Space News & Blog Articles

Gamma rays strike Earth from all directions of the sky. Our planet is bathed in a diffuse glow of high-energy photons. It doesn’t affect us much, and we don’t really notice it, because our atmosphere is very good at absorbing gamma rays. It’s so good that we didn’t notice cosmic gamma rays until the 1960s when gamma-ray detectors were launched into space to look for signs of atomic weapons tests. Even then, what we noticed were intense flashes of gamma rays known as gamma ray bursts.

Gamma-ray bursts are bright but short-lived. They are so bright that it was first feared they were caused by nuclear blasts on Earth, but we now know they are caused by large dying stars as their core collapses into a black hole. The collapse can trigger the formation of jets of material streaming away from the star at nearly the speed of light. When the jet collides with interstellar gas, it creates a beam of gamma rays. If the jet of a dying star happens to be pointed in our direction, we detect a gamma-ray burst.

As our gamma-ray telescopes became more sensitive, we also detected a galactic gamma-ray glow. Most of these gamma rays come to us from the plane of the Milky Way and are caused by high-energy particles that collide with interstellar gas and dust in our galaxy. There are gamma rays that come from the active galactic nuclei of distant galaxies. They are created when supermassive black holes consume matter near them. But if you exclude gamma rays from all those known sources, there is still a faint, diffuse glow of gamma rays. They come to us from all directions, even from regions that seem to be empty space. We’ve never been able to figure out the source of this faint background, but a new paper in Nature seems to have solved this mystery.

How cosmic ray particles create gamma rays. Credit: Max Planck Intitut/ESO VLT

The team looked at how gamma rays can be produced by cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are extremely energetic particles, typically protons moving at nearly light speed. These cosmic ray particles sometimes strike our atmosphere to create a cascade of particles we can detect on the surface. But cosmic ray collisions can also create gamma rays. The team thought the faint gamma-ray background might be caused by cosmic rays striking gas and dust in distant galaxies. Since most of the gas and dust in a galaxy is found in star-forming regions, the team compared the gamma-ray background to the distribution of galaxies actively forming stars. They found that star-forming regions in galaxies could be the source of diffuse gamma rays.

Thinking outside the box has always been a strong suit of space exploration.  Whether taking a picture of the Earth in a sunbeam or attempting to land a rocket on a floating ship, trying new things has been a continual theme for those interested in learning more about the universe.  Now, a team from the University of Manchester has come up with an outside-the-box solution that could help solve the problem of building infrastructure in space – use astronauts themselves as bioreactors to create the building blocks of early colonies.

Concrete is typically used as part of those basic building blocks here on Earth. But its creation requires a vast amount of infrastructure and power consumption that would make it prohibitively expensive for early Martian explorer’s lodgings.  Researchers have come up with various potential solutions to this problem, but each still has some disadvantages.

3D printed shape using the new biocomposite.
Credit – University of Manchester

The new technique has some disadvantages, not the least of which is the sacrifices it would ask of the astronauts.  The new material would literally require their blood, sweat, tears, and sometimes their urine to make a practical building material.

Binding agents are a crucial element of any building material – what holds it together.  In this new material, the answer is simple – human serum albumin, a type of blood plasma.  Named “AstroCrete,” the new material combines human serum albumin mixed with Martian regolith that has compressive strengths similar to standard concrete on Earth. 

Dust devils are generally used as a trope in media when the writers want to know that an area is deserted. They signify the desolation and isolation that those places represent. Almost none of the settings of those stories are close to the isolation of Perseverance, the Mars rover that landed on the planet earlier this year.  Fittingly, the number of dust devils Perseverance has detected is also extremely high – over 300 in its first three months on the planet. 

The paper discussing those findings, written by Brian Jackson of Boise State University, is available on arXiv.  Data used in that analysis was collected by a suite of instruments on the rover known as the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). That suite includes everything from humidity and wind sensors to ground temperature and dust optical sensors.

MEDA Instrument on Earth.
Credit – NASA / JPL-Caltech

Those sensors were all put to good use, collecting data on that many dust devils. However, this wasn’t the first time dust devils were seen on Mars – the Viking missions first noticed them back in the 1970s, and they have been visible even from space by orbiting satellites for years.  But never before have as many fine-tuned on the ground sensors been able to collect a myriad of data on the phenomena.

