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June 27, 2019June 27, 2019 by David Dickinson

Our Complete Guide to the July 2019 Total Solar Eclipse

This image combines many exposures of different durations taken to reveal aspects of the widely-viewed total solar eclipse of 21 August 2017, which was visible from the United States. In the centre the faint circle of the Moon can be seen, with its surface features dimly illuminated in light reflected from the Earth. Around the edge red prominences can be seen and further out the white glow of the corona is sculpted by the Sun's magnetic field.

You couldn’t order up a geekier solar eclipse from the cosmos. Next Tuesday on July 2^nd, the second of three eclipse seasons begins for 2019, with the only total solar eclipse of the year spanning the southern tip of South America, including the nations of Chile and Argentina. As an extra-special part of the spectacle, however, the path of totality for the eclipse passes right over the La Silla observatory complex in the Atacama Desert.

June 26, 2019June 26, 2019 by Matt Williams

The Most Efficient Way to Explore the Entire Milky Way, Star by Star

Modelling galactic settlement. Credit: ESA/ACT

It seems like the stuff of dreams, the idea that humanity will one day venture beyond the Solar System and become an interstellar species. Who knows? Given enough time and the right technology (and assuming there’s not some serious competition), we might even be able to colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy someday. And while this seems like a far-off prospect at best, it makes sense to contemplate what a process like this would entail.

That’s what a think tank from the ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) managed to do recently. As part of the tenth annual Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GOTC X), they created a simulation that showed how humanity could optimally colonize the Milky Way. This was in keeping with the competition’s theme of “Settlers of the Galaxy“, which challenged teams to find the most energy-efficient way of settling as many star systems as possible.

June 25, 2019June 25, 2019 by Matt Williams

Of Course Mars 2020 is Going to Get a New Name. NASA is Looking for Judges for an Upcoming Naming Contest

This artist's concept depicts NASA's Mars 2020 rover exploring Mars. Credit: NASA

A little over a year from now, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will launch for Cape Canaveral and begin its journey to the Red Planet. When it arrives, in February 2021, it will begin exploring the Jezero Crater to learn more about Mars’ past and search for evidence of past and present life. But before that happens, this robotic explorer still needs a proper name.

Like its predecessors, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, the Mars 2020 rover will get its official name with the help of a nationwide contest. Towards this end, NASA recently announced that it has partnered with two organizations to give K-12 students all across the US a chance to name the rover that will continue in the search for life and pave the way for humans to begin exploring Mars.

June 25, 2019June 25, 2019 by Matt Williams

Curiosity Sniffs a Spike in Methane. Could it be a Sign of Life?

This low-angle self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called "Buckskin" on lower Mount Sharp. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Since it landed on Mars in 2012, one of the main scientific objectives of the Curiosity rover has been finding evidence of past (or even present) life on the Red Planet. In 2014, the rover may have accomplished this very thing when it detected a tenfold increase in atmospheric methane in its vicinity and found traces of complex organic molecules in drill samples while poking around in the Gale Crater.

About a year ago, Curiosity struck pay dirt again when it found organic molecules in three-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks located near the surface of lower Mount Sharp. But last week, the Curiosity rover made an even more profound discovery when it detected the largest amount of methane ever measured on the surface of Mars – about 21 parts per billion units by volume (ppbv).

June 24, 2019June 24, 2019 by Matt Williams

Uranus’ Rings are Surprisingly Bright in Thermal Emissions

Composite image of Uranus’s atmosphere and rings at radio wavelengths, taken with the ALMA array in December 2017. The image shows thermal emission, or heat, from the rings of Uranus for the first time, enabling scientists to determine their temperature: a frigid 77 Kelvin (-320 F). Dark bands in Uranus’s atmosphere at these wavelengths show the presence of molecules that absorb radio waves, in particular hydrogen sulfide gas. Bright regions like the north polar spot (yellow spot at right, because Uranus is tipped on its side) contain very few of these molecules. (UC Berkeley image by Edward Molter and Imke de Pater)

During the late 1970s, scientists made a rather interesting discovery about the gas giants of the Solar System. Thanks to ongoing observations using improved optics, it was revealed that gas giants like Uranus – and not just Saturn – have ring systems about them. The main difference is, these ring systems are not easily visible from a distance using conventional optics and require exceptional timing to see light being reflected off of them.

