INFORMATION

The planet Jupiter hosts more than 100 moons with the majority of attention going to the four Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. This is primarily due to their active geology, including Io being the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system and Europa having a vast subsurface liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust. However, Jupiter’s smaller and lesser-known moons could provide astronomers key insights into the history of the solar system since they’ve remained largely unchanged, unlike the Galilean moons. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/ula0TcX via IFTTT

At least once in our lives, we’ve all seen a bright streak of light briefly blaze across the sky and have quickly referred to it as an asteroid, meteor, shooting star, comet, or some other whimsical name we’ve heard others use to describe it. For those calling it a meteor, you would be correct, but we’ll touch upon this later. The time it takes for a space rock, bolide being its scientific name, to travel through Earth's atmosphere and crash into the ground literally takes only a few seconds. But what happens to a space rock during this very brief travel time, and how can scientists use this to learn about a specific space rock’s origin and the potential damage it could cause if it explodes in mid-air? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/769a2Nx via IFTTT

When a meteoroid hits the Moon's surface, it does more than just dig up a little dirt. It actually excavates a little bit of cosmic history that recorded a long-ago supernova explosion. Scientists at the University of Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology have come up with a way to decode that history and learn something about such energetic events in the Universe. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/GtCqujH via IFTTT

NASA's newest eye on the sky, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has begun its journey to unravel the secrets of dark matter, dark energy and Earthlike planets — months ahead of schedule. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/dTCyOnL via IFTTT

Those little dust grains that fall to Earth during meteor showers or end up as part of larger meteorites found on Earth may hold surprising clues to the formation of the Sun. That's because they record the state of the magnetic field in the protostellar nebula from which Earth (and ultimately the planets) formed. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Lc2qCab via IFTTT

Due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue, NASA and Katalyst Space announced Wednesday the LINK spacecraft will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Iq3MDPW via IFTTT

How do scientists know the mass of the Universe? Measuring it has traditionally relied on knowing how many stars there are in galaxies, as well as clouds of gas and dust, and associated dark matter. Astronomers generally use the mass of the brightest stars to estimate the mass of an entire galaxy. That means the rest of a galaxy's stars and its dark matter are essentially invisible. For decades, astronomers estimated the number of small, unseen stars in clusters and galaxies using a mathematical rule that assumed stars formed in roughly the same mass proportions everywhere in the Universe. That tool is called the initial mass function (IMF). It describes how many stars of each size there are in a given cluster or galaxy. However, there are challenges with the way it's currently applied because of assumptions it contains. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/FsHTj3a via IFTTT

In our fifth installment, we explore the most exotic proposals for interstellar travel, including the Alcubierre Warp Metric, wormhole travel, the Halo Drive, and other truly advanced concepts. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/KFjYyh5 via IFTTT

Since the dawn of human space exploration, astronauts, scientists, and engineers have examined the short- and long-term effects of microgravity (often mistakenly called zero-gravity) on the human body. This includes the distribution of fluids to the upper body (called “puffy face”), an increase in height from the spine slightly extending, how solar and cosmic radiation impacts humans at the genetic level, and skeletal and muscle loss. However, arguably all these aspects pale in comparison to how the microgravity from spaceflight impacts the heart, and specifically heart muscle cells. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/gTqWJfw via IFTTT

One of the primary objectives of space exploration that often gets overlooked is the intense effort that goes into ensuring Earth microbes don’t contaminate planetary objects, also called forward contamination. This is done to prevent contaminating any potential life that might be present could get killed off my Earth microbes and scientists don’t want to make false discoveries. While space radiation and extreme temperatures often kill off any pesky microbes that hitch a ride on spacecraft, there remains a longstanding knowledge gap regarding whether microbes could survive the lunar polar regions due to its deep craters and varying topography. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/78KlOTn via IFTTT

Japanese researchers got lucky when a comet they wanted to study was found photo-bombing archival images from Japan's Subaru Telescope. The Subaru, with its 8.2 meter mirror, happened to image comet 28P/Neujmin from just the right angle to accurately characterize its surface. Their work is part of the ongoing effort to understand comets and asteroids, why some of them share properties, and what that means for their formation and evolution as Solar System objects. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/lm5eVx7 via IFTTT

A new study identifies possible mechanisms behind changes in astronauts' lower eyelids, a symptom associated with long periods in space that can affect their eyesight. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/yP6i9Ss via IFTTT

The discovery of lava worlds with atmospheres is challenging our theories of how atmospheres escape, and calling into question the idea of the cosmic shoreline. Stanford researchers have developed a model that explains how lava-covered worlds close to their stars can retain their atmospheres. The new theory could inform the search for life beyond our Solar System. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/GkXqCBt via IFTTT

Planets form in protoplanetary disks, reservoirs of gas and dust around young stars. But young stars are a little hyperactive, and they emit powerful winds that can dissipate the gas. So planets, especially gas giants, are in a race against time to form. They only have a few million years before the gas is gone. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/U59iLbm via IFTTT

