Astronomy

An Alabama court ruling that human embryos outside the uterus should be regarded as children has raised concerns among doctors and scientists about the future of the fertility treatment in vitro fertilization

Predicting what the sun will look like during a total solar eclipse is a helpful exercise for scientists in the long quest to understand how our star works

From the time I learned to read, I have experienced a form of mental closed-captioning called ticker-tape synesthesia

Hot on the heels of its predecessor, the DJI Mini 4 Pro emerges as the best sub-250g drone money can buy.

Protected zones are meant to let adult fish populations recover from overfishing, but an analysis of 111 sites in the Caribbean finds that this is not happening in most cases

Protected zones are meant to let adult fish populations recover from overfishing, but an analysis of 111 sites in the Caribbean finds that this is not happening in most cases

A bunch of breweries in the path of totality for the April 8 total solar eclipse have created special beers for the surreal event.

ESA’s new Arctic Weather Satellite has taken centre stage at OHB’s facilities in Stockholm, Sweden, before the spacecraft is packed up and shipped to California, US, for a launch currently scheduled for June.

Embracing the New Space approach to demonstrate new concepts in a cost-effective and timely manner, the Arctic Weather Satellite has been designed to show how it can improve weather forecasts in the Arctic.

Video: 00:03:01

Watch the first episode of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission – Europe’s ambitious exploration journey to search for past and present signs of life on Mars.

This episode starts after a successful descent and landing on the Red Planet in 2030.

Rovers on Mars have previously been caught in loose soils, and turning the wheels dug them deeper, just like a car stuck in sand. To avoid this, Rosalind Franklin has a unique wheel-walking locomotion mode to to overcome difficult terrains, as well as autonomous navigation software.

A major goal of the mission is to understand the geological context and identify minerals formed in the presence of water that could be good targets for drilling into and collecting samples for analysis.

The scientific eyes of the rover are set atop the mast on the Panoramic Camera suite, known as PanCam. From its vantage point about two metres above the ground, PanCam cameras come into play to get a whole picture of the site with high resolution imaging.

Enfys, meaning rainbow in Welsh, is an infrared spectrometer to study mineral composition. Enfys and PanCam work in synergy. PanCam is used to obtain colour, visual information of what lies around the rover. Enfys’ job is to inform scientists what the minerals are.

Rosalind Franklin will be the first rover to reach a depth of up to two metres deep below the surface, acquiring samples that have been protected from surface radiation and extreme temperatures.

The mission will serve to demonstrate key technologies that Europe needs to master for future planetary exploration missions.

This episode shows the spacecraft, the rover and martian landscapes are as true to reality as possible for a simulation.

Check ESA’s ExoMars website and our frequently asked questions for the latest updates.

Credits:

Production: Mlabspace for ESA

3D animation: ESA/Mlabspace

Video footage: ESA/NASA, Shutterstock

Music composed by Valentin Joudrier

On 8 April 2024, a great swath of the United States and Mexico will experience a total solar eclipse, with viewers getting the rare chance to see the Sun’s stunning outer atmosphere.

Some of the biggest names in aerospace — and the automotive industry — will play roles in putting NASA astronauts in the driver’s seat for roving around on the moon.

The space agency today selected three teams to develop the capabilities for a lunar terrain vehicle, or LTV, which astronauts could use during Artemis missions to the moon starting with Artemis 5. That mission is currently scheduled for 2029, three years after the projected date for Artemis’ first crewed lunar landing.

The teams’ leading companies may not yet be household names outside the space community: Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab. But each of those ventures has more established companies as their teammates.

Over the next 15 years, the three teams will be eligible to work on task orders amounting to a potential total value of $4.6 billion — with the aim of providing mobility technology for crewed and uncrewed moon rovers. The marquee vehicle would be a rover capable of carrying Artemis astronauts on journeys of exploration around the lunar surface, as well as taking robotic trips on its own.

“We look forward to the development of the Artemis generation lunar exploration vehicle to help us advance what we learn at the moon,” Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said today in a news release. “This vehicle will greatly increase our astronauts’ ability to explore and conduct science on the lunar surface while also serving as a science platform between crewed missions.”

In a posting to X / Twitter, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the LTV rover is “essential to the success of Artemis.”

After the teams conduct year-long feasibility studies, NASA plans to select one of the teams to go ahead with construction and testing of its LTV, leading up to a lunar demonstration mission in advance of Artemis 5. NASA could give the teams additional task orders to fill its needs for unpressurized rover capabilities on the moon through 2039.

Texas-based Intuitive Machines is best-known for putting a robotic lander on the lunar surface in February. A couple of its teammates — Boeing and Northrop Grumman — have moon-mission experience that goes back to the Apollo era. Michelin (the tire company) and AVL (which provides vehicle testing and simulation services) round out the Moon RACER team.

NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines $30 million as a prime contractor to complete a Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract. The company’s global Moon RACER team will be tasked with creating a feasibility roadmap to develop and deploy a Lunar Terrain Vehicle on the Moon using… pic.twitter.com/GaVh3cvrG5

— Intuitive Machines (@Int_Machines) April 3, 2024

Colorado-based Lunar Outpost has already booked three rover missions for delivery to the moon by SpaceX and Intuitive Machines. Its teammates on the Lunar Dawn project include Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Goodyear Tire & Rubber and MDA Space (known for building the robotic arms on NASA’s space shuttles and the International Space Station).

Buckle up, Earthlings!@NASA has selected the Lunar Dawn team to develop a next-generation lunar terrain vehicle for its LTV contract as part of the @NASAArtemis program. pic.twitter.com/blxXrYL0F8

— Lockheed Martin Space (@LMSpace) April 3, 2024

California-based Astrolab made a separate deal last year with SpaceX to have its FLEX rover delivered to the moon aboard a Starship lander for a commercial mission that’s set for as soon as 2026. Astrolab’s teammates on the FLEX LTV project include Axiom Space (which is making spacesuits for Artemis moon missions) and Odyssey Space Research.

NASA has awarded Astrolab and its partners a contract worth up to $1.9 billion to advance the development of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle which will help Artemis astronauts explore more of the Moon’s surface.

Read the full announcement: https://t.co/h9Cwopy5Z5 pic.twitter.com/FJJtq0oiH9

— Astrolab (@Astrolab_Space) April 3, 2024

NASA said the LTV would support the Artemis program’s crewed missions to the moon’s south polar region, plus remote-controlled exploration activities as needed between those missions. “Outside those times, the provider will have the ability to use their LTV for commercial lunar surface activities unrelated to NASA missions,” the space agency said.

With regard to the financial arrangements, NASA said only that the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract had a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all task-order awards. But a couple of the teams provided additional details. Intuitive Machines said it was awarded $30 million as a prime contractor to complete the initial feasibility study for Moon RACER. And Astrolab said its LTV contract could be worth up to $1.9 billion, depending on NASA’s needs.

The post Start Your Engines: NASA Picks 3 Teams to Work on Lunar Terrain Vehicle appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA's Curiosity rover is now exploring a possible ancient river on Mars named Gediz Vallis.

NASA has selected three companies to develop their versions of a rover that Artemis astronauts will start driving on the moon in 2030.

Trees use circadian genes to time photosynthesis and reproduction – but as temperatures rise, the clocks may not work as well

Trees use circadian genes to time photosynthesis and reproduction – but as temperatures rise, the clocks may not work as well

From cloud coverage to clear skies, here’s up-to-date weather conditions expected along the path of April 8’s total solar eclipse

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the Milky Way’s most massive satellite galaxy. Because it’s so easily observed, astronomers have studied it intently. They’re interested in how star formation in the LMC might have been different than in the Milky Way.

A team of researchers zeroed in on the LMC’s most metal-deficient stars to find out how different.

The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and about 32,000 light-years across. Even though it’s that large, it’s still only 1/100th the mass of the Milky Way. It was probably a dwarf spiral galaxy before gravitational interactions with the Milky Way and the Small Magellanic Cloud warped its shape. Scientists predict it’ll probably merge with the Milky Way in about 2.4 billion years.

The LMC wasn’t always this close to the Milky Way. It formed elsewhere in the Universe, out of a different reservoir of gas than the Milky Way. The LMC’s stars preserve the environmental conditions they formed in.

The first stars to form in the Universe were the most metal-poor stars. When they formed, only hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang were available. These stars are called Population 3 stars, and they’re largely hypothetical. They were massive and many of them exploded as supernovae. These stars forged the heavier elements, called metals in astronomy, and then spread them out into space to be taken up by the next stars to form. That process continued generation by generation.

Population III stars were the Universe’s first stars. They were extremely massive, luminous stars, and many exploded as supernovae. Image Credit: DALL-E

Nobody’s ever found a Population 3 star because even if they’re more than hypothetical, they’d all be long gone by now. But in new research, scientists examined 10 of the LMC’s most metal-poor stars. They found one Population 2 star that is so metal-poor it’s similar to Population 3 stars.

The research is titled “Enrichment by extragalactic first stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud.” It’s published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The lead author is Anirudh Chiti from the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, both at the University of Chicago.

