Category: Solar System

Our solar system

The moon’s thin atmosphere is made by constant meteorite bombardment

NeRD

It is easy to imagine the moon as an atmosphere-less hunk of rock orbiting Earth. However, while lacking breathable air, our planet’s loyal natural satellite companion does have a thin and wispy atmosphere.  Scientists have long puzzled over the existence of this tenuous atmosphere or “exosphere” and have searched for the main process that sustains it, but new research indicates that this tenuous lunar atmosphere or “exosphere” owes its existence to renewal and replenishment caused by the violent bombardment of space rocks upon the moon.  The team behind the research…

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Test your space debris catching skills in new game released by Astroscale

NeRD

Space sustainability company Astroscale has launched a computer game that allows players to test their space debris catching skills in a simulation based on one of the company’s real missions.  The Space Protector game comes in different difficulties and can be played on a desktop computer or via a game console. Based on Astroscale’s planned COSMIC mission, which will attempt to remove two old, defunct British satellites from orbit later this decade, the game allows players to control a robotic arm to capture an errant piece of space junk. Astroscale,…

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Never played the Borderlands games? Here’s what you need to know ahead of the Borderlands movie

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After several delays, the live-action Borderlands movie is right around the corner. While you might be curious about the Eli Roth-directed sci-fi romp, it’s easy to feel confused by the trailers if you don’t know anything about the universe nor the games serving as source material. With this primer, we hope to illuminate why we hope this flick is at least somewhat decent at bringing the Borderlands universe to life. The Borderlands video game franchise transports players to Pandora, an unruly, barely colonized planet at the edge of the known…

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Could galaxy cluster collisions be used as dark matter detectors?

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Dark matter is notoriously antisocial, refusing to interact with light and “normal” matter, making it effectively invisible. But what scientists aren’t sure about is if dark matter interacts with itself. If whatever particles make up dark matter do self-interact by colliding, and possibly even annihilating one another, new research suggests that clusters of galaxies could be used as natural dark matter colliders. This dark matter detection method would hinge on two of these vast groupings of galaxies meeting and smashing into each other. As these galaxy clusters are packed with…

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‘Cosmic dawn:’ NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will get baby pictures of our universe

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When it opens its eye to the cosmos, NASA‘s next big off-Earth observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will peer back to a distant period in the universe’s history called “cosmic dawn.” Though Roman’s predecessor telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), take full advantage of the fact that the cosmos is now transparent to light, the universe wasn’t always this way. Up to around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was opaque, full of an obscuring “fog” of particles absorbing photons,…

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Magnetic fields on the sun could solve longstanding solar heating mystery

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Scientists have long wondered why the hot soup of charged particles in our sun’s atmosphere gets hotter moving away from the surface of the sun. New research may have the answer, finding the super-hot nature of the sun’s outer atmosphere or “corona” could be due to the intriguing behavior of small-scale waves in this nebulous plasma. These waves, known to scientists as “kinetic Alfvén waves” or “KAWs,” are wave-like vibrations of magnetic fields manifested by motions in the sun’s photosphere. The findings could provide an important clue to decoding the…

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Can the moon help preserve Earth’s endangered species?

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Could the moon soon be home to frozen biological samples of Earth’s endangered creatures? New research suggests scientists could use naturally occurring lunar cold spots, some of which haven’t seen sunlight for billions of years, to do just this. Recent studies have shown that as many as 8 million species exist on Earth, and over 1 million of these are under threat of extinction. Worryingly, this estimate could be the tip of the iceberg, as there could be many species that could become extinct before they have even been identified.…

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Moon robots could build stone walls to protect lunar bases from rocket exhaust

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An autonomous, robotic hydraulic excavator could build a dry stone wall to act as a blast shield around a launch pad on the moon, propose a team of Swiss researchers. The excavator would make use of in situ materials (rather than the costly practice of transporting building material from Earth to the moon), collecting rocks on the lunar surface for use in a ringed wall with a radius of between 50 and 100 meters (164 to 328 feet). “The robot would be used to both collect the boulders as well…

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Astrophotographer peers into a cosmic ‘eye’ looking out into the universe

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Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory Photo Ambassador and member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical “Skyscapes” that connect both Earth and the night sky.  This unusual portrait appears to depict what could be a giant eye, viewed from our lovely planet Earth while staring deep into the beauty of the Milky Way galaxy. It is important to remember that this collection of…

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Astronaut traveling to Titan loses his grip on reality in 1st ‘Slingshot’ trailer (video)

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Slingshot | Official Trailer | Bleecker Street – YouTube Watch On It seems that acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne (“The Matrix“) has some uncanny attraction to sci-fi projects centered around doomed spaceships, having co-starred in 2016’s “Passengers” and the 1997 cult classic, “Event Horizon.” Now he’s sharing the screen with the Academy Award-winning Casey Affleck (“Manchester By the Sea”) and Tomer Capone (“The Boys”) in Bleecker Street’s upcoming outer space thriller, “Slingshot,” and we’ve got the first full trailer to share to prove our point.  The basic plot revolves around a…

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