It takes oxygen to make iron rust. So when scientists discovered hematite spread widely through lunar high latitudes, they were surprised. How did that happen?
A new study suggests that oxygen from Earth could be playing a role in rusting the Moon.
Continue reading “Earth’s Oxygen Could be Making the Moon Rust”
Californians woke up to an alien-looking sky this morning, Wednesday, September 9, 2020.
Continue reading “Can you tell the difference between California, Venus, Titan and Mars? Hint: California is the one with buildings.”
In August 2014, the ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft arrived at its destination, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, after a 10 year journey. Rosetta carried a small companion, the Philae Lander. On November 12th, Philae was sent to the surface of Comet 67P. Unfortunately, things didn’t go exactly as planned, and the lander’s mission lasted only 63 hours.
During that time, it gathered what data it could. But mission scientists weren’t certain of its precise location, meaning its data was difficult to interpret accurately. Only when scientists knew precisely where Philae was located on the comet, could they make best use of all of its data.
Continue reading “Rosetta’s Philae Lander Was Alive on the Surface of 67P for 63 Hours, Trying to Communicate”
Whatever we grow up with, we think of as normal. Our single solitary yellow star seems normal to us, with planets orbiting on the same, aligned ecliptic. But most stars aren’t alone; most are in binary relationships. And some are in triple-star systems.
And the planet-forming disks around those three-star systems can exhibit some misshapen orbits.
Continue reading “The Strange, Misshapen Orbits of Planet-Forming Disks in a Triple-Star System”
This summer, the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) started posting “riddles” or challenges on their website. These riddles provide a look at how difficult it is for astronomers to find faint, near Earth objects (NEO). Try it for yourself by looking at the animation below:
Continue reading “There are Three Asteroids Hiding in this Animation, See If You Can Find Them”
It’s one of the stranger observations in ancient literature, and one of the earliest recorded tales of daytime astronomy.
A curious account comes to us from the 1st century AD Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, concerning the exploits of Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, who notes that:
“The Sun’s radiance makes the fix’d stars invisible in the daytime, although they are shining as much as in the night, which becomes manifest at a solar eclipse and also when the star is reflected in a very deep well.”
Continue reading “Astro-Challenge: Adventures in Daytime Astronomy”
Explaining the concept of a dust bunny to small children can be quite amusing. No, it’s not actually alive. It’s moving around because of really small currents of wind that we can’t even see. It’s mainly formed out of dead skin and spider webs. No, the spiders don’t actually eat the dead skin. Most of the time.
Now take that same concept of a bunch of particles stuck together, scale it up a few orders of magnitude, and put it in space. Though it’s still not alive, it would be blown by solar radiation rather than the winds. And instead of being made out of skin and spider webs, it could be made up of cometary dust particles. That is what scientists think our first detected visitor from another star might be – an interstellar dust bunny.
Continue reading “Okay, New Idea. Oumuamua is an Interstellar “Dust Bunny””
In 2015, Russian-American billionaire Yuri Milner established Breakthrough Initiatives, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing space exploration. Central to this effort is Breakthrough Listen, a ten-year international research program dedicated to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the largest and most sophisticated effort to find intelligent life beyond Earth to date.
In the past five years, the project has made two major data releases (in the June of 2019 and February of 2020) and announced that it found no signs of alien transmissions from the 1,327 nearest star systems. But thanks to an analytical breakthrough recently proposed by researchers from the University of Manchester, it looks as though Breakthrough Listen’s search efforts could be expanded by a factor of more than 200!
Continue reading “Extraterrestrial Hunters Figure Out a Way to Expand Their Search for Signals by a Factor of 200”
The Nancy Roman Telescope has reached another milestone in its development. NASA has announced that the space telescope’s primary mirror is now complete. The 2.4 meter (7.9 ft) mirror took less time to develop than other mirrors because it wasn’t built from scratch. It’s a re-shaped and re-surfaced mirror that came from the National Reconnaissance Office.
Continue reading “Nancy Roman Telescope’s Primary 2.4-Meter Mirror is Ready”
It’s kind of hard to see inside a star as it’s blowing up, because of the whole “blowing up” part, but gravitational waves – tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself – may help astronomers unlock how the biggest stars die.
Continue reading “Gravitational waves could show what’s happening inside a star as it’s going supernova”