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space

SCIENCE: What Is Dark Matter?

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dark matter - pixabay

In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in a distant cluster were orbiting one another much faster than they should have been given the amount of visible mass they had. He proposed than an unseen substance, which he called dark matter, might be tugging gravitationally on these galaxies. Since then, researchers have confirmed that this mysterious material can be found throughout the cosmos, and that it is six times more abundant than the normal matter that makes up ordinary things like stars and people. Yet despite seeing dark matter throughout the universe, scientists are mostly … Read more

SPACE: When the Sun Blows, There Will Be Sand Everywhere

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sand - pixabay

Until now, scientists didn’t know for sure where most of the stuff around us came from. Now, they do. Silica, or silicon dioxide (SiO2), is just about the most abundant thing here on the outer shell of Earth. It makes up most of the planet’s crust by mass — about 60 percent, according to NASA. It’s the main thing in sand at the beach. It’s common in dirt and clay. It makes up most of the stuff in sandstone and quartz, and it’s a critical ingredient in feldspar (a super common sort of rock). Granite has a lot of it. … Read more

SPACE: A Moon Dust Economy

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lunar ceramics

How do you start a colony on the moon? Can you ship everything the colonists need from Earth? That’s how NASA handled brief excursions to the lunar surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but astronauts couldn’t haul that much with them — certainly not enough to sustain themselves over the long term. Technology has improved since then, but most plans for a sustainable lunar base assume that its residents will use local resources, rather than hauling everything from Earth. So that’s why the European Space Agency (ESA) created a whole bunch of fake moon dust (fake “regolith” in … Read more

SPACE: NASA’s Insight Lander Arrives on Mars Today

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InSight Mission

Mars is the second-most studied planet — only behind our own — but we know virtually nothing about its interior. All astronomers have to go by is models and theories, but no concrete evidence. NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission aims to change that. InSight will touch down Monday (Nov. 26) around 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT), in a “6 minutes of terror” touchdown that you can follow live here at Space.com. Shortly thereafter, the lander will begin looking beneath the surface of Mars to reveal the secrets within the Red Planet. About 4.5 … Read more

SPACE: Is There a Large Exoplanet in the Neighborhood?

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exoplanet

Sitting about 6 light-years away from our sun, the red dwarf named Barnard’s star is the nearest solitary star to our solar system and the fastest-moving star in our night sky. It’s also really wobbly. Chalk up the wobbles to old age if you like: The star may have been born some 10 billion years ago — making it more than twice the age of our sun — and it has only 16 percent of the sun’s mass. But astronomers prefer a different explanation. A new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature combines 20 years of research … Read more

SCIENCE: Using Lasers to Guide Aliens to Earth – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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Earth Laser - MIT News

We could build a laser that could send signals to extraterrestrial intelligence. Not we as in the staff of Live Science. (That’s probably beyond our skill set.) But we as in humanity. A new paper published yesterday (Nov. 5) in The Astrophysical Journal has found that humanity could feasibly build an infrared laser hot and bright enough that — if we shined it directly at nearby exoplanets — alien astronomers should be able to detect it using sky-watching technology not too much more advanced than our own. (Presuming they’re out there, of course.) [9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why We … Read more

SPACE: Black Holes Can Raise the Dead (And Then Kill Them Again)

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Zombie Star - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Adding a cosmic “Walking Dead” twist to the most morbid of all space objects, scientists have found that some black holes could bring dead “zombie” stars back to life — and then destroy them. Black holes are invisible “objects” in space where the gravity is so strong that it sucks everything into it, even light. All of the black holes that astronomers have found so far are either superbig — as in hundreds of thousands and even billions of times the mass of our sun — or on the smallish side, as in, say, less than 100 times the mass … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers Find Evidence of Space Dustballs

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dust - pixabay

For all of its emptiness, space is a messy place filled with dust, grease, gas and a whole lot of man-made junk. When that interstellar schmutz gets caught in the gravitational nets of suns, planets and other massive celestial bodies, some interesting things can happen. Take, for example, the twin balls of space dust known as Kordylewski clouds. First described in the 1950s, these roiling clouds of crud are hypothesized to exist in permanent orbits about 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) above our planet — one cloud pushed ahead of Earth and the other dragged behind it — thanks to a … Read more

SPACE: Scientists Create Rare Fifth Form of Matter

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matter - pixabay

For a few minutes on Jan. 23, 2017, the coldest spot in the known universe was a tiny microchip hovering 150 miles over Kiruna, Sweden. The chip was small — about the size of a postage stamp — and loaded with thousands of tightly-packed rubidium-87 atoms. Scientists launched that chip into space aboard an unpiloted, 40-foot-long (12 meters) rocket, then bombarded it with lasers until the atoms inside it cooled to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) — a fraction of a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature in nature. While the rocket … Read more

SPACE: Check Out This Bizarre, Blue Space Rock

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3200 Phaethon

A bizarre, blue asteroid that acts like a comet and appears to be responsible for the annual Geminid meteor showermade a close flyby of Earth last year, giving astronomers an opportunity to study the object in unprecedented detail. They found that the asteroid is even weirder than they had imagined. Asteroid 3200 Phaethon is a special space rock with a rare blue color and an extremely eccentric orbit that has the object pass superclose to the sun and then out past the orbit of Mars. One orbit takes about 1.4 Earth years. This kind of orbit is more typical for … Read more