Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 25

Saturn is the new King of Moons – and you can help name the moons just discovered!

The fact that a planet – like the Earth – has only one single companion, is rather unusual in our Solar System. With 79 moons, the giant planet Jupiter previously had the most moons. Now, it’s been surpassed by Saturn, which changed from having 62 to 82 moons in one fell swoop. The new moons around the ringed planet were discovered using the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Each of the newcomers has a diameter of about 5 km (3 miles). Seventeen of the twenty are orbiting Saturn in the wrong...

A planet that shouldn’t exist

GJ 3512 is a red dwarf. The star is about 31 light-years from us and has only 12% the mass of the Sun. But as far as the size of its companions go, GJ 3512 doesn’t hold back. As a German and Spanish research team has discovered, it has a gas giant with a mass of almost half our Jupiter. “Such stars should actually only have Earth-sized planets or at most super-Earths with slightly more mass,” says Professor Christoph Mordasini of the Physics Institute at the University of Bern, discussing pla...

Our second interstellar visitor has a name: 2I/Borisov

Were we being too loud, or did they just want to see Earth before it’s too late? Our Solar System is apparently becoming a popular destination point with extrasolar tourists. All jokes aside: After ‚Oumuamua at the end of 2017, astronomers have apparently just photographed our second interstellar object, which is currently moving toward the Sun.

The object was first discovered on August 30th. That night, amateur astronomer, Gennadi Borisov, found a comet-like object (initially called C/2019 Q...

New NASA simulations: what it’s like around a black hole

A black hole grows by being fed from a so-called accretion disk that supplies it with fresh matter. This disk is made up of plasma, ionized gas that orbits in continuous spirals around the black hole at high speeds. This plasma is constantly heated by internal collisions.

To an observer, however, an accretion disk won’t look like a classic disk (like, for example, Saturn’s rings). This is because a black hole generates such an unbelievably large force of gravity that radiation from the rear p...

Exo-Io: volcanic exomoon in orbit around WASP-49 b?

WASP-49 is a yellow dwarf star, somewhat smaller than the Sun and, in the grand scheme of the universe, just as unimportant as our own home star, so that up to now it hasn’t even been given a proper name. Astronomers also know it as “2MASS J06042146-1657550” or “TYC 5936-2086-1.” The fact that it also has the relatively short and catchy name of WASP-49 is thanks to the “Wide Angle Search for Planets”: WASP is an international cooperation that operates two autonomous telescopes. In 2011, resea...

Water vapor in the atmosphere of an inhabitable rocky planet

There’s no shortage of water in the universe. Water molecules have even been found in the cold interstellar medium. After hydrogen, water is the second most abundant substance in the atmosphere of hot gas planets. Neptune, Uranus, and their siblings in space are not called ice giants for no reason – they also contain a large amount of water ice.

On rocky planets, water could be a sign of good conditions for life. This, however, would also depend on where the water is located. Researchers alre...

Big baby stars grow the same way as small baby stars

The protostellar object, G353.273+0.641, which is located 5500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpio, is still a baby. It ignited only around 3000 years ago; astronomically, that is an extremely short amount of time. Nevertheless, G353 is already ten-times heavier than the Sun, and it’s still growing.

For the first time, researchers were able to catch a direct glance from above of such a massive protostar and its surroundings using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Arra...

When storms carry ammonia gas to the top

Jupiter is easily identifiable from the band-like structures that extend across its surface. These belts are areas of different rotation and quite different properties. But what’s going on underneath them? The Hubble telescope or probes such as Juno primarily show just the exterior layer. To understand the dynamic behavior of Jupiter’s atmosphere, scientists need to look into its depths – something the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) makes possible in the radio frequency r...

Structures in the cosmic mist

The Milky Way has existed for at least 13 billion years. Since then, it has continued to produce more and more new stars; one generation gives way to the next. To do this, it needs gas – more than it contains itself. That applies to all other galaxies too. But where do the Milky Way, Andromeda, and their like find more gas? In the intergalactic medium, which, at first glance, looks like just empty space between the galaxies.

But these gigantic areas are not empty. They contain the intergalac...

ISS Above: your direct line to the International Space Station

Since 2014, four high-definition cameras on the outside of the International Space Station ISS have been tracking what’s going on in space. “ISS Above” can bring this video stream (and a lot more information) right to your television screen. Normally, the cameras are filming our planet and thus offer a unique look at the Earth as usually experienced only by astronauts.

However, the Earth is visible in the video stream only when the ISS is above the Sun-lit side of the Earth during its 92-minu...