Space

A 15-year-old boy, from Seaford, East Sussex, captured an awesome picture of Saturn using a personal telescope in his back garden that many experienced astrophysicists would be proud of. Marcus Reed was able to take this perfect picture of the Saturn, as well as its entire rings, using a reflector telescope of diameter 102mm. According to Marcus Reed, he stayed up till 4 am, using an iPhone app called Sky Guide to pinpoint the Saturn in the sky. He said: “I took the picture at four in the morning. I turned on the app and saw that Saturn was evident, so straight away I put my slippers on and ran downstairs, setting up my telescope on the back lawn in my pajamas. I was pleasantly amazed when I looked back and saw I got such a clear picture - Saturn is my favorite planet. 'I have been interested in astronomy and photography for a long time, and I really enjoy it - I use my telescope every night when it's clear.” The Gas Giant (Saturn) is the sixth planet from in the Solar System a

It is one of the most massive black holes ever discovered. Scientists have identified an ultra-supermassive black hole 30 billion times the mass of our sun hiding in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Black holes are born when colossal stars many times the size of our sun run out of fuel, and collapse in on themselves in spectacular fashion. The resulting singularity is incredibly dense, and boasts a gravitational pull so powerful that light itself cannot escape it. Astronomers attempting to unravel the secrets of these insatiable singularities have to contend with a unique cosmological problem: how can you understand something that you cannot physically see? Want to know how our #astronomers including @JwNightingale22 used gravitational lensing to discover a black hole 30 billion times the mass of our Sun? Check out our explainer video here 👉 https://t.co/1e96uYXH5t #DUInspire — Durham University (@durham_uni) March 30, 2023 As their name suggests, black holes emit n

At least a dozen planets outside our solar system may be more suitable for life than Earth. These worlds are somewhat older, slightly wetter, slightly warmer, and slightly larger than Earth, according to research published Sept. 18 in the journal Astrobiology. All of these criteria may indicate that some of these planets are ideal for searching for extraterrestrial life. "We have to focus on certain planets that have the most promising conditions for complex life. However, we have to be careful to not get stuck looking for a second Earth because there could be planets that might be more suitable for life than ours," University of Washington astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch said in a statement. Astronomers have discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, so far. Most of these are not particularly conducive to life. For example, planet KELT-9b is so hot that its atmosphere is constantly melting. The darkest known planet, TrES-2b, has an atmosph

We know there's water on the Moon, but questions remain about how it got there, where it's stored, and how it moves around. In a new study, scientists from China have identified tiny glass beads in the lunar soil as potential places where water could hide. And we're talking about a lot of water too, perhaps as much as 270 trillion kilograms (297.6 billion tons) of the stuff. The new findings are based on samples brought back from China's Chang'e 5 rover mission. The spacecraft spent a couple of weeks collecting material from the lunar surface in December 2020, and we've already seen exciting new discoveries from subsequent analysis. Impact glass beads under analysis. (He et al, Nature Geoscience, 2023) Microscopic glass beads typically form as bits of space rock smack into another object's surface, vaporizing minerals which can cool into vitreous particles barely a few tens or hundreds of micrometers across. Past studies on beads found in Apollo lunar sample

Earth, often considered the best planet for supporting life, is not the only contender in the Universe. Scientists have identified other potential worlds that could be even more suitable for life, and one such candidate is KOI 5715.01, located approximately 3,000 light-years away from our Solar System. However, KOI 5715.01 goes beyond meeting the basic requirements and exhibits characteristics that make it a potential superhabitable planet. Belonging to a planetary system approximately 5.5 billion years old, KOI 5715.01 is about one billion years older than our Solar System. Furthermore, its size nearly meets the criteria for superhabitable worlds, with scientists seeking planets up to 1.5 times the mass of Earth and about 10% larger. This size difference contributes to better heat retention, and if the average temperature were about 5 °C (8 °F) higher than Earth's, the exoplanet could potentially harbor even richer biodiversity. However, being nearly double the size of Earth, KOI

