Space and astronomy news
Even with all we’ve learned about Mars in recent decades, the planet is still mysterious. Most of the mystery revolves around life and whether the planet ever supported any. But the planet teases us with more foundational mysteries, too.
One of those mysteries is the Martian dichotomy: Why are the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres so different?
Continue reading “A Marsquake Reveals Why Mars has Two Very Different Hemispheres”
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, previously known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), will be the first observatory of its kind. Jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), Rubin will conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – a 10-year survey of the southern hemisphere. The observatory is expected to collect 15 terabytes of data a night, which will be used to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition, time-lapse record of the cosmos, containing tens of billions of stars, galaxies, and astronomical objects.
After ten years of construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is less than one year away from starting this revolutionary observation campaign. In preparation for this, the observatory recently completed a series of full-system tests using an engineering test camera. With this milestone complete, the stage is now set for the installation of the 3200-megapixel LSST Camera (LSSTCam), the world’s largest digital camera. Once mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope, the observatory will have finished construction and be ready to collect its first light.
Continue reading “Vera Rubin Completes its Comprehensive System Tests”
There might be a type of exoplanet without dry land. They’re called “Hycean” worlds, a portmanteau of ‘hydrogen’ and ‘ocean.’ They’re mostly or entirely covered in oceans and have thick hydrogen atmospheres.
They’re intriguing because their atmospheres keep them warm enough to have liquid water outside of the traditional habitable zones. If they do exist, scientists think they’re good candidates to support microbial life.
Continue reading “Could Ocean Worlds Support Life?”
Kepler was one of the most successful exoplanet-hunting missions so far. It discovered 2,600 confirmed exoplanets – almost half of the total – in its almost ten years of operation. However, most data analysis focused only on one of the 150,000 targets it “intended” to look at. While it was making those observations, there were a myriad of background stars that also had their light captured incidentally. John Bienias and Robert Szabó of Hungary’s Konkoly Observatory have spent a lot of time looking at those background stars and recently published a paper suggesting there might be seven more exoplanet candidates hiding in the data.
Continue reading “Even More Planets Were Hiding in Kepler’s Fields”
Rovers on alien worlds need to be built of strong stuff. The dry rugged terrain can be punishing on the wheels as they explore the surface. In order to prevent the damage to the wheels, NASA is testing a shape memory alloy material that can return to its original shape after being bent, stretched, heated or cooled. NASA has already used this material for years but never in tires, in what may be its perfect application.
Continue reading “NASA is Testing Shape Memory Alloy Wheels”
The study of exoplanets is challenging enough with the immense distances and glare from the host start but astronomers have taken planetary system explorations to the next level. A team of astronomers have recently announced that they have observed belts of icy pebbles in systems with exoplanets. Using a radio telescope they have been able to detect wavelengths of radiation emitted by millimeter-sized pebbles created by exocomet collisions! Based upon this survey, they have found that about 20% of planetary systems contain these exocometary belts.
Red dwarfs always make me think of the classic British TV science comedy show in the 90’s that was named after them. The stars themselves better little resemblance to the show though. They are small, not surprisingly red stars that can generate flares and coronal mass ejections that rival many of the much larger stars. A team of astronomers have recently used the Chandra X-Ray Observatory to study Wolf 359 and found it unleashes brutal X-ray flares that would be extremely damaging to life on nearby planets.
If you want to know what the newly forming Solar System looked like, study planetary disks around other stars. Like them, our star was a single star forming its retinue of worlds and other stars did the same. This all happened 4.5 billion years ago, so we have to look at similar systems around nearby stars.
Continue reading “Several Double Planetary Disks Found”
A spacecraft takes between about seven and nine months to reach Mars. The time depends on the spacecraft and the distance between the two planets, which changes as they follow their orbits around the Sun. NASA’s Perseverance is the most recent spacecraft to make the journey, and it took about seven months.
If it didn’t take so long, then Mars would be within reach of a human mission sooner rather than later. NASA is exploring the idea of using nuclear electric propulsion to shorten the travel time.
Continue reading “Getting To Mars Quickly With Nuclear Electric Propulsion”
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense flashes of radio light that last for only a fraction of a second. They are likely caused by the intense magnetic fields of a magnetar, which is a highly magnetic neutron star. Beyond that, FRBs remain a bit of a mystery. We know that most of them originate from outside our galaxy, though the few that have occurred within our galaxy have allowed us to pin the source on neutron stars. We also know that some of them repeat, meaning that FRBs can’t be caused by a cataclysmic event such as a supernova. Thanks to one repeating FRB, we now know something new about them.
Continue reading “A Fast Radio Burst Came From an Old, Dead Galaxy”