Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 30

Gigantic patterns in the clouds of Venus – and how they are formed

Venus is often called “Earth’s hot sister.” It is called “sister” because it is similar to our home planet in size and shape. But its atmosphere is characterized by extreme pressure and high temperatures. On the surface, temperatures can reach up to 460 °C (860 °F). The planet needs 243 Earth days to make one revolution about its axis, while Earth needs only one day, but the Earth always takes its atmosphere along with it like a good, well-behaved planet. On Venus, however, a fast, 360 km/h (...

A cosmic beacon from the dawn of the universe

The Hubble Space Telescope has succeeded in imaging an especially bright quasar from the dawn of the universe. As astronomers report in a paper, J043947.08+163415.7 is 12.8 billion light-years away. That also means that we can see 12.8 billion years into the past. When the light that is reaching us today was emitted from the quasar, the universe was still in its epoch of reionization.

Thus, by discovering this quasar, astronomers have the chance of observing the cosmos as a child. The quasar...

Our Milky Way is weird – but a catastrophe will soon straighten everything out

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is, we must unfortunately admit, rather an oddball specimen of a spiral galaxy. The black hole at its center is underdeveloped (it is too light by a whole order of magnitude), it is surrounded by a (too) low mass halo of stars with extremely low metal content, and it has an unusually large companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

But there is some good news, as astronomers report in a recent paper: in just 2.4 billion years (the universe is currently 13.8 b...

Do we live on the skin of a bubble in an extra dimension?

Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have developed an interesting model of the universe. They describe and support their idea in a paper that uses the principles of string theory (according to which all matter is made up of tiny, vibrating strings) and simultaneously incorporates the phenomenon of dark energy (which is considered as a possible cause for the expansion of the cosmos).

According to their model, our universe is being carried along on the skin of a kind of bubble that is e...

A sapphire- or ruby-like planet?

55 Cancri e, HD219134 b, and WASP-47 e are three rocky planets – and they have something else in common: they might belong to a new class of super-Earths, according to arguments laid out by scientists from the University of Zurich and the University of Cambridge in a new paper. The astronomers looked at how planets are formed in protoplanetary disks. If they are formed, like the Earth, at a reasonable distance from their central star, then heavy elements, such as iron, magnesium, and silicon,...

Neptunes and super-Earths are the most common types of exoplanets

With the help of the ALMA radio telescope, astronomers have taken a closer look at a series of protoplanetary disks around young stars in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a region 430 light-years from Earth, in which many stars are currently being born. The researchers examined 32 protoplanetary disks; twelve of these disks have a structure with rings and gaps.

This provides evidence that the formation of planets is not an unusual event, because the formation of planets is the most likely cause f...

Way, way out there: “Farout” is a pink dwarf planet

It is approximately 500 kilometers big (roughly the size of Saturn’s moon Enceladus), has a surface that appears to be pink from a distance (typical for an ice-rich object), and takes about 1000 years to make one orbit around the Sun. That’s all astronomers know about the dwarf planet nicknamed “Farout,” whose discovery was recently announced. The object’s actual designation is 2018 VG18; it got its nickname because it was discovered so far out from the Earth.

120 astronomical units or 120 t...

Here we are: a signal for extraterrestrial civilizations

Would it be possible to alert extraterrestrial civilizations to our presence in the universe? Yes, says a feasibility study that was carried out by MIT doctoral candidate, James Clark, and was published in The Astrophysical Journal. Clark combined two already available technologies: a strong laser with an output power of 1 or 2 MW, similar to, for example, the U.S. Air Force’s Airborne Laser, and a large telescope with 30-meter (100-feet) or 45-meter (150-feet) optics, like those already in c...

Dark matter + dark energy = fluid with negative mass?

Physicists introduced the concept of dark matter after they determined that, among other things, galaxies didn’t have enough mass to explain their rotation. Dark energy with its strange properties is needed to explain, for example, the evolution of the universe during its early childhood when it must have experienced a sudden, tremendous growth spurt. Both concepts are incorporated into the current model of the universe called Lambda-CDM.

This model, however, has a small disadvantage: it says...

Eu:Cropis – more than just growing tomatoes in space

On the evening of December 3rd, I was at the German Space Operations Center in Oberpfaffenhofen and witnessed the successful launch of a SpaceX rocket into space and the final transfer of control over the deployed satellite to the team at the German Aerospace Center (Deutschen Zentrums für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)). Now there is a new garden floating in space. Developed by researchers at the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen and built by DLR specialists, Eu:Cropis is intended to stu...