Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 28

Karst lakes on Titan

One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has a number of similarities to Earth: it has a dense atmosphere, mountains, and deserts, it rains, snows, and storms, with precipitation collecting in lakes and flowing in rivers into oceans. One of the differences is that it is much colder there, with temperatures around negative 180 °C. Therefore, methane and ethane, which are gases on Earth, play the role of terrestrial water on Titan; they form ice and even the sand grains in the deserts consist of frozen me...

Airborne telescope detects helium hydride ion in space

The helium hydride ion HeH+ is a puzzle in and of itself. As a noble gas, helium does not easily bond with other elements. And in the early universe, the selection of elements was much smaller than it is today: the only elements were hydrogen (H), helium (He), and traces of lithium, and only in ionized form, that is, without electrons, which form the basis for chemical bonds. After the big bang, the universe had to cool down first, for a period of approximately 300,000 years, before chemistry...

Traces of life in a meteorite from Mars

ALH-77005 has already been through a lot. The lump of stone, which weighs around one pound, was ripped from the surface of Mars 178 million years ago by the impact of a bigger meteorite. The force of the impact flung it into space. Through no fault of its own, ALH-77005 was then put on a course to Earth, where it arrived three million years later.

It was bigger at the time, but its entry into the Earth’s thick atmosphere would have broken it apart. A lump of brown-gray stone, weighing 483 gra...

What dark matter is (not) made of

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” the detective, Sherlock Holmes, says to Dr. Watson in “The Sign of the Four.” Cosmologists searching for dark matter, which should make up 85 percent of the universe’s mass, seem to be following a similar process right now. They are eliminating one component after another. Recently, they succeeded in eliminating two more possibilities.

Dark matter is not made up of tiny black holes. This result...

The weather for HR 8799 e: 1000 degrees Celsius with clouds of iron and silicate dust

HR 8799 e is a rather inhospitable place. The celestial body discovered in 2010 and orbiting the 30-million-year-young star HR 8799 at a distance of 129 light-years from Earth is a gas giant similar to Jupiter. But its host star shines nearly five times brighter than our Sun, creating a significantly hotter atmosphere for HR 8799’s innermost planet (despite the “e,” HR 8799 e is the closest planet to its host star) than Jupiter.

That is quite astonishing because at approximately 14.5 AU, HR 8...

What does the interior of Neptune or Uranus look like?

Exploring the interior of icy giant planets is not an easy task. Without more advanced technology, we won’t be able to use probes to make measurements on site, so researchers must rely on models. These models are based on what scientists know about the substances that make up these ice giants such as Neptune and Uranus.

However, we can’t rule out that these models might contain errors. For example, it was previously assumed that carbon always took the form of diamond under very high pressures...

How to send a spaceship to the closest star using lasers

The StarShot program wants to accelerate mini-spaceships by means of laser bombardment to a velocity of one-quarter the speed of light so that they can reach our neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, within the foreseeable future. The technology sounds feasible, but still must overcome a few hurdles.

Imagine you had to keep a ball floating in the air using a hairdryer. You will automatically think of a ping-pong ball floating a few inches above a fan. But could you accomplish this feat with a s...

Is it possible to fly on Mars?

Of course, it’s possible to fly to Mars – but how about on Mars? The red planet’s atmosphere is significantly thinner than Earth’s. Atmospheric pressure at Mars’s surface is 0.00636 bar, which is one-hundred-fiftieth of the pressure at Earth’s surface. For a heavier-than-air aircraft to take off, it needs lift. It’s difficult to generate enough lift in such a thin atmosphere – but engineers at NASA’s JPL have apparently done it.

In any case, on NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission, they want to inc...

Physicists turn back time – a bit

“Man! If only I could turn back time!” According to an article in the science magazine Scientific Reports, physicists have apparently succeeded in doing just that – at least in the quantum realm and with very small particles. However, it’s still impossible to manipulate the wheel of time, because the Second Law of Thermodynamics distinguishes between the past and the future.

Most other physical laws are reversible. But when the Second Law comes into play, nature behaves very stubbornly, and e...

How to look inside a black hole

When mass is so strongly concentrated that not even light can escape its gravitational field, physicists call this phenomenon a black hole. In reality, however, the name doesn’t quite fit its true physical nature. This is because some radiation, so-called Hawking radiation, is indeed emitted from a black hole. In addition, black holes set their surroundings in so much turmoil that in no way do they remain invisible: the matter falling into the hole forms an accretion disk around it, there are...