Today we saw the 6th flight of SpaceX's Starship/Super Heavy rocket. The monster rocket blasted off on schedule on Tuesday, with a perfect liftoff. The Starship separated and headed off to orbit, but SpaceX decided not to attempt catching the booster with Mechazilla, navigating it to splash down in the ocean. Starship continued on to space, successfully relit a Raptor engine, and then returned to Earth, landing in the Indian Ocean during daylight.
Read the full story by Alan Boyle
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Starship completes its 6th flight test, Webb analyzes a star in another galaxy and confirms the Hubble tension, again, and a new explanation for the moons of Mars.
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There's an ongoing mystery on Mars. Why is there methane in its atmosphere and where is it coming from? The methane was first discovered by Curiosity, which saw methane levels rise around it several times greater than the background. Then it disappeared again. One exciting possibility is that it could be coming from life, similar to what we see on Earth. Unfortunately, there are non-biological ways to produce methane. More data are needed.
Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter
One explanation for dark matter is that it's made out of primordial black holes, formed in the earliest moments of the universe. Although they've never been seen directly, asteroid-mass black holes could account for all the dark matter influence. It's believed that these low-mass black holes would be undetectable as they merged, releasing gravitational waves. But according to a new paper, if the conditions are ideal, there are instruments that might detect these mergers.
Read the full story by Brian Koberlein
The Earth is surrounded by a layer of weakly ionized plasma called the ionosphere, extending from 50 to 1,500 km above the planet. Although it's diffuse, it does interfere with satellite communications and navigation systems. To better understand and map the shape and extent of the ionosphere, researchers are proposing that millions of phones could pitch in. Phones could fill the gaps between existing ionosphere measurement instruments, relying on their GPS antennas.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
With the Higgs boson discovered, particle physicists are planning the best experiments that might help them explore the nature of reality beyond the standard model of particle physics. In a new interview, Alan Boyle talks with Hitoshi Murayama about a plan to develop new physics experiments that could begin in the next ten years. Some could be extensions of existing experiments, improving their sensitivity or adding instruments, or entirely new experiments.
Read the full story by Alan Boyle
The early Earth was bombarded by rocks from space, even after life had formed. Researchers are studying the implications of a meteorite that pummeled our planet 3.26 billion years ago. According to their calculations, this space rock was 200 times bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, triggering a tsunami that mixed up the ocean and flushed debris from the land. With the newly available organic material, bacteria and other organisms flourished.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
The Breakthrough Starshot program plans to use a high-powered laser to accelerate a reflective sail to relativistic velocities, crossing the gulf to the nearest star in mere decades. The material for the sail must be extremely lightweight and able to handle high accelerations and radiation from the laser. A new paper examines different materials and suggests that core-shell structures, spherical particles made of two different materials, might be promising.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
One of the Hubble Space Telescope's objectives was to measure the expansion rate of the Universe. It analyzed Cepheid variables and Type Ia supernovae, with enough accuracy that there was a mismatch between its observations and the measurements of expansion from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Astronomers used JWST to double-check the Hubble results, first checking the Cepheids and now checking the supernovae, and the results hold up.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Astronomers are continuing to find ultra-massive galaxies in the early history of the Universe. The three galaxies have a similar mass to the Milky Way, despite being within the first billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies are forming stars nearly twice as efficiently as lower-mass galaxies or galaxies later on in the Universe. Although they're still within standard theories of cosmology, they demonstrate how much needs to be learned about the early Universe.
Read the full story by Nancy Atkinson
The atmosphere on Mars is tricky. It's not thick enough for an atmospheric re-entry, but it's too thin for a propulsive landing. For decades, the largest payloads that could be sent to the surface of Mars were about a tonne. Researchers have been studying different Martian landing systems and think they have a new strategy to land heavy payloads on Mars. Future missions will take advantage of the lessons learned by SpaceX about propulsive landings, using them on Mars.
Read the full story by Nancy Atkinson
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the closest, brightest dwarf galaxy to the Milky Way—20 times bigger than the full Moon in the sky. Astronomers think that the LMC just completed its closest approach to the Milky Way, blowing away the spherical halo of gas surrounding it. Smaller galaxies would have shut down star formation, but the LMC has enough material to keep forming stars. New observations from Hubble have helped astronomers measure its halo structure.