Other rovers have also experience dust devils, but Jezero crater, Perseverance’s landing site, seems to have a high occurrence of dust devils.  Meteorological predictions suggested that might be the case, and observational evidence from Perseverance so far has confirmed those predictions.

History has viewed mining as a job that requires a lot of heavy machinery and physical labor.  Pulling valuable material out of the ground has been necessary for human progress for thousands of years.  That progress has led to an alternative method of getting those resources out of the Earth or other celestial bodies. The new technique relies on a symbiotic life partner that has co-habited with us for millennia – bacteria. A recent experiment conducted by ESA’s Biorock investigation team shows that this process – known as “biomining” – might be the most effective way to collect some materials in space.

The new research wasn’t the first space-based Biorock experiment.  In 2019, the team showed that it could extract rare Earth elements (REEs) using a biofilm attached to basalt, a type of igneous rock that is also present on both Mars and the Moon.  REEs, though found almost everywhere on Earth, are only present at minuscule levels.  Mining them is prohibitively expensive using traditional methods for most locations, though they are widely used in various industrial processes and high technology products.  

REEs weren’t the only material of interest for the Biorock experiment, though.  Although not a rare Earth element itself, vanadium is also widely used in industrial processes, including strengthening steel, making superconducting devices, and batteries.  Data on the collection of vanadium was the focal point of the new paper, but that data was collected simultaneously with the original REE data.

Three different types of bacteria were used in the study – Sphingomonas desiccabilis, Bacillus subtilis, and Cupriavidus metallidurans.  Astronauts fed them a kind of rock substrate known as R2A, a known growth medium for all three types of bacteria.  Instead of crushing the basalt, as would most likely be done in large-scale bioreactors, the experimenters took thin slices of basalt collected from a quarry in Iceland that is remarkably similar to the basalts found on the Moon and Mars.   

After flight preparation and landing on the ISS, astronauts introduced the samples to a KUBIK incubator. Two of the experimental containers began spinning to simulate Martian and Lunar gravity.  A third container was left stationary on the space station, while another container resided as a control at NASA’s Ames Research Center.  Additionally, the researchers placed “sterile” chambers with no bacteria introduced into them at both locations and all gravity levels.  These would be used as “controls” of the experiment to see how much vanadium was extracted from the basalt simply by the presence of the bacteria.

Seventy years ago, Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues a question during a lunchtime conversation. If life is common in our Universe, why can’t we see any evidence of its activity out there (aka. “where is everybody?”) Seventy years later, this question has launched just as many proposed resolutions as to how extraterrestrial intelligence (ETIs) could be common, yet go unnoticed by our instruments.

Some possibilities that have been considered are that humanity might be alone in the Universe, early to the party, or is not in a position to notice any yet. But in a recent study, Robin Hanson (creator of the Great Filter) and an interdisciplinary team offer a new model for determining when the aliens will get here. According to their study, humanity is early to the Universe and will meet others in 200 million to 2 billion years from now.

In addition to being an associate with the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, Robin Hanson is also a professor of economics at George Mason University. He was joined by colleagues from Durham University’s Centre for Particle Theory and the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department, and the international trading firm Jump Trading.

To break it down succinctly, the “grabby aliens model” assumes that civilizations are born according to a series of steps similar to what we see with the biological evolution of life here on Earth. These civilizations, which Hanson and his colleagues refer to as “grabby civilizations” (GCs), will then expand at a common rate, alter the volume of space they occupy, and prevent technologically advanced civilizations (similar to where humanity is today) from arising in these volumes. The model has three parameters, consisting of:

The model assumes that the expansion speed of alien civilizations can be estimated based on the fact that we (13.8 billion years after the Big Bang) do not detect the presence of them at this time, the amount of time it takes for advanced life to evolve (based on) and the assumption that humanity’s location in space and time is not unusual, relative to the appearance of advanced and expanding civilizations (similar to the Copernican Principle).

In 1994, the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) impacted Jupiter, which had captured the comet shortly before (and broken apart by its gravity). The event became a media circus as it was the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects. The impact was so powerful that it left scars that endured for months and were more discernible than Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

Since then, astronomers have observed multiple objects impacting Jupiter, and it is expected that such impacts happen all the time (though unobserved). On September 13th, 2021, at 22:39:30 UTC (06:39:30 PM EDT; 03:39 PM:30 PDT), another impact was observed by multiple astronomers across the world. Images and a video of the impact (shown below) were captured by members of Société Lorraine d’Astronomie (SLA) in France.

