Space News & Blog Articles

Do you know what time it is? It's an easy question, right? Just look at your phone or watch. But is that really the exact time? Oh, well, for that you can look to Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. It's what your phone clock is synced to, give or take, but you can get a more accurate measure of UTC with a device that can pick up the UTC radio time signal. Of course, UTC is only an agreed-upon standard that tries to stay in sync with Earth's rotation. It, in turn, is based upon International Atomic Time (TAI), which is a weighted average of 450 atomic clocks located all over the world.

Getting close to things is one way for scientists to collect better data about them. But that's been hard to do for the Sun, since getting close to it typically entails getting burnt to a crisp. Just ask Icarus. But if Icarus had survived his close encounter with the Sun, he might have been able to see massive magnetic “tadpoles” tens of thousands of kilometers wide reconnecting back down to the surface of our star. Or maybe not, because he had human eyes, not the exceptionally sensitive Wide-Field imagers the Parker Solar Probe used to look at the Sun while it made its closest ever pass to our closest star. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters from Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors describes what they say on humanity’s closest brush with the Sun so far.

Long before scientists discovered that other stars in the Universe host their own planetary systems, humanity had contemplated the existence of life beyond Earth. As our technology matured and we began monitoring the night sky in multiple wavelengths (i.e., radio waves), this curiosity became a genuine scientific pursuit. By the 1960s, a scientific field dedicated to the search for advanced life (similar to ours) emerged: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Since then, multiple SETI surveys have been conducted to search for potential signs of technological activity (aka. "technosignatures").

Astronomers may have just seen the first ever ‘superkilonova,’ a combination of a supernova and a kilonova. These are two very different kinds of stellar explosions, and if this discovery stands, it could change the way scientists understand stellar birth and death.