Space

When Neil Armstrong took his first step for all mankind in 1969, researchers obviously had no idea how much of a nuisance the lunar soil beneath his feet would be. The scratchy dust clung to everything it touched, causing scientific instruments to overheat and, for Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a sort of lunar dust hay fever. The annoying particles even prompted a scientific experiment to figure out how fast they collect, but the data got lost. Now it's been found. More than 40 years later, scientists have used the rediscovered data to make the first determination of how fast lunar…

Astronomers have found strong evidence that Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is producing a jet of high-energy particles. Jets of high-energy particles are found throughout the universe, on large and small scales. They are produced by young stars and by black holes a thousand times larger than the Milky Way's black hole. They play important roles in transporting energy away from the central object and, on a galactic scale, in regulating the rate of formation of new stars. Previous studies, using a variety of telescopes, suggested there was a…

A research team has uncovered what may be the first recognized example of ancient Martian crust. Lead author Munir Humayun, a Florida State University scientist, and colleagues analyzed  a 4.4 billion-year-old Martian meteorite that was unearthed by Bedouin tribesmen in the Sahara desert. The rock - NWA 7533 - may be the first recognized sample of ancient Martian crust and holds a wealth of information about the origin and age of the Red Planet's crust. In order to detect minute amounts of chemicals in this meteorite, the team used mass spectrometers in the MagLab's geochemistry…

Messier 15 is a gathering of  100,000 very old stars that orbits the center of the Milky Way. It is one of the densest globular clusters known, with most of its mass concentrated at its core.  It could also hide a rare type of black hole or a collection of dark neutron stars. Messier 15 is located 35,000 light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus, The Winged Horse). It is one of the oldest globular clusters known, with an age of around 12 billion years. In a new Hubble image, very hot blue stars and cooler golden stars are seen swarming together, becoming more concentrated…

An international team say they know what is inside the enigmatic jets emitted by black holes. Jets are narrow beams of matter spat out at high speed from near a central object, like a black hole. They came to their new understanding by studying the radio waves and X-rays emitted by a small black hole a few times the mass of the Sun. The black hole in question was known to be active, but the team's radio observations did not show any jets, and the X-ray spectrum didn't reveal anything unusual. A few weeks later, the team took another look and this time saw radio emissions…

You might be surprised to know that there are quite a few places we might be able to go to find present day life or evidence of the evolution of life. It would be easy to miss it, because we have sent no life detection missions outside of Earth since the two Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s. For sure, there is no planet like Earth, covered in forests and grasslands, but one thing we have discovered since the 1970s is that life need not be as easy to spot as that. We have found life on Earth in caves deep underground, in caves sealed from the surface for millions of years. We have…

Germans: ‘We’ve found second solar system’ This sounds like something from a science fiction comic when I was young, back in the days when Dan Dare was with Spacefleet, which was effectively the RAF in Space before the Russians and Americans took over. However, this bit of news is quite contemporary.  According to one of my favourite online newspapers*, a team of German scientists claim to have discovered a “second solar system” made up of seven planets orbiting a star similar to our own. The astrophysicists at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR or Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt…

Supernovae, those intensely bright objects formed when a star reaches the end of its life, 'start' with a big, expelling most of their material out into space, and it's always interesting when we see it. Spiral galaxy NGC 6984 played host to one of these explosions back in 2012, SN 2012im. Now, another star has exploded, forming supernova SN 2013ek, which is visible in this image as the prominent, star-like bright object just slightly above and to the right of the galaxy's center. SN 2012im is known as a Type Ic supernova, while the more recent SN 2013ek is a Type Ib. Both of these types are…

The sun emitted its sixth significant flare since Oct. 23, 2013, peaking at 11:26 p.m. EST on Nov. 7, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation - the radiation from a flare can't pass through Earth's atmosphere to affect us but, when intense enough, they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an X1.1 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc. NASA's Solar Dynamics…

A 1.1 metric Ton satellite will re-enter the earth's atmosphere in the next 48 hours, fragmenting into smaller pieces as it falls. The exact location of the fall is unknown, so you better watch out... Or not. I was discussing this event with my daughter this morning, and it ended up being an instructive discussion on random events of very low probability. If we are totally oblivious of the satellite orbit, and forget different likelihood of earth surface points for the re-entry (the very north and south latitude are much less likely), we can try and compute how likely it is that one of, say…