The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has released its first huge batch of data. It's all part of the telescope's mission to study dark energy and dark matter. The telescope is busy creating the largest ever 3D map of the Universe with its huge 600 megapixel camera, and new images give us some highlights.
Carl Sagan and Frank Drake were pivotal to the development of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), as exemplified by the Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Golden Records.
Researchers compared the samples from asteroid Bennu with the Murchison meteorite and measured the amino acid β-alanine in both. Using new techniques, they were able to measure not only their isotopic compositions, but isotopic differences between individual atoms in the same molecule. The results show that some of the same pre-cursors to life formed in different conditions and positions in the protoplanetary disk.
If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn’t work that way, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who we typically cover for his work on the Solar Gravitational Lens idea, makes a good argument as to why.
Astrophysical jets are enormously powerful and energetic phenomena. Black holes launch them from their poles and they can extend enormous distances into space, disrupting star formation in adjacent regions. Astrophysicists want to be able to forecast when they're launched so they can understand theire extreme physics better. New research is making progress in understanding when they are triggered.
Uranus and Neptune, the Solar System's ice giants, have interiors unlike the other planets. As a result, they also have magnetic fields unlike the others. They're messy and tilted, and Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to even flyby them, showed us how messy they are. New research uses models to try to understand what's going on with the pair of planets and their weird fields, and found that it's likely they change on very short timescales. They could already be much different than when Voyager 2 visited in the late 1980s.
TESS watched an exoplanet about 1,000 light years away as it repeatedly transited in front of its star for seven years. But astronomers were surprised to find that the hot Jupiter disappeared. Of course, planets don't just disappear. Something interrupted its transits from our point of view, and astronomers think they've figured out what happened. An unseen, nearby giant planet companion tugged on it until TESS couldn't see it anymore.
