INFORMATION

To stand on a coastal shore and watch how eagles, ravens, seagulls, and crows take flight in high winds. it’s an inspiring sight, to be sure. Additionally, it illustrates an important concept in aerial mechanics, like how the proper angling of wings can allow birds to exploit differences in wind speed to hover in mid-air. Similarly, birds can use these same differences in wind speed to gain bursts of velocity to soar and dive. These same lessons can be applied to space, where spacecraft could perform special maneuvers to pick up bursts of speed from “space weather” (solar wind). This was the subject of a recent study led by researchers from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. By circling between regions of the heliosphere with different wind speeds, they state, a spacecraft would be capable of “dynamic soaring” the same way avian species are. Such a spacecraft would not require propellant (which makes up the biggest mass fraction of conventional missions) and would need only a mi...

For years, we’ve seen images from various Mars rovers and landers of dust devils churning across the dusty landscape of the Red Planet. But now, thanks to a microphone on the Perseverance rover and a whirling dust storm that passed directly over the rover, we know what a dust devil on Mars sounds like, too. Perseverance is equipped with a microphone on the SuperCam laser-zapping science instrument. When SuperCam blasts a rock, the resulting sounds give scientists clues about the rock’s composition. But one of the most anticipated uses of the microphone was the ability to hear the sounds of Mars itself. “We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools,” said Roger Wiens, the principal investigator of SuperCam, from Purdue University.  “The microphone lets us sample, not quite at the speed of sound, but nearly 100,000 times a second. It helps us get a stronger sense of what Mars is like.” This video shows the original images taken of the direct dus...

A new study has shown that in order to grow more than one giant planet in the same solar system, the planets must go through a complicated and intricate dance to prevent one from destroying the other. Planets grow from tiny seeds of rock and ice. In the initial stages of planetary formation, astronomers believe that the seeds simply merge and glue together through countless small interactions. But something different has to happen to get to the enormous sizes of the giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn in our own solar system.  That’s because as the star in the center of a growing planetary system begins to wake up, it can send out bursts of high energy radiation and strong winds of particles that can blow away all the material that the planets need to build themselves. So planet formation has to happen relatively quickly. Astronomers believe that this rapid growth phase happens through instabilities that develop in the disk of gas and dust that surrounds young stars. After ...

The large scale structure of the universe is dominated by vast empty regions known as cosmic voids. These voids appear as holes hundreds of millions of light years across in the distribution of galaxies. However, new research shows that many of them may surprisingly still be filled with dark matter. At the very largest scales in our universe, galaxies are not scattered around randomly like salt thrown on a table. Instead they follow a pattern known as the cosmic web . This is the largest pattern found in nature. The cosmic web is made of galaxies the same way that your body is made of cells…if your cells were a million times smaller.  Filling up the entire observable universe and beyond, the cosmic web is made of a series of interlocking filaments, clusters, and walls. Sitting between all those structures are the vast empty regions called cosmic voids . At the smallest scales these voids are 20 million light years across. Map of the nearest voids to the Milky Way galaxy. (imag...

For years cosmologists had thought that a strange feature appearing in the microwave sky, known as the CMB cold spot, was due to the light passing through a giant supervoid. But new research casts that conclusion into doubt. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the single greatest source of light in all the universe. It completely permeates all of space and is made of light leftover from when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old . At that time our universe had expanded and cooled to the point that it could transition from a hot dense plasma into a slightly cooler, but neutral, gas. That process released white-hot radiation with a temperature of around 10,000 K. In the intervening 13.8 billion years, however, that radiation has cooled and redshifted down to around three degrees above absolute zero, which puts that radiation firmly in the microwave regime. Within that light there are tiny bumps, wiggles, and variations in brightness. These variations spread across the sky and are...

The “Blue Marble” was one of the most iconic pictures of the Apollo era. Taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17 on their return trip from the moon, the first fully illuminated image of the Earth taken by a person captured how the world looked on December 7th, 1972, just over 50 years ago. Now, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology has recreated that iconic image using a climate model. As a new press release described, they didn’t do this for a publicity stunt. This effort has been a culmination of two decades worth of work on climate modeling that the team has been working on. Their climate model, which they ran with the help of researchers at the German Climate Computing Center, is now capable of drawing up details as fine as 1 km to accurately recreate environmental conditions at a given time. To feed that model, though, they need data. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot available in terms of data that could be fed into the mode from 1972, let alone any data from...

Simulation is key to space exploration. Scientists and engineers test as many scenarios as possible before subjecting their projects to the harshness of space. It should not be any different with the future living quarters of explorers on the Moon. One of the most commonly cited locations for a future permanent lunar base is in the relatively recently discovered lava tube caves scattered throughout the lunar mare. Simulating such an environment on Earth might be difficult, but a team from the Center for Space Exploration in China thinks they might have a solution – using karst caves to simulate lunar lava tubes. Simulating the exact environment of lunar lava tubes is likely impossible on Earth. The higher gravity and constant weather changes of our planet would probably collapse them. However, they have been stable on the Moon for billions of years and offer an ideal place to hide humanity’s first infrastructure. That is because they protect explorers from three major hazards on the ...