Astro Blog

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-webb-telescope-takes-flight-christmas-gift-astronomers-everywhere Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Infrared scope will target alien worlds and the universe’s first galaxies—if it survives a month of nerve-racking maneuvers ...The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, an instrument  expected to revolutionize astronomy  by gathering light from the atmospheres of alien worlds and the universe’s first galaxies, launched at 7:20 a.m. EST on a sultry Christmas morning from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. Some 30 minutes after launch, the telescope detached from the top of its Ariane 5 rocket and deployed its solar array, which is needed to charge its batteries and support communication with Earth. Webb is now en route to its observing station, a gravitational balance point known as L2 at 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Before it gets there, mission controllers will have a tense month, as they unfurl parts of the ...

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Opening_a_50-year-old_Christmas_present_from_the_Moon By European Space Agency.  Excerpt: A pretty special gift unwrapping will soon take place – a piercing tool built by ESA will open a Moon soil container from Apollo 17 that has gone untouched for nearly 50 years. The opening will allow the extraction of precious lunar gases which may have been preserved in the sample.…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/15/nasa-touches-sun-spacecraft-parker By  Timothy Bella , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: A NASA spacecraft became the first to “touch the sun,” scientists announced Tuesday — a long-awaited milestone and a potential giant leap in understanding the sun’s influence on the solar system. The Parker Solar Probe successfully flew through the sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere, in April to sample particles and its magnetic fields, according to research published in the journal  Physical Review Letters . The findings were also announced Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans. ...The spacecraft, launched three years ago in an effort to study the sun and its dangers, will help scientists uncover significant and unknown information about Earth’s closest star, including how the flow of the sun’s particles can influence the planet. ...The spacecraft’s brush with the sun is the culmination of a missio...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/science/iron-exoplanet-super-mercury.html By  Adam Mann , The NewYork Times.  Excerpt: Astronomers call it a “super-Mercury” and think it holds clues to how planets form close in to their stars. ...Because it sits so close to its parent, one side of GJ 367 b likely always faces the blazing star. Its dayside temperatures should soar toward 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt rock and metal, making it a potential lava world…

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-first-planetary-defense-mission-will-nudge-asteroid By Adam Mann, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Intentional crash of robotic probe will test way to avert asteroid impacts on Earth. In the name of planetary defense, NASA is set to launch a robotic probe next week that in late 2022 will hurtle into a sizable space rock in the hopes of nudging its orbit. Although the celestial target of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) poses no danger to our planet, the mission will assess the feasibility of deflecting potentially hazardous objects away from Earth.… [ DART successfully launched last night (Tuesday, Nov. 23, at 10:21 p.m. PST)] See also New York Times article .

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/moon-kamooalewa-asteroid.html By Robin George Andrews , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...a little rock would decide to tag along with Earth and the moon on their yearly circumnavigation of the sun. Said rock, 165 feet long, was discovered in 2016 by Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid-hunting telescope. This eccentric entity’s Hawaiian name, (469219)  Kamoʻoalewa , means “wobbling celestial object.” As it repeatedly loops around Earth, this shy body never gets closer than 9 million miles, which is 38 times farther out than the moon. It gets as distant as 25 million miles away before swinging back around for a closer encounter. Calculations of its orbital waltz indicate that it began trailing our planet in a relatively stable manner  about a century ago , and it will continue to pirouette around Earth for several centuries to come. ...in a paper published Thursday in  Communications Earth & Environment , a team of sc...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/science/perpendicular-planets-star-system.html By Jonathan O’Callaghan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Two planets orbit the poles while another revolves around the star’s equator, suggesting a mysterious, undetected force.… See also A Mysterious, Undetected Force Is Influencing the Orbit of Two Alien Worlds and the paper -- The Rossiter–McLaughlin effect revolutions: an ultra-short period planet and a warm mini-Neptune on perpendicular orbits .

https://www.science.org/content/article/dinosaurs-thrived-until-moment-asteroid-hit-excavators-controversial-site-claim By Michael Price, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: ...Two years ago, a paleontologist claimed to have found evidence at a fossil-rich North Dakotan site called Tanis that dinosaurs were alive until moments after the impact, when floodwaters surged over them. But many paleontologists were skeptical, especially because the dinosaur data were first discussed in a magazine story rather than a peer-reviewed journal. Last week, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Portland, Oregon, paleontologist Robert DePalma and colleagues added detail to their claims. They presented evidence of fossils from Tanis—including stunningly well-preserved bones, skin, and footprints from what’s probably a  Triceratops —that suggest dinosaurs were indeed witnesses to the asteroid that ushered them out of existence.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/world/canada/meteorite-bed.html By  John Yoon  and  Vjosa Isai , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by “an explosion.” She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock said 11:35 p.m. ...“Oh, my gosh,” she recalled telling the operator, “there’s a rock in my bed.” A meteorite, she later learned. The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist had barely missed Ms. Hamilton’s head, leaving “drywall debris all over my face,” she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it  captivated the internet  and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/white-dwarf-planet.html By  Becky Ferreira , The New York Times.  Excerpt: When our sun enters its death throes in about five billion years, it will incinerate our planet and then dramatically collapse into a dead ember known as a white dwarf. But the fate of more distant planets, such as Jupiter or Saturn, is less clear. On Wednesday  in the journal Nature , astronomers reported observing a tantalizing preview of our solar system’s afterlife: a Jupiter-size planet orbiting a white dwarf some 6,500 light years from here. Known as MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, the planet occupies a comparable orbit to Jupiter. The discovery not only offers a glimpse into our cosmic future, it raises the possibility that any life on “survivor” worlds may endure the deaths of their stars. ...“The fate of our solar system is likely to be similar to MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb,” he added in an email. “The sun will become a white dwarf, the inner planets will be engulfed...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/science/triple-sun-planet.html Source: By Jonathan O’Callaghan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: It’s called a circumtriple planet, and evidence that one exists suggests that planet formation is less unusual than once believed. ...GW Ori is a star system 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation of Orion. It is surrounded by a huge disk of dust and gas, a common feature of young star systems that are forming planets. But fascinatingly, it is a system with not one star, but three. ...GW Ori’s disk is split in two, almost like Saturn’s rings if they had a massive gap in between. ...Scientists  have been trying to explain  what is going on there. Some hypothesized that the gap in the disk could be the result of  one or more planets  forming in the system. ...Now the GW Ori system has been  modeled  in greater detail, and researchers say a planet — a gassy world as massive as Jupiter — is the best explanation for th...

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-fleet-moon-landers-will-set-sail-next-year-backed-private-companies Source: By Joel Goldberg, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Who knew outsourcing could extend to outer space? In some ways, that’s the aim of NASA’s $2.6 billion initiative meant to galvanize the private sector’s development of Moon landers and rovers. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program has tasked a number of companies—including Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic—with delivering landers to the Moon’s surface twice a year. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, roughly the size of a tree house, is set to blast off this year from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as is Houston-based Intuitive Machines’s Nova-C. A second Astrobotic lander, Griffin, is expected to launch in 2023, ferrying the well-equipped, NASA-designed Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover. Its neutron counter, spectrometers, and specialized drill will seek out evidence of water and attempt to identify its origin. ....

[ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/science/asteroid-deflection-collision.html ] Source: By Katherine Kornei , The New York Times.  Excerpt: There’s probably a large space rock out there, somewhere, that has Earth in its cross hairs. Scientists have in fact spotted one candidate —  Bennu, which has a small chance of banging into our planet in the year 2182 . But whether it’s Bennu or another asteroid, the question will be how to avoid a very unwelcome cosmic rendezvous. For almost 20 years, a team of researchers has been preparing for such a scenario. Using a specially designed gun, they’ve repeatedly fired projectiles at meteorites and measured how the space rocks recoiled and, in some cases, shattered. These observations shed light on how an asteroid might respond to a high-velocity impact intended to deflect it away from Earth. At the 84th annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society held in Chicago this month, researchers  presented findings from all of that high-powe...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/ancient-supernovae-might-have-upended-earth-s-evolution By  Claire Hogan , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: When stars run out of fuel, they can collapse under their own gravity, exploding as supernovae that blast debris and radioactive nuclei far into space. Most of these events are too far from Earth to affect our planet. But if one happened nearby,  the effects could be dramatic . By studying radioactive isotopes on Earth, scientists have uncovered evidence suggesting two near-Earth supernovae occurred in the past few million years. Some researchers now hypothesize that supernova-generated particles known as cosmic rays might have depleted the ozone layer, increased cancer rates in ancient organisms, sparked wildfires, and even started an ice age....

By  Elizabeth Pennisi , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Today, oxygen fuels much of life on Earth, but it wasn’t always that way. Three billion years ago, this gas was scarce in the atmosphere and oceans. Knowing why oxygen became plentiful could illuminate the evolution of our planet’s flora and fauna, but scientists have struggled to find an explanation satisfying to all. Now a research team has proposed a novel link between how fast our planet spun on its axis, which defines the length of a day, and the ancient production of additional oxygen. Their modeling of Earth’s early days, which incorporates evidence from microbial mats coating the bottom of a shallow, sunlit sinkhole in Lake Huron, produced a surprising conclusion: as Earth’s spin slowed, the resulting longer days could have triggered more photosynthesis from similar mats, allowing oxygen to build up in ancient seas and diffuse up into the atmosphere.  That proposal , described today in Nature Geoscience, has intr...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/opinion/pulsars-jocelyn-bell-burnell-astronomy.html Source: By Ben Proudfoot, The New York Times.  Excerpt: [see video] In 1967, [Jocelyn] Burnell made a discovery that altered our perception of the universe. As a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University assisting the astronomer Anthony Hewish, she discovered pulsars —  compact, spinning celestial objects  that give off beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses. 

