Astro Blog

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: For decades, elementary students learned the same tale of the Solar System: first come rocky terrestrial planets such as Earth, followed by gas giants such as Jupiter and ice giants such as Neptune, with lovable Pluto bringing up the rear. ...the so-called ice giants likely contain very little ice. ...Uranus and Neptune were first called ice giants because they orbit past the Solar System’s so-called ice lines: the points beyond which water, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other volatile molecules exist as solids rather than gases. If this region abounded with frozen water during the early Solar System, then Uranus and Neptune’s interiors might consist mostly of water, squeezed by the pressure of the planets’ gravity into a hot “supercritical” soup. ...researchers have come up with a smorgasbord of ideas about the interiors of our outermost planets. The newest, posted as a preprint last week and currently in review at The Astrophysical Journal ,...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Last night, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began to film the greatest time-lapse movie ever made: a 10-year record of the changing night sky. Over a few nights, the telescope will sweep the entire hemisphere of sky visible from its Chilean mountaintop with the largest digital camera ever built, then do it again and again for a decade. In its first year the survey will generate more data than all previous optical telescopes combined. It will capture everything from wandering asteroids and exploding stars to the growth of distant galaxies, and it will spew the data continuously to the world’s astronomers....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/rubin-observatory-begins-10-year-movie-changing-universe .

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Disclosure Day , arriving in movie theaters this week, deals with what would be a pivotal event in history: the moment conclusive evidence arrives of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The movie pits sinister military-industrial forces that hide and control the information against those who strive to reveal the truth. ...Researchers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have long realized this moment—if it ever arrives outside cinemas—is going to be fraught with emotion, confusion, and possible danger. To get a jump on such events, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) convened a permanent committee of SETI experts. In 1989, the committee drew up a set of “postdetection protocols,” nonbinding guidelines for what scientists and their institutions should do when the time comes. The protocols stress the importance of verifying the alien signal and making accurate and transparent announcements. They sugge...

By Adrian Cho , Science.  Excerpt: A new neutrino experiment in China has put the world on notice that it’s poised to make a breakthrough. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a plastic sphere 10 stories high filled with a liquid that flashes when certain particles pass through it, detects neutrinos streaming from nuclear power plants 53 kilometers away. Neutrinos come in three types that “oscillate,” or morph into one another, as they zip along at near–light-speed, a phenomenon physicists have yet to fully puzzle out. Now, JUNO has measured with unequaled precision two of the six parameters that describe the oscillations, as reported today in Nature . The result, based on just 2 months of data, suggests JUNO is on track to reach its main goal: sorting the neutrinos by mass. ...Nearly massless, neutrinos interact with other matter so rarely that every second trillions pass through each of us....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/first-re...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: When violent eruptions from the Sun slam into Earth’s magnetic field, they do more than paint aurorae across the night sky. They can scramble the electronics of satellites and induce powerful ground currents that knock out electrical grids. It’s been estimated that a one-in-a-100-year solar storm like the 1859 Carrington Event could cause more than $3 trillion of damage to the power grid alone. ...In a study published today in Space Weather , the researchers describe a provocative proposal called “StormWall”: a fleet of satellites that would release hundreds of tons of gases into space just before a solar storm strikes Earth. Computer simulations suggest the artificial cloud could cut the intensity of a major solar storm by half or more....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/radical-proposal-would-block-solar-storms-orbital-airbag . 

By ScienceAdvisor.  Excerpt: Most small worlds in the outer Solar System are not expected to have atmospheres. Gas escapes too easily, and there is little to replace it. Pluto, larger and rich in ices that can vaporize into gas, has long been the only known exception. Now,  astronomers have spotted a thin atmosphere around a much smaller object . Known as 2002 XV93, it’s a distant plutino, a Kuiper Belt object ...described in a new paper in  Nature Astronomy . At roughly 250 kilometers in radius, it falls far below the size thought necessary to sustain an atmosphere. But in January 2024, as the object passed in front of a distant star, astronomers noticed something unusual: The starlight did not vanish all at once, but instead dimmed gradually. That subtle fade is the telltale signature of an atmosphere. ...By modeling the signal, researchers estimated a surface pressure of about 100 to 200 nanobars, tens of times thinner than Pluto’s atmosphere, but far denser than expec...