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space

SPACE: The Milky Way Is Warped

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Milky Way - Pixabay

There’s trouble brewing at the edge of the Milky Way: New measurements suggest that a peculiar distortion of the galactic disk is hardly moving, contradicting earlier reports. As yet, nobody knows which finding will end up being correct. At stake are some key details in the structure and formation of spiral galaxies throughout the universe. Astronomers describe the Milky Way as a flat disk-shaped, double-armed spiral galaxy twirling and twinkling with stars. Yet since the mid-20th century, astronomers have known that this picture is partially wrong. Observations in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum first revealed that our galaxy’s … Read more

MARS: Are There Dozens of Lakes Buried on Mars?

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Martian Lakes - ESA

Much more liquid water may lie beneath the south pole of Mars than scientists had thought — or there may be something going on down there that they don’t fully understand. In 2018, researchers analyzing radar data gathered by Europe’s Mars Express spacecraft announced they’d found evidence of a big subsurface lake in the Red Planet’s south polar region. The lake appears to be about 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide, and it lies about 1 mile (1.6 km) beneath the dry, frigid surface, the scientists reported. The same core research team soon followed up on the find, using the same … Read more

SPACE: How to Get a Plane Into Space

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Space Plane - NASA

A never-ending detonation could be the key to hypersonic flight and space planes that can seamlessly fly from Earth into orbit. And now, researchers have recreated the explosive phenomenon in the lab that could make it possible. Detonations are a particularly powerful kind of explosion that move outward faster than the speed of sound. The massive explosion that rocked the port of Beirut in Lebanon last August was a detonation, and the widespread destruction it caused demonstrates the huge amounts of energy they can produce. Scientists have long dreamed of building aircraft engines that can harness this energy; such craft … Read more

SPACE: New Map Reveals Filaments of Dark Matter That Connect Galaxies

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Dark Matter

A new map of dark matter made using artificial intelligence reveals hidden filaments of the invisible stuff bridging galaxies. The map focuses on the local universe — the neighborhood surrounding the Milky Way. Despite being close by, the local universe is difficult to map because it’s chock full of complex structures made of visible matter, said Donghui Jeong, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University and the lead author of the new research. “We have to reverse engineer to know where dark matter is by looking at galaxies,” Jeong told Live Science. Full Story From Live Science

SPACE: Something’s Humming between the Stars

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Voyager 1 - NASA

Forty-four years after it rocketed off from Earth, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is detecting the background “hum” of interstellar space for the first time. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, left the bounds of the solar system — known as the heliosphere — in 2012. The heliosphere is the bubble of space influenced by solar wind, the stream of charged particles that emanates from the sun. Since popping out of this bubble, Voyager 1 has been periodically sending back measurements of the interstellar medium. Occasionally, the sun sends off a burst of energy known as a coronal mass ejection that disturbs … Read more

SPACE: Ganymede Gets Its Close-Up

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Ganymede - Juno - NASA

Swooping low over Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, NASA’s Juno probe has snapped the first close-up photographs of the frozen giant in more than two decades — and they’re breathtaking. Juno zoomed as close as 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) from the icy surface of the solar system’s largest moon Monday (June 7), giving the spacecraft just a 25-minute window to snap photos — long enough for five exposures —— before it zipped away on its 33rd orbit of Jupiter. Two photos from the flyby released by NASA Tuesday (June 8) — one of Ganymede’s light, sun-facing side and the other of … Read more

That’s a Big, Um, Rocket You Got There…

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Jeff Bezos rocket

The internet has thoughts. “Is it me, or does Jeff Bezos’ rocket look like a giant penis?” one person tweeted. “I thought ‘penis’ as soon as I saw that image.” another person agreed, with numerous other tweets noting the phallic shape. Others quickly suggested the historic rocket “looks like a giant sex toy,” with one writing, “It’s basically a giant flaming space dildo.” Full Story at the NY Post

SPACE: Are There Anti-Matter Stars? We Don’t Know… yet

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Anti-Matter Star - Deposit Photos

Out of an estimated 100 billion stars in our galaxy, no more than 14 may be made from antimatter. That’s the result from a new study that scoured the Milky Way for signs of antistars — which are identical to regular stars save for the fact that they would burn antimatter at their cores. Though the findings turned up mostly empty this time, researchers haven’t yet fully ruled out the existence of antistars, whose presence would change much about our understanding of the universe. The recent search for antistars can be traced back to 2018, when a $1.5-billion experiment called … Read more

SPACE: How Will We Find Our Way Home?

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spaceship - deposit photos

Space is big — really big. And if you want to successfully navigate the interstellar depths of our Milky Way galaxy, you’re going to need some sort of reliable system. A new proposal tries to keep the method as simple as possible: use pairs of stars to provide a galactic reference frame. Within our solar system, interplanetary spacecraft rely on Earth-based systems for navigation. When we send a radio signal to a spacecraft and it replies, we can use the time delay of the reply to calculate a distance. We can also monitor the spacecraft in the sky, and by … Read more

SPACE: A Cloudy Day on Mars

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clouds on Mars

It might look like a postcard from Arizona, but this snapshot shows something much more exotic: the planet Mars, as seen by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image is a combination of 21 individual photographs the rover took recently to study a strange type of wispy cloud over its Gale Crater home. Scientists realized two Earth years ago that the cloud type was forming earlier in the Martian year than they expected. So this Martian year, Curiosity was watching for the early clouds, and it was not disappointed. The clouds did indeed show up beginning in late January, when the robotic … Read more