Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 18

The last of its kind?

Stellar streams consist of groups of stars moving in orbit together. They are usually remnants of small galaxies that were absorbed by larger galaxies or former star clusters. The Phoenix stream discovered four years ago is the latter. It was, as researchers show in an article in Nature, once a globular cluster, and a very special one at that.

Globular clusters are special objects in themselves. Imagine the night sky full of gleaming stars shining much brighter than the brightest planets in our ...

Time travel in the quantum world: how to generate a self-healing reality

The “butterfly effect” is a term from nonlinear dynamics, which is a subdomain of physics. It occurs in systems that meet three requirements: the output is not always proportional to the input (“nonlinear”), the progression is dependent on time, but is a function of only the original state (“dynamic”), and randomness is not a factor (“deterministic”: if A, then B). When these three conditions are met, a small change to the initial conditions can lead to large changes in the results. The phrase w...

How many planets fit into a star’s habitable zone?

The habitable zone of our Solar System is relatively narrow. Mars is at the very outer edge of it, while Venus, which orbits closer to the Sun than Earth, is not quite inside it. Of eight planets, only the Earth is at just the right distance from its host star. A ratio like this would naturally lower the chances of finding inhabitable worlds in the universe. But is the Solar System an exception or the rule?

Astronomers have, in fact, found other star systems that give a rosier outlook. For insta...

This star system will never be the Solar System

TYC 8998-760-1 might someday become something like our Sun. Right now, however, the young star is still a few billion years away from that. It’s been around for only about 17 million years. If it were the Sun, there would still be a long time before it would even be able to watch the dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the whippersnapper is still something special: astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) photographed it and found two planets in its orbit.

“Eve...

Centaurs: they’ve been with us for a long time

We’ve been waiting for extraterrestrial visitors our whole lives – but in reality, they’re already here and have been with us for a long time. No, I don’t mean “Men in Black.” But it’s also not science fiction, it’s the truth. When astronomers discovered 2017 1I/ʻOumuamua, their surprise was enormous: we’d never seen an interstellar object inside our Solar System before. Or had we?

We had. For some time, astronomers have known about asteroids that don’t orbit the Sun in the same plane as the pla...

Meanwhile, in the outer edges of the Solar System

Gonggong, Quaoar, Orcus, Salacia, Gǃkúnǁ’hòmdímà, Leleākūhonua. You’ve probably never heard of the names of any of these worlds before (except for maybe Quaoar), but they are all very real celestial bodies that likely meet the definition of a dwarf planet and thus would have had the same claim to the title of “planet” as Pluto, right up until the time Pluto was demoted from planet status. The reason you won’t find them on any night-sky charts for amateur astronomers is because their orbits are s...

In the orbit of two giants

Eta Carinae, approximately 7500 light-years from Earth, has everything that an astronomer could want. First, there’s the nebula surrounding Eta Carinae. The so-called Homunculus Nebula is still growing. It has the shape of two opposing cones, whose tips originate in Eta Carinae, and measures more than 0.5 light-years from end to end. From the propagation rate of up to 700 km/s, the existence of the nebula can be traced back to an outburst in the 1840s.

Second, it is not just a single star, but a...

How does a star simply vanish?

PHL 293B, also known as HL 293B, the Kinman dwarf galaxy, A2228-00, or SDSS J223036.79-000636.9, is a small, not especially bright galaxy 75 million light-years from the Sun. It belongs to a class of so-called “blue compact dwarf galaxies.” These normally consist of several large, young star clusters containing hot, massive stars. The brightest of these are blue – thus the designation of the galaxies and their color.

PHL 293B is no different. Between 2001 and 2011, astronomers observed that the ...

When you gotta go, you gotta go, even on the Moon…

Space is harsh and uncomfortable. That’s true for all human bodily functions. But maybe you’ve spent some time thinking about this problem and you have an idea for the perfect space toilet? It could win you $20,000 if it meets the following specifications:

General requirements

Easy to use
Odor control
Usable for at least 14 days
Usable for urine, feces, vomit, diarrhea, menses
Usable by female and male users between 58 to 77 inches tall and 107 to 290 lbs
Also usable by sick crew members, e.g.,...

Moving blocks of ice around on Triton – the reality

May 24, 2082, Neptune’s moon Triton: The hero of one of my novels, Nick, tries to move a block of ice weighing 80 kg (176 lbs). But it’s damn hard, even with Triton’s low force of gravity. “On Earth, the ice would slide because its bottom would melt due to the pressure, like under the blade of a skate, but it’s too cold for that here,” Nick thinks.

A mistake, a Swedish reader just wrote to me. The idea that ice skating works because ice melts under pressure and then forms a lubricating layer is ...