Universe Today

April 9, 2020April 9, 2020 by Brian Koberlein

New observations show that the Universe might not be expanding at the same rate in all directions

How cosmic expansion is measured. Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Feild (STScI)

When we look at the world around us, we see patterns. The Sun rises and sets. The seasons cycle through the year. The constellations drift across the night sky. As we’ve studied these patterns, we’ve developed scientific laws and theories that help us understand the cosmos. While our theories are powerful, they are still rooted in some fundamental assumptions. One of these is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. This is known as cosmic isotropy, and it allows us to compare what we see in the lab with what we see light-years away.

April 8, 2020April 8, 2020 by Evan Gough

Seriously, Life Really Does Get Around. It was Found in Rocks Deep Beneath the Seafloor

Map showing the underwater topography (bathymetry) of the ocean floor. Like land terrain, the ocean floor has ridges, valleys, plains and volcanoes. Image Credit: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=617528

After a lot of hard work spanning many years, a team of scientists have discovered something surprising. They’ve found abundant bacterial life in tiny cracks in undersea volcanic rock in the Earth’s crust. The bacteria are thriving in clay deposits inside these tiny cracks.

This discovery is generating new excitement around the hope of finding life on Mars.

April 8, 2020April 8, 2020 by David Dickinson

Study Finds Bizarre Exoplanet Orbits for Binary Stars

There’s an iconic scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker looks out over the desert landscape of Tatooine at the amazing spectacle of a double sunset. Now, a new study out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) suggests that such exotic exoplanet worlds orbiting multiple stars may exist in misaligned orbits, far out of the primary orbital plane.

April 7, 2020 by Matt Williams

WFIRST Will Use Relativity to Find More Exoplanets!

Using the microlensing metthod, a team of astrophysicists have found the first extra-galactic planets! Credit: NASA/Tim Pyle

In 2025, NASA’s next-generation telescope, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), will take to space and join in the search for extrasolar planets. Between its 2.4-meter (8 ft) telescope, 18 detectors, 300-megapixel camera, and the extraordinary survey speed it will offer, the WFIRST will be able to scan areas of the sky a hundred times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Beyond its high-sensitivity and advanced suite of instruments, WFIRST will also rely on a technique known as Gravitational Microlensing to search for and characterize exoplanets. This is essentially a small-scale version of the gravitational lensing technique, where the gravitational force of a massive object between the observer and the target is used to focus and magnify the light coming from a distant source.

April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Watched a Star System Die

This is an artist’s impression of a white dwarf (burned-out) star accreting rocky debris left behind by the star’s surviving planetary system. It was observed by Hubble in the Hyades star cluster. At lower right, an asteroid can be seen falling toward a Saturn-like disk of dust that is encircling the dead star. Infalling asteroids pollute the white dwarf’s atmosphere with silicon. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

About 570 light years from Earth lies WD 1145+017, a white dwarf star. In many respects it’s a typical white dwarf star. Its mass is about 0.6 solar masses, and its temperature is about 15,900 Kelvin. But five years ago, a team of astronomers wrote a paper on the white dwarf, showing that something unusual was going on.

April 7, 2020 by Matt Williams

How the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Could be Used to Search for Aliens

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) has just finished construction in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Credit: FAST

In 2016, China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope – the largest single-aperture radio telescope in the world – gathered its first light. Since then, the telescope has undergone extensive testing and commissioning and officially went online in Jan of 2020. In all that time, it has also been responsible for multiple discoveries, including close to one hundred new pulsars.

According to a recent study by an international team of scientists and led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) suggests that FAST might have another use as well: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)! Building on their collaboration with the non-profit science organization Breakthrough Initiatives, the authors of the study highlight the ways in which FAST could allow for some novel SETI observations.

April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 by Paul M. Sutter

Decaying Dark Matter Should be Visible Here in the Milky Way as a Halo Around the Galaxy

A simulated image of what the X-ray emission from dark matter might be. Image credit: Christopher Dessert, Nicholas L. Rodd, Benjamin R. Safdi, Zosia Rostomian (Berkeley Lab), based on data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Astronomers are very sure that dark matter exists, but they’re not sure at all what it’s made of.

The problem is that it isn’t just dark, it’s invisible. As far as we know, dark matter doesn’t emit light, absorb light, reflect light, refract light, scatter light, diffract light, or really have anything to do with light at all. This makes it hard to study. We know that dark matter exists, however, through its gravitational effects. Even though it’s invisible, it still has mass, and so the dark matter in our universe (which, by the way, makes up 85% of all the mass in the cosmos) can affect the motions of normal (or light-interacting) matter, like stars and galaxies.

April 7, 2020April 8, 2020 by Susie Murph

Weekly Space Hangout: April 8, 2020 – Colonel Mike Mullane, Astronaut

Hosts: Fraser Cain (universetoday.com / @fcain)

Dave Dickinson (www.astroguyz.com / @astroguyz)

Beth Johnson (@planetarypan)

Veranika Klimovich ( @VeranikaSpace)

This week we are excited to welcome Colonel Mike Mullane to the Weekly Space Hangout. Mike was selected as a Mission Specialist in 1978 in the first group of Space Shuttle Astronauts. He completed three space missions aboard the Shuttles Discovery (STS-41D) and Atlantis (STS-27 & 36) before retiring from NASA and the Air Force in 1990.

April 6, 2020May 20, 2020 by Matt Williams

SpaceX Will be Flying Cargo to the Moon

In the coming years, NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon as part of Project Artemis. However, the long-term goal is to establish a sustainable program for lunar exploration, as well as a permanent human presence on the Moon. A key aspect of this plan is the Lunar Gateway, an orbiting habitat that will allow for long-duration missions to the lunar surface (and eventually to Mars.)

To realize this goal, NASA is moving ahead with the development of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft. The agency also recently announced that it has awarded its first contract to SpaceX as part of the Gateway Logistics Services (GLS) program. As per this agreement, SpaceX will be tasked with delivering cargo, experiments, and other supplies to the agency’s Lunar Gateway once it is deployed in orbit of the Moon.

April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Paul M. Sutter

Astronomers are hoping to see the very first stars and galaxies in the Universe

The epoch of reionization was when light from the first stars could travel through the early Universe. At this time, galaxies began assembling, as did black holes. Why did some early galaxies have ancient stars? That's a question JWST will help answer. Credit: Paul Geil & Simon Mutch/The University of Melbourne

Sometimes it’s easy being an astronomer. When your celestial target is something simple and bright, the game can be pretty straightforward: point your telescope at the thing and just wait for all the juicy photons to pour on in.

But sometimes being an astronomer is tough, like when you’re trying to study the first stars to appear in the universe. They’re much too far away and too faint to see directly with telescopes (even the much-hyped James Webb Space Telescope will only be able to see the first galaxies, an accumulation of light from hundreds of billions of stars). To date, we don’t have any observations of the first stars, which is a major bummer.