galaxy has swallowed smaller satellite galaxies whole, with collisions resulting in massive rounds of star formation. We see threads of these remnant mergers as streams of stars and clusters, strung out around the Milky Way.
Continue reading “Gaia Finds Ancient Satellite Galaxy Pontus Embedded in Milky Way”
In the coming years, NASA and other space agencies hope to explore the southern polar region of the Moon. Recent surveys of this region have revealed an environment rich in volatiles – elements that vaporize rapidly due to changes in conditions. In particular, missions like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) have detected abundant water ice in the permanently-shadowed craters around the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
Where this water came from has remained the subject of much debate, with theories ranging from it being deposited by volcanic activity or solar wind to being delivered by comets. After examining LCROSS data on the Cabeus crater near the Moon’s south pole, a multinational team of researchers from the U.S. and France determined that the water ice and volatiles in the crater were likely delivered by the impactor (a comet) that created it.
Continue reading “One Crater on the Moon is Filled with Ice and Gas that Came from a Comet Impact”
What a year it’s been — Earth year, that is!
The dramatic touchdown on Mars for the Perseverance rover and the stowaway Ingenuity helicopter on February 18, 2021 was a bright moment in a tumultuous year here on Earth. And even though the pandemic meant that many people were watching the event from home – even some of the Mars rover team – NASA made sure to share the event as widely as possible.
Here’s a video highlight of that day, with pictures and video from both planets, and watching it brings smiles, goosebumps tears of joy. Of course, the incredible video we received of the landing from from the rover itself – especially the sky-crane lowering Perseverance to the planet’s surface — is nothing short of stunning.
Continue reading “How Time Flies: Perseverance and Ingenuity Have Been on Mars for a Year”
For almost sixty years, robotic missions have been exploring the surface of Mars in search of potential evidence of life. More robotic missions will join in this search in the next fifteen years, the first sample return from Mars (courtesy of the Perseverance rover) will arrive here at Earth, and crewed missions will be sent there. Like their predecessors, these missions will rely on mass spectrometry to analyze samples of the Martian sands to look for potential signs of past life.
Given how much data we can expect from these missions, NASA is looking for new methods to analyze geological samples. To this end, NASA has partnered with the global crowdsourcing platform HeroX and the data-science company DrivenData to launch the Mars Spectrometry: Detect Evidence for Past Life challenge. With a prize purse of $30,000, this Challenge seeks innovative methods that rely on machine learning to automatically analyze Martian geological samples for potential signs of past life.
Continue reading “NASA and HeroX are Crowdsourcing the Search for Life on Mars”
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched last December, has been slowly powering up its instruments and unfurling its sunshield, and is now in the process of aligning its mirrors in preparation for operation. Within a few months, the most powerful space telescope ever built is going to set its sights on the stars. Astronomers are hoping that what JWST sees will change the way we understand our universe, just as the Hubble Space Telescope did decades before.
One tantalizing capability that JWST offers that Hubble could not is the opportunity to directly image planets orbiting distant stars, and maybe, just maybe, detect signs of life.
Continue reading “James Webb Might be Able to Detect Other Civilizations by their Air Pollution”
Gravity is a funny force. The gravity of every given object technically impacts every other given object, though, in practice, large distance and small masses make those forces negligible for such interactions. But in some cases, especially when large groups are floating in empty space, gravity can still hold sway over considerable distances. Such is the case with a new pair of brown dwarfs found by astronomers at the Keck Observatory.
Continue reading “Twin Brown Dwarfs Discovered, Orbiting one Another at Three Times the Distance From the Sun to Pluto”
The connection between relativity and quantum mechanics has been a black box for the world of physics for decades. That partially stems from the difficulty in collecting data on systems that interface between the two of them. Relativity is the realm of the supermassive, while quantum mechanics can best be described as the realm of the minuscule. But, there is, in fact, one particular realm where they overlap. One of the results of relativity is that gravity can affect the flow of time. Commonly known as “time dilation,” this effect has now been studied by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US using an extraordinarily accurate atomic clock.
Continue reading “Atomic Clocks Separated by Just a few Centimetres Measure Different Rates of Time. Just as Einstein Predicted”
The inner 600 light years of our galaxy is a maelstrom of cosmic radiation, turbulent swirling gas clouds, intense star formation, supernovae, huge bubbles of radio energy, and of course a giant supermassive black hole. This bustling downtown of the Milky Way is a potential treasure trove of discovery but has been difficult to study as the galaxy’s central regions are obscured by dust and glaring radiation. But a new image of this region with unprecedented detail reveals more than we’ve ever seen before. We find some familiar objects like supernovae but also some mysterious structures – gaseous filaments dozens of light years long channeling electrons at near light speed.
Behold, the galaxy’s centre as never seen before:
