The venerable Hubble Space Telescope has taken some truly stellar (no pun!) images over its many years of dedicated service. A new image recently released by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the spiral galaxy NGC 3137 in all its glittering glory. Located about 53 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia, NGC 3137 offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the life cycle of stars in a galaxy similar to our own.
There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.
They are known as "buckyballs," ball-shaped molecules that resemble a hollow sphere, and are found in space. These strange customers were first observed by Professor Jan Cami and a team from Western University in 2010 using the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST). And now, more than 15 years later, Cami and his colleagues have detected buckyballs again using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The rich data they retrieved from Webb's observations have pointed to the origin of these strange cosmic molecules.
You’re a long-necked Titanosaurs grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night sky and notice a bright dot that seems slightly larger and brighter than usual since you’ve seen it a bunch. You grunt at your cousin (official dinosaur language) asking if he notices it, too. Your cousin grunts back that it does seem bigger and brighter and wonders what’s up.
Welcome back to A Brief-ish History of SETI, where we examine the major milestones and foundational principles that have defined the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In part I, we examined the purpose and motivations behind this field of study, as well as how Fermi's big question ("Where is everybody?") helped define the challenges it entails. We also looked at some of the earliest experiments and how they reflected a growing sense of curiosity about the cosmos and our place in it.
I once got a drill bit jammed in concrete and the language that followed was, let's say, colourful…and that was with the offending masonry right in front of me. That, in essence, is what happened to NASA's Curiosity rover on the 25th of April this year and the solution required some impressive problem solving from 300 million kilometres away. At least I could give mine a firm wobble and a stern look of disappointment. Curiosity's team had to think rather harder than that.
Scientists are puzzling over another oddball on the edge of the solar system: This time, it's an icy object less than a quarter of Pluto's size with a thin atmosphere – a layer of gas that's not typically found around objects so small.
The Department of Defense has released a fresh batch of images and transcripts relating to reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, including pictures and descriptions from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.
Black holes live forever, at least according to general relativity. Once material crosses a black hole's event horizon, it is trapped forever. Until the last day of cosmic time. But we know that isn't true. General relativity is a classical model. It doesn't take into account the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of the quantum. We don't have a complete and consistent theory of quantum gravity, but we do have some understanding of quantum black holes.
Aerospace engineers have to consider numerous factors when designing a spacecraft, but one that comes up more and more often is the need to design against Micro-Meteoroids and Orbital Debris (MMOD). While most designers understand the threat, designing structural solutions capable of withstanding the hypervelocity impacts these undercontrolled pieces of material can cause can take a significant bite out of a mission’s mass budget. A new paper from Binkal Kumar Sharma of the University of Bremen and Harshitha Baskar, an independent researcher, provides a detailed review of cutting-edge options for defending against those deadly particles.
Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects?
When researchers look up at the sky and wonder if we’re not alone, they also realize the origins of life here on Earth might hold the key to finding out. The chaotic chemical soup of our early world eventually led to the staggering complexity of modern life, but how exactly did it start? Proteins were one of the key ingredients in the early years, but we’re still only just discovering how these marvels of modern biology first managed to fold, function, and survive. A new review paper, The borderlands of foldability: lessons from simplified proteins, published recently in Trends in Chemistry, showcases how scientists are attempting to answer this question - by researching “simplified proteins”.
The Universe is an unfathomably large and ancient place. It began with a giant explosion roughly 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang) and has been in a state of expansion ever since. Based on current estimates, there are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the "observable Universe," some with as many as a trillion stars each. Within our galaxy alone, there are between 100 and 400 billion stars and 100 to 160 billion planets. And according to every bit of scientific evidence available, the ingredients for life are everything in abundance.
Here's a sobering thought. Right now, there are asteroids and comets in our Solar System that could pose a genuine threat to Earth and we usually can't see them. Some are as dark as coal while others hide in the glare of the Sun where our telescopes simply can't look. A few are small enough to slip past our detection systems entirely and this is the problem NASA's NEO (Near Earth Objects) Surveyor has been designed, from the ground up, to solve.
Stars are the basic units of a galaxy. But they form from gas, which is even more elemental. How star-forming gas moves around in a galaxy shapes star formation, and also shapes the galaxy and how it evolves.
For years, when something happened on the far side of the Sun, it was invisible to us on Earth. Sunspots could form there, flares could lash out and the corona could send masses of material out to space. However, we didn't know about any of this until those active regions rotated around to our view. In the late 1900s, scientists came up with a technique called helioseismology to analyze sound waves influenced by such activity as they echoed through the Sun.
Astronomers have long been fascinated by the powerful jets emanating from black holes. These jets result from gas and dust being pulled into the black hole's gravity well, forming an accretion disk that is accelerated to velocities approaching the speed of light. While most of this material slowly accretes onto the black hole's event horizon, some will spiral away from the poles, creating powerful jets that can be seen many light-years away.
In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is our best bet for “living off the land” for a future Martian base, but tracking down those resources is no easy task. As of now, we have two options - send a rover to a specific location to scout it, or monitor it from orbit. Since rovers are expensive, and there are an absolute ton of sites that we would eventually want to scout, doing so from orbit would seem a better option. But monitoring for temperature, one of the most important orbital scans we can do, is notoriously blurry - based in part on the fact that most of the main instruments used to collect data on it are a few decades old. Now, a paper from researchers at Curtin University in Australia presented at the International Astronautical Congress meeting last September uses a fancy AI-like algorithm to improve that thermal resolution, and, as a result, provided a much better map to some of the most important resources we’ll be looking for.
The NASA planet-hunting satellites Kepler and TESS scanned the skies autonomously, searching for the tiny dips in light caused by exoplanets transiting in front of their stars. Their diligent observations uncovered more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. As scientists examined the types of planets the spacecraft found, they discovered some patterns that need explanations.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a city on Mars is likely going to take even longer to build than Rome itself. At the time of the first Martian colonists, it is likely that the entirety of humanity’s industrial capacity, including the infrastructure to make critical materials like metals, will be based in the Earth-Moon system. While Mars has some iron, it also lacks many of the materials needed to make advanced materials, like boron and molybdenum. To alleviate that resource bottleneck, a new study, available in pre-print on arXiv and led by Serena Suriano and a team of researchers, offers a workaround that seems obvious in theory but difficult in practice - mine the necessary material from Main Belt asteroids.
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