Space

Two highly promising concepts are being funded by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). In terms of ISP and power levels, the new ion drives could have been five times better. The development of multi-megawatt ion engines and antimatter propulsion is ongoing. Propulsion and Speed in Space What is the fastest spacecraft we have made? Voyager 1 is travelling at a speed of 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h). Both a gravitational slingshot and a chemical rocket were mostly used to accomplish this. Using gravitational boosts, the Juno, Helios I, and Helios II spacecraft attained speeds in the 150,000 mph range. The Sun's gravity will let the recently launched Parker Solar Probe travel at 430,000 miles per hour. Gravitational acceleration can increase the speed of a spacecraft by many times. However, using the gravity of Jupiter and the Sun to get more speed waste a lot of time. The spacecraft take many months to go around the Sun and get speed before starting the real mission. Best Che

It turns out that the existence of life on planets orbiting stars like our sun does not require those stars to be vibrant and powerful. A potential " major planet " that orbits a dying sun and could support life in the future has been found by scientists. The “ surprising ” discovery was made by researchers from University College London while watching a white dwarf, the burning remnants of a star that ran out of hydrogen fuel. It is about 117 light-years away from us. This star, known as WD1054-226, has a ring of planetary rubble in its orbital habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone, where temperatures should enable the planet to have liquid water on its surface. If the newfound planet is proved to be a life-sustaining world, it will be the first time a life-sustaining planet has been identified around a dying sun. Scientists made the discovery while monitoring the light from the white dwarf and reported their results in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly No

The sun will not last forever. Scientists can foresee the future of the star that gives energy to our solar system. However, we will not be alive to witness it. The ESA's Star Mapping GAIA project now provides a glimpse into the Sun's future by detecting stars of similar mass and composition and forecasting how our Sun will evolve in the future. Despite the fact that the Earth has less time than the Sun, let us investigate what will happen in the future. We already know that the Sun is powered by ' nuclear fusio n.' Over the next few billion years, the Sun will continue to heat up, eventually depleting the hydrogen at its core. The core would then contract, bringing the hydrogen together to create the nucleus. While the core is contracting, the Sun's outer atmosphere begins to expand significantly, consuming Earth and even engulfing Mars, transforming the Sun into a red giant. When the Sun's core runs out of hydrogen and helium, it will eject all of its outer ma

Humanity is anticipating a spectacular performance. Two black holes will merge in a galaxy in the constellation Bootes. Scientists ensure that these occurrences will not be disastrous. A tremendous gravitational wave will arrive as a result of such an event, as well as a flash in the sky. A gravitational wave is a space-time distortion. That is, time begins to slow or reverse, and space " pulsates ." Nobody knows how it looks in reality because this has never happened before. Gravitational waves arrive on Earth on occasion, but they are quite faint. The relevant galaxy is 1 billion light-years away. This is beneficial because the phenomenon will not be disastrous. Two black holes revolve around each other in the heart of this faraway galaxy. Their combined mass is around 800 million times that of the Sun, yet they are minuscule by cosmic standards, smaller than the radius of the Earth's orbit. Black holes approach and then recede. There is a little flash as they approach.

We define a day as 86,400 seconds, or 24 hours – the time it takes for Earth to rotate once. However, the Earth doesn’t rotate perfectly uniformly.  Usually, the Earth’s rotation is actually slowing down so that the length of the day increases by about 1.8 milliseconds per century, on average. This means that 600 million years ago a day lasted only 21 hours. The variation in day length is due to several factors, including the tidal effects of the Moon and Sun, core-mantle coupling inside the Earth, and the overall distribution of mass on the planet. Seismic activity, glaciation, the weather, the oceans and the Earth’s magnetic field may also affect the length of the day. In 2020 scientists made a startling discovery. They found that, instead of slowing down, the Earth has started to spin faster. It is now spinning faster than at any time in the last 50 years. In fact, the shortest 28 days on record all occurred during 2020. As yet, scientists are not entirely sure what is causing this

An international team of astronomers from Chile and Germany has managed to capture an image of unprecedented detail of another star — that isn’t the Sun — the red supergiant star Antares. The team has also made the first map of the velocities of material in the atmosphere of a star other than the Sun, revealing unexpected turbulence in the extended atmosphere of Antares. Image description:  This artist’s impression shows the red supergiant star Antares. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO. Antares, also designated Alpha Scorpii, is a well-studied, close red supergiant star at a distance of 554 light years. It is the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky and the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius. With a diameter about 700 times that of the Sun and a mass about 12 times solar, Antares is one of largest stars. This is the most detailed image ever of the red supergiant star Antares, or any other star apart from the Sun. Image credit: K. Ohnaka / ESO.   It is thought that An

