Around three decades ago, we weren't certain that other stars had planets orbiting them. Scientists naturally thought there would be, but they had no evidence. Now, not only do we know of more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, but we can watch as baby planets take shape around distant stars.
The Moon's thin atmosphere, called an exosphere, has been a puzzle to science for some time. Two main processes were thought to create this wispy gas envelope; tiny meteoroids hitting the surface and solar wind particles bombarding the lunar soil. But new research using Apollo moon samples reveals that the Moon's own surface features provide surprising protection against solar wind erosion.
When a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH), the star's fate is sealed. The SMBH's gravity is overwhelming, and as the star is drawn toward the hole, it is stretched out and eventually consumed. These are called tidal disruption events (TDE), and while they're rare, their brilliant light catches astronomers' attention.
It is true that crewed missions to the Moon are expensive, difficult, and dangerous. And we now have a long history going back decades of reliable, dependable, capable robotic exploration, including fly-bys, orbiters, landers, and rovers. Why don’t we look at how much human spaceflight would cost to return to the moon, and just spend that money on lots of robots instead?
Sometimes serendipity happens in science. Whether it’s an apple falling from a tree or a melting chocolate bar, some of the world’s greatest discoveries come from happy accidents, even if their stories may be apocryphal. According to a new paper on arXiv, there’s a new story to add to the archives of serendipitous scientific discoveries - Rubin happened to make observations of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS before its official discovery, while the telescope was still in its Science Validation survey, marking the earliest, high resolution images we will likely get of the comet at that time.
Betelgeuse is a star that's never out of the news for long. It made headlines in recent years when it dimmed considerably, and since it's a red supergiant, people wondered if it was about to explode as a supernova. That expectation died down when scientists showed that the dimming is because of dust, but now Betelgeuse is in the news again, this time because of a newly-discovered companion star.
Located in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) and its many radio antennas are dedicated to studying the unseen Universe. Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been using its advanced infrared instruments to visualize another unseen part of the Universe. Together, the two observatories have seen, for the first time, hot minerals in a distant solar system beginning to solidify to create a small planetesimal. In short, these observations have allowed astronomers to pinpoint the moment when planets begin to form.
When astronauts return from the International Space Station, many have noticed an unexpected side effect of their mission, their eyesight has changed. This phenomenon, affecting about 70% of astronauts on long duration missions, has NASA scientists working to understand why weightlessness effects how we see.
Just imagine it, the news stories are all over your phone when you wake! The day will surely come that we will discover that we are not alone in the Universe! What happens the day after though? A new research paper from the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews tackles this question, outlining how NASA and the global scientific community should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
A team of scientists have developed a new material that could transform how we build equipment for space missions and other extremely cold environments. This new copper based alloy maintains its unique "shape memory" properties even at temperatures as cold as -200°C.
Magnetic fields play an important, if sometimes underappreciated, part in planetary systems. Without a strong magnetic field, planets can end up as a barren wasteland like Mars, or they could indirectly affect massive storms as can be seen on Jupiter. However, our understanding of planetary magnetic fields are limited to the eight planets in our solar system, as we haven’t yet accrued much data on the magnetic fields of exoplanets. That could be about to change, according to a new preprint paper by a group of research scientists from Europe, the US, India and the UAE.
When the JWST began science observations in July 2022, it flung open a whole new window on the Universe. The JWST looked further back in time than any other telescope, and it revealed several surprises. One of them was the Little Red Dots (LRD), ancient, faint objects that the powerful space telescope detected as far back as only 600 million years after the Big Bang.
The New Horizons spacecraft is humanity's fastest-moving spacecraft and headed to interstellar space. Since its exploration of Pluto 10 years ago and subsequent flyby of Arrokoth in 2019, it's been traversing and studying the Kuiper Belt while looking for other flyby objects. That's not all it's been doing, however. New Horizons also has an extended program of making heliophysics observations. The mission science team has also planned astrophysical studies with the spacecraft's instruments. Those include measuring the intensity of the cosmic optical background and taking images of stars such as Proxima Centauri. As the spacecraft moves, the apparent positions of its stellar navigation targets have changed, but that hasn't bothered New Horizons one bit. It knows exactly where it is thanks to 3D observations of those nearby stars.
The Orion Nebula Cluster, the Pleiades, and the Hyades are all open star clusters located near each other. They're easily located in the night sky. The Pleiades, aka the Seven Sisters, and the Hyades are close together, and the ONC is a little further away below Orion's Belt in the Orion Nebula.
Sometimes combining technologies is the way to go. That seems to be the case for utilizing lunar regolith for the raw materials needed to support a base anyway. According to a new paper published in Joule by a team of Chinese scientists combined the powers of light and heat is the most effective way to get hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon monoxide out of the lunar soil - and to prove it they tested their system on some actual lunar regolith samples returned by Chang’E-5.
A team of scientists led by the NSF's Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO) recently identified an incredibly rare object known as a Long Period Radio Transient (LPT), designated CHIME J1634+44. These objects are similar to Rotating Radio Transients (RRTs), which are sources of short radio pulses believed to be caused by pulsating neutron stars (pulsars). The difference with LPTs is that they have extremely long rotation periods, often lasting between minutes and hours. However, CHIME J1634+44 is the only LPT observed to date that is spinning up, as indicated by its decreasing spin period and unusual polarization.
Stars of all ages and masses emit electromagnetic energy in different ways, and these emissions attract the attention of astronomers. Each of these emissions is a clue to how stars form, evolve, and even die. Young stars are known for their high luminosity and their high level of activity. They have strong stellar winds and powerful magnetic fields.
One of the world’s most powerful instruments reveals interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it heads towards perihelion.
Our understanding of the Universe begins with the Big Bang, a moment in time where the Universe began expanding into what we see around us now. Big Bang nucleosynthesis describes how only the lightest elements were created originally: hydrogen, helium, and a tiny bit of lithium. For elements heavier than those, which astrophysicists call metals, a generation of stars had to live and die.
Multiple space agencies plan to return astronauts to the Moon by the end of this decade. Along with commercial and international partners, these efforts aim to create infrastructure that will ensure a "sustained program of lunar exploration and development." This includes NASA's Artemis Program, China's International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), and the ESA's Moon Village, all of which consist of creating lunar habitats around the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Providing power for these bases is a significant challenge given the cycle of lunar day and night, which lasts for two weeks at a time.
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