Read the full story by Brian Koberlein
Moon has a non-uniform bumpy gravitational field. We can use these anomalies to launch stuff off the surface of the Moon with electromagnetic launchers. How exactly can we do it? Finding out in this interview.
Astronomers have analyzed the chemical signatures of millions of stars and noticed that many have evidence of surprisingly heavy metals in their upper atmospheres. These heavier metals should have sunk down into the star during formation, so they must have been deposited later. A new paper calculates that up to 30% of Sun-like stars have engulfed rocky planets during their lifetimes. This would explain why ultra-short-period planets are extremely rare. They were eaten.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
The Chinese Space Agency has unveiled a new automated, reusable cargo spacecraft that looks surprisingly familiar. It's called the Haolong and should remind you of the Space Shuttle or Dream Chaser cargo vehicle. Its wingspan is about 8.7 meters, similar to the shuttle, but it'll be shorter with a smaller cargo bay. It'll deliver payloads to the Chinese Space Station and then re-enter the atmosphere, gliding to a landing where it can be refurbished for a new mission.
Read the full story by Matt Williams
How did supermassive black holes get so big so quickly after the beginning of the Universe? Astronomers assume that they started from stellar-mass black holes and then merged their way up to supermassive black holes. In a new paper, researchers propose that the first black holes formed microseconds after the Big Bang, accumulating material immediately, giving them everything they needed to reach billions of solar masses within the first billion years of the Universe.
Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter
In 1054, a new star appeared in the sky. This was a supernova, and the resulting wreckage is known as the Crab Nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope has given us amazing images of the nebula, and radio telescopes have found the rapidly rotating pulsar at its center. In 2007, astronomers noticed a strange pattern in the pulsar's high-frequency radio emissions, and according to a new paper, they finally know what's causing them.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Will SpaceX be able to deliver Starship in time for Artemis? Will Elon and Donald cancel SLS and replace it with Falcon Heavy? Is there any chance for real competition with SpaceX? How serious is the space race with China? Finding out the answers in this interview.
ESA's Gaia mission has revealed many interesting things about the Milky Way and even turned up two black holes, dubbed BH1 and BH2. Both have about 10 times the mass of the Sun, and both have a companion star that's roughly the size and mass of the Sun on wide orbits. These companion stars are surprising since black holes tend to eject their companion stars when they form or just gobble them up. How did BH1 and BH2 have this rare configuration?
Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter
There have been several gamma and X-ray space telescopes launched. But these can weigh thousands of kilograms with large instruments, power systems, and electronics. Now researchers have demonstrated they can shrink a gamma or X-ray detector down to fit into a CubeSat chassis. The Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal (SpIRIT) CubeSat launched in late 2023, testing out miniaturized high-energy detectors in a tiny spacecraft.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
When ESA's Mars Express spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2007, it deployed the Beagle 2 lander, watching its departure with a tiny webcam called the Visual Monitoring Camera. Then the camera was turned off for several years. Scientists turned it back on again and repurposed its 30x40-degree view to watch the entire disk of Mars. This allowed scientists to track planetary weather systems as they evolved across the surface of Mars.
Read the full story by David Dickinson
Should they teach conspiracy theories in schools? How can we preserve history? How restricted is JWST because of its sunshield? Answering all these questions and more in this week's Overtime Q&A.
Uranus is an oddball. The ice giant planet was pushed over on its side and has an axial tilt of 98 degrees. There's another mystery to Uranus: its upper atmosphere is getting colder. When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, it measured the planet's temperature. Since then, ground- and space-based telescopes have continued to measure its temperature, watching it continue to lower. New research suggests that the temperature decrease is due to the solar wind.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
About 11 million years ago, a large meteor crashed into Mars, hurling debris into space. One piece of that debris drifted through space, finally entering the Earth's atmosphere. It was found by scientists and then put into a drawer and forgotten. In 1935, researchers found it again and discovered it originated from Mars. Now, researchers have learned that the rock was part of a structure that was 1.4 billion years old, revealing new details about the history of Mars.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Sometimes binary stars can be right in front of our eyes, and we just don't notice them. One example of this is a main sequence star that has reached the end of its life and bloated up to become a red giant. If the star is orbiting a white dwarf companion, then the outer atmosphere can envelop the smaller white dwarf so that it's orbiting inside the larger star. This is called a common envelope binary, and they can be the cause of Type Ia supernovae.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
On January 15th, 2022, an undersea volcano off the coast of Tonga exploded, becoming one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recent memory. In a new paper, researchers show that there was a seismic wave released about 15 minutes before the main eruption, before there was any visible surface disruption. The waves were detected at seismic stations about 750 km away, roughly as strong as a magnitude 4.9 earthquake. This is the first precursor signal detected so far.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Exploring the Moon is going to be dangerous. Both the environment and terrain are harsh and unforgiving. If a serious accident happens, help could be days or weeks away. Researchers in Australia have developed a distress system based on the COSPAS-SARSAT technology that is used for search and rescue on Earth. This would use low-power emergency beacons that astronauts could deploy with minimal infrastructure, using a future lunar satellite network.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Some of the largest "things" in the Universe are the vast filaments of dark matter that connect the cosmic web, forming the large-scale structure of the Universe. How do you weigh something that's millions of light-years long? Very carefully. Researchers have observed the relationship between the amount of dark matter and the motion of galaxies within the filament. The faster the galaxies, the more dark matter mass contained within the filament.
Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter
Astronomers have only been aware of fast radio bursts for about two decades. These are incredibly short-lived blasts of radio waves that appear randomly across the sky. Various theories have been proposed to explain them, and they typically involve neutron stars in some way. A new paper calculates that interstellar objects crashing into neutron stars would do the trick. The duration of a burst nicely matches how long it would take for an impact to occur.
Read the full story by Brian Koberlein
We're still waiting for the results from JWST about the atmospheres on the TRAPPIST-1 planets. But is there a way for red dwarf planets to keep atmospheres on planets. Latest research seems to show that it might be possible.
ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft is getting closer and closer to the Sun, also giving us a new view of higher and higher latitudes—regions of the Sun that have never been seen before. Astronomers have released a collection of stunning new images of the Sun in various wavelengths that show sunspots on its surface, maps of its magnetic field, and the Sun's glowing outer atmosphere, or corona. The images were taken when the spacecraft was 74 million km away.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
You can describe a black hole with just two numbers, its mass and its spin. Everything else is a mystery, shrouded by the event horizon. But black holes can still affect their environments, harboring vast accretion disks and powerful jets of matter and energy blasting into space, surrounded by intense magnetic fields. New research suggests that the magnetic fields of the jets are inherited by the magnetic fields of the original stars themselves.
Read the full story by Matt Williams
One of the largest known stars is WOH G64, 2,000 times larger than the Sun. It's located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, approximately 170,000 light-years away. Astronomers think this star is set to detonate as a supernova, probably within the next few thousand years. The world's most powerful network of infrared telescopes, ESO's Very Large Telescope, recently captured detailed images of the giant star for the first time, revealing its surface and surroundings.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Magnetic fields are everywhere across the Universe, but they need some kind of dynamo mechanism to get going. For example, the interior of the Earth is a dynamo that generates our planet's magnetosphere. Astronomers have long wondered about very faint magnetic fields that can stretch for millions of light-years in length. The answer seems to be: electrically charged dust grains, formed early on in the Universe, that hung onto their magnetic fields.
Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter
One mystery in planetary science is a satisfying origin story for Mars's moons, Phobos and Deimos. Were they chunks of Mars blasted into space by a meteor impact? Were they captured asteroids from the belt? A new supercomputer simulation found that a reasonable explanation could come from a massive asteroid passing just close enough to Mars that it was torn into pieces. Over time, chunks and debris would have settled into a disk around Mars and clumped into moons.
Read the full story by Brian Koberlein
For the last 6 weeks, Earth has been joined by a new "mini-moon" asteroid that has been temporarily orbiting near our planet. It departs again on November 25th, but not before astronomers turned some of the world's largest telescopes toward it. According to a new paper, 2024 PT5 is basaltic, similar to volcanic rocks, and matches the composition of Sv-type asteroids or lunar material. It spins once in less than an hour and has had many close encounters with Earth.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
The Sun can produce powerful flares and coronal mass ejections that turn into the auroras that light up our skies. But if these storms are powerful enough, they can damage living things and generate powerful auroras across the entire planet. Researchers studying ancient tree rings have discovered times when they were affected by powerful solar storms. So far, six storms in the last 14,500 years were so powerful they left a mark on the trees growing at the time.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Other Interesting Space Stuff
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Fraser Cain
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Universe Today
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