Space

NASA has discovered a water planet 100 million light years away from Earth that completes an orbit of its star every 11 days. A group of astronomers at the Université de Montréal came across the ocean planet through NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite or TESS, according to a study published in The Astronomical Journal . CNET reports that the planet covered by a blanket of water, named TOI-1452 b by scientists, is thought to live 100 million light years from Earth and orbits within a binary star system among the Draco constellation. Credit: Alexandr Yurtchenko / Alamy Stock Photo Université de Montréal Professor René Doyon said in a press release : “I’m extremely proud of this discovery because it shows the high calibre of our researchers and instrumentation. “It is thanks to the OMM, a special instrument designed in our labs called SPIRou and an innovative analytic method developed by our research team that we were able to detect this one-of-a-kind exoplanet.” While more rese

Astronomers have discovered 12 new moons around Jupiter, putting the total count at a record-breaking 92. That’s more than any other planet in our solar system. Saturn, the one-time leader, comes in a close second with 83 confirmed moons. The Jupiter moons were added recently to a list kept by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, said Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution, who was part of the team. They were discovered using telescopes in Hawaii and Chile in 2021 and 2022, and their orbits were confirmed with follow-up observations. These newest moons range in size from 0.6 miles to 2 miles (1 kilometer to 3 kilometers), according to Sheppard. “I hope we can image one of these outer moons close-up in the near future to better determine their origins,” he wrote in an email. In April, the European Space Agency is sending a spacecraft to Jupiter to study the planet and some of its biggest, icy moons. And next year, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper to explore

Astronomers refer to it as the multiverse. There are multiple universes in this one.  Physicists define more than one as an infinite number. These innumerable universes coexist in higher levels that our senses are incapable of directly experiencing. Nonetheless, astronomers and cosmologists appear to be increasingly using the multiverse to explain baffling observations. The stakes are really high. Each alternate universe has an own version of reality. There will be one in which you wrote this column and I read it; another in which the Guardian is an alt-right propaganda rag; and yet another in which Donald Trump uses Twitter to distribute only adorable cat videos. The latest piece of evidence supporting a multiverse comes from the Royal Astronomical Society in the United Kingdom. They recently published a study on the " cold spot ." This is an extremely chilly area of space detected in the radiation produced by the Universe's birth around 13 billion years ago. The cold sp

The South Pole-Aitken Basin, which is on the far side of our Moon, is one of the biggest intact craters in the Solar System. Numerous orbiters, including the Chinese lander Chang’e-4, and other spacecraft are examining the region, which is the focus of numerous research. Now, scientists have found something strange under its surface. A structure that weighs 2.18 billion billion kilos and measures more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) in deep has been found by planetary scientists. The team speculates that the mass may have come from the asteroid that created the crater, as described in the journal Geophysical Research Letters . “Imagine burying a mass of metal five times the size of Hawaii’s Big Island underneath. We identified about that much unexpected mass, “Baylor University’s Peter B. James, the paper’s principal author, said in a press release . The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission of NASA, which monitors minute variations in the Moon’s gravitational field,

The warp engine of the Enterprise, Star Trek's starship, could become a reality much sooner than we thought. Or that is, at least, what is deduced from a recently published work in ' Classical and Quantum Gravity ' by a team of researchers from the Applied Physics group , specialized in advising governments and companies on scientific and technological issues.   In their study, the researchers openly announce the first feasible model of a curvature motor, one based on the idea proposed more than 20 years ago by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre , who has explicitly endorsed the research.   "Many people in the field of science" - says Alexey Bobrick, first author of the article - "are familiar with Alcubierre's motor and believe that bending impulses are not possible in the physical world due to the need to use negative energy. But this, however, is no longer the case."   The Alcubierre engine, the starting point   In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre publis

The Milky Way’s galactic center is orbited by the Sυп, Earth, and the entire solar system at a blistering 140 miles per second. Even at this great speed, though, oυr planetary пeighborhood still takes about 200 million years to make one complete orbit — a testament to the vast size of our home galaxy.

