A Combined Map of Almost 15,000 Dust Storms on Mars

Data in the world of astronomy is spread out in so many different places.  There are archives for instruments on individual spacecraft and telescopes.  Sometimes all that is needed to get new insight out of old data is to collect it all together and analyze a whole set rather than isolated instances.  That is exactly what happened recently when a team from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics collected and analyzed data about almost 15,000 dust storms that have taken place on Mars over the last eight Martian years.

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The Crab Nebula Seen in 3-Dimensions

The Crab Nebula is arguably one of the most famous objects in the night sky.  It was delineated as M1 in Messier’s famous catalogue.  It is the remnants of a supernova that was actually visible in day time almost 1000 years ago.  And its remnants have been astonishing both professional and amateur astronomers ever since.

Now thanks to modern technology, we can get an updated view of this iconic supernova remnant. Researchers from a variety of institutions, led by Thomas Martin from the Universite Laval, have created a three dimensional image of the nebula for the first time ever.

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Quantum Theory Proposes That Cause and Effect Can Go In Loops

Causality is one of those difficult scientific topics that can easily stray into the realm of philosophy.  Science’s relationship with the concept started out simply enough: an event causes another event later in time.  That had been the standard understanding of the scientific community up until quantum mechanics was introduced.  Then, with the introduction of the famous “spooky action at a distance” that is a side effect of the concept of quantum entanglement, scientists began to question that simple interpretation of causality.

Now, researchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the University of Oxford have come up with a theory that further challenges that standard view of causality as a linear progress from cause to effect.  In their new theoretical structure, cause and effect can sometimes take place in cycles, with the effect actually causing the cause.

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February 7th Was the Start of a New Year on Mars

Happy New Year – from Mars.  It’s always mind expanding to think about the passage of time from other perspectives than the ones we are most familiar with.  So let’s celebrate that our slightly colder red cousin completed another spin around the sun.  The 36th Martian year began on February 7th, with a noticeable lack of fireworks or people singing Auld Lang Syne.  

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Here’s the Best Place for Explorers to Harvest Martian Ice

Water ice, especially any located in the sub-surface, has long been a focal point of Mars exploration efforts. Reasons abound as to why – from the need to grow plants to the need to create more rocket fuel to blast off the planet for a round trip.  Most of that effort has focused on the poles of the planet, where most of the water ice has been found.  

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What’s Causing Those Landslides on Mars? Maybe Underground Salt and Melting Ice

Changes in Mar’s geography always attract significant scientific and even public attention.  A hope for signs of liquid water (and therefore life) is likely one of the primary driving forces behind this interest.  One particularly striking changing feature is the Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) originally found by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Now, scientists at the SETI Institute have a modified theory for where those RSLs might develop – a combination of water ice and salt just under the Martian surface.

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Electrons Can Get Accelerated to Nearly the Speed of Light As They Interact With the Earth’s Magnetosphere

Electrons serve many purposes in physics.  They are used by some particle accelerators and they underpin our modern world in the silicon chips that run the world’s computers.  They’re also prevalent in space, where they can occasionally be seen floating around in a plasma in the magnetospheres of planets.  Now, a team from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) lead by Drs Hayley Allison and Yuri Shprits have discovered that those electrons present in the magnetosphere can be accelerated up to relativistic speeds, and that could potentially be hazardous to our increasing orbital infrastructure.

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A New Radar Instrument Will Try To Fill the Void Left By Arecibo

Observational astronomy is dependent on its data, and therefore also dependent on the instruments that collect that data.  So when one of those instruments fails it is a blow to the profession as a whole.  The collapse of the Arecibo Telescope last year after it was damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017 permanently deprived the radio astronomy world of one of its primary observational tools. Now a team at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) hopes to upgrade an existing telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to replace the failed Puerto Rican one and provide even more precise images of near Earth objects in the radio spectrum.

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What Looked Like Phosphine On Venus Might Actually Just Be Sulfur Dioxide

There’s nothing like a good old fashioned science fight.  When the discovery being challenged is one of the most public and intriguing of the last year, it’s bound to be even more interesting.  A team of scientists, led by Andrew Lincowski and Victoria Meadows at the University of Washington (UW), and involving members from a variety of NASA labs and other universities, has challenged the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus that was first announced last year.  Their explanation is much simpler: it was most likely sulfur dioxide, one of the most abundant materials already known to be in Venus’ atmosphere.

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Dark Energy Survey Finds Hundreds of New Gravitational Lenses

It’s relatively rare for a magical object from fantasy stories to have a analog in real life.  A truly functional crystal ball (or palantir) would be useful for everything from military operations to checking up on grandma. While nothing exists to be able to observe the mundanities of everyday life, there is something equivalent for extraordinarily far away galaxies: gravitational lenses.  Now a team led by Xiaosheng Huang from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and several universities around the world have published a list of more than 1200 new gravitational lensing candidates.

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