Space and astronomy news
Its solar panels are caked with dust and the batteries are running out of juice, but NASA’s InSight Mars lander continues to soldier forth collecting more science about the Red Planet until its very last beep. To conserve energy, InSight was projected to shut down its seismometer—its last operational science instrument—by the end of June, …
In about 5 billion years, the Sun will leave the main sequence and become a red giant. It’ll expand and transform into a glowering, malevolent ball and consume and destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars. Can humanity survive the Sun’s red giant phase? Extraterrestrial Civilizations (ETCs) may have already faced this existential threat. Could …
The InSight Mars lander will cease science operations sometime in the next few months due to a decreasing power supply, mission managers said at a news conference on May 17. Martian dust covering the solar panels has reduced the amount of power to roughly 500 watt-hours per Mars day or sol. When InSight landed in …
Continue reading “InSight is Losing Power, it Probably Will be Shut Down in a Few Months”
We’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets and are likely to find many thousands more of them. While the wide variety of planets we’ve found are scientifically interesting in their own right, what lurks behind all these discoveries is the search for a world that could harbour life. But to sort the potentially habitable worlds from all …
Continue reading “The Younger the Planet, the More Likely it is to be Habitable”
We’re still in the early days of searching for life elsewhere. The Perseverance rover is on its way to a paleo-delta on Mars to look for fossilized signs of ancient bacterial life. SETI’s been watching the sky with radio dishes, listening for signals from distant worlds. Our telescopes are beginning to scan the atmospheres of …
Continue reading “Next Generation Telescopes Could Search for Intelligent Civilizations Directly”
A new study takes a look at Von Neumann probes and asks the really important questions: “why would aliens send them?” and, “where might we find them?”
In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll just be getting started with today’s topic: protoplanetary disk!
Will we ever understand life’s origins? Will we ever be able to put our finger on the exact moment and circumstances that lead to living matter? Will we ever pinpoint the spark? Who knows. But what we can do is find out how widespread the conditions for life are and how widespread the molecular constituents …
Earth formed from the Sun’s protoplanetary disk about 4.6 billion years ago. In the beginning, it was a molten spheroid with scorching temperatures. Over time, it cooled, and a solid crust formed. Eventually, the atmosphere cooled, and life became a possibility. But how did all of that happen? The atmosphere was rich in carbon, and …
Continue reading “How did Earth go From Molten Hellscape to Habitable Planet?”
We know a ton about the inside of Earth. We know it has both an inner core and an outer core and that the churning and rotation create a protective magnetosphere that shields life from the Sun’s radiative power. It has a mantle, primarily solid but also home to magma. We know it has a …