Space Stuff

A raging dust storm has been observed on a planet outside our Solar System for the first time.
It was detected on the exoplanet known as VHS 1256b, which is about 40 light-years from Earth.
It took the remarkable capabilities of the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make the discovery.
The dust particles are silicates - small grains comprising silicon and oxygen, which form the basis of most rocky minerals.
But the storm detected by Webb isn't quite the same phenomenon you would get in an arid, desert region on our planet. It's more of a rocky mist.
 
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Did we already observe our first “blitzar”?​

Radio burst may come from a neutron star that's too big to live.​

Image of a radio telescope against the night sky.

Enlarge / The CHIME telescope has proven adept at picking up fast radio bursts.

By combing through a collection of data, researchers may have discovered evidence that we've already observed the first "blitzar," a bizarre astronomical event caused by the sudden collapse of an overly massive neutron star. The event is driven by an earlier merger of two neutron stars; this creates an unstable intermediate neutron star, which is kept from collapsing immediately by its rapid spin. In a blitzar, the strong magnetic fields of the neutron star slow down its spin, causing it to collapse into a black hole several hours after the merger.
 

Juice: European Space Agency Jupiter moons mission to assess chance of life​


Juice spacecraft



The European Space Agency (Esa) is set to launch a satellite to the planet Jupiter, one of the organisation's most ambitious missions ever.
The satellite will leave Earth on Thursday on an eight-year journey to reach the giant planet's major moons.
There's good evidence that these icy worlds - Callisto, Europa and Ganymede - hold oceans of liquid water at depth.
The Esa mission aims to establish whether the moons might also have the conditions needed to sustain life.
 
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Juice: European Space Agency Jupiter moons mission to assess chance of life​


Juice spacecraft



The European Space Agency (Esa) is set to launch a satellite to the planet Jupiter, one of the organisation's most ambitious missions ever.
The satellite will leave Earth on Thursday on an eight-year journey to reach the giant planet's major moons.
There's good evidence that these icy worlds - Callisto, Europa and Ganymede - hold oceans of liquid water at depth.
The Esa mission aims to establish whether the moons might also have the conditions needed to sustain life.
Click to expand...

Europe successfully launches spacecraft toward the moons of Jupiter [Updated]​

"We wanted to see if these were possible habitats for life."​

 
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Saturn's rings are shrinking and boffins will use the Webb 'scope to find out why​

They go down, down, down, with the burning pull of gravity ... or do they?​


Astronomers will direct NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to peer at Saturn in an attempt to discern when its iconic rings might vanish.
Saturn is the most recognizable planet in the Solar System thanks to its extensive rings, comprising uncountable billions of ice and rock chunks that circle the planet's equator at diverse speeds.
Observations made by NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 probes in 1980 and 1981 hinted that Saturn's rings were eroding. Other spacecraft like Cassini have since made closer observations of the planet, leading to development of a theory that Saturn's gravity and magnetic field attracts matter from its rings.
Boffins believe that over 300 million years, give or take an eon, that process will make Saturn's rings increasingly sparse.
 

Caught in the act: Astronomers spot star swallowing a planet for first time​

A sneak peek at Earth's eventual fate.​

An aging star dubbed ZTF SLRN-2020 has been caught in the act of swallowing a planet.
Roughly 5 billion years from now, our Sun will end, not with a bang but with a whimper. That's when it finally burns through all the fuel in its core and puffs outward into a red giant, swallowing all the inner planets of our Solar System in the process, including Earth. But no star has ever been caught in the act of gulping down a planet this way—until now. Astronomers have spotted a white-hot flash from a distant star in our Milky Way galaxy and concluded that it came from the final stage of this process, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Yes, it's a literal "Death Star," announced on the eve of Star Wars Day (May 4).
 
LONG BEACH, Calif. — May 10, 2023 — Vast, a pioneer in space habitation technologies, announced today their plans to launch the world’s first commercial space station, called Haven-1. Scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to low-Earth orbit no earlier than August 2025, Haven-1 will initially act as an independent crewed space station prior to being connected as a module to a larger Vast space station currently in development. The mission will be quickly followed by Vast-1, the first human spaceflight mission to Haven-1 on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The vehicle and its four-person crew will dock with Haven-1 for up to 30 days while orbiting Earth. Vast also secured an option with SpaceX for an additional human spaceflight mission to Haven-1.

This represents the first time in history that a commercial space station company has both a contracted launch for its space station and a visiting human spaceflight mission.
 

Chinese Mars rover sends back images of recent water-shaped crusts​

Within the last million years or so, melted snow might have dampened Mars' sands.​

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Most of Mars appears to be an endless expanse of alien desert, without a river or lake in sight. However, liquid water definitely existed in the planet’s distant past. A new paper has also suggested that it's also possible small quantities of water still might exist in places that otherwise appear barren.

Before China’s Zhurong (also known as Phoenix) rover went into hibernation mode last May, researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered something unexpected. Zhurong was exploring the Utopia Planitia region, which is near the planet’s equator. No liquid water was thought to exist at those latitudes. Yet when the rover beamed back data from its Multispectral Camera (MSCam), Navigation and Terrain Camera (NaTeCam), and Mars Surface Composition Detector (MarSCoDe), there was possible evidence for liquid water having been present less than half a million years ago.
 

Gravitational lens gives us a third estimate of the Universe’s expansion​

Lensed images of a supernova appear at different times.​

Image of a field full of stars and galaxies

The arc of thin, distorted objects around the center of this image is a clear indication of gravitational lensing.

Anyone who has ever measured something twice, like the width of a doorway, and gotten two different answers knows how annoying it can be. Now imagine you're a physicist, and what you're measuring tells us something fundamental about the Universe. There are a number of examples like this—we can't seem to get measurements to agree on how long neutrons survive outside of atomic nuclei, for example.
But few of these are more fundamental to the Universe's behavior as disagreements over what's called the Hubble Constant, a measure of how quickly the Universe is expanding. We've measured it using information in the cosmic microwave background and gotten one value. And we've measured it using the apparent distance to objects in the present-day Universe and gotten a value that differs by about 10 percent. As far as anyone can tell, there's nothing wrong with either measurement, and there's no obvious way to get them to agree.

Now, researchers have managed to make a third, independent measure of the Universe's expansion by tracking the behavior of a gravitationally lensed supernova. When first discovered, the lens had created four images of the supernova. But sometime later, a fifth appeared, and that time delay is influenced by the Universe's expansion—and thus the Hubble constant.
 

Jeff Bezos to help Nasa return to Moon​

Blue Moon lander


The US space agency has enlisted a second billionaire to help it put astronauts back on the Moon.
Nasa is already working with Elon Musk's SpaceX firm on a descent system based on its novel Starship rocket that will touch down as early as 2025.
It has now also awarded Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos a contract to build a landing craft to take a crew down to the lunar surface later this decade.
His Blue Origin company will produce a more conventional-looking vehicle.
 
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