Space and astronomy news
New research has found that as the number of satellites in Earth orbit continues to increase, their accumulated light pollution will brighten the night sky – making it much harder to do fundamental astronomy.
Continue reading “Satellites Have Brightened the Skies by About 10% Across the Entire Planet”
The EmDrive is a hypothetical rocket that proponents claim can generate thrust with no exhaust. This would violate all known physics. In 2016, a team at NASA’s Eagleworks lab claimed to measure thrust from an EmDrive device, the news of which caused quite a stir. The latest attempt to replicate the shocking results has resulted in a simple answer: the Eagleworks measurement was from heating of the engine mount, not any new physics.
Continue reading “In a Comprehensive new Test, the EmDrive Fails to Generate any Thrust”
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – the largest and most powerful of all the storms in the solar system – has been churning for hundred of years. Recently dozens of smaller storms have slammed into the Red Spot. Those smaller storms only caused superficial damage – and may have ended up feeding the beast itself.
Continue reading “Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has a Dark Secret. It Feeds on Smaller Storms”
Underneath its shell of ice, the globe-spanning ocean of Enceladus isn’t sitting still. Instead, it might possibly host massive ocean currents, driven by changes in salinity.
Continue reading “There are Ocean Currents Under the ice on Enceladus”
Breathe it while you still can. A new research study forecasts the future of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere and finds grim news. As the sun continues to warm, carbon dioxide will bind to rocks. This will starve plants, and in as little as a billion years they won’t be able to produce enough oxygen to keep our planet habitable (for us).
Continue reading “A Billion Years From now There won’t be Much Oxygen in the Earth’s Atmosphere”
Red giant stars are, well, red and giant. But astronomers have always had difficulty estimating their temperatures, due to their complex and turbulent atmospheres. Without an accurate gauge of their temperatures, it’s difficult to tell when they will end their lives in gigantic supernova explosions. Now a team of astronomers have developed a more effective technique for taking the temperature of red giants, based on the amount of iron in the stars.
Continue reading “Measuring the Temperatures of Red Giants is Actually Pretty Tricky”
Just when do comets get their signature coma? Conventional wisdom says it only happens when they get close enough to the sun, but new research suggests it starts when they are still beyond the orbit of the planets.
Continue reading “Comets Already Grow a Coma out in the Kuiper Belt”
Astronomers are struggling to understand the discrepancies when measuring the expansion rate of the universe with different methods, and are desperate for any creative idea to break the tension. A new method involving some of the oldest stars in the universe could just do the trick.
Continue reading “The Oldest Stars Help Tell us how big the Universe is”
Sometimes the sun spits out high-energy particles which slam into the Earth, potentially disrupting our sensitive electronics. New research has found that these particles originate in the plasma of the sun itself, and are trapped there by strong magnetic fields. When those fields weaken, the particles blast out.
Continue reading “Researchers Discover the Source of the Sun’s Most Dangerous High-Energy Particles”
Supermassive black holes are just a little bit too supermassive – astronomers have difficulty explaining how they got so big so quickly in the early universe. So maybe it’s time for a new idea: perhaps giant black holes formed directly from dark matter.
Continue reading “Did Supermassive Black Holes Form Directly From Dark Matter?”