Universe Today

October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 by Evan Gough

India’s Crashed Lander is In This Picture, Somewhere

The Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram, attempted a landing September 7th (Friday the 6th in the United States), on a small patch of lunar highland smooth plains between Simpelius N and Manzinus C craters. Unfortunately the landing was not successful and location of the spacecraft has not been announced. The scene above was captured from an LROC Quickmap fly-around of the site, image width is about 150 kilometers across the center [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

This image of the lunar highlands is from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You’d need superhuman eyesight to spot it, but India’s crashed Vikram lander is in there somewhere. The lander attempted to land on the Moon on September 6th, but when it was only 2.1 km above the surface, within reach of its objective, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) lost contact with the spacecraft.

October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 by Fraser Cain

What Will It Take To Feed A Million People On Mars?

Mars vegetation chamber. A greenhouse on Mars. Credit: NASA

In 2017, Elon Musk laid out his grand sweeping plans for the future of SpaceX, the company that would take humanity to Mars. Over decades, tens of thousands of Starship flights would carry a million human beings to the surface of the Red Planet, the minimum Musk expects it’ll take to create a self-sustaining civilization.

October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 by Evan Gough

A Red Dwarf Star Has a Jupiter-Like Planet. So Massive it Shouldn’t Exist, and Yet, There It Is

Artist's illustration of the newfound gas-giant planet GJ 3512b, which circles a red dwarf star. (Image credit: Guillem Anglada-Escude—IEEC/Science-wave, using SpaceEngine.org (CC BY 4.0))

Thanks to the Kepler mission and other efforts to find exoplanets, we’ve learned a lot about the exoplanet population. We know that we’re likely to find super-Earths and Neptune-mass exoplanets orbiting low-mass stars, while larger planets are found around more massive stars. This lines up well with the core accretion theory of planetary formation.

But not all of our observations comply with that theory. The discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a small red dwarf means our understanding of planetary formation might not be as clear as we thought. A second theory of planetary formation, called the disk instability theory, might explain this surprising discovery.

October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 by Susie Murph

Carnival of Space #631

Carnival of Space. Image by Jason Major.

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Allen Versfeld at his Urban Astronomer blog.

Click here to read Carnival of Space #631.

September 30, 2019September 30, 2019 by Evan Gough

Confirmed. Fossils That Formed 3.5 billion Years Ago, Really are Fossils. The Oldest Evidence of Life Found So Far

A stromatolite from the Pilbara Craton in Australia. Image Credit: By Didier Descouens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15944367

The title of Earth’s Earliest Life has been returned to the fossils in the Pilbara region of Australia. The Pilbara fossils had held that title since the 1980s, until researchers studying ancient rocks in Greenland found evidence of ancient life there. But subsequent research questioned the biological nature of the Greenland evidence, which put the whole issue into question again.

Now a new study of the Pilbara fossils has identified the presence of preserved organic matter in those fossils, and handed the ‘Ancient Life’ crown back to them.

September 30, 2019September 30, 2019 by David Dickinson

Tracking Twilight: ‘Purple Sunset Effect’ Seen Worldwide

Has twilight looked at little… purple to you as of late? The ‘purple sunset’ effect is subtle, but currently noticeable on a clear evening. Sunsets are always colorful events, as the Sun’s rays shine through a thicker layer of the atmosphere at an oblique angle, scattering out at longer, redder wavelengths. When the air is clear and relatively dust free, this effect is at a minimum… but when the upper atmosphere becomes saturated with dust particles and aerosols, the sky can erupt in a panoply of colors at twilight.

September 29, 2019September 29, 2019 by Matt Williams

Musk Presents the Orbital Starship Prototype. Flights will Begin in Six Months

Artist's illustration of a SpaceX Starship lands on Mars. Credit: SpaceX

On Saturday, Sept. 28th, SpaceX founder Elon Musk presided over a media circus at their testing facility in Boca, Chica, Texas. With the fully-assembled Starship Mk.1 as his backdrop, Musk shared the latest updates on the Starship launch system, which include a timetable for when the first test-flights, commercial flights and crewed flights will commence. Sometime next year, he promised, it will begin taking passengers to space!

September 28, 2019September 28, 2019 by Matt Williams

New Technique for Estimating the Mass of a Black Hole

A Hubble Space Telescope view of M87's core and its jet. it points nearly directly at us and is also known as a blazar. Astronomers are studying other blazars that have meandering jets and think that binary black holes may be hidden inside some of them. Courtesy STScI.

Black holes are the one the most intriguing and awe-inspiring forces of nature. They are also one of the most mysterious because of the way the rules of conventional physics break down in their presence. Despite decades of research and observations there is still much we don’t know about them. In fact, until recently, astronomers had never seen an image of black hole and were unable to guage their mass.

However, a team of physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) recently announced that they had devised a way to indirectly measure the mass of a black hole while also confirming its existence. In a recent study, they showed how they tested this method on the recently-imaged supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 active galaxy.

September 27, 2019September 27, 2019 by Evan Gough

Mice That Spend a Month in Space Were Able to Reproduce Once They Got Back to Earth

The International Space Station (ISS), seen here with Earth as a backdrop. Credit: NASA

A team of Japanese researchers have used sperm from mice that spent time aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to fertilize female mice back on Earth. While previous research has shown that freeze-dried mouse sperm stored in space can experience radiation damage, these results show that the sperm from live mice may not suffer the same damage.

September 27, 2019September 27, 2019 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Have Found a Place With Three Supermassive Black Holes Orbiting Around Each Other

The three black holes at the center of three separate galaxies as imaged by Chandra and other telescopes. Image Credit: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/George Mason Univ./R. Pfeifle et al.; Optical: SDSS & NASA/STScI

Astronomers have spotted three supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of three colliding galaxies a billion light years away from Earth. That alone is unusual, but the three black holes are also glowing in x-ray emissions. This is evidence that all three are also active galactic nuclei (AGN,) gobbling up material and flaring brightly.

This discovery may shed some light on the “final parsec problem,” a long-standing issue in astrophysics and black hole mergers.