The Search for Life in our Solar System leads seekers to strange places. From our Earthbound viewpoint, an ice-covered moon orbiting a gas giant far from the Sun can seem like a strange place to search for life. But underneath all that ice sits a vast ocean. Despite the huge distance between the moon and the Sun and despite the thick ice cap, the water is warm.
Few things in life are certain. But it seems highly probable that people will explore the lunar surface over the next decade or so, staying there for weeks, perhaps months, at a time. That fact bumps up against something we are certain about. When human beings spend time in low-gravity environments, it takes a toll on their bodies.
Space debris is a growing problem, so companies are working on ways to mitigate it. A new satellite called ADRAS-J was built and launched to demonstrate how a spacecraft could rendezvous with a piece of space junk, paving the path for future removal. Astroscale Japan Inc, the Japanese company behind the satellite, released a new picture from the mission showing a close image of its target space debris, a discarded Japanese H2A rocket’s upper stage, captured from just a few hundred meters away.
Few space images are as iconic as those of the Horsehead Nebula. Its shape makes it instantly recognizable. Over the decades, a number of telescopes have captured its image, turning it into a sort of test case for a telescope’s power.
It stands to reason that stars formed from the same cloud of material will have the same metallicity. That fact underpins some avenues of astronomical research, like the search for the Sun’s siblings. But for some binary stars, it’s not always true. Their composition can be different despite forming from the same reservoir of material, and the difference extends to their planetary systems.
We go about our daily lives sheltered under an invisible magnetic field generated deep inside Earth. It forms the magnetosphere, a region dominated by the magnetic field. Without that planetary protection shield, we’d experience harmful cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun.
When the first stars in the Universe formed, the only material available was primordial hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang. Astronomers call these original stars Population Three stars, and they were extremely massive, luminous, and hot stars. They’re gone now, and in fact, their existence is hypothetical.
On 9 January 2024, the Einstein probe was launched, its mission to study the night sky in X-rays. The first image from the probe that explores the Universe in these energetic wavelengths has just been released. It shows Puppis A, the supernova remnant from a massive star that exploded 4,000 years ago. The image showed the expanding cloud of ejecta from the explosion but now, Einstein will continue to scan the skies for other X-ray events.
Anyone familiar with astronomy will know that galaxies come in a fairly limited range of shapes, typically; spiral, elliptical, barred-spiral and irregular. The barred-spiral galaxy has been known to be a feature of the modern universe but a study from astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope has recently challenged that view. Following on observations using the James Webb Space Telescope has found the bar feature in some spiral galaxies as early as 11 billion years ago suggesting galaxies evolved faster in the early Universe than previously expected.
When a spacecraft arrives at its destination, it settles into an orbit for science operations. But after the primary mission is complete, there might be other interesting orbits where scientists would like to explore. Maneuvering to a different orbit requires fuel, limiting a spacecraft’s number of maneuvers.
The list of chemicals found in space is growing longer and longer. Astronomers have found amino acids and other building blocks of life on comets, asteroids, and even floating freely in space. Now, researchers have found another complex chemical to add to the list.
The JWST is flexing its muscles with its interferometry mode. Researchers used it to study a well-known extrasolar system called PDS 70. The goal? To test the interferometry mode and see how it performs when observing a complex target.
Brown dwarfs span the line between planets and stars. By definition, a star must be massive enough for hydrogen fusion to occur within its core. This puts the minimum mass of a star around 80 Jupiters. Planets, even large gas giants like Jupiter, only produce heat through gravitational collapse or radioactive decay, which is true for worlds up to about 13 Jovian masses. Above that, deuterium can undergo fusion. Brown dwarfs lay between these two extremes. The smallest brown dwarfs resemble gas planets with surface temperatures similar to Jupiter. The largest brown dwarfs have surface temperatures around 3,000 K and look essentially like stars.
Life on Earth would not be possible without food, water, light, a breathable atmosphere and surprisingly, a magnetic field. Without it, Earth, and its inhabitants would be subjected to the harmful radiation from space making life here, impossible. If we find exoplanets with similar magnetospheres then those worlds may well be habitable. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which is still under construction should be able to detect such magnetospheres from radio emissions giving us real insight into our exoplanet cousins.
When I heard about this I felt an amused twinge of envy. Over the last year I have been using an unimpressive 4G broadband service and at best get 20 Mbps, NASA’s Psyche mission has STILL been getting 23 Mbps at 225 million km away! It’s all thanks to the prototype optical transmission system employed on the probe. It means it can get up to 100 times more data transmission rate than usual radio.
The Hubble Space Telescope has gone through its share of gyroscopes in its 34-year history in space. Astronauts replaced the gyros during the last servicing mission in 2009, bringing it back up to six (three with three spares), but they only last so long. Last week, HST went into safe mode because one of the gyros experienced fluctuations in power. NASA paused the telescope’s science operations today to investigate the fluctuations and perhaps come up with a fix.
Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance. Events where black holes and neutron stars collide can send out waves detectable here on Earth. It is possible that there can be an event in visible light when neutron stars collide so to take advantage of every opportunity an early warning is essential. The teams at LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories are working on an alert system that will alert astronomers within 30 seconds fo a gravity wave event. If warning is early enough it may be possible to identify the source and watch the after glow.
During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated the concept of ion propulsion. Like many early Space Age proposals, the concept was originally explored by luminaries like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth – two of the “forefathers of rocketry.” Since then, the technology has been validated repeatedly by missions like the Deep Space-1 (DS-1) technology demonstrator, the ESA’s Smart-1 lunar orbiter, JAXA’s Hayabusa and Hayabysa 2 satellites, and NASA’s Dawn mission.
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to explain this for years. One of the more interesting ideas comes from a team of astronomers in Europe and invokes dark matter, neutron stars, and primordial black holes (PBHs).
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too common but it’s wonderful to see missions exceed expectations. The Japanese Space Agency’s SLIM lunar lander was only supposed to survive a single day but it’s survived three brutal, harsh lunar nights and is still going. The temperatures plummet to -170C at night and the lander was never designed to operate into the night. Even sat upside down on the surface it’s still sending back pictures and data.
It’s difficult to actually visualise a universe that is changing. Things tend to happen at snails pace albeit with the odd exception. Take the formation of galaxies growing in the early universe. Their immense gravitational field would suck in dust and gas from the local vicinity creating vast collections of stars. In the very centre of these young galaxies, supermassive blackholes would reside turning the galaxy into powerful quasars. A recent survey by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals that black holes can create a powerful solar wind that can remove gas from galaxies faster than they can form into stars, shutting off the creation of new stars.
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