As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Space

SPACE: Fast Radio Bursts Could Be Signs of Alien Life. Or Not.

by
radio telescope - pixabay

Earth is being bombarded with invisible light that nobody understands. Known as fast radio bursts (or FRBs), these ultrashort, ultrapowerful pulses of ancient energy are the universe’s brightest flashes you cannot see. They travel billions of light-years across time and space, shine with the intensity of nearly 100 suns and then blip out of existence mere milliseconds after reaching the range of Earthly telescopes. Because they are radio waves, they do all of this while remaining totally invisible to human eyes. Could these mystery pulses be the distant flashes of supermassive supernovas? The wild spin of the universe’s speediest neutron … Read more

Europa’s 50-Foot Ice Spikes – Live Science

by
Europe - NASA

It’s almost as if Europa has something to protect, something that it doesn’t want us to see. The moon of Jupiter has a saltwater ocean that scientists have long proposed visiting, because at least some researchers think it might contain extraterrestrial life. But there could be a problem: Scientists now report that there’s a good chance 50-foot (15 meters) ice blades defend this fascinating place. In a new paper published yesterday (Oct. 8) in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers likened the environment at Europa to high altitudes on Earth. In those spots, when the sun blasts fields of ice, it … Read more

SPACE: The Hopping Landers of Ryugu

by
Hoppy Laner - Ryugu - Live Science

The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu — and they’ve even sent back some wild postcards from their new home. The tiny rovers are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission. Engineers with the agency deployed the robots early Friday (Sept. 21), but JAXA waited until today (Sept. 22) to confirm the operation was successful and both rovers made the landing safely. The rovers are part of the MINERVA-II1 program, and are designed to hop along the asteroid’s surface, taking photographs and gathering data. In fact, one … Read more

SPACE: Going to Mars? You Might Glow in the Dark When You Return

by
Mars - pixabay

There are plenty of challenges to putting people on Mars, whether you look at the rocket, the astronaut or the planet itself. New data from one of the many spacecraft at work around Mars confirm just how dangerous a round-trip human journey would be by measuring the amount of radiation an astronaut would experience. Cosmic radiation is made up of incredibly tiny particles moving incredibly fast, nearly at the speed of light — the sort of phenomenon a human body isn’t very well equipped to withstand. That radiation travels across all of space, but Earth’s atmosphere buffers us from the … Read more

SPACE: Making Nuclear Pasta – Live Science

by
Nuclear Pasta

How to cook “nuclear pasta” in three easy steps: 1. Boil one large, dying star until it goes supernova and explodes. (This could take a billion years, so be patient.) 2. Vigorously stir any leftover protons and electrons inside the star’s shriveled core until they merge into a soup of ultradense neutrons. Apply as much gravity as necessary. 3. Scrunch the neutron stew into an airtight sphere the size of Toronto. Cover in a crystalline crust and serve at 1.08 million degrees Fahrenheit (600,000 degrees Celsius). Voila! You have just made one of the universe’s strangest concoctions — nuclear pasta. … Read more

SPACE: Colliding Galaxies Create Ring of Black Holes

by
Giant Ring of Black Holes

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study. The bright X-ray source emanates from the ring galaxy AM 0644-741 (abbreviated AM 0644), which lies approximately 300 million light-years from Earth. By combining data from Chandra and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers created a … Read more

SPACE: Scientists Search for Our Mother Sun

by
mother sun

Image Credit: NAOJ Billions of years ago, a huge star blasted open and spewed its guts into space. At that energetic moment, the so-called core-collapse supernova formed a debris cloud of brand-new atoms, forged in the heat of its blast. Time passed. The cloud contracted, attracted to itself by its own gravity. A star formed — our sun — surrounded by chunks of rock and gas that formed our planets and other orbiting bodies. Much later, we came along. That’s the basic story of our solar system’s birth. And, mostly from watching other supernovas and other star births out in … Read more

SPACE: Cosmic Zombies

by
Cosmic Zombies - NASA

Close encounters with medium-size black holes can reanimate dead stars, if only momentarily, a new study suggests. A team of astronomers performed computer simulations to determine what happens when a burned-out stellar corpse known as a white dwarf passes close to an intermediate-mass black hole — one that harbors between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of Earth’s sun. The researchers determined that the black hole’s powerful gravity can stretch and distort the white dwarf’s previously inert innards so dramatically that nuclear-fusion processes can reignite for a few seconds, converting helium, carbon and oxygen into heavier elements such as iron. … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Jello

by

Jupiter, space, Jello, discoveries, plot bunnies   That title is a little misleading, I know. It’s actually in reference to what my astrophysicist friend told me about the bigger planet in our system. The ridiculously awesome Jupiter. A couple years back, the probe Juno inserted into Jupiter’s orbit with the simple, massive, mission of gathering data. Scientists, and the world, were astounded by the sheer amount of weirdness and awesome we learned. The cyclones at the poles, the wonky electromagnetic field, the sci-fi-esque core. The core and ground are the parts that really stuck with me. Metallic hydrogen. When I … Read more

SPACE: Closest Exoplanet to Earth Could Be ‘Highly Habitable’

by
Proxima Centauri b - NASA

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet — known as Proxima Centauri b— in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions, Proxima Centauri b can sustain enormous areas of liquid water on its surface, potentially raising its prospects for harboring living organisms. “The major message from our simulations is that there’s … Read more