Space and astronomy news
The construction of the Vera C. Rubin observatory has just crossed a major milestone with the successful installation of its 3.5 meter diameter secondary mirror. The observatory is now one step closer to first light in 2025, when it will begin the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST): a mission to repeatedly image the entire sky, at high resolution, to create a time-lapse record of the Universe.
Continue reading “Rubin's Secondary Mirror is Installed”
The Moon is a tough place to survive, and not just for humans. The wild temperature extremes between day and night make it extremely difficult to build reliable machinery that will continue to operate. But an engineering team from Nagoya University in Japan have developed an energy-efficient new way to control Loop Heat Pipes (LHP) to safely cool lunar rovers. This will extend their lifespan, keeping them running for extended lunar exploration missions.
Continue reading “A New Way to Survive the Harsh Lunar Night”
It should not be surprising that Venus is dry. It is famous for its hellish conditions, with dense sulphurous clouds, rains of acid, atmospheric pressures comparable to a 900 meter deep lake, and a surface temperature high enough to melt lead. But it’s lack of water is not just a lack of rain and oceans: there’s no ice or water vapour either. Like Earth, Venus is found within our Solar System’s goldilocks zone, so it would have had plenty of water when it was first formed. So where did all of Venus’s water go?
Continue reading “Where Did Venus's Water Go?”
The Artemis Program represents NASA’s effort to return to the Moon. One of the goals of the project is to set up long-term exploration of the Earth’s only natural satellite. This will need much bulkier equipment than what the Apollo astronauts carried though, and this equipment needs to be transported to the Moon’s surface. Blue Origin and SpaceX, contracted by NASA to provide human landing systems, have begun developing vehicles that can safely deliver this equipment from space to the Moon’s surface.
Continue reading “NASA Wants Heavy Cargo Landers for the Moon”
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it’s center seems to break our standard models of stellar evolution. But new data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggests that there may once have been three stars, and that one was destroyed in a catastrophic collision.
Continue reading “Two Stars in a Binary System are Very Different. It's Because There Used to be Three”
A new theory suggests that Titan’s majestic dune fields may have come from outer space. Researchers had always assumed that the sand making up Titan’s dunes was locally made, through erosion or condensed from atmospheric hydrocarbons. But researchers from the University of Colorado want to know: Could it have come from comets?
Continue reading “Are Titan's Dunes Made of Comet Dust?”
A 2023 expedition to the Pacific Ocean, searching for debris from a suspected extraterrestrial object, may have been looking in the wrong place. A new look at the infrasound data used to locate the point of impact suggests that they may have been confused by the rumblings of a truck driving past.
Continue reading “The Sound of an Interstellar Meteor Might Have Just Been a Rumbling Truck”
Gamma-ray telescopes observing neutron star collisions might be the key to identifying the composition of dark matter. One leading theory explaining dark matter it that is mostly made from hypothetical particles called axions. If an axion is created within the intensely energetic environment of two neutron stars merging, it should then decay into gamma-ray photons which we could see using space telescopes like Fermi-LAT.
Continue reading “Colliding Neutron Stars are the Ultimate Particle Accelerators”
Researchers from Ohio State University have come up with a novel method to detect dark matter, based on existing meteor-detecting technology. By using ground-based radar to search for ionization trails, similar to those produced by meteors as they streak through the air, they hope to use the Earth’s atmosphere as a super-sized particle detector. The results of experiments using this technique would help researchers to narrow down the range of possible characteristics of dark matter particles.
Continue reading “The Technique for Detecting Meteors Could be Used to Find Dark Matter Particles Entering the Atmosphere”
NASA’s Balloon Program Analysis Group recently presented a roadmap to NASA, to guide them on how to plan and fund future balloon astronomy programs. Balloons have been used for over a century to conduct physics experiments, astronomical observations and Earth observing work, but remain relatively unknown to the general public. Balloon astronomy share many advantages with space telescopes, but at a fraction of the cost.