Focus: Space Channel Featured Story TOP

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A research collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Air Force Institute of Technology investigates how the neutron energy output from a nuclear device detonation can affect the deflection of an asteroid. Scientists compared the resulting asteroid deflection from two different neutron energy sources, representative of fission and fusion neutrons, allowing for side-by-side comparisons. The goal was to understand which neutron energies released from a nuclear explosion are better for deflecting an asteroid and why, potentially paving the way for optimized deflection performance.

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Astronomers are “seeing double,” uncovering two close pairs of ancient quasars that reside at the centers of merging galaxies. These brilliant light beacons are powered by supermassive black holes feeding on material, unleashing a torrent of radiation.

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In a comment published today in Nature Astronomy, Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, challenges assumptions about the possibility of modern life on Mars held by many in the scientific community.

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Following the successful landing of NASA's Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater on Mars, the SuperCam operational teams at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) received the first results showing that SuperCam is in good health and giving its first impressions of the crater.

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The new era of space exploration features two Stony Brook University faculty members as part of the development of NASA’s Mars2020 Perseverance rover that recently landed. Distinguished Professor Scott McLennan and Associate Professor Joel Hurowitz both worked on the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) that is attached to the arm of the rover. The PIXL is a micro-focus X-ray fluorescence instrument that rapidly measures elemental chemistry by focusing an X-ray beam to a tiny spot on the target rock or soil, analyzing the induced X-ray fluorescence. Both professors have been working on Mars missions with NASA since 2004.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope in their hunt for a massive black hole at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6397 found something they weren’t expecting: a concentration of smaller black holes lurking there instead. This is a new twist on the search for intermediate-mass black holes. They are the long-sought “missing link” between supermassive black holes and stellar-mass black holes.

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A new analysis of ceramic chips embedded in meteorites suggests the formation of our solar system was not as quiet and orderly as we once thought.

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A University of Washington-led team has revisited and comprehensively reinterpreted radio telescope observations underlying a 2019 claim of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. They report that sulfur dioxide, a common gas in the atmosphere of Venus, is likely what was detected instead of phosphine.

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A Canadian-led team of astronomers discovers that the core mass of exoplanet WASP-107b is much lower than previously thought possible for a gas-giant planet.

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How dark is the sky, and what does that tell us about the number of galaxies in the visible universe? A team of scientists has used observations by NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt to determine the brightness of the cosmic optical background. Their result sets an upper limit to the abundance of faint, unresolved galaxies, showing that there is about twice as much optical light permeating space as can be accounted for by all known galaxies.

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A giant dark storm on Neptune heading for certain doom at the equator mysteriously halted its journey and began drifting in the opposite direction. Almost simultaneously, another smaller dark spot appeared nearby, only to vanish months later. Hubble astronomers are presenting these findings today at the Fall 2020 American Geophysical Union meeting.

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Astronomers analyzing Hubble images of the double star, HD 106906, have discovered a planet in a huge 15,000-year-long orbit that sweeps it as far from its stellar duo as Planet Nine would be from our Sun. This is observational evidence that similarly far-flung worlds may exist around other stars. Researchers hypothesize that the planet wound up there in a game of planetary pinball where the gravitational pull of a passing star modified the orbit's shape.

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Great things take time. This is true when it comes to many processes in the universe. For example, it takes millions of years for stars—the building blocks of the universe—to form. Then, many stars last for billions of years before they die and begin to eject shells of gas that glow against the vastness of space—what we call nebulas. It can be exceedingly rare to capture some of these processes in real time. Lucky for us, it seems as if the Stingray nebula, Hen 3-1357, was destined to stand out from the crowd since its beginnings. It was dubbed the youngest known planetary nebula in 1998 after Hubble caught a rare peek at the central star’s final stages of life. Now, twenty years after its first snapshot, the Stingray nebula is capturing the attention of astronomers again for a very different reason. Images from 2016 show a nebula that has drastically faded over the last two decades. Additionally, shells of gas that surrounded the central star have changed, no longer as crisp as

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Every meteoroid has a story to tell; before they flash across our sky, the celestial objects have traveled around the solar system for billions of miles and millions of years. And now, astronomers at the University of North Dakota may have found a key “origin story,” the source of 40 percent of the meteorites that fall to Earth. Those meteorites likely arose from a “cosmic crime scene” that took place in the distant past, in which an asteroid called (6) Hebe collided catastrophically with another asteroid, say Assistant Professor Sherry Fieber-Beyer and Professor Mike Gaffey of UND’s Space Studies Department.

