INFORMATION

Dust storms are a serious hazard on Mars. While smaller storms and dust devils happen regularly, larger ones happen every year (during summer in the southern hemisphere) and can cover continent-sized areas for weeks. Once every three Martian years (about five and a half Earth years), the storms can become large enough to encompass the entire planet and last up to two months. These storms play a major role in the dynamic processes that shape the surface of Mars and are sometimes visible from Earth (like the 2018 storm that ended the Opportunity rover’s mission). When Martian storms become particularly strong, the friction between dust grains causes them to become electrified, transferring positive and negative charges through static electricity. According to research led by planetary scientist Alian Wang at Washington University in St. Louis, this electrical force could be the major driving force of the Martian chlorine cycle. Based on their analysis, Wang and her colleagues believe ...

Sending a lander to Venus presents several huge engineering problems. Granted, we’d get a break from the nail-biting entry, descent and landing, since Venus’ atmosphere is so thick, a lander would settle gently to the surface like a stone settles in water — no sky cranes or retrorockets required. But the rest of the endeavor is fraught with challenges. The average temperature at the surface is 455 degrees C (850 F), hot enough to melt lead. The mix of chemicals that make up the atmosphere, such as sulfuric acid, is corrosive to most metals. And the crushing atmospheric pressure is roughly equivalent to being 1,500 meters (5,000 ft) under water. These extreme environmental conditions are where metals and electronics go to die; therefore, the few Venus lander missions that have made it to the surface — like the Soviet Venera missions — only lasted two hours or less. Any future landers or rovers will need to have nearly super-hero-type characteristics to endure on the surface of Earth’s...

An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building flew past Earth in early February, coming within 1.8 million km (1.1 million miles) of our planet. Not only is it approximately the same size as the building, but astronomers found the asteroid – named 2011 AG5 — has an unusual shape, with about the same dimensions as the famous landmark in New York City. “Of the 1,040 near-Earth objects observed by planetary radar to date, this is one of the most elongated we’ve seen,” said Lance Benner, principal scientist at JPL who helped lead the observations, in a JPL press release. This extremely elongated asteroid has a length-to-width ratio of 10:3. The orbit of asteroid 2011 AG5 carries it beyond the orbit of Mars and as close to the sun as halfway between Earth and Venus. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/NEOPO Since there was no risk of this asteroid hitting our planet, astronomers took the opportunity to study 2011 AG5, as this is the closest pass the asteroid has made to Earth since i ...

Jupiter is well known for its spectacular aurorae , thanks in no small part to the Jun o orbiter and recent images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Like Earth, these dazzling displays result from charged solar particles interacting with Jupiter’s magnetic field and atmosphere. Over the years, astronomers have also detected faint aurorae in the atmospheres of Jupiter’s largest moons (aka. the “ Galilean Moons “). These are also the result of interaction, in this case, between Jupiter’s magnetic field and particles emanating from the moons’ atmospheres. Detecting these faint aurorae has always been a challenge because of sunlight reflected from the moons’ surfaces completely washes out their light signatures. In a series of recent papers , a team led by the University of Boston and Caltech (with support from NASA) observed the Galilean Moons as they passed into Jupiter’s shadow. These observations revealed that Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto all experience oxygen-...

When stars die, they spread the elements they’ve created in their cores out to space. But, other objects and processes in space also create elements. Eventually, that “star stuff” scatters across the galaxy in giant debris clouds. Later on—sometimes millions of years later—it settles onto planets. What’s the missing link between element creation and deposition on some distant world? That’s the question researchers asked themselves for years as they tried to figure out how heavy elements like manganese, iron, and plutonium showed up on Earth. It turns out they’re made in different processes, often in different parts of the Milky Way. Yet, they’ve been found layered together on Earth’s seabed. That implies they arrived about the same time, despite their different origins. Scientists from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK and the Konkoly Observatory, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences in Hungary put together some theories and computer models to simulate how elemen...