The impact was reported by Brazilian amateur astronomer Jose Luis Pereira and confirmed a day later by Harald Paleske from Langendorf, Germany. At the time, Paleske had been taking a video of the transit of Io’s shadow when the event occurred, which appeared as a two-second flash. Upon reviewing the footage, he ruled out the possibility that the event happened closer to Earth (with Jupiter merely being the backdrop).

Still image of the impact. Credit: H. Paleske

After a thorough examination, Paleske determined that the impact happened at Jovian latitude 106.9° (CM1), longitude +3.8°, and timed it to 22:39:27 UTC on Sept. 13th. The impact was independently observed by two teams of French amateur astronomers with the SLA. According to a statement issued by the SLA, the two teams consisted of:

Today, history was made when the first all-civilian spaceflight launched from Launch Complex 39A at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The purpose of this flight was to raise awareness and funds for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and offer inspiration to people all over the world. Operated by SpaceX and sponsored by Jared Isaacman and Shift4Payments, this flight illustrates how accessibility to space is growing by leaps and bounds.

The mission began at 08:02 PM local time (05:02 PM PST) as the Crew Dragon spacecraft blasted off the launch pad atop a SpaceX Falcon 9. The rocket lifted off without any issues and soared into the night sky, rapidly gaining altitude towards orbit. During the next few minutes, the mission controllers at SpaceX watched in anticipation and waited for updates. They were joined by people all over the world watching the many live streams of the event.

This mission represents several milestones. In addition to being the first all-civilian spaceflight, it is also the first free-flight Crew Dragon mission and the first crewed orbital mission that will not dock with a space station since the final Hubble mission in 2009 (STS-125). The crew is targeting an approximate 575 km orbit, flying farther than any human since Hubble, for an expected mission duration of approximately three days.

Close-up of the Falcon 9 Raptor engines (left) and the launch vehicle reaching the upper atmosphere (right). Credit: Max Evans/Alex Brock

The crew for the mission included Jared Isaacson, the mission benefactor, CEO of Shift4Payments, and commander of the mission. He was joined by Dr. Sian Proctor, a professor of geoscience, science communicator, and analog astronaut who piloted the spacecraft. Hayley Arceneaux, a Physicians Assistant (P.A.) at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, was the mission’s medic, while aeronautical engineer and retired USAF officer Chris Sembroski served as the mission specialist.

So far we know of only two interstellar objects (ISO) to visit our Solar System. They are ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. There’s a third possible ISO named CNEOS 2014-01-08, and research suggests there should be many more.

But a new research letter shows that cosmic ray erosion limits the lifespan of icy ISOs, and though there may be many more of them, they simply don’t last as long as thought. If it’s true, then ‘Oumuamua was probably substantially larger when it started its journey, wherever that was.

The title of the research letter is “Erosion of Icy Interstellar Objects by Cosmic Rays and Implications for ‘Oumuamua.” It’s available on the preprint site arxiv.org and hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. The lead author is Vo Hong Minh Phan from Aachen University in Germany.

The team of researchers looked at four different types of ices: nitrogen (N2), carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4). Then they considered the cosmic rays in the interstellar medium (ISM) and their erosion effect on the ices. They also considered the erosion that collisions between icy ISOs and ambient gas in the ISM would have on the ISOs.

The research takes many variables into account. CR flux can vary widely and the erosion time for a given icy ISO can vary according to the cosmic ray strength. The same is true for encounters with gas in the ISM. And the different types of ices erode at different rates too.

On the evening of Wednesday, September 15th, history will be made as a crew of four commercial astronauts launch to orbit aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft Resilience. This flight will be operated by SpaceX, sponsored by Jared Isaacman (CEO of Shift4Payments) and represents the first all-civilian spaceflight in history. The launch will take place tonight at 08:00 PM EDT (05:00 PM PDT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A.

The purpose of this mission is to raise awareness and funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which specializes in the treatment of childhood cancers and pediatric diseases. At the same time, it demonstrates the accessibility of the modern space age, where civilians (and not just astronauts) can go to space. Universe Today’s own Alex Brock was on the scene to capture the pre-flight excitement, which was palatable!

