INFORMATION

Water will be one of the most important resources for human explorers on Mars. They’ll need it for drinking, propellant, breathing, and more. It makes sense to land near a spot where there’s water ice close to the surface. NASA has released a new map of Mars’s northern hemisphere showing all the places where subsurface water ice has been detected, some of which are surprisingly close to the equator, as well as surprisingly close to the surface. This map could decide the first human landing site. Earlier and later HiRISE images of a fresh meteorite crater 12 meters, or 40 feet, across located within Arcadia Planitia on Mars show how water ice excavated at the crater faded with time. The images, each 35 meters, or 115 feet across, were taken in November 2008 and January 2009. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Early on during the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission, which arrived at Mars in 2006, scientists started finding evidence of subsurface water ice being ex...

When the JWST activated its penetrating infrared eyes in July 2022, it faced a massive wish-list of targets compiled by an eager international astronomy community. Distant, early galaxies, nascent planets forming in dusty disks, and the end of the Universe’s dark ages and its first light were on the list. But exoplanets were also on the list, and there were thousands of them beckoning to be studied. But one distant solar system stood out: HR 8799, a system about 133 light-years away. Why this system over others? 15 years ago astronomers discovered three exoplanets orbiting the star. Not long after they announced a fourth, all detected with direct imaging. They’re all massive planets on wide orbits, which are rare. The HR 8799 system is also young, another important point. The fact that they were discovered 15 years ago is also important; it means we have observations of these planets that span a lengthy time. This type of data is critical to understanding other solar systems becaus...

Even though Venus is very similar to Earth in many ways, it’s a hell-world with a runaway greenhouse effect. It was assumed this was because it lacked plate tectonics like Earth to sequester carbon inside the planet. A new study suggests that the high nitrogen and argon in its atmosphere are evidence from outgassing when it had plate tectonics billions of years ago. This could mean that Venus was habitable for a long time before something went horribly wrong. Scientists have long tried to understand why Venus’ crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere is 90 times as thick as Earth’s. Additionally, there is almost no water vapor, and temperatures hover around 462 degrees Celsius (864 degrees Fahrenheit). But it might not have always been this way. P revious work on modeling the planet’s geologic past has indicated it was quite likely Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to 2 billion years of its early history. So, what happened? Resear...

Despite the fact that we’ve discovered thousands of them, exoplanets are hard to find. And some types are harder to find than others. Naturally, some of the hardest ones to find are the ones we most want to find. What can we do? Keep working on it, and that’s what a trio of Chinese scientists are doing. Scientists have four methods of detecting exoplanets. The transit method is the most prolific, but there’s also the radial velocity method, astrometry, and, of course, direct imaging. Each one works differently, has different strengths and weaknesses, and is better at finding some planets around different types of stars than others. We’re mostly interested in finding terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. Which of the four methods will deliver the best results as we continue our search? The three Chinese scientists set out to determine that. Their paper “ The Potential of Detecting Nearby Terrestrial Planets in the HZ with Different Methods ,” sums up their res...

Pick any object in the Universe, and it is probably spinning. Asteroids tumble end over end, planets and moons rotate on their axes, and even black holes spin. And for everything that spins, there is a maximum rate at which it can rotate. The black hole in our galaxy is spinning at nearly that maximum rate. For objects such as the Earth, the maximum rate of rotation is defined by its surface gravity. The weight we feel while standing on the Earth isn’t just due to the gravitational pull of the Earth. Gravity pulls us toward the center of our world, but the Earth’s rotation also tends to fling us outward away from the Earth. This “centrifugal” force is tiny, but it does mean that your weight at the equator is just slightly less than it is at the north or south pole. With our 24-hour day, the weight difference between the equator and pole is just 0.3%. But Saturn’s 10-hour day means that the difference is 19%. So much that Saturn bows outward a bit at its equator. Now imagine a planet...

A recent study published in Nature investigates recent observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and ground-based telescopes of heavy elements within the ejected material of a recent gamma-ray burst (GRB) , classified as GRB 230307A , that was likely produced by a kilonova with GRB 230307A being designated as the second-brightest GRB ever detected. The heavy element in question is the chemical element tellurium , which is classified as a metalloid on the periodic table. However, scientists also hypothesize that the element iodine , which is a requirement for most of life on the Earth and classified as a reactive nonmetal, could also exist within the kilonova’s explosion, with both elements residing side-by-side on the periodic table. “Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote down the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in a position to start filling in those last blanks of understanding where everything was made, thanks to Webb,” said Dr. And...

No need to panic, but the Andromeda Galaxy is barreling towards us. It is due to begin merging with the our Milky Way Galaxy in a few billion years. From an outside observer, that process will very likely look like this new picture captured by the Gemini South Observatory. This is NGC 7727, a peculiar galaxy in the constellation Aquarius, about 90 million light-years away. Two giant spiral galaxies are merging, their gravitational interactions are hurling giant tidal tails of stars into the cosmos. Astronomers believe the collision that created NGC 7727 began over a billion years ago. Inside this mess and chaos are pair of black holes – one from each original galaxy. These two black holes hold two records: 1. the closest supermassive black hole pair to Earth and, 2.  the closest together pair ever seen. One of the black holes measures 154 million solar masses and the other 6.3 million solar masses. They are approximately 1,600 light-years apart.  Astronomers have estimate...