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(May 25, 2013) Ed Stone, now 77, has been the sole Project Scientist with the Voyager 1 and 2 missions for the past 36 years -- and has no intention of retiring. He looks forward to seeing both spacecraft pass safely into interstellar space. Read more (Nature) |
(May 24, 2013) Far from the warm inner regions of the solar system, in orbit around the great gas giants are moons full of surprises. Several NASA spacecraft have flown by or orbited Jupiter and Saturn and their impressive collections of moons. Next up, the European Space Agency plans to launch its heavily-instrumented JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) to investigate the four big moons of Jupiter—Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io—in 2022 for arrival in 2030. Read more (Americaspace.com) |
(May 23, 2013) The atmosphere is a problem for astronomers for two big reasons: it’s turbulent, so it smears out the light from cosmic objects, and it blocks out huge swathes of the electromagnetic spectrum. To see the universe in extreme clarity and observe in regions of the spectrum such as the far ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma-rays, instruments have to be lofted into space. Read more (Americaspace.com) |
(May 23, 2013) Given enough time, bits of matter and energy just floating around in space can and will organize themselves into pretty much anything – from a pint of beer to a classic corvette. They could also organize themselves into "Boltzmann brains" centers of consciousness that just pop up randomly in the void. The appearance of Boltzmann brains all around the cosmos in the far future could be a problem because ultimately it would mean that the experience of the Boltzmann brains would vastly outweigh our own (read the whole article to understand why). But, it seems, we may not have to worry anyway, thanks to string theory. Read more (New Scientist) |
(May 22, 2013) It seems that the Magellanic Stream – a long ribbon of gas – that wends its way around the halo of the Milky Way contains material that has been stripped out from both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Observations of the Stream also suggest a new theory: that the Clouds have not always been close neighbors of ours. Read more (Nature) |
(May 20, 2013) The Kepler planet-hunting mission may (we don't know yet) be over, but astronomers have enough data from it to keep them busy for years. This graphic shows 1,235 of the 2,740 planet candidates that the Kepler mission has found. Read more (NASA/Kepler) |
(May 17, 2013) Quantum computers are no longer pie-in-the-sky devices being talked about theoretically or tinkered with in labs. A $15 million D-Wave Two quantum computer, made by Canadian company D-Wave Systems, is going to be installed at NASA's Ames Research Center later this year. Read more (BBC) |
(May 16, 2013) One of the Kepler Space Telescope's reaction wheels has frozen, meaning that it can no longer be pointed at targets in the sky. The spacecraft is now in safe mode while engineers try to free the wheel or devise some means by which the mission can be continued. Read more (New York Times) |
(May 16, 2013) We may be seeing the dawn of a completely new branch of astronomy – neutrino astronomy – with the announcement today that the IceCube experiment at the South Pole has now detected 28 of these elusive particles of such high energy that they must have come from outside the solar system. Read more (BBC) |
(May 15, 2013) Launched on this day in 1963, the final mission of Project Mercury – America's first crewed space program. It carried astronaut L. Gordon Cooper into orbit aboard his Faith 7 capsule. Cooper was so relaxed while waiting on the launch pad, he actually managed to nod off! He had another opportunity to sleep once in space because this 22-orbit mission was the first in American manned spaceflight history to last more than a day. (Vostok 2, however, holds the record for the first full-day manned mission of all.) Read more |
(May 14, 2013) Astronomer Dale Frail, using the Very Large Array, has made an exciting discovery at the center of our galaxy. Seeking to find out more about an X-ray flare from close to the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, he found that the flare was coming from a magnetar – a highly magnetized neutron star. The magnetar's regular radio pulses should prove valuable in measuring the warping of space-time near the black hole and testing predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Read more (Nature) |
(May 14, 2013) They do it differently in Russia. No splashdown in the sea to be winched aboard an aircraft carrier. You get to sit in a field in a comfy chair with a beach towel over you, while an interested crowd looks on! The return to Earth, earlier this day, of ISS expedition crew Chris Hadfield, Roman Romanenko, and Tom Marshburn. Read more (BBC) |
(May 13, 2013) When we (Dirk Schulze-Makuch and I) wrote our book Megacatastrophes, we included a "catastrophometer" reading at the end of each chapter. The highest ranking we gave was to the possibility of a worldwide pandemic of disease for which there was no adequate treatment. That possibility seems to be getting closer ... Read more (BBC) |
(May 11, 2013) By looking at the spectra of two white dwarfs in the Hyades cluster, astronomers have found signs that rocky objects have fallen into these stars – evidence of the disruptive effect that late stellar evolution can have on planetary systems and offering clues as to what might befall our own solar system in a few billion years time. Read more (BBC) |
(May 11, 2013) Born on this day in 1918, the American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga for their independent work on quantum electrodynamics. With Murray Gell-Mann, he proposed the quark as a fundamental subatomic particle. Read more |
(May 10, 2013) The Curiosity science team at JPL have picked a second target for the rover to start drilling some time in the next few days. Called 'Cumberland,' it's about nine feet (2.75 meters) west of the rock where Curiosity drilled for the first time, back in February. Read more (NASA/JPL) |
