Space and astronomy news
On Tuesday, December 1st, at 10:11 EST (07:00 PST) the Chang’e-5 sample return spacecraft landed safely on the Moon. This mission is the latest in China’s lunar exploration program, which is paving the way for the creation of a lunar outpost and a crewed mission by the 2030s. The day after it landed, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) passed over the site and acquired an image of the lander.
Continue reading “Here’s Chang’e-5, Seen From Lunar Orbit”
One of the best things about astronomy is that it’s a never-ending supply of awesome visuals. Almost every new mission or telescope provides new ways to see the universe, and when those are translated visually they can offer absolutely stunning images of some of the most interesting places in that universe. Now humanity is starting to process the images from one of the newer missions to grace the heavens: the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter. And boy are those images breathtaking.
Continue reading “Pictures are coming in from Solar Orbiter”
Lately there has been a flood of interest in gravitational waves. After the first official detection at LIGO / Virgo in 2015, data has been coming in showing how common these once theoretical phenomena actually are. Usually they are caused by unimaginably violent events, such as a merging pair of black holes. Such events also have a tendency to emit another type of phenomena – light. So far it has been difficult to observe any optical associated with these gravitational-wave emitting events. But a team of researchers hope to change that with the full implementation of the Gravitation-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) telescope.
Continue reading “The Kilonova-Chasing Gravitational-Wave Optical Transient Observer is About to be Watching the Whole Sky”
We are once again indebted to Kevin M. Gill, a science data visualization artist with a flair for the cosmos, for this beautiful rendering! The image first popped up on Kevin’s Twitter feed last week and can also be found (and downloaded) on his Flickr account. As he explained, the visual is his rendition of what the Hypanis Valles on Mars may have looked like back when water still flowed in the region. As he described it:
Continue reading “A Real River Valley on Mars, Filled With Virtual Water by @Kevinmgill”“A meandering river? Obvious and bad CGI? Based on a real place on Mars? All Three! Outflow location at Hypanis Valles With Flowing Water, via @HiRISE DTM data.”
Measuring time is about counting steps. Whether it’s the drip-drip of a water clock, the tic-toc of a mechanical clock, or the oscillating crystal of a quartz watch. Any accurate timepiece is built around counting the steps of something regular and periodic. Nothing is perfectly regular, so no clock keeps perfect time, but our timepieces are getting very, very accurate.
Continue reading “A new Type of Atomic Clock Uses Entangled Atoms. At Most, it Would be off by 100 Milliseconds Since the Beginning of the Universe”
On Dec.7th, 2020, World War II flying ace and legendary test pilot General Chuck Yeager passed away while in hospital in Los Angeles. He was 97 years of age and is survived by his second wife, Victoria Yeager (nee Victoria Scott D’Angelo), and his three children, Susan, Don, and Sharon. Yeager is interred at Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington D.C. with full military honors.
Continue reading “Chuck Yeager, the First Man to Break the Sound Barrier has Died. He was 97”
Even with all we’ve learned about our own Solar System, especially in the last couple of decades, researchers still face many unanswered questions. One of those questions regards the so-called Planet Nine. The Planet Nine hypothesis states that there’s a massive planet in our Solar System orbiting at a great distance from the Sun.
Nobody’s ever observed the hypothesized planet; the evidence for it lies in a cluster of bodies that orbit the Sun 250 times further out than Earth does. These objects are called e-TNOs, for extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects. According to the hypothesis, Planet Nine’s gravity is responsible for the unusual clustered orbits of these e-TNOs.
Now astronomers have found a distant solar system with its own Planet Nine, and that discovery is breathing new life into the hypothesis.
Continue reading “Astronomers Have Found Planet 9… in Another Solar System”Please welcome our guest tonight, John Powell, President of JP Aerospace, a nonprofit that launches student designed Pongsats (i.e., experiments that fit inside of a ping pong ball,) and other experiments to the edge of space using balloons. To date, over 80,000 students have participated in this program with plans to expand it even further.
Continue reading “Weekly Space Hangout: December 16, 2020 – John Powell Tells Us About PongSats and Airship to Orbit”
A Chinese probe has delivered the first samples to be collected from the Moon in more than 40 years, and its mission isn’t done yet.
The Chang’e-5 sample return capsule floated down to the snowy plains of Inner Mongolia, capping an odyssey that began less than a month ago with the launch of a nine-ton spacecraft from south China’s Wenchang Space Launch Center.
Continue reading “China’s Chang’e-5 Probe Drops Off Moon Samples at the Climax of a Historic Mission”
Gravitational-wave astronomy is still in its youth. Because of this, the gravitational waves we can observe come from powerful cataclysmic events. Black holes consuming each other in a violent chirp of spacetime, or neutron stars colliding in a tremendous explosion. Soon we might be able to observe the gravitational waves of supernovae, or supermassive black holes merging billions of light-years away. But underneath the cacophony is a very different gravitational wave. But if we can detect them, they will help us solve one of the deepest cosmological mysteries.
Continue reading “Next Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors Should be Able to see the Primordial Waves From the Big Bang”