Category Astronomy/Space

During Exploration Mission-1, Orion will venture thousands of miles beyond the moon during an approximately three week mission. Credits: NASA

Here are the ins and outs of NASA’s First Launch of SLS and Orion. NASA is building Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the ground systems needed to send astronauts into deep space and core capabilities needed to enable the journey to Mars.

Orion’s first flight atop the SLS will not have humans aboard, but it paves the way for future missions with astronauts. During this flight, Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), the spacecraft will travel thousands of miles beyond the moon over 3 wks. It will launch on the most powerful rocket in the world and fly farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown...

Artists impression of GJ 3470b and its host star. Image credit: NAOJ.

A team of astronomers have used the LCOGT network to detect light scattered by tiny particles (called Rayleigh scattering), through the atmosphere of a Neptune-size transiting exoplanet. This suggests a blue sky on this world which is only 100 light years away from us.

When the orbit of an exoplanet is aligned just right for transits to occur, astronomers can measure the planet’s size at different wavelengths in order to generate a spectrum of its atmosphere >> reveals substances in the planet’s atmosphere, thus composition. This measurement is most often performed using infrared light, where the planet is brightest and most easily observed...

A black hole devouring a star. Credit: NASA

An international team of astrophysicists led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.
The finding tracks the star—about the size of our sun—as it shifts from its customary path, slips into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole and is sucked in. “These events are extremely rare,” van Velzen said. “It’s the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months.”

Astrophysicists had predicted that when a black hole is force-fed a large amount of gas, in this case a whole star, then a ...

A prototype station of AugerPrime: Every water-Cherenkov detector containing 12,000 l of water is extended by a four-square-meter scintillation detector. Credit: Pierre Auger Collaboration

The Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, an international large-scale experiment to study cosmic rays, will be continued until 2025 and extended to “AugerPrime”. The observatory will be upgraded with new scintillation detectors for a more detailed measurement of gigantic air showers. This is required to identify cosmic objects that accelerate atomic particles up to highest energies.

The Pierre Auger Observatory in the province of Mendoza/Argentina is the world’s biggest and best known project for studying high-energy cosmic rays...