Space

Oct 17 2018

Rocky with a hint of hydrogen: what’s a good recipe for a planet?

Rocky planets are rather small and gas giants are large – that’s one hypothesis you might come up with if you look at our Solar System. But is that true always and everywhere? Is our own system an example of the rule or an exception to the rule? Astronomers have now found more than 3700 exoplanets, but very little is known about their composition. At most the radius and mass are known. But even if the size and mass are known, it is still very difficult to say whether the exoplanet has, in fact, a large, but thanks to…

It’s not Planet X, but 2015 TG387 is still pretty far out

Space

Oct 16 2018

It’s not Planet X, but 2015 TG387 is still pretty far out

A team led by astronomers Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo has been searching for a while for Planet X, which is supposed to orbit the Sun somewhere in the Oort Cloud far beyond the other planets. To do this, they are studying the areas of interest particularly closely – and keep coming up with interesting discoveries in the process. This time the result is called 2015 TG387. The object was first registered in 2015; scientists needed until today to confirm its orbit, which leads it once around the Sun every 40,000 years. 2015 TG387 is one of the most…

Space

Oct 6 2018

Exoplanets have pretty moons too

Nobody really believes that our Solar System is the only one with moons. But the existence of moons in other star systems has only been a hypothesis up until now. So-called exomoons are particularly difficult to find, because they are smaller than their host planets (which is, of course, in their nature) and they follow complicated paths due to their orbits around their planets and, in turn, around their stars. Such objects are usually identified by measuring the occultation caused when they pass in front of their star (transit method). Nevertheless, the Hubble Space Telescope has now finally found…

Space

Sep 12 2018

Where is the Milky Way’s sibling now?

Once upon a time there were three siblings who roamed the universe together. Two of their names are still known today: the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are still the dominant galaxies of the Local Group. But the third sibling went missing two billion years ago – today, astronomers call it “M32p.” At the time, M32p was the third largest galaxy of the Local Group and twenty times larger than any galaxy that has ever merged with the Milky Way. (more…)

Confirmed for the first time: there’s ice on the surface of the Moon

Space

Aug 21 2018

Confirmed for the first time: there’s ice on the surface of the Moon

Anyone who wants to stay on the Moon for a long time (for example, in their own base) will need water. It has been known for some time that water exists buried deep in the Moon’s rocks, but of course it would be easier to reach if it were directly on the surface. Using data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument, a research team led by Shuai Li from the University of Hawaii and Brown University has now shown that water is just waiting to be collected from permanently shaded areas of craters in the Moon’s north and…

New Horizons probe sees the hydrogen wall at the end of the Solar System

Space

Aug 15 2018

New Horizons probe sees the hydrogen wall at the end of the Solar System

NASA’s New Horizons probe is on its way to its next destination. Scientists are using the interim time (when the probe is not sleeping) to evaluate the measurements of its instruments. Even before arriving at Pluto, the probe’s ultraviolet telescope might have measured a shadow of the wall of hydrogen that is expected at the outermost limit of our Solar System. (more…)

Ganymede awakens: whistling and chirping around Jupiter’s moon

Space

Aug 7 2018

Ganymede awakens: whistling and chirping around Jupiter’s moon

The Sun generates low-frequency radio waves in the Earth’s radiation belt. If you were to listen to them in a loudspeaker (which is actually what scientists were doing when these radio waves were discovered in the 1960s), they sound like the whistling and chirping of a flock of birds. These special waves were therefore given the name chorus waves. It was later discovered what these chorus waves produce: they are particularly well suited for transferring energy to electrons in the solar wind. Charged particles accelerated by them can then produce particularly good auroras when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere.…

Are black holes surrounded by a firewall?

Space

Aug 5 2018

Are black holes surrounded by a firewall?

Black holes suck in anything that gets too close to them—even light. In their interiors, researchers imagine objects that, according to current physics, should not even exist: singularities, where matter becomes infinitely dense and hot and classical physics breaks down. The area around a black hole is also a hot subject of discussion. In particular, astrophysicists run into problems when they consider a black hole simultaneously with the general theory of relativity and quantum physics. One problem arises with the quantum states of all the particles that fall into the black hole. For the rest of the universe, information…