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space

SPACE: Ultima Thule is a Frankenstein Beast

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Ultima Thule

Less than three months after the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a distant, cold space rock, scientists are beginning to piece together the story of how that object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, came to be. In a series of scientific presentations held March 18 at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, mission scientists shared new data about the space rock’s topography and composition, which is helping them to refine scenarios about how the object formed. “Every single observation that we planned worked as planned,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research … Read more

SPACE: Could Carbon Monoxide Be a Sign Of Life?

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Scientists hunting for signs of alien life shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss carbon monoxide (CO), a new study suggests. The substance is highly poisonous to people and most other animal life here on Earth because it latches firmly onto hemoglobin, preventing this blood protein from carrying vital oxygen in the required quantities. And the gas hasn’t typically rated as a promising “biosignature” that astrobiologists should target in the search for ET. Indeed, many researchers regard CO as an anti-biosignature, because it’s a readily available source of carbon and energy that life-forms should theoretically gobble up. So, finding lots of … Read more

SPACE: The Earth is Basically a Mini Sun

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Our sun is a lifeless, fiery ball of gas fueled by a nuclear inferno. Earth, meanwhile, is a rocky, layered planet covered by water and teeming with life. Nevertheless, the elemental composition of these two celestial bodies is surprisingly similar. The elements in the sun and Earth are pretty much the same, though Earth had less of the sun’s more volatile elements, which evaporate at high temperatures, a new analysis reveals. This suggests that Earth formed from material in the solar nebula — the cloud of dust and gas that shaped the sun — but volatile elements such as helium, … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers Identify “Chimneys” in the Galactic Center

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Milky Way Chimneys

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is a bit like the hearth at the center of a cozy pub. It’s a bright, warm gathering place around which all the quotidian life of the Milky Way swirls — and, according to a new study published today (Mar. 20) in the journal Nature, it might even have a chimney or two. In a recent study of the X-ray emissions seething out of the Milky Way’s galactic center, researchers noticed two unusual structures that have never been described before. Twin columns of superhot, X-ray-emitting plasma appeared to be billowing … Read more

SPACE: Could Aliens Be Using Black Holes and Lasers to Zip Around the Galaxy?

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An astronomer at Columbia University has a new guess about how hypothetical alien civilizations might be invisibly navigating our galaxy: Firing lasers at binary black holes (twin black holes that orbit each other). The idea is a futuristic upgrade of a technique NASA has used for decades. Right now, spacecraft already navigate our solar system using gravity wells as slingshots. The spacecraft itself enters orbit around a planet, flings itself as close as possible to a planet or moon to pick up speed, and then uses that added energy to travel even faster toward its next destination. In doing so, … Read more

SPACE: Alien World Saved From Exile

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A distant alien world that was potentially on its way into exile in interstellar space was rescued by the gravitational pull of a passing pair of stars, a new study argues. These findings support arguments that close stellar misses help sculpt planetary systems, the researchers said. Although Earth and most of its sibling planets have relatively circular orbits around the sun’s equator, Pluto and many other dwarf planets have more elongated, tilted orbits. Previous research suggested these distorted features are potentially due to a close approach from another star during the solar system’s infancy whose gravitational pull hurled things helter-skelter. … Read more

SPACE: Giant Bubbles Spitting Cosmic rays

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space,bubble,x-ray

Astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy that’s giddily blowing bubbles like a toddler with a glass of chocolate milk. Unlike milk bubbles, however, these two huge galactic balloons are filled with gas, stretch a few thousand light-years across and appear to be crackling with charged particles 100 times more energetic than any found on Earth. Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, researchers detected the bubbles jiggling near the center of a galaxy named NGC 3079, located about 67 million light-years away from Earth. Bubbles like these are known as “superbubbles” because, well, they’re supersized. … Read more

SPACE: Remember FarOut? Now There’s FarFarOut

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FarFarOut - Credit: R. Hurt (IPAC)/Caltech

The solar system has a new distance champ. Astronomers just found an object that lies 140 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. That’s 140 times the Earth-sun distance, which is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). In case you want some more perspective: Pluto orbits the sun at an average distance of about 39.5 AU. “This is hot off the presses,” Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said during a public lecture last Thursday (Feb. 21) at his home institution.  Indeed, Sheppard announced the detection during that talk; it has yet to be peer-reviewed, or even … Read more

SPACE: Neptune’s New Moon Reveals Its Secrets

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Hippocamp moon - NASA

A faint and frigid little moon doesn’t have to go by “Neptune XIV” anymore. Astronomers have given a name — “Hippocamp” — to the most recently discovered moon of Neptune, which also formerly went by S/2004 N1. They’ve figured out how big the satellite is as well, and teased out some interesting details about its past, a new study reports. A team led by Mark Showalter, of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, announced the existence of S/2004 N1 in 2013. The scientists did so after analyzing photos taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope between … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers Find Clue to Missing Matter

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Astronomers think they’ve found a new clue in their continuing quest to solve one of the most substantial mysteries of the cosmos: where about a third of the universe’s matter is hiding. That missing matter isn’t dark matter (a whole different head-scratcher), it’s perfectly normal, run-of-the-mill matter that scientists simply can’t find. And that makes it a massive cosmic annoyance for astronomers. But a team of researchers may have figured out a clue that will help them track down this missing matter, thanks to the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. “If we find this missing mass, we can solve one of … Read more