Last month, a private satellite tracking company spotted a Chinese spacecraft apparently grabbing and throwing a dead satellite away into a " graveyard " orbit. Something out of a Star Wars movie occurred in Earth's orbit last month.  A Chinese satellite was spotted in late January grabbing another long-dead satellite and days later throwing it into a " graveyard " orbit 300 km away, where objects are less likely to hit spacecraft. These rare events were presented by Dr. Brien Flewelling in a webinar hosted by the Center of Strategic and International Studies and Secure World Foundation last month. Flewelling is the chief space situational awareness architect of ExoAnalytic Solutions, a private U.S. company that tracks the position of satellites using a large global network of optic telescopes.  The Chinese SJ-21 satellite was seen on January 22 changing its usual place in the sky to approach decommissioned satellite Compass-G2. A few days later, SJ-21 attached

Is time travel possible? Well, we might find the answer in this amazing video. Professor Brian Cox, a Doctor Who admirer, makes a stunning experiment to prove the Physics and possibility of time travel. His conclusion: Time travel is possible, but not into the past but only into the future!

One of quantum mechanics' stranger aspects could be explained by an equally strange idea: causation can run backwards in time as well as forwards. What Einstein referred to as " spooky " action at a distance could theoretically be evidence of retro-causality, which is the particle equivalent of getting a stomach ache today because of a bad lunch tomorrow. A pair of physicists from the United States and Canada examined some basic assumptions in quantum theory and concluded that, unless we discovered that time only runs one way, measurements made to a particle could echo back in time as well as forward.  We've all heard that quantum mechanics is strange. Part of the strangeness stems from the fact that particles, on a fundamental level, don't behave like solid billiard balls rolling down a table, but rather like a blurry cloud of possibilities shifting around the room. When we try to measure particles in this blurry cloud, we only see a white ball hitting a black ba

The observable universe contains around 40 billion billion (4x1019, or 40,000,000,000,000,000,000) black holes, according to a newly published estimate. If you can't get your mind around that figure, join the club – but another way of putting it is that approximately 1 percent of the “ordinary” matter in the universe is contained in the form of black holes. The figure is published in The Astrophysical Journal and is the work of Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Italy, PhD student Alex Sicilia and supervisors, along with a large team of collaborators. Sicilia didn't actually count the black holes of course – although if his PhD was like most, he probably felt as if he had by the end. Instead, the research relied on the fact most black holes are formed when stars with masses more than 20 times that of the Sun reach the end of their lives. The result is an object with a mass 5-160 times that of the Sun, so dense not even light can escape its mighty gravitational f

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical profile of a distant world’s skies. While Webb and other space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet’s atmosphere, the new readings from Webb provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds. The latest data also gives a hint of how these clouds might look up close: broken up rather than a single, uniform blanket over the planet. The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, a “hot Saturn” (a planet about as massive as Saturn but in an orbit tighter than Mercury) orbiting a star some 700 light-years away. The findings bode well for the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct the broad range of investigations of all types of exoplanets – planets around other stars – hoped for by the science community. That includes probing the atm

With only one star in the sky, our Solar System appears to be an outlier. Most stars in the Milky Way galaxy have at least one gravitationally bound stellar companion, implying that two-star worlds such as Tatooine are not uncommon. However, star systems are not limited to a maximum of two stars. We discovered systems with up to seven stars linked together in a complex orbital dance. And now, scientists have found what they believe may be a first for astronomy: an exoplanet orbiting a system of three stars, also known as a stellar trinary. To be clear, exoplanets have previously been discovered in trinary systems – orbiting only one of the system’s stars. If this new discovery is validated, the exoplanet will be in orbit around all three stars, which has never been observed before. Stars in the Milky Way are not typically born alone. Their birthplaces are massive molecular clouds, where dense clumps of gas collapse under gravity. As these clumps spin, the cloud’s material condenses int

Astronomers have obtained stunning new images of a young star system that reveal a surprising twist: three planets that were previously detected are now missing.  The images, taken by two powerful telescopes in Hawaii, show the system with unprecedented clarity and detail, shedding new light on the process of planet formation. The star system, called LkCa 15, is located about 473 light-years away from Earth. It is a Sun-like star surrounded by a disc of dust and gas, which is the raw material for building planets. In 2015, a team of astronomers claimed to have found evidence of three giant planets, each about 10 times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting within a gap in the disc. However, a new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, challenges this claim and shows that the planets were actually an illusion caused by the complex structure of the disc itself. The study is based on new observations made by the Subaru Telescope and the WM Keck Observatory, both located on Ma

