Space and astronomy news
Earth is the only planet in the solar system with aircraft capable of sustained flight. Suppose the ground-breaking Ingenuity helicopter, currently stowed aboard the similarly spectacular Mars Perseverance rover, accomplishes its planned mission. In that case, Mars will become the second planet to have a powered aircraft fly through its atmosphere.
Continue reading “The Mars Helicopter is Online and Getting Ready to Fly”
Origin stories are a focus of many astronomical studies. Planetary formation, solar system formation, and even galaxy formation have long been studied in order to understand how the universe came to be where it is today. Now, a team of scientists from the Lyman Alpha Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization (LAGER) consortium have found an extremely early “protogalaxy” that was formed approximately 750 million years after the big bang. Studying it can provide insights into that early type of galaxy formation and everything that comes after.
Continue reading “Protogalaxy Cluster Found When the Cosmic Fog Was Starting to Clear, When the Universe Was Just 750 Million Years Old”
Ever since NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009, there has an explosion in the study of the extrasolar planets. With the retirement of Kepler in 2018, it has fallen to missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to pick up where its predecessor left off. Using observations from TESS, an international team of astronomers recently discovered three exoplanets orbiting a young Sun-like star named TOI 451.
Continue reading “Just Some of the Planets That TESS Has Found Nearby”
When it comes to the private aerospace sector (aka. NewSpace), some names stand out from the rest. The most obvious of these is SpaceX (the brainchild of Elon Musk and the leading source of innovation in commercial space) and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But what of Blue Origin, the private aerospace company created by Jeff Bezos in 2000?
In recent years, Blue Origin has fallen behind the competition and missed out on several billion dollars worth of contracts. But with Bezos stepping down as CEO of Amazon, industry sources have indicated that this could change soon (according to Eric M. Johnson at Reuters). With all of the opportunities available for commercial space, Bezos is now in a position to take a more hands-on role as the company faces a most pivotal year.
Continue reading “Once He Steps Down From Amazon, Jeff Bezos Will be Able to Focus his Energy on Blue Origin”
About 66 million years ago a massive chunk of rock slammed into Earth in what is the modern-day Yucatan Peninsula. The impact extinguished about 75% of all life on Earth. Most famously, it was the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
While mainstream scientific thought has pointed to an asteroid as the impactor, a new research letter says it could’ve, in fact, been a comet.
Continue reading “Did a Comet Wipe out the Dinosaurs?”
In physics, there are two main ways to model the universe. The first is the classical way. Classical models such as Newton’s laws of motion and Einstein’s theory of relativity assume that the properties of an object such as its position and motion are absolute. There are practical limits to how accurately we can measure an object’s path through space and time, but that’s on us. Nature knows their motion with infinite precision. Quantum models such as atomic physics assume that objects are governed by interactions. These interactions are probabilistic and indefinite. Even if we constrain an interaction to limited outcomes, we can never know the motion of an object with infinite precision, because nature doesn’t allow it.
Continue reading “A new Approach Could Tease out the Connection Between Gravity and Quantum Mechanics”
They’ve done it again. After a journey of nearly seven months for the Perseverance rover, the Navigation and Entry, Descent and Landing teams successfully guided their intrepid traveler to a pinpoint landing inside Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021.
And within minutes of the landing, Perseverance sent back two images from the front and rear Hazard Avoidance Cameras, revealing its surroundings on the Red Planet.
Continue reading “Perseverance has Landed. Here are its First Pictures From the Surface of Mars”
Watch as the Jovian moons perform a spectacular celestial dance in 2021.
Wondering where all the planets have gone? With the the exception of Mars high in the dusk sky, all of the other naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn) are currently hiding low in the dawn… but that’s about to change.
Continue reading “Following the Jovian Moons Through 2021 Mutual Eclipse Season”
Upcoming telescopes will give us more power to search for biosignatures on all the exoplanets we’ve found. Much of the biosignature conversation is centred on biogenic chemistry, such as atmospheric gases produced by simple, single-celled creatures. But what if we want to search for technological civilizations that might be out there? Could we find them by searching for their air pollution?
If a distant civilization was giving our planet a cursory glance in its own survey of alien worlds and technosignatures, they couldn’t help but notice our air pollution.
Could we turn the tables on them?
Continue reading “We Could Find Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Their Air Pollution”
In all of scientific modeling, the models attempting to replicate planetary and solar system formation are some of the most complicated. They are also notoriously difficult to develop. Normally they center around one of two formative ideas: planets are shaped primarily by gravity or planets are shaped primarily by magnetism. Now a new theoretical model has been developed by a team at the University of Zurich (UZH) that uses math from both methodologies to inform the most complete model yet of planetary formation.
Continue reading “Magnetic Fields Help Shape the Formation of New Planets”