Preparations for this mission reached the final stage as the crew members arrived in Florida last week (Thurs. Sept. 9th), where the spacecraft and rocket that will take them to space were also undergoing their final checks. The mission will launch from the historic Launch Complex 39A, where the Apollo and Space Shuttle missions also launched. The Resilience spacecraft also has a significant history, being the same vehicle used for the NASA-SpaceX Crew-1 mission.

Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Credit: Alex Brock

That mission effectively restored domestic launch capability to the US, something that it did not possess since the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Back in April, SpaceX conducted a second crewed mission that delivered astronauts to the ISS (the Crew-2 mission), once again using a Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft. Tonight, these launched-tested and crew-capable vehicles will be achieving another milestone as they transport a crew of entirely commercial astronauts to orbit.

In the near future, astronomers will benefit from the presence of next-generation telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST). At the same time, improved data mining and machine learning techniques will also allow astronomers to get more out of existing instruments. In the process, they hope to finally answer some of the most burning questions about the cosmos.

For instance, the Dark Energy Survey (DES ), an international, collaborative effort to map the cosmos, recently released the results of their six-year survey of the outer Solar System. In addition to gathering data on hundreds of known objects, this survey revealed 461 previously undetected objects. The results of this study could have significant implications for our understanding of the Solar System’s formation and evolution.

The research was led by Dr. Pedro Bernardinelli, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). He was joined by Gary Bernstein and Masao Sako (two professors with the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at UPenn) and other members of the DES Collaboration. Beginning in 2013, DES seeks to ascertain the role Dark Energy has played (and continues to play) in the expansion and evolution of the cosmos.

The Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam) at the SiDet clean room. The Dark Energy Camera was designed specifically for the Dark Energy Survey. Credit: DES

Between 2013 and 2019, DES used the 4m Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile to study hundreds of millions of galaxies, supernovae, and the large-scale structure of the Universe. While their primary objective is to measure the accelerating rate of cosmic expansion (aka. the Hubble-Lemaître Constant) and the spatial distribution of Dark Matter, the DES Collaboration also reported the discovery of individual TNOs of interest. As Dr. Bernardinelli explained to Universe Today via email:

The James Webb Space Telescope has faced a lot of questions during its arduous journey to completion. Some of the questions have been posed by concerned legislators, mindful of the limitations of the public purse as the telescope’s cost ballooned.

But the budget wrangling and the cost overruns are behind us now. The question that needs an answer is, why is it travelling to its launch site by boat and not airplane?

At this point in time, the ground-breaking space telescope has cost around 10 billion USD. That’s a lot of money. So whatever happens next for Webb, including its journey to the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, will be focused on avoiding any damage or mishaps.

The JWST is due to launch from Kourou in December. That’s 14 years past its initial launch date in 2007. Once in operation at the Sun-Earth L2 orbit, it’ll bring its power to bear on some of the most pressing issues in astronomy and cosmology. The Webb will look back in time to the formation of some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. It’ll also examine the atmospheres of some potentially habitable exoplanets. Read about its science objectives here.

We’ve been waiting a long time for the JWST to become operational, but we have to wait a little longer. The next step in its journey is to the launch site at Kourou. Rather than flying the telescope to the launch site, NASA is transporting it by ship from Long Beach, California, down through the Panama Canal, then along the coast of South America to French Guiana.

Thanks to the most advanced telescopes, astronomers today can see what objects looked like 13 billion years ago, roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang. Unfortunately, they are still unable to pierce the veil of the cosmic Dark Ages, a period that lasted from 370,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, where the Universe was shrowded with light-obscuring neutral hydrogen. Because of this, our telescopes cannot see when the first stars and galaxies formed – ca., 100 to 500 million years after the Big Bang.

This period is known as the Cosmic Dawn and represents the “final frontier” of cosmological surveys to astronomers. This November, NASA’s next-generation James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will finally launch to space. Thanks to its sensitivity and advanced infrared optics, Webb will be the first observatory capable of witnessing the birth of galaxies. According to a new study from the Université de Genève, Switzerland, the ability to see the Cosmic Dawn will provide answers to today’s greatest cosmological mysteries.

The research was led by Dr. Hamsa Padmanabhan, a theoretical physicist and Collaboratrice Scientifique II at the Université de Genève. She is also the principal investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and a recipient of the 2017 Ambizione Grant (research funding awarded by the SNSF) for her independent project, titled “Probing the Universe: through reionization and beyond.”

