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Category: space – Page 217

The James Webb Space Telescope continues to provide answers about the earliest days of the universe, but it’s also discovering more questions.

Question marks, to be precise. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team at the European Space Agency (ESA) released an image on Wednesday (June 26) offering the most detailed look yet at two actively forming young stars located 1,470 light-years from Earth in the Vela Constellation. In the image, the stars, named Herbig-Haro 46/47, are surrounded by a disk of material that “feeds” the stars as they grow for millions of years.

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India’s latest space mission entered the moon’s orbit on Saturday ahead of the country’s second attempted lunar landing, as its cut-price space program seeks to reach new heights.

The world’s most populous nation has a comparatively low-budget aerospace program that is rapidly closing in on the milestones set by global space powers.

Only Russia, the United States and China have previously achieved a controlled landing on the .

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In 1,846, astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier sat down and attempted to locate a planet that had never been seen before by humans. Uranus (grow up) had been moving in unexpected ways, as predicted by the Newtonian theory of gravity.

Though the discrepancies were small, there was a difference between the observed orbit of Uranus and the way Newtonian physics predicted its orbit to be. In July, Le Verrier proposed that the difference could be explained by another planet beyond Uranus, and made predictions as to the orbit of this previously unknown body.

Being a mathematician first and an astronomer second, he wasn’t really interested in finding it with a telescope now that he’d found it in maths, and the task of searching for it was left to German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle. On September 23, 1846, Galle looked at the spot Le Verrier had predicted the planet would be, and found to be within 1 degree of the spot… the planet Neptune.

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The gold that makes up your most precious jewelry may have been forged in a violent cosmic collision millions or billions of light years away between two neutron stars. New research seeks to better understand this process.

There is only a single confirmed site in the Universe capable of generating conditions extreme enough to initiate the production process for many of the heaviest elements in the Universe, including gold, platinum, uranium – neutron star.

A neutron star is the collapsed core of a large (between 10 and 29 solar masses) star. Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars known to exist. Though neutron stars typically have a radius on the order of just 10 — 20 kilometers (6 — 12 miles), they can have masses of about 1.3 — 2.5 that of the Sun.

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When Samuel Peralta contacts artists about putting their work on the moon, they don’t always believe him.

“I say, ‘I’d like to put your art on the moon,’ and they think this is some sort of a scam,” the semiretired physicist and author tells the New York Times’ J. D. Biersdorfer.

But it’s true. Peralta is the mastermind behind the Lunar Codex, a series of time capsules containing the work of 30,000 artists from 157 countries that will journey to the lunar surface. Peralta wants the project to honor artists after the difficulties they faced during the pandemic, he tells the Toronto Star’s Kevin Jiang.

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The Cygnus NG-19 cargo freighter arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, Aug. 4, after a two-day space ride with 8,200 pounds (3,700 kilograms) of supply, experiments and new technology aboard.

The craft, built by U.S. aerospace giant Northrop Grumman and named after astronaut Laurel Clark who perished during the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003, was the last to launch on a version of the company’s Antares rocket using a first stage built in Ukraine.

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The solar arrays have successfully deployed on Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft that is on its way to deliver more than 8,200 pounds of scientific investigations, cargo, and supplies to the International Space Station after launching at 8:31 p.m. EDT Sunday from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

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