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space

SPACE: How It All Began

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Milky Way - pixabay

About 13.8 billion years ago, the universe as we know it began. This moment, known as the Big Bang, is when space itself rapidly began expanding. At the time of the Big Bang, the observable universe (including the materials for at least 2 trillion galaxies), fit into a space less than a centimeter across. Now, the observable universe is 93 billion light-years across and still expanding. There are many questions about the Big Bang, particularly about what came before it (if anything). But scientists do know some things. Read on for some of the most mind-bending discoveries about the beginning … Read more

space: Is there Less Intelligent Life Than We Thought?

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aliens - pixabay

Where is complex alien life hanging out in the universe? Likely not on planets stewing in toxic gases, according to a new study that dramatically reduces the number of worlds where scientists will have the best luck finding ET. In the past, researchers defined the “habitable zone” based on the distance between the planet and its star; planets that, like Earth, orbit at just the right distance to accommodate temperatures in which liquid water could exist on the planetary surface would be considered “habitable.” But while this definition works for basic, single-celled microbes, it doesn’t work for complex creatures, such … Read more

SPACE: There’s Something Big Lurking Beneath the Moon’s South Pole

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moon anomaly - NASA

Earth’s moon is hiding an enormous secret on its storied dark side. Deep below the moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin (the largest preserved impact crater anywhere in the solar system), researchers have detected a gargantuan “anomaly” of heavy metal lodged in the mantle that is apparently altering the moon’s gravitational field. According to a study of the mysterious blob, published April 5 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the anomaly may be the heavy leftovers of the asteroid that crashed into the far side of the moon and created the giant South Pole-Aitken crater some 4 billion years ago. However, all … Read more

SPACE: Watch The First Solar Eclipse Ever Filmed

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Solar Eclipse

Magicians are known for making things disappear, but when the sun vanished from the sky on May 28, 1900, it happened not through a sleight of hand, but because of a solar eclipse. There was magic in the air that day after all — movie magic. Nevil Maskelyne, a performing magician who also happened to be a pioneering filmmaker, preserved the spectacular event — as the moon passed between Earth and the sun — on celluloid, from a location in North Carolina. More than a century later, Maskelyne’s film of the eclipse has been digitally scanned and restored in a … Read more

SPACE: NASA Proposes “Starshade” to Hunt for Alien Worlds

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Starshade exoplanet-hunting missions may be technologically daunting, but they’re not beyond NASA’s reach, recent research suggests. Such a mission would employ a space telescope and a separate craft flying about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) ahead of it. This latter probe would be equipped with a large, flat, petaled shade designed to block starlight, potentially allowing the telescope to directly image orbiting alien worlds as small as Earth that would otherwise be lost in the glare. (Instruments called coronagraphs, which have been installed on multiple ground-based and space telescopes, work on the same light-blocking principle. But coronagraphs are incorporated into the … Read more

Take a Walk On the Dark Side (of the Moon) – Live Science

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Looking up at the silvery orb of the Moon, you might recognize familiar shadows and shapes on its face from one night to the next. You see the same view of the Moon our early ancestors did as it lighted their way after sundown. Only one side of the spherical Moon is ever visible from Earth — it wasn’t until 1959 when the Soviet Spacecraft Luna 3 orbited the Moon and sent pictures home that human beings were able to see the “far side” of the Moon for the first time. A phenomenon called tidal locking is responsible for the … Read more

SPACE: Nasa Developing Soft Robots for Planetary exploration – And They’re Weird

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Think robots are all square corners and rigid metal parts? Think again. Two interns at NASA are part of a larger group working on “soft robots” that could be used for exploring worlds beyond Earth. This includes the moon, NASA’s next major destination for astronauts. The advantage of a soft robot is that it’s flexible and, in some ways, better able to adapt to new environments. Soft robots move in ways similar to living organisms, which expands their range of motion, perhaps making it easier to squeeze into a tight spot, for example. Interns Chuck Sullivan and Jack Fitzpatrick are … Read more

SPACE: Thar Be Quakes on Mars

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Scientists just felt the Red Planet move under their feet — robotically from millions of miles away, on the stark surface of Mars. On April 6, NASA’s InSight lander sensed its first confirmed marsquake, a phenomenon scientists suspected, but couldn’t confirm, occurred on the neighboring planet. Measuring the Martian equivalent of earthquakes, seismic waves traveling through the interior of the planet, was among the lander’s key science goals. “We’ve been waiting months for our first marsquake,” Philippe Lognonné, the principal investigator for the seismometer instrument, said in a statement released by the French space agency, which runs the instrument with … Read more

SPACE: Something’s Poking Holes in the Milky Way

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Milky Way - Pixabay

There’s a “dark impactor” blasting holes in our galaxy. We can’t see it. It might not be made of normal matter. Our telescopes haven’t directly detected it. But it sure seems like it’s out there. “It’s a dense bullet of something,” said Ana Bonaca, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who discovered evidence for the impactor. Bonaca’s evidence for the dark impactor, which she presented April 15 at the conference of the American Physical Society in Denver, is a series of holes in our galaxy’s longest stellar stream, GD-1. Stellar streams are lines of stars moving together across … Read more

SPACE: Algae – It’ What’s For Dinner

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algae - deposit photos

Astronauts on the International Space Station will begin testing an innovative algae-powered bioreactor to assess its feasibility for future long-duration space missions. The algae-powered bioreactor, called the Photobioreactor, represents a major step toward creating a closed-loop life-support system, which could one day sustain astronauts without cargo resupply missions from Earth. This will be particularly important for future long-duration missions to the moon or Mars, which require more supplies than a spacecraft can carry, according to a statement from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The Photobioreactor arrived at the space station Monday (May 6) on a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship. The … Read more