NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has been searching for exoplanets since its launch in 2018, and it turns out it may have found plenty more of them than we had thought
Category: space
An interplanetary shortcut can speed up trips to Mars
Whether it’s robotic rovers heading to Mars or, one day, a crew of astronauts, a round-trip journey is an incredibly long one. But there may be a way to find a shortcut. A new study published in the journal Acta Astronautica suggests that hundreds of days could be shaved off a return trip to the Red Planet by using the early orbital data of asteroids. This could bring the total mission time down to as low as 153 days.
To identify optimal routes and calculate fuel needs, planners of interplanetary missions use precise planetary data. Sending missions to other worlds rarely involves early orbital data from asteroids.
When it comes to Mars missions, a key planning consideration is a phenomenon known as Mars opposition. This occurs roughly every 26 months when Earth passes directly between the sun and Mars. During this alignment, the two planets are on the same side of the sun, bringing Mars to its closest point to Earth.
Why stars spin down, or up, before they die
From birth to death, stars generally slow by 100 to 1,000 times their initial rotation rates; in other words, they “spin down.” The sun’s total angular momentum has declined as material is gradually blown off at the surface as solar wind. By observing this, astronomers have theorized the interaction between magnetic fields and plasma flow to be the most efficient way to spin down stars.
Why and how this happens has long interested astronomers, and recently an observational technique called asteroseismology, which measures a star’s natural oscillation frequencies, has made it possible to measure the internal rotation rates and magnetic fields of other stars in our galaxy.
From this huge population, a picture of how stellar rotation decreases with stellar age has emerged, one that suggests that current theory is insufficient to explain the dramatic decrease in rotation.
Better volcano eruption predictions on Earth—and Venus—thanks to Mauna Loa study
When Mauna Loa erupted in 2022, the largest lava flow headed on a path headed directly toward Daniel K. Inouye State Highway 200, also known as Saddle Road, a critical route that carries many residents from their homes on one side to their jobs on the other.
No one could accurately predict whether the lava would continue to flow and eventually block the highway, or stop short, sparing the road.
However, when the volcano next erupts scientists will be better able to monitor the eruption in real time and make more accurate predictions about where the lava will flow and when the volcano might erupt. These advances are thanks to the availability of satellite data from public and private sources as well as machine learning algorithms developed at Pitt with help from a colleague in Italy, as highlighted in a recent publication in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.
Using Moon Regolith to Build Lunar Habitats
“Our results show that you can take a material that is inherently challenging and convert it into something structurally beneficial,” said Dr. Denizhan Yavas. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30488/using-moon-reg…habitats-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30488/using-moon-reg…habitats-2)
How can lunar dust (officially called regolith) be used to build future habitats on the Moon? This is what a recent study published in Advanced Engineering Materials hopes to address as a pair of researchers investigated how a novel technique for how lunar regolith could strengthen advanced composite materials. This study has the potential to help reduce the cost of shipping building materials to the Moon for future habitats by using available resources.
For the study, the researchers used lunar regolith simulant, a common substitute for lunar regolith since the latter is in low supply, to examine whether it could be used as a reinforcer for a common aerospace building material called polymer composites. The motivation for this study came from previous lunar regolith research that explored repelling lunar dust using nanoscale polymer surfaces. This is because lunar dust is highly abrasive, as the Apollo astronauts found out, and repelling it could prove beneficial for future astronauts.
Now, the researchers aspired to exploit this abrasiveness to their benefit for developing next generation building material on the Moon. In the end, the researchers found the lunar regolith simulant strengthened both the impact resistance and toughness of the polymers between 30 to 40 percent. Both attributes will be crucial to maintaining lunar habitats due to the Moon’s much harsher environment than Earth, specifically regarding micrometeorite strikes and solar radiation.
A physicist reveals how time travel is possible | Jim Al-Khalili
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Time is the one thing every human being experiences identically, or so we assume.
Physicist Jim Al-Khalili dismantles that assumption, explaining how velocity and gravity don’t just affect clocks but actually alter the rate at which time passes for the person experiencing it.