(May 10, 2013) Born on this day in 1900, the British-American American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin who became the first female full professor at Harvard and one of the founders of modern astrophysics. Her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Stellar Atmospheres: A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars" (1925), was later acclaimed as the best in 20th century astronomy. Read more |
(May 10, 2013) On this day in 1946, the first successful launch took place of a captured German V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Ground. Fired from Pad 33, the flight reached an altitude of 112.6 kilometers. Read more |
(May 10, 2013) The message of tiny glass beads inside the Apollo Moon rocks is that the infant Earth was wet – long before comets and asteroids delivered more during a heavy bombardment phase. And some of Earth's early water ended up on the Moon. Read more (New Scientist) |
(May 9, 2013) Last night, people in many parts of England and Wales watched a fireball pass across the sky. Since the event happened at the time of the annual Eta Aquarids meteor shower, the object is suspected to have been debris from Halley's Comet. Read more (BBC) |
(May 9, 2013) "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids," sang Elton John. Maybe the second line of that verse should be changed to "In fact, it's toxic as hell" following the realization by scientists that Martian dust could prove extremely hazardous to human health. Not only does it contain fine-grained silicates of the type that, if breathed in, can damage the lungs, but perchlorates also seem to be widespread on the Red Planet – chemicals that can attack the thyroid gland. Meticulous ways to avoid bringing dust into habitable areas will probably be essential. Read more (New Scientist) |
(May 8, 2013) Observations made by the Herschel Space Observatory, before it ran out of coolant recently, have given astronomers an unprecedented look at the region – just a few light-years across – which surrounds the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. Shown here is an artist's impression of that region. Read more (ESA) |
(May 7, 2013) NASA appears to be getting serious about sending humans to Mars,although it insistsw on the importance of a precursor mission, to capture an asteroid and push it into an orbit near the Moon. The US space agency still has to overcome two giant hurdles if it is put people on another planet: financial and technological. Among the latter are the radiation risks to astronauts of a 1,000-day excution in to deep space. Read more (Guardian) |
(May 4, 2013) Now, this could prove interesting. Bits of whatever it was that exploded over the Tunguska River area of Siberia on June 30, 1908, have been found according to Andrei Zlobin from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Was the Tunguska object a small asteroid or a piece of a comet? If these fragments are from that event we may be able to find out. Read more (MIT) |
(May 2, 2013) Researchers have used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to take a closer look at the scene of a mighty collision between two large spiral galaxies. The central supermassive black holes of the galaxies are spiraling in toward each other; meanwhile, the merging systems are undergoing a vigorous burst of star formation. Read more (NASA/Chandra) |
(Apr 30, 2013) Does antimatter respond differently than matter to gravity – falling "up" instead of "down". Surprisingly, we don't know. But that may be about to change thanks to an experiment at CERN called ALPHA – Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus which is designed to make and trap antimatter atoms. Read more (BBC) |
(Apr 29, 2013) Today, Virgin Galactic completed the first rocket-powered flight of its space vehicle, SpaceShipTwo (SS2). The test, conducted by teams from Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, marks the start of the final phase of vehicle testing prior to commercial service from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Read more (Virgin Galactic) |
(Apr 29, 2013) At the link below is a brief introduction (drawing on material from my book Gravity's Arc) to the General Theory of Relativity – Einstein's theory of gravity, which describes gravitational forces in terms of the curvature of spacetime caused by the presence of mass. As the American physicist John Wheeler neatly put it: "Space tells matter how to move; matter tells space how to curve." Read more |
(Apr 26, 2013) An exotic binary star system consisting of the most massive known neutron star and a white dwarf in close proximity has enabled one of the most precise tests to date of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Once again the theory has come through with flying colors. Read more (ESO) |
(Apr 25, 2013) The IceCube detector in Antarctica has detected its first two neutrinos, potentially opening a new window on the cosmos outside the electromagnetic spectrum. The events have estimated energies of 1.04 ± 0.16 and 1.14 ± 0.17 PeV (PeV = 1,000 trillion electronvolts), hundreds of times greater than the energy of a proton at the Large Hadron Collider. Read more (IceCube) |
(Apr 24, 2013) The galaxy at the tip of the arrow, shown magnified in the box, lies nearly 6 billion light-years away and is one of the most efficient converters of gas to stars in the universe. SDSSJ1506+54 has been caught in a short-lived phase of evolution, possibly triggered by the merging of two galaxies into one. The star formation is so prolific that in a few tens of millions of years, the gas will be used up and SDSSJ1506+54 will mature into a giant elliptical galaxy. Read more (NASA/JPL) |
(Apr 22, 2013) Yesterday's flawless launch of a new medium-sized rocket, the Antares, from Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, followed by the successful deployment of a dummy payload in orbit, will come as a huge relief to NASA and the rocket's manufacturer, Orbital Sciences Corporation. NASA no longer has a manned spaceflight capability or, indeed, any means of its own of reaching the International Space Station. Eventually, it's hoped, Antares and OSC will join SpaceX as a provider of payload launches to the ISS. Read more (BBC) |
