Space and astronomy news
Seismic waves in Saturn’s rings reveal the strange ‘fuzzy core’ interior of the planet within.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft continues to uncover amazing facts about the ringed planet Saturn. A recent study in the August edition of Nature: Astronomy highlighted an intriguing method to indirectly probe the interior of the planet.
Continue reading “Saturn’s ‘Fuzzy Core’ Seen In Ring Ripples”
Black holes are more than just massive objects that swallow everything around them – they’re also one of the universe’s biggest and most stable energy sources. That would make them invaluable to the type of civilization that needs huge amounts of power, such as a Type II Kardashev civilization. But to harness all of that power, the civilization would have to encircle the entire black hole with something that could capture the power it is emitting.
Continue reading “Advanced Civilizations Could be Using Dyson Spheres to Collect Energy From Black Holes. Here’s how we Could Detect Them”
At the heart of most massive galaxies in our Universe, there are supermassive black holes (SMBH) on the order of millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. As these behemoths consume gas and dust that’s slowly fed into their maws, they release tremendous amounts of energy. This leads to what is known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) – aka. a quasar – which can sometimes send hypervelocity jets of material for light-years.
Since they were first discovered, astrophysicists have suspected that SMBHs play an important role in the formation and evolution of galaxies. However, as a result, there has also been considerable research dedicated to how these massive objects form and evolve themselves. Recently, a team of astrophysicists conducted a high-powered simulation that showed exactly how SMBHs feed and determined that a galaxy’s arms play a vital role.
Continue reading “This is How a Supermassive Black Hole Feeds”
Three months after touching down on the Martian surface, China’s Zhurong rover has completed its primary mission and is still going strong.
Continue reading “China’s Rover Completes its Primary 90-day Mission, but it Still has More Science to do”
The search for Martian life has been ongoing for decades. Various landers and rovers have searched for biosignatures or other hints that life existed either currently or in the past on the Red Planet. But so far, results have been inconclusive. That might be about to change, though, with a slew of missions planned to collect even more samples for testing. Mars itself isn’t the only place they are looking, though. Some scientists think the best place to find evidence of life is one of Mars’ moons.
Continue reading “The Best Evidence for Life on Mars Might be Found on its Moons”
Astronomers have spotted the fastest-ever asteroid orbiting Sun — and at times, it gets closer to the Sun than the planet Mercury.
Continue reading “An Asteroid has Been Discovered That Crosses Mercury’s Orbit”
Despite decades of exploration and study, Mars still has its fair share of mysteries. In particular, scientists are still trying to ascertain what happened to the water that once flowed on Mars’ surface. Unfortunately, billions of years ago, the Martian atmosphere began to be stripped away by the solar wind, which also resulted in the loss of its surface water over time – although it was not entirely clear where it went and what mechanisms were involved.
To address this, a team of scientists recently consulted data obtained by three orbiter missions studying the Martian atmosphere. In the process, they found evidence that the smaller regional dust storms that happen almost annually on Mars are making the planet drier over time. These findings suggest that storms are a major driving force behind the evolution of Mars’ atmosphere and its transition to the freezing and desiccated place we know today.
Continue reading “Dust Storms on Mars Continue to Make the Planet Drier”
What a parting gift the Cassini mission gave us.
Below is a movie sequence of images, garnered from the final dedicated observation of the Enceladus’ geysers by the imitable Cassini spacecraft.
Continue reading “Watch: 14 Hours of Enceladus Geyser Action”
It’s no secret that a new Space Race has been brewing over the past few years. This time, rather than being a competition between two federal space agencies, the race has more competitors and is more complicated. In addition to more state competitors, there are also commercial space entities vying for positions and lucrative contracts. Add to that a network of public-private partnerships, and you have Space Race 2.0!
In particular, there has been quite the stir ever since NASA awarded the Artemis contract for the Human Landing System (HLS) to SpaceX. This resulted in legal challenges filed by Blue Origin and Dynetics (SpaceX’s competitors), as well as a lawsuit and messy public relations campaign. NASA has since removed the stop-work order and commenced payments to SpaceX, which recently indicated their HLS concept could be ready to go before the 2024 deadline.
Continue reading “SpaceX Thinks it can Send Humans to the Moon Sooner Than 2024”
In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! If only there was a way to measure the distance to today’s topic: standard candles!
Continue reading “Astronomy Jargon 101: Standard Candles”