Phoenix reports that it is snowing on Mars!
(Thanks Gary!)
Space
Interstellar War Not Declared Say Experts
Given all of the crisis in the financial markets, the last thing our poor little planet needed was to find itself on the edge of an interstellar war. Thankfully that possibility has (probably) been ruled out, at least according to astronomers at the University of Warwick. But just what has caused a massive burst of light in an area of the sky where no stars were known to exist is still a mystery. Nature has more details.
Not Science Fiction, Honest
Nature reports on an astronomy professor from Hawaii who thinks that aliens might have been sending us messages by manipulating the behavior of variable stars.
So, oh great Internet brain, which science fiction writers have beaten him to the punch by suggesting something similar. I’m sure that there must have been some. The idea of doing semaphore by twinkling stars is just too Space Opera to not have been done before.
Limits to Growth
Just in case some of you were worried that the black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider would devour the entire universe, I have good news. Apparently black holes cannot grow much bigger than 10 billion solar masses. So it’s OK. If anything does go wrong we probably won’t even destroy all of our galaxy.
Evidence of Vast Aquifer Found on Mars
It is all gone now, sadly. All that is left is what the mission control people describe as a “bathtub ring”. The Chronicle has more on the story.
One Fat Galaxy
Hold the front pages – there is apparently an obesity epidemic in the universe. Newly discovered galaxies are weighing much more than expected. A government spokesman puts the epidemic down to over-consumption of a type of fast food known as “dark energy burgers”.
Well, not exactly, but the jauntily named 2XMM J083026+524133 is one heck of a beast, weighing in at around the size of a thousand large galaxies. And apparently dark energy is the only cosmological theory that can explain its existence. More details here.
Water Found on Moon
OK, so only around 46ppm, and in little bits of volcanic glass, but hey, water! On the Moon!
It looks like there used to be a lot more, but it probably all vaporized long ago, unless…
Since the Moon’s gravity is too feeble to retain an atmosphere, the researchers speculate that some of the water vapor from the eruptions was probably forced into space, but some may also have drifted toward the cold poles of the Moon where ice may be present in permanently shadowed craters. Several previous lunar missions have suggested the presence of ice at both poles.
So now maybe someone will go and look for it.
Sorry, Spoke Too Soon
Just when you thought it was safe to leave your bunker, Nature has a whole pile of stories about cataclysmic asteroid impacts.
Firstly here’s an article about some of the odd theories advanced to explain the Tunguska crater.
Next up, an article about South Pole–Aitken, a crater on the moon that is 2,600 kilometers across and 12 kilometers deep (which as Nature helpfully explains is “big enough to blot out half of China and hide the highest mountains of Tibet”).
And finally, the biggest crater in the solar system: a hole on Mars that is 10,600 kilometers long and 8,500 kilometers wide. There’s even a computer-generated simulation of the asteroid impact smashing the top off Mars. Ouch!
Phoenix Strikes Ice
On Mars, of course. Well done that little spacecraft! Nature has details.
On Space Suit Design
Space suits, as every geek knows, should not be the horrible, bulky things that actual astronauts wear. They should be sleek, sexy designs as they might have been imagined by someone like Jim Burns. And, as Jennifer Ouellette reports, someone is working on it. Hopefully many people, in fact, though from an aesthetic point of view I think that Dava Newman’s design will be hard to beat.
As for the comments in that article about NASA, the less said the better: “inability to recreate heritage technology” indeed!
Star Going Boom
Nature reports that an astronomer at Princeton was lucky enough to actually film a supernova explosion as it happened. Sadly no video online. Hopefully later. And congratulations to Alicia Soderberg, it must have been a wonderful moment.
The Great Galactic Ghoul
With NASA’s Phoenix probe now well on the way to the Red Planet, The Independent asks why so many missions to Mars have gone missing.
How I Almost Traveled the Universe
Today’s online reading turned up what sounded like one of the coolest pieces of software in a very long time. Microsoft has come up with something called WorldWide Telescope, which basically hooks you in to a vast collection of astronomical databases and allows you to browse the night sky in much the same way as Google Earth allows you to browse our planet. The introductory videos on the site talk a lot about creating stories, and it is clear that, at least as far as the astronomy community is concerned, one of the major purposes of this is to get kids doing astronomy from their PCs and making their own multi-media presentations based on their explorations. That’s seriously cool.
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Space Not Empty – Official
Astronomers working with the Hubble telescope now believe that the space between galaxies not not empty, but is rather filled with a vast, diffuse web of baryonic matter – mainly hydrogen. This “cosmic web” may account for around half of the missing mass of the universe, but does not preclude the need for the existence of more massive clumps of dark matter. (The visible universe only accounts for around 4% of the expected total mass.) Story here and here.
Astrophysics Rocks
We know that galaxies can collide, and we’ve always expected such events to be pretty traumatic. But now some clever astronomers have spotted that one pair of colliding galaxies have managed to spit out a large black hole. And I mean spit out – fast enough to escape the gravity well of the galaxy. That’s an object massing the same as several million suns, traveling at 2650 km/s. Wow!
New NASA Science Web Site
I see that NASA has a new web site devoted to science stuff, which of course means mainly space stuff. It looks very neat. However, even though it has a news page, I can’t find any RSS feeds on it. I guess I won’t be following it much then.
Fly Me to the Moon (dead)
Celestis, the company who handled Jimmy Doohan’s ascent into space, is now planning to offer to send your cremated remains to the Moon. For a mere $10,000 you can have your ashes (well, one gram of them) scattered on the lunar surface. However, the service won’t be available before 2009. Try not to die before then.
You know, the Moon is pretty dull. I’d much rather go for being accelerated out of the solar system.
Calling Londo Mollari
California astronomers say their computer models predict that there is a very good chance that there is a habitable Earth-like plant orbiting Alpha Centauri.
Lake on Mars
No, not Jay Lake, silly. Whatever were you thinking? One of those big holes filled with water.
Not that the water is there any more of course. But it quite clearly was. A body of water bigger than Lake Huron. That’s serious wet. Photo here.
Aliens Stole My Spaceship?
Suppose you were to read this:
The speed and direction of some spacecraft are being mysteriously altered as they pass near the Earth.
Would you assume it was from some nutty UFOlogy web site? Well you would be wrong. That’s scientists from JPL talking to Nature. The differences in trajectory are very small, but they seem to happen with every spacecraft that is monitored. Either there’s a problem with NASA’s model, or there’s something about physics that we don’t quite understand.