Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 27
June 30, 2019
The Very Large Telescope checks out the Alpha Centauri system
The closest star system to our Sun (4.37 light-years away) consists of two Sun-like stars (Alpha Centauri A and B) and the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. Astronomers already discovered a rocky planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. But what about the binary Alpha Centauri system? A new instrument named NEAR and developed by the “Breakthrough Watch” Initiative and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is set to find out.
NEAR (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region) is, above all, a so-called thermal in...
June 19, 2019
Into space with Blue Origin: test seating in New Shepard
In 2019, the private space travel company Blue Origin is still planning on being the first private organization to bring humans above the Karman line to an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles) and thus officially into space. The company founded by Jeff Bezos (Amazon) is setting its hopes on the “New Shepard,” a suborbital rocket with a passenger and cargo capsule that is launched and also landed by remote control – and is also reusable. It’s not yet clear how expensive the flights will be, b...
June 17, 2019
How does a radio telescope work? A visit to the Very Large Array
Every – okay, almost every – object in the universe emits light. When astronomers talk about light, however, they’re not only talking about the small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum that humans can see, i.e., the optical range, but instead they’re talking about all of it: radio waves, infrared, visible light, UV light, X-rays, gamma radiation (listed here in order of decreasing wavelength). Physicists would call this “electromagnetic radiation,” but “light” also fits very well,...
June 15, 2019
Three exocomets discovered in orbit around Beta Pictoris
NASA’s satellite TESS is actually supposed to be searching for exoplanets. To do this, TESS records light curves of stars, that is, the change in brightness of a star over time. If something happens in a certain rhythm in these light curves, then there must be something there covering the star repeatedly – something like a planet. Or maybe a comet! TESS has apparently just discovered three of these in orbit around the nearby star Beta Pictoris.
Sebastian Zieba, a graduate student on a team le...
June 13, 2019
Where the geysers on Neptune’s moon, Triton, come from
Triton is a strange moon. It is the only one of the large moons of our Solar System that rotates the wrong way about its planet – Neptune, the eighth and outermost planet. That’s also why it’s assumed that Triton is a Kuiper belt object, similar to Pluto, that was captured by Neptune. On first look, Triton appears very hostile to life – at temperatures close to 0 °C, the atmosphere, which consists of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, is almost completely frozen, and thus it is very thin...
June 11, 2019
Fly to Mars with NASA – on board the next Mars rover
Right now, not only can you send a postcard into space, but you can also send your name to Mars – on board NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. All you need to need is enter your name and e-mail address at go.nasa.gov/Mars2020Pass. Your name will then be etched onto a microchip that is mounted on the rover. Your name will be arranged on a line that is 75 micrometers high. This will allow NASA to etch a million names on the chip. 2 million names flew along with the Insight probe. As a reward you’ll get a v...
June 9, 2019
Gas-hydrate layer keeps Pluto’s ocean warm
In 2015, the dwarf planet, Pluto, received its first visitor from Earth. NASA’s New Horizons probe sent back spectacular images that showed, among other things, the “heart” of Pluto – a region named Tombaugh Regio consisting of, among other things, the unusually light-colored Sputnik Planitia. This is a plain that is up to one to nine kilometers deep, covers approximately the surface area of Texas, and is coated with nitrogen ice.
From its existence, researchers could already assume a few thi...
May 16, 2019
The first star explosions were gigantic – and asymmetrical
After a star with significantly more mass than the Sun has consumed all its fuel, it decays into a massive firework display, a supernova. In today’s universe, that is not a very common sight, because the greatest percentage of stars is made up of red dwarfs, which end their lives not nearly so spectacularly. Our Sun is also not destined to turn into a supernova. It will grow into a red giant and then, at the end, only a harmless white dwarf will remain.
In the early universe, however, things...
May 14, 2019
Two values for one constant – impossible, but true
The universe is expanding. That’s something astronomers have agreed on for a long time. Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer, was the first to discover that light from distant galaxies was shifted toward red frequencies by the time it reached us – which meant that the source of the light was moving away from us. The Hubble constant, which expresses how quickly the universe is expanding, was named in Hubble’s honor. It has a value of approximately (more on this later) 70 kilometers per second...
May 12, 2019
Gliding in the clouds of Venus: NASA studies two Venus missions
Every year, NASA uses the “NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts” program (NIAC) to finance interesting projects that might someday become a reality. Projects in Phase 1 are subject to a nine-month study on their general feasibility, while in Phase 2, projects receive a two-year grant to develop their designs in detail. At the end, they aren’t required to be commercially marketable just yet – the transition to that level of development is done in Phase 3.
Currently, the list includes two projects...
