Phys.org Astronomy and Space

• Establishing a permanent lunar presence will depend on ingenuity and the moon's own resources, researchers say

  NASA's Artemis program goal of establishing a human presence on Earth's moon is closer than ever to becoming a reality within the next few decades. But today's starry-eyed dreamers are reckoning with the gritty reality of building a permanent base on an airless, dusty, radiation-blasted rock thousands of miles from home. How hard can it be?

• Earth is bombarded with rocks from space—but who gets to keep these ultimate antiques?

  Every day, about 48.5 tons of space rock hurtle towards Earth. Meteorites that fall into the ocean are never recovered. But the ones that crash on land can spark debates about legal ownership.

• Swarm detects ocean tides' magnetic signatures

  A study using data from ESA's Swarm mission suggests that faint magnetic signatures created by Earth's tides can help us determine magma distribution under the seabed and could even give us insights into long-term trends in global ocean temperatures and salinity.

• Astronauts set to swab the exterior of station for microbial life

  Astronauts are scheduled to venture outside the International Space Station to collect microbiological samples during crew spacewalks for the ISS External Microorganisms experiment. This investigation focuses on sampling at sites near life support system vents to examine whether the spacecraft releases microorganisms, how many, and how far they may travel.

• Suborbital flight experiments test dust particle agglomerates to study planet formation

  Planets are formed when dust and rock in a disk around a young star collide and combine to form ever larger bodies. This so-called accretion is not yet fully understood. Astrophysicists at the University of Duisburg-Essen were able to make significant observations of collision speed and electrical charge of the particles through experiments on a suborbital flight. Their results have just been published in Nature Astronomy.

• Did the COVID-19 lockdowns really affect lunar temperatures?

  Almost five years ago, much of the world went quiet for several weeks due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. It went so quiet, in fact, that scholars published a 2024 article in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters claiming the lack of human activity likely led to the moon's surface temperatures cooling down in April and May of 2020.

• M87* observations catch the black hole's turbulent accretion flow

  Using observations from 2017 and 2018, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has advanced our understanding of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87*). This study marks a significant step toward multi-year analysis at horizon scales, in order to investigate the black hole's turbulent accretion flow. It utilizes a vastly improved set of simulations that is a factor of three larger than previous ones. The results include major contributions from the MPIfR in Bonn, Germany.

• New radio transients discovered with MeerKAT

  Using the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, an international team of astronomers has detected 26 new Galactic radio transients. Most of them turned out to be rotating radio transients (RRATs). The finding is detailed in a research paper published Jan. 14 on the arXiv preprint server.

• A tether covered in solar panels could boost the ISS's orbit

  The ISS's orbit is slowly decaying. While it might seem a permanent fixture in the sky, the orbiting space laboratory is only about 400 km above the planet. There might not be a lot of atmosphere at that altitude. However, there is still some, and interacting with that is gradually slowing the orbital speed of the station, decreasing its orbit, and, eventually, pulling it back to Earth. That is, if we didn't do anything to stop it.

• NASA rockets to fly through flickering, vanishing auroras

  Two NASA rocket missions are taking to the Alaskan skies in hopes of discovering why some auroras flicker, others pulsate, and still others are riddled with holes. Understanding these peculiar features is part of NASA's goal to understand the space environment around our planet, which can affect both spacecraft and astronauts.

• How the new NASA and India Earth Satellite NISAR will see Earth

  When NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) new Earth satellite NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) launches in coming months, it will capture images of Earth's surface so detailed they will show how much small plots of land and ice are moving, down to fractions of an inch.

• Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

  Astronomers have discovered extremely powerful winds pummeling the equator of WASP-127b, a giant exoplanet. Reaching speeds up to 33,000 km/h, the winds make up the fastest jet stream of its kind ever measured on a planet. The discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile and provides unique insights into the weather patterns of a distant world.

• Black holes are spinning faster than expected, researchers find

  There's a universe full of black holes out there, spinning merrily away—some fast, others more slowly. A recent survey of supermassive black holes reveals that their spin rates reveal something about their formation history.

• First fast radio burst traced to old, dead, elliptical galaxy

  For the first time, astronomers have traced a fast radio burst (FRB) to the outskirts of an ancient, dead, elliptical galaxy—an unprecedented home for a phenomenon previously associated with much younger galaxies.

• Trump vows to plant flag on Mars, omits mention of Moon return

  US President Donald Trump vowed Monday to "plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars" but made no mention of NASA's planned return to the moon, heightening speculation about his space strategy.

