Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Q. Morris
Do bacteria use tungsten for protection from interstellar radiation? Life

Do bacteria use tungsten for protection from interstellar radiation?

Tungsten is a heavy metal with impressive properties: the white, shiny material doesn’t melt until the temperature is at 3422 °C and doesn’t boil until 5930 °C. It is resistant to almost all acids and has approximately the density of gold. It is also interesting that all its natural isotopes are theoretically unstable. Their half-lives, however, are on the order of trillions of years, so their decomposition is not measurable on our time scales. Humans have used tungsten to construct light-bulb filaments for incandescent and fluorescent lights. In the carbon compound, tungsten carbide, it is almost as hard as…
Old and young at the same time? The mystery of red giants Astrophysics

Old and young at the same time? The mystery of red giants

At the end of their life, main sequence stars (which also include our Sun) develop into red giants. This fate is predestined for them. However, it’s not so easy to figure out the true age of a red giant. This is because there are many individual factors that can accelerate or slow down their development. Astronomers have gotten rather good at this in recent years, but there are always exceptions. Four years ago, researchers of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy discovered red giants whose age estimates differed by up to four billion…
Interstellar medium as a filling station – a model calculation Proxima

Interstellar medium as a filling station – a model calculation

In my book “Proxima Rising,” I describe how a spaceship, which at first is the size of a needle, is accelerated by powerful lasers to 20% of the speed of light. Then it increases its size by collecting material from its surroundings. But isn’t that totally unrealistic? Isn’t space just empty between the stars? No. I’m sure you had already guessed that answer, because hopefully you know I’m trying hard to write scientifically possible science fiction. The vacuum in space is not empty. From a quantum-physics perspective, it is anything but, however I’m not referring to that. Normal interstellar…
Launch of Dragonfly Mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, planned for 2026 Space

Launch of Dragonfly Mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, planned for 2026

NASA just announced some great news for readers of the ice moon series: in 2026, so in just seven years, an innovative mission will be launched to Titan, a mission that will study the surface of the fascinating moon with the help of an autonomous drone. “Dragonfly” should find good flying conditions there – the atmospheric pressure at Titan’s surface is 50% higher than the air pressure at the Earth’s surface. Under those conditions, even a human in a wingsuit could fly under his or her own power, researchers believe, because Titan’s gravity (which is only slightly greater than…
The Very Large Telescope checks out the Alpha Centauri system Life

The Very Large Telescope checks out the Alpha Centauri system

The closest star system to our Sun (4.37 light-years away) consists of two Sun-like stars (Alpha Centauri A and B) and the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. Astronomers already discovered a rocky planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. But what about the binary Alpha Centauri system? A new instrument named NEAR and developed by the “Breakthrough Watch” Initiative and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is set to find out. NEAR (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region) is, above all, a so-called thermal infrared coronagraph. The instrument blocks out most of the light received from a target star and at the same time…
Into space with Blue Origin: test seating in New Shepard Space

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…
How does a radio telescope work? A visit to the Very Large Array Astrophysics

How does a radio telescope work? A visit to the Very Large Array

Every – okay, almost every – object in the universe emits light. When astronomers talk about light, however, they’re not only talking about the small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum that humans can see, i.e., the optical range, but instead they’re talking about all of it: radio waves, infrared, visible light, UV light, X-rays, gamma radiation (listed here in order of decreasing wavelength). Physicists would call this “electromagnetic radiation,” but “light” also fits very well, because, in the end, the same laws always apply for reception. Resolution, focal length, etc., it doesn’t matter if you are using a…
Three exocomets discovered in orbit around Beta Pictoris Space

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…