"I never think about the future. It comes soon enough."

— Albert Einstein

Astronomy

Can AI Replace Air Traffic Controllers to Reduce Airline Accidents?

Scientific American.com - 7 hours 17 min ago

Tests in London and Singapore could reveal whether AI can improve the safety of air travel

Categories: Astronomy

Webb scratches under Cat’s Paw Nebula for third anniversary

ESO Top News - 7 hours 17 min ago

To mark its third year of highly productive science, astronomers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region.

Categories: Astronomy

Trump names Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator

Space.com - 7 hours 35 min ago
Trump abruptly announced the appointment of Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy as acting NASA Administrator as the U.S. Senate reviews the space agency's proposed budget.
Categories: Astronomy

Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS might be the oldest comet ever seen

New Scientist Space - Cosmology - 7 hours 44 min ago
Astronomers tracking an interstellar object flying through the solar system think it comes from a star at least 8 billion years old, almost twice the age of our sun
Categories: Astronomy

Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS might be the oldest comet ever seen

Astronomers tracking an interstellar object flying through the solar system think it comes from a star at least 8 billion years old, almost twice the age of our sun
Categories: Astronomy

Are you a Canon fan? These anti-Prime deals save you hundreds off top models including R8, R5 II and R6 II

Space.com - 7 hours 56 min ago
Walmart is serving up some hot anti-Prime Day deals on Canon EOS R cameras with hundreds of dollars off the best models!
Categories: Astronomy

Why scientists are so excited about the newfound interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS (op-ed)

Space.com - 8 hours 17 min ago
The scientific and cultural impact of 3I/ATLAS over the coming months and years will serve as an exemplar of what astronomy can learn and why it matters.
Categories: Astronomy

Did you feel it? Earth just had one of its shortest days ever and 2 more are coming

Space.com - 9 hours 17 min ago
As Earth spins faster than it has in decades, atomic clocks are catching the difference, and shorter days are on the horizon.
Categories: Astronomy

Attacks on Higher Education Are Attacks on All Americans

Scientific American.com - 9 hours 17 min ago

If Americans don’t fight back against efforts to dismantle higher education, the U.S. will lose lifesaving medical research, innovation that spurs our economy and the ability to freely study science and society

Categories: Astronomy

UK is Considering a Mission to Venus to Search for Life

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

Is there life on Venus? The controversial detection of phosphine and ammonia hints that bacterial life could be surviving in the planet's milder upper atmosphere. But to confirm its existence, we'll need to measure the atmosphere directly. A new mission concept was recently unveiled called the Venus Explorer for Reduced Vapours in the Environment (VERVE). It's a CubeSat that could fly with ESA's EnVision mission in 2031, studying the atmosphere for more evidence of active biology.

Categories: Astronomy

Lunar Astronauts Could Eat "Moon Rice"

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

If we can learn to grow our own food in space, it'll make surviving off Earth less challenging. While plants do grow in space, some genetic improvements are in order. Researchers have unveiled "Moon rice," a genetically manipulated strain of rice that grows much shorter than even dwarf varieties of rice and could be grown reliably in space. They're also simulating microgravity, constantly rotating the rice in all directions to see how it responds.

Categories: Astronomy

Deflecting Asteroids Isn't Simple According to New Data from DART

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

Sometimes a mission can be too successful. When NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos in 2022 as part of an asteroid redirection test, it altered the asteroids orbit, proving that kinetic impactors can be used to defend Earth from hazardous objects. Unfortunately, the impact also created a shower of boulders that also gave Dimorphos an unpredicted kinetic kick.

Categories: Astronomy

HKU astrobiologist joins national effort to map out China’s Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

China's Tianwen-3 is poised to be the first sample-return mission to Mars. The science team now includes a group of astrobiologists from Hong Kong University (HKU), led by Professor Yiliang Li. In a recent paper, the team advised the China National Space Agency (CNSA) on landing site selection and how the first samples from Mars should be analyzed and curated once they are brought back to Earth.

Categories: Astronomy

How Your Flight Home Could Be Broadcasting Earth's Location to Aliens.

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

Alarmingly, a team of scientists propose that every flight you take could be alerting alien civilizations to our existence. I must apologise now as I pack for a flight out to Mexico in a few days! The new research reveals that airport radar systems from Heathrow to JFK are unintentionally broadcasting powerful signals up to 200 light years into space, that’s far enough to reach over 120,000 star systems that might harbor intelligent life! These "accidental technosignatures" would appear obviously artificial to any aliens with technology similar to ours, potentially making every takeoff and landing an announcement that we're here!

Categories: Astronomy

Giant Liquid Mirrors Could Revolutionise the Hunt for Habitable Worlds

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

A team of researchers has cracked the code for building space telescopes with mirrors the size of a soccer field, not from perfectly figured glass, but from liquid floating in zero gravity! The new research reveals how a 50-metre liquid mirror telescope could maintain its optical quality for decades despite the constant slewing motions needed to observe different stars, with deformations taking years to propagate from the edges toward the centre. The idea could enable the next generation of space telescopes capable of directly imaging Earth-like planets around other stars, potentially answering the ultimate question: are we alone in the universe?

Categories: Astronomy

NASA's Future Telescope Could Solve the Mystery of Life's Origins

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

A team of scientists are preparing to use NASA's upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory to answer one of the most profound questions of all time: How does life begin? Rather than searching for individual signs of life, the team plan to study patterns across dozens of exoplanets to test competing theories about the origins of life; from scenarios where life is so rare we might be alone within 33 light-years, to theories predicting that life emerges wherever basic conditions exist. This approach could transform perhaps our oldest question into testable science, potentially revealing whether our biosphere is an accident or part of a universe teeming with life.

Categories: Astronomy

This Planet Makes Its Star Flare and the Planet Suffers Because Of It

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of exoplanets on extremely short orbits of less than 10 days. Our Solar System has nothing like this, and these planets are so close to their stars that they can disrupt the stars' magnetic fields. Scientists think this can induce stellar flaring, and researchers have detected the first example of exoplanet-induced stellar flaring.

Categories: Astronomy

Finding An Ocean On An Exoplanet Would Be Huge and the Habitable Worlds Observatory Could Do It

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

The search for habitable exoplanets boils down to the search for water. Exoplanet scientists lack the technological capability to detect surface water on exoplanets from great distances, so instead they can only search for planets in habitable zones where surface water is likely. But what if we could directly detect the surface water itself?

Categories: Astronomy

Finding PBHs Using The LSST Will Be A Statistical Challenge

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

With the recent first light milestone for the Vera Rubin observatory, it's only a matter of time before one of astronomy’s most long-awaited surveys begins. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to start on November 5th, and will scan the sky of billions of stars for at least ten years. One of the most important things it hopes to find is evidence (or lack thereof) of primordial black holes (PBHs), one of the primary candidates for dark matter. A new paper from researchers at Durham University and the University of New Mexico looks at the difficulties the LSST will have in finding those enigmatic objects, especially the statistical challenges, and how they might be overcome.

Categories: Astronomy

New Heat Sink Tested in Space Uses Melting Wax to Regulate Temperature

Universe Today - 9 hours 30 min ago

It's cold in space, but overheating is a bigger problem than low temperatures. That's because the only way to regulate a spacecraft's heat is through radiation, or slowing down its computing. Engineers have tested a new type of heat sink in space that contains a wax-based phase change material that melts within the normal operating temperature range of the electronics, absorbing heat and then helping to radiate it away. The heat sink was part of a CubeSat launched in August 2024.

Categories: Astronomy