Recent Comments

    Category Astronomy/Space

    Affordable Housing in Outer Space: Scientists Develop Cosmic Concrete from Space Dust and Astronaut Blood

    September 15, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Transporting a single brick to Mars can cost more than a million British pounds – making the future construction of a Martian colony seem prohibitively expensive. Scientists at The University of Manchester have now developed a way to potentially overcome this problem, by creating a concrete-like material made of extra-terrestrial dust along with the blood, sweat and tears of astronauts.

    In their study, published today in Materials Today Bio, a protein from human blood, combined with a compound from urine, sweat or tears, could glue together simulated moon or Mars soil to produce a material stronger than ordinary concrete, perfectly suited for construction work in extra-terrestrial environments.

    The cost of transporting a single brick to Mars has been estimated at about US$2 mill...

    Read More

    Astronomers Spot the Same Supernova Three Times—and Predict a Fourth Sighting in 16 years

    September 14, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Now you see them, now you don’t. Three views of the same supernova appear in the 2016 image on the left, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But they’re gone in the 2019 image. The distant supernova, named Requiem, is embedded in the giant galaxy cluster MACS J0138. The cluster is so massive that its powerful gravity bends and magnifies the light from the supernova, located in a galaxy far behind it. Called gravitational lensing, this phenomenon also splits the supernova’s light into multiple mirror images, highlighted by the white circles in the 2016 image. The multiply imaged supernova disappears in the 2019 image of the same cluster, at right. The snapshot, taken in 2019, helped astronomers confirm the object’s pedigree. Supernovae explode and fade away over time...
    Read More

    Largest Virtual Universe Free for Anyone to Explore

    September 14, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The distribution of dark matter in a snapshot from Uchuu. The images show the dark matter halo of the largest galaxy cluster formed in the simulation at different magnifications. (Credit: Tomoaki Ishiyama) 

    An international team of researchers has generated an entire virtual UNIVERSE, and made it freely available on the cloud to everyone.

    Uchuu (meaning “Outer Space” in Japanese) is the largest and most realistic simulation of the Universe to date. The Uchuu simulation consists of 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube an unprecedented 9.63 billion light-years to a side. For comparison, that’s about three-quarters the distance between Earth and the most distant observed galaxies...

    Read More

    ESO captures best images yet of peculiar “Dog-Bone” Asteroid

    September 10, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    ESO captures best images yet of peculiar “dog-bone” asteroid
    These eleven images are of the asteroid Kleopatra, viewed at different angles as it rotates. The images were taken at different times between 2017 and 2019 with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s VLT. Kleopatra orbits the Sun in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers have called it a “dog-bone asteroid” ever since radar observations around 20 years ago revealed it has two lobes connected by a thick “neck”. Credit: ESO/Vernazza, Marchis et al./MISTRAL algorithm (ONERA/CNRS)

    Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), a team of astronomers have obtained the sharpest and most detailed images yet of the asteroid Kleopatra...

    Read More