Category Astronomy/Space

It’s viable to produce low-cost, lightweight solar panels that can generate energy in space, according to new research from the Universities of Surrey and Swansea.

The first study of its kind followed a satellite over six years, observing how the panels generated power and weathered solar radiation over 30,000 orbits.

The findings could pave the way for commercially viable solar farms in space.

Professor Craig Underwood, Emeritus Professor of Spacecraft Engineering at the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, said:

“We are very pleased that a mission designed to last one year is still working after six...

Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT-CSTR) have captured the Oct. 14 solar eclipse in a way never seen before — recording the first radio images of an annular eclipse’s famous “ring of fire” effect.

The eclipse was partially visible to much of the continental U.S. for several hours that Saturday, though the full “ring of fire” effect was only visible for less than five minutes, and only for those within its 125-mile-wide path of annularity.

However, the new observations o...

Researchers from the University of Southampton, together with colleagues from the universities of Cambridge and Barcelona, have shown it’s theoretically possible for black holes to exist in perfectly balanced pairs — held in equilibrium by a cosmological force — mimicking a single black hole.

Black holes are massive astronomical objects that have such a strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape. They are incredibly dense. A black hole could pack the mass of the Earth into a space the size of a pea.

Conventional theories about black holes, based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, typically explain how static or spinning black holes can exist on their own, isolated in space...

When stars are born, they do it inside a molecular cloud. Astronomers long assumed that the “crèche” supplied all the nutrients that protostars needed to form. However, it turns out they get help from outside the nest.

A new study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics delved into the role of streamers and filaments in the star-birth process. Think of them as channels that extend out from the interior of the stellar creche, sometimes out as far as 10,000 astronomical units (about 0.15 light-years)...