Albert Einstein is frequently regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all times, with brilliant insights about the laws of nature. However, his work has one very disappointing consequence, especially for science buffs who hope one day to travel to distant stars. His theory demonstrated that there is a fastest speed in the Universe: the speed of light. That means the shortest possible round-trip to the nearest star will take nearly a decade. But just how does that work? Even the most informed science enthusiasts often have a wrong, or at least incomplete, understanding of why you can’t go faster than light. The textbook answer This ultimate speed limit is a curious fact and one that runs quite against our common intuition. After all, if you are zooming along in your car and step on the gas, you’ll go faster. And while your car has a top speed, we know of faster things like fighter jets and bullets. However, speeding up eventually stops working. No matter how hard you try,

  NASA will be unable to defend our planet against a doomsday asteroid that could smash into Earth in 2135, a chilling study has revealed. Researchers found that it might be impossible to stop the space rock – which is the size of the Empire State building – from careering into Earth next century. Scientists revealed that even their most advanced technology would prove ‘ inadequate ’ for deflecting such a space rock, which has been dubbed Bennu. The consequences would be ‘ dire ’ experts have warned, and the asteroid has sparked fears that it could even wipe out life for good. Scientists are investigating the possibility of using a specially designed spacecraft to nuke approaching cosmic objects, in hopes that doing so could deflect the threat. While it could be possible to divert a near-Earth object (NEO) by slamming into it with a so-called impactor, experts say a nuclear explosion may be the best bet when time is running out. In a new paper, scientists from NASA and the National Nuc

Comets are among the oldest objects in the solar system and are inhabitants of deep space. These cold "Lego bricks" are left over from when planets were first being built.  In a gravitational pinball game between the huge outer planets, they were abruptly flung out of the solar system. The expelled comets settled in the Oort Cloud, a large collection of distant comets that surrounds the solar system and extends billions of kilometers into deep space. This clip demonstrates how the solid, ice nucleus of Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) was separated from a sizable shell of dust and gas. A picture of the comet obtained by the Wide Field Camera 3 on January 8, 2022, is seen on the left. By fitting the surface brightness profile created from the observed picture on the left, a model of the coma (middle panel) was created. This made it possible to remove the coma and see the nucleus's pointlike light. The nucleus size was precisely determined by astronomers using d

You are going to jump into a black hole, so there you are. What may possibly be in store for you if, all all odds, you survive?  If you could find a way back, where would you end up and what fascinating stories could you tell? Who knows is the fundamental response to all of these questions, according to Professor Richard Massey. Massey is highly versed in the enigmas surrounding black holes due to his position as a Royal Society research fellow at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology. He said that crossing an event horizon is equivalent to physically going beyond the veil since once someone has done so, no one would ever be able to communicate with them again. I don't think somebody falling through would go anywhere because of the tremendous gravity, which would shatter them to bits. That reaction certainly seems depressing and terrible, and it is. It has been known that black holes arise when a big star dies, leaving behind a tiny, dense remnant core since

Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network that allows them to travel much faster through the Solar System than was previously possible. Such paths can transport comets and asteroids from Jupiter to Neptune in less than a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. They could be used to rapidly send spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system, as well as to monitor and comprehend near-Earth objects that may collide with our planet. The researchers observed the dynamical structure of these routes, forming a connected series of arches inside what are known as space manifolds that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond, in their paper, published in the November 25, 2020, issue of Science Advances. This newly discovered " celestial autobahn ," or celestial highway, operates over several decades, rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions of years typical of Solar System dynamics. The most noticeable arch structures are associa

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZFT) was visible to the naked eye when it passed closest to Earth in January and February 2023 after 50,000 years. Photographer John Chumack of GalacticImages.com on January 7 photographed comet C/2022 E3 (ZFT) in the night sky in Yellow Springs, Ohio. According to Chumack, the comet is so bright that the green head and tail trail are clearly visible. Astronomy lovers can observe C/2022 E3 (ZFT) until February this year. Without a telescope, comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) looks blver and dimmer in the sky than it actually is. According to Space, it has two tails, an extremely long tail with a characteristic green color as shown in recent photos. The comet's head is also blue because it contains dicarbon, a chemical consisting of two carbon atoms bonded together. This chemical process mainly occurs only at the tip of the comet. According to NPR, a comet is a collection of solidified gas, rock and dust. However, as they get closer to the Sun and warm up, they transform into co