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SPACE: Where Is Everybody?

Out There - Mike Wall

In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi — who led the team that created the first-ever nuclear reactor, the inadequately named Chicago Pile-1 — and a few of his colleagues were discussing UFOs during their lunch break. The conversation prompted Fermi to ask his companions, “Where is everybody?” [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens] Fermi meant that the lack of visits by ET is distinctly odd. The Milky Way harbors hundreds of billions of stars and is about 13 billion years old, so there has been plenty of time and opportunity for alien civilizations to rise and spread throughout the … Read more

SPACE: A Moon Dust Economy

lunar ceramics

How do you start a colony on the moon? Can you ship everything the colonists need from Earth? That’s how NASA handled brief excursions to the lunar surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but astronauts couldn’t haul that much with them — certainly not enough to sustain themselves over the long term. Technology has improved since then, but most plans for a sustainable lunar base assume that its residents will use local resources, rather than hauling everything from Earth. So that’s why the European Space Agency (ESA) created a whole bunch of fake moon dust (fake “regolith” in … Read more

SPACE: NASA’s Insight Lander Arrives on Mars Today

InSight Mission

Mars is the second-most studied planet — only behind our own — but we know virtually nothing about its interior. All astronomers have to go by is models and theories, but no concrete evidence. NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission aims to change that. InSight will touch down Monday (Nov. 26) around 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT), in a “6 minutes of terror” touchdown that you can follow live here at Space.com. Shortly thereafter, the lander will begin looking beneath the surface of Mars to reveal the secrets within the Red Planet. About 4.5 … Read more

SPACE: Is There a Large Exoplanet in the Neighborhood?

exoplanet

Sitting about 6 light-years away from our sun, the red dwarf named Barnard’s star is the nearest solitary star to our solar system and the fastest-moving star in our night sky. It’s also really wobbly. Chalk up the wobbles to old age if you like: The star may have been born some 10 billion years ago — making it more than twice the age of our sun — and it has only 16 percent of the sun’s mass. But astronomers prefer a different explanation. A new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature combines 20 years of research … Read more

SCIENCE: Using Lasers to Guide Aliens to Earth – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Earth Laser - MIT News

We could build a laser that could send signals to extraterrestrial intelligence. Not we as in the staff of Live Science. (That’s probably beyond our skill set.) But we as in humanity. A new paper published yesterday (Nov. 5) in The Astrophysical Journal has found that humanity could feasibly build an infrared laser hot and bright enough that — if we shined it directly at nearby exoplanets — alien astronomers should be able to detect it using sky-watching technology not too much more advanced than our own. (Presuming they’re out there, of course.) [9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why We … Read more

SPACE: Black Holes Can Raise the Dead (And Then Kill Them Again)

Zombie Star - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Adding a cosmic “Walking Dead” twist to the most morbid of all space objects, scientists have found that some black holes could bring dead “zombie” stars back to life — and then destroy them. Black holes are invisible “objects” in space where the gravity is so strong that it sucks everything into it, even light. All of the black holes that astronomers have found so far are either superbig — as in hundreds of thousands and even billions of times the mass of our sun — or on the smallish side, as in, say, less than 100 times the mass … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers Find Evidence of Space Dustballs

dust - pixabay

For all of its emptiness, space is a messy place filled with dust, grease, gas and a whole lot of man-made junk. When that interstellar schmutz gets caught in the gravitational nets of suns, planets and other massive celestial bodies, some interesting things can happen. Take, for example, the twin balls of space dust known as Kordylewski clouds. First described in the 1950s, these roiling clouds of crud are hypothesized to exist in permanent orbits about 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) above our planet — one cloud pushed ahead of Earth and the other dragged behind it — thanks to a … Read more

SPACE: Is Killer Ice Knocking Off Alien Life Forms?

ice - pixabay

There’s a new kind of ice. It forms at speeds of more than 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h), it lies deep beneath our feet, it could destroy hopes for alien life, and — finally — scientists understand how it works. Back in March, researchers writing in the journal Science revealed that they have found the first evidence for this ice, called “Ice VII.” Scientists had predicted its existence beforehand. Under the right conditions, it was believed, ice could form in a pool of water without a layer of heat at the leading edge of its growing surface. That — along with … Read more

SPACE: Scientists Create Rare Fifth Form of Matter

matter - pixabay

For a few minutes on Jan. 23, 2017, the coldest spot in the known universe was a tiny microchip hovering 150 miles over Kiruna, Sweden. The chip was small — about the size of a postage stamp — and loaded with thousands of tightly-packed rubidium-87 atoms. Scientists launched that chip into space aboard an unpiloted, 40-foot-long (12 meters) rocket, then bombarded it with lasers until the atoms inside it cooled to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) — a fraction of a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature in nature. While the rocket … Read more

SPACE: Check Out This Bizarre, Blue Space Rock

3200 Phaethon

A bizarre, blue asteroid that acts like a comet and appears to be responsible for the annual Geminid meteor showermade a close flyby of Earth last year, giving astronomers an opportunity to study the object in unprecedented detail. They found that the asteroid is even weirder than they had imagined. Asteroid 3200 Phaethon is a special space rock with a rare blue color and an extremely eccentric orbit that has the object pass superclose to the sun and then out past the orbit of Mars. One orbit takes about 1.4 Earth years. This kind of orbit is more typical for … Read more