Unveiling the Next Exoplanet Act , by  Heather Goss .  Excerpt: ...our  August issue is all about exoplanets —what we know and what awaits us over the launch horizon. Who gets the first peek through James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)? In March, the proposals selected for the first observing cycle were announced. Meet the slate of scientists who will be pointing the telescope at other worlds, and read what they hope to learn in “ Overture to Exoplanets ." ...In “ The Forecast for Exoplanets Is Cloudy but Bright ,” we learn the immense challenge posed by exoplanet atmospheres, when researchers are still struggling to understand the complex dynamics of clouds on our own planet. ...And in “ Exoplanets in the Shadows ,” we look at the rogues, the extremes, and a new field being coined as necroplanetology. See also  Oddballs of the Exoplanet Realm . 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/hubble-back-famed-space-telescope-has-new-lease-life-after-computer-swap-appears-fix Source: By  Daniel Clery .  Excerpt: The iconic but elderly Hubble Space Telescope appears to have been resurrected again after a shutdown of more than a month following a computer glitch. Science has learned that following a switch from the operating payload control computer to a backup device over the past 24 hours, Hubble’s operators have re-established communications with all the telescope’s instruments and plan to return them to normal operations today.... 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/exploding-stars-may-have-assaulted-ancient-earth Source: By  Daniel Clery , Since Magazine.  Excerpt: ...Over the past 2 decades, researchers have found hundreds of radioactive atoms, trapped in seafloor minerals, that came from an ancient explosion marking the death of a nearby star. Its fusion fuel exhausted, the star had collapsed, generating a shock wave that blasted away its outer layers in an expanding ball of gas and dust so hot that it briefly glowed as bright as a galaxy—and ultimately showered Earth with those telltale atoms. Erupting from hundreds of light-years away, the flash of x-rays and gamma rays probably did no harm on Earth. But the expanding fireball also accelerated cosmic rays—mostly nuclei of hydrogen and helium—to close to the speed of light. These projectiles arrived stealthily, decades later, ramping up into an invisible fusillade that could have lasted for thousands of years and might have affected the atmosphe...

https://eos.org/articles/gap-in-exoplanet-size-shifts-with-age Source: By  Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Smaller planets are scarcer in younger systems and larger planets are lacking in older systems, according to new research that analyzed hundreds of exoplanets. ...Planets just a bit larger than Earth appear to be relatively rare in the exoplanet canon. A team has now used observations of hundreds of exoplanets to show that this planetary gap isn’t static but instead evolves with planet age—younger planetary systems are more likely to be missing slightly smaller planets, and older systems are more apt to be without slightly larger planets. This evolution is consistent with the hypothesis that atmospheric loss—literally, a planet’s atmosphere blowing away over time—is responsible for this so-called “radius valley,” the researchers suggested....

https://eos.org/articles/fifteen-years-of-radar-reveal-venuss-most-basic-facts Source: By  Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU .  Excerpt: Venus’s heavy atmosphere tugs the planet’s surface enough to change the length of its day by up to 21 minutes [per day]. ...In a recent paper in  Nature Astronomy , astronomers used 15 years of radar measurements to reveal a few of these fundamental properties of our closest planetary neighbor that have long remained elusive. ...The 70-meter radio antenna at the  Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex  in California served as the flashlight, ...The researchers carefully measured the timing of the returned waves with two radio telescopes: Goldstone in California and the  Green Bank Telescope  in West Virginia. ...they found that Venus’s spin axis is tilted 2.6392° from its orbital plane and that tilt precesses once every 29,000 Earth years, 3,000 years longer than Earth’s precession. These measurements are 5–15 tim...