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The most habitable region for life on Mars would have been up to several miles below its surface, likely due to subsurface melting of thick ice sheets fueled by geothermal heat, a Rutgers-led study concludes. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, may help resolve what’s known as the faint young sun paradox – a lingering key question in Mars science.

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This Hubble image of a disk of material feeding a monster black hole in nearby galaxy IC 5063 may be casting its shadow into space. The shadow is interspersed with bright rays that extend across the galaxy. This unique effect offers insight into the structure of the disk.

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A long time ago – roughly 4.5 billion years – our sun and solar system formed over the short time span of 200,000 years. That is the conclusion of a group of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists after looking at isotopes of the element molybdenum found on meteorites.

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Following up on an enormous gamma ray burst detected by Swift in May, Hubble astronomers believe they've viewed the glow of a kilonova, the aftermath of a colossal explosion caused by the merger of two neutron stars that formed a magnetar. The near-infrared emission seen by Hubble was 10 times brighter than predicted.

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Fast radio bursts, or FRBs - powerful, millisecond-duration radio waves coming from deep space outside the Milky Way Galaxy - have been among the most mysterious astronomical phenomena ever observed.

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In the distant reaches of the solar system lies a region called the Kuiper Belt. Beyond the orbit of Neptune, this ring of icy bodies is left over from the early days of planet formation. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will examine an assortment of these objects shortly after its launch in 2021.

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For the first time, over 250 million stars in our galaxy’s bulge have been surveyed in near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared light, opening the door for astronomers to reexamine key questions about the Milky Way’s formation and history. Using ultraviolet data, and with 450,000 individual images, the team was able to measure the chemical composition of tens of thousands of stars spanning a large area of the bulge. The vast dataset can be explored in spectacular detail in this image.

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Three decades after Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that Voyager 1 snap Earth’s picture from billions of miles away – resulting in the iconic Pale Blue Dot photograph – two astronomers now offer another unique cosmic perspective: Some exoplanets – planets from beyond our own solar system – have a direct line of sight to observe Earth’s biological qualities from far, far away.

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Astrophysicists announced today that a 3-billion year old merger between a dwarf galaxy and the Milky Way produced a series of telltale shell-like formations of stars in the vicinity of the Virgo constellation, the first such “shell structures” to be found in the Milky Way.

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A new theoretical study examines how well NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2021, will be able to separate the light of host galaxies from the bright central quasar. The researchers find that Webb could detect host galaxies that existed just 1 billion years after the big bang.

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Astronomers using the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, have captured the western wall of the Carina Nebula in unprecedented detail in a compelling image released today. The image reveals a number of unusual structures in the nebula. The exquisite detail revealed in the image is in part due to a technology known as adaptive optics, which resulted in a ten-fold improvement in the sharpness of the research team’s observations.

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More massive than all the other planets combined, Jupiter truly is the king of our solar system. The swirling clouds, arranged in colorful, banded structures, change from year to year. The rich colors are produced by trace compounds in Jupiter’s predominantly hydrogen/helium atmosphere. Hurricane-force winds propel these clouds, and upwelling currents are ablaze with lightning bolts far more powerful than those seen on Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope serves as a “weather satellite” for monitoring Jupiter’s stormy weather. The iconic Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, shows that it’s shrinking a little in the Hubble images, but it still dominates the entire southern atmosphere, plowing through the clouds like a cargo ship. Hubble astronomers patiently wait to get close-up snapshots as Earth make its nearest annual approach to Jupiter – an astronomical alignment called an opposition, when Jupiter is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun.

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MADISON – Thanks to a bevy of telescopes in space and on Earth — and even a pair of amateur astronomers in Arizona — a University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer and his colleagues have discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting at breakneck speed around a distant white dwarf star.

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Notre Dame researchers will use data from the new high-speed light detectors to determine the temperature of the sun’s lower atmosphere, measure the spectrum of solar flares and gain a better understanding of the role magnetic fields play in solar flare generation.

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n international team of astronomers, led by Professor Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, today announced the discovery of a rare molecule - phosphine - in the clouds of Venus. On Earth, this gas is only made industrially, or by microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments.

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Astronomers using Hubble and the VLT have found that something may be missing from the theories of how dark matter behaves. This missing ingredient may explain why they have uncovered an unexpected discrepancy between observations of the dark matter concentrations in a sample of massive galaxy clusters and theoretical computer simulations of how dark matter should be distributed in clusters. The new findings indicate that small-scale concentrations of dark matter produce lensing effects that are 10 times stronger than expected.

