Category Astronomy/Space

This mosaic image of the Crab Nebula was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Features of this nebula and other astrophysical phenomena are being studied at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Credit: NASA / ESA / J. Hester / Arizona State University

Intrigued by a curious “kink” phenomenon observed in the Crab Nebula, an interstellar cloud of gas and dust that formed in the wake of a supernova explosion, senior research scientist Chikang Li has been looking for answers. Images from the Chandra X-ray observatory show that a jet of plasma pouring straight out from the neutron star at the center of the nebula appears to change direction every few years, without changing its structure...

Pan-STARRS SKY SURVEY This compressed view of the entire sky visible from Hawai’i by the Pan-STARRS1 Observatory is the result of half a million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length, taken over a period of four years. The shape comes from making a map of the celestial sphere, like a map of the Earth, but leaving out the southern quarter. The disk of the Milky Way looks like a yellow arc, and the dust lanes show up as reddish brown filaments. The background is made up of billions of faint stars and galaxies. If printed at full resolution, the image would be 1.5 miles long, and you would have to get close and squint to see the detail. Credit: Danny Farrow, Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestial Physics

Mapping billions of stars and galaxies in the w...

This illustration shows how a series of five borehole muon detectors could be deployed in a horizontal well below a carbon dioxide reservoir. Credit: PNNL

Muons, once used to explore the inside of pyramids and volcanoes alike, are enabling researchers to see deep underground with a technological breakthrough from PNNL. Invisible to the naked eye, muons are elementary particles created by the collisions of cosmic rays with molecules in the atmosphere. Muons are constantly raining down on the earth at various angles. They can pass through materials, such as earth and rock, and detecting these particles have helped researchers “see” the inside of structures such as the pyramids of Giza...

With a roof 2 m thick, lava tubes a kilometer or more in width can remain stable  according to computer modelling, supporting inferences from GRAIL observations. Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A team of researchers with Purdue University has found evidence from lunar-mapping spacecraft that the moon may have large lava tubes that could conceivably be used to house astronauts and supplies. In their paper published in the journal Icarus, the team describes their study of data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) twin spacecraft and outline the evidence for large lava tubes.

Prior research here on Earth has shown that lava flowing across a surface can form a shell of sorts as it cools, and when the shell collapses, a hollowed-out underground space remains—geologists call ...