Elizabeth Tasker's Blog, page 2

Have We Photographed Our Nearest Planetary System?

Artist impression of Proxima Centauri c. Press HD on the player for the best image quality (E. Tasker).

The discovery of Proxima Centauri b in 2016 caused a flood excitement. We had found an extrasolar planet around our nearest star, making this the closest possible world outside of our solar system!

But despite its proximity, discovering more about this planet is difficult. Proxima Centauri b was found via the radial velocity technique, which measures the stars wobble due to the gravity of...

Japan’s Mission to the Martian Moons Will Return a Sample From Phobos. What Makes This Moon So Exciting?

[image error]Artist impression of JAXA’s MMX spacecraft around Mars (JAXA).

Japan in planning to launch a mission to visit the two moons of Mars in 2024. The spacecraft will touchdown on the surface of Phobos, gathering a sample to bring back to Earth. But what is so important about a moon the size of a city?

Unlike the spherical shape of the Earth’s moon, the Martian moons resemble asteroids, with an asymmetric lumpy potato structure. This highlights one of the first mysteries about the pair: how did...

Exactly How Like Our Earth is an Earth-like Planet?

Explainer video for Earth-Like. (Vimeo edition with subtitles here)

Are we alone? The question hangs over each discovery of an Earth-sized planet as we speculate on its habitability. But how different and varied could these worlds really be? Perhaps the best way to get a flavor of this potential diversity is to build a few planets.

This is the idea behind Earth-Like: a website and twitter bot that lets you build your own Earth-like world. Earth-Like begins with a planet that resembles our...

The Giant Moon That Might Be the Heart of a Jupiter

[image error]Artist’s impression of the exomoon candidate Kepler-1625b-i, the planet it is orbiting and the star. (NASA/ESA/L. Hustak, STScI)

“Moons are where planets were in the 1990s,” predicted René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research a few years ago. “We’re on the brink.”

Heller was predicting that we were close to the first discoveries of exomoons: moons that orbit extrasolar planets outside our solar system. When a possible exomoon detection was announced in 2017, Heller’s...

The Planets Too Big for Their Star

[image error]Artist rendering of a red dwarf , with three exoplanets orbiting. About 75% of all stars in the sky are the cooler, smaller red dwarfs. (NASA)

Two giant planets have been found orbiting a tiny star, defying our theories for how planets are formed.

To be entirely truthful, there is nothing new in an exoplanet discovery shredding our current ideas about how planets are built. The first extrasolar planets ever discovered orbit a dead star known as a pulsar. Pulsars end their regular starry life...

Searching for the Edge of Habitability

[image error]Topographical map of Venus by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft (1990 – 1994). Color indicates height. (NASA/JPL/USGS)

How many habitable worlds like our own could exist around other stars? Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, the answer to this question has seemed tantalizingly close. But to estimate the number of Earths, we first need to understand how our planet could have gone catastrophically awry.

In other words, we need to return to Venus.

We have now discovered over 4000 planets beyo...

Hayabusa2 Snatches Second Asteroid Sample

[image error]Artist impression of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft touching down on asteroid Ryugu (JAXA / Akihiro Ikeshita)

“1… 2… 3… 4…”

The counting in the Hayabusa2 control room at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (JAXA, ISAS) took on a rhythmic beat as everyone in the room took up the chant, their eyes fixed on the large display mounted on one wall.

“10… 11… 12… 13…”

The display showed the line-of-sight velocity (speed away from or towards the Earth) of...

Starting Life on Another Planet

[image error]A look inside the planet simulator in the Origins of Life laboratory at McMaster University. Within this chamber, the origins of life can be explored on different worlds (McMaster University).

Have you ever wondered if you could kick-start life on another planet? In the Origins of Life laboratory at McMaster University in Canada, there is a machine that allows you to try this very task.

Exactly how life began on the Earth remains heavily debated, but one of the most famous ideas was proposed...

Japan’s Hayabusa2 Asteroid Mission Reveals a Remarkable New World

The Hayabusa2 touchdown movie, taken on February 22, 2019 (JST) when Hayabusa2 first touched down on asteroid Ryugu to collect a sample from the surface. It was captured using the onboard small monitor camera (CAM-H). The video playback speed is five times faster than actual time (JAXA).

On March 5 the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) released the extraordinary video shown above. The sequence of 233 images shows a spacecraft descending to collect material from the surface of an ast...

The Gale Winds of Venus Suggest How Locked Exoplanets Could Escape a Fate of Extreme Heat and Brutal Cold

Two images of the nightside of Venus captured by the IR2 camera on the Akatsuki orbiter in September 2016 (JAXA).

 

More than two decades before the first exoplanet was discovered, an experiment was performed using a moving flame and liquid mercury that could hold the key to habitability on tidally locked worlds.

The paper was published in a 1969 edition of the international journal, Science, by researchers Schubert and Whitehead. The pair reported that when a Bunsen flame was rotated beneath...