INFORMATION

Historical astronomical records from China and Japan recorded a supernova explosion in the year 1181. It was in the constellation Cassiopeia and it shone as bright as the star Vega for 185 days. Modern astronomers took their cue from their long-gone counterparts and have been searching for its remnant. But it took them time to find it because they were looking for the wrong thing. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses in on itself and then explodes. It leaves behind a dense core where the protons and electrons are crushed into neutrons. It’s called a neutron star, and they’re the smallest and densest stellar objects in the Universe other than black holes. It took a concerted effort from astronomers over the years to understand SN 1181’s remnant. At first, they couldn’t even find it. For a time, researchers thought that the pulsar 3C 58 was the remnant. The ancient Chinese and Japanese records were not accurate enough to pinpoint SN 1181’s exact location, and the pulsa...

Solar sails rely upon pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces. Get the sail closer to the Sun and not surprisingly efficiency increases. A proposed new mission called Mercury Scout aims to take advantage of this to explore Mercury. The mission will map the Mercurian surface down to a resolution of 1 meter and, using the highly reflective sail surface to illuminate shadowed craters, could hunt for water deposits.  Unlike conventional rocket engines that require fuel which itself adds weight and subsequently requires more fuel, solar sails are far more efficient. Light falling upon the sail can propel a prob across space. It’s a fascinating concept that goes back to the 1600’s when Johannes Kepler suggested the idea to Galileo Galilei. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 21st Century that the Planetary Society created the Cosmos 1 solar sail spacecraft. It launched in June 2005 but a failure meant it never reached orbit. The first successfully launched solar sail was Ikaros...

From its vantage point at the Sun-Earth L2 point, the ESA’s Euclid spacecraft is measuring the redshift of galaxies with its sensitive instruments. Its first science images showed us what we can expect from the spacecraft. But the ESA noticed a problem. Over time, less light was reaching the spacecraft’s instruments. Euclid launched on July 1st, 2023 and made its way to the Sun-Earth Lagrange 2 point, the same spot where the JWST resides. Euclid is basically a wide-angle telescope with a 600 MB camera. Using its suite of scientific instruments, it measures the redshift of galaxies in an effort to understand the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Its measurements support the mission’s main science goals: to understand dark matter and dark energy. Euclid released its first images in November 2023. To describe them as dazzling was not an exaggeration. Those images whetted our appetite for more and built anticipation for the science results to come. The first test images from th...

Fresh imagery from the Event Horizon Telescope traces the lines of powerful magnetic fields spiraling out from the edge of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and suggests that strong magnetism may be common to all supermassive black holes. The newly released image showing the surroundings of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* — which is about 27,000 light-years from Earth — is the subject of two studies published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This picture follows up on an initial picture issued in 2022 . Both pictures rely on radio-wave observations from the Event Horizon Telescope’s network of observatories around the world. Sagittarius A* wasn’t the first black hole whose shadow was imaged by the EHT. Back in 2019, astronomers showed off a similar picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 , which is more than a thousand times bigger and farther away than the Milky Way’s black hole. In 2021, the EHT ...

The Solar System’s icy ocean moons are primary targets in our search for life. Missions to Europa and Enceladus will explore these moons from orbit, improving our understanding of them and their potential to support life. Both worlds emit plumes of water from their internal oceans, and the spacecraft sent to both worlds will examine those plumes and even sample them. New research suggests that evidence of life in the moons’ oceans could be present in just a single grain of ice, and our spacecraft can detect it. It’s all because of improvements to scientific instruments, particularly the mass spectrometer . Mass spectrometers can identify unknown chemical compounds by their molecular weights and can also quantify known compounds. These instruments are now powerful enough to detect a tiny amount of cellular material. “For the first time, we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said Fabian Klenner, ...

If all goes well, NASA’s Artemis III mission will bring humans back to the Moon as early as 2026, the first time since the Apollo 17 crew departed in 1972. It won’t be a vacation, though, as astronauts have an enormous amount of science to do, especially in lunar geology. A team from NASA recently presented their planetary science goals and objectives for Artemis III surface activities, which will guide the fieldwork the astronauts will carry out on the lunar surface. The Artemis III Geology Team presented their priorities at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March 2024. In addition, NASA also announced their choices for the first science instruments that astronauts will deploy on the surface of the Moon during Artemis III. The landing site hasn’t been chosen yet, but it will be within 6 degrees of latitude from the South Pole. These instruments will collect valuable scientific data about the lunar environment, the lunar interior, and how to sustain a long-duration hum...

In an effort to enhance the educational outreach of their Starlink constellation, SpaceX has an interactive global map of their Starlink internet satellites, which provides live coverage of every satellite in orbit around the Earth. This interactive map comes as SpaceX continues to launch Starlink satellites into orbit on a near-weekly basis with the goal of providing customers around the world with high-speed internet while specifically targeting rural regions of the globe. In 2022, Starlink officially reached all seven continents after Starlink service became available in Antarctica . Additionally, SpaceX announced in 2023 a partnership with T-Mobiel for Starlink to provide mobile coverage, as well. 2021 video showing an early attempt at Starlink tracking Within this interactive map, users can opt to see live satellite coverage or rewind and fast forward their respective orbital speeds. Scrolling your mouse will highlight each satellite, and clicking on them will produce their...