Ice geysers also on Jupiter’s moon Europa
One of the special features of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, magnificently photographed and analyzed by the Cassini probe, are its geysers: close to its south pole, large fountains made from ice crystals burst from the ocean under the crust and leap into space. Like Enceladus, we know that Jupiter’s moon Europa is also an icy moon. Whether there are also geysers on Europa, however, is anything but clear. If there are geysers on Europa, this would be an advantage because then we could find out very simply what is in the ocean believed to be under Europa’s crust. Since Europa…
Project KRUSTY: NASA wants to operate low-power nuclear reactors on the Moon and Mars
In the television show “The Simpsons,” Krusty is the name of a clown who usually treats everyone any way but nice. The US space agency NASA is using this name for its project for making exploration on the moon and other planets easier with the help of nuclear reactors (laymen would say “nuclear power plants”). KRUSTY stands for “Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology” and has already proven reliable and safe in every way in various tests. (more…)
What will happen after the Sun dies?
In approximately ten billion years, our Sun will cease to exist, that much is clear. But astronomers, of course, are thinking even farther out – they wonder what will become of our mother star. Nine out of ten stars will leave behind a planetary nebula, a massive, illuminated cloud of interstellar gas and dust, when they transition from red giants to white dwarves. A nebula can contain almost half the mass of its former star; the nebula is visible for approximately 10,000 years, as long as the core is still hot enough to light up the cloud from inside.…
How the InSight probe will explore the interior of Mars
As background research for my up-coming novel “Mars Nation,” I’ve been following live the start of the new Mars “InSight” satellite. For the first time, an interplanetary NASA mission will begin on the west coast of the USA. The launch site is the Vandenberg Air Force Base, home of the US Air Force’s 30th Space Wing. Military and civil missions to Earth orbit have started from here, but the Insight probe is so lightweight that it does not need to take advantage of being close to the equator. In addition, in the available launch window (there is one only…
Star sizes in the universe: can we have a recount, please?
When astronomers make statements on how many stars of different sizes there might be in our Milky Way and elsewhere, they don’t simply count them – they use an estimate. Their estimates are based on models that have been developed and then checked with reality. One such model is the Salpeter function, first derived in 1955 by Edwin Salpeter for the area around the Sun. It establishes a relationship between the initial masses of young stars and the masses of the cores from which they were created. Accordingly, there should be significantly more low-mass stars than high-mass stars, which…
Did life come from outer space?
How did the building blocks of life come about on Earth? So far, science has not given a very exact answer to this question. The most important experiment on this question was conducted in 1952 by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago. They mixed together simple chemical substances of a hypothetical young Earth atmosphere – water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide, but no oxygen – and exposed this mixture to electrical discharges that were meant to replicate the energy supplied from lightning in thunderstorms. The result: after some time, organic molecules were produced. At…
Born from dust: merging proto-galaxies in the early universe
As an object of research, the universe is an enviable and unenviable object at the same time. Unenviable because it is really, really big and all of us can only observe it from a single position that is not optimal at all (imagine you had to take all of your photos through the keyhole of your bedroom’s closet door – even pictures of your living room!). Enviable because it permits a look into its own past. Not like a human, who sees his or her own past in their gray hair and wrinkled skin, but instead “as it actually…
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