A diagram of the evolution of the observable universe. Credit: NASA/Cherkash

For today’s astronomers and cosmologists, the ability to observe the Cosmic Dawn represents an opportunity to answer the most enduring cosmic mysteries. While the earliest light in the Universe is still visible today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), what followed shortly thereafter (and until about 1 billion years after the Big Bang) has historically been invisible to our most advanced instruments.

During Juno’s extended mission, every orbit is like a new adventure. Each orbit is a little different, and NASA says the natural evolution of Juno’s orbit around the Jupiter provides a wealth of new science opportunities. But for most of us, what we look forward to on every perijove – the point in each orbit where the Juno spacecraft comes closest to the gas giant – are the incredible images taken by the camera on board, JunoCam. As Juno’s “eyes,” the camera provides a unique vantage point no other spacecraft has been able to give us.

Some of the latest images from Juno’s 36th close pass – Perijove 36 – give us a closeup view of skimming over Jupiter’s cloud tops. When the spacecraft comes close to the planet, Jupiter’s powerful gravity accelerates the spacecraft to tremendous speeda – about 200,000 kilometers per hour (~130,000 mph), relative to the planet.

Citizen scientists are the ones who do all the image processing for Junocam, and one of our favorite image wizards, Kevin Gill, doesn’t disappoint with these latest views of from the solar-powered spacecraft zooming over Jupiter’s swirling atmosphere, collecting data from a unique vantage point no other spacecraft has enjoyed. While Juno was actually 5,361.5 kilometers above the clouds at the time of image, Kevin lowered the camera perspective artificially to an equivalent of ~3,000 km.

We also love this incredible view, processed by Andrea Luck:

NASA says the design of the extended mission takes advantage of incorporating flybys of Jupiter’s Galilean moons. . Those flybys change Juno’s course when it comes back around Jupiter, resulting in a continued northward migration over the planet, sharpening its view of the multiple cyclones encircling the north pole.

In the classical theory of general relativity, black holes are relatively simple objects. They can be described by just three properties: mass, charge, and rotation. But we know that general relativity is an incomplete theory. Quantum mechanics is most apparent in the behavior of tiny objects, but it also plays a role in large objects such as black holes. To describe black holes at a quantum level, we need a theory of quantum gravity. We don’t have a complete theory yet, but what know so far is that quantum mechanics makes black holes more complex, giving them properties such as temperature and perhaps even pressure.

Temperature is perhaps the best known quantum property of a black hole. Because of the fuzziness of quantum particles, energy cannot be completely bound by a black hole’s event horizon. Sometimes energy can escape its gravitational prison through a process known as Hawking radiation. The amount of energy that escapes is tiny, but it means that black holes have a (very cold) temperature. And that means black holes can be described in terms of the laws of thermodynamics. For regular matter, thermodynamics describes not just the temperature of an object, but also properties such as pressure. That’s where this new study comes in.

The team was looking at a thermodynamical property known as entropy. Entropy is a subtle concept, often described as a measure of the disorder of a system or the amount of information needed to describe a system. It relates to the temperature of an object through the second law of thermodynamics. In black holes, entropy is related to the surface area of an event horizon. Physicists study black hole entropy because it could help us answer fundamental questions in quantum gravity, such as whether a black hole can destroy information.

So the team was applying entropy equations to a simple black hole, trying to figure out what happens when you extend Einstein’s equations into quantum theory, which is a common trick known as the semi-classical approach. When they did this, they kept getting strange extra terms in their equations that they didn’t expect. These terms didn’t make sense until the team looked at them in terms of pressure. It turns out the extra terms act like pressure for a black hole in the same way that gas atoms in a container create pressure. In other words, when you apply quantum theory to a black hole, you get both temperature and pressure.

As with Hawking temperature, this quantum pressure for a black hole is extremely tiny. It’s far too small to affect the kinds of black holes we see in the universe. But the fact that it exists could have real consequences for the most extreme regions of the cosmos, such as the big bang. This particular model is too simple to apply to real systems, but it is an interesting clue toward a more complete theory of quantum gravity.

The European Southern Observatory returns intriguing views of enigmatic asteroid 216 Kleopatra.

It’s not every day we get a new look at a distant world, let alone a strange misshapen asteroid. But that just what happened last week, when the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile released new images of asteroid 216 Kleopatra.