Another way to study them is to observe their planet in infrared or radio wavelengths. This was recently demonstrated by a team of astronomers who conducted observations of Uranus using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT). In addition to obtaining temperature readings from the rings, they confirmed what many scientists have suspected about them for some time.

June 24, 2019December 2, 2019 by Tammy Plotner

Messier 88 – the NGC 4501 Spiral Galaxy

Welcome back to Messier Monday! Today, we continue in our tribute to our dear friend, Tammy Plotner, by looking at the spiral galaxy known as Messier 88!

During the 18th century, famed French astronomer Charles Messier noticed the presence of several “nebulous objects” while surveying the night sky. Originally mistaking these objects for comets, he began to catalog them so that others would not make the same mistake. Today, the resulting list (known as the Messier Catalog) includes over 100 objects and is one of the most influential catalogs of Deep Space Objects.

One of these objects is the spiral galaxy known as Messier 88 (New General Catalog designation 4501), a spiral galaxy located between 50 and 60 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. M88 was one of the first celestial objects to be recognized as a spiral galaxy and is one of the brighter galaxies of its kind in the Virgo Cluster.

Continue reading “Messier 88 – the NGC 4501 Spiral Galaxy”

June 20, 2019June 20, 2019 by Matt Williams

Enceladus is Filled with Tasty Food for Bacteria

The plumes of Enceladus have phosphate-rich ice grains entrained. Credit: NASA — A NASA illustrations of Cassini flying through the plumes of Enceladus. Credit: NASA.

As soon as the Cassini-Huygens mission arrived the Saturn system in 2004, it began to send back a number of startling discoveries. One of the biggest was the discovery of plume activity around the southern polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus’, which appears to be the result of geothermal activity and an ocean in the moon’s interior. This naturally gave rise to a debate about whether or not this interior ocean could support life.

Since then, multiple studies have been conducted to get a better idea of just how likely it is that life exists inside Enceladus. The latest comes from the University of Washington’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences (ESS), which shows that concentrations of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane in Enceladus’ interior ocean (as well as its pH levels) are more conducive to life than previously thought.

June 20, 2019June 25, 2019 by Matt Williams

Want to Find Aliens? The Largest Dataset in the History of SETI has Been Released to the Public

In 2016, Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner launched Breakthrough Initiatives, a massive non-profit organization dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). A key part of their efforts to find evidence of intelligent life is Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million program that is currently conducting a survey of one million of the nearest stars and the 100 nearest galaxies.

In keeping with their commitment to making the results of their surveys available to the public, the Listen team recently submitted two papers to leading astrophysical journals. These papers describe the analysis of Listen’s first three years of radio observations which resulted in a petabyte of radio and optical data, the single largest release of SETI data in the history of the field.

June 19, 2019June 19, 2019 by Matt Williams

Two Earth-Like Worlds Found Orbiting a Red Dwarf Only 12.5 Light-Years Away

Artistic recreation of the Teegarden Star system. Credit: University of Göttingen

In the past few decades, there has been an explosion in the number of planets discovered beyond our Solar System. With over 4,000 confirmed exoplanets to date, the process has gradually shifted from discovery towards characterization. This consists of using refined techniques to determine just how likely a planet is to be habitable.

At the same time, astronomers continue to make discoveries regularly, some of which are right in our cosmic backyard. For instance, an international team of researchers recently detected two new Earth-like planets orbiting Teegarden’s Star, an M-type (red dwarf) star located just 12.5 light-years from the Solar System in the direction of the Aries constellation.

June 18, 2019June 18, 2019 by Matt Williams

Inflatable Heat Shield Could Deliver Heavy Payloads to Worlds With a Thick Atmosphere

Illustration of Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID). Credits: NASA

One of the greater challenges of sending payloads to Mars is having to contend with the planet’s atmosphere. While incredibly thin compared to Earth’s (with roughly half of 1% of Earth’s air pressure), the resulting air friction is still an issue for spacecraft looking to land there. And looking to the future, NASA hopes to be able to land heavier payloads on Mars as well as other planets – some of which may have atmospheres as dense as Earth.

A possible solution to this is the use of inflatable aeroshells (aka. heat shields), which offer numerous advantages over rigid ones. To develop this technology, NASA and United Launch Alliance (ULA) have partnered to develop an inflatable heat shield known as the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID). By 2022, they hope to send this cutting-edge prototype to low-Earth orbit (LEO), where it will be tested.