Paul Sutter writes: In our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we see a region surrounding the solar system that is far less dense than average. But that space, that cavity, is a very irregular, elongated shape. What little material is left inside of this cavity is insanely hot, as it has a temperature of around a million Kelvin. What’s going on? We call this region surrounding the solar system the Local Bubble, which is a bit unimaginative, but it gets…
The New York Times reports: The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos. Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a…
This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. NASA By Timothy J McCoy, Smithsonian Institution and Sara Russell, Natural History Museum A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them…
Evolution, the process of change, governs life on Earth − and potentially different forms of life in other places. Just_Super/E+ via Getty Images By Chris Impey, University of Arizona We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like? These questions are preoccupying astrobiologists, who are scientists who look…
Elise Cutts writes: Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as onboard instruments caught and analyzed the dust and gas streaming away from the comet. Scientists sought hints about how our solar system came to be — and about the origin of one class of molecules in particular. Organic molecules — compounds containing…
my god.https://t.co/jTnhJ3O2jU pic.twitter.com/egWqXk9JS5 — remnynt (@remnynt) November 6, 2024 CNET reports: Since NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit in July 2016 and began transmitting image data, the world has gotten glimpses of the solar system’s largest planet and its moons. But a new batch of images that have been contributed by spacewatchers using data from the mission are stunning, even by these standards. The most recent perijove, or the point when it’s closest to the planet, occurred for Juno on…
Rebecca Boyle writes: The galaxies were never supposed to be so bright. They were never supposed to be so big. And yet there they are — oddly large, luminous objects that keep appearing in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Kevin Hainline is part of a team that uses the JWST to find these galaxies, whose brightness, apparent mass, and sheer existence a virtual eyeblink after the Big Bang are among the biggest surprises from the three-year-old…
Phil Plait writes: How dark is dark? When you go outside on a clear, moonless night, you can see not only lots of stars but also the black space between them—literally space, in this case. Given that you can see stars and that the sky is black, you might think the sky is transparent. But it’s not—at least, not really. Various molecules, atoms and particulates float around in the air, and these reflect light. During the day, sunlight entering the…
Universe Today reports: Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), Earth has been heating up at a rate of 0.06 °C (0.11 °F) per decade since 1850 – or about 1.11 °C (2 °F) in total. Since 1982, the average annual increase has been 0.20 °C (0.36 °F) per decade, more than three times as fast. What’s more, this trend is projected to increase by between 1.5 and 2 °C…
Science Alert reports: If you travel far enough away from the Sun, the Solar System becomes a lot more populated. Out past the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a vast, ring-shaped field of icy rocks. This is where Pluto resides, and Arrokoth, and countless other small objects in the cold and the dark. These are known as Kuiper Belt objects or KBOs, and astronomers have just found hints of an unexpected rise in their density, between 70 and…
Science News reports: The biggest clash in cosmology might be inching closer to resolution, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists disagree over the universe’s expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. There are two main methods for measuring it — one based on exploding stars called supernovas and the other on the universe’s oldest light, the cosmic microwave background. The two techniques have been in conflict for a decade, in what’s known as the “Hubble tension.” If this…
Rebecca Boyle writes: Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it was visible as a faint smudge. But through a telescope it sharpened into a brilliant ellipse called the Andromeda Nebula. To settle a debate about the size of the Milky Way —…
Phil Plait writes: Polaris, the North Star, is one of the most famous stars in the sky, but it’s also quite an enigma. A recent reappraisal of its basics—such as its mass and distance from Earth—suggests that the star is paradoxically youthful, appearing to be only a small fraction of its true multi-billion-year age, like a middle-aged human who somehow passes for a toddler. This is deeply strange; you’d probably assume astronomers have simply miscalculated this star’s age. But in…
Quartz reports: Some stars in our very own Milky Way are some of the earliest ever seen, according to research published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The stars are in the Milky Way’s halo, a shroud of stars that surrounds the galactic disk. The stars are also relatively close, at just 30,000 light-years from Earth. The team found that the stars are between 12 billion and 13 billion years old, clocking them to around the…
The universe as a network of rivers: This remarkable new map reveals how galaxies flow like water, following the pull of gravity across hundreds of millions of light years. https://t.co/krsqjnnoa3 pic.twitter.com/192Q28SrM9 — Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) April 26, 2024 Astrobites reports: Cosmography is the science of cartography, but applied to the Universe by mapping out the Large Scale Structures such as voids, filaments and superclusters. While galaxy surveys are able to create such maps from just looking at spatial information…
NASA reports: For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars). Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission…