Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 9

Mars structures from blood and urine

When establishing colonies on Mars or the Moon, it will hardly be possible to bring the necessary building material from Earth. Transporting even a single brick to Mars could initially cost up to two million dollars. The solution is to use resources found on the ground – sand and dust that can be combined with water to make a building material. But ordinary water still won’t do. Additional binders are needed.

In the future, these could be produced by the crew itself – in the form of blood and ur...

Let there be light: How to generate photons from nothing

From black holes we know the effect of Hawking radiation: If in vacuum a pair of photons is born in a random way and one of them falls into the black hole, the other one remains: light from nothing. The energy debt to the universe must be paid by the black hole, which is why it evaporates over many billions of years. But there is a second trick. With the black hole the gravity plays the role of the magician who makes the one photon disappear. But according to the equivalence principle of the gen...

There are fewer boulders lying around on Mercury than on Moon

Mercury can very well be imagined as an extreme version of the Earth’s moon. The rocky planet orbits so close to the sun that it is exposed to much stronger temperature fluctuations than the moon. Water, like on the Moon, exists only in the few areas that are never exposed to sunlight. Nevertheless, as NASA’s Messenger probe photos have shown, there are a few characteristic differences at the surface. For example, there are far fewer boulders lying around on Mercury.

Why is that? An internationa...

Superflares may not be that dangerous for planets

In “Proxima Rising,” the planet Proxima b and its inhabitants become victims of an eruption of the central red dwarf, a superflares. Astronomers have long suspected that such radiation bursts can permanently damage the atmospheres – and thus the habitability – of exoplanets. A new study published Aug. 5 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society may now give the all-clear.

Using optical observations from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – TESS for short – the team, led by ...

Interesting planetary system in our neighborhood

At a distance of 34 light-years, the red dwarf L98-59 belongs to the closer neighborhood of the solar system. The fact that three rocky planets orbit it was discovered two years ago by the planet hunter TESS. The three inner planets are relatively close to their parent star. It is probably too warm there for life. The innermost planet is only about half the size of our Venus and thus one of the smallest planets discovered so far. Technically, it is easier to find large and heavy planets than sma...

Sharpest radio image of the Andromeda galaxy achieved

The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way – but still 2.5 million light-years away. Details are therefore difficult to discern. This makes it all the more important to observe our future home (Andromeda will merge with the Milky Way in a few billion years) in all possible wavelengths. Each region of the spectrum reveals different secrets.

Such an image has now been obtained with unprecedented accuracy at the microwave frequency of 6.6 GHz by physicist Sofia Fatigoni of t...

Water vapor on Ganymede

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and, at 5262 km in diameter, is even larger than the planet Mercury. But while the planet closest to the sun is dry and hot, Ganymede is the complete opposite. The moon harbors more water than all the Earth’s oceans combined. However, because it orbits so far from the Sun, most of the water is frozen. All of it? No. At a depth of 160 kilometers, there is a liquid ocean beneath the icy crust, warmed by the gravitational pull of the g...

Clouds on Venus

Venus, Earth’s hot sister and the setting for my book “Clouds of Venus“, is completely enveloped in a dense atmosphere with numerous layers of clouds. Nevertheless, it has much in common with Earth. Both planets are similar in size and mass, they are both in the same orbital region known as the habitable zone, they both have solid surfaces and dense atmospheres. Therefore, studying weather on Venus can help researchers better understand weather on Earth as well. To do this, it would be important...

Enceladus: Be careful when walking on ice

Anyone landing on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, for example to explore the ocean at its depth, had better be careful: Ice quakes could be part of everyday life on the surface of the 500-kilometer-diameter moon. Researchers are drawing attention to this in a new study.

The culprit is the massive tidal forces caused by Saturn and the planet’s other, larger moons – much like the moon on Earth. These tidal movements, on the plus side, warm its interior so that life could possibly arise there. But the...

Supernova due to overeating

Actually, a type Ia supernova is pretty nasty. The star that will eventually perish has basically done everything right and ended its long, modest life as a white dwarf. As such, it could continue to watch its fellow stars burn up for many billions of years – longer than the universe is old – if it didn’t have a younger partner that was still in the prime of its life. Because if material flows from this other star to our white dwarf, an overshooting reaction likes to happen. The (former) white d...