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SPACE: When Betelgeuse Goes Supernova…

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Betelgeuse supernova

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life, and researchers are preparing for what it will look like when the star dies in a fiery explosion called a supernova. Located in the constellation Orion, the star is about 1,000 times the size of the sun. Betelgeuse’s brightness has been dipping to the lowest point in the past 100 years, and some scientists have suggested that the star is getting close to running out of fuel and going supernova. In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have modeled the stellar explosions that … Read more

We’re All Living in a Bubble (But Not the One You Think)

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space bubble - pixabay

We might be living in a bubble. That’s the conclusion of a new paper published in the journal Physics Letters B, due for print publication April 10. The paper is an attempt to resolve one of the deepest mysteries of modern physics: Why don’t our measurements of the speed of the universe’s expansion make sense? As Live Science has previously reported, we have multiple ways of measuring the Hubble constant, or H0, a number that governs how fast the universe is expanding. In recent years, as those methods have gotten more precise, they’ve started to produce H0s that dramatically disagree … Read more

SPACE: Ice on Mercury?

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ice on mercury - NASA

Could Mercury’s close orbit around the sun help the planet generate ice? It sounds like a paradox, but new analysis of the planet’s surface chemistry suggests that heat-generated ice may indeed be the case. Even though daytime temperatures on Mercury soar to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius), ice can occur in craters sheltered from the sun. There, the surface is exposed to cold space at about minus 330 F (minus 200 C). We’ve known about this ice for almost a decade thanks to observations from NASA’s now-defunct MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft. But the explanation … Read more

Freeman Dyson is Gone, But the Dyson Sphere Lives On

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Dyson Sphere - Deposit Photos

Freeman Dyson may be gone, but his famous alien-hunting idea will likely persist far into the future. Dyson, a quantum physicist who died at age 96 on Feb. 28, recalled in a 2003 interview just how he first advanced his concept of a “Dyson sphere,” which could betray the existence of an advanced alien civilization. It was via a 1960 article in the journal Science called “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation.” Dyson wrote the article just as scientists were beginning to search for signs of alien intelligence using radio telescopes. The 1960 piece noted, Dyson said, that … Read more

SPACE: What’s Up With the North Star?

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north star - pixabay

Something’s up with the North Star. People have watched the North Star for centuries. The bright star, also known as Polaris, is almost directly above Earth’s North Pole and serves as a landmark in the sky for travelers without a compass. It’s also Earth’s closest cepheid, a type of star that pulses regularly in diameter and brightness. And Polaris is part of a binary system; it’s got a dimmer sister, known as Polaris B, that we can watch circling it from Earth. “However, as we learn more, it is becoming clear that we understand less” about Polaris, wrote the authors … Read more

SCIENCE: The Coronavirus & Mars

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Mars - Pixabay

A new virus called SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus that has caused an outbreak of a disease called COVID-19. Public health groups, such as the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are still learning about the virus, monitoring the disease it causes, and researching potential ways to stop it. You can read all about the coronavirus and COVID-19 at our sibling site, LiveScience. But me being me, my mind went straight to Mars. I have long been aware of science fiction’s vision of Earth receiving space souvenirs that carry organisms that might be dangerous to … Read more

SPACE: Should We Be Looking at White Dwarfs For Alien Life?

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Humans have been searching for signs of extraterrestrial (ET) life for decades. We’ve been listening carefully for strange radio signals, looking for signatures of the artificial altering of stars and digging up rocks on Mars. But alas, so far, we’ve found nothing. As far as we can tell, we’re alone. But it could be that we’re looking in the wrong places. We know that life can appear around stars like our sun, and we know that stars like our sun will turn into white dwarfs (small, dense stars that are stellar core remnants approximately the size of planets) at the … Read more

SERIOUSLY?: Hackers Could Use Satellites as weapons…

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satellite - pixabay

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about: Last month, SpaceX became the operator of the world’s largest active satellite constellation. As of the end of January, the company had 242 satellites orbiting the planet with plans to launch 42,000 over the next decade. This is part of its ambitious project to provide internet access across the globe. The race to put satellites in space is on, with Amazon, U.K.-based OneWeb and other companies chomping at the bit to place thousands of satellites in orbit in the coming months. These new satellites have the potential to revolutionize many aspects … Read more

SPACE: Titan’s Possibility of Life Takes a Hit

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Saturn’s most Earth-like moon looks a bit less likely to host life, thanks to quantum mechanics, the weird rules that govern subatomic particles. Titan, the second largest moon in our solar system after Jupiter’s Ganymede, is unique in two ways that have convinced some researchers that this moon might host extraterrestrial life: It’s the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it’s the only body in space, besides Earth, known to definitely have pools of liquid on its surface. In Titan’s case, those pools are frigid lakes of hydrocarbons, closer to the gasoline in a car … Read more

SPACE: There Are Vampire Stars???

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A “vampire” dwarf star is sucking the life force from its partner star, and their entanglement produced a rare superoutburst. NASA detailed this previously unknown dwarf nova, a brief eruption from dwarf stars, in a statement on Jan. 24. The system brightened by a factor of 1,600 over less than a day, space agency officials said in the statement, and this uncommon sighting was made by a mission targeting an entirely different cosmic population. This rare finding was made by “accident,” according to the research team that found the super-outburst. The Kepler Space Telescope is now retired, but when it … Read more