Posted on by Matt Williams

The Earth’s Wandering Poles Could Have Caused the Ice Age

Artist's impression of ice age Earth at glacial maximum. Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Ittiz

Earth’s last great ice age, known as the Quaternay Glaciation, began roughly 3.2 million years ago. This period was characterized by the expansion of ice sheets out of Antarctica and Greenland, as well as the fluctuation of the Laurentian ice sheet, which covered most of Canada and the United States. The retreat of this glacier is responsible for the creation of millions of standing bodies of water across North America, including the Great Lakes.

While the causes of ice ages have been attributed to a combination of astronomical cycles, atmospheric conditions, ocean currents and plate tectonics, a complete explanation has been lacking thus far. However, according to a new research findings by a team of Rice University geophysicists, Earth’s last ice age may have been caused by shifts in the Earth relative to its spin axis that caused its poles to wander.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Name Change Alert! SpaceX’s BFR is Now Just Called “Starship”

In September of 2016, Musk treated the world to an early sneak-peak at his proposed super-heavy launch vehicle. Previously known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, the renamed Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) was the centerpiece to Musk’s long-term vision of conducting commercial trips to orbit, to the Moon, and even to Mars. Since that time, the mission architecture and even the name of the system have changed a few times.

For example, in September of 2017 – during a presentation titled “Making Life Interplanetary” – Musk presented the world with an updated design of launch system, which had been renamed the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) and the Big Falcon Spacecraft (BFS). And just recently, Musk announced the system will henceforth be known as the “Starship”, and its rocket the “Super Heavy“.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Massive Triple Star System Creates this Bizarre Swirling Pinwheel of Dust. And it Could be the Site of a Gamma Ray Burst

The VISIR instrument on ESO’s VLT captured this stunning image of a newly-discovered massive binary star system. Nicknamed Apep after an ancient Egyptian deity, it could be the first gamma-ray burst progenitor to be found in our galaxy. Apep’s stellar winds have created the dust cloud surrounding the system, which consists of a binary star with a fainter companion. With 2 Wolf-Rayet stars orbiting each other in the binary, the serpentine swirls surrounding Apep are formed by the collision of two sets of powerful stellar winds, which create the spectacular dust plumes seen in the image. The reddish pinwheel in this image is data from the VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), and shows the spectacular plumes of dust surrounding Apep. The blue sources at the centre of the image are a triple star system — which consists of a binary star system and a companion single star bound together by gravity. Though only two star-like objects are visible in the image, the lower source is in fact an unresolved binary Wolf-Rayet star. The triple star system was captured by the NACO adaptive optics instrument on the VLT. Credit: ESO/Callingham et al.

When stars reach the end of their lifespan, many undergo gravitational collapse and explode into a supernova, In some cases, they collapse to become black holes and release a tremendous amount of energy in a short amount of time. These are what is known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and they are one of the most powerful events in the known Universe.

Recently, an international team of astronomers was able to capture an image  of a newly-discovered triple star system surrounded by a “pinwheel” of dust. This system, nicknamed “Apep”, is located roughly 8,000 light years from Earth and destined to become a long-duration GRB. In addition, it is the first of its kind to be discovered in our galaxy.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Lakes on Mars Filled up so Quickly They Would Overflow Catastrophically Carving Canyons Within Weeks

Artist rendition of how the "lake" at Gale Crater on Mars may have looked millions of years ago. Credit and copyright: Kevin Gill.

Roughly 4.2 billion years ago, Mars was a much different place than it is today. It’s atmosphere was thicker and warmer and its surface much wetter. Unfortunately, the planet’s atmosphere was stripped away by solar wind over the next 500 million years, causing the surface to become so cold and dry that it makes Antarctica look balmy by comparison!

As a result, most of Mars’ water is currently locked away in its polar ice caps. But billions of years ago, water still flowed freely across the surface, forming ancient rivers and lakes. In fact, new research led by The University of Texas at Austin indicates that sometimes these lakes would fill so fast that they would overflow, causing massive floods that had a drastic impact on the surface.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Astronomers Find One of the Sun’s Sibling Stars. Born From the Same Solar Nebula Billions of Years Ago

Image of the Sun. Credit: SDO/NASA

According to current cosmological theories, the Milky Way started to form approximately 13.5 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This began with globular clusters, which were made up of some of the oldest stars in the Universe, coming together to form a larger galaxy. Over time, the Milky Way cannibalized several smaller galaxies within its cosmic neighborhood, growing into the spiral galaxy we know today.

