Category Archives: Astronomy

The James Webb space telescope: in search of the secrets of the Milky Way

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Billions of dollars over budget and years late, the most expensive, complex telescope to be sent into space will launch next month. What will it learn?

In a few weeks, the most ambitious, costly robot probe ever built, the £6.8bn James Webb space telescope, will be blasted into space on top of a giant European Ariane 5 rocket. The launch of the observatory – which has been plagued by decades of delays and massive cost overruns – promises to be the most nervously watched liftoff in the history of unmanned space exploration.

The observatory – built by Nasa with European and Canadian space agency collaboration – has been designed to revolutionise our study of the early universe and to pinpoint possible life-supporting planets inside our galaxy. However, its planning and construction have taken more than 30 years, with the project suffering cancellation threats, political controversies and further tribulations. In the process, several other scientific projects had to be cancelled to meet the massive, swelling price tag of the observatory. As the journal Nature put it, this is “the telescope that ate astronomy”.

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Nasa to slam spacecraft into asteroid in mission to avoid future Armaggedon

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Test drive of planetary defence system aims to provide data on how to deflect asteroids away from Earth

That’s one large rock, one momentous shift in our relationship with space. On Wednesday, Nasa will launch a mission to deliberately slam a spacecraft into an asteroid to try to alter its orbit – the first time humanity has tried to interfere in the gravitational dance of the solar system. The aim is to test drive a planetary defence system that could prevent us from going the same way as the dinosaurs, providing the first real data about what it would take to deflect an Armageddon-inducing asteroid away from Earth.

Our planet is constantly being bombarded with small pieces of debris, but these are usually burned or broken up long before they hit the ground. Once in a while, however, something large enough to do significant damage hits the ground. About 66m years ago, one such collision is thought to have ended the reign of the dinosaurs, ejecting vast amounts of dust and debris into the upper atmosphere, which obscured the sun and caused food chains to collapse. Someday, something similar could call time on humanity’s reign – unless we can find a way to deflect it.

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Astronomers spot first possible exoplanet outside our galaxy

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Saturn-sized planet candidate has been identified in Whirlpool Galaxy 28m light years away

A possible Saturn-sized planet identified in the distant Whirlpool Galaxy could be the first exoplanet to be detected outside the Milky Way.

The exoplanet candidate appears to be orbiting an X-ray binary – made up of a normal star and a collapsed star or black hole – with its distance from this binary roughly equivalent to the distance of Uranus from the sun.

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‘Waiting for a ghost’: the search for dark matter 1km under an Australian town

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To study the stuff of the universe, you have to block it out, and that is exactly what a bold project in regional Victoria is trying to do

Dark matter is flowing through you, right now.

This mysterious, invisible stuff makes up more than 80% of the universe, an elusive web of particles that pass freely through matter. To observe it, you have to get rid of all the interference.

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Dark matter: one last push to crack the biggest secret in the universe

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Scientists are pinning hopes on elaborate detectors to track the elusive material that holds galaxies together

Deep underground, scientists are closing in on one of the most elusive targets of modern science: dark matter. In subterranean laboratories in the US and Italy, they have set up huge vats of liquid xenon and lined them with highly sensitive detectors in the hope of spotting subatomic collisions that will reveal the presence of this elusive material.

However, researchers acknowledge that the current generation of detectors are reaching the limit of their effectiveness and warn that if they fail to detect dark matter with these types of machines, they could be forced to completely reappraise their understanding of the cosmos.

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Scientists identify 29 planets where aliens could observe Earth

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Astronomers estimate 29 habitable planets are positioned to see Earth transit and intercept human broadcasts

For centuries, Earthlings have gazed at the heavens and wondered about life among the stars. But as humans hunted for little green men, the extraterrestrials might have been watching us back.

In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth.

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How and when to watch the solar eclipse on Thursday

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The moon will partially cover the sun in the UK later this week, but some parts of the northern hemisphere will experience a total eclipse

This Thursday, Greenland, Iceland, the Arctic, most of Europe, much of North America and Asia will experience a solar eclipse.

Most will see a partial eclipse, where the moon takes a bite out of the sun. From a few specific places in Russia, Greenland and Canada, the event will be visible as an annular eclipse, which occurs when the moon is located near the furthest part of its orbit around the Earth.

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Asteroid’s 22m-year journey from source to Earth mapped in historic first

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Flight path of Kalahari’s six-tonne asteroid is first tracing of meteorite shedding rock to solar system origin

Astronomers have reconstructed the 22m-year-long voyage of an asteroid that hurtled through the solar system and exploded over Botswana, showering meteorites across the Kalahari desert.

It is the first time scientists have traced showering space rock to its source – in this case Vesta, one of largest bodies in the asteroid belt that circles the sun between Jupiter and Mars.

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Cielo review – love letter to the desert’s starry skies

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Alison McAlpine’s documentary draws out tales from locals and astronomers to evoke the magic and mystery of Chile’s stargazing hotspot

Cielo means “sky” in Spanish, and “heaven”, too. And it’s with a sense of humbled wonder at the immense mystery of it all that the Canadian film-maker Alison McAlpine casts her camera upwards in this beautiful documentary about the night sky. It’s filmed at the stargazing hotspot of Chile’s Atacama desert, where there is virtually no light pollution; the heavens appear to be within touching distance – as if a seam in the sky has been unpicked and the stars tumble out like diamonds.

