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
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…)
Complex organic molecules from the depths of Enceladus
The Cassini probe that sent us the spectacular pictures of tiger stripes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and that flew through the ice plumes there several times has long since crashed into Saturn. Nevertheless, scientists are still discovering more and more new details from the data that it sent. Now a research team led by Frank Postberg and Nozair Khawaja from the University of Heidelberg have succeeded in identifying fragments of complex organic molecules in the particles ejected from the ice geysers. “This is the first-ever detection of complex organics coming from an extraterrestrial water world,” says Postberg. “we found large fragments…
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.…
Where does the dust on Mars come from?
The movie “The Martian” begins with the hero being separated from his crew by a dust storm and then being left behind, presumed dead, alone on Mars. In fact, because of its very thin atmosphere, a storm on Mars would feel like a light breeze on Earth and would definitely not have the force to knock over a spaceship. But Martian storms could certainly produce problems, because they would darken the sky, and this would make generating energy from sunlight no longer possible. But where does the dust come from that is currently covering almost all of Mars? (more…)
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…
Terraforming Mars: There’s not enough carbon dioxide
The atmosphere of the red planet not only lacks enough oxygen, it is also very thin. Instead of a surface pressure of one bar on Earth, the surface pressure in Mars’s atmosphere reaches only 6 millibars, thus, less than one-hundredth of the Earth’s surface pressure. Consequently, to work on Mars, astronauts would have to wear pressurized suits. The atmosphere would have to be considerably denser for a respiratory mask to be sufficient. If the density were even higher, carbon dioxide, the main component of Mars’s atmosphere, could play its same role that is so dreaded on Earth, that of…