Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 5

4 mile high ice volcanoes on Pluto

The exploration of the dwarf planet Pluto is divided into two eras: Before the arrival of NASA’s New Horizons probe, the celestial body was thought to be an icy, unspectacular Kuiper Belt object. But New Horizons then delivered images and data that sent astronomers into raptures. The composition of Pluto’s surface shows that there are a variety of ages here, from relatively old, heavily cratered regions to very young surfaces with few to no impact craters.

One of the regions with very few impact...

Peas, blueberries and grapes – not every galaxy is like the Milky Way

Elliptical galaxies, spiral galaxies, barred spiral galaxies, you’ve probably heard of them. But did you know that there are types of galaxies named after green peas, blueberries, or purple grapes? When a group of amateurs within the “Galaxy Zoo,” a project conducted by citizen scientists, classified galaxies observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) by color and morphology, they found 251 very special galaxies that didn’t easily fit into the known galaxy types. These galaxies, which looke...

Earendel: The farthest star

Far-away stars, however luminous, cannot be photographed individually even with the best space-based telescopes. But this would be extremely interesting for researchers, because with increasing distance we are entering the early days of the universe, about which we still know too little.

But with a bit of luck, the universe itself is helping astronomers – by placing powerful galaxies in such a convenient way that they amplify the light of a star that is actually much too distant – in this case i...

How old is the Milky Way?

Our home galaxy contains up to 400 billion stars, and to cross it would take 200,000 years even at the speed of light. Such a huge object (which is rather average in cosmic comparison) does not come into being overnight. The Milky Way was actually born relatively early – at a time when the universe was still quite young. But when exactly, and how do you measure that?

Quite simply, if you want to know how old a forest is, you determine the age of its trees. The stars of the Milky Way do not have ...

When the universe began to boil

How did the supermassive black holes come into being, which today are gigantic sentinels in the center of many galaxies? Initially, one proceeded from the obvious: The giants grew by accreting other matter or consuming black holes, that is, by merging with them. Step by step, from small to medium to giant. But this concept has a couple of problems. First, we have not yet been able to detect the necessary intermediate stages. They should still exist, but so far we have only found small black hole...

Even on smaller icy moons, the chances for life on the ocean floor are good

The fact that astrobiologists have such high hopes for icy moons like Enceladus or Europa is not only due to the oceans they have been able to detect under their ice crusts, but also to the fact that they are geologically active worlds. The culprits are the giant parent planets Saturn and Jupiter, respectively, which really knead the moons with their gravitational force. This creates heat, which keeps the water in their hidden oceans liquid and relatively warm. The water in turn dissolves from t...

How do you weigh a particle that you don’t even know exists?

Dark matter accounts for 85 percent of the mass content of the universe. Researchers call it “dark” because we don’t notice anything about it – except for its gravity. However, it can be detected quite well. Without dark matter, galaxies would move differently than they demonstrably do, and the universe would have a different structure. The physicists need the Dumkle materie thus, in order to explain the cosmos. Too bad that they still do not know what it consists of. There are candidates for it...

Shrouded in ash: New type of star discovered

Most stars follow the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram in their life cycle. This is because they fuse certain elements in each part of their life, starting with hydrogen, followed by helium. Only particularly large or small stars deviate from this, or binaries that, for example, get fresh material from their neighbors despite their small size. But there are deviations from the rule, and lots of them. A team of German astronomers led by Klaus Werner of the University of Tübingen h...

Interstellar travel: With the perfect sail to the stars

The StarShot project, launched by the Russian billionaire, aims to use lasers to bring tiny spaceships weighing only a few grams to such a speed that they can reach the stars closest to the sun in a generation instead of in a few tens of thousands of years – the time it would take for spaceships to reach them based on current or near-future technology. My readers are familiar with the concept from the Proxima trilogy. For this purpose, these mini-ships have a sail onto which the laser can fire. ...

A planet that has outlived its star

Located 117 light-years from Earth, the star WD1054-226 is a white dwarf – the remnant of a star the size of our Sun that has reached the end of its life. It’s about the size of Earth, but about as heavy as the Sun. And it’s hot: 20,000 to 30,000 Kelvin on the surface, 20 million Kelvin inside. Fusion processes no longer take place, but it takes about 10 billion years for it to cool down completely – our sun has only been around for five billion years. During this time, of course, a habitable zo...