Exoplanet habitability depends on a whole host of factors, with liquid water at the top of the list. It also needs a stable atmosphere, the right chemistry, and possibly even things like plate tectonics or other geological activity. Planetary magnetic fields are a critical part of the formula, too, but detecting them from Earth's surface is difficult.
Compact, reflective, easy to manufacture mirrors are a critical component for advancing astronomical technology in space. Mirrors are a key component in most telescopes, though they are notoriously hard to manufacture with the necessary precision, especially at large scales. A new paper from researchers in the UK uses additive manufacturing to make a thin, flexible, and lightweight mirror out of aluminum and analyzes its properties to see if it will be useful in applications such as CubeSats.
In the 1960s, astronomers theorized that the Universe was filled with a mysterious mass that did not interact normally with light, which they named "Dark Matter." This theoretical matter is believed to constitute 80% of the Universe's mass, largely in the form of "halos" surrounding galaxies and galaxy clusters. However, even after six decades of searching, scientists have still not found the particle that constitutes this mass. Many candidates have been proposed in that time, including Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), primordial black holes, and ultralight particles known as "axions."
We already know a decent amount about how planets form, but moon formation is another process entirely, and one we’re not as familiar with. Scientists think they understand how the most important Moon in our solar system (our own) formed, but its violent birth is not the norm, and can’t explain larger moon systems like the Galilean moons around Jupiter. A new book chapter (which was also released as a pre-print paper) from Yuhito Shibaike and Yann Alibert from the University of Bern discusses the differing ideas surrounding the formation of large moon systems, especially the Galileans, and how we might someday be able to differentiate them.
Taking a walk is great for inspiration. There have been numerous studies about how people think more clearly on walks, and how new ideas come to them more frequently while doing so. That’s part of the reason some of the most famous minds in history included a daily walk in their schedule. Just such an inspiration must have happened recently to Nicholas Heinz, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. On a hike in Arizona he found a rock that could be used as an analog of a unique one found by the Perseverance rover on Mars - and decided to take it back to his lab to study it.
Answers to some of cosmology's most pressing questions are obscured by simple dust. It concerns the Cosmic Noon, a period of time that began around two billion years after the Big Bang, when nearly all galaxies experienced a burst of growth and rapid star formation. Galaxies formed stars at rates 10 to 100 times higher than today, and they became more massive through mergers with other galaxies. Dark matter haloes grew rapidly during this time as well. Astronomers want to understand how galaxies grow and evolve, and the Cosmic Noon and its high star formation rate (SFR) and rapid growth is a critical stage in galactic evolution.
The European research project called "gEICko" aims to develop satellites that can literally stick to space junk and drag it safely out of orbit. The secret lies in synthetic materials that mimic the microscopic structures on the feet of gecko, which allow these remarkable reptiles to cling to virtually any surface using molecular forces called van der Waals interactions.
Imagine the entire universe suddenly blazing with light in a flash that lasted just a brief moment in time and then vanishing, leaving behind the most massive black holes ever discovered. This dramatic scenario forms the heart of a new theory that could solve one of astronomy's biggest mysteries about supermassive black holes and how they got so enormous so quickly after the Big Bang.
The connection between greenhouse gases and space weather might seem surprising, but it illustrates just how interconnected Earth's atmospheric layers really are. While carbon dioxide warms the lower atmosphere by trapping heat, it has the opposite effect in the thin regions of the upper atmosphere, roughly 300-400 miles above Earth's surface. At these extreme altitudes, carbon dioxide actually cools the atmosphere by radiating heat directly into space, causing the air to become significantly less dense over time.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) established a reputation worldwide in 2019 when it released the first-ever image of a black hole. This was made possible by the science of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), a technique in which multiple instruments collect light to create a complete picture of what an object looks like. In this case, the image was of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. This was followed by images of the relativistic jets emanating from two bright galaxies, and of Sagitarius A*, the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way.
Our Moon is a seismically active world with a long history of quakes stretching back to its early history. It turns out those quakes can and will affect the safety of permanent base structures for anybody planning to explore and inhabit the Moon. That's one conclusion from a study of quakes along the Lee-Lincoln fault in the Taurus-Littrow valley where the Apollo 17 astronauts landed in 1972. “The global distribution of young thrust faults like the Lee-Lincoln fault, their potential to be still active and the potential to form new thrust faults from ongoing contraction should be considered when planning the location and assessing stability of permanent outposts on the Moon,” said Smithsonian senior scientist emeritus Thomas R. Watters, lead author of the paper.
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed many wonders of the early universe, but few discoveries have puzzled astronomers more than some mysterious "little red dots." These tiny, brilliant galaxies appear scattered across deep space images like cosmic breadcrumbs, challenging everything scientists thought they knew about how galaxies formed in the early universe.
When global events set our minds to wondering if humanity has what it takes to persist, it's natural to wonder about other worlds, other life, other intelligent species, and if those others might be better suited to survive whatever Great Filters they face. Those are fanciful thoughts, but there's an underpinning of nuts-and-bolts thinking to them. It starts with identifying which planets in habitable zones around other stars might actually be habitable.
Mars still holds the promise of being one of the first places in the solar system humanity will colonize. However, if there was evolutionarily distinct, extant life on the planet, it might sway the heart of even the most ardent Mars colonization fans. So astrobiologists are in a race against time to try to determine whether or not such life exists, before the entire planet becomes an analogue of the Earth’s biosphere, if only unintentionally, and only a shadow of the ones that exists here. A new paper from the Christopher Temby and Jan Spacek of the Agnostic Life Finder (ALF) team discusses one of the most promising ways to prove definitively that life exists on the Red Planet - finding polyelectrolyte polymers - in other words, DNA.
Astronomers are confident that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide, merge, or at least interact with one another in the next few billion years. What will that merger look like? Both galaxies have dwarf galaxies, and astronomers want to know if their behaviour can predict the future of the merger.
Black holes appear stranger and more bewildering the more deeply scientists study them. They display complex characteristics that defy simple explanations. One such characteristic is the vibrations they emit when perturbed.
Any material used as a light sail is bound by very restrictive physical requirements. It has to be extremely light , can’t melt from the energy applied to it, and must bend, but not break, from that pressure. Various research groups around the world have been working on materials they believe will meet those requirements, and a new paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania describes experimental testing of what they believe to be the most functional light sail material yet developed.
The numbers paint a stark picture of our orbital traffic problem. More than 11,000 active satellites currently circle Earth, with thousands more planned for launch in coming years. Even more concerning are the over 1.2 million pieces of space debris larger than one centimetre hurtling through space at incredible speeds. At those velocities, even a paint chip can damage a spacecraft, while larger debris can destroy entire satellites.
A recent discovery by a team of astronomers centres on a galaxy cluster called CHIPS 1911+4455, located an incredible 6 billion light-years from Earth. At its heart lies a supermassive black hole that has only recently "turned on”, just a thousand years ago. While that might sound like a long time, it's merely a blink of an eye in astronomical terms.
All large galaxies are thought to host supermassive black holes (SMBH). When the black holes are actively accreting material and emitting radiation, astrophysicists call them active galactic nuclei (AGN). Some AGN emit relativistic jets, streams of ionized matter moving at near the speed of light. When those powerful jets are pointed at us, we call them blazars.
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