Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 26

A radio view into a black hole’s backyard

By definition, black holes themselves remain shut off from direct observation. But astronomers have been able to precisely image the sphere of influence of a black hole – the area in which its gravity is the dominant force. In the case of a supermassive black hole in the interior of a galaxy, this area can be up to 500 light-years across. For comparison, the closest star to the Sun is a good four light-years away.

This imaging was done by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA...

Life might also exist on cold planets

Our Earth has already lived through several ice ages, during which the oceans were covered with ice all the way down to the equator – so-called Snowball eras. Life on our planet has survived all these times; primarily due to one reason: at the time, life existed only in the oceans, and the depths of the oceans still offered good conditions for life. What would have happened if life had already made its way onto land? That was the basis of a study done by Canadian researchers.

Snowball Earths...

Next year in space? Launch your very own satellite

While searching for interesting space gadgets (I also always gladly accept tips and suggestions), I came across a very exciting project. How would you like to be able to send your very own satellite into space? And it wouldn’t cost you millions of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars; for less than 300 dollars and your own time and effort, you can have your own personal satellite called AmbaSat-1.

How does it work? You can find a description at www.ambasat.com. AmbaSat-1 is a micr...

How our Milky Way was born

13 billion years ago, the universe looked quite different. Stars formed in rapid sequence and joined to form dwarf galaxies that grew bigger through collisions with each other, in order to finally become the massive galaxies we see today. Our Milky Way was formed through a similar process.

Spanish researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have now succeeded in retracing the development of our home galaxy using data from the Gaia satellite. To do this, the astronomers compa...

Have you ever seen a moon being born?

It starts with a cloud of gas and dust. The cloud contracts into a disk and a star ignites at its center. Planetoids form around the star in the protoplanetary disk and grow into planets. Around the planets, in turn, are dust disks that eventually form moons. Up to that last step, this theory of solar system formation had long been confirmed by observations. But no telescope had yet discovered a dust disk around a planet.

Now one has. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array mad...

Transforming Mars into a second Earth – a simple trick

In the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers have presented an exciting method for transforming Mars into a fertile planet: they want to cover our neighbor with a thin layer made of silicate aerogels.

How is that supposed to work? The Red Planet has two properties that make the existence of life on its surface more difficult. First, it is significantly too cold there, and second, life can be destroyed by the cosmic radiation that is incident on the Mars surface in much higher amounts than on...

Do bacteria use tungsten for protection from interstellar radiation?

Tungsten is a heavy metal with impressive properties: the white, shiny material doesn’t melt until the temperature is at 3422 °C and doesn’t boil until 5930 °C. It is resistant to almost all acids and has approximately the density of gold. It is also interesting that all its natural isotopes are theoretically unstable. Their half-lives, however, are on the order of trillions of years, so their decomposition is not measurable on our time scales.

Humans have used tungsten to construct light-bul...

Old and young at the same time? The mystery of red giants

At the end of their life, main sequence stars (which also include our Sun) develop into red giants. This fate is predestined for them. However, it’s not so easy to figure out the true age of a red giant. This is because there are many individual factors that can accelerate or slow down their development.

Astronomers have gotten rather good at this in recent years, but there are always exceptions. Four years ago, researchers of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institut...

Interstellar medium as a filling station – a model calculation

In my book “Proxima Rising,” I describe how a spaceship, which at first is the size of a needle, is accelerated by powerful lasers to 20% of the speed of light. Then it increases its size by collecting material from its surroundings. But isn’t that totally unrealistic? Isn’t space just empty between the stars?

No. I’m sure you had already guessed that answer, because hopefully you know I’m trying hard to write scientifically possible science fiction. The vacuum in space is not empty. From a q...

Launch of Dragonfly Mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, planned for 2026

NASA just announced some great news for readers of the ice moon series: in 2026, so in just seven years, an innovative mission will be launched to Titan, a mission that will study the surface of the fascinating moon with the help of an autonomous drone. “Dragonfly” should find good flying conditions there – the atmospheric pressure at Titan’s surface is 50% higher than the air pressure at the Earth’s surface. Under those conditions, even a human in a wingsuit could fly under his or her own po...