Recent searches for the technosignatures of hypothetical Dyson Spheres again turn up empty. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Q6iqVU9 via IFTTT

When we think of weather forecasts, we instinctively think of weather on Earth like rain or shine. However, we rarely consider weather forecasts from outside of the Earth, also called space weather. While space weather often results in the awe-inspiring aurora located at the northern and southern latitudes, we often forget the negative impacts of space weather on our everyday lives. This includes potential disruption of communication satellites or ground stations. The primary conundrum that has eluded researchers is being able to forecast incoming space weather so we can better prepare for its impact. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/pthKa2T via IFTTT

Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn’t happen on Earth, or even Jupiter’s Great Red Spot - it happens in the interior of the Ice Giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressure and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside of these planets. And for the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates that. A new paper by physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), published in Nature Physics, resolves a 20 year old scientific mystery, and shows how the same physics that makes it rain diamonds inside Neptune could also help us triple our fusion energy output. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/3sgcjRm via IFTTT

The ESA's Sentinel satellites captured a 76 sq. km. chunk of ice breaking off from Greenland's Petermann Glacier. They watched the cracks and deformations happen in real time leading up to the calving. While calving is normal, it's happening more often, and this is another clear sign that the Arctic is rapidly changing due to the warming climate. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/HzQuVNO via IFTTT

Using a state-of-the-art galaxy simulation, a team led by scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) gained new insights into the processes shaping galactic centres across the Universe and the formation history of the Milky Way. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/t5pFs02 via IFTTT

Most stars, including massive ones, are in binary pairs. Astronomers think that about 70% of them have gained mass from their companions, but there's been no way to determine which ones have done so. Now, researchers have found a way. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/r7mxVLO via IFTTT

Dark matter continues to challenge astronomers as they work to solve the mystery of this so-far-unseen material that permeates the Universe. It's not that the stuff doesn't exist. It does, but we just can't see it. The only way it can be detected is by its gravitational effects on ordinary matter. A team of researchers led by University of Copenhagen PhD student Julie Kiel Holm has found a stream of stars stretching out more than 3,000 light-years from a globular cluster that appears to have been shaped by dark matter in a distant galaxy. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/k6ygbdz via IFTTT

It has been a busy month for astronomy. In the midst of an eclipse season bookended by the total solar eclipse on August 12th and the deep partial lunar eclipse coming right up this week on August 28th, an outbound comet hanging high in the dawn sky just refuses to die: 220P/McNaught. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/PRwN9gu via IFTTT

Roger Penrose found a way to extract energy from a spinning black hole without breaking any laws of physics. To understand it, we first have to level up our picture of spacetime, from Newton's empty stage to a swirling, draggable fabric. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Bx7PTjW via IFTTT

Innovative NASA-funded orbital starshade could help capture first direct images from extrasolar earths. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/1AMzXS2 via IFTTT

An international team observed a magnetar known as 1E 1547.0–5408 using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), leading to what could be the first detection of vacuum birefringence taking place in the magnetar’s ultra-strong magnetic field. These findings could potentially resolve a long-standing mystery quantum mechanics. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/D7iaSXL via IFTTT

NASA and its commercial partners are making progress on their way to a permanent human presence on the Moon. As part of that, a recent press release and accompanying YouTube video hints they may be looking to provide regular updates to the progress of those efforts - and, at least for this first one, that progress looks pretty good. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/96Bx8cs via IFTTT

Researchers have helped unravel the mystery of why certain pairs of stars pulse with regular, long-period bursts of radio waves. The particular class of objects they observed come in pairs that always include a compact dead star, called a white dwarf, locked in orbit with an M dwarf, a red star smaller than our Sun. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/NZECWYk via IFTTT

Billions of years ago, Mars was hypothesized to have been a habitable world with flowing liquid water and the potential for life. But directly studying its ancient past is currently limited to orbiters and rovers, as scientists have yet to obtain direct samples from Mars. However, meteorites have been found on Earth to have potentially originated from Mars during large impacts that flung chunks of the Red Planet into space, eventually being grabbed by Earth’s gravity and crashing into the Earth’s surface. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/P1f7c8r via IFTTT

A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: what happened in the roughly 150 million years of cosmic dark ages, before the universe’s first stars appeared? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/O4KDuQ3 via IFTTT

Long-period Radio Transients are sources that emit repeating radio and x-ray signals. The signals are polarized and coherent, and are similar to pulsars in some respects. But the type of astrophysical object responsible for them has been vigorously debated. New research says that at least one of them comes from a cataclysmic variable, a binary star where a white dwarf and a red dwarf orbit closely. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/1DFfYzO via IFTTT

Astrobiologists use new starting points to produce ‘organic’ models of our solar system’s formation. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/MXt1w7Z via IFTTT

A SpaceX Falcon upper stage crashed into the Moon on August 5th. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the crash site from different viewing angles and with different sunlight angles. The images showed that the crater is about 18 meters wide and about 3 meters deep. SpaceX says the crash was an accident. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/iSPG8Zo via IFTTT

