Space and astronomy news
It’s time for another Weekly Space Hangout, where we give you a rundown of the big space news stories of the week, from a team of scientists and space journalists. Host: Fraser Cain Participants: Sondy Springmann, Alan Boyle, Brian Koberlein, Nicole Gugliucci, David Dickinson Stories: Alan Boyle Visits Blue Origin Facility Arecibo Images 2003 DZ15 …
Astronomers think they’ve detected the first-ever rainbow-like “glory effect” on an exoplanet. The observations were made with ESA’s Cheops mission, which helps to pin down the characteristics of known exoplanets, including the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-76b. When the star’s light passes through a planet’s atmosphere, it creates colorful concentric rings that have been seen on Earth and even Venus but never on an exoplanet.
This is an image of the FS Tau multi-star system taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The bright object at the nebula’s heart is FS Tau A, a newly ignited T Tauri star, but its companion on the right side, FS Tau B, hasn’t ignited yet. It’s still in the process of collapsing and heating up, releasing heat from the gravitational collapse. The Harbig-Haro protostar releases jets of fast-moving energized material, visible as the blue material stretching across the nebula.
If dark matter is a particle, it’s possible that it could self-annihilate, becoming normal matter and releasing gamma radiation. Dwarf galaxies are the best objects to search for this radiation because they’re small, rich in dark matter, and don’t have other phenomena that could contaminate the view. A new survey examined 50 dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way and saw a faint hint of gamma radiation that could be coming from dark matter annihilation.
Researchers recently collected 850 millimeter-sized spherules from the seafloor near Papua New Guinea. They believed they were caused by an interstellar bolide that struck the atmosphere in 2014. Most were terrestrial in origin or resembled typical iron or chondritic meteoroids, but a small ratio was unusual. In a new paper, scientists propose that these spherules are similar to debris found in a vast region caused by an impactor that hit Earth 788,000 years ago.
When a star like the Sun reaches the end of its life, it becomes a red giant and blows away its outer layers, leaving an exposed core – a white dwarf. What happens to its planets? Some were consumed when it became a red giant; others could spiral inward and impact the star. Astronomers have found white dwarfs that were polluted with metals in the past, but now they’ve found one with a metal scar on its surface, where a large, metal-rich asteroid crashed onto the surface.
SETI researchers have directed their search toward interesting star systems where extraterrestrial civilizations could send signals toward Earth. According to a new paper, sufficiently advanced civilizations will communicate across the galaxy, sending signals between stars, rogue planets, and interstellar objects. They’ll probably be using pulsars as a navigation system to coordinate their activities at a vast scale. To confirm their existence, we just have to listen in.
Astronomers continue to find more and more evidence of black holes, but there’s an alternative theory that could explain the observations: gravastars. First proposed in 2001, these objects are one possible solution to Einstein’s field equations, having the same impact on the Universe. But they won’t have an event horizon or singularity. Instead, they’d contain thin shells of matter surrounding an exotic dark energy that pushes back against the star’s gravitational force.
Astronomers have found evidence of geothermal activity across the Solar System, from planets like Mars, icy moons like Europa and Enceladus, and even dwarf planets like Pluto. They’ve used JWST to find evidence of geothermal activity in Kupiter Belt Objects Eris and Makemake. It was thought that these tiny worlds were long dead and cold, but they found evidence of elements on the surface that indicate geothermal activity, like geysers or cryovolcanoes.
ESA’s Euclid mission was launched in July 2023 and has already sent home test images showing that its instruments are ready to go. Now, the space telescope begins mapping huge swaths of the sky, focusing on an area for 70 minutes at a time. Throughout its 6-year mission, it will complete 40,000 of these “pointings”, eventually observing 1.5 billion galaxies in the sky. Astronomers will use this map to measure how dark matter and dark energy have changed over time.