Universe Today

1. New Exoplanet Can Cause Chemical Discrepancies In Paired Stars

   

   Co-paired stars, or stars that travel together, can provide insights into processes that other stars can't. Differences in their brightness, orbits, and chemical composition can hint at different features, and scientists are beginning to exploit them. A new paper from researchers in Australia, China, the US, and Europe analyzed data to determine if one of those features - specifically the depletion of particular elements in a star - could be a sign that it has formed a planet, or if it ate one.

2. Is the World Ready for a Catastrophic Solar Storm?

   

   Some 13,000 years ago, the Sun emitted a huge belch of radiation that bombarded Earth and left its imprint in ancient tree rings. That solar storm was the most powerful one ever recorded. The next strongest was the 1839 Carrington Event. It was spurred by a huge solar flare that triggered a powerful geomagnetic storm at Earth. The resulting "space weather" disrupted telegraph communications around the world. Today, as we move through this year's "solar maximum", a period of solar activity that occurs every 11 years, scientists want to prepare governments for the effects of severe solar storms.

3. The New, Farthest Galaxy has Been Found by Webb. Only 280 Million Years After the Big Bang

   

   The JWST has done it again. The powerful space telescope has already revealed the presence of bright galaxies only several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Now, it's sensed light from a galaxy only 280 million years after the Big Bang, the most distant galaxy ever detected.

4. Is Mars Storing its Water Underground?

   

   Mars' oceans, lakes, and rivers are long gone. They've left behind evidence of their time here in river channels, deltas, paleolakes, and other features. The water's existence isn't a mystery, but its whereabouts is. Did it disappear into space, or did it retreat into underground aquifers?

5. Lunar Landing Pads Will Need to be Tough

   

   As humanity heads back to the Moon, a silent danger lurks: exhaust plumes from multiple spacecraft will blast lunar dust into orbit, creating a potentially deadly obstacle course for future missions. The solution will be to build landing pads on the lunar surface out of the lunar regolith. Researchers simulated landing pads just like these and their tests showed they could handle the heat and force of the propellant exhaust from a landing spacecraft. The techniques they found will minimise erosion over multiple landings.

6. New Study Suggests that Jupiter was Once Twice as Big as it is Today

   

   Jupiter and its powerful gravity have played a major role in sculpting the Solar System. A new study provides a glimpse into Jupiter's primordial state, which could have implications for our understanding of how the Solar System evolved.

7. Building A Giant Catchers' Mitt On The Moon

   

   Members of the space exploration community are always coming up with novel ideas to solve problems that they view as holding back humanity's expansion into the cosmos. One such problem that has become more noticeable of late, due to the failure of several powered lunar landers, is the difficulty of landing on the Moon. To open up the wealth of resources on our nearest neighbor, we will have to regularly deliver cargo to it as well as ship cargo off of it. A new idea from Lunar Cargo, a company based in Europe, has come up with a novel, patented way to deliver cargo to the Moon - the Momentum Absorption Catcher for Express Deliveries on Non-Atmospheric Somata, or M.A.C.E.D.O.N.A.S.

8. Terraforming Mars Could Be Within Reach

   

   Mars has fascinated us for centuries. Since the invention of the telescope, science fiction writers have mused over its habitability. Its location in the Solar System's habitable zone suggests it could, in theory, support life—despite lacking a global magnetic field and surface water. In a new paper, researchers propose that terraforming Mars is now an achievable goal. They outline methods for warming the planet, releasing pioneer species to build an ecosystem, and improving its atmosphere.

9. A CubeSat Propulsion System to Visit Near Earth Objects

   

   In recent years, humanity has visited several near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), including Ryugu (Hayabusa2) and Didymos (DART). However, we will need more frequent missions to start gathering more helpful information about this class of over 37,000 space rocks. CubeSats have off-the-shelf components and a relatively small size, making them a potentially good candidate for such an exploration program. But how would they reach these asteroid locations given their relatively limited payload and propulsion capacity? That is the focus of a new paper from Alessandro Quarta of the University of Pisa. He looks at potential trajectory planning for CubeSats given one of several configurations of ion drives. He shows how many NEAs can be accessed by simply entering a heliocentric orbit and awaiting the asteroid's arrival as part of its orbit.

10. Planetary Scientists Confirm There's No Flowing Water on Mars

    

    It was big news years ago when Mars orbiters found streaks of what appeared to be water running down Martian cliffs and crater walls. Scientists worked hard to figure out what they were. Some proposed that they were seasonal streaks of briny ice, melting as the weak Mars summer arrived. New research says no to that.