Ever since the Pioneer and Voyager probes passed through the Jovian system in the 1970s, NASA and other space agencies have dreamed of one-day sending a mission to Europa. Beyond Earth, it is considered one of the most promising candidates for finding life, which could exist in the subsurface ocean that lies beneath the moon’s icy crust.
One of these concepts is known as the Cool High Impact Method for Exploring Down into Europan Subsurface (ARCHIMEDES), a proposed direct-laser penetrator that will use a laser light carried by an optical fiber tether to penetrate Europa’s icy crust. This mission could provide future missions with access to the ocean that exists beneath Europa’s surface and enable the search for life there.
Neutron stars are one of the most fascinating astronomical objects in the known Universe. In addition to being the densest type of star (with the possible exception of quark stars), they have also been known to form binary pairs with massive stars. To date, only 39 such systems have been discovered, and even fewer have been detected that were composed of a massive star and a very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray neutron star.
To date, only two of these systems have been found, the second of which was discovered just a few years ago by a team of international astronomers known as the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) collaboration. In addition to being a rare find, the discovery was also very fortunate, since the unusual behavior they observed coming from this system will not be happening again until 2067.
Not all oppositions are created equal. This week’s sky target offers a good case in point, as asteroid 3 Juno reaches its most favorable viewing position for the decade. Continue reading “Catching Asteroid 3 Juno at Its Best”
In the past thirty years, the number of planets discovered beyond our Solar System has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of our technology, the vast majority of these exoplanets have been discovered by indirect means, often by detecting the transits of planets in front of their stars (the Transit Method) or by the gravitational influence they exert on their star (the Radial Velocity Method).
Very few have been imaged directly, where the planets have been observed in visible light or infrared wavelengths. One such planet is Beta Pictoris b, a young massive exoplanet that was first observed in 2008 by a team from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Recently, the same team tracked this planet as it orbited its star, resulting in some stunning images and an equally impressive time-lapse video.
Dr. Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and science educator – and now AUTHOR – is no stranger to the regular viewers of the WSH – but in case you missed it, and for anyone new to the WSH, Paul earned his Bachelor of Science in Physics from California Polytechnic State University in 2005 and his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. By day, Paul is a Cosmological Researcher & Community Outreach Coordinator with the Department of Astronomy at Ohio State University.
But Paul is probably best known and loved by everyone here at the WSH as one of our four co-hosts, his weekly show Space Radio, and of course, let’s not forget his podcast Ask a Spaceman!
This week, we turn the tables on Paul (at least briefly!) as he joins us as our special guest to discuss his first book Your Place in the Universe.
You can learn more about Paul and his research by visiting his website, http://www.pmsutter.com.
If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions!
If you’d like to join Dr. Paul Sutter and Dr. Pamela Gay on their Cosmic Stories in the SouthWest Tour in August 2019, you can find the information at astrotours.co/southwest.
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Wednesday at 5:00 pm Pacific / 8:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Weekly Space Hangout YouTube page – Please subscribe!
Welcome back to Messier Monday! Today, we continue in our tribute to our dear friend, Tammy Plotner, by looking at the unusual globular cluster known as Messier 71.
If you look up into the night sky, on a particularly clear night when there’s not a lot of bright lights nearby, you may be able to make out a series of faint objects. Similar to the Milky Way, that cloudy, ghostly band that reaches across the night sky, these small pockets of fuzzy light are in fact collections of stars located thousands of light years away.
We’re always interested in the surface features of the planets and moons in the Solar System, but that’s only skin deep. It turns out, these worlds have an interesting inner life too. Thanks to the science of seismology, we can peer into our planet and learn how it works… inside. And we’re about to take that technology to Mars.
If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions!
We have comets and asteroids to thank for Earth’s water, according to the most widely-held theory among scientists. But it’s not that cut-and-dried. It’s still a bit of a mystery, and a new study suggests that not all of Earth’s water was delivered to our planet that way.
