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Recent Posts

  • JWST is Powerful Enough to See a Variety of Biosignatures in Exoplanets
  • Research helps pave way for first manned mission to Mars
  • Nuclear fusion will not be regulated the same way as nuclear fission
  • “Building Blocks of Life” Discovered in Meteorite That Crash Landed in England
  • Astronomers discover metal-rich galaxy in early universe
  • Unexpected New Ring System Discovered in Our Own Solar System
  • Astronomers discover eight new super-hot stars
  • More funding for OzGrav
  • Cosmological enigma of Milky Way’s satellite galaxies solved
  • After Artemis 1, it will take NASA 2 years to send astronauts to the moon. Why so long?
  • Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies
  • Researchers suggest that wormholes may look almost identical to black holes
  • ‘Planet killer’ asteroid found hiding in sun’s glare
  • Astrophysicists make observations consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity
  • NASA scientists say images from the Webb telescope nearly brought them to tears
  • Liquid mirror telescope opens in India
  • Launch of NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission delayed to late September
  • In a pair of merging supermassive black holes, a new method for measuring the void
  • Diagnosing Neptune’s Chilly Summer
  • Subatomic particle seen changing to antiparticle and back for the first time

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Recent Posts

  • JWST is Powerful Enough to See a Variety of Biosignatures in Exoplanets
  • Research helps pave way for first manned mission to Mars
  • Nuclear fusion will not be regulated the same way as nuclear fission
  • “Building Blocks of Life” Discovered in Meteorite That Crash Landed in England
  • Astronomers discover metal-rich galaxy in early universe
  • Unexpected New Ring System Discovered in Our Own Solar System
  • Astronomers discover eight new super-hot stars
  • More funding for OzGrav
  • Cosmological enigma of Milky Way’s satellite galaxies solved
  • After Artemis 1, it will take NASA 2 years to send astronauts to the moon. Why so long?

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JWST is Powerful Enough to See a Variety of Biosignatures in Exoplanets

By Earl on 19 Jun 2023 on No Comments

The best hope for finding life on another world isn’t listening for coded messages or traveling to distant stars, it’s detecting the chemical signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres. This long hoped-for achievement is often thought to be beyond our current observatories, but a new study argues that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could pull it off.

Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered so far have been found by the transit method. This is where a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view. Even though we can’t observe the planet directly, we can see the star’s brightness dip by a fraction of a percent. As we watch stars over time, we can find a regular pattern of brightness dips, indicating the presence of a planet.

Read more here

Exoplanets

Research helps pave way for first manned mission to Mars

By Earl on 27 Apr 2023 on No Comments

Scientists have greater insight into the atmospheric conditions on Mars than ever before following an international research project involving the University of Huddersfield. The findings of the project will help them identify safe landing sites with increased accuracy, and further paves the way for the first manned mission to the red planet.

One of the researchers on the project is Dr. Thomas Smyth, a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography within the Department of Biological and Geographical Sciences in the School of Applied Sciences.

Alongside researchers from Ulster University, California Institute for Technology (Caltech) and the University of Wisconsin Madison in the U.S., the research has discovered a more informed and realistic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) microscale modeling method, which will provide more detailed insight into the surface wind forcing of aeolian transport patterns on Martian surfaces such as dunes. Read more here.

Mars

Nuclear fusion will not be regulated the same way as nuclear fission

By Earl on 24 Apr 2023 on No Comments

The top regulatory agency for nuclear materials safety in the U.S. voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win.

As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won’t apply to fusion plants. (Fusion reactors cannot melt down.)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the top governing body for nuclear power plants and other nuclear materials, announced the results of its vote on April 14.

Read more here

Cosmology

“Building Blocks of Life” Discovered in Meteorite That Crash Landed in England

By Earl on 08 Mar 2023 on No Comments

New research has been published on the organic analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite which crashed landed onto a driveway in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England in 2021. The research, led by Dr. Queenie Chan, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, found organic compounds from space which holds the secrets to the origin of life.

In the study, the analysis found a range of organic matter which reveals that the meteorite was once from part of an asteroid where liquid water occurred, and if it that asteroid had been given access to the water, a chemical reaction could have occurred leading to more molecules turning into amino acids and protein — the building blocks of life

Read more here

Solar System

Astronomers discover metal-rich galaxy in early universe

By Earl on 28 Feb 2023 on No Comments

Amazing to see a metal-rich galaxy so early in the Universe’s history.

Scanning the first images of a well-known early galaxy taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Cornell astronomers were intrigued to see a blob of light near its outer edge.

More here

Cosmology

Unexpected New Ring System Discovered in Our Own Solar System

By Earl on 09 Feb 2023 on No Comments

A new ring system in the Solar System? Plus it’s beyond the Roche Limit – which will mean a re-think of our understanding of orbital bodies.

ESA’s Cheops finds an unexpected ring around dwarf planet Quaoar

During a break from looking at planets around other stars, the European Space Agency’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops) mission has observed a dwarf planet in our own Solar System and made a decisive contribution to the discovery of a dense ring of material around it.

