As much as we want to tell Mr Sulu to “Take us to warp factor five”, dangerous causality problems, tricky maths and negative energy could get in the way.
Brown dwarfs are curious celestial bodies that appear to straddle the mass divide between stars and planets. Often referred to as “failed stars,” brown dwarfs form in isolation from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust like a star.
However, while fully-fledged stars continue to gather material from the gas and dust cloud that births them, brown dwarfs are less successful at this mass harvesting. As a result, they don’t reach the masses of the smallest stars and can’t trigger the process that defines main sequence stars, like our sun.
Dwarf galaxies like the SMC are often un-evolved when it comes to their chemistry because their history of star formation isn’t very extensive, so they haven’t had a chance to build up many heavy elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon or iron. NGC 346, for instance, contains about 10% the abundance of heavy elements that star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy have. This makes clusters such as NGC 346 great proxies for studying conditions akin to those found in the early universe.
NGC 346 is still forming lots of stars, and JWST found that many of the young ones, with ages of 20 to 30 million years, still possess planet-forming disks around them. Their existence confounds expectations.
“With Webb, we have a strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we must rethink how we create computer models for planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,” said Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, who led the research.
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The sublime is an emotion described as equal parts awe and terror; a perfect description of our universe.
Most of Earth’s meteorites also trace their origins to S-type asteroids, yet they contain minimal organic material. This scarcity has made analyzing their organic content a significant challenge. In contrast, the Hayabusa mission’s meticulously curated samples are free from terrestrial interference, enabling groundbreaking studies of organic compounds.
Among the particles returned by Hayabusa, one named “Amazon” has proven particularly revealing. Measuring just 30 micrometers wide, Amazon offers a rare opportunity to investigate both water and organic content. Its unique shape, reminiscent of the South American continent, underscores its distinctiveness.
Amazon’s mineral composition includes olivine, pyroxenes, albite, and traces of high-temperature carbonates. These minerals confirm its origin as an S-type asteroid, linking it directly to ordinary chondrites.
New studies led by researchers at the University of Central Florida offer for the first time a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs.
The findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the region of the giant planets between Jupiter and Saturn, becoming centaurs.
TNOs are small bodies, or “planetesimals,” orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. They never accreted into planets, and serve as pristine time capsules, preserving crucial evidence of the molecular processes and planetary migrations that shaped the solar system billions of years ago. These solar system objects are like icy asteroids and have orbits comparable to or larger than Neptune’s orbit.
UNSW engineers have developed and built a special maser system that boosts microwave signals—such as those from deep space—but does not need to be super-cooled.
They say that diamonds are a girl’s best friend—but that might also soon be true for astronomers and astrophysicists following the new research. The team of quantum experts have developed a device known as a maser which uses a specially created purple diamond to amplify weak microwave signals, such as those which can come from deep space.
Most importantly, their maser works at room temperature, whereas previous such devices needed to be super-cooled, at great expense, down to about minus 269°C.
A new computer model can be used to detect and measure interior oceans on the ice covered moons of Uranus. The model works by analyzing orbital wobbles that would be visible from a passing spacecraft. The research gives engineers and scientists a slide-rule to help them design NASA’s upcoming Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission.
When NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, it captured grainy photographs of large ice-covered moons. Now nearly 40 years later, NASA plans to send another spacecraft to Uranus, this time equipped to see if those icy moons are hiding liquid water oceans.
The mission is still in an early planning stage. But researchers at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) are preparing for it by building a new computer model that could be used to detect oceans beneath the ice using just the spacecraft’s cameras.
After its formation, the moon may have been the scene of such immense volcanic activity that its entire crust melted several times and was completely churned through. At that time, the moon orbited significantly closer to Earth than today. The resulting tidal forces heated up its interior and thus powered the violent volcanism. Only Jupiter’s moon Io, by far the most volcanically active body in the solar system, offers comparable conditions.
These new considerations published today in the journal Nature by an international team of researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz, the Max Planck Institute for solar system Research (MPS) and the Collège de France resolve previous contradictions and inconsistencies regarding the age of the moon. According to the researchers, the moon was formed between 4.43 and 4.51 billion years ago. Its crust, however, appears around 80 to 160 million years younger.
The moon is apparently quite reluctant to reveal its age. Attempts to uncover its secret have yielded estimates that lie several hundred million years apart: While some researchers suggest that our cosmic companion was formed 4.35 billion years ago, others date its birth to 4.51 billion years ago.
At night, charged particles from the sun caught by Earth’s magnetosphere rain down into the atmosphere. The impacting particles rip electrons from atoms in the atmosphere, creating both beauty and chaos. These high-energy interactions cause the northern and southern lights, but they also scatter radio signals, wreaking havoc on ground-based and satellite communications.
Scientists would like to track electrical activity in the ionosphere by measuring the distribution of plasma, the form matter takes when positive ions are separated from their electrons, to help better predict how communications will be affected by electromagnetic energy.
But analyzing plasma in the ionosphere is a challenge because its distribution changes quickly and its movements are often unpredictable. In addition, collisional physics makes detecting true motion in the lower ionosphere exceedingly difficult.
