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C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) this summer provided renewed opportunities to study material left by outgassing. Using data gathered by the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), an international team of astronomers found that 2I/Borisov contains cyanide. Since comets and asteroids are essentially material left over from the formation of a planetary system, these studies will allow scientists to place constraints on the physical and chemical processes involved in the formation of extrasolar planets. Basically, it's like being able to study extrasolar planets without having to go there physically. Prof. Fitzsimmons told Universe Today, materials from other planetary systems, delivered to our doorstep—or at...

The idea is surprisingly old school. This company wants to modernize it. Launching into space is more popular than ever. But the big companies often come with big price tags. That allows for smaller competitors to try and break into smaller markets. Leo Aerospace wants to launch microsatellites from a surprising place: hot air balloons. Sending balloons close to the atmosphere has some history in the military, but reusability is a big challenge for the group. So is funding. The second space race is in full effect. And while well-heeled organizations like SpaceX and Blue Origin often hog the headlines,...

SENDING messages into deep space could be the best way for Earthlings to find extraterrestrial intelligence, but it carries a grave risk: alerting hostile aliens to our presence. Game theory may provide a way to navigate this dilemma. So far the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has mostly been restricted to listening for signs of technology elsewhere. Only a few attempts have been made to broadcast messages towards distant stars. Many scientists are against such “active” SETI for fear of revealing our presence. If all aliens feel the same way then no one will be broadcasting, and the chance of...

Commenters on YouTube are divided as to whether the lights are UFOs or just flares used by the military. The latter is plausible, given the proximity of the Outer Banks to multiple military facilities, including Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg in Eastern North Carolina. “I know what those lights are,” posted Derrick Chennault on YouTube. “As a former Marine based at the 2nd Marine Air Wing in Cherry Point, N.C. ... we used to regularly drop flares out of the back of our plane in the evenings for military exercises... Glad to see the Marines are still spooking people.” Guy...

In the cold wilderness of space, galaxies huddle together around the campfires of stars and the assuring pull of supermassive black holes. Between these cozy clusters of galaxies, where empty space stretches on for millions of light-years all around, a faint highway of gas bridges the darkness. This gassy, intergalactic network is known in cosmological models as the cosmic web. Made of long filaments of hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, the web is thought to contain most (more than 60%) of the gas in the universe and to directly feed all of the star-producing regions in space. At...

Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect: in its most intuitive form, a single atom is irradiated with light. According to Einstein, light consists of particles (photons) that transfer only quantized energy to the electron of the atom. If the photon’s energy is sufficient, it knocks the electrons out of the atom. But what happens to the photon’s momentum in this process? Physicists at Goethe University are now able to answer this question. To do so, they developed and constructed and new spectrometer with previously unattainable resolution. Doctoral student Alexander Hartung became a father twice during...

But now a pair of scientists suggests that some black holes may not be black holes at all. Instead, they may be weird objects chock-full of dark energy — the mysterious force thought to be pushing at the bounds of the universe, causing it to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Croker and Joel Weiner, a professor emeritus in mathematics at the same university, were looking at Friedmann's equations, which are simplified from Einstein's theory of general relativity.... Physicists use Friedmann's equations to describe the expansion of the universe, in part because the math is simpler than in Einstein's body of...

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are old and relatively small black holes that emerged soon after the Big Bang. They are thought to have been formed as a result of density fluctuations in the very early universe. It is believed that PBHs with the lowest mass have likely evaporated. However, those with larger masses may still exist, evaporating at the present epoch—even though they have been never directly observed. Astronomers Jakub Scholtz of Durham University and James Unwin of University of Illinois at Chicago, assume that PBHs could reside even closer to us than we think. In a recently published paper,...

A BAND of alien hunters led by an ex-punk rocker claim they've found evidence of UFOs. The US organisation, bankrolled by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge, says it's acquired "exotic material" from what could be an alien spacecraft. DeLonge, from California, co-founded the group To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017 with the goal of researching extraterrestrials. The team most famously turfed up classified footage of UFOs recorded by American pilots that were confirmed as real by the US Navy earlier this month. Speaking to the New York Times, a spokesperson for the group gave a tantalising...

