The Sun produces more power than 100 trillion times humanity's entire electricity generation. In orbit, solar panels can be eight times more productive than their Earth bound counterparts, generating energy almost continuously without the need for heavy battery storage. These facts have led a team of Google researchers to ask what if the best place to scale artificial intelligence isn't on Earth at all, but in space?
Weather forecasting is notoriously wonky - climate modeling even more so. But their slowing increasing ability to predict what the natural world will throw at us humans is largely thanks to two things - better models and increased computing power. Now, a new paper from researchers led by Daniel Klocke of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and available in pre-print form on arXiv, describes what some in the climate modeling community have described as the “holy grail” of their field - an almost kilometer-scale resolution model that combines weather forecasting with climate modeling.
For decades, astronauts traveling to space were forced to subsist on a diet that largely consisted of freeze-dried and packaged food. This changed with the introduction of plant-growing operations in orbit, like the Vegetable Production System (Veggie) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). But in what is a really big first, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has installed a new in-orbit barbecue system aboard the Tiangong space station. In a recent video (shown below) released by the China Central Television (CCTV), we see the current crew of the Tiangong giving the BBQ a whirl!
As stars age, they expand. That’s bad news for planets orbiting close to their stars, according to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this month. The study suggests that planets closest to their stars, especially those that orbit their stars in just 12 days or less, are at a higher risk of being sent to their doom by their aging suns.
Long before humans reached orbit, insects had already proven they could handle spaceflight. Fruit flies travelled aboard a V-2 rocket in 1947, becoming the first animals to reach space and survive the journey. Since then, countless creepy crawlies have followed, from bumblebees and houseflies to ants and stick insects, helping scientists understand how living organisms cope with the extreme environment beyond Earth's atmosphere.
October and November 2024 proved to be particularly productive for gravitational wave astronomy. Within the two months, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration detected two black hole mergers with such unusual properties that they're changing our understanding of how they form and evolve. Both events feature rapidly spinning black holes in unequal mass pairs, properties that point toward a violent history of previous collisions rather than a quiet stellar origin.
At a young age, we're told how the Sun warms the Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we learn that Earth its own heat sources that help it maintian habitability: remnant heat and radioactive decay. Other rocky worlds can have these sources, too.
Tracking time is one of those things that seems easy, until you really start to get into the details of what time actually is. We define a second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. However, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, mass slows down these oscillations, making time appear to move more slowly for objects in large gravity wells. This distinction becomes critical as we start considering how to keep track of time between two separate gravity wells of varying strengths, such as on the Earth and the Moon. A new paper pre-print on arXiv by Pascale Defraigne at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and her co-authors discusses some potential frameworks for solving that problem and settles on using the new Lunar Coordinate Time (TCL) suggested by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
Astronauts lose significant amounts of muscle mass during any prolonged stay in space. Despite spending 2-3 hours a day exercising in an attempt to keep the atrophy at bay, many still struggle with health problems caused by low gravity. A new paper and some further work done by Emanuele Pulvirenti of the University of Bristol’s Soft Robotics Lab and his colleagues, describe a new type of fabric-based exoskeleton that could potentially solve at least some of the musculoskeletal problems astronauts suffer from without dramatically affecting their movement.
Work continues on designs for robots that can help assist the first human explorers on the Moon in over half a century. One of the most important aspects of that future trip will be utilizing the resources available on the Moon’s surface, known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). This would give the explorers access to materials like water, structural metals, and propellant, but only if they can recover it from the rock and regolith that make up the Moon’s surface. A new paper from researchers mainly affiliated with Tohoku University describes the design and testing of a type of robot excavator that could one day assist lunar explorers in unlocking the world’s potential.
Back in 2009, astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope noticed that there was a lot more gamma-ray light coming from the center of the Milky Way than might otherwise be expected given the objects there. Since then, two theories have appeared to explain this Galactic Center Excess (GCE) as it’s become known. One theory posits that the extra gamma rays are created by thousands of unseen milli-second pulsars (MSPs) in the Galactic center, while the other suggests that dark matter annihilating itself could also be the source. A new paper from Moortis Muru and hisco-authors at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) hasn’t necessarily solved the conundrum, but does level the playing field between the two theories again.
Conditions on Venus’ surface have largely remained a mystery for decades. Carl Sagan famously pointed out that people were quick to jump to conclusions, such as that there are dinosaurs living there, from scant little evidence collected from the planet. But just because we have little actual data doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions, and better yet models, from the data we do have. A new paper from Maxence Lefèvre of the Sorbonne and his colleagues takes what little data has been collected from Venus’ surface and uses it to valid a model of what the wind and dust conditions down there would be like - all for the sake of making the work of the next round of Venusian explorer easier.
Astronomy would be a lot easier if there were no clouds of gas and dust in space. There'd be no need for telescopes with the abilty to see through these thick veils. Alas, space is not only full of things we want to see, but full of things that get in the way.
Exoplanet scientists are eagerly awaiting the discovery of an atmosphere around a terrestrial exoplanet. Not a thin, tenuous, barely perceptible collection of molecules, but a thick, robust, potentially life-supporting atmosphere. Due to the way we detect exoplanets, most of the terrestrial planets we find are orbiting red dwarfs (M dwarfs).
In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of "universal constructor." The theory was further detailed in the 1966 book, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, a collection of von Neumann's writings compiled and completed by a colleague after his death. In the years that followed, scientists engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) considered how advanced civilizations could rely on self-replicating probes to explore the galaxy.
At the heart of the Milky Way, just 27,000 light-years from Earth, there is a supermassive black hole with a mass of more than 4 million Suns. Nearly all galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, and many of them are much more massive. The black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87 has a mass of 6.5 billion Suns. The largest black holes are more than 40 billion solar masses. We know these monsters lurk in the cosmos, but how did they form?
Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.
When it comes to finding baby, still-forming planets around young stars, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory is astronomers' most adept tool. ALMA has delivered many images of the protoplanetary disks around young stars, with gaps and rings carved in them by young planets. In new research, a team of researchers used ALMA to image 16 disks around young class 0/1 protostars and found that planets may start forming sooner than previously thought.
Brown dwarfs are a growing area of focus for astronomers, thanks to improved instruments that have the necessary resolution to visualize them. The term describes substellar objects that are about 13 to 80 Jupiter masses, making them too small to become stars, but massive enough to experience some nuclear fusion in their cores and produce heat. Initially theorized in the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1990s that this class of stellar object was confirmed through direct observation. And thanks to next-generation telescopes and improved data-sharing techniques, there are growing opportunities to study these objects.
Is there anything more dramatic than an exploding star? More than just extraordinarily bright, energetic events that can light up the sky for months, these explosions play important roles in the cosmos. Supernova create heavy elements and spread them out into their surroundings, where they can be taken up in the next round of planet and star formation.
The cosmic voids of the universe are empty of matter. But we all know there’s more to the universe than just matter. Nothing in this universe is completely empty, and that’s because there’s always your constant companions. Me? No, not me, I only visit once a month.
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