• X-ray observations uncover merger process in a nearby low-mass galaxy cluster

  Using NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton spacecraft, an international team of astronomers have performed X-ray observations of a nearby low-mass galaxy cluster designated PSZ2 G181.06+48.47. The observational campaign, detailed in a paper published Jan. 13 on the pre-print server arXiv, uncovers essential information regarding the nature and properties of this cluster.

• NASA Kennedy ground systems prepping hardware for Artemis II and beyond

  Teams with NASA are gaining momentum as work progresses toward future lunar missions for the benefit of humanity as numerous flight hardware shipments from across the world arrived at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the first crewed Artemis flight test and follow-on lunar missions. The skyline at Kennedy will soon see added structures as teams build up the ground systems needed to support them.

• Malargüe—A satellite dish best served cold: Cryogenic upgrade boosts capacity by almost 80%

  In late July 2024, the Malargüe deep-space communication station completed an important upgrade of its antenna feed that will allow missions to send much more data back to Earth, a capacity increase of almost 80%.

• Astronauts on NASA's Artemis mission to the moon will need better boots. Here's why

  The U.S.'s return to the moon with NASA's Artemis program will not be a mere stroll in the park. Instead it will be a perilous journey to a lunar location representing one of the most extreme environments in the solar system.

• 'Troublesome' radio galaxy 32 times the size of Milky Way spotted

  Astronomers have discovered an extraordinary new giant radio galaxy with plasma jets 32 times the size of our Milky Way.

• The Starbase rocket testing facility is permanently changing the landscape of southern Texas

  If there is a leader in the aerospace industry, SpaceX is it. The company's Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon spacecrafts are the current go-to vehicles to deliver astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station.

• Mystery mounds reveal the history of water on Mars

  Thousands of mounds and hills in Mars' barren northern plains are full of clay minerals, providing evidence that the rocks here were once soaked with water, a new study reveals. These mounds are all that is left of a landscape, roughly the size of the U.K., that has been almost entirely eroded away.

• NASA sets new hydrogen sulfide exposure limits for space missions

  NASA's Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer (OCHMO) assembled a small working group to review hydrogen sulfide (H2S) Spacecraft Maximum Allowable Concentration (SMAC) values. The group met virtually three times during February and March 2023, and panel members submitted individual opinion statements in April 2023.

• Newly discovered group hosts two optically dark star-forming galaxies

  An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new compact galaxy group using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The new group, designated CGG-z4, hosts two optically dark star-forming galaxies. The finding was detailed in a research paper published Jan. 9 on the pre-print server arXiv.

• Why is one half of Mars so different to the other? 'Marsquakes' may have just revealed the answer

  Mars is home to perhaps the greatest mystery of the solar system: the so-called Martian dichotomy, which has baffled scientists since it was discovered in the 1970s.

• Watch doorbell camera capture rare meteorite strike in Canada

  A doorbell camera on a Canadian home captured rare video and sound of a meteorite striking Earth as it crashed into a couple's walkway.

• US grounds SpaceX's Starship after fiery mid-air explosion

  The United States on Friday grounded SpaceX's Starship and ordered Elon Musk's company to investigate why the spaceship spectacularly disintegrated in a fiery cascade over the Caribbean during its latest test mission.

• A new industrial megaproject threatens the view of the world's best observatories

  Astronomers have been battling threats to their clear skies on all fronts lately. One of the most notable battles, which we have reported on repeatedly, is the one against Starlink and other mega-constellations of satellites, which, while they offer high-speed internet in the most far-flung places, also disrupt observations by sensitive telescopes due to their reflectivity and fast movement speed.

• New model predicts solar storm particle acceleration and escape

  The sun, a searing hot sphere of gas primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, boasts surface and outer atmospheric temperatures ranging from 10,000 to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit on its surface and its atmosphere's outermost layer. This intense heat causes the sun to continuously emit a stream of plasma, made up of charged subatomic particles—mainly protons and electrons. These particles, possessing significant energy, escape the sun's gravitational pull and drift into space as solar wind. Understanding how charged particles interact with other transient eruptions of energy from the sun can help scientists study cosmic rays emitted in supernova explosions.

• A seed-sized signal amplifier chip could boost space communications

  Smaller than a strawberry seed, this tiny signal amplifier was produced by the European Space Agency to fill a missing link in current technology, helping to make future radar-observing and telecommunications space missions feasible.