Astronomers in Chile used the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to find an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System. They did this just ten days ago. Every 113 days, the asteroid, which is about 1 kilometer across, comes as close to the Sun as 20 million kilometers (12 million miles or 0.13 au). Asteroid 2021 PH27 has the shortest period and the shortest semi-major axis of any known asteroid in our Solar System. Only Mercury has a shorter period and a shorter semi-major axis. Since the asteroid is so close to the Sun, it feels the strongest effects of general relativity of any known object in the Solar System. Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Science found the asteroid 2021 PH27 by looking at data from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Vctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. Ian Dell’antonio and Shenming Fu of Brown University took pictures of the ast

Practical applications for quantum entanglement have already been proposed, as entangled particles have been suggest for use in  powerful quantum computers and “ impossible ” to crack networks. Now, it seems quantum entanglement may be linked to wormholes. Entangled wormholes Theoretical physicists Juan Martín Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Leonard Susskind at Stanford University argue that wormholes are nothing but pairs of black holes entangled together. A proposed mechanism of wormhole generation would be that when a black is born, its pair is simultaneously created as well. Moreover, they conjectured that entangled particles such as electrons and photons were connected by extraordinarily tiny wormholes. Kristan Jensen, a theoretical physicist at Stony Brook University in New York and his colleague theoretical physicist Andreas Karch at the University of Washington in Seattle sought to investigate entangled particles behave in supersymmety theory whic

Energy teleportation sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but now, research shows that you can actually pull energy from nothing. Using quantum mechanics, two different physics experiments prove it’s possible to conjure energy from an energy vacuum—essentially pulling energy out of thin air—by teleporting energy across microscopic distances, helping bolster a 2008 theory from Japanese physicist Masahiro Hotta, according to a new report from Quanta Magazine. “This really does test it,” Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and not a member of the research teams, tells Quanta. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.” When Hotta debuted his theory more than a decade ago, it wasn’t met with much fanfare. Pulling energy from the quantum vacuum wasn’t considered a realistic equation. But every vacuum still had some sort of fluctuation in the quantum fields. And pulling energy from nearby into the vacuum, and then using that ener

A spectacular new photo has been released showing the record-holder for largest galaxy in the universe. NGC 6872, also known as the Condor Galaxy, stretches 522,000 light years from tip to tip. The Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years across. The galaxy is visible in the southern skies as part of the Pavo constellation, and is 212 million light-years from Earth. It was always thought to be among the largest stellar systems in the universe, but NGC 6872 was officially designated the largest galaxy known to science by NASA in 2013. The new image of NGC 6872 combines different wavelengths of light from three different observatories to show the galaxy in all its glory. It combines visible light from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile; far-ultraviolet data from NASA’s now decommissioned space telescope Galaxy Evolution Explorer; and infrared information from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Not only is NGC 6872 massive, it also has a very different st

Observations with the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have revealed a hidden Jupiter-like planet orbiting the star AF Leporis, 87.5 light-years away. Image: Direct Images Of The Planet Orbiting AF Leporis. - ESO/MESA, DE ROSA ET AL. Two groups of astronomers led by Dino Mesa (INAF, Italy) and Robert De Rosa (ESO, Chile) studied star catalogs obtained with the Hipparcos and Gaia satellites of the European Space Agency. Over the years, these two space missions have accurately identified the position and motion of the stars in our galaxy with the technique of astrometry. Planets exert a gravitational tug on their host stars, disturbing their path in the sky. The two teams found that the star AF Leporis exhibited an altered trajectory, a telltale sign that a planet might be hidden. As the two groups took a closer look at this system with the VLT, they managed to obtain direct images of the planet orbiting AF Leporis, the ESO reports in a statement . Both

