NASA has already decided to send Starliner home to Earth because of issues with its thrusters and coolant leaks. You can add a malfunctioning audio system to the list. Astronaut Butch Wilmore reported a strange pulsing noise coming from the capsule's speakers that sounded like a "sonar ping." NASA shared on its blog that it was caused by an audio configuration problem between the station and Starliner and wasn't a risk to the crew or equipment.
Read the full story by Matt Williams
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Another asteroid hit exactly where astronomers predicted, a monster asteroid rolled Ganymede over onto its side, strange sounds coming from Starliner, and China announces when it'll try to grab a piece of Mars.
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A longstanding mystery in astronomy is the growth of supermassive black holes early in the Universe. Within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, some black holes were already approaching a billion solar masses. The problem is that hydrogen heats up as it collects, pushing away new material that could be added to a star, limiting its mass. Researchers think that early dark matter could have kept hydrogen from cooling, allowing more to collect into a small region.
Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen
When you boil it down, there are six numbers that define the standard model of the Universe. Researchers simulated the Universe with precision and then provided 2,000 of them to a machine learning algorithm to train it. Once it had learned enough about the cosmos, they gave the algorithm data from cosmological surveys. Based on its knowledge, it was able to estimate five of these cosmological constants with incredible precision.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Andrew McCarthy is one of the most accomplished astrophotographers in the field, taking ever more amazing images of space. But it's his images of the Sun that really shine (pun intended). Andrew posted this picture of the Sun in late July, showing coronal loops stretching out from the surface. He even shared a time-lapse of several images showing how they evolve over time. It's amazing that an amateur can take pictures like this with backyard equipment.
Read the full story by Laurence Tognetti
Many exoplanets have been discovered using the radial velocity method, which measures the back-and-forth tug of gravity of the planet pulling on its star. Minor variations in the stars can add noise to the data. In a new paper, researchers report on 3.5 years of solar observations, measuring the Sun over 100,000 times to detect tiny changes in brightness and radial velocity compared to Earth. This will help next-generation telescopes search for other Earths.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Astronomers still aren't sure if there are primordial black holes, which would have formed in the earliest moments of the Universe. If they are out there, some could have gone through three-body interactions with stars, hurled into relativistic velocities. If any of these come close to the Solar System, our current crop of gravitational wave observatories might be able to detect their passage. This could set boundaries on how many primordial black holes exist.
Read the full story by Scott Alan Johnston
China's Tianwen-1 mission arrived at Mars in 2021, going into orbit and deploying a lander and rover to the surface. The orbiter has continuously observed the surface of Mars. Now researchers have released a global map of Mars in true color with a resolution of 76 meters per pixel based on the Tianwen-1 data. These images will be useful for future missions to Mars, to help identify interesting regions to explore.
Read the full story by Matt Williams
September should be an interesting time for amateur astronomy thanks to several lunar occultations set to occur during the month. This is when the Moon passes in front of another star or planet. On September 10th, it occults the bright star Antares, and it'll pass in front of Saturn on September 17th and then Neptune on the 18th. Finally, it'll occult the famous Pleiades star cluster on the 22nd of September.
Read the full story by David Dickinson
Could entangled electrons be used for FTL communications? Will Starship enable better satellites? Could we detect radiation on another world? Are there alternative explanations for black holes? Answering all these questions and more in this week's Overtime Q&A.
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe, and they're caused by an actively feeding supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy. But these black holes can go through periods when they're quiet and others when they're blasting out radiation as quasars. Now astronomers think they've found the site of a future quasar, where two galaxies are in the process of merging, driving gas, dust and stars into the black holes at their centers.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Black holes absorb everything that falls into them, even radiation. And yet, astronomers have detected X-ray radiation coming from black holes, and this has been an unsolved mystery since the 1970s. Researchers have built a detailed simulation of the environment around a black hole, modeling the interactions between radiation, plasma, and magnetic fields. They found that the turbulence of the magnetic fields heats the local plasma and makes it radiate in X-rays.
Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen
Evolution explains the variety of life we see on Earth, but it doesn't answer the question: how did life arise? Unfortunately, we only have the Earth as a place where we've found life and can't compare with the process on other worlds. But the existence of life on Earth gives us some clues. Researchers focused on places where life could have formed, like hydrothermal vents, impact sites, lakes, and ponds, and calculated the likelihood of being the source.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
ESA announced that they've secured a ride to the Moon for their Prospect package on an Intuitive Machines flight in 2027. PROSPECT consists of a drill and miniaturized laboratory that will bore into the lunar regolith searching for water and other volatiles on the Moon. While the surface of the Moon experiences high temperatures and radiation, water could be stable below the surface where the temperatures remain a constant -100°C.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Interferometers are a great tool for getting incredible resolution without building giant mirrors. Why don't all telescopes use it? What projects should we expect and what could we get from them? What are the challenges? Finding out in this interview!
