Space and astronomy news
Star Trek meets star reality as William Shatner, the iconic 90-year-old actor, will fly on the next Blue Origins suborbital launch on October 12th.
Continue reading “It’s Official, William Shatner Will be Flying to Space With Blue Origin”
A supermassive black hole (SMBH) likely resides at the center of the Milky Way, and in the centers of other galaxies like it. It’s never been seen though. It was discovered by watching a cluster of stars near the galactic center, called S stars.
S stars’ motions indicated the presence of a massive object in the Milky Way’s center and the scientific community mostly agreed that it must be an SMBH. It’s named Sagittarius A*.
But some scientists wonder if it really is a black hole. And one of the S stars could answer that question and a few others about black holes.
Continue reading “One Star Could Answer Many Unsolved Questions About Black Holes”
Even the most supermassive of the supermassive black holes aren’t very large, making it extremely difficult to measure their sizes. However, astronomers have recently developed a new technique that can estimate the mass of a black hole based on the movement of hot gas around them – even when the black hole itself it smaller than a single pixel.
Continue reading “Astronomers Have a new way to Measure the Mass of Supermassive Black Holes”
Astronomers have been using gravitational waves to detect merging black holes for years now, but may have to rely on pulsars – rapidly spinning neutron stars – to observe the mergers of supermassive black holes.
Continue reading “Astronomers Might use Pulsars to First Detect Merging Supermassive Black Holes”
Usually, when the topic of asteroid mining comes up, thoughts turn to the riches of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The sheer size and scale of the available resources in these asteroids are astounding and overshadow a much more accessible resource – Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) that are much closer to home. Now a team from the University of Arizona (UA) has spent some time looking at these near neighbors and realized some are very similar to one of the most famous asteroids in the belt – Psyche.
Continue reading “There are Many Metal-Rich Asteroids Nearby to Investigate”
Materials science has once again come through for space exploration. Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have developed a coating that could increase the sensitivity of LIGO by almost an order of magnitude. That would increase the detection rate of the gravitational waves the observatory is seeking from about once a week to once a day, mainly due to the increased volume of space that the observatory’s interferometers would be able to collect signals from.
Continue reading “On its Next run, LIGO Will be Able to Probe 8 Times as Much Space”
Welcome back to our Fermi Paradox series, where we take a look at possible resolutions to Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where Is Everybody?” Today, we examine the possibility that we haven’t heard from any aliens is because no one is transmitting!
In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project. According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: “Where is everybody?”
This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence. Since Fermi’s time, there have been several proposed resolutions to his question, including the possibility that everyone is listening, but no one is broadcasting – otherwise known as the “SETI-Paradox.”
Continue reading “Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVII: What is the “SETI-Paradox” Hypothesis?”
The new Arid meteor shower may be making itself known in early October 2021.
It’s not every day that we witness an outburst from a new meteor shower gracing the skies of the Earth. But that’s just what may be in store this week for fortunate observers deep in the southern hemisphere, with the advent of the Arid meteors.
Continue reading “Arid Meteor Outburst in the Works This Week?”
Carl Sagan once famously, and sarcastically, observed that, since we couldn’t see what was going on on the surface of Venus, there must be dinosaurs living there. Once humans started landing probes on the planet’s surface, any illusion of a lush tropical world was quickly dispelled. Venus was a hellscape of extraordinary temperatures and pressures that would make it utterly inhospitable to anything resembling Earth life.
But more recently, astrobiologists have again turned their attention to the Morning Star. But this time, instead of looking at the surface, they looked in the clouds. And now, a new study from researchers at California Polytechnic, Pomona, has calculated that there is likely a layer in the atmosphere where photosynthesis can occur. Meaning there is a zone in Venus’ cloud layer where life could have evolved.
Continue reading “There’s Enough Sunlight Getting Through Venus’ Clouds to Support High-Altitude Life”
You know the feeling …. seeing Jupiter through your own telescope. If it gives you the chills — like it does for me — then you’ll know how the team for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter felt when they turned their spacecraft around – yes, the orbiter that’s been faithfully circling and looking down at the Moon since 2008 – and saw the giant planet Jupiter with their camera. If you zoom in on the picture, you can even see Jupiter’s Galilean moons.
Continue reading “NASA Spacecraft Takes a Picture of Jupiter … From the Moon”