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Space

WHAT IF: A Solar Storm Destroyed the Internet?

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Solar Storm - NASA

The sun is always showering Earth with a mist of magnetized particles known as solar wind. For the most part, our planet’s magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a pleasant aurora in their wake. But sometimes, every century or so, that wind escalates into a full-blown solar storm — and, as new research presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference warns, the results of such extreme space weather could be catastrophic to our modern way of life. In … Read more

SPACE: What Does the Inside of Mars Look Like?

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Mars Core

Like a bruised peach sliced apart to reveal an enormous yellow pit, Mars shares its inner mysteries in the first-ever map of an alien planet’s interior — released as part of three new studies published July 22 in the journal Science. This premiere look at the Martian interior is the culmination of two years of research (and decades of planning) with NASA’s InSight lander — a stationary science robot deployed to Mars in 2018 with the sole mission of studying the Red Planet’s unseen innards. About a month after landing on the flat, smooth plain known as Elysium Planitia, InSight … Read more

SPACE: Harvesting the Asteroids

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asteroid - pixabay

There’s gold in them thar asteroids! Literally — asteroids have more than enough gold, plus other metals, to provide a few lifetimes’ worth of fortunes. But there are plenty of other reasons asteroids are valuable. So how do we get these metals from these faraway asteroids? Perhaps the best way is to bring the space rocks to Earth. Most of the metals we use in our everyday lives are buried deep within Earth. And I mean deep: When our planet was still molten, almost all of the heavy metals sank to the core, which is pretty hard to get to. … Read more

What is the Multiverse?

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multiverse - deposit photos

Multiverse theory suggests that our universe, with all its hundreds of billions of galaxies and almost countless stars, spanning tens of billions of light-years, may not be the only one. Instead, there may be an entirely different universe, distantly separated from ours — and another, and another. Indeed, there may be an infinity of universes, all with their own laws of physics, their own collections of stars and galaxies (if stars and galaxies can exist in those universes), and maybe even their own intelligent civilizations. It could be that our universe is just one member of a much grander, much … Read more

SPACE: Are Traversable Wormholes Possible?

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Wormhole - Pixabay

Interested in scooting through a wormhole, the ultimate cheat-code through space and time? Perhaps you’d like to hop from star system to star system across the universe without breaking a sweat? But first, you’d better make sure your wormhole is traversable. “Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses,” João Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, told Live Science. Rosa is attempting to virtually “build” a stable, traversable wormhole, one that can be safely crossed without the theoretical passageway collapsing or trapping its occupant. And he … Read more

STUDY: Saturn’s Core Mighty Be Soupy (But Is It More Minestrone or Clam Chowder?)

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pea soup - pixabay

Saturn’s rings aren’t just a beautiful adornment — scientists can use the feature to understand what’s happening deep inside the planet. By using the famous rings like a seismograph, scientists studied processes in the planet’s interior and determined that its core must be “fuzzy.” Instead of a solid sphere like Earth’s, the core of Saturn appears to consist of a ‘soup’ of rocks, ice and metallic fluids that slosh around and affect the planet’s gravity. The new study used data from NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn and its moons for 13 years between 2004 and 2017. In 2013, data … Read more

SPACE: Is the Universe a Giant Donut?

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unicorn donut - pixabay

Imagine a universe where you could point a spaceship in one direction and eventually return to where you started. If our universe were a finite donut, then such movements would be possible and physicists could potentially measure its size. “We could say: Now we know the size of the universe,” astrophysicist Thomas Buchert, of the University of Lyon, Astrophysical Research Center in France, told Live Science in an email. Examining light from the very early universe, Buchert and a team of astrophysicists have deduced that our cosmos may be multiply connected, meaning that space is closed in on itself in … Read more

SPACE: Asteroid Bennu Totally Won’t Hit Earth in 2035. Probably.

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Asteroid Bennu

An asteroid known as Bennu will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact with our planet in the coming centuries is very slight, scientists said Wednesday. OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft, spent two years near Bennu, an asteroid that is about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide, observing its size, shape, mass and composition and monitoring its orbital trajectory around the sun. Using its robotic arm, the spacecraft also collected a sample from the surface of the asteroid that will help researchers determine the future trajectory of Bennu. … Read more

SPACE: Could We really terraform Mars?

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Mars - NASA

Almost every sci-fi story begins (and sometimes ends) with the terraforming of Mars to turn it into a more hospitable world. But with its frigid temperatures, remoteness from the sun and general dustiness, changing Mars to be more Earth-like is more challenging than it seems (and it already seems pretty tough). The thing is, Mars used to be cool. And by cool, I mean warm. Billions of years ago, Mars had a thick, carbon-rich atmosphere, lakes and oceans of liquid water, and probably even white fluffy clouds. And this was at a time when our sun was smaller and weaker, … Read more

Ten Extreme Exoplanets

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planet 9 - pixabay

It’s almost hard to believe that until the early years of the 1990s, astronomers had yet to discover a planet outside the solar system. Even though scientists were certain that other stars orbited other stars, there was little evidence of other planetary systems until the discovery of two extrasolar planets — or exoplanets — orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12 in 1992 by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail, as logged in the journal Nature. This initial discovery was soon followed by the observation of 51 Pegasi b — the first exoplanet discovered around a sun-like star — in 1995, for which … Read more