Black holes are difficult to spot, but if they have enough accumulated material surrounding them, this accretion disk can shine. Researchers have made the highest-resolution simulation of a black hole accretion disk ever created, revealing the hot, turbulent material swirling around a black hole. They showed that the conditions are similar to the interior of stars, with magnetosonic waves creating turbulence inside the accretion disk.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
The International Space Station is in low-Earth orbit. Between this and the Moon is a region known as cislunar space, and over the coming decades, several nations are planning to send missions. Some of these will be to provide infrastructure for the permanent human presence on the Moon. Others will be scientific missions, helping to explore the region, charting the environment outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere. Here's a review of what's coming.
Read the full story by Matt Williams
Once again, astronomers have predicted exactly when and where a small asteroid was expected to strike the Earth's atmosphere. The 1-meter asteroid, now named 2024 RW1, was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey hours before it was due to hit Earth. Astronomers made further observations and predicted that it would strike the Philippines on September 5th. And then, right on schedule, skywatchers saw a bright fireball blaze a trail across the sky.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Researchers recently demonstrated that manganese nodules on the ocean floor could act like natural batteries, releasing oxygen into the deep ocean. This was an exciting discovery for astrobiologists because it provides a mechanism for oxygen to be delivered into region of the ocean far away from the atmosphere. This could help life form and evolve in the deep ocean, which has deep-sea hydrothermal vents providing energy and nutrients. What are the implications?
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Comets are made from a collection of small icy particles that formed in the early Solar System. As they approach the Sun for the first time, tidal forces and radiation pressure cause them to crumble, shedding smaller meteoroids that follow them in orbit. When those meteoroids cross Earth's orbit, we see them as a meteor shower. A new paper suggests that the meteor showers we see can explain the sizes of the particles that went into the formation of the comet.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Archaeology is the study of human prehistory, so it's surprising to hear that there's an ongoing archaeological study of the International Space Station. Researchers are watching how astronauts use the living areas on the station, especially in ways that the designers never intended. Astronauts took pictures of 6 locations on the ISS for 60 days, allowing researchers to study how they use and customize their environment.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Like Earth, Mars has polar ice caps of frozen water. Over the seasons, carbon dioxide cycles in and out of the atmosphere, collecting on the surface in a layer during the winter. The two ice caps aren't identical, thanks to the tilt of Mars' axis and its highly eccentric orbit around the Sun. It's farthest from the Sun during the southern winter, which drives a more severe winter in the region. This is accentuated by the higher elevations in the south, making it even colder.
Read the full story by Matt Williams
Now that the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System has deployed its booms and sail, the spacecraft is receiving light pressure from the Sun. Now NASA is testing out how it handles. The spacecraft was slowly tumbling before it deployed its booms, and now controllers will see how well they can get its motions under control under sail power. You can spot the mission with your eyes if you know when and where to look. NASA's app can give you alerts.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
The European Space Agency launched its final Vega rocket this week, lofting a Sentinel-2C Earth observation satellite into orbit. This wraps up 12 years of service and 20 successful flights. The mission launched several well-known missions, including LISA Pathfinder, Proba-V, and Aeolus. ESA will now launch these payloads on the new Vega-C rocket, specializing in launches of small satellites into polar orbit, capable of launching heavier payloads at a lower price.
Read the full story by Nancy Atkinson
We arrived late to the cosmic party. The most star formation happened about 7 billion years ago during a period known as "Cosmic Noon." New observations from JWST show how a pair of galaxies was undergoing star formation during a key time in the Universe's history. The galaxies are in the process of merging, with one blue, face-on galaxy and another dusty red, edge-on galaxy. The observation was possible thanks to an intervening cluster acting as a gravitational lens.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Jupiter's moon Ganymede is the largest in the Solar System. When the Voyagers flew past in 1980, they revealed a series of furrows that formed concentric circles in one spot on its surface, evidence of an enormous asteroid collision billions of years ago. Now, scientists think this impact was so catastrophic that it actually rolled Ganymede over onto its side. Over time, tidal forces reoriented the impact site so that it's opposite the side facing Jupiter.
Read the full story by Matt Williams
Mars was once warm and wet, but now it's a bone-dry desert, having lost its water billions of years ago. Orbiters see river channels and ancient lakes from space, while rovers are detecting the past presence of water from the surface. Did the water go underground or was it lost to space? NASA's MAVEN mission has been tracking the amount of water that Mars is still losing to space and found that seasonal variations and even distance to the Sun can have an impact.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Other Interesting Space Stuff
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