The planet Uranus is a weird place. Not only does it roll around the Sun on its side once every 84.3 Earth years, it also sports a spindly set of rings corralled in some places by strange little moons. Two of those rings, the μ (mu) and ν (nu) rings are incredibly faint, which makes them challenging to study.
Imagine holding a wine glass up to a candle (of course I had to pour a glass to try this.) The curved glass bends and distorts the flame, stretching it into arcs and rings of light. Now scale that up to the size of a galaxy, replace the glass with a trillion solar masses of matter, and the candle with an entire galaxy billions of light years away. What you get is one of the most beautiful and scientifically powerful phenomena in all of astronomy, a gravitational lens.
Imagine a world where the Sun never rises and never sets! It feels like that here in the UK sometimes with what feels like a never-ending cover of cloud. On one side of a world like this, a permanent blazing day whilst on the other, an endless frozen night. No seasons, no dawn, no dusk just an eternal, pitiless divide. For more than three quarters of the stars in our Galaxy, this is the reality facing their planets. And now, for the first time, astronomers have mapped the climate of two such worlds in extraordinary detail.
There is a place at the centre of our Galaxy where the rules of physics are pushed to their limits. Squeezed into a region smaller than our Solar System sits Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of our Sun. The space around it is a churning and chaotic environment where stars orbit at breakneck speeds, gas swirls through intense gravitational fields, and anything straying too close risks being torn apart and consumed. Yet for all its violence, one of the biggest mysteries here has been surprisingly simple; what on earth (pardon the pun) is feeding it?
When the first gravitational wave (GW) was detected back in 2015, scientists said they had opened a new window into the Universe. While most of astronomy is based on detecting electromagnetic energy, GW are different. They're ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein.
NASA's MSL Curiosity rover has found some more pieces of the puzzle that is Mars' ancient habitability. Evidence that the planet was once warm, wet, and habitable is growing, and now Curiosity has detected some new organic molecules. The rover found 21 organic compounds in rocks in Gale Crater with its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. Seven of them were detected for the first time.
The dependable Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit for more than 35 years now. It's at a point where it can reexamine objects it observed decades ago and can uncover changes that have transpired over human timescales. This is an impressive feat for a telescope that was projected to last only 15 years.
One of the most dramatic and memorable scenes from Interstellar comes from Miller’s planet - and if you don’t want a spoiler for an 11 year old movie, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. When the crew arrives on this potential new home for humanity, they are faced with a literal 1.2 km high wall of water bearing down on them quickly. It’s a great representation of how waves on other planets can act differently than on Earth. Admittedly, according to Kip Thorne, the scientific advisor for that movie, those waves are actually caused by the planet’s proximity to a local black hole rather than the wind that forms our waves here.
Scientists have been debating for decades whether Mars once held a vast ocean covering a large part of its northern face. To prove the idea, they’ve been looking for a “bathtub ring” - a distinct, level shoreline that shows where water once stood. But, despite years of looking, they’ve only been able to find a very distorted potential shoreline whose height deviates by several kilometers - not exactly great evidence of a stable water level. But, according to a new paper in Nature from Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of CalTech, what scientists should have been looking for wasn’t a bathtub ring, but a continental shelf.
The search for life beyond Earth has traditionally focused on exoplanets orbiting Sun-like stars, which is a G-type star. However, low-mass stars, which are designated as K-type and M-type stars, have rapidly become a target for astrobiology, primarily due to their much longer lifetimes. This also means the habitable zone (HZ), which is the distance from a star where liquid water could exist, is much smaller than our solar system’s HZ, and is referred to as the liquid water habitable zone (LW-HZ). In contrast, another type of HZ that involves a star’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation potentially enabling life-harboring conditions is known as UV-HZ.
As we make our way through the latest solar maximum period, scholars and scientists are looking to similar events in the past to learn more about ancient bouts of solar activity. In particular, they want to know more about solar proton events (SPEs). These outbursts of high-energy particles get triggered by flares and coronal mass ejections.
Human history is littered with expired civilizations, and scholars and archaeologists have made a determined effort to understand why and how civilizations collapse. They've found that symptoms like a growing wealth gap and distrust of the elites are precursors to civilizational collapse. But what about global technological civilizations like the one we live in now? How long can they last? What causes their collapse? How can they recover?
Liquid water is the primary ingredient for life as far as we can determine. The search for habitable exoplanets focuses on this fact. Exoplanet scientists sift through data trying to determine which worlds might be in their stars' habitable zones, a zone with just the right amount of star energy to maintain liquid surface water.
New missions mean new capabilities - and one particularly interesting new mission is finally up and running. Data is starting to come in from SPHEREx, the medium-class surveyor that is mapping the entire sky every six months. A paper based on some of that early data was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, mapping ice and compounds called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) throughout some interesting regions of our Milky Way.
So far, America has remained ahead in the new space race. But its biggest rival is making continual steps to catch up. China announced another step in that direction with the unveiling of its first ever reusable five-meter-wide composite propulsion module, announced in a press release on April 11th.
The Universe looks mighty impressive when visualized with X-ray instruments. More importantly, X-ray images provide vital scientific insights by revealing features in the Universe that are not observable in visible light. The same is true of our Solar System, which has been difficult because of the challenges of separating local emissions from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. In a recent study, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) managed, for the first time, to disentangle the X-ray glow of our Solar System from deep space.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory was built with an ambitious purpose in mind. As part of its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the Rubin Observatory will gather about 30 petabytes of data. This will include creating an inventory of the Solar System, transient objects (such as supernovae and variable stars), and mapping the Milky Way. Using preliminary data gathered by the Observatory, scientists have already discovered 11,000 new asteroids in the Solar System. These results were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (IAU-MPC).
Between the Artemis Program, the ESA's Moon Village, and the Sino-Russian International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), the next step in space exploration is clear: We're going back to the Moon, and this time, to stay! This plan requires significant investment, research, development, and strategies adapted to lunar conditions. In particular, mission planners are concerned about the hazard posed by lunar regolith (aka. "Moon dust"). In addition to being electrostatically charged, causing it to stick to literally any surface, it is incredibly fine and easily kicked up by rovers and spacecraft as they land and take off.
In 2014, a strange cloudy object called G2 made a close approach to Sagittarius A*, (Sag A*) the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers were pretty excited, partly because they thought it might get torn apart by Sag A*'s intense gravitational pull. That didn't happen, and the event turned out to be a cosmic fizzle. G2 skipped around the black hole, survived the flyby, and continued on a shortened orbit. Various observations showed that it wasn't just a gas cloud. It was likely a dusty protostellar object encased in a dusty cloud. Or perhaps several merged stars.
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