“This star provides a unique window into the very early element-forming process in galaxies other than our own,” said lead author Chiti. “We have built up an idea of how these stars that were chemically enriched by the first stars look like in the Milky Way, but we don’t yet know if some of these signatures are unique or if things happened similarly across other galaxies.”

The earliest Population 3 stars changed the Universe. By producing metals, they guaranteed the stars to follow had higher metallicities. But exactly what metals did they produce, and how much?

“We want to understand what the properties of those first stars were and what were the elements they produced,” said Chiti.

The difficult part is that nobody’s ever seen a Population 3 star. But by identifying an extremely metal-poor star that’s very similar to the first stars, the researchers found the next best thing. Finding nine other metal-poor stars was also helpful.

They compared the 10 LMC metal-poor stars to metal-poor stars in the Milky Way. The results show how different processes and different environments in both galaxies affected star formation and metal enrichment.

This illustration shows the Milky Way galaxy’s inner and outer halos. Old, metal-poor stars tend to inhabit the halo. (Image Credits: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild [STScI])

These metal-poor stars are difficult to find. Most of the stars in the Universe resulted from successive generations of stars; their enriched metallicity is a testament to that. Our Sun is a metal-rich Population 1 star, for example.

But these older, metal-poor Population 2 stars are out there. Since astronomers will likely never find an ancient Population 3 star, the Population 2 stars with the lowest metallicities are the next best things.

“Maybe fewer than 1 in 100,000 stars in the Milky Way is one of these second-gen stars,” Chiti said. “You really are fishing needles out of haystacks.”

But once astronomers find them, the outer layers of these rare stars hold evidence of the conditions they formed in. “In their outer layers, these stars preserve the elements near where they formed,” Chiti explained. “If you can find a very old star and get its chemical composition, you can understand what the chemical composition of the universe was like where that star formed billions of years ago.”

This figure from the study shows the ten LMC stars (blue crosses) compared to all stars within 10° of the LMC. They’re colour-coded with the Fe/H bar on the right. The Fe/H ratio shows the ratio of iron atoms to hydrogen atoms and is a common measure of overall metallicity. The scale on the left shows Calcium, Hydrogen, and Potassium abundances across the whole sky, another useful measure of metallicity. Image Credit: Chiti et al. 2024.

Finding such metal-poor stars in the LMC allowed astronomers to compare the star-forming conditions in that satellite galaxy to those in the Milky Way. The comparison can help astrophysicists understand how these star-forming conditions may have differed.

One of the 10 stars in the LMC stood out from the rest. It had markedly lower metallicity than the other nine. Called LMC 119, it’s 50 times more metal-deficient than the others. “Given its extremely low metallicity, this star exhibits the characteristics of a second-generation star that preserves the chemical imprints of a first-star supernova,” the authors write.

This figure from the research compares the atomic abundances of LM 119 to red giant stars in the Milky Way’s halo, where older, metal-poor stars are situated. As the figure shows, LMC 119 has much lower metallicity than the Milky Way’s metal-poor stars. Image Credit: Chiti et al. 2024.

One fact stood out to the researchers when they mapped LMC 119’s elements. It had much less carbon than iron when compared to Milky Way stars. In fact, the same was true of all 10 stars in the sample. This is important because the LMC wasn’t always a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. That association only goes back a couple of billion years or so. Its stars formed in a distant region of the high-redshift Universe.

“That was very intriguing, and it suggests that perhaps carbon enhancement of the earliest generation, as we see in the Milky Way, was not universal,” Chiti said. “We’ll have to do further studies, but it suggests there are differences from place to place.”

For Chiti and his colleagues, the conclusion is clear. “This, and other abundance differences, affirm that the extragalactic early LMC experienced diverging enrichment processes compared to the early Milky Way. Early element production, driven by the earliest stars, thus appears to proceed in an environment-dependent manner,” they write in their conclusion.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are visible at the lower right-hand corner of this image of the Milky Way as seen by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Since Chiti and his fellow researchers found one very low-metallicity star in the LMC, there are probably many more among its suspected population of 20 billion stars. Chiti is leading a program to map out more stars in the southern sky and find more of these types of stars.

“This discovery suggests there should be many of these stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud if we look closely,” he said. “It’s really exciting to be opening up stellar archeology of the Large Magellanic Cloud and to be able to map out in such detail how the first stars chemically enriched the universe in different regions.”

The post The Large Magellanic Cloud isn’t Very Metal appeared first on Universe Today.

An exclusive Sonequa Martin-Green interview excerpt from "Star Trek Explorer #11."

The James Webb Space Telescope has dived into the smoking heart of the "Cigar Galaxy" to create an image of the starburst galaxy alight with intense star birth.

A surge of mining in some African countries for materials used to make green energy technologies puts gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos at risk