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space

ANNOUNCEMENT: Entity – Toshi Drake

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Entity - Toshi Drake

QSFer Toshi Drake has a new gay sci-fi book out: Entity. Lieutenant Michael Collins’s week just went to hell. The suspicious actions of his captain escalates as he orders Michael to investigate a dead ship’s heart—the cephalopods that pilot the star drive system. The mission forces Michael from the safety of his ship and his lover, Commander Eizen Sartris, while straining the bond with his own ship’s heart, Padua. Attacked by Siwu pirates, Michael finds refuge on a damaged alien vessel, where he waits for Eizen to rescue him. But in the dark cold wreckage, he discovers a thriving garden … Read more

Space is a Dusty Place

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space dust - pixabay

Every year, 5,200 tons of extraterrestrial dust fall to Earth. This gentle rain of bits of comets and asteroids far outweighs larger meteorites that hit the planet, according to research to be published April 15 in the journal Earth & Planetary Science Letters. Only about 10 tons (9 metric tons) of larger space rocks land on Earth annually. Despite the large quantities, it’s hard to detect space dust or track its annual accumulation in most places due to precipitation that washes dust away. And in most places, dust originating on Earth swamps dust from space. But in Adélie Land, Antarctica, … Read more

SPACE: A Star is Born

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A Star is Born - Live Science

Astrophysicists have developed the first high-resolution 3D model of a gas cloud coalescing to form a star — and it’s mind-blowing. The “Starforge” model (which stands for “star formation in gaseous environments”) allows users to fly through a colorful cloud of gas as it pools into stars all around them. Researchers hope that the visually stunning simulation will help them to explore the many unsolved mysteries of star formation, such as: Why is the process so slow and inefficient? What determines a star’s mass? And why do stars tend to cluster together? The computational framework is able to simulate gas … Read more

SPACE: Is Mars Still Volcanically Active?

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Mars Volcanic Activity - NASA

Evidence of what may be the youngest eruption seen yet on Mars suggests the Red Planet may still be volcanically active, raising the possibility it was recently habitable, a new study finds. Most volcanism on Mars occurred between 3 billion and 4 billion years ago, leaving behind giant monuments such as Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. At 16 miles (25 km) high, Olympus Mons is about three times as tall as Mount Everest, Earth’s highest mountain. Previous research suggested the Red Planet may still have flared with smaller volcanic eruptions as recently as 2.5 million years … Read more

SPACE: China’s Rover Successfully Lands on Mars

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Chinese Mars Rover

China just successfully landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second nation to do so. The Tianwen-1 mission, China’s first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to “Heavenly Questions”) arrived in Mars’ orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a Long March 5 rocket in July 2020. After circling the Red Planet for more than three months, the Tianwen-1 lander, with the rover attached, … Read more

Will There Be a Space War One Day?

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space war - deposit photos

Here on Earth, the air, land, and sea are zones of conflict, clashes and combat. There is a growing perception that next up is the ocean of space, transformed into an arena for warfare. There is ongoing chatter regarding military use of space by various nations. The freshly established U.S. Space Force, for instance, is busily shaping how best to protect U.S. and allied interests in the increasingly contested and congested space domain. What conditions could lead to clashes in space? Is such a situation a given, or can conflicts be short-circuited ahead of time? Could nations “slip into” off-planet … Read more

SPACE: What Are Dark Sirens, And Why Should You Care?

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black hole - pixabay

In recent years, cosmologists have been faced with a crisis: The universe is expanding, but no one can agree on how fast it’s moving away from us. That’s because different ways of measuring the Hubble constant, a fundamental parameter that describes this expansion, have produced conflicting results. But a single, lucky observation of what are known as dark sirens — black holes or neutron stars whose crashes can be picked up by gravitational wave detectors on Earth but remain invisible to ordinary telescopes — could help resolve this tension. As the cosmos expands, galaxies in the universe move away from … Read more

SPACE: Now There Are Invisible “Space Hurricanes”

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Space Hurricane

For the first time, astronomers have detected a powerful, 600-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) hurricane of plasma in Earth’s upper atmosphere — a phenomenon they’re calling a “space hurricane.” The space hurricane raged for nearly 8 hours on Aug. 20, 2014, swirling hundreds of miles above Earth’s magnetic North Pole, according to a study published Feb. 22 in the journal Nature Communications. Made from a tangled mess of magnetic field lines and fast-flying solar wind, the hurricane was invisible to the naked eye — however, four weather satellites that passed over the North Pole detected a formation not unlike a typical terrestrial … Read more

SPACE: Astrophysicists Propose Existence of “Gravity Portals”

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Gravity Portal / Tunnel / black hole - Deposit Photos

Astrophysicists have an idea that could help to solve two mysteries: the reason for the bizarre abundance of super-high-energy radiation shooting from the center of our galaxy and the identity of invisible stuff called dark matter that has perplexed the world since its discovery some 50 years ago. And the idea has a super-cool name: gravity portals. The idea goes, when two dark matter particles (whatever they are) get sucked into one of these portals, they obliterate each other and spit out shockingly strong gamma rays. This line of thinking can potentially explain why the galactic center — where dense … Read more

Want to Buy a Bottle of Space Wine? It Will Cost You

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space wine

About 20 years ago, some grapes from the Bordeaux region of France were picked, crushed and fermented into merlot, just as countless of similar grapes had been before them. Then, in November 2019, those lucky grapes were launched into space. This space wine — actually 12 bottles of Pétrus 2000 merlot, normally valued at about $6,000 apiece — spent 438 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where a team of incredibly disciplined astronauts refrained from drinking it. The wine circled Earth many times, subject to the uncertain effects of microgravity and cosmic radiation, before finally returning to land aboard … Read more