Space and astronomy news
As of 2020, there were over 19,000 pieces of individually tracked space junk in orbit above the Earth. Of those, a mere 2,200 were operational satellites. As more and more satellites go up, the risk of collisions increases. And what are governments doing to stop it? Basically, nothing.
Continue reading “We Need to Fix Space Junk Before It’s Too Late”
Dark matter rules every galaxy. But what exactly is it? Astronomers believe it to be some kind of new, exotic particle. You may have heard some terms tossed around, like WIMPs or axions. Let’s explore what those terms actually mean.
Continue reading “WIMPS vs. Axions: What is dark matter?”
We find examples of fractals everywhere in nature. Tree branches, snowflakes, river deltas, cloud formations, and more. So it’s natural to ask the ultimate question: is the entire universe one giant fractal? The answer is…no, but sorta yes.
Continue reading “Is the Universe a Fractal?”
Every few years the “EmDrive”, a proposed method of generating rocket thrust without any exhaust, hits the news. Each time, everyone asks: could this be it? Could this be the technological leap to revolutionize spaceflight?
Don’t hold your breath.
Continue reading “Don’t Be Surprised if EmDrive Experiments Never Work”
We don’t quite understand how the first supermassive black holes formed so quickly in the young universe. So a team of physicists are proposing a radical idea. Instead of forming black holes through the usual death-of-a-massive-start route, instead giant dark matter halos directly collapsed, forming the seeds of the first great black holes.
Continue reading “How did Supermassive Black Holes Form? Collapsing Dark Matter Halos can Explain Them”
A team of astronomers has found that giant, organized magnetic fields can help drive some of the most powerful explosions in the universe. But when all is said and done, the shock wave from that blast scrambles any magnetic fields in a matter of minutes.
Continue reading “Exploding Material From a Gamma-ray Burst Scrambled Nearby Magnetic Fields”
Space may be pretty, but it’s dangerous. Astronauts face a much higher dose of ionizing radiation than us Earth-bound folks, and a new report says that NASA’s current guidelines and risk assessment methods are in serious need of an update.
Continue reading “Report Suggests That Astronauts Shouldn’t get More Than 600 Millisieverts of Radiation Exposure During Their Career. We get 2-3 a Year Down Here on Earth”
It’s tough to see inside of Saturn, because the atmosphere is opaque to all wavelengths of radiation. We have to rely on computer simulations and physics-based guesswork to try to understand the interior of that giant world. But researchers are becoming more adept at a different technique: looking for the slightest motions in the rings of Saturn.
Continue reading “Using Saturn’s Rings to Figure out What’s Inside the Planet”
If it were’t for an enormous halo of dark matter enveloping our galaxy, the spin-rate of our central bar should stay pretty constant. But researchers have recently inferred that it has slowed down by almost 25% since its formation, a clear sign of the presence of dark matter.
Continue reading “The Milky Way’s Central bar Spin-Rate is Slowing Down Thanks to Dark Matter”
In 1181 CE, Chinese and Japanese astronomers noticed a “guest star” as bright as Saturn briefly appearing in their night sky. In the thousand years since, astronomers have not been able to pinpoint the origins of that event. New observations have revealed that the “guest star” was a supernova, and a strange one at that. It was a supernova that did not destroy the star, but left behind a zombie that is still shining.
Continue reading “Supernova Observed by Astronomers in 1181 Could Have Been a Rare Type 1ax That Leaves Behind a “Zombie Star” Remnant”