Evan Gough, Author at Universe Today

June 17, 2021June 21, 2021 by Evan Gough

The Largest Rotating Objects in the Universe: Galactic Filaments Hundreds of Millions of Light-Years Long

Artist’s impression of cosmic filaments: huge bridges of galaxies and dark matter connect clusters of galaxies to each other. Galaxies are funnelled on corkscrew like orbits towards and into large clusters that sit at their ends. Their light appears blue-shifted when they move towards us, and red-shifted when they move away. Credit: AIP/ A. Khalatyan/ J. Fohlmeister

We’ve known for a while about the large-scale structure of the Universe. Galaxies reside in filaments hundreds of millions of light-years long, on a backbone of dark matter. And, where those filaments meet, there are galaxy clusters. Between them are massive voids, where galaxies are sparse. Now a team of astronomers in Germany and their colleagues in China and Estonia have made an intriguing discovery.

These massive filaments are rotating, and this kind of rotation on such a massive scale has never been seen before.

June 15, 2021June 15, 2021 by Evan Gough

NASA has Approved a Space Telescope That Will Scan the Skies for Dangerous Near-Earth Asteroids

An artist's illustration of the NEO Surveyor, a space telescope designed to detect and catalogue NEOs. Image Credit: NASA/JPL

A lot of the threats humanity faces come from ourselves. If we were listing them, we’d include tribalism, greed, and the fact that we’re evolved primates, and our brains have a lot in common with animal brains. Our animalistic brains subject us to many of the same destructive emotions and impulses that animals are subject to. We wage war and become embroiled in intergenerational conflicts. There are genocides, pogroms, doomed boatloads of migrants, and horrible mashups of all three.

Isn’t humanity fun?

But not all of the threats we face are as intractable as our internal ones. Some threats are external, and we can leverage our technologies and our knowledge of nature in the struggle against them. Case in point: asteroids.

June 14, 2021June 14, 2021 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Have Found the Perfect Exoplanet to Study Another World’s Atmosphere

An artist's rendering of TOI-1231 b, a Neptune-like planet about 90 light years away from Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has found a new planet, and the discovery of this sub-Neptune exoplanet has scientists excited about atmospheres. The combination of the planet’s size, its thick atmosphere, and its orbit around a small M-class star close to Earth provides researchers with an opportunity to learn more about exoplanet atmospheres. We’re getting better and better at finding exoplanets, and studying their atmospheres is the next step in understanding them as a whole.

June 10, 2021March 9, 2022 by Evan Gough

Did Asteroid Impacts Provide Both the Heat and Raw Ingredients to Enable Life?

An artist's conception of an asteroid collision, which leads to how "families" of these space rocks are made in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech — An artist's conception of an asteroid collision, in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This is our Great Question: How did life begin on Earth? Anyone who says they have the answer is telling tall tales. We just don’t know yet.

While a definitive answer may be a long way off—or may never be found—there are some clever ways to nibble at the edges of that Great Question. A group of researchers at Kobe University in Japan are taking their own bites out of that compelling question with a question of their own: Did the heat from asteroid impacts help life get started?

June 8, 2021June 8, 2021 by Evan Gough

The Universe is Constantly Bathing you in Radiation. Incredibly, This Could be Used for Medical Diagnosis

A cluster of massive stars seen with the Hubble Space Telescope. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust called a nebula. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains the central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603. Recent research shows that galactic cosmic rays flowing into our solar system originate in clusters like these. Credits: NASA/U. Virginia/INAF, Bologna, Italy/USRA/Ames/STScI/AURA

Walk into any modern hospital, and you’ll find a medical imaging department. Medical imaging uses x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and other arcane-sounding methods like positron emission tomography (PET) to image the body’s interior for analysis and diagnosis. To a non-specialist, these techniques can sound almost otherwordly. But in one way or another, these technologies rely on natural phenomena, including radiation, to do their thing.

Now a new study suggests that the Universe’s naturally occurring radiation could be used in medical imaging and could be particularly useful when it comes to COVID-19. The type of radiation in question is cosmic rays.

February 25, 2021February 25, 2021 by Evan Gough

What a Geologist Sees When They Look at Perseverance’s Landing Site

A topographic map of the region around Jezero Crater. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Geologists love fieldwork. They love getting their specialized hammers and chisels into seams in the rock, exposing unweathered surfaces and teasing out the rock’s secrets. Mars would be the ultimate field trip for many of them, but sadly, that’s not possible.

Instead, we’ve sent the Perseverance rover on the field trip. But if a geologist were along for the ride, what would it look like to them?

February 23, 2021February 23, 2021 by Evan Gough

Since Perseverance is Searching for Life, What Will it Be Looking for?

The rocks seen here along the shoreline of Lake Salda in Turkey were formed over time by microbes that trap minerals and sediments in the water. These so-called microbialites were once a major form of life on Earth and provide some of the oldest known fossilized records of life on our planet. NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance mission will search for signs of ancient life on the Martian surface. Studying these microbial fossils on Earth has helped scientists prepare for the mission. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

You have to be careful what you say to people. When NASA or someone else says that the Perseverance rover will be looking for fossil evidence of ancient life, the uninformed may guffaw loudly. Or worse, they may think that scientists are looking for actual animal skeletons or something.

Of course, that’s not the case.

So what is Perseverance looking for?

February 23, 2021February 23, 2021 by Evan Gough

Watch Perseverance Land on Mars. Mind…Blown

This screenshot from a NASA video shows Perseverance's chute opening. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech

NASA’s Perseverance rover is practically bristling with cameras. And those cameras were busy during the rover’s breathtaking descent to the Martian surface. Now NASA has released images and videos of the blessed event.

February 19, 2021February 19, 2021 by Evan Gough

Did a Comet Wipe out the Dinosaurs?

Artist's rendering of a comet headed towards Earth. Public domain illustration.

About 66 million years ago a massive chunk of rock slammed into Earth in what is the modern-day Yucatan Peninsula. The impact extinguished about 75% of all life on Earth. Most famously, it was the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

While mainstream scientific thought has pointed to an asteroid as the impactor, a new research letter says it could’ve, in fact, been a comet.

February 18, 2021February 18, 2021 by Evan Gough

We Could Find Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Their Air Pollution

Exoplanet Kepler 62f would need an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide for water to be in liquid form. Artist's Illustration: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Upcoming telescopes will give us more power to search for biosignatures on all the exoplanets we’ve found. Much of the biosignature conversation is centred on biogenic chemistry, such as atmospheric gases produced by simple, single-celled creatures. But what if we want to search for technological civilizations that might be out there? Could we find them by searching for their air pollution?

If a distant civilization was giving our planet a cursory glance in its own survey of alien worlds and technosignatures, they couldn’t help but notice our air pollution.

Could we turn the tables on them?