Many new stars formed as mergers added more clouds of dust and gas and caused them to undergo gravitational collapse. In fact, it is believed that our Sun was part of a cluster that formed 4.6 billion years ago and that its siblings have since been distributed across the galaxy. Luckily, an international team of astronomers recently used a novel method to locate one of the Sun’s long-lost “solar siblings“, which just happens to be an identical twin!

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Astronomers Finally Spot the Type of Star That Leads to Type 1C Supernovae

Artist's impression of the blue supergiant that underwent a Type Ic supernova in 2017. Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI)

As astronomical phenomena go, supernovae are among the most fascinating and spectacular. This process occurs when certain types of stars reach the end of their lifespan, where they explode and throw off their outer layers. Thanks to generations of study, astronomers have been able to classify most observed supernovae into one of two categories (Type I and Type II) and determine which kinds of stars are the progenitors for each.

However, to date, astronomers have been unable to determine which type of star eventually leads to a Type Ic supernova – a special of class where a star undergoes core collapse after being stripped of its hydrogen and helium. But thanks to the efforts of two teams of astronomers that pored over archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have now found the long sought-after star that causes this type of supernova.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Chinese Fusion Experiment Reaches 100 Million Degrees

Researchers at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak facility in China have achieved a new milestone in fusion power. Credit: ipp.cas.cn

Fusion power has been the fevered dream of scientists, environmentalists and futurists for almost a century. For the past few decades, scientists have been attempting to find a way to create sustainable fusion reactions that would provide human beings with clean, abundant energy, which would finally break our dependence on fossil fuels and other unclean methods.

In recent years, many positive strides have been made that are bringing the “fusion era” closer to reality. Most recently, scientists working with the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) – aka. the “Chinese artificial sun” – set a new record by super-heating clouds of hydrogen plasma to over 100 million degrees – a temperature which is six times hotter than the Sun itself!

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Super Earth Planet Found Around One of the Closest Stars to us. But it’s Probably a Terrible Place to Live

The nearest single star to the Sun hosts an exoplanet at least 3.2 times as massive as Earth — a so-called super-Earth. Data from a worldwide array of telescopes, including ESO’s planet-hunting HARPS instrument, have revealed this frozen, dimly lit world. The newly discovered planet is the second-closest known exoplanet to the Earth and orbits the fastest moving star in the night sky. This image shows an artist’s impression of the planet’s surface. Credit: ESO

In the course of searching for extra-solar planets, some very interesting finds have been made. Some of them have even occurred within our own galactic neighborhood. Just two years ago, astronomers from the Red Dots and CARMENES campaigns announced the discovery of Proxima b, a rocky planet that orbits within the habitable zone of our nearest stellar neighbor – Proxima Centauri.

This rocky world, which may be habitable, remains the closest exoplanet ever discovered to our Solar System. A few days ago (on Nov. 14th), Red Dots and CARMENES announced another find: a rocky planet orbiting Barnard’s star, which is just 6 light years from Earth. This planet, Barnard’s Star b, is now the second closest exoplanet to our Solar System, and the closest planet to orbit a single star.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

SpaceX Gives More Details on how their Starlink Internet Service Will Work. Less Satellites, Lower Orbit, Shorter Transmission times, Shorter Lifespans

Still image from Hadley's simulation of the Starlink satellite constellation. Credit: Mark Hadley

For years, Elon Musk has talked about his plans to provide broadband internet access to the world using a constellation of satellites. Known as Starlink, this constellation was originally going to of nearly 12,000 low-cost satellites providing a terabit internet service. The first batch of these satellites is scheduled to launch in June of 2019, with the full constellation being deployed by the mid-2020s.

While the bare bones of this plan have been public knowledge for some time, Musk and the company he founded to reinvigorate space exploration have been somewhat scant on the details. But thanks to a simulation created by Prof. Mark Handley of University College London, the world may finally get an idea of what Starlink might look like.

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Posted on by Matt Williams

ARCHIMEDES: Digging into the ice on Europa with lasers

The fascinating surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. This is the color view of Europa from Galileo that shows the largest portion of the moon's surface at the highest resolution. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

Ever since the Pioneer and Voyager probes passed through the Jovian system in the 1970s, NASA and other space agencies have dreamed of one-day sending a mission to Europa. Beyond Earth, it is considered one of the most promising candidates for finding life, which could exist in the subsurface ocean that lies beneath the moon’s icy crust.

One of these concepts is known as the Cool High Impact Method for Exploring Down into Europan Subsurface (ARCHIMEDES), a proposed direct-laser penetrator that will use a laser light carried by an optical fiber tether to penetrate Europa’s icy crust. This mission could provide future missions with access to the ocean that exists beneath Europa’s surface and enable the search for life there.

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