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Astronomers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues have discovered that a halo of warm gas surrounding the Magellanic Clouds likely acts as a protective cocoon, shielding the dwarf galaxies from the Milky Way’s own halo and contributing most of the Magellanic Stream’s mass.

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There is a huge halo of gas circling our Galaxy with the mass of a billion Suns.

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Crews at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken the first 3,200-megapixel digital photos – the largest ever taken in a single shot – with an extraordinary array of imaging sensors that will become the heart and soul of the future camera of Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

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Fifty years ago, astronomers discovered carbon monoxide in space. It allowed us to see dark regions of the universe, and helped us understand it more clearly.

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How complete is our census of the Sun’s closest neighbors? Astronomers using NSF’s NOIRLab facilities and a team of data-sleuthing volunteers participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, a citizen science project, have discovered roughly 100 cool worlds near the Sun — objects more massive than planets but lighter than stars, known as brown dwarfs. Several of these newly discovered worlds are among the very coolest known, with a few approaching the temperature of Earth — cool enough to harbor water clouds.

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Hubble Space Telescope observations show that the unexpected dimming of supergiant star Betelgeuse was probably caused by an immense amount of hot plasma ejected into space. The plasma cooled, forming a dust cloud that blocked starlight coming from Betelgeuse's surface.

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Astronomers used Hubble during a total lunar eclipse to detect ozone in our planet’s atmosphere by looking at Earthlight reflected off the Moon in ultraviolet wavelengths. This method serves as a proxy for how astronomers will observe Earth-like exoplanets in search of life.

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Massive compressive shearing forces generated by the tidal pull of Jupiter-like planets on their rocky ice-covered moons may form a natural reactor that drives simple amino acids to polymerize into larger compounds. These extreme mechanical forces strongly enhance molecule condensation reactions, opening a new arena of possibilities for the chemical origins of life on Earth and other rock planets, according to new research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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Bizarre white dwarf star shows evidence of a ‘partial supernova’ in observations using the Hubble Space Telescope, led by University of Warwick astronomers

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As dying stars take their final few breaths of life, they gently sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos through the magnificent planetary nebulae. These ashes, spread via stellar winds, are enriched with many different chemical elements, including carbon. Findings from a study published today in Nature Astronomy show that the final breaths of these dying stars, called white dwarfs, shed light on carbon’s origin in the Milky Way.

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Thanks to 20 years of homegrown galactic data, astronomers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, UW–Whitewater and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University have finally figured out just how much energy permeates the center of the Milky Way. The researchers say it could one day help astronomers track down where all that energy comes from. Understanding the source of the radiation could help explain not only the nature of the Milky Way, but the countless others that resemble it.

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Astronomers have discovered the second most distant quasar ever found, using the international Gemini Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Programs of NSF’s NOIRLab. It is also the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name, Pōniuāʻena. The quasar contains a monster black hole, twice the mass of the black hole in the only other quasar found at the same epoch, challenging the current theories of supermassive black hole formation and growth in the early Universe.

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Scientists have simulated conditions on water-rich exoplanets to learn more about their geological composition, and found a new transition state between rock and water.

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Several years ago, planetary scientist Lynnae Quick began to wonder whether any of the more than 4,000 known exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system, might resemble some of the watery moons around Jupiter and Saturn.

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Using the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper telescope, astronomers have for the first time measured the Fermi Bubbles in the visible light spectrum. The Fermi Bubbles are two enormous outflows of high-energy gas that emanate from the Milky Way and the finding refines our understanding of the properties of these mysterious blobs.

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In our 13.8 billion-year-old universe, most galaxies like our Milky Way form gradually, reaching their large mass relatively late. But a new discovery made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of a massive rotating disk galaxy, seen when the universe was only ten percent of its current age, challenges the traditional models of galaxy formation. This research appears on 20 May 2020 in the journal Nature.

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A colorful image resembling a cosmic version of an undersea world teeming with stars is being released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope's 30 years of viewing the wonders of space.

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Scientists will use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope study three mysterious, cold, dense clouds where high-mass stars form.

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A team of astronomers have found the best evidence yet that the culprit in a stellar homicide is a mid-sized black hole, the long-sought "missing link" in the black hole family. Multiple lines of evidence pointed to the elusive type of black hole, including investigations using Hubble and Chandra.