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    Category Astronomy/Space

    AI Shines a New Light on Exoplanets

    September 8, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Comparison of the solution from the scattering PINN with a higher accuracy PINN with fixed parameters. Credit: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2024). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stae1872

    Researchers from LMU, the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), and the ORIGINS Data Science Lab (ODSL) have made an important breakthrough in the analysis of exoplanet atmospheres.

    Using physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), they have managed to model the complex light scattering in the atmospheres of exoplanets with greater precision than has previously been possible.

    This method opens up new opportunities for the analysis of exoplanet atmospheres, especially with regard to the influence of clouds, and could significantly improv...

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    NASA’s Hubble, MAVEN help Solve the Mystery of Mars’s Escaping Water

    September 8, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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 H...

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    Distorted Galaxy Forming Cosmic Question Mark

    September 5, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154 is so massive it is warping the fabric of space-time and distorting the appearance of galaxies behind it, an effect known as gravitational lensing. This natural phenomenon magnifies distant galaxies and can also make them appear in an image multiple times, as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope saw here. Two distant, interacting galaxies — a face-on spiral and a dusty red galaxy seen from the side — appear multiple times, tracing a familiar shape across the sky. Active star formation, and the face-on galaxy’s remarkably intact spiral shape, indicate that these galaxies’ interaction is just beginning.
    NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, V. Estrada-Carpenter (Saint Mary’s University).

    It’s 7 billion years ago, and the universe’s heyday of star formation is ...

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    Gigantic Asteroid Impact Shifted the Axis of Solar System’s Biggest Moon

    September 4, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Kobe University HIRATA Naoyuki was the first to realize that the location of an asteroid impact on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is almost precisely on the meridian farthest away from Jupiter. This implied that Ganymede had undergone a reorientation of its rotational axis and allowed Hirata to calculate what kind of impact could have caused this to happen. © HIRATA Naoyuki (CC BY)

    Around 4 billion years ago, an asteroid hit the Jupiter moon Ganymede. Now, a Kobe University researcher realized that the Solar System’s biggest moon’s axis has shifted as a result of the impact, which confirmed that the asteroid was around 20 times larger than the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs on Earth, and caused one of the biggest impacts with clear traces in the Solar System.

    Ganymede is the la...

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