Tag: The Universe

Tiny plasma jets on the sun drive the elusive solar wind, Europe’s Solar Orbiter reveals

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Solar scientists have found tiny, short-lived jets of energy on our sun to be the primary drivers of the solar wind, marking a step toward decoding our star’s elusive behavior and, eventually, refining predictions of its storms. The “solar wind” refers to pockets of energetic particles blasted out from the sun. These particles are occasionally directed toward Earth, like last summer when a rare cluster of such storms rained on our planet and sparked breathtaking auroras across the globe — likely the strongest auroras we’ve seen in centuries. The solar…

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NASA picks SpaceX to launch Pandora exoplanet mission

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A small NASA exoplanet probe now has a ride to Earth orbit. The agency announced on Monday afternoon (Feb. 10) that it has picked SpaceX to launch Pandora, a 716-pound (325-kilogram) satellite designed to help scientists better understand how our understanding of exoplanets‘ atmospheres are affected by changes in their host stars. Pandora will lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than this fall, according to NASA officials. Pandora will head to low Earth orbit. Once there, the satellite will observe at least 20 known transiting exoplanets —…

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What was the mysterious space signal scientists discovered in 2024? Here are some possibilities

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Having launched on January 9, 2024 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Einstein Probe detected several new events during its commissioning phase. Last October, Yuan Weimin, the spacecraft’s principle investigator, told China Central Television that the X-ray observatory had already discovered around 60 very strong transient celestial objects, close to a thousand potential transients, and nearly 500 stellar flares, along with a gamma-ray burst from the very early universe. One of those detections was EP240408a, an unusual blast that lit up discussions between astronomers. Zhang and his colleagues immediately…

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1st supernovas may have flooded the early universe with water — making life possible just 100 million years after the Big Bang

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When the cosmos’ first stars exploded in spectacular supernovas, they may have unleashed enormous amounts of water that flooded the early universe — and potentially made life possible just millions of years after the Big Bang, new simulations suggest. However, this theory clashes with our current understanding of cosmic evolution and will be extremely difficult to prove. Water is one of the most abundant compounds in the universe, according to NASA. Aside from Earth, astronomers have found water in several places throughout the solar system, including scattered above and below…

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‘Marsquakes’ may solve 50-year-old mystery about the Red Planet

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Recordings of Martian earthquakes, or “marsquakes,” collected by a robot on the Red Planet may have finally solved a 50-year-old mystery: why one half of Mars is so drastically different from the other. Since the 1970s, researchers have known that Mars is split into two main areas. The northern lowlands cover around two-thirds of the planet’s northern hemisphere, while the southern highlands cover the rest of the planet and have an average elevation roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) higher than that of the northern lowlands. Mars’ crust, which sits on…

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Hubble Goes Supernova Hunting

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Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News…

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Giant planet or ‘failed star?’ Newfound mystery world blurs the lines

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One of the largest exoplanets to be found orbiting a relatively low-mass star has been discovered, thanks to the way the planet’s gravity drags its star around on its journey through space. The planet is the fourth world to be spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which was designed to map a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, cataloguing their masses, luminosities, temperatures and motions through space. It’s this latter property that led to the discovery of the giant exoplanet Gaia-4b. It orbits a star…

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‘Roasting marshmallow’ exoplanet is so hot, it rains metal. How did it form?

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Astronomers may have inadvertently complicated the mystery of how strange “roasting marshmallow” planets form. Using the Gemini South telescope, researchers found that the “hot and puffy” ultra-hot Jupiter planet WASP-121b may have formed closer to its star than previously believed, challenging what we know about how planets form. Since the discovery of the first planet outside the solar system in the mid-1990s, the catalog of extrasolar planets, or “exoplanets,” has grown to over 5,000 entries. Many of these exoplanets are like nothing found in our solar system. The hot and…

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A year in isolation: 366-day mock moon mission wraps up in Russia

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On Nov. 14, 2024, the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences marked the successful completion of SIRIUS-23, a year-long biomedical isolation experiment simulating the conditions of deep-space travel and lunar surface operations. For 366 days, a crew of six analog astronauts lived and worked in a sealed environment, a meticulously controlled Earth-based stand-in for interplanetary missions of the future. The SIRIUS (Scientific International Research in Unique terrestrial Station) project, launched in collaboration with NASA’s Human Research Program and the IBMP in 2017, had previously conducted…

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6 Things to Know About SPHEREx, NASA’s Newest Space Telescope

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5 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in August 2024. Launching no earlier than Feb. 27, 2025, the mission will make the first all-sky spectroscopic survey in the near-infrared, helping to answer some of the biggest questions in astrophysics. BAE Systems/NASA/JPL-Caltech Shaped like a megaphone, the upcoming mission will map the entire sky in infrared light to answer big questions about the universe. Expected to launch no earlier than Thursday, Feb. 27, from Vandenberg Space…

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