Preorder Jim Al-Khalili’s forthcoming book, On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe, here: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Physics-T?tag=lifeboatfound-20…
About Jim Al-Khalili: Jim is a multiple award-winning science communicator renowned for his public engagement around the world through writing and broadcasting and a leading academic making fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, particularly in nuclear reaction theory, quantum effects in biology, open quantum systems and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Jim is a theoretical physicist at the University of Surrey where he holds a Distinguished Chair in physics as well as a university chair in the public engagement in science. He received his PhD in nuclear reaction theory in 1989 and has published widely in the field. His current interest is in open quantum systems and the application of quantum mechanics in biology.
About Jim Al-Khalili:
Alien comet carries record-heavy water, and its birthplace looks nothing like our cosmic neighborhood
Less than a year ago, astronomers discovered a comet soaring through our sky that was not from our solar system. Although we still don’t know where this interstellar object called 3I/ATLAS came from, research led by the University of Michigan has revealed new insights about its birthplace. Wherever that was, it was much colder than the environment that created our solar system.
The new finding is based on the observation that 3I/ATLAS is remarkably rich in a specific type of water that contains deuterium. The team’s study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“Our new observations show that the conditions that led to the formation of our solar system are much different from how planetary systems evolved in different parts of our galaxy,” said Luis Salazar Manzano, lead author of the new study and a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Astronomy.
Mars dust storms are sparking electricity and rewriting the planet’s chemistry
Mars may look like a quiet, dusty world, but it’s actually buzzing with hidden electrical activity. Powerful dust storms and swirling dust devils generate static electricity strong enough to spark faint glowing discharges across the planet, triggering chemical reactions that reshape its surface and atmosphere. Scientists have now shown that these tiny lightning-like events can create a surprising mix of chemicals—including chlorine compounds and carbonates—and even leave behind distinct isotopic “fingerprints.”
Mars is often portrayed as a dry, lifeless desert, but it is far more active than it appears. Its thin atmosphere and dusty terrain create an environment where constant motion generates electrical energy. Dust storms and spinning dust devils sweep across the surface, continually reshaping the landscape and driving processes that scientists are only beginning to fully understand.
Planetary scientist Alian Wang has been studying this phenomenon in depth. In a series of studies, including recent work published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, she has examined how these electrically charged dust activities influence the chemistry of Mars, particularly through their impact on isotopes.
Aquila Booster turns a weak pulsar into a powerhouse of PeV particles
A point-like cosmic particle accelerator pumps out PeV gamma rays stronger than expected from a pulsar 50x weaker than Crab.
What makes this discovery remarkable is not just the energy, but the efficiency. This system appears to convert energy into high-speed particles far more effectively than current physics says it should.
In simple terms, astronomers may have found a cosmic particle accelerator that outperforms even their best theoretical designs.
To understand the breakthrough, it helps to know what scientists were looking at. A pulsar wind nebula forms when a dead star, called a pulsar, spins rapidly and blasts out a stream of charged particles at nearly the speed of light.
Deep under Antarctic ice, a long-predicted cosmic whisper finally breaks through in 13 strange bursts
A detector buried deep in Antarctic ice has captured the first experimental evidence of a predicted but never-before-seen phenomenon: radio pulses generated when high-energy cosmic rays slam into the ice sheet and trigger particle cascades inside it. Through results published in Physical Review Letters, astronomers of the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) Collaboration have validated a key technique, which they hope will eventually allow them to detect some of the rarest and most energetic particles in the universe.
In 1962, Soviet physicist Gurgen Askaryan predicted that high-energy particles passing through a dense material should produce a distinctive burst of radio waves. When such a particle strikes an atom, it triggers a cascade of secondary particles that sweeps up electrons from the surrounding material, creating a negatively charged shower front that radiates at radio frequencies.
This “Askaryan radiation” was later confirmed in lab experiments and detected in air, but observing it in ice proved far more challenging. This is partly due to the difficulty of distinguishing genuine signals from the many sources of radio noise in polar environments, and partly because the simulations needed to model the effect in ice have only recently become sophisticated enough to make such rigorous analysis possible.