Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 13

When a star rips apart …

… a muon deep under the ice of Antarctica creates a trace in a gigantic detector. The muon was created because a high-energy neutrino interacted with an atom in the detector. The neutrino began its journey about 700 million years ago, around the time the first animals evolved on Earth. That’s the travel time it took for the particle to get from the distant, unnamed galaxy (cataloged as 2MASX J20570298+1412165) in the constellation of The Dolphin to Earth. It occurred as a result of “AT2019dsg.” ...

Far far out is farther out than far out

It is like it is. Astronomers have now confirmed it: Dwarf planet candidate “Farfarout” really is farther away than its buddy “Farout”. Farfarout was first spotted in January 2018 by the Subaru telescope on Maunakea in Hawai’i. Its discoverers could tell it was very far away, but they weren’t sure exactly how far. They needed more observations.

“At that point, we didn’t know the orbit of the object because we only had the Subaru discovery observations over 24 hours, but it takes years of observa...

Where water will be easiest to find on Mars

The more resources we have to transport to our neighboring planet, the more expensive a manned mission to Mars will be. Current concepts therefore rely on the human inhabitants using the resources that Mars makes available to them. On the one hand, there is the carbon dioxide atmosphere, from which methane can be obtained as fuel for the return flight – and on the other, there are water and ice deposits from which oxygen and drinking water can be obtained.

It is already known that Mars is not co...

How heavy is dark matter?

Dark matter is a mysterious phenomenon. We do not know what it looks like or what it is made of. But physicists are convinced that it exists, because the effect of its gravitational pull can be observed in many examples in the cosmos. The visible universe – ourselves, the planets and stars – accounts for 25 percent of the total mass in the universe. The remaining 75 percent of its mass consists of dark matter.

The fact that it interacts via gravity at least gives researchers a clue as to how hea...

Three couples in a rare star dance

It must be quite interesting to live in the star system TYC 7037-89-1. Imagine a Galileo Galilei who has to explain this to his church highers: “Gentlemen, the earth moves around the sun while the sun moves around another sun. Just as two other stars orbit each other, with which we in turn orbit the center of mass with a third pair.”

But that probably still would have been the simpler option, because the three pairs of stars astronomers found using NASA’s TESS satellite telescope orbit each othe...

Six exoplanets in unusual resonance

If one leaves multi-body systems to themselves, sometimes a strange order appears. The distances of the planetary orbits are integer multiples of a basic value, moons and planets move in unison, celestial bodies always turn to the same side – what we then perceive as cosmic order are all no miracles, but merely results of the effect of gravity in a system built up in a certain way.

This is also true of TOI-178, a star about 200 light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. When researchers fir...

How deep is Titan’s largest lake?

Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most mysterious celestial bodies in the solar system. Beneath the golden haze of gaseous nitrogen in which it is enveloped, it has a weather cycle comparable to Earth’s – only not with water, but with liquid methane. The methane comes down from the sky as rain, flows down the mountains in rivers, forms lakes and oceans, and evaporates from them back into the atmosphere.

In a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, researchers now use data from one of t...

In search of the axion, a hypothetical elementary particle

For some time now, physicists have been thinking about an elementary particle that has very little mass, no electric charge and no spin (quantum angular momentum). It would interact very little with other particles because of these properties and would therefore be a good candidate for dark matter, which is characterized by just that. But the axion is also used in physics because in the neutron, a neutral nuclear particle, the charge of the quarks of which it is composed is so perfectly distribu...

Premature birth? The most distant quasar raises questions

Astronomers have discovered the most distant quasar yet. The monstrous celestial object called J0313-1806, which existed 670 million years after the Big Bang, shines thousands of times brighter than the Milky Way and is powered by another extreme, the earliest supermassive black hole, more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. This fully formed distant quasar with a redshift of z = 7.64, formed more than 13 billion years ago, is also the earliest quasar discovered to date, giving astronome...

I welcome our future rulers, the Artificial Superintelligences

An artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans is one of the favorite subjects in science fiction. There are researchers who claim that such an AI is technically impossible. Others believe it is inevitable. If that could be the case, humanity faces a difficult problem. Can we somehow ensure that this superintelligence is benevolent to us? Can we control it? Because if we can’t, the survival of humanity would be in its hands alone. A conception, which can please us so little that we would...