Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 33
August 27, 2018
Selfies in space: cool NASA app
Have you ever wanted your picture taken in front of the Andromeda Galaxy, the Crab Nebula, or the center of the Milky Way? A new app from NASA will do just that. To make these selfies of you, the app puts you in a spacesuit and places you in front of your chosen backdrop.
Biggest advantages: You’ll save a lot of time and money, because you won’t need to travel in a rocket and the app is free. There is only a limited number of backgrounds, however.
August 20, 2018
Confirmed for the first time: there’s ice on the surface of the Moon
Anyone who wants to stay on the Moon for a long time (for example, in their own base) will need water. It has been known for some time that water exists buried deep in the Moon’s rocks, but of course it would be easier to reach if it were directly on the surface. Using data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument, a research team led by Shuai Li from the University of Hawaii and Brown University has now shown that water is just waiting to be collected from permanently shaded areas...
August 14, 2018
New Horizons probe sees the hydrogen wall at the end of the Solar System
NASA’s New Horizons probe is on its way to its next destination. Scientists are using the interim time (when the probe is not sleeping) to evaluate the measurements of its instruments. Even before arriving at Pluto, the probe’s ultraviolet telescope might have measured a shadow of the wall of hydrogen that is expected at the outermost limit of our Solar System.
On its way through space, our Sun constantly sends out a stream of charged particles in all directions, the solar wind, which stretc...
August 8, 2018
Complex organic molecules from the depths of Enceladus
The Cassini probe that sent us the spectacular pictures of tiger stripes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and that flew through the ice plumes there several times has long since crashed into Saturn. Nevertheless, scientists are still discovering more and more new details from the data that it sent. Now a research team led by Frank Postberg and Nozair Khawaja from the University of Heidelberg have succeeded in identifying fragments of complex organic molecules in the particles ejected from the ice g...
August 6, 2018
Ganymede awakens: whistling and chirping around Jupiter’s moon
The Sun generates low-frequency radio waves in the Earth’s radiation belt. If you were to listen to them in a loudspeaker (which is actually what scientists were doing when these radio waves were discovered in the 1960s), they sound like the whistling and chirping of a flock of birds. These special waves were therefore given the name chorus waves. It was later discovered what these chorus waves produce: they are particularly well suited for transferring energy to electrons in the solar wind....
August 5, 2018
Where does the dust on Mars come from?
The movie “The Martian” begins with the hero being separated from his crew by a dust storm and then being left behind, presumed dead, alone on Mars. In fact, because of its very thin atmosphere, a storm on Mars would feel like a light breeze on Earth and would definitely not have the force to knock over a spaceship. But Martian storms could certainly produce problems, because they would darken the sky, and this would make generating energy from sunlight no longer possible.
But where does the...
August 4, 2018
Are black holes surrounded by a firewall?
Black holes suck in anything that gets too close to them—even light. In their interiors, researchers imagine objects that, according to current physics, should not even exist: singularities, where matter becomes infinitely dense and hot and classical physics breaks down. The area around a black hole is also a hot subject of discussion. In particular, astrophysicists run into problems when they consider a black hole simultaneously with the general theory of relativity and quantum physics.
One...
August 2, 2018
Terraforming Mars: There’s not enough carbon dioxide
The atmosphere of the red planet not only lacks enough oxygen, it is also very thin. Instead of a surface pressure of one bar on Earth, the surface pressure in Mars’s atmosphere reaches only 6 millibars, thus, less than one-hundredth of the Earth’s surface pressure. Consequently, to work on Mars, astronauts would have to wear pressurized suits. The atmosphere would have to be considerably denser for a respiratory mask to be sufficient. If the density were even higher, carbon dioxide, the main...
July 17, 2018
A dozen new moons of Jupiter – including a maverick
With 67 moons, Jupiter was already the record holder among all the planets of the Solar System. Now a team of astronomers has identified twelve more moons of Jupiter for a grand total of 79. The researchers first discovered the new moons in 2017 while searching for objects at the outermost edge of the Solar System. “Jupiter just happened to be in the way,” explained team leader Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Confirmation that the new objects actually had an orbit a...
July 12, 2018
How fast is the universe expanding?
Since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding. The decisive question is: how fast? This speed is also called the Hubble constant – after Edwin Hubble, who first noticed the expansion of the universe.
Astronomers have come up with two methods to calculate this constant. Method 1 involves the measurements by the ESA’s Planck satellite. This satellite measured the precise structure of the cosmic microwave background, which was produced 380,000 years after the big ban...