Exoplanet WASP-12b does not seem like a good place to go for a visit. New research has found that most of the light that goes towards it does not come out again, making the gas giant pitch black. The planet, discovered in 2008, is just 1400 light- years from Earth. It's become one of the most studied outside our solar system, and we know a fair bit about it. We know that it's what is known as a " hot Jupiter ", a gigantic gaseous planet 40 times more massive than Jupiter that orbits extremely close to its host star. In fact, it's so close that it completes an orbit (one WASP-12b year) in just less than one Earth day, and has been pulled by gravity into an egg shape. At only 3.2 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from its star, 46 times smaller than the average distance between the sun and Earth, WASP-12b is tidally locked. Its rotation matches its orbit. This means one side is always facing its star, perpetually in day, and the other is always facing away, per

A recently discovered star, now designated S4716, is traveling at the mind-boggling speed of 5,000 miles (8,000 km) per second around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, Space.com reported.  The vast expanse of our universe means that astronomers always find something they have never seen before. Earlier this week, astronomers spotted two bus-sized asteroids heading toward Earth, which will pass at distances just a quarter of what separates the Moon from us.  Apart from asteroids, our galaxy is also of special interest to astronomers looking for signs of other planets supporting life. Right at the center of the Milky Way though, there is a supermassive black hole that has been dubbed Sagittarius A* or Sgr A* and S4716 is orbiting this black hole at a fierce pace.  What we know about S4716 From the observations made so far, we know that at 5,000 miles (8,000 km) a second or 18 million miles (29 million km) per hour, S4716 is the fastest star orbiting Sgr A*. It co

Four Jupiter-mass exoplanets dance around their parent star in a stunning new timelapse collected over a dozen years. The aim of the newly released video is to make the long orbits of these massive exoplanets more recognizable to a wide audience, Northwestern University astrophysicist Jason Wang said in a statement . "This video shows planets moving on a human time scale. I hope it enables people to enjoy something wondrous," said Wang. In real life, the planet nearest the star HR8799 takes 45 years to make a single circuit. The world farthest away would take half a millennium (500 years) to go around the star once. A timelapse animation of the four exoplanets "dancing" around the star HR8799. (Image credit: Jason Wang/Northwestern University) HR8799 is 1.5 times more massive than our sun and lies roughly 133 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. (By comparison, the closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is a bit more than 4 light-years away.) Whi

Massive cosmic explosions created when neutron stars collide aren't as chaotic as you might expect. When neutron stars collide, the explosions they create are perfectly spherical, a new study finds. This contradicts previous theories surrounding the blasts, known as kilonovas, that suggest they should proceed as flattened discs. But the reason these blasts take a spherical shape is still shrouded in mystery. Kilonovas are important to our understanding of cosmic evolution because it is in the extreme conditions created by these massive cosmic explosions that heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium are synthesized.  The ultimate result of a kilonova is a so-called "hypermassive" merged neutron star that rapidly collapses to birth a black hole. But other details about these events remain largely unknown, so any information about the collisions that cause them are metaphorical gold dust to astrophysicists. The first time a kilonova was detected was in 2017, and the

ASTEROID BELT It contains debris and space objects of different sizes and shapes. The biggest of them is series. Its surface is slightly larger than the area of Argentina and its weight is about one percent of the moons. The total weight of the entire asteroid belt is 25 times less than the moons. Next we pass gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. These are the largest planets in the solar system. They’re also the heaviest, even though they don’t have a solid surface. Then we travel by Uranus and Neptune. They’re called ice giants. And at the very edge of the solar system we see Pluto. It was once considered a full-fledged Planet, but now it’s not even on the list. After that, we’re 4.3 billion miles away from our home. It took the New Horizon space probe about nine years to get here. Hold on to your seat. We are speeding up. We’re passing through the Kuiper belt. There are lots of asteroids and blocks of ice here. These are some of the oldest building materials in our solar system. Billions