Hard to believe, but the Perseverance Rover has begun its third year exploring Mars. On Feb. 18, 2021,  Perseverance rover survived the harrowing landing at Jezero Crater, and almost immediately, began an expedition to collect a geologically diverse set of rock samples, ones that could help answer the question if Mars once had ancient microbial life. JPL and NASA put together a wonderful two-year animation of images from the rover’s Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera to celebrate Percy’s landing anniversary. Tomorrow is my two-year anniversary of landing on Mars. Time flies when you’re having fun (i.e., doing literally millions of science tasks)! Get geeky and dive into the numbers: https://t.co/YNje1rS3i5 Or celebrate in other fun ways: https://t.co/30gDJhc1o1 pic.twitter.com/euXmCxKRiR — NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 17, 2023 During the timelapse, you can see various rocks that Perseverance stopped to study with its robotic arm and senso...

Kilonovae are incredibly powerful explosions. Whereas regular supernovae occur when two white dwarfs collide, or the core of a massive star collapses into a neutron star, kilonovae occur when two neutron stars collide. You would think that neutron star collisions would produce explosions with all sorts of strange shapes depending on the angle and speed of the collisions, but new research shows kilonovae are very spherical, and this has some serious implications for cosmology. Kilonova explosions were first predicted in 1974, but we’ve only been able to reliably identify them in the last decade. Part of this is due to detailed spectral analysis, and part is due to our ability to detect neutron star mergers through gravitational waves. The combination of gravitational and optical data gives us a much better understanding of these collisions. Kilonova explosions play a key role in the evolution of the universe, particularly in how heavy elements are created. Neutron stars are a dense m...

As the successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope , one of the main duties of the James Webb Space Telescope has been to take deep-field images of iconic cosmic objects and structures. The JWST’s next-generation instruments and improved resolution provide breathtakingly detailed images, allowing astronomers to learn more about the cosmos and the laws that govern it. The latest JWST deep-field is of a region of space known as Abell 7244 – aka. Pandora’s Cluster – where three galaxy clusters are in the process of coming together to form a megacluster. The image was taken as part of the Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization (UNCOVER) program. The UNCOVER team relies on data obtained by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to observe Pandora’s Cluster for about 30 hours. Follow-up observations are then made with the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to provide precise distance measurements and other detailed information about the lensed ga...

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) lurk in the center of large galaxies like ours. From their commanding position in the galaxy’s heart, they feed on gas, dust, stars, and anything else that strays too close, growing more massive as time passes. But in rare circumstances, an SMBH can be forced out of its position and hurtle through space as a rogue SMBH. In a new paper, researchers from Canada, Australia, and the USA present evidence of a rogue SMBH that’s tearing through space and interacting with the circumgalactic medium (CGM.) Along the way, the giant is creating shock waves and triggering star formation. The paper is “ A candidate runaway supermassive black hole identified by shocks and star formation in its wake. ” The lead author is Pieter van Dokkum, Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. The paper hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. If you’ve never heard of a runaway SMBH, you’re not alone. SMBHs are normally locked into place at the centers of galaxies, and that...

For over sixty years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This consists of listening to other star systems for signs of technological activity (or “technosignatures), such as radio transmissions. This first attempt was in 1960, known as Project Ozma, where famed SETI researcher Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct a radio survey of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, the vast majority of SETI surveys have similarly looked for narrowband radio signals since they are very good at propagating through interstellar space. However, the biggest challenge has always been how to filter out radio transmissions on Earth – aka. radio frequency interference (RFI). In a recent study, an international team led by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) applied a new deep-learning algorithm to data collecte...

Life doesn’t appear from nothing. Its origins are wrapped up in the same long, arduous process that creates the elements, then stars, then planets. Then, if everything lines up just right, after billions of years, a simple, single-celled organism can appear, maybe in a puddle of water on a hospitable planet somewhere. It takes time for the building blocks of stars and planets to assemble in space, and the building blocks of life are along for the ride. But there are significant gaps in our understanding of how all that works. A new study is filling in one of those gaps. Stars form in Giant Molecular Clouds, vast stellar nurseries that can be hundreds of light-years across and contain millions of solar masses of gas and dust. These nurseries contain mostly hydrogen, the stuff of star formation. But they also contain carbon, and the carbon, hydrogen, and some other atoms combine to form complex molecules that are the rudiments of life. New research shows how some important organic mo...