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Space

SPACE: Could Nearby Exoplanet Harbor Life?

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exoplanet

There’s a rocky planet out there that’s very big and cold. Its sun, a red dwarf named “Barnard’s star” looks much larger in its sky than Earth’s. It bathes the planet in X-rays and ultraviolet light, likely enough radiation to strip away any atmosphere. But Barnard’s star is also much dimmer than Earth’s host star, so the planet’s surface is probably a frozen wasteland — the sort of place that likely wouldn’t have any liquid water, and that most scientists wouldn’t expect to support life. But a new analysis suggests that the planet, named Barnard B, might give rise to … Read more

SPACE: The Crystal Sun

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In a process not unlike human aging, most stars entering the final chapter of their lives tend to shrink, shrivel and slowly turn white. Astronomers call these cold, dense husks of once-mighty stars white dwarfs and, unlike humans, their dotage can last for billions of years. In that time, stars with masses between about a tenth and eight times the mass of our sun burn up the last of their nuclear energy, shed their fiery outer layers and dwindle into ultracompact cores that pack about a sun’s-worth of mass into a planet-size package. While this might sound like an unglamorous … Read more

Did We Just Witness the Birth of a Black Hole?

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Exploding Cow

On June 16, 2018, a stupendously bright explosion tore across the cosmos and lingered in the sky above Earth for several weeks. The mysterious blast traveled 200 million light-years from the gut of the Hercules constellation, shone with the light of nearly 100 supernovas and captured the attention of the world’s stargazers until, finally, it vanished from the sky as mysteriously at it appeared. Astronomers named it “The Cow.” From the moment of its discovery, scientists knew that The Cow (officially named AT2018cow, which is a procedurally generated name) was no typical supernova. Now, months later, a team of international … Read more

There Are Animals On the Moon – Live Science

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China’s Chang’e-4 lander touched down on the far side of the moon (Jan. 3 Beijing time, Jan. 2 US), and it’s got some living things on board. A small “tin” in the lander contains seeds of potatoes and rockcress (Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, as well as a model organism for plant biology), as well as silkworm eggs. The idea, according to a report in The Telegraph earlier this year, is that the plants will support the silkworms with oxygen, and the silkworms will in turn provide the plants with necessary carbon dioxide and nutrients … Read more

SPACE: Ultima Thule Looks Like a Snowman

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Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman. At a news conference on Wednesday, scientists working with NASA’s New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by on Jan. 1. The scientists now say with confidence that Ultima Thule long ago was two bodies that got stuck together, what they call a contact binary. “Two completely separate objects that are now joined together,” said S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission. Full Story at the New York Times

SPACE: Is the Drake Equation Useless?

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aliens - pixabay

For the precocious hunter of off-Earth life, the Drake equation is the ever-ready, go-to toolkit for estimating just how (not) lonely humans are in the Milky Way galaxy. The equation was developed by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961 in a slight hurry so that attendees of an upcoming conference would have something to confer about, and it breaks down the daunting question “Are we alone?” into more manageable, bite-size chunks.  The equation starts with some straightforward concepts, such as the rate of star formation and the fraction of stars hosting planets. But it quickly moves into tricky terrain, asking for numbers like … Read more

There Are Blueberries on Mars. Sort Of. – Live Science

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https://www.livescience.com/64265-mars-blueberries-mystery.html

It was just a few months after NASA’s Opportunity rover touched down on Mars in 2004 that it spotted a geological curiosity: tiny, iron-rich spheres scattered across the rock surface near the robot’s landing site. Snack-loving scientists working with the mission dubbed these objects “blueberries,” but the features were easier to name than to understand. Their recipe remains something of a puzzle. Trying to sort out the origins of these blueberries has always involved studying similar-looking spherical formations here on Earth. New research takes its inspiration from these terrestrial analogs to offer a new idea of the chemistry that may have gone … Read more

Ten Bizarre Things We Launched Into Space This Year – Live Science

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Humanity Star

This past year, engineers launched many oddities into space, including a Tesla Roadster, a gold-plated canopic jar and a cosmic disco ball. The total list of launched objects is lengthy, so here are the top 10 coolest objects (in our opinion) that blasted spaceward in 2018: Cosmic disco ball Got an urge to dance some disco? This past year, you had the opportunity to do it under the cosmic disco ball, which was launched into orbit on Jan. 21 by the U.S. company Rocket Lab.  The 3-foot-long (1 m) reflective ball’s official name is the Humanity Star, and it was … Read more

SPACE: Star Births Its Own Twin – Live Science

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a star is born

A close-up look at the birth of a star has revealed a surprise: Not one new stellar body, but two. In 2017, scientists using a new array of radio telescopes in the Chilean desert were observing a massive young star named MM 1a in an active star-forming region of the galaxy more than 10,000 light-years away. As they analyzed the data, they realized that MM 1a was accompanied by a second, fainter object, which they dubbed MM 1b. This, they found, was the first star’s smaller sibling, formed from the spray of dust and gases it holds in its gravitational … Read more

Are Black Holes Portals to the Future? – Live Science

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black hole - pixabay

Black holes are among the most mysterious places in the universe; locations where the very fabric of space and time are warped so badly that not even light can escape from them. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, at their center lies a singularity, a place where the mass of many stars is crushed into a volume with exactly zero size. However, two recent physics papers, published on Dec.10 in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D, respectively, may make scientists reconsider what we think we know about black holes. Black holes might not last forever, and … Read more