Space

Your galaxy has a supermassiv black hole - so does mine as does every large galaxy. But how did they grew so big is a matter of speculation. Einstein predicted gravitational waves; ripples in space-time, generated by bodies changing speed or direction. Bodies, for instance, such as pairs of black holes orbiting each other. When galaxies merge, their resident central black holes are doomed to meet. They first waltz together then enter a desperate embrace and merge. Towards the end of this dance they're sending out gravitational waves at a frequency we can detect and played out again and again…

You wouldn't think the brightest exploding stars ever discovered in the universe could need some light shed on them, but they got it anyway. A new paper proposes that the most luminous supernovae – exploding stars – are powered by small and incredibly dense neutron stars, with gigantic magnetic fields that spin hundreds of times a second. Scientists observed two super-luminous supernovae for more than a year. Contrary to existing theories, which suggested that the brightest supernovae are caused by super-massive stars exploding, the findings suggest that their origins may be better explained…

Researchers have found evidence that magnetic waves in a polar coronal hole contain enough energy to heat the corona and that they also deposit most of their energy at sufficiently low heights for the heat to spread throughout the corona. The observations help to answer a 70-year-old solar physics conundrum about the unexplained extreme temperature of the Sun's corona – known as the coronal heating problem. The team analyzed data from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer onboard the Japanese satellite Hinode. They used observations of a polar coronal hole, a region of the Sun where…

The Toby Jug Nebula, formally known as IC 2220, is an example of a reflection nebula - a cloud of gas and dust illuminated from within by a star called HD 65750.  The Toby Jug Nebula is located 1,200 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Carina  - The Ship's Keel. HD 65750, the driver of the nebula, is a red giant, has five times the mass of our Sun and is in a much more advanced stage of its life, despite its comparatively young age of around 50 million years. Stars with more mass run through their lives much more quickly than lighter ones such as the Sun, which…

Unusual impact craters formed on Mars feature a thin outer deposit that extends many times beyond the typical range of ejecta. Nadine Barlow, professor of physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University, calls these craters Low-Aspect-Ratio Layered Ejecta (LARLE) craters, since the ratio of the thickness to the length of the deposit (the aspect ratio) is so small.  Barlow found the LARLE craters while poring over high-resolution images to update her highly popular catalog of Martian craters. These craters stood out since they displayed this extensive outer deposit beyond the normal…

This special edition of the Space Show may be of special interest if you read my recent science20.com articles about Mars and space colonization. I was asked great questions by David Livingston, and listeners to his live show. Could Mars One comply with the Outer Space Treaty and planetary protection? What about Elon Musk's Space-X plans to colonize Mars? NASA's plans for a Mars sample return? Missions to the Moon and asteroids? What would it be like to explore Mars from orbit, telerobotically, and never set foot on it in person? Other questions asked by listeners to the show included:…

This is part 5 of my series on Mars, planet of surprises, great to explore, not so great to colonize. It seems that a human mission to the surface of Mars significantly increases the risk of irreversibly contaminating Mars. If that's right, the best way to explore Mars would be with telerobotics or telepresence.  Airplanes For The Martian Atmosphere This is an example of an entomopter, which flies like a bumble bee but on Mars can be far larger because of the thin air. Video of Robert Michelson's entomopter. On Mars it might be easier for machines to fly with insect type flight…

The nearby star system Fomalhaut has been discovered to be not just a double star, as astronomers had thought, but a really wide triple star -   a previously known smaller star in its vicinity is also part of the Fomalhaut system.  While Fomalhaut C is a red dwarf star – the most common type of star in the universe – Fomalhaut B is an orange dwarf star about three-fourths the mass of our Sun. From the vantage point of a hypothetical planet orbiting Fomalhaut C, Fomalhaut A would appear to be a brilliant white star nine times brighter than Sirius (the brightest star in our night sky…

Supposing we do eventually decide to terraform Mars, and know how to do it, will it be possible at all if humans visit the surface of Mars first? Could aerobes and other microbes introduced by humans work against all our attempts to terraform the planet? There are more immediate issues to think about such as need to keep Mars pristine for present day scientific exploration. Also, I am not yet at all sure myself that terraforming is the best way forward, or that we are anywhere close to the level of knowledge needed to do it successfully. But it is not too soon to start thinking about this…

This is part 3 of my series on Mars, planet of surprises, great to explore, not so great to colonize. In "Is it as good a place to live as a desert? we saw that Mars is a more inhospitable place than the coldest driest deserts on Earth, and has severe supply issues from Earth. It is a place for highly trained hardy explorers like the early Apollo astronauts.  Then in Life on the edge in cold dry deserts of Mars, we saw that there are possible habitats for life on Mars. Human visitors with their hundreds of trillions of microbes could contaminate the planet. We absolutely…