Universe Today

August 20, 2020August 20, 2020 by Matt Williams

NASA’s New Video Shows You What it’s Like Traveling Close to the Speed of Light

If you’re a fan of science fiction, chances are you encountered a few franchises where humanity has spread throughout the known Universe. The ships that allow them to do this, maybe they use a warp drive, maybe they “fold space,” maybe have a faster-than-light (FTL) or “jump” drive. It’s a cool idea, the thought of “going interstellar!” Unfortunately, the immutable laws of physics tell us that this is simply not possible.

However, the physics that govern our Universe do allow for travel that is close to the speed of light, even though getting to that speed would require a tremendous amount of energy. Those same laws, however, also tell us that near-light-speed travel comes with all sorts of challenges. Luckily for all of us, NASA addresses these in a recently-released animed video that covers all the basics of interstellar travel!

August 20, 2020August 20, 2020 by David Dickinson

First Laser Space Debris Detection Made… in Daylight

A new technique may prove to be a powerful tool in the battle to mitigate space debris.

As the Space Age continues into its seventh decade, space debris is now growing at an exponential rate. Most of this debris is in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and ranges from bus-sized discarded rocket boosters and defunct satellites, to tiny millimeter-sized fragments.

August 19, 2020August 19, 2020 by Matt Williams

The Sun Might Have Once Had a Binary Companion Star

For some time now, astronomers have known that the majority of systems in our galaxy consist of binary pairs rather than individual stars. What’s more, in recent decades, research has revealed that stars like our Sun are actually born in clusters within solar nebulas. This has led to efforts in recent years to locate G-type (yellow dwarf) stars in our galaxy that could be the Sun’s long-lost “solar siblings.”

And now, a new study by Harvard astronomers Amir Siraj and Prof. Abraham Loeb has shown that the Sun may once have once had a very similar binary companion that got kicked out of our Solar System. If confirmed, the implications of this could be groundbreaking, especially where theories on how the Oort Cloud formed and whether or not our system captured a massive object (Planet Nine) in the past.

August 19, 2020August 19, 2020 by Brian Koberlein

Could a tabletop experiment detect gravitational waves and determine the quantum nature of gravity?

This illustration shows the merger of two black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. Could black holes like these (which represent those detected by LIGO on Dec. 26, 2015) collide in the dusty disk around a quasar's supermassive black hole explain gravitational waves, too? Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle — This illustration shows the merger of two supermassive black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Perhaps the most surprising prediction of general relativity is that of gravitational waves. Ripples in space and time that spread through the universe at the speed of light. Gravitational waves are so faint that for decades their detection was thought impossible. Even today, it takes an array of laser interferometers several kilometers long to see their effect. But what if we could detect them with a table-top experiment in a university lab?

In a recent paper published in the New Journal of Physics, a team of physicists proposes just such a device. Rather than using beams of light, they suggest using the quantum superposition of a single electron.

August 18, 2020August 18, 2020 by Matt Williams

This Distorted Circle is Actually a Galaxy That Looked Very Similar to the Milky Way, Shortly After the Big Bang

Astronomers using ALMA, in which the ESO is a partner, have revealed an extremely distant galaxy that looks surprisingly like our Milky Way. The galaxy, SPT0418-47, is gravitationally lensed by a nearby galaxy, appearing in the sky as a near-perfect ring of light.

The most widely accepted cosmological view states that the first galaxies formed about 380–400 million years after the Big Bang. These were made up of young, hot stars that lived fast and died young, causing the galaxies themselves to be turbulent. At least, that was the theory until a European team of astronomers observed a galaxy 12 billion light-years away that closely resembled the Milky Way.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA), the team observed the galaxy, SPT0418-47, as it appeared when the Universe was just 1.4 billion years old. Much to their surprise, the team noted that the structure and features of this galaxy were highly evolved and stable, something that contradicts previously-held notions about the nature of galaxies in the early Universe.