For those of us who live in urban areas, we look up from noisy streets and bright city lights to the vast emptiness of the sky. In Atacama, it’s the reverse; the sky seems more alive than the earth – a bare, Martian landscape of rock and sand. With her cinematographer, Benjamín Echazarreta, McAlpine shoots some astonishing time-lapse photography, which features alongside interviews with astronomers at the European observatories in the desert and locals who eke out a living somehow. One man is a UFO photographer; he thinks that humans are more evil than the aliens and, knowing this, the aliens don’t bother to land.

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String theorist Michio Kaku: ‘Reaching out to aliens is a terrible idea’

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The physicist on Newton finding inspiration amid the great plague, how the multiverse can unite religions, and why a ‘theory of everything’ is within our grasp

Michio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at City College, New York, a proponent of string theory but also a well-known populariser of science, with multiple TV appearances and several bestselling books behind him. His latest book, The God Equation, is a clear and accessible examination of the quest to combine Einstein’s general relativity with quantum theory to create an all-encompassing “theory of everything” about the nature of the universe.

How close do you believe science is to accomplishing a theory of everything?
Well, I think we actually have the theory but not in its final form. It hasn’t been tested yet and Nobel prize winners have taken opposite points of view concerning something called string theory. I’m the co-founder of string field theory, which is one of the main branches of string theory, so I have some “skin in the game”. I try to be fair and balanced. I think we’re on the verge of a new era. New experiments are being done to detect deviations from the Standard Model. Plus, we have the mystery of dark matter. Any of these unexplored areas could give a clue as to the theory of everything.

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Space oddity Oumuamua probably shard of Pluto-like world, scientists say

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Interstellar visitor likely made of frozen nitrogen, cookie-shaped rather than cigar, and not a comet or asteroid – while some stick to alien theory

Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid as first suspected and looks nothing like a cigar. A new study says the mystery object is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world and shaped like a cookie.

Arizona State University astronomers report the strange 45-metre (148ft) object appears to be made of frozen nitrogen, just like the surface of Pluto, and Neptune’s largest moon, Triton.

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Scientists may have solved ancient mystery of ‘first computer’

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Researchers claim breakthrough in study of 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in sea

From the moment it was discovered more than a century ago, scholars have puzzled over the Antikythera mechanism, a remarkable and baffling astronomical calculator that survives from the ancient world.

The hand-powered, 2,000-year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses. But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle.

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Astronomers’ hopes raised by glimpse of possible new planet

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Bright speck in space near Alpha Centauri A may be evidence of asteroids or dust – or a technical glitch

Astronomers have glimpsed what may be a previously unknown planet circling one of the closest stars to Earth.

Researchers spotted the bright dot near Alpha Centauri A, one of a pair of stars that swing around each other so tightly they appear as one in the southern constellation of Centaurus. The stars form what is called a binary system 4.37 light years away, a mere stone’s throw in cosmic terms.

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Star buys: celebrities send meteorite prices into orbit

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Elon Musk, Steven Spielberg and Nicolas Cage among those who collect rocks that can cost millions

They really are from out of this world, and the prices are astronomical. For those who have everything they need on Earth, what they now want is a little bit of space. Meteorites are attracting the attention of celebrity collectors who have pushed the price of the rocks – which have hurtled through space for hundreds or even thousands of year before crashing into this planet – tenfold over the past decade.

More than 70 of the most spectacular meteorites ever found will go under the hammer at Christie’s auction house next week in a sale that is expected to generate millions of pounds. Included in the Deep Impact auction are meteorites embedded with gem stones and others have suffered such an impact from blasting through the atmosphere at up to 160,000mph that they resemble sculptures by Alberto Giacometti or Henry Moore.

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How to watch the Jupiter and Saturn ‘great conjunction’ on winter solstice

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On 21 December 2020, the planets will align, appearing closer than they have since the middle ages, in what is being called a ‘Christmas kiss’

This year, stargazers will have the chance to see a Christmas “kiss” beneath interplanetary mistletoe when Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer to one another and brighter than they have in 800 years in an event known as a “great conjunction”.

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Burst of radio waves in Milky Way probably came from neutron star

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First fast radio burst found in our galaxy is traced to magnetar 30,000 light years away

For more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over the origins of mysterious and fleeting bursts of radio waves that arrive from faraway galaxies.

Now, scientists have discovered the first such blast in the Milky Way and traced it back to its probable source: a small, spinning remnant from a collapsed star about 30,000 light years from Earth.

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Three scientists share Nobel prize in physics for work on black holes

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Roger Penrose says win, shared with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, ‘is in some ways a distraction’

Three scientists have won the 2020 Nobel prize in physics for their work on black hole formation and the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez together scooped the 114th Nobel prize in physics.

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The search for life – from Venus to the outer solar system

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While the discovery of the normally microbe-produced phosphine on our toxic neighbour is astonishing, other candidates for life are more promising

It remains one of the most unexpected scientific discoveries of the year. To their astonishment, British scientists last week revealed they had uncovered strong evidence that phosphine – a toxic, rancid gas produced by microbes – exists in the burning, acid-drenched atmosphere of Venus.

Related: If we don't find life on planets like Venus, doesn't it make us that bit more special? | Charles Cockell

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