Latest news with #AstronomyAstrophysics
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Just Found Something Very Weird About the Mysterious Object Hurtling Into Our Solar System
As evidence continues to mount that the mysterious object with interstellar origins currently speeding toward the inner solar system at a breakneck speed is a comet, not everybody's convinced quite yet. Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb raised the far-fetched, yet tantalizing possibility that the object, which was first spotted by astronomers earlier this year, could have been sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. While he admitted in a blog post last month that it's most likely that "3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet," a letter to the editors of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics has Loeb questioning that conclusion once more. At the heart of the conundrum is the purported comet's tail. The glowing globs of icy particulates conventionally leave a trail of gas and dust in a comet's wake, resulting in their distinctive shape. However, there's a slim chance that 3I/ATLAS may be an outlier. According to the paper, which was authored by an international team of astronomers, 3I/ATLAS "exhibits increasing dust activity and reddening colors during the observation period, with no visible tail detected." The lack of a tail could be "likely due to viewing geometry and low dust production," they posited. The researchers, therefore, called on the astronomy community to continue monitoring the unusual object to glean more "insights into the evolution of interstellar materials under solar radiation." Loeb agreed with the sentiment, arguing in a recent blog post that the "more data we collect, the more difficult it would be for scientists to shove anomalies of 3I/ATLAS under the carpet of traditional thinking." "We are used to finding icy rocks which exhibit familiar cometary tails in the solar system," he added, "but an encounter with objects from interstellar space is a blind date on astronomical scales." To Loeb, it's still too early to definitively conclude that 3I/ATLAS is a comet. To the astronomer, who previously authored a book about the possibility that 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object first observed in 2017, may have been an sent to us by an alien civilization, there's still enough compelling evidence suggesting otherwise. In a follow-up blog post, he pointed out a separate paper, showing that the first images taken of the object by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope showed a nucleus "surrounded by a much larger cloud of dust," and a "diffuse emission ahead of its motion towards the Sun rather than a trailing tail as expected from a typical comet." Loeb has also suggested that 3I/ATLAS' highly unusual trajectory is "fine-tuned to get unusually close to Jupiter, Mars and Venus," an exceedingly improbable path. Loeb and his colleagues have also posited that the object's large size — roughly 12.4 miles in diameter, according to his calculations — makes it an immensely rare, once-in-only-10,000-years encounter. To neatly summarize his stance on the chance that we're looking at a visitor from an interstellar civilization, Loeb and his colleagues constructed the "Loeb Scale," which ranks the chance of a given object being alien technology on a scale of one to ten, where one is "likely natural," and 10 is "confirmed technology" of "extraterrestrial artificial origin." The scale takes "incorporates multiple observable characteristics, including trajectory anomalies, spectroscopic signatures, geometric properties, and other observable characteristics that could distinguish natural from potentially artificial objects" into account. This week, Loeb gave 3I/ATLAS his "Loeb Scale" rating. "As of now, I give 3I/ATLAS a rank of 6, but note that this rank is time-dependent as it reflects the limited data we have so far," he wrote in his blog post. He also took the opportunity to once again warn that the scientific community shouldn't dismiss the possibility of a first encounter, no matter how far-fetched. "The scientific method allows for all possible questions, which are later answered by collecting data and ruling out possibilities," he wrote. "It is anti-scientific to suppress curiosity-driven questions about anomalies before conclusive data is gathered to explain them." More on the object: Existing NASA Spacecraft Could Intercept the Weird Interstellar Object Cruising Into Our Star System Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Just Found Something Very Weird About the Mysterious Object Hurtling Into Our Solar System
As evidence continues to mount that the mysterious object with interstellar origins currently speeding toward the inner solar system at a breakneck speed is a comet, not everybody's convinced quite yet. Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb raised the far-fetched, yet tantalizing possibility that the object, which was first spotted by astronomers earlier this year, could have been sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. While he admitted in a blog post last month that it's most likely that "3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet," a letter to the editors of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics has Loeb questioning that conclusion once more. At the heart of the conundrum is the purported comet's tail. The glowing globs of icy particulates conventionally leave a trail of gas and dust in a comet's wake, resulting in their distinctive shape. However, there's a slim chance that 3I/ATLAS may be an outlier. According to the paper, which was authored by an international team of astronomers, 3I/ATLAS "exhibits increasing dust activity and reddening colors during the observation period, with no visible tail detected." The lack of a tail could be "likely due to viewing geometry and low dust production," they posited. The researchers, therefore, called on the astronomy community to continue monitoring the unusual object to glean more "insights into the evolution of interstellar materials under solar radiation." Loeb agreed with the sentiment, arguing in a recent blog post that the "more data we collect, the more difficult it