Philip Plait's Blog, page 4

Multiple stars like being born in chaos

A surprising fact about the Universe is that a significant number of stars are in binary systems, where two stars orbit each other. It depends on the type of star — red dwarfs tend to be more solitary, while high-mass stars are more likely to be in multiple systems — but something like 1/3 of all stars are in binary systems. 

Why doesn’t Jupiter have even more spectacular rings than Saturn?

Just recently on the blog I posted a series of images of Jupiter taken by JWST, some of which showed Jupiter’s faint ring. 

The building blocks for RNA-based life have been found… in the center of the Milky Way

We don’t know exactly how life arose on Earth.

For one thing it was a long time ago: Roughly 3.8 billion years in the past, give or take, and records of anything that happened from that period in Earth’s very ancient history are spotty. For another, we don’t know the chemical path life took. Surely simple molecules built up into more complex ones, eventually becoming able to store information and self-replicate. And then, abracadabra, DNA popped up and the rest is biological history.

In the early Universe, dark galaxies swarmed

When you think of a galaxy, you probably picture some gorgeous, sprawling spiral-armed disk loaded with bright blue stars and pink/red clouds of gas dotted along the arms. And in truth many galaxies are like that, including our Milky Way, while others are elliptical, or irregular, or even peculiar.

Sunlight forces tiny asteroids to get rid of their dust bunnies

Why are the surfaces of the tiny asteroids Ryugu and Bennu rocky and not smooth?

The spooky swirly spiral galaxies of JWST

Astronomers — and the public — are still reeling from the first images released taken by JWST. In many ways they’re similar to Hubble images, with amazing clarity and beauty.

But in a fundamental way they are very different. Hubble can see ultraviolet light, visible light — the kind we see — and a little bit into the infrared, where light has wavelengths longer than about 0.75 microns, the reddest red we can see. 

Wanna live on the Moon? Pack a sweater and a spacesuit and move to a lava tube.

If and when humans establish a permanent base on the Moon, it’ll be the pits.

Collapse pits, I should add. These are holes in the lunar surface where the roofs of cave-like lava tube have collapsed, allowing relatively easy access to underground “rooms” which can provide a pre-fab haven for astronauts working and living on the Moon.

The first dormant black hole likely found lurking in another galaxy

Despite years of searching for stellar-mass black holes — ones up to a few dozen times the mass of the Sun that form when massive stars explodes — not that many have been found. And in all those cases they betray their presence by eating matter from a companion star, causing them to glow brightly in X-rays. 

Did JWST find the most distant galaxy ever seen? Maaaaaybe.

[UPDATE: Welp.

One of the Universe’s most powerful explosions tried to disguise itself

Gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, are pretty much the ultimate explosions: Catastrophic releases of energy that can be many, many billions of times brighter than the Sun. They explode with such power that we can see some clear across the observable Universe!