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What Does 60 Years of Silence Tell Us About the Search for Extraterrestrials?

By Brian Koberlein - August 01, 2023 10:41 AM UTC | Astrobiology
Astronomers have only been scanning the skies for a signal from extraterrestrial civilizations for about 60 years. Although no signal has been found, a new study suggests that this lack of detection can help us predict what the future holds for SETI. According to their analysis, this means there's a 50% probability that Earth won't detect signals for the next 60 to 1800 years.
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New Simulation Reveals the Churning Interiors of Giant Stars

By Brian Koberlein - July 30, 2023 12:12 PM UTC | Stars
Stellar fusion happens at a star's core, where the enormous temperatures and pressures fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing radiation. Waves of turbulent convection generated in the core can take hundreds of thousands of years to ripple outward through the stars' layers, finally reaching the surface. A new simulation shows waves generated deep inside stars, more massive than the Sun, make their way to the surface and affect the star's brightness.
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Chinese Scientists Complete a Concept Study for a 6-Meter Space Telescope to Find Habitable Exoplanets

By Brian Koberlein - July 29, 2023 02:25 PM UTC | Exoplanets
With JWST safely in space, researchers are designing the next generation of space telescope that could Earth-sized worlds orbiting sunlike stars. Chinese scientists released a concept paper this week for the Tianlin mission, a 6-meter UV/Optical/IR space telescope, which could begin operations in 2045. This telescope would search for rocky planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars and search for biosignatures using direct imaging. The team estimates they could obtain the spectrum of 20 candidate exoplanets in the first five years of operation.
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Clumps Around a Young Star Could Eventually Turn Into Planets Like Jupiter

By Brian Koberlein - July 28, 2023 12:29 PM UTC | Exoplanets
New images from the European Southern Observatory show a young star surrounded by dusty clumps that could collapse and create giant planets like Jupiter. The star is V960 Mon, located about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. The star brightened suddenly in 2014, leading astronomers to conclude it's assembling spiral arms in its protoplanetary disk. The new observations show that these arms are fragmenting into clumps, with masses similar to giant planets.
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A Gamma Ray Burst Lasted So Long it Triggered a Satellite Twice

By Brian Koberlein - July 26, 2023 04:39 PM UTC | Extragalactic
amma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe, briefly outshining all the stars in their galaxy combined. They typically last for just seconds or a few minutes at the most. In 2022, an ultra-long gamma-ray burst exploded in the sky, lasting so long, with two separate blasts of radiation that it triggered the Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor twice. The blast was clocked at almost 1000 seconds, with a double blast that made some astronomers wonder if it was due to a gravitational lens.
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Astronomers Have a New Trick to Work out the Age of Stars

By Brian Koberlein - July 25, 2023 12:11 PM UTC | Stars
Determining the age of a star is surprisingly tricky and has wide error bars. It's only inside star clusters that you get a chance to accurately measure a star's age since they all had the exact origin and age. But a new technique hopes to discover the age of stars by measuring their rotation. As stars get older, their rotation rate slows down. By plotting the rotation rates of stars in clusters against their known ages, they can apply it to individual stars which aren't in clusters.
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Venus Needed Asteroid Impacts to Get its Volcanoes Going

By Brian Koberlein - July 24, 2023 01:11 PM UTC | Planetary Science
Unlike Earth, Venus lacks the plate tectonics that give rise to volcanoes. But the surface of Venus looks far younger than other worlds, like Mars or the Moon, which means it does have volcanic activity that regularly resurfaces the planet. Because Venus is closer to the Sun, it came farther out in the Solar System and hit the planet at higher velocities. A new study suggests that early catastrophic asteroid impacts melted its mantle, leading to its flavor of volcanism.
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One Side of This White Dwarf is Covered in Hydrogen While the Other Side is Helium.

By Brian Koberlein - July 21, 2023 01:15 PM UTC | Stars
Here's a new one. Astronomers have found a white dwarf star - the dead remnant from a main sequence star like the Sun - with one hemisphere composed of hydrogen while the other is covered in helium. The star was discovered with the Zwicky Transient Facility, revealing that it rotates every 15 minutes. Spectroscopic data unveiled its two-sided nature. What?! Also. How?! Some white dwarfs transition from hydrogen- to helium-dominated surfaces, and astronomers might have caught it in the act.
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Thin Flat Lenses Could Unleash a Revolution in Space Telescopes

By Brian Koberlein - July 20, 2023 01:08 PM UTC | Telescopes
Space telescopes use traditional polished mirrors like ground telescopes, which are heavy, unwieldy, and expensive to build. A new type of flexible telescope lens could be lighter and larger, creating space telescopes that could collect 100 times more light than JWST. Instead of a single large, delicate telescope, the Nautilus Space Observatory would consist of a fleet of lighter, cheaper, identical spacecraft working together to produce images. They'd use thin diffractive lenses, which have been improved to the point that they can produce near-perfect image quality.
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Did That Message Come From Earth or Space? Now SETI Researchers can be Sure

By Brian Koberlein - July 19, 2023 02:45 PM UTC | Astrobiology
When SETI researchers discover an intriguing radio signal, their first instinct is to ask, "Is the signal coming from Earth?" So many alien messages turned out to be Earth signals reflecting off objects in space, like satellites. Scientists have developed a new technique to vet these signals and confirm whether they came from outer space, even with a single message. When a signal passes through the interstellar medium, it should be affected by free electrons from cold plasma, and it's possible to separate the genuine interstellar message from one that emanated close to Earth.
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