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Space

SPACE: Multiplanet System Around Sunlike Star Photographed For First Time

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multiplanet system - ESO

For the first time ever, astronomers have directly imaged multiple planets orbiting a sunlike star. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile photographed two giant planets circling TYC 8998-760-1, a very young analogue of our own sun that lies about 300 light-years from Earth, a new study reports. “This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our solar system, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution,” study lead author Alexander Bohn, a doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. Before this historic cosmic portrait, only … Read more

Another Mars Mission This Month – This One from NASA

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Mars Perseverance - NASA

NASA’s new Mars rover will launch toward the Red Planet this Thursday, July 30. The Mars Perseverance rover will explore the planet for ancient habitable environments and signs of fossilized microbial life at Mars’ Jezero crater, which was once a lake. The launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT, according to NASA. Pre-launch coverage will begin at 7:00 a.m. EDT. The launch window will stay open until about 9:50 a.m. EDT, with opportunities to launch every five minutes in that two-hour timeframe. The pre-launch and launch will be livestreamed on Live Science. Mars Perseverance is part of NASA’s Moon to … Read more

Scientists Make “Super Space Sunblock”

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Mars - NASA

For astronauts preparing to spend a long summer vacation on Mars, hats and umbrellas might not be enough to protect them from the sun’s harsh rays. And just like beachgoers slathering on sunscreen, explorers on the moon or Mars may one day shield themselves using creams containing a new bioengineered material called selenomelanin, created by enriching the natural pigment melanin with the metal selenium. Outside the Earth’s protective magnetic field, humans are exposed to many types of dangerous radiation, according to NASA. This includes damaging ultraviolet radiation, X-rays and gamma rays from the sun, as well as superfast subatomic particles … Read more

SPACE: The Moon’s Younger Than We Thought

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Moon formation

It turns out the moon is a little younger than scientists previously thought — about 85 million years younger, to be precise. In a new study, researchers at the German Aerospace Center found out that, not only did the moon once have a massive, fiery magma ocean, but our rocky satellite also formed later than scientists previously expected. Billions of years ago, a Mars-size protoplanet smashed into the young Earth and, amid the debris and cosmic rubble, a new rocky body formed — our moon. In this new work, the researchers reconstructed the timeline of the moon’s formation. While scientists … Read more

How Old Is the Universe? Older Than Me (and You)

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light rays - pixabay

Ancient light from the Big Bang has revealed a precise new estimate for the universe’s age: 13.77 billion years, give or take 40 million years. The new estimate, based on data from an array of telescopes in the Chilean Atacama Desert, also weighs in on one of the most important disagreements in astrophysics: How fast is the universe expanding? Described in two scientific papers, the new result gives a significant boost to one side of the disagreement, though the physicists couldn’t prove the other side of the dispute wrong. Here’s the problem: Physicists need to understand the universe’s expansion rate … Read more

Water Bears On the Sun!

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Solar Tardigrade - ESA

Regular followers of the QSF blog know we have a soft spot for tardigrades – also called “water bears,” and we live for space news. So we HAD to share this one with you! From Live Science: No, tardigrades haven’t colonized the sun. But a tardigrade-shaped speck on a solar mission’s images recently led to some joking about the unlikely solar presence of a wee water bear. Today (July 16), when the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA unveiled the latest images captured by the agencies’ Solar Orbiter mission, some sharp-eyed viewers were quick to point out a small, dark blotch on … Read more

Can You Suck Energy OUT of a Black Hole?

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black hole - pixabay

A rotating black hole is such an extreme force of nature that it drags surrounding time and space around with it. So it is only natural to ask whether black holes could be used as some sort of energy source. In 1969, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a method to do just this, now known as the “Penrose Process.” The method could be used by sophisticated civilizations (aliens or future humans) to harvest energy by making “black hole bombs.” Some of the physics required to do so, however, had never been experimentally verified — until now. Our study confirming the … Read more

Is There a Mirror Universe? And Does My Hair Look Better There?

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Mirror universe - pixabay

A series of viral articles claimed that NASA had discovered particles from another parallel universe in which time runs backward. These claims were incorrect. The true story is far more exciting and strange, involving a journey into the Big Bang and out the other side. The sensational headlines had muddled the findings of an obscure 2018 paper, never published in a peer-reviewed journal, which argued that our universe might have a mirror reflection across time, a partner universe that stretches beyond the Big Bang. If that’s the case, and a series of other extremely unlikely and outlandish hypotheses turn out … Read more

What Color is the Sunset on Alien Worlds?

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Alien Sunset - Deposit Photos

Fiery rose and peach sunset skies are a unique perk of our home on Earth. But what colors appear when the sun sets on other planets in the solar system? The answer depends on the planet. On Mars, the sun comes and goes with a blue glow. On Uranus, the sunset sky transitions from blue to turquoise, according to NASA. And on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, the sky turns from yellow to orange to brown as the sun dips beneath the horizon. Sunset colors aren’t uniform because, in large part, these hues are a product of each planet’s atmosphere … Read more

SPACE: Strange Signal From a Mystery Object

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black hole - pixabay

A signal from space first detected Aug. 14, 2019, may have come from a mystery object. And it might force physicists to rip up an old idea about black holes and neutron stars. The signal was a gravitational wave, a ripple in space-time labeled GW190814, and seemed to indicate the collision of two wildly mismatched objects. The larger one was definitely a black hole, about 23 times the mass of our sun. And the smaller one was either a black hole or a neutron star, about 2.6 times the mass of our sun. There’s just one problem: There’s never been … Read more