Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 22
March 16, 2020
Bad news for life on Titan – or not?
So that life as we know it can emerge, it must be able to differentiate itself somehow from its environment. Therefore, every cell needs a shell that allows nutrients to pass through it from the outside, but nevertheless protects the cells insides from the outside world. On Earth, cell membranes perform this function and are made from lipids, hydrocarbon compounds that include, among other things, fatty acids.
On Saturns moon, Titan, it is much too cold, at an average temperature of -180 °C,...
March 14, 2020
Why the star of Orion’s left shoulder is fading
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant. With a diameter 1000 times that of the Suns and formerly 10,000 times the illuminance, it has wowed the entire Milky Way, but now its even being mentioned on the cable news shows. Why? Because everyones hoping for a catastrophe. If such a large star fades to 36 percent of its previous illuminance within a short time, it would suggest it might soon end in a supernova. That would certainly be spectacular, because it would grace the Earths night skies with the...
March 12, 2020
NASA wants to visit Triton, Io, and Venus
NASA has unveiled four new research missions that could set flight under the Discovery Program if their feasibility can be confirmed. They highlight three locations that you will already know from my books: Venus (two proposals), Io, and Triton. However, a maximum of two of the four proposals will be developed.
Here are the details:
DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus)
DAVINCI+ will analyze Venuss atmosphere in order to understand how it...
March 10, 2020
Cosmic strings and our existence in the universe
The Big Bang was the beginning of this, our universe. Astrophysicists agree on that much at least. Whether it was or will be the only event of this type is a debate for philosophers. But there are still a few unresolved questions involving the Big Bang. The most important of these would probably be: why do we exist at all? Because after all the four fundamental forces finally developed after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should always be formed in exactly the same amount. The evolution...
March 8, 2020
Sleeping monster from the early days of the universe
At first glance, XMM-2599 appears to be a rather boring galaxy (because it’s dying). But an international research team has recently discovered that it’s really a sleeping monster. XMM-2599 formed more than 12 billion years ago, when the universe was still very young, only 1.8 billion years old. At first the galaxy was extremely active. “Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy,” says...
February 13, 2020
Spectacular details on the Sun’s surface
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Daniel K.Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) plays an important role in my novel “Silent Sun.” When I wrote the book, the solar telescope was still under construction. It’s still not completely finished, but it’s already taken its first snapshots of its only object of observation, our Sun. The images are absolutely stunning, showing the Sun’s surface at a level of detail never seen before.
Close-up of the image above, edge length 8,200 km x 8,200 km....
February 12, 2020
The dramatic end of a starry couple
The death fight between two stars has been captured in pictures by astronomers with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). The gas cloud, which appears to consist of multiple rings, is the remains of the binary star system HD101584. “A nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant,” explains Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who is the lead author of a study on this object,now published in the journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The...
February 11, 2020
New simulations of the cosmos in 3D
View a supernova from all sides, follow a shock wave from all directions, watch the birth of a star: you can do all that and more with some impressive 3D simulations that are freely available on the net; they were made using data from some of the most important space telescopes.
I encourage you to take a look; the examples are fascinating and allow you to experience events in space much more vividly and clearly than by just reading about them or by looking at 2D pictures.
February 9, 2020
What’s going on at the bottom of Enceladus’s oceans?
Along with Mars, Saturn’s moon, Titan, and Jupiter’s moon, Europa, another of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, has long topped the list of locations to search for possible extraterrestrial life. The last probe to study it, Cassini, gave up the ghost in a fiery descent through Saturn’s atmosphere, but new discoveries are still being made in the data it transmitted back to Earth, as an article in Geophysical Research Lettersshows.
Dr. Christopher Glein, the main author of the study, explained: “We...
January 23, 2020
Galaxy group from the epoch of reionization discovered
The universe has a 13.8 billion year long history behind it. Astronomers have already found lots of evidence to support the current model, but the more evidence there is for a theory, the better. To observe the formation of the universe, astronomers use actual time machines – their telescopes. The farther an object is away from us, the longer its light takes to reach us, and thus the farther back in time the light we are now seeing was created.
An international research group has now...
