Space and astronomy news
How do stars form?
We know they form from massive structures called molecular clouds, which themselves form from the Interstellar Medium (ISM). But how and why do certain types of stars form? Why, in some situations, does a star like our Sun form, versus a red dwarf or a blue giant?
That’s one of the central questions in astronomy. It’s also a very complex one.
Continue reading “This is a Simulation of the Interstellar Medium Flowing Like Smoke Throughout the Milky Way”
What’s better than two gigantic galaxies swirling into one another until they collide? How about three galaxies swirling into one another until they collide – and they all have supermassive black holes at their core to boot! Recently, a team led by Dr. Adi Foord of Stanford combed through data from the WISE mission and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to search for instances of three galaxies colliding with one another. In all that data, they managed to find 7 separate systems that met those criteria.
Continue reading “What Happens to Their Supermassive Black Holes When Galaxies Collide?”
Likely the most well-known result of the Earth’s magnetic field are the Aurora Borealis and Australis (Northern and Southern Lights). When chargers particles from the solar wind run into the Earth’s magnetic field, they can occasionally elicit spectacular light displays. For years now, scientists have thought that the charged particles that cause those displays were sent in equal numbers toward the north and south pole. However, recent research from a team led by scientists from the University of Alberta, have shown that there are actually more charged particles heading north rather than south. The question now is why?
Continue reading “The Solar Wind is More Attracted to the Earth’s North Pole Than the South. Why?”
Messier objects are some of the most imaged objects in the universe. In part that’s because many of them are so visibly appealing. A good example of that is the Whirlpool galaxy, M51, which recently received an even more dramatic visual representation with a new photo released by NASA. In it, the magnetic fields that are holding the galaxy together and tearing it apart at the same time are clearly visible. And it is even more stunning to look at.
Continue reading “The Magnetic Fields Swirling Within the Whirlpool Galaxy”
Student-led teams aren’t the only ones testing out novel electric propulsion techniques recently. Back in November, a company called Exotrail successfully tested a completely new kind of electric propulsion system in space – a small hall-effect thruster.
Continue reading “The First Cubesat With a Hall-Effect Thruster has Gone to Space”
Discovering exoplanets is a difficult job. Given the challenges, it’s amazing that we’ve found any at all. But astronomers are clever, so there are currently more than 4,300 confirmed exoplanets. They range from small Mercury-sized worlds to planets larger than Jupiter, but most of them have one thing in common: they orbit close to their home star.
Continue reading “Planets are Finally Being Discovered Orbiting Farther From Their Stars”
In the vein of “go big or go home,” the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has launched a stunning new website to showcase information about — and match the scale of — its Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the highly anticipated observatory scheduled to have first light in 2025.
Continue reading “Here’s the Extremely New Website for the Extremely Large Telescope”
Staying afloat in space can be deceptively hard. Just ask the characters from Gravity, or any number of the hundreds of small satellites that fall into the atmosphere in a given year. Any object placed in low Earth orbit (LEO) must constantly fight against the drag caused by the small number of air molecules that make it up to that height.
Usually they counteract this force by using small amounts of propellant. However, smaller satellites don’t have the luxury of enough propellant to keep them afloat for any period of time. But now a team of students from the University of Michigan has launched a prototype satellite that attempts to stay afloat using a novel technique – magnetism.
Continue reading “A New Satellite Is Going to Try to Maintain Low Earth Orbit Without Any Propellant”
Have you ever seen the videos of people taking daily selfies of themselves over the course of years or even decades? Now the sun has started it’s own series of pictures – with 366 complete pictures from the year 2020, captured by the European Space Agency’s Proba-2 satellite.
Continue reading “This is What the Sun Looked Like for Every Day in 2020”
In December of 2020, the world got a bit of a pre-holiday surprise when it was announced that astronomers at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia had detected a “tantalizing” signal coming from Proxima Centauri (the red dwarf companion of the Alpha Centauri system). Afterward, researchers at Breakthrough Listen consulted the data on the signal – Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 (BLC1) – and noted the same curious features.
However, the scientific community has since announced that the signal is unlikely to be anything other than the result of natural phenomena. This was also the conclusion reached by Amir Siraj and Prof. Abraham Loeb of Harvard University after they conducted a probability assessment on BLC1. Like the vast majority of candidate radio signals discovered to date, this one appears to be just the forces of nature saying hello.
Continue reading “According to the Math, it’s Highly Unlikely That an Intelligent Civilization is Located at Alpha Centauri”