The images were obtained courtesy of SPHERE, the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument, attached to the 8.2 metre VLT Unit Telescope 3. Though SPHERE is designed for direct visual observations of planets around other stars, it does a pretty solid job at resolving objects in our own solar system, including asteroids.

What you’re seeing in the image sequence is twin-lobed, dog-boned shaped asteroid 216 Kleoptra. Discovered on the night of April 10th, 1880 by astronomer Johann Polisa from the Austrian Naval Pola Observatory, the asteroid ranges on a 4.7 year orbit, from a perihelion 2.1 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun, to a distant aphelion of 3.5 AU. SPHERE uses an adaptive optics system which cancels out atmospheric distortions to nab fine detail.

“Kleopatra is truly a unique body in our Solar System,” says astronomer Frank Marchis (SETI-Institute) in a recent press release. “Science makes a lot of progress thanks to the study of weird outliers. I think Kleopatra is one of those and understanding this complex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our solar system.”

We’d love to find another planet like Earth. Not exactly like Earth; that’s kind of ridiculous and probably a little more science fiction than science. But what if we could find one similar enough to Earth to make us wonder?

How could we find it? We progress from one planet-finding mission to the next, compiling a list of planets that may be “Earth-like” or “potentially habitable.” Soon, we’ll have the James Webb Space Telescope and its ability to study exoplanet atmospheres for signs of life and habitability.

But one new study is focusing on exomoons and the role they play in a planet’s habitability. If we find a Moon-like exomoon in a stable orbit around its planet, could it be evidence that the planet itself is more Earth-like? Maybe, but we’re not there yet.

Scientists believe that the stable relationship between the Earth and the Moon is part of what makes Earth habitable. For one thing, the Moon keeps Earth’s axial tilt stable, which nurtures a stable climate. Researchers also know that many factors can disrupt long-term planet-moon stability. In the paper “Exomoons in Systems with a Strong Perturber: Applications to ? Cen AB” the authors explore the orbital relationships between moons, their planets and stars. The lead author is Billy Quarles, an astrophysicist and planetary dynamicist from Georgia Tech. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

In our own Solar System, there are many more moons than there are planets. There’s an average of 20 moons per planet, thanks largely to Jupiter and Saturn and their combined 160+ moons. Mercury and Venus have none, Earth has only one, and Mars has only two, which are likely captured asteroids.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), over 4,000 operational satellites are currently in orbit around Earth. According to some estimates, this number is expected to reach as high as 100,000 by the end of this decade, including telecommunication, internet, research, navigation, and Earth Observation satellites. As part of the “commercialization” of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) anticipated in this century, the presence of so many satellites will create new opportunities (as well as hazards).

The presence of these satellites will require a great deal of mitigation (to prevent collisions), servicing, and maintenance. For example, the San Francisco-based startup Orbit Fab is working to create all the necessary technology for orbital refueling services for satellites. To help realize this goal, industry giant Lockheed Martin recently announced that they are investing in Orbit Fab’s “Gas Stations in Space™” refueling technology.

The San Francisco-based startup was founded in 2018 by Daniel Faber and Jeremy Schiel, both of whom have strong backgrounds in the commercial space industry. Between 2016 and 2019, Faber was the CEO of Deep Space Industries (DSI), one of the leading companies currently developing asteroid mining capabilities. Schiel, meanwhile, was the vice-chair of the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS), a consortium dedicated to fostering standards and best practices for satellite servicing.

Orbit Fab’s Refueling Network Concept. Credit: Orbit Fab

As they state on their website, the company was founded to create “a thriving in-space market for products and services that support both existing space businesses (communications and Earth observation) and new industries like space tourism, manufacturing, and mining.” Their first product is the Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface (RAFTI), a fueling port that will allow for orbital refueling for satellites.

Gas from the intergalactic medium constantly rains down on galaxies, fueling continued star formation. New research has shown that this gas is not evenly mixed, and stars are not equal across the galaxy. This result means that solar systems are not the same within the Milky Way.

Galaxies are born with a reservoir of gas which they use to manufacture stars. That gas is pristine, made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. It doesn’t contain any heavier elements, which astronomers call “metals”.

But gas from outside the galaxy is always raining in, providing fresh material. That gas is equally pristine.

