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space

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: 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

A history of Martian illusions – Live Science

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Mars

Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. Perhaps it’s because, other than Earth, Mars is the closest thing in the solar system to a habitable planet, or perhaps it’s simply because it’s close enough to get a pretty good look at. Either way, Earthlings have been fooled time and again by the rocky Martian surface and their own psychology. People have at various times reported finding everything from canals to spooky humanoid faces to alien Martian bases on the surface of the Red Planet — though each sighting has been thoroughly debunked. In this … Read more

SPACE: Are Buried Martian “Lakes” Just Frozen Clay?

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Mars

Bright reflections that radar detected beneath the south pole of Mars may not be underground lakes as previously thought but deposits of clay instead, a new study finds. For decades, scientists have suspected that water lurks below the polar ice caps of Mars, just as it does here on Earth. In 2018, researchers using the MARSIS radar sounder instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected evidence for a lake hidden beneath the Red Planet’s south polar ice cap, and in 2020, they found signs of a number of super-salty lakes there. If these lakes were remnants of … Read more

What If: The Earth Was Really Flat?

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Flat Earth - Deposit Photos

Earth — the blue marble — is our spherical home. But what if Earth were flat? After all, some people truly believe in this retrograde idea. How would everyday life function? Would it function at all? We explore how much of an oddball, or “oddslice” Earth would be if it were flat and whether there are any advantages to living on a strange disk with the sun and moon rotating overhead like a cosmic carousel. Say goodbye to gravity (at least as we know it) On spherical Earth, gravity tugs equally on objects no matter where in the world they … Read more