Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 32

Hyperion, a supercluster of galaxies in the early universe

The vast expanse of the universe has one advantage: because the light from the farthest reaches of the universe takes so long to get to us, astronomers can gain insight into its early history. Scientist’s latest discovery: galaxy superclusters apparently formed relatively early – as shown by one structure that scientists have named “Hyperion.” The gigantic proto-supercluster was identified by a team of astronomers led by Olga Cucciati from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) Bologna...

Four gas giants and a young sun

CI Tau, which is 450 light-years from Earth, is a T-Tauri star – these are stars that are still in their birth phase. Fusion has only recently ignited in its core, and the star is still contracting to its final size. Even though CI Tau is only approximately two million years old, it already has a companion: a “hot Jupiter” that has a mass of eight to ten Jupiters and is orbiting its host star at a close distance.

It was previously thought that at least ten million years were needed to form th...

What is there in the space between the oldest galaxies?

Nothing? Not quite, which you can see with just a quick glance at the picture below. Images taken by the MUSE spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) show the exact opposite. Using the MUSE instrument on the VLT, an international team of astronomers led by Lutz Wisotzki, professor for observational cosmology at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the University of Potsdam, discovered an unexpected abundance of so-called Lyman-a...

Rocky with a hint of hydrogen: what’s a good recipe for a planet?

Rocky planets are rather small and gas giants are large – that’s one hypothesis you might come up with if you look at our Solar System. But is that true always and everywhere? Is our own system an example of the rule or an exception to the rule? Astronomers have now found more than 3700 exoplanets, but very little is known about their composition. At most the radius and mass are known.

But even if the size and mass are known, it is still very difficult to say whether the exoplanet has, in fac...

It’s not Planet X, but 2015 TG387 is still pretty far out

A team led by astronomers Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo has been searching for a while for Planet X, which is supposed to orbit the Sun somewhere in the Oort Cloud far beyond the other planets. To do this, they are studying the areas of interest particularly closely – and keep coming up with interesting discoveries in the process.

This time the result is called 2015 TG387. The object was first registered in 2015; scientists needed until today to confirm its orbit, which leads it once aroun...

When can we be certain that we’re the only civilization in the galaxy?

Are we alone in the universe? Most science-fiction authors would answer that question with a no. Scientists, however, aren’t so sure. SETI projects, such as Breakthrough Listen, have not produced any clear results, at least not yet. But assume we search and search and search – and find nothing. Will there come a moment when we can say with some certainty that we are alone in the universe – and can stop searching?

Yes, says Claudio Grimaldi from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Sw...

Exoplanets have pretty moons too

Nobody really believes that our Solar System is the only one with moons. But the existence of moons in other star systems has only been a hypothesis up until now. So-called exomoons are particularly difficult to find, because they are smaller than their host planets (which is, of course, in their nature) and they follow complicated paths due to their orbits around their planets and, in turn, around their stars. Such objects are usually identified by measuring the occultation caused when they...

Dust storms discovered on Saturn’s moon Titan

If you want to see a dust storm on Earth, you only need to visit one of its deserts. Beyond that, the next best opportunity for a dust storm is many millions of miles away on Mars, as NASA’s Mars rovers recently discovered. But there is yet a third celestial body that is regularly hit by dust storms – Saturn’s moon Titan.

Titan, after Ganymede the second largest moon in the Solar System, seems to be predestined, with its dense methane atmosphere, for such phenomena. There are, however, no act...

Where is the Milky Way’s sibling now?

Once upon a time there were three siblings who roamed the universe together. Two of their names are still known today: the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are still the dominant galaxies of the Local Group. But the third sibling went missing two billion years ago – today, astronomers call it “M32p.” At the time, M32p was the third largest galaxy of the Local Group and twenty times larger than any galaxy that has ever merged with the Milky Way.

As it turns out, Andromeda might know a thing...

Become an astronaut now: the Austrian Space Forum is looking for two new analog astronauts

In February 2018, I spent a couple of exciting days in Oman. There, I was allowed to participate in the Mars Simulation Amadee-18 mission. For a couple weeks, approximately twenty men and women from different countries lived as if they hadn’t landed in the Oman desert, but instead on the Red Planet. This wasn’t about fun and adventure (although the participants had quite a bit of that too), but instead about identifying problems and weak points in a real Mars expedition before one is actually...