Category Astronomy/Space

The Earth may not be engulfed by the expanding fireball of the dying sun, which has long been assumed to be our home planet’s ultimate fate, according to scientists.

Don’t worry: This is not expected to happen for another 5 billion years, long after all life on Earth has been wiped out.

When the sun burns through all of the hydrogen in its core, it will go through two immense expansion phases: first becoming a red giant, then, when its helium is spent, an “AGB” star.

This fiery death will bring about some significant changes back here on Earth.

As the sun grows, increasing gravitational forces will pull the Earth toward it.

For the Earth and the moon, this force creates the ...

Astronomers have revealed new details about how young stars shape their galactic surroundings in a new study. Researchers analyzed about 18,000 star-forming regions in nearby spiral galaxies using data from powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, whose observations were made as part of the PHANGS survey—a collaboration aimed at better understanding galactic evolution.

They found that in normal galaxies, pressure from ionized gas drives the expansion of young star-forming regions...

Astronomers have detected one of the most powerful ultrafast outflows ever seen from a distant supermassive black hole. Using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR, a team studied a hyper-luminous quasar at cosmic noon and found two distinct wind components blasting away from the black hole, details of which are outlined in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server on June 3. The study has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is currently under minor revision.

Killer winds
Black holes consuming large amounts of material tend to lash out, driving powerful winds of gas outward from the vicinity of the accretion disk...

If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar mission concepts. Combined with giant lasers pushing them, they can be accelerated to speeds unreachable by any other current technologies.

However, according to a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server by Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology, once those missions start reaching a significant percentage of the speed of light, they’re going to run into a drag force from the light itself.

The paper ...