The dwarf planet is known as Quaoar. The presence of a ring at a distance of almost seven and a half times the radius of Quaoar and its moon, Weyot, opens up a mystery for astronomers to solve: why has this material not coalesced into a small moon?

More here

Solar System

Astronomers discover eight new super-hot stars

By Earl on 09 Jan 2023 on No Comments

Astronomers discover eight new super-hot starsImage of a star field with a red square in the centre highlighting a small group of stars.A sky survey image centred on the newly-discovered O(H) star SALT J203959.5-034117 (J2039). An international team of astronomers has discovered eight of the hottest stars in the universe, all with surfaces hotter than 100,000 degrees Celsius. The work was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.The paper is based on data gathered using the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, with a 10m x 11m mirror. The study describes how a survey of helium-rich subdwarf stars led to the discovery of several very hot white dwarf and pre-white dwarf stars, the hottest of which has a surface temperature of 180,000 degrees Celsius. For comparison, the Sun’s surface is a mere 5,800 degrees.

Read more here.

Astrophysics

More funding for OzGrav

By Earl on 04 Jan 2023 on No Comments

OzGrav Makes Waves With $35M To Understand the Universe

The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) at Swinburne has been awarded a further $35 million in funding to continue their ground-breaking discoveries at the cutting edge of human understanding.

The new funding will support OzGrav’s work investigating the fundamental nature of relativistic gravity, ultra-dense matter, and the universe, generating critical discoveries to cement Australia’s leadership role in the growing field of gravitational wave science.

Read more here.

Uncategorized

Cosmological enigma of Milky Way’s satellite galaxies solved

By Earl on 20 Dec 2022 on No Comments

Astronomers say they have solved an outstanding problem that challenged our understanding of how the universe evolved—the spatial distribution of faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

These satellite galaxies exhibit a bizarre alignment—they seem to lie on an enormous thin rotating plane—called the “plane of satellites.”

This seemingly unlikely arrangement had puzzled astronomers for over 50 years, leading many to question the validity of the standard cosmological model that seeks to explain how the universe came to look as it does today.

More here.

Cosmology

After Artemis 1, it will take NASA 2 years to send astronauts to the moon. Why so long?

By Earl on 13 Dec 2022 on No Comments

Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch in 2024, but it may be tough for NASA to hit that target.

Orion’s successful splashdown Sunday afternoon (Dec. 11) returned some critical components needed for NASA’s Artemis 2 moon mission, which is scheduled to launch 2024 — but it may be tough for the agency to hit that target. 

Read more here.

Space

Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies

By Earl on 10 Dec 2022 on No Comments

Two new studies suggest that certain tetrahedral arrangements of galaxies outnumber their mirror images, potentially reflecting details of the universe’s birth. But confirmation is needed.

Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang.

“If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the analysis.

Read more here.

Cosmology

Researchers suggest that wormholes may look almost identical to black holes

By Earl on 25 Nov 2022 on No Comments

Why haven’t we found wormholes? It might be because they look just like blackholes!

A group of researchers at Sofia University has found evidence that suggests the reason that a wormhole has never been observed is that they appear almost identical to black holes.

In their paper published in the journal Physical Review D, , Petya Nedkova, Galin Gyulchev, Stoytcho Yazadjiev and Valentin Delijski describe studying theoretical linear polarization from an accretion disk that would be situated around a class of static traversable wormholes and compared the findings to images of black holes.

More here.

Cosmology

‘Planet killer’ asteroid found hiding in sun’s glare

By Earl on 01 Nov 2022 on No Comments

Is this isn’t a worry, I don’t know what is!

Astronomers have discovered a giant asteroid hiding in the glare of the sun that might one day cross paths with Earth

The 0.9-mile-wide (1.5 kilometers) asteroid is the largest potentially hazardous asteroid spotted in the past eight years and astronomers have dubbed it a “planet killer” because the effects of its impact would be felt across multiple continents.

The asteroid, named 2022 AP7, managed to avoid detection for so long because it orbits in the region between Earth and Venus. To spot space rocks in this area, astronomers have to look in the direction of the sun, and that is notoriously difficult due to the sun’s luminosity. For example, flagship telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope never look toward the sun, as the star‘s brightness would fry their sensitive optics. 

More here.

Solar System

Astrophysicists make observations consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity

By Earl on 26 Oct 2022 on No Comments

An international team of astrophysicists has made a puzzling discovery while analyzing certain star clusters. The finding challenges Newton’s laws of gravity, the researchers write in their publication. Instead, the observations are consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity. However, this is controversial among experts. The results have now been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In their work, the researchers investigated open star clusters. These are formed when thousands of stars are born within a short time in a huge gas cloud. As they “ignite,” the galactic newcomers blow away the remnants of the gas cloud. In the process, the cluster expands considerably. This creates a loose formation of several dozen to several thousand stars. The weak gravitational forces acting between them hold the cluster together.

More here.

Astrophysics
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