Space

Nov 29 2020

The solar system – a crash birth

About 4.5 billion years ago, a large cloud of gas and dust collapsed where the solar system is today. Everything that makes up our sun, the planets, moons, asteroids and other celestial bodies in the solar system comes from this cloud. As an international team of researchers led by planetologists from the University of Münster has now discovered, the formation of the entire system took a surprisingly short time: only 200,000 years. The first solids that formed in the solar system can now be found as micrometer to centimeter-sized inclusions in meteorites. The so-called calcium- and aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs)…

Astrophysics

Nov 26 2020

Milky Way’s Family Tree

From small to large: this is one of the possible ways in which structures are created in the universe. Galaxies like our Milky Way are formed when several small predecessor objects join together. But what exactly did the Milky Way form from? An international team of astrophysicists led by Dr. Diederik Kruijssen from the Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg has succeeded in reconstructing the merging history of our home galaxy and creating its family tree. To this end, the researchers analyzed the properties of globular star clusters orbiting the Milky Way. Globular clusters are dense groups…

Where the geysers on Europa could come from

Enceladus

Nov 20 2020

Where the geysers on Europa could come from

There are several worlds - usually moons - in the solar system, where it appears that life-friendly conditions could exist in the oceans below their crust. Whether this is really the case, we will only know after we have drilled through the ice and checked (as is done in The Enceladus Mission). A new paper by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is now lowering hopes somewhat. As the researchers show, some eruptions may not come from the depths of the oceans, but from water pockets embedded in…

Why the brain and the cosmos are structurally similar

Astrophysics

Nov 18 2020

Why the brain and the cosmos are structurally similar

The human brain has a volume of a about one liter (0,26 gallons, man: 1.27 l, woman: 1.13 l), i.e. one cubic decimeter or 0.001 cubic meter. The universe, on the other hand, has a volume of 2.3 million billion trillion cubic light years. Obviously, this is a huge difference of over 30 orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, both structures, the network of galaxies that criss-crosses the universe and the neural network in the brain, have surprising similarities, as Franco Vazza (astrophysicist at the University of Bologna) and Alberto Feletti (neurosurgeon at the University of Verona) note in a paper…

Space

Nov 5 2020

Where it rains rocks into magma oceans

Not all rocky worlds resemble the Earth or Mars. If a rocky planet has the bad luck to circle too closely around its star, it becomes an extreme world. Such as the planet K2-141b, which is about 200 light years away from Earth, takes just under 7 hours to orbit around its star K2-141 and orbits only about 1 million kilometers away from it (Earth-Sun: 150 million kilometers). In a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists from McGill University, York University and the Indian Institute of Science Education have analyzed what the weather…

Space

Oct 30 2020

Hotter than a star

WASP-189 b is a rather unusual planet. The gas giant was already discovered two years ago. Now researchers have discovered new details about it with the help of the CHEOPS satellite. Thus WASP-189b orbits its star 20 times closer than the earth the sun. For a complete orbit it needs only 2.7 days. Its home star is larger and over 2,000 degrees hotter than the Sun, which is why it appears to glow blue. "We only know of a handful of planets that orbit around such hot stars. In addition, this system is by far the brightest we know…

Life

Oct 27 2020

BepiColombo photographs Venus in flight

The ESA-JAXA mission BepiColombo has completed the first of two flybys of Venus needed to put it on course for the innermost planet of the solar system, Mercury. The closest approach to the Earth's hot sister took place this morning (15. 10.) at 03:58 GMT at a distance of about 10 720 km from the planet's surface. Launched on 20 October 2018, the spacecraft will require nine gravity assist fly-bys - one to Earth, two to Venus and six to Mercury - before it can enter orbit around Mercury in 2025. The flybys will use the gravitational pull of…

Space

Oct 26 2020

Why it snows on Pluto’s mountains

In 2015, the New Horizons space probe discovered spectacular snow-covered mountains on Pluto that are strikingly similar to the mountains on Earth. Such a landscape had never before been observed anywhere else in the solar system. However, there is one major difference: On Earth, atmospheric temperatures decrease with altitude. On Pluto, however, they increase with altitude due to the sun's radiation. So where does this ice come from? An international team of researchers has now investigated this. The scientists first discovered that the "snow" on the mountains of Pluto is actually frozen methane, with traces of this gas in…