When a new NASA space telescope opens its eyes in the mid-2020s, it will peer at the universe through some of the most sophisticated sunglasses ever designed. This multi-layered technology, the coronagraph instrument, might more rightly be called "starglasses": a system of masks, prisms, detectors and even self-flexing mirrors built to block out the glare from distant stars - and reveal the planets in orbit around them. Normally, that glare is overwhelming, blotting out any chance of seeing planets orbiting other stars, called exoplanets, said Jason Rhodes, the project scientist for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) at NASA's Jet...

Are There As Many Stars as Sand Grains? September 22, 2019 | David F. Coppedge A video clip from Illustra Media attempts to answer a common question: How many stars are there? Lord willing, the Editor will soon be back from travel and speaking. Till then, enjoy this amazing video from Illustra Media! HOW MANY STARS? The question is timeless. Pondered, throughout history, by human beings of every culture, age, and nationality: how many stars are there in the universe? This fascinating film explores worlds gigantic and microscopic to reveal answers that challenge our perceptions of creation. Travel with us...

At midnight on Mars, the red planet’s magnetic field sometimes starts to pulsate in ways that have never before been observed. The cause is currently unknown. That’s just one of the stunning preliminary findings from NASA’s very first robotic geophysicist there, the InSight lander. Since touching down in November 2018, this spacecraft has been gathering intel to help scientists better understand our neighboring planet’s innards and evolution, such as taking the temperature of its upper crust, recording the sounds of alien quakes, and measuring the strength and direction of the planet’s magnetic field. As revealed during a handful of presentations...

Astrophotography is probably one of the most difficult and specialized types of photography to try your hand at, but if you manage to get it right the rewards are some of the most astonishingly breathtaking images you are ever likely to see. The Royal Observatory Greenwich has just revealed the winners of its annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, and the quality of the entrants was nothing short of spectacular. This year the competition attracted 4,602 entries from 90 different countries across the world, all presenting the universe in a new light and vying for the coveted prize of...

The asteroid, called "2019 OK," passed about 40,400 miles above Earth's surface — roughly 5 times closer to Earth than the moon — at 55,000 miles per hour and could have "created localized devastation to an area roughly 50 miles across" if it struck land, according to a NASA news release. "An asteroid of this size coming this close to Earth is a pretty rare event — on the order of about twice a century," according to Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL.

Can the little bot still function? India claims to have spotted the country’s Vikram lunar lander on the surface of the Moon days after the spacecraft presumably crashed during a landing attempt. India still has not made contact with the lander, which went silent moments before its scheduled touchdown, but Indian officials are hopeful that the lander might still function. “We are trying to establish contact,” Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which oversees the lander, told Asian News International (ANI). “It will be communicated soon.” The Vikram lander is a key part of India’s...

Sept. 19 (UPI) -- The U.S. Navy has acknowledged what appear to be unusual flying objects in footage from three separate military videos, saying they show "unidentified aerial phenomena" moving at high speeds. All three videos were recorded by F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets -- two in 2015 and one in 2004. The Navy refers to the sightings as UAP, not UFOs. "The three videos show incursions into our military training ranges by unidentified aerial phenomena," Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher said in an emailed statement. "The Navy has characterized the observed phenomena as 'unidentified.'" The 2004 footage, taken from an...

Twice in the last month, the President of the United States has claimed that the Pentagon has weapons even more powerful than nuclear weapons, with the ability to easily kill millions. He is either bluffing, confused, or is incapable of understanding the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons. President Donald Trump made the claim during remarks to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. According to The Washington Post, Trump told an audience, emphasis mine: “The last four days, we have hit our enemy harder than they have ever been hit before,...

Scientists have proposed a method to connect the Earth and the moon with a cable that will allow us to travel between them, but the European Space Agency isn't convinced Two astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Columbia have proposed a plan for a kind of elevator between the moon and the Earth. Have you ever thought about what it would be like if we could just hop in an elevator, press a button, and head up to the moon? According to the scientists' calculations, it would be possible to construct such a structure using existing...

The team used the Osiris instrument at the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Spain, to obtain visible spectra - measurements of sunlight reflected by Borisov. By studying these spectra, scientists can draw conclusions about its chemical composition, including how it might differ from comets that were "born" around the Sun. "The spectrum is the red side of the comet's total spectrum, so the only thing we can see in the spectrum is the slope," said Miquel Serra Ricart, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife. In coming days, the team will obtain measurements of the...

The universe is looking younger every day, it seems. New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos. The huge swings in scientists' estimates — even this new calculation could be off by billions of years — reflect different approaches to the tricky problem of figuring the universe's real age.