Universe Today

January 9, 2021January 9, 2021 by Matt Williams

SpaceX Releases a Recap Video of their SN8 Making its Hop Test!

To commemorate their greatest accomplishment to date with the Starship, SpaceX has released a recap video of the SN8 high-altitude flight. This was the 12.5 km hop test that took place on December 9th, 2020, which saw the SN8 prototype ascend to an altitude of 12.5 km (7.8 mi), conduct a “belly-flop” maneuver, and return to the launch pad. While it didn’t quite stick the landing, the test was a major milestone in the development of the Starship.

January 9, 2021February 11, 2021 by Matt Williams

Winning Urban Farming Ideas for Mars!

If humans plan to go to live and work beyond Earth someday, they will need technologies that allow for sustainable living in alien environments. This is especially true of Mars, which is extremely cold, dry, and subject to more radiation than we are used to. On top of that, it also takes six to nine months to send spacecraft there, and that’s every two years when Earth and Mars are closest to each other in their orbits.

As such, settling on the Red Planet will require some serious creativity!

This is the purpose of Mars City Design (the Mars City®), an innovation and design platform founded by architect and filmmaker Vera Mulyani. Every year since its inception, this organization has hosted the Mars City Design Challenges, where students from around the world come together with industry experts to produce architectural designs for living on Mars (what Mulyani calls “Marchitecture”).

January 8, 2021January 8, 2021 by Evan Gough

These Bizarre Cloud Patterns are von Kármán’s Vortices, Caused by the air Wrapping Around Tall Islands

Three peaks in Cape Verde form von Kármán vortex streets when wind conditions are right. Image Credit: Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.

This is an image of some of the islands that make up the nation of Cape Verde. While most in that group of ten islands are flat, some are very tall: Fogo, Santa Antão, and São Nicolau. Those three stand well above their compatriots, with Fogo reaching an altitude of 2,829 metres (9,281 feet).

The three tall volcanic islands sometimes interact with the wind to create von Kármán vortices, also called von Kármán vortex streets.

January 8, 2021January 8, 2021 by Evan Gough

Stellar Flares May Not Condemn a Planet’s Habitability

An artistic rendering of a series of powerful stellar flares. New research says that flaring activity may not prevent life on exoplanets. CREDIT NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger

Red dwarf stars are the most common kind of star in our neighbourhood, and probably in the Milky Way. Because of that, many of the Earth-like and potentially life-supporting exoplanets we’ve detected are in orbit around red dwarfs. The problem is that red dwarfs can exhibit intense flaring behaviour, much more energetic than our relatively placid Sun.

So what does that mean for the potential of those exoplanets to actually support life?

January 7, 2021February 7, 2022 by Matt Williams

Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

The Full Moon at 10:30 p.m. last night (Aug. 30). Even at 25 altitude, it glowed a deep, dark orange due to heavy smoke from western forest fires. Credit: Bob King

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 Earth hasn’t been visited by aliens because interstellar travel is not very practical!

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, which includes the Dark Forest Hypothesis, where extraterrestrial civilizations are deliberately avoiding contact.

January 7, 2021January 7, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

New Observations Agree That the Universe is 13.77 Billion Years old

Cosmic Microwave Background. Scientists compared this to modern galaxy distributions to track dark matter. Copyright: ESA/Planck Collaboration

The oldest light in the universe is that of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This light was formed when the dense matter at the beginning of the universe finally cooled enough to become transparent. It has traveled for billions of years to reach us, stretched from a bright orange glow to cool, invisible microwaves. Naturally, it is an excellent source for understanding the history and expansion of the cosmos.

January 6, 2021January 9, 2021 by Matt Williams

Big News for SpaceX: Static Fire Today, Hop Test This Weekend?

For years, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has talked about what he will do once his company’s super heavy-lift launch system is finally ready to go! While tidbits of information were shared between 2011 and 2015, it was not until September of 2017 that Musk began to share detailed plans for this system. By 2018, Musk announced that work on the Starship and Super-Heavy (formerly known as the BFR) was underway.

In the past year, progress on the Starship has advanced by leaps and bounds (despite a few explosions). This reached a high point on Dec. 9th, 2020, when the SN8 prototype conducted a hop test where it reached an altitude of 12.5 km (7.8 mi) and did a “belly-flop” on the way down. According to recent indications, the SN9 may be making a hop test by the end of this week!

January 6, 2021January 5, 2021 by Paul M. Sutter

There Should be a few Supernovae in the Milky Way Every Century, but we’ve Only Seen 5 in the Last 1000 Years. Why?

This image of the supernova remnant SN 1987A was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in January 2017 using its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Since its launch in 1990 Hubble has observed the expanding dust cloud of SN 1987A several times has helped astronomers get a better understanding of these cosmic explosions. Supernova 1987A is located in the centre of the image amidst a backdrop of stars. The bright ring around the central region of the exploded star is material ejected by the star about 20 000 years before the actual explosion took place. The supernova is surrounded by gaseous clouds. The clouds’ red colour represents the glow of hydrogen gas. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation) and P. Challis (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Our galaxy hosts supernovae explosions a few times every century, and yet it’s been hundreds of years since the last observable one. New research explains why: it’s a combination of dust, distance, and dumb luck.

January 6, 2021January 6, 2021 by David Dickinson

Japan to Launch ‘Wooden Satellite’ in 2023

What a proposed wooden satellite could (and could not) accomplish.

A strange satellite proposal made at the end of 2020 by a Japanese company had many space pundits scratching their heads into 2021.

The proposal came out of Kyoto University in partnership with Sumitomo Forestry in Japan, though most of the information on the project comes from a BBC post quoting Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut and Kyoto University professor Takao Doi, who flew aboard the U.S. space shuttle on missions STS-87 and STS-123 to the International Space Station. STS-123 delivered and installed JAXA’s Kib? module in 2008.

January 5, 2021January 5, 2021 by Evan Gough

Here’s the Asteroid Hayabusa2 is Going to be Visiting Next

The asteroid 1998 KY26 (the point of light located at where the two lines would cross) captured by Hyper Suprime-Cam mounted on the Subaru Telescope. The blurring of the background stars is due to the motion of the telescope tracking the asteroid. Five shots, each with a 2-minute exposure time, taken during 2:04–2:16 on December 10, 2020 (Hawai?i Standard Time) were stacked to create this image. The field of view is 30 x 15 arcseconds. (Credit: NAOJ)

Check out this image of asteroid 1998 KY₂₆ from the Subaru Telescope. It’s not exactly beautiful, but it’s not intended to be. The compelling thing about this image isn’t its attractiveness, it’s the context. This small asteroid is the next target for Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft.