Category Astronomy/Space

Physicists at MIT have designed a pocket-sized cosmic ray muon detector to track these ghostly particles. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

Pocket-sized device detects charged particles in surrounding air. At any given moment, Earth’s atmosphere is showered with high-energy cosmic rays that have been blasted from supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena far beyond the Solar System. When cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they decay into muons – charged particles that are slightly heavier than an electron. Muons last only fractions of a second, and during their fleeting lifespan they can be found through every layer of Earth’s atmosphere, circulating in the air around us and raining onto the surface at a rate similar to a light drizzle...

The Milky Way…..The Solar Neighborhood. XLII. Parallax Results from the CTIOPI 0.9 m Program—Identifying New Nearby Subdwarfs Using Tangential Velocities and Locations on the H–R Diagram. The Astronomical Journal, 2017; 154 (5): 191 DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aa8b64

Astronomers have discovered some of the oldest stars in our Milky Way galaxy by determining their locations and velocities, according to a study led by scientists at Georgia State University. Just like humans, stars have a life span: birth, youth, adulthood, senior and death. This study focused on old or “senior citizen” stars, also known as cool subdwarfs, that are much older and cooler in temperature than the sun.

The Milky Way is nearly 14 billion years old, and its oldest stars developed in the early stage of the galaxy’s f...

This HiRISE image cutout shows Recurring Slope Lineae in Tivat crater on Mars in enhanced color. The narrow, dark flows descend downhill (towards the upper left). Analysis shows that the flows all end at approximately the same slope, which is similar to the angle of repose for sand. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/USGS

Planet appears to have water-restricted environment. Dark features previously proposed as evidence for significant liquid water flowing on Mars have now been identified as granular flows, where sand and dust move rather than liquid water, according to a new article published in Nature Geoscience by the U.S. Geological Survey. These new findings indicate that present-day Mars may not have a significant volume of liquid water...

Space dust collisions as a planetary escape mechanism. arxiv.org/abs/1711.01895

Life on our planet might have originated from biological particles brought to Earth in streams of space dust, a study suggests. Fast-moving flows of interplanetary dust that continually bombard our planet’s atmosphere could deliver tiny organisms from far-off worlds, or send Earth-based organisms to other planets, according to the research. The dust streams could collide with biological particles in Earth’s atmosphere with enough energy to knock them into space, a scientist has suggested.

Such an event could enable bacteria and other forms of life to make their way from one planet in the solar system to another and perhaps beyond...