Space

Into space with Blue Origin: test seating in New Shepard Space
Jun 20 2019

Into space with Blue Origin: test seating in New Shepard

In 2019, the private space travel company Blue Origin is still planning on being the first private organization to bring humans above the Karman line to an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles) and thus officially into space. The company founded by Jeff Bezos (Amazon) is setting its hopes on the “New Shepard,” a suborbital rocket with a passenger and cargo capsule that is launched and also landed by remote control – and is also reusable. It’s not yet clear how expensive the flights will be, but its competitor Virgin Galactic offers something similar for $250,000 (but not with…
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Three exocomets discovered in orbit around Beta Pictoris Space
Jun 16 2019

Three exocomets discovered in orbit around Beta Pictoris

NASA’s satellite TESS is actually supposed to be searching for exoplanets. To do this, TESS records light curves of stars, that is, the change in brightness of a star over time. If something happens in a certain rhythm in these light curves, then there must be something there covering the star repeatedly – something like a planet. Or maybe a comet! TESS has apparently just discovered three of these in orbit around the nearby star Beta Pictoris. Sebastian Zieba, a graduate student on a team led by Konstanze Zwintz at the Institute for Astrophysics and Particle Physics at the…
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Where the geysers on Neptune’s moon, Triton, come from Space
Jun 14 2019

Where the geysers on Neptune’s moon, Triton, come from

Triton is a strange moon. It is the only one of the large moons of our Solar System that rotates the wrong way about its planet – Neptune, the eighth and outermost planet. That’s also why it’s assumed that Triton is a Kuiper belt object, similar to Pluto, that was captured by Neptune. On first look, Triton appears very hostile to life – at temperatures close to 0 Kelvin, the atmosphere, which consists of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, is almost completely frozen, and thus it is very thin; Earth’s atmosphere is 70,000 times thicker. (more…)
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Gas-hydrate layer keeps Pluto’s ocean warm Space
Jun 10 2019

Gas-hydrate layer keeps Pluto’s ocean warm

In 2015, the dwarf planet, Pluto, received its first visitor from Earth. NASA’s New Horizons probe sent back spectacular images that showed, among other things, the “heart” of Pluto – a region named Tombaugh Regio consisting of, among other things, the unusually light-colored Sputnik Planitia. This is a plain that is up to one to nine kilometers deep, covers approximately the surface area of Texas, and is coated with nitrogen ice. From its existence, researchers could already assume a few things – among other things, there is probably a liquid ocean under Pluto’s surface, like the kind that also exists…
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The first star explosions were gigantic – and asymmetrical Astrophysics
May 17 2019

The first star explosions were gigantic – and asymmetrical

After a star with significantly more mass than the Sun has consumed all its fuel, it decays into a massive firework display, a supernova. In today’s universe, that is not a very common sight, because the greatest percentage of stars is made up of red dwarfs, which end their lives not nearly so spectacularly. Our Sun is also not destined to turn into a supernova. It will grow into a red giant and then, at the end, only a harmless white dwarf will remain. In the early universe, however, things were much different. At that time, there were neither…
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Gliding in the clouds of Venus: NASA studies two Venus missions Life
May 13 2019

Gliding in the clouds of Venus: NASA studies two Venus missions

Every year, NASA uses the “NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts” program (NIAC) to finance interesting projects that might someday become a reality. Projects in Phase 1 are subject to a nine-month study on their general feasibility, while in Phase 2, projects receive a two-year grant to develop their designs in detail. At the end, they aren’t required to be commercially marketable just yet – the transition to that level of development is done in Phase 3. Currently, the list includes two projects whose destination is Venus, Earth’s hellish little sister. (more…)
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Karst lakes on Titan Space
Apr 28 2019

Karst lakes on Titan

One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has a number of similarities to Earth: it has a dense atmosphere, mountains, and deserts, it rains, snows, and storms, with precipitation collecting in lakes and flowing in rivers into oceans. One of the differences is that it is much colder there, with temperatures around negative 180 °C. Therefore, methane and ethane, which are gases on Earth, play the role of terrestrial water on Titan; they form ice and even the sand grains in the deserts consist of frozen methane mixed with water ice. Most of our knowledge about Titan’s hydrogeology originates from NASA’s…
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Airborne telescope detects helium hydride ion in space Astrophysics
Apr 25 2019

Airborne telescope detects helium hydride ion in space

The helium hydride ion HeH+ is a puzzle in and of itself. As a noble gas, helium does not easily bond with other elements. And in the early universe, the selection of elements was much smaller than it is today: the only elements were hydrogen (H), helium (He), and traces of lithium, and only in ionized form, that is, without electrons, which form the basis for chemical bonds. After the big bang, the universe had to cool down first, for a period of approximately 300,000 years, before chemistry could begin. At a temperature of about 3700 degrees Celsius, the…
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