Space and astronomy news
It’s a measure of human ingenuity and curiosity that scientists debate the possibility of life on Venus. They established long ago that Venus’ surface is absolutely hostile to life. But didn’t scientists find a biomarker in the planet’s clouds? Could life exist there, never touching the planet’s sweltering surface?
It seems to depend on who you ask.
Continue reading “Could Life Exist in Water Droplet Worlds in Venus’ Atmosphere?”
In 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO.) Its ongoing mission is to map the lunar surface in detail, locating potential landing sites, resources, and interesting features like lava tubes. The mission is an ongoing success, another showcase of NASA’s skill. It’s mapped about 98.2% of the lunar surface, excluding the deeply shadowed regions in the polar areas.
But recently, the LRO team’s skill was on display for another reason: it captured images of another satellite speeding over the lunar surface.
Continue reading “US Satellite Photographs a South Korean Satellite from Lunar Orbit”
In 2013, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted water vapour on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The vapour was evidence of plumes similar to the ones on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. That, and other compelling evidence, showed that the moon has an ocean. That led to speculation that the ocean could harbour life.
But the ocean is obscured under a thick, global layer of ice, making the plumes our only way of examining the ocean. The plumes are so difficult to detect they haven’t been confirmed.
Continue reading “If Europa has Geysers, They’re Very Faint”
In a couple billion years, our Sun will be unrecognizable. It will swell up and become a red giant, then shrink again and become a white dwarf. The inner planets aren’t expected to survive all the mayhem these transitions unleash, but what will happen to them? What will happen to the outer planets?
Continue reading “What Happens to Solar Systems When Stars Become White Dwarfs?”
You’ve likely heard of the Breakthrough Starshot (BTS) initiative. BTS aims to send tiny gram-scale, light sail picospacecraft to our neighbour, Proxima Centauri B. In BTS’s scheme, lasers would propel a whole fleet of tiny probes to the potentially water-rich exoplanet.
Now, another company, Space Initiatives Inc., is tackling the idea. NASA has funded them so they can study the idea. What can we expect to learn from the effort?
Continue reading “What a Swarm of Probes Can Teach Us About Proxima Centauri B”
Life on Earth depends on six critical elements: Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous, and Sulfur. These elements are referred to as CHNOPS, and along with several trace micronutrients and liquid water, they’re what life needs.
Scientists are getting a handle on detecting exoplanets that might be warm enough to have liquid water on their surfaces, habitability’s most basic signal. But now, they’re looking to up their game by finding CHNOPS in exoplanet atmospheres.
Continue reading “Measuring the Atmospheres of Other Worlds to See if There are Enough Nutrients for Life”
Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.
Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?
Continue reading “Does the Rise of AI Explain the Great Silence in the Universe?”
Astronomers routinely provide the ages of the stars they study. But the methods of measuring ages aren’t 100% accurate. Measuring the ages of distant stars is a difficult task.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope should make some progress.
Continue reading “Roman Will Learn the Ages of Hundreds of Thousands of Stars”
The region near the Milky Way’s centre is dominated by the supermassive black hole that resides there. Sagittarius A*’s overwhelming gravity creates a chaotic region where tightly packed, high-speed stars crash into one another like cars in a demolition derby.
These collisions and glancing blows change the stars forever. Some become strange, stripped-down, low-mass stars, while others gain new life.
Continue reading “The Stellar Demolition Derby in the Centre of the Galaxy”
At the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, an instrument with 5,000 tiny robotic eyes scans the night sky. Every 20 minutes, the instrument and the telescope it’s attached to observe a new set of 5,000 galaxies. The instrument is called DESI—Dark Energy Survey Instrument—and once it’s completed its five-year mission, it’ll create the largest 3D map of the Universe ever created.
But scientists are getting access to DESI’s first data release and it suggests that dark energy may be evolving.
Continue reading “A New Map Shows the Universe’s Dark Energy May Be Evolving”