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Category: space – Page 48

“We now need to continue observing this star to confirm the other candidate signals,” said Dr. Alejandro Suárez Mascareño. “But the discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets.”

How close are Earth-sized exoplanets to Earth? This is what a recent study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as a large international team of researchers have announced the discovery of Barnard b, which orbits Barnard’s star approximately 6 light-years from Earth. This discovery is profound because Barnard’s star is the closest single star to Earth but also because Barnard b is estimated to be approximately just over one-third the mass of the Earth, or approximately three times the mass of the planet Mars.

Barnard’s star is approximately 16 percent the mass of our Sun with approximately 19 percent of its diameter. While the size of Barnard b poses the possibility that it might be Earth-like, its 3.15-day orbit puts it well inside its star’s habitable zone (HZ).

“Barnard b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few known with a mass less than that of Earth. But the planet is too close to the host star, closer than the habitable zone,” said Dr. Jonay González Hernández, who is a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, and lead author of the study. “Even if the star is about 2,500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot there to maintain liquid water on the surface.”

Continue reading “Discovery of Barnard b: A New Exoplanet Orbiting Our Nearest Stellar Neighbor” | >

Dr Shannon Curry said she believes humans will first land on Mars — at the earliest — in 2040, but more realistically 2050. And 2075 before Mars colonization! Very realistic prediction, and I enthusiastically agree.

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, led by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder, was supposed to operate for one year when it entered orbit on September 21, 2014. Ten years later, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter has been a boon to scientists studying the red planet and they hope it will remain in operation for years to come.

In May, MAVEN researchers got to watch as a huge solar storm hit the planet along with a massive dose of radiation. The MAVEN spacecraft is an orbiter, so it won’t ever land on the surface of Mars like the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Instead, it’s designed to examine the Martian atmosphere, which principal investigator Shannon Curry said “holds a number of secrets in terms of our past, present, and future.”

Here are some takeaways from Curry’s interview with Colorado Matters.

Continue reading “How the MAVEN spacecraft — led by CU Boulder — could help pave the way for human exploration on Mars” | >

“No one knows how the moon was formed,” said Dr. Darren Williams. “For the last four decades, we have had one possibility for how it got there. Now, we have two. This opens a treasure trove of new questions and opportunities for further study.”

How did the Moon form? Was it from a collision, as has been the longstanding theory, or could it have been captured by the Earth early in our planet’s formation? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as two researchers from Penn State investigated a new model for how our Moon came to reside within its present orbit around the Earth. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the origin of our Moon, which could help explain how some moons throughout our solar system came to be orbiting their respective planets, as well.

For the study, the researchers performed a series of calculations aimed at ascertaining if a simulated binary object could end up in the Moon’s orbit. The argument the researchers make is that if the Moon was formed from a collision, then it would orbit above the Earth’s equator. In contrast, the Moon’s orbit follows a different orbit.

“The moon is more in line with the sun than it is with the Earth’s equator,” said Dr. Darren Williams, who is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State Behrend and lead author of the study.

Continue reading “Revisiting the Moon’s Origin: A New Capture Theory” | >

We know that beneath its crater-pocked silicate crust, the moon has an olivine mantle and a metallic core. Some research has also suggested that a partially molten layer may lie at the base of the otherwise solid mantle, sandwiched between it and the solid core. But other evidence disagrees.

Read more | >

Star Bound is a book for anyone who wants to learn about the American space program but isn’t sure where to start. First and foremost, it’s a history—short, sweet, and straightforward. From rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard’s primitive flight tests in 1926 through the creation of NASA, from our first steps on the moon to construction of the International Space Station and planning a trip to Mars, readers will meet the people and projects that have put the United States at the forefront of space exploration. Along the way, they’ll learn:

• How the United States beat the Soviets to the moon.

• Why astronauts float in space (Hint: It’s not for lack of gravity!)

Read more | >

Mars was once a very wet planet, as is evident in its surface geological features. Scientists know that over the last 3 billion years, at least some water went deep underground, but what happened to the rest? Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) missions are helping unlock that mystery.

“There are only two places water can go. It can freeze into the ground, or the water molecule can break into atoms, and the atoms can escape from the top of the atmosphere into space,” explained study leader John Clarke of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University in Massachusetts. “To understand how much water there was and what happened to it, we need to understand how the atoms escape into space.”

Clarke and his team combined data from Hubble and MAVEN to measure the number and current escape rate of the hydrogen atoms escaping into space. This information allowed them to extrapolate the escape rate backwards through time to understand the history of water on the red planet.

Read more | >