At the beginning of the exoplanet age, the goals were fairly simple. The first was to find as many of them as possible to flesh out our understanding of the exoplanet population. The second was to determine if any were in the habitable zones around their stars. The definition of a habitable zone was necessarily simple in the beginning. Any planet in the right distance range from its star to allow liquid surface water was considered to be in the habitable zone.
The universe occasionally produces flashes of light so bright and so blue that they outshine entire galaxies, then vanish within days. For years, astronomers studying these rare event, called luminous fast blue optical transients, or LFBOTs, debated their origin. Were they unusual supernovae, or something fundamentally different?
The thunderous roar that echoed across Huntsville, Alabama, on January 10 wasn't a rocket launch but something equally momentous: the end of an era. Two massive test stands that helped send humans to the Moon collapsed in carefully choreographed implosions, their steel frameworks crumbling in seconds after decades standing as monuments to American spaceflight achievement.
When stars at least thirty times the mass of our Sun reach the end of their lives, astronomers had assumed they simply winked out, collapsing silently into black holes under the force of gravity from which not even light can escape. No bright supernova explosion, no spectacular death throes, just a quiet gravitational implosion.
What exists beneath the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon, Callisto? This is what a recent study accepted by *The Planetary Science Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the subsurface composition of Callisto, which is Jupiter’s outermost Galilean satellite. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the interior composition of Callisto, which is hypothesized to possess a subsurface liquid water ocean, and develop new techniques for exploring planetary subsurface environments.
There is a fundamental tension in space exploration that has created ongoing debates for decades. By creating the infrastructure we need to explore other worlds, we damage them in some way, making them either less scientifically interesting or less “pristine,” which some would argue, in itself, is a bad thing. A new paper available in JGR Planets, from Francisca Paiva, a physicist at Instituto Superior Técnico, and Silvio Sinibaldi, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) planetary protection officer, argues that, in the Moon’s case at least, the problem is even worse than we originally thought.
Galaxy clusters aren’t supposed to be scorching hot when they’re young. Like infants, they should need time to mature before developing their full characteristics. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array have just discovered that nature doesn’t always follow the same script.
Galaxies don’t always die dramatically. Sometimes they fade away, slowly strangled by the very black holes at their hearts. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array have caught one such death in progress, revealing a surprisingly subtle method of galactic murder.
Newborn stars aren’t gentle. They blast ionised gas into space, carving luminous paths through the darkness. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has just captured fresh images of one of these stellar outbursts, showing bright ribbons of pink and green gas stretching across 32 light years of space.
NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The cloud is relatively nearby in astronomical terms, only about 1000 light-years away. The nebula is a very active star-forming region, and since it's so close, it's very well-studied. Most of the cloud is basically invisible, but NGC 1333 is one of two visible structures.
Betelgeuse is the star that everybody can't wait to see blow up, preferably sooner than later. That's because it's a red supergiant on the verge of becoming a supernova and there hasn't been one explode this close in recorded human history. It's been changing its brightness and showing strange surface behavior, which is why astronomers track its activity closely. Are these changes due to its aging process? Do they mean it's about to blow up? Probably not.
Bit by bit, scientists are piecing together Mars' climate history. Thanks to orbiters armed with powerful cameras and rovers carrying suites of scientific instruments, the red planet's history is becoming clearer year-by-year. In the past decade or so, evidence of Mars' ancient habitability is becoming more and more convincing.
New Space is a term now commonly used around the rocketry and satellite industries to indicate a new, speed focused model of development that takes its cue from the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and (hopefully don’t) break things.” Given that several of the founders of rocketry and satellite companies have a Silicon Valley background, that probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but the mindset has resulted in an exponential growth in the number of satellites in orbit, and also an exponential decrease in the cost of getting them to orbit. A new paper, recently published in pre-print form in arXiv from researchers at Schmidt Space and a variety of research institutes, lays out plans for the Lazuli Space Observatory, which hopes to apply that same mindset to flagship-level space observatory missions.
Our red neighbour Mars, seems to experience many similar phenomena to Earth. It does however seem to lack the hurricanes and typhoons that lash Earth, but don’t underestimate the Martian winds. Over millions of years, these persistent atmospheric currents have carved spectacular grooves and ridges across the landscape, carrying sand grains like microscopic chisels to sculpt the surface. ESA’s Mars Express has now captured some of the most striking examples of this erosion near the planet’s equator.
The universe’s most massive galaxies present astronomers with a puzzle. Each containing more than 100 billion stars, making our Milky Way look modest by comparison, these ultramassive systems had already reached enormous sizes less than two billion years after the Big Bang. What astronomers couldn’t easily determine was whether these ancient giants were still actively building stars or had already shut down their stellar factories and retired into quiet old age.
Our Solar System, it turns out, is something of an oddball. While we have rocky planets close to the Sun and gas giants further out, most stars in the Milky Way harbour something entirely different. They are worlds between the sizes of Earth and Neptune and orbit closer to their stars than Mercury does to ours. These super Earths and sub Neptunes are the Galaxy’s most common planets, found around nearly every Sun like star ever have studied. Until now that is.
It's a well-known fact that Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH) play a vital role in the evolution of galaxies. Their powerful gravity and the way it accelerates matter in its vicinity causes so much radiation to be released from the core region - aka. an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) - that it will periodically outshine all the stars in the disk combined. In addition, some SMBHs accelerate infalling dust and gas into jets that emanate from the poles, sending streams of super-heated material millions of light-years at close to the speed of light.
Warmer oceans are not good. Shallow, glib commentators might try to laugh it off, but their laughter reveals an infantile lack of seriousness in their thinking. Earth is one big, life-supporting system, and we know from the geological record that when the system falters, life pays the price.
Supernovae play a central role in the birth of new stars. They provide a rich source of gas and dust to form stellar nurseries, and their explosions can trigger shockwaves that trigger the birth of new stars. But it all depends on where supernovae occur. A supernova that happens within a dense cloud of gas will have a very different effect than one that occurs in a large void. Understanding these effects is a challenge. It is much easier to observe a supernova while it happens rather than long before or after. But a new radio study of the Andromeda Galaxy explores these interactions.
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