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space

SPACE: China and Russia to Establish Moon Base

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moon base - deposit photos

China and Russia want to build a shared moon base. The two countries agreed to the plans on Tuesday (March 9), saying the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) would be “open to all interested countries and international partners.” The “memorandum of understanding” between the two countries, announced by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), described the ILRS as a “comprehensive scientific experiment base with the capability of long-term autonomous operation, built on the lunar surface and/or on the lunar orbit that will carry out multi-disciplinary and multi-objective scientific research activities such as the lunar exploration and utilization, lunar-based observation, basic … Read more

Growing Black Holes In a Lab? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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black hole - pixabay

In 1974, Stephen Hawking theorized that the universe’s darkest gravitational behemoths, black holes, were not the pitch-black star swallowers astronomers imagined, but they spontaneously emitted light — a phenomenon now dubbed Hawking radiation. The problem is, no astronomer has ever observed Hawking’s mysterious radiation, and because it is predicted to be very dim, they may never will. Which is why scientists today are creating their own black holes. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology did just that. They created a black hole analog out of a few thousand atoms. They were trying to confirm two of Hawking’s most important … Read more

SPACE: Dark Streaks on Mars Explained

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Mars dark streaks - NASA

Evidence of landslides on Mars may also raise the prospects that the Red Planet was once hospitable to life. A new study, published Feb. 3 in the journal Science Advances, found that melting ice is combining with the Red Planet’s salty subsurface permafrost, resulting in a chemical reaction that creates a “liquid-like flowing slush.” Scientists think this slush causes landslides that leave dark, narrow lines known as recurring slope lineae (RSL) on the Martian surface. While the icy slush is currently too salty to harbor life, that may not have been the case 2 billion to 3 billion years ago, … Read more

ASTRONOMY: Ancient Origin of “The Seven Sisters?”

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Seven Sisters - Deposit Photos

People both modern and ancient have long known of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, a small collection of stars in the constellation Taurus. But this famous assembly could point the way to the world’s oldest story, one told by our ancestors in Africa nearly 100,000 years ago, a speculative new study has proposed. To make this case, the paper’s authors draw on similarities between Greek and Indigenous Australian myths about the constellation. But one expert told Live Science that similarities in these myths could be pure chance, not a sign they emerged from a common origin. The Pleiades are part … Read more

What Will Perseverance Do Inside Jezero Crater?

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Mars Perseverance - NASA

One of the most exciting aspects of successful landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars is the fact that the laboratory-on-wheels will start the first leg in a long-awaited sample-return mission. Researchers have never gotten their hands on fresh pieces of the Red Planet, meaning that many key pieces of information — such as the age of features on the Martian surface — remain unknown. Perseverance aims to change that, with a plan to drill and capture up to 30 test-tube-size samples from the mudstone rocks in its landing site, known as Jezero crater. A key challenge will be ensuring … Read more

Meet Faffarout – The Farthest Object in the Solar System (That We Know About)

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Farfarout

Astronomers have identified the most distant known object in our solar system — a dwarf planet nicknamed Farfarout that orbits far beyond Pluto. This remote mini-planet swings so far away from the sun that from Farfarout’s perspective Earth and Saturn look like neighbors. With an orbit that’s an average of 132 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or 132 astronomical units (AU), it beats “Farout,” the previous record holder for most-distant solar object; Farout orbits the sun at an average of 124 A.U. Farfarout’s technical name is 2018 AG37, and it will likely get an official name as … Read more

SPACE: Mars is a Busy Place This Month

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It’s a busy February for Mars, with three probes from three separate countries arriving at the Red Planet over the course of just nine days. But this Martian party didn’t happen by coincidence — it has to do with the mechanics of both Earth and Mars’ orbits. The United Arab Emirates’ first interplanetary mission, the Hope probe, achieved Mars orbit Tuesday (Feb. 9), as Live Science sister site Space.com reported. China’s first interplanetary mission, Tianwen-1, is scheduled to enter its own Martian orbit Wednesday (Feb. 10). The Chinese probe includes both an orbiter and a lander with a rover onboard, … Read more

SPACE: Turns Out Dark Matter is Way Lighter Than We Thought…

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dark matter - deposit photos

Scientists are finally figuring out how much dark matter — the almost imperceptible material said to tug on everything, yet emit no light — really weighs. The new estimate helps pin down how heavy its particles could be — with implications for what the mysterious stuff actually is. The research sharply narrows the potential mass of dark matter particles, from between an estimated 10^minus 24 electronvolts (eV) and 10^19 Gigaelectron volts (GeV) , to between 10^minus 3 eV and 10^7eV — a possible range of masses many trillions of trillions of times smaller than before. The findings could help dark … Read more

space: A New NASA Mars Rover Will Arrive on the Red Planet in February

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Mars Rover Perseverence - NASA

The long deep-space journey of NASA’s next Mars rover is nearly over. The car-size Perseverance rover, which launched on July 30 of last year, is scheduled to land inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater on Feb. 18. “I am thrilled to be here today as our countdown to Mars winds down from months to just weeks,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said during a news conference on Wednesday (Jan. 27). “Perseverance is closing in on the Red Planet, and our team is preparing for her to touch down in Jezero Crater.” Perseverance is the centerpiece of … Read more

SPACE: Titan’s Largest sea is Really Deep, Too

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Titan - NASA

NASA’s epic Cassini mission at Saturn is still generating valuable scientific data more than three years after its demise. Data from one of the spacecraft’s last flybys of Titan, a large moon with the precursors of life’s chemistry, reveals that a huge lake on the surface called Kraken Mare is more than 1,000 feet ( 300 meters) deep — that’s roughly the equivalent of the height of New York City’s Chrysler Building. In fact, the lake is so deep that Cassini’s radar couldn’t probe all the way to the bottom. Back in 2014, preliminary data from this flyby suggested that … Read more