https://eos.org/articles/record-setting-flare-spotted-on-the-nearest-star-to-the-sun Source: By  Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: As stellar neighbors go, the Sun is a pretty good one—it occasionally produces a sizeable solar flare, but mostly, it leaves Earth well enough alone. The Proxima Centauri solar system isn’t so lucky, however: Blasts of electromagnetic radiation from Proxima Centauri, the next nearest star to our own, can be potentially lethal to nearby planets. Researchers recently spotted the brightest stellar flare ever detected from Proxima Centauri. That flare might have contributed to stripping away the atmosphere of one of its planets, a roughly Earth mass world that potentially hosts liquid water on its surface. ...Destroyer of Atmospheres ...Proxima Centauri’s faintness stems from its low mass—it’s what astronomers refer to as an M dwarf star, defined as having a mass between roughly 10% and 50% the mass of the Sun. M dwarf stars are the most common sta...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/china-mars-rover/ Source: By   Antonia Noori Farzan , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: China successfully landed a rover-carrying spacecraft on Mars for the first time, state-run media reported Saturday, marking another major victory for the country’s ambitious space program.... China now joins the United States as the only other nations to have successfully landed and operated rovers on Mars, and Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed a   “milestone”  achievement. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched from the Chinese province of Hainan in July, has been orbiting Mars since February while looking for potential landing sites. Early Saturday, it released an entry capsule containing a lander and a rover that began to plummet through the Mars atmosphere, according to   state-run Xinhua News Agency . The entry capsule safely touched down in a flat plane on Mars’ surface at 7:18 a.m. Beijing time (7:18 p.m. Friday Eastern time)...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/science/mars-helicopter-nasa-ingenuity.html Source: By  Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: On Friday, Ingenuity, which last month became the first machine to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world, took off for the fifth time. It made a successful one-way trip to another flat patch of Mars more than the length of a football field away. The spot where it landed will serve as its base of operations for the next month at least, beginning a new phase of the mission where it will serve as a scout for its larger robotic companion, the Perseverance rover....  

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html Source:  By  Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world. ...Like the first flight of an airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903, the flight did not go far or last long, but it showed what could be done. Flying in the thin atmosphere of Mars was a particularly tricky technical endeavor, on the edge of impossible because there is almost no air to push against. NASA engineers employed ultralight materials, fast-spinning blades and high-powered computer processing to get Ingenuity off the ground and keep it from veering off and crashing....   See also April 22 NY Times article,  NASA’s Mars Ingenuity Helicopter Completes Se...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/remains-impact-created-moon-may-lie-deep-within-earth Source:    By  Paul Voosen .  Excerpt: Scientists have long agreed that the Moon formed when a protoplanet, called Theia, struck Earth in its infancy some 4.5 billion years ago. Now, a team of scientists has a provocative new proposal: Theia’s remains can be found in two continent-size layers of rock buried deep in Earth’s mantle. For decades, seismologists have puzzled over these two blobs, which sit below West Africa and the Pacific Ocean and straddle the core like a pair of headphones. Up to 1000 kilometers tall and several times that wide, “they are the largest thing in the Earth’s mantle,” says Qian Yuan, a Ph.D. student in geodynamics at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe. Seismic waves from earthquakes abruptly slow down when they pass through the layers, which suggests they are denser and chemically different from the surrounding mantle rock. ...Evidence from Ic...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/science/mars-water-missing.html Source:  By  Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. Although the planet is now desert dry, scientists say most of the water is still there, just locked up in rocks. ...most of the water, a new study concludes, went down, sucked into the red planet’s rocks. And there it remains, trapped within minerals and salts. Indeed, as much as 99 percent of the water that once flowed on Mars could still be there, the researchers estimated in  a paper published this week in the journal Science.  Data from the past two decades of robotic missions to Mars, including NASA’s Curiosity rover and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showed a wide distribution of what geologists call hydrated minerals.... 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/martian-rover-sends-back-overwhelming-video-audio-red-planet Source:    By   Catherine Matacic , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Just four martian days after   touching down on the Red Planet , NASA’s Perseverance rover has sent back its first video of its new home: a 1-minute arabesque of color and motion captured from four on-board cameras, as the car-size rover dangles from its rocket-propelled descent vehicle, a red-and-white parachute snaps into place, and the pitted surface of Mars comes slowly into view, dark canyons giving way to ripples of dust that look like giant, rust-colored dunes (see video, above). But perhaps even more thrilling, an unexpected gift arrived along with the video and the   thousands of new images   that were downloaded over the weekend: the   first sound recording   taken from the surface of Mars....  See also   Perseverance’s ‘sky crane’ captures Mars descent .

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/touchdown-confirmed-perseverance-landing-marks-new-dawn-mars-science Source:    By   Paul Voosen , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: It’s a new day on Mars. NASA’s $2.7 billion Perseverance rover has successfully landed in Jezero crater, alighting just 35 meters away from hazardous boulders it had identified during descent. At about 3:55 p.m. EST, confirmation came back of the rover safely touching its wheels down, resulting in exuberant but socially distanced applause from double-masked engineers at the mission’s control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)....   See also   Perseverance’s ‘sky crane’ captures Mars descent ; and New York Times article   Perseverance’s Pictures From Mars Show NASA Rover’s New Home .