Venus, the second planet from the Sun, has long been considered a hostile and uninhabitable world, with a surface temperature of about 470°C and a crushing atmospheric pressure of 92 times that of Earth.  However, a recent discovery by an international team of astronomers has raised the possibility that life may exist in the clouds of Venus, where the conditions are more temperate and Earth-like. The researchers, led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, detected a chemical signature of phosphine in Venus' atmosphere, using two powerful telescopes: the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. Phosphine is a gas that on Earth is produced only by living organisms or in industrial processes. It is highly toxic and flammable, and has a distinctive smell of rotten fish. The detection of phosphine on Venus is surprising and intriguing, because it implies that there may be some biological or chemical process that is producing the gas in the

If you think you have seen some spectacular fireworks on Earth, you might want to think again. Astronomers have recently witnessed a colossal explosion in space that dwarfed anything we have ever created. This explosion was so powerful that it shook the entire universe and left scientists baffled. What caused this cosmic blast? The answer lies in one of the most extreme objects in the universe: a neutron star. Neutron stars are the remnants of massive stars that have collapsed under their own gravity after running out of fuel. They are incredibly dense, with a teaspoon of their material weighing billions of tons. They also have intense magnetic fields and spin very fast, sometimes hundreds of times per second. Some neutron stars are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that they accrete from a companion star or the interstellar medium. This process heats up the neutron star and causes it to emit X-rays, which can be detected by telescopes on Earth. These neutron stars are called X-ray

Glimpsed only occasionally at the hearts of massive clusters of galaxies, ultramassive black holes are some of the largest and most elusive objects in the universe.  These black hole behemoths have masses exceeding that of 10 billion suns, making them far more monstrous than even the supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way, and their tremendous size has long perplexed astronomers.  Now, researchers studying a rare galaxy merger with three supermassive black holes at its center may have finally discovered the origins of these cosmic monsters.  Using a high-resolution cosmological simulation called ASTRID, the team modeled the evolution of the universe as it appeared about 11 billion years ago. In the simulation, the team witnessed the birth of an ultramassive black hole following the merger of the three galaxies. Each of these galaxies contained its own quasar, a supermassive black hole that feeds on gas and powers massive outbursts of radiation that

Jupiter is so big, it doesn't actually orbit the sun. Here's how. Jupiter, our solar system’s fifth planet from the sun, the massive gas giant that protects Earth and the inner planets from potential catastrophic comet and asteroid strikes, is more unique than you’ve ever imagined. The gas giant is so huge, that it doesn’t actually orbit around the sun. Jupiter is 2.5 times the mass of ALL other planets in our solar system combined. This means that it’s so freakishly large, that the center of gravity between the gas giant and the sun does not reside within the sun, but a point in space, located just above our sun’s surface. And there’s a perfectly rational explanation for that. When a smaller object orbits a bigger one, the smaller body does not travel around the larger one in a circle. Instead, both these objects orbit a ‘shared’ center of Gravity; which means they meet somewhere in a perfect center. But Jupiter is special. Due to the fact that the gas giant is so hefty, its c

A 15-year-old boy, from Seaford, East Sussex, captured an awesome picture of Saturn using a personal telescope in his back garden that many experienced astrophysicists would be proud of. Marcus Reed was able to take this perfect picture of the Saturn, as well as its entire rings, using a reflector telescope of diameter 102mm. According to Marcus Reed, he stayed up till 4 am, using an iPhone app called Sky Guide to pinpoint the Saturn in the sky. He said: “I took the picture at four in the morning. I turned on the app and saw that Saturn was evident, so straight away I put my slippers on and ran downstairs, setting up my telescope on the back lawn in my pajamas. I was pleasantly amazed when I looked back and saw I got such a clear picture - Saturn is my favorite planet. 'I have been interested in astronomy and photography for a long time, and I really enjoy it - I use my telescope every night when it's clear.” The Gas Giant (Saturn) is the sixth planet from in the Solar System a