Hello again readers, here I will be reviewing some articles that are related to space. This post will be constantly updated as I remain with this project for the next three months and there are definitely news that will be aired about space.
A NASA telescope has found its first habitable Earth-sized planet
SPACE 7 January 2020
By Leah Crane
An illustration of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
One hundred light years away, there is a planet that might be just right for life. Called TOI 700 d, it is the first Earth-sized world with moderate temperatures found by NASA’s newest planet-hunting space telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
TOI 700 d orbits a star that is about 40 per cent the size of the sun and half its temperature. It is fairly close to the star, in what is called the habitable zone – the area around a star that is warm enough for water on a world’s surface to remain liquid but not so hot that it all evaporates. This exoplanet gets 86 per cent of the sunlight that Earth does.
Members of the TESS team presented this research at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Hawaii on 6 January. TOI 700 d is one of the best targets for further observations to learn whether it really does have the right conditions for life, said Emily Gilbert at the University of Chicago.
After TESS spotted TOI 700 d, astronomers also used the Spitzer Space Telescope to take more detailed measurements of its size and orbit. Those observations revealed that it is about 22 per cent bigger than Earth and orbits its star once every 37 days.
Gabrielle Engelmann-Suissa at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and her colleagues ran 20 simulations of possible conditions on the surface and in the potential atmosphere of TOI 700 d.
“We find across all our 20 simulations that TOI 700 d is a robust candidate for habitability,” she said. “It retains surface water in all of our simulations, and in none of our simulations does it go into a runaway greenhouse state like Venus.”
On Venus, evaporating water created clouds that held in heat and let carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere, leading to the hellish temperatures on the planet today.
All the simulations assumed that TOI 700 d is rocky and has an atmosphere. “The question which remains is, is this planet rocky like it would be in our solar system, or is it like a mini-Neptune?” said Joseph Rodriguez at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.If it were a small Neptune-like planet, it would be mostly gas. But if it is rocky and has a thick enough atmosphere made of gases that we know support life, it might be a good place to look for signs of alien life.
As far as this shows, there are many exoplanets that are yet to be discovered, although this article claims it has found an inhabitable planet, they have yet to prove that there are creatures there who are surviving in the conditions that planet is providing.
Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough
This article is more than 8 months old
Network of eight radio telescopes around the world records revolutionary image
Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Wed 10 Apr 2019 15.23 BSTFirst published on Wed 10 Apr 2019 14.00 BST
The image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Photograph: EHT Collaboration
Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects.
The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55m light years from Earth.
Quick guide
What are black holes?
The black hole itself – a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape – is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.
The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists.
Sheperd Doeleman, EHT director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: “Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole.”
France Córdova, director of the US National Science Foundation and an astrophysicist, said that the image, which she had only seen as it was unveiled at the press briefing she was chairing, had brought tears to her eyes. “We have been studying black holes for so long that sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us has seen one,” she said. “This will leave an imprint on people’s memories.”
The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole’s accretion disc, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily “feeds” the monster within.
The EHT picks up radiation emitted by particles within the disc that are heated to billions of degrees as they swirl around the black hole at close to the speed of light, before vanishing down the plughole.
The halo’s crescent-like appearance in the image is because the particles in the side of the disc rotating towards Earth are flung towards us faster and so appear brighter. The dark shadow within marks the edge of the event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which no light or matter can travel fast enough to escape the inexorable gravitational pull of the black hole.
Black holes were first predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity – although Einstein himself was sceptical that they actually existed. Since then, astronomers have accumulated overwhelming evidence that these cosmic sinkholes are out there, including recent detection of gravitational waves that ripple across the cosmos when pairs of them collide.
But black holes are so small, dark and distant that observing them directly requires a telescope with a resolution equivalent to being able to see a bagel on the moon. This was once thought to be an insurmountable challenge.
As shown in the picture, all predictions and 3D image drawings of what a black hole actually is are proven to be true and exactly the way we imagined it to be. There will need to be better telescopes and better spacecraft to be built in order to capture the black hole in detail.
Scientists uncover potential source of methane on Mars
This article is more than 9 months old
Gas detected by Curiosity rover may have been released from fractured Martian permafrost
Ian Sample Science editor
Mon 1 Apr 2019 16.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 1 Apr 2019 20.25 BST
Nasa’s Curiosity rover on Mars, where it detected a spike in methane levels in 2013. Photograph: Nasa/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/EPA
A waft of methane detected by Nasa’s Curiosity rover on Mars may have been released from a layer of permafrost containing bubbles of the gas that was fractured by a geological event, researchers have said.
It is the first time scientists have identified a potential source of methane on Mars, though the scientific community is still divided on whether the gas is really produced on the planet at all. Some says the methane detections on Mars are spurious or have come from other sources such as the rover itself.
On 16 June 2013, instruments on Curiosity recorded a spike in methane in the Gale crater, a 96-mile-wide bowl where the rover landed in August 2012. Since then, it has found evidence of seasonal variations in methane, with levels of the gas rising and falling with the Martian summers and winters.
The apparent presence of methane on Mars has fuelled intense speculation that the gas could emanate from microbial Martians beneath the surface, though a more prosaic explanation points to a reaction between olivine rocks and water. Both processes release the gas on Earth.
In the latest study, Marco Giuranna and colleagues at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome turned to an instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter to look for more evidence of methane on Mars.
The scientists used the orbiter’s planetary fourier spectrometer (PFS) to look for methane in and around Gale crater from December 2012 to July 2014. The instrument spotted methane only once, on the same day Curiosity detected the sudden spike in the gas.
“Our finding constitutes the first independent confirmation of a methane detection,” Giuranna said. “Prior to our study, methane detections on Mars, being either in situ, from orbit, or from Earth-based telescopes, were not confirmed by independent observations.”
While the Curiosity rover measured a methane concentration of 5.78 parts per billion (ppb) in Gale crater on 16 June 2013, the Mars Express instrument recorded 15.5ppb in the column of atmosphere above the crater, the scientists report in Nature Geoscience.
In an attempt to trace the source of the methane, the scientists divided up a wide region around Gale crater into a grid with squares 250km on each side. Researchers at the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy in Brussels used computer models to simulate one million different emission scenarios in each square. Meanwhile, geologists in the US and Italy scrutinised the region around the crater for features that might release methane.
If this a way of saying they have found liquid on this planet, then that is not such a reliable source of information. Especially since people are trying to find a planet that is habitable after Earth cannot be fixed.
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