“Galaxies are fueled by ‘virgin’ gas that falls in from the outside, which rejuvenates them and allows new stars to form”, explained Annalisa De Cia, a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the UNIGE Faculty of Science and first author of a new study, recently published in Nature, examining the role that the new gas plays in star formation.

Stellar evolution pollutes the composition of the initial reservoir of gas. Stars fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements – the metals – like oxygen, carbon, silicon, and more. When they die, either through a drawn-out and dramatic unfolding of a planetary nebula or a spectacular supernova blast, they eject these metals into the surrounding galaxy. Those metals then go on to get mixed freely.

On September 5, 2021, a team of MIT researchers successfully tested a high-temperature superconducting magnet, breaking the world record for the most powerful magnetic field strength ever produced. Reaching 20 Teslas (a measure of field intensity), this magnet could prove to be the key to unlocking nuclear fusion, and providing clean, carbon-free energy to the world.

Nuclear fusion has been the holy grail of clean energy for decades now, but it’s a difficult nut to crack. Current nuclear power plants use fission – the splitting of atoms – to produce electricity. It’s effective, but can be dangerous, and leaves behind long-lasting nuclear waste which is difficult and expensive to store safely. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, relies on combining two atoms together to make a larger one. This is the kind of reaction that occurs in the Sun and stars. When artificially reproduced on Earth, it is far less prone to catastrophic explosions than fission is, and it produces far less radioactive waste. If a commercially viable fusion reactor could be made a reality, it could quickly become the energy source of the future.

This is where MIT’s powerful new magnet comes in. Nuclear fusion only occurs at immensely high temperatures – the plasma must reach temperatures that would melt or destroy any material that humans could think to build a reactor out of. The solution, proposed as early as the 1950s, is to contain the plasma without letting it touch anything. A strong magnetic field can do just that, creating an artificial ‘bottle’ in which nuclear fusion can occur.

The most common shape for one of these magnetic bottles is a donut-like object known as a tokamak. MIT scientists hope to arrange their powerful new magnets into a tokamak reactor, and in doing so produce net-positive nuclear fusion (fusion that produces more energy than it uses) by 2025.

The real ground-breaking work here isn’t the fusion itself. Artificial fusion reactions have been produced before. The problem is that, so far, they always take more energy to run than they produce (keeping those magnetic fields up to contain the plasma uses a lot of energy). By working to improve the magnets, the MIT team hopes to be the first to finally produce a reactor that makes more energy than it uses.

Astronomy is a bit different from many sciences because you only have a sample size of 1. The cosmos contains everything we can observe, so astronomers can’t study multiple universes to see how our universe ticks. But they can create computer simulations of our universe. By tweaking different aspects of their simulation, astronomers can see how things such as dark matter and dark energy play a role in our universe. Now, if you are willing to spring for a fancy hard drive, you can keep one of these simulations in your pocket.

The Uchuu simulation is the largest and most detailed simulation of the universe ever made. It contains 2.1 trillion “particles” in a space 9.6 billion light-years across. The simulation models the evolution of the universe across more than 13 billion years. It doesn’t focus on the formation of stars and planets but instead looks at the behavior of dark matter within an expanding universe. The detail of Uchuu is high enough that the team can identify everything from galaxy clusters to the dark matter halos of individual galaxies. Since dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe, it is the main driver of galaxy formation and clustering.

It takes a tremendous amount of computational power and storage to create such a detailed model. The team used over 40,000 computer cores and 20 million computer hours to generate their simulation, and it produced more than 3 Petabytes of data. That’s 3,000 Terabytes or 3 million Gigabytes for us mortals. Using high-density compression, however, the team was able to compress their results into a mere 100 Terabytes of storage.

That’s still a tremendous amount of data, but it can be stored on a single drive. For example, the Exadrive from Nimbus is a 100 Tb solid-state drive in a standard 3.5-inch form factor. Granted, it will set you back $40,000, but if you have that kind of change hiding between your couch cushions, why not use it to keep a universe in your pocket. Fortunately, if you don’t have that much spare change, you can access the data online. The Uchuu team has their raw data on skiesanduniverses.org, so you can explore their virtual universe all you want.

In addition to being a detailed cosmic simulation, the Uchuu simulation can be used by researchers working on scientific data mining. As large sky surveys and more simulations are created, the data will become so large data mining will play a crucial role in astronomical research. Until that data becomes available, data miners can hone their skills on a pocket universe.