In the desert hills of China’s Gansu province, a company called C-Space has just opened “Mars Base 1,” a simulated Martian base of operations for future astronauts. Plans for the base, currently an educational facility, include expansion—becoming more of a tourist destination soon, adding a space-themed hotel and restaurant. Photographers were on hand as some of the first student groups arrived to tour this vision of Mars in the China’s Gobi desert.
A mere 17–20 meters across, the Chelyabinsk meteor caused extensive ground damage and numerous injuries when it exploded on impact with Earth’s atmosphere in February 2013.
To prevent another such impact, Amy Mainzer and colleagues use a simple yet ingenious way to spot these tiny near-Earth objects (NEOs) as they hurtle toward the planet. She is the principal investigator of NASA’s asteroid hunting mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and will outline the work of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office this week at the American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver—including her team’s NEO recognition method and how it will aid the efforts to prevent future Earth impacts.
“If we find an object only a few days from impact, it greatly limits our choices, so in our search efforts we’ve focused on finding NEOs when they are further away from Earth, providing the maximum amount of time and opening up a wider range of mitigation possibilities,” Mainzer said.
On its final flyby of Saturn’s largest moon in 2017, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft gathered radar data revealing that the small liquid lakes in Titan’s northern hemisphere are surprisingly deep, perched atop hills and filled with methane.
The new findings, published April 15 in Nature Astronomy, are the first confirmation of just how deep some of Titan’s lakes are (more than 300 feet, or 100 meters) and of their composition. They provide new information about the way liquid methane rains on, evaporates from and seeps into Titan—the only planetary body in our solar system other than Earth known to have stable liquid on its surface.
Scientists have known that Titan’s hydrologic cycle works similarly to Earth’s—with one major difference. Instead of water evaporating from seas, forming clouds and rain, Titan does it all with methane and ethane. We tend to think of these hydrocarbons as a gas on Earth, unless they’re pressurized in a tank. But Titan is so cold that they behave as liquids, like gasoline at room temperature on our planet.
Kepler-47 is a roughly 3.5-billion-year-old system located 3,340 light-years from Earth. One of its stars is quite sunlike, but the other is considerably smaller, harboring just one-third the mass of our sun. The two stars orbit their common center of mass once every 7.45 Earth days.
Back in 2012, Welsh and his colleagues, led by fellow SDSU astronomer Jerome Orosz, announced the discovery of two planets circling the two stars. These worlds, Kepler-47b and Kepler-47c, both have two suns in their skies, just like Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine in the “Star Wars” universe.
The news we had finally found ripples in space-time reverberated around the world in 2015. Now it seems they might have been an illusion.
LIGO’s detectorsEnrico Sacchetti
THERE was never much doubt that we would observe gravitational waves sooner or later. This rhythmic squeezing and stretching of space and time is a natural consequence of one of science’s most well-established theories, Einstein’s general relativity. So when we built a machine capable of observing the waves, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before a detection.
In August of 2016, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced the discovery of an exoplanet in the neighboring system of Proxima Centauri. The news was greeted with considerable excitement, as this was the closest rocky planet to our Solar System that also orbited within its star’s habitable zone.
Since then, multiple studies have been conducted to determine if this planet could actually support life.
Unfortunately, most of the research so far has indicated that the likelihood of habitability are not good. Between Proxima Centauri’s variability and the planet being tidally-locked with its star, life would have a hard time surviving there.
Astronomers from the United States and South Korea have made the first high-resolution, radio telescope observations of the molecular clouds within a massive star-forming region of the outer Milky Way.
“This region is behind a nearby cloud of dust and gas,” said Charles Kerton, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University and a member of the study team. “The cloud blocks the light and so we have to use infrared or radio observations to study it.”
The Milky Way region is called CTB 102. It’s about 14,000 light years from Earth. It’s classified as an HII region, meaning it contains clouds of ionized—charged—hydrogen atoms. And, because of its distance from Earth and the dust and gas in between, it has been difficult to study.