(Apr 22, 2013) Hard to believe that it's been 41 years since Apollo 16, the penultimate Apollo mission to the Moon, stood on the lunar surface. Since that great era of manned space exploration in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies, humans have not ventured again beyond low Earth orbit. Read more |
(Apr 20, 2013) Most galaxies huddle together in clusters, both large and small. Our own Milky Way, for example, is part of the Local Group of a few dozen galaxies and is "only" two and a half million light-years away from its nearest large neighbor (Andromeda, M31). But not all galaxies live in clusters. Some exist in the immense "voids" of the cosmos, alone or in tiny groups of two or three, tens of millions of light-years away from any other galaxy. Such is the case with VGS_31, a trio of stunted galaxies, possibly aligned with a small dark matter filament. Read more (New Scientist) |
(Apr 19, 2013) The Kepler space telescope has found two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the habitable zone, the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the exoplanet closest to the size of our planet known in the habitable zone of another star. Read more (NASA/JPL) |
(Apr 18, 2013) Here's another new observation that's going to keep theorists on their toes. ESA's Herschel space telescope has spotted a galaxy, far, far away (and therefore long, long ago), that is in a furious phase of star formation (the picture here is just as an artist's impression). The finding calls into question some models of how the first galaxies formed. Read more (ESA/Herschel) |
(Apr 17, 2013) A blazar – an active galaxy whose jet is pointing roughly along our line of sight – called Markarian 421 is currently putting on the brightest sustained display of gamma-ray emission ever seen by astronomers. And its timing couldn't have been better, coinciding with the start of a global program to monitor it and a meeting of some of the world's top astrophysicists. Read more (BBC) |
(Apr 16, 2013) It seems as if the net might be closing on dark matter. Less than two weeks after it was announced that the AMS experiment attached to the International Space Station may have caught a whiff of the elusive stuff comes news that three events detected by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search deep in a mine in Minnesota may have been triggered by WIMPs (Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles) – a popular dark matter candidate. Read more (BBC) |
(Apr 15, 2013) I have a special fondness for planetary nebulae because they were the subject of my university research many years ago. Here's a recently-taken image of one such object – IC 1295, a glowing shell of gas lying about 3,300 light-years away in the constellation Scutum. It was captured by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Read more (ESO) |
(Apr 12, 2013) It looks like the Soviet lander Mars 3 has been found – 42 years after it became the first spacecraft to touch down safely on the Red Planet. What appear to be the main components of the spacecraft have been seen in high resolution images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Read more (Americaspace.com) |
(Apr 12, 2013) On this day in 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. The flight of his spacecraft, Vostok 1, was fully automated, although Gagarin was provided with a key in a sealed envelope (never opened) to take control in an emergency. Vostok 1 completed a single orbit in a mission lasting 108 minutes, from launch to landing. After re-entry, Gagarin ejected and made a planned descent with his own parachute. However for many years the Soviet Union denied this, because the flight would not have been recognized for various FAI world records unless the pilot had accompanied his craft to a landing. Read more |
(Apr 11, 2013) NASA has announced its intention to capture and redirect an asteroid robotically, and then visit it with astronauts to study it and return samples of it to Earth. The space agency's Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier explained that the mission will afford valuable experience in deep space operations to send humans to more distant destinations in the solar system, including Mars. Read more (NASA/JPL) |
(Apr 9, 2013) The rate at which planets are found around other stars is set to go up dramatically over the next decade, thanks to powerful telescopes that will be joining the search both on the ground and in space. Now NASA has announced plans to launch a new exoplanet mission to continue and expand upon the outstanding work being done by Kepler. TESS – the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – will be the first space-based mission that hunts for planetary transits (the same method used by Kepler) over most of the sky. It is scheduled for lift-off in 2017. Read more (Nature) |
(Apr 8, 2013) The second part of my article on exoplanets. The number and variety of planets discovered around other stars over the past two decades are stunning. Giant planets in tiny orbits, worlds around red dwarfs and pulsars, and planets wandering free through space are among the curiosities that have come to light. Read more (Americaspace.com) |
(Apr 6, 2013) It's been only about 20 years since the first planets were found outside our solar system. Today almost 900 exoplanets are known and that number is set to increased dramatically. According to current estimates there may be at least one planet for every star in our galaxy -- 100 to 400 billion planets in the Milky Way alone. Read more (Americaspace.com) |
(Apr 5, 2013) Most life on Earth today uses the molecule ATP (adenosine triphophate) as its main energy-storage chemical. But enzymes are needed to make ATP and tap its energy supply, so when life was first getting started it probably used something simpler. The question is, what? Many origin-of-life researchers think the most likely ancient biological energy storage took the form of a chemical called pyrophosphate. Terry Kee of the University of Leeds, England, however, begs to differ. He suggests it may have been pyrophosphite and that it came from phosphite minerals delivered to Earth by meteorites. Read more (New Scientist) |
