Space

Six exoplanets in unusual resonance Astrophysics
Jan 25 2021

Six exoplanets in unusual resonance

If one leaves multi-body systems to themselves, sometimes a strange order appears. The distances of the planetary orbits are integer multiples of a basic value, moons and planets move in unison, celestial bodies always turn to the same side - what we then perceive as cosmic order are all no miracles, but merely results of the effect of gravity in a system built up in a certain way. This is also true of TOI-178, a star about 200 light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. When researchers first observed the star, they initially suspected they had discovered two planets orbiting…
Read More
How deep is Titan’s largest lake? Space
Jan 22 2021

How deep is Titan’s largest lake?

Saturn's moon Titan is one of the most mysterious celestial bodies in the solar system. Beneath the golden haze of gaseous nitrogen in which it is enveloped, it has a weather cycle comparable to Earth's - only not with water, but with liquid methane. The methane comes down from the sky as rain, flows down the mountains in rivers, forms lakes and oceans, and evaporates from them back into the atmosphere. In a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, researchers now use data from one of the Cassini mission's last Titan flybys to show how deep Titan's…
Read More
Luhman-16 B: The striped dwarf Space
Jan 10 2021

Luhman-16 B: The striped dwarf

Luhman-16 B is a brown dwarf - a star that was a little too small to actually become a star and ignite hydrogen fusion in its interior. Brown dwarfs are about the size of Jupiter, but typically dozens of times more massive. Luhman-16 B, along with its brother Luhman-16 A, is the closest to Earth of this type of celestial object. It is also the target of the "Majestic Dracht" in Proxima log 2. Because of their nature - they do not glow - brown dwarfs are quite difficult to observe. Only with the right tricks can researchers find…
Read More
Intelligent life in the Milky Way is slowly dying out Life
Jan 3 2021

Intelligent life in the Milky Way is slowly dying out

Mankind is pretty late and pretty far out. That's the conclusion of a study that statistically examines the development of intelligent life in the Milky Way. In it, the authors look at a whole range of factors that they think influence the evolution of intelligent life, such as the frequency of Sun-like stars hosting Earth-like planets, the frequency of civilization destroying supernovas, the length of time it takes for intelligent life to evolve (if conditions are right), and the tendency of advanced civilizations to self-destruct. The researchers incorporated these factors, with varying values, into a simulation of the Milky…
Read More
Intergalactic gas filaments crisscross the universe Astrophysics
Dec 27 2020

Intergalactic gas filaments crisscross the universe

They crisscross the cosmos like cobwebs in a room that hasn't seen a vacuum cleaner in a long time: In so-called filaments, unfathomably large, threadlike structures of hot gas that surround and connect galaxies and clusters of galaxies, astrophysicists have long suspected the previously hidden half of matter in our universe. We owe our existence to a tiny error. After the big bang 13.8 billion years ago, the matter of the cosmos spread out in a gigantic gas cloud and was almost evenly distributed in it. Almost, but not quite: in some parts the cloud was somewhat denser than in…
Read More
A lonely pair of gas giants that could never become a star Space
Dec 23 2020

A lonely pair of gas giants that could never become a star

Star formation processes sometimes give rise to astronomical objects called brown dwarfs. They are smaller and colder than stars, and in the most extreme cases can have masses and temperatures down to those of exoplanets. Like stars, brown dwarfs often wander through space alone, but they can also appear in binary systems, where two brown dwarfs orbit each other and travel together in the galaxy. Researchers led by Clémence Fontanive of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern have now discovered a curious starless binary system of brown dwarfs. The system, CFHTWIR-Oph 98 (or…
Read More
Spiders in Space: Light as a Substitute for Gravity Life
Dec 9 2020

Spiders in Space: Light as a Substitute for Gravity

The University of Basel has just issued a very nice story in a press release. It's about spiders, and the following is probably only great for those who like the useful animals at least a little bit. But let the (translated) press release have its say. On earth, spiders form asymmetrical webs, whose center is shifted towards the upper edge. In resting state the spiders sit upside down, because they can move faster in the direction of gravity towards freshly caught prey. But what do arachnids do in zero gravity? In 2008, NASA wanted to get high schools in…
Read More
When the fog dissolves Astrophysics
Dec 4 2020

When the fog dissolves

In winter the fog sometimes does not dissolve the whole day. In space, planetary nebulae usually exist for many millennia, because they are star shells that have been ejected by their stars at the end of their lifetime. In the case of the Stingray Nebula, which was first catalogued in 1976 and is located 18,000 light years from Earth, this seems to be an exception. Images of the system taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016 show a nebula that has drastically lost brightness and changed shape compared to Hubble images from 1996. Light blue gas shells near…
Read More