Mars' moon Deimos has a large crater on its southern pole. It's also covered by a layer of regolith so deep it buries many other, smaller craters. New research shows that an impact is responsible for both, and that the moon is rather fragile and porous, like a rubble pile asteroid. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/5vIhQjn via IFTTT

Some signs of an alien civilization are easier to spot than signs of life itself. On technosignatures, from CFCs and industrial gases to the pandemic dip in pollution, and why Earth's most detectable moment might be right now. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/eZNFisJ via IFTTT

This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month takes us to a fantastical realm within our home galaxy, where piercing starlight and billowing winds sculpt dust clouds into inventive shapes. This scene is from the Carina Nebula, which lies just 7500 light-years away in the constellation Carina (the Keel). from Universe Today https://ift.tt/DM7ceaA via IFTTT

Something's wetting the surface of dwarf planet Pluto along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, and planetary scientists have found a good explanation for it. A recent study of new Horizons images taken during the 2015 flyby revealed evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising up through cracks in Sputnik Planitia. That's the giant heart-shaped glacial basin we see in all the Pluto images taken by the spacecraft. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Vm5Kbsr via IFTTT

Astronomers have discovered another S star, the population of stars that orbits the Milky Way's SMBH. This one is the fastest of them all, and also comes closest to the SMBH. It will let astronomers test relativity, especially the Lense-Thirring effect. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/ZiaLWP4 via IFTTT

When the JWST peered into the ancient Universe, it found surprisingly massive galaxies. These galaxies were so massive they challenged our understanding of how quickly galaxies can assemble. But new research says that multitudes of low-mass stars are hiding in these galaxies, and they're actually even more massive than we thought. When will it end? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/dl7VQuz via IFTTT

A single pixel of light holds astonishing detail. How ocean glint, rotational mapping, and the vegetation red edge let us read a distant planet's oceans, continents, and even forests, all without ever resolving it as more than a point. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/EanDP1q via IFTTT

Nitrous oxide (otherwise known as laughing gas) is likely a key atmospheric component of life in the cosmos. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/cgUMb3W via IFTTT

Astronomers know that evolved AGB stars shed their outer layers, contributing to the makeup of the interstellar medium. But new JWST observations show this can happen even near a supermassive black hole, where powerful radiation could obliterate molecules. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/ZDEO05V via IFTTT

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of NGC 2392 (also known as the Lion Nebula), which Hubble previously imaged in 2000. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/LtiYsTo via IFTTT

Black holes aren't just engines of inexorable destruction. They're complex regions of space and time, and under the right conditions, giant planets can form in their AGN disks. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/PFg8Mf3 via IFTTT

Engineers developed a unique fabric-based design for a ground-penetrating radar that will be a key instrument on NASA’s SkyFall Mars helicopters. The hardware will enable the SkyFall mission’s trio of planetary rotorcraft to use ground-penetrating radar to study the Martian subsurface. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/iI4e3cP via IFTTT

Little red dots have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in JWST data from the Universe’s deep past. Their ‘powering engines’ might resemble a newly discovered phenomenon dubbed a “black hole star”—an early, rapidly growing black hole wrapped in dense gas. This object, described in a study published today in Nature by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and international collaborators, may help explain how billion-solar-mass black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/ixIN3m9 via IFTTT

Readers of a certain age will remember a golden area of asteroid films, capstoned by two with very different endings. Deep Impact engrained the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas Armageddon, though arguably the more kitschy of the two films, was an uplifting story about technical ingenuity and sacrifice. And now, the central crux of that movie’s storyline - essentially blasting an asteroid with a nuclear detonation - is taking center stage as our last line of defense against a potential Deep Impact scenario. A new paper from researchers at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, and published in Space: Science & Technology, describes two potential scenarios examining how we might actually be able to nuke a space rock - and whether it would actually save us. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/W5iaSvq via IFTTT

If an alien civilization could see Earth only as a single pale blue dot, what could they learn? We start with transit spectroscopy, the biosignature cocktail of oxygen, methane, ozone, and water, and why even the James Webb will struggle to find life. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/yWIqOCQ via IFTTT

New research shows that extreme space weather can significantly raise radiation exposure on commercial flights and increase electronic faults in aircraft systems. A severe 1956 scale solar storm could expose passengers to a year's worth of radiation in a single flight, and the researchers point to last year's Airbus A320 grounding, triggered by a solar radiation linked flight computer fault, as proof this isn't theoretical. To address the gap, the team has proposed a new aviation specific radiation scale designed to give airlines clearer, more reliable guidance on when to monitor, reroute, or ground flights during severe events. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/k0QTY93 via IFTTT

Largest Italian radio telescope located on an out of the way mountain plateau in southern Sardinia sheds light on the cosmos’ still misunderstood Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). from Universe Today https://ift.tt/3X5Pxiq via IFTTT

Scientists have discovered a rare star formation hidden in a distant galaxy, unlike anything seen before beyond the Milky Way. What’s more, the discovery offers a brand new way to measure the distribution of dark matter in distant galaxies. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/zCYe3BG via IFTTT