August 18, 2020August 19, 2020 by Nancy Atkinson

Remembering Don Arabian, the ‘Mad Genius’ Behind NASA’s Apollo Engineering Team

Don Arabian, center, yelling into the phone in the Mission Evaluation Room at Johnson Space Center during one of the Apollo missions. Credit: NASA/JSC.

One of the truly unsung heroes of the Apollo program has passed away at age 95. Donald D. Arabian, Chief of the Apollo Test Division, headed the Mission Evaluation Room (MER), which was responsible for solving in-flight problems during the Apollo missions to the Moon.

His nickname was “Mad Don,” and anyone who had the privilege of meeting him or working with him described Arabian as “one of a kind,” “colorful,” and “completely and totally unforgettable.” But in the book “Apollo: Race to the Moon” authors Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox designated Arabian as one of four people responsible for the success of the Apollo Program.

August 18, 2020August 18, 2020 by Andy Tomaswick

Machine Learning Just Classified Over Half a Million Galaxies

Shows some of the galaxies in Subaru's image set that allows them to be classified. — Graphic showing some of the images successfully classified by the NAOJ's AI algorithm

Humanity is still a long way away from a fully artificial intelligence system. For now at least, AI is particularly good at some specialized tasks, such as classifying cats in videos. Now it has a new skill set: identifying spiral patterns in galaxies.

As with all AI skills, this one started out with categorized data. In this case, that data consisted of images of galaxies taken by the Subaru Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The telescope is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), and has identified upwards of 560,000 galaxies in images it has taken.

August 18, 2020August 18, 2020 by Matt Williams

Some Astronomers Think Betelgeuse Dimmed Because it “Sneezed”. And it Might be Getting Ready to do it Again

Artist's impression of Betelgeuse. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

Betelgeuse, the tenth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest in the constellation Orion, has been behaving a little oddly lately. Beginning in December of 2019, researchers from Villanova University noticed the red supergiant was dimming noticeably. This trend continued into the new year, with Betelgeuse dimming throughout January and February of 2020. eventually losing two-thirds of its brilliance.

From this point onward, Betelgeuse began to brighten again and returned to its typical visual brightness by April. And now, the massive star dimming once again, and ahead of schedule. In response, an international team of researchers recently conducted a study where they theorized that this pattern might be the result of Betelgeuse “sneezing” out dense clouds of hot gas which then cooled.

August 17, 2020August 17, 2020 by Brian Koberlein

The Last Supernovae

Artist's conception of SN2016aps, a candidate pulsational pair instability supernova. The explosion energy of SN2016aps, fueled by the shedding of a massive shell of gas, was ten times that of a normal-sized supernova, making SN2016aps the most massive supernova ever identified. Credit: M. Weiss

A supernova is a powerful event. For a brief moment in time, a star shines as bright as a galaxy, ripping itself apart in a last, desperate attempt to fight against its gravity. While we see supernovae as rare and wondrous things, they are quite common. Based on observations of isotopes in our galaxy, we know that about twenty supernovae occur in the Milky Way every thousand years. These brilliant cosmic flashes fill the universe with heavy elements, and their remnant dust makes up almost everything we see around us. But supernovae won’t keep happening forever. At some point in the far future, the universe will see the last supernova.

August 16, 2020August 18, 2020 by Matthew Cimone

Perseverance and the Quest to Find Life on Mars

Perseverance Rover before being sent to Mars

I remember the Summer of 1997 when a shoebox-sized Mars rover literally broke the Internet.

Sojourner – the first rover we sent to another planet – had just landed on Mars in a giant space airbag bouncing along the surface to a safe stop. The Internet was new. And I was a young space enthusiast with a dial-up modem. For the first time, images from a space exploration mission were beamed to an audience that was connected online. Now we use the term “broke the Internet” as a hyperbolic phrase for various Internet phenomena, but interest in the Mars mission in 97 drove so many hits to NASA mirror servers around the world that global web traffic was disrupted. Patiently I watched as, line by line, orange sky to red stone, the first image posted by NASA loaded on my screen…it took about an hour. Each line resolved was like my own exploration of the planet. And finally, the landing site, in “real time”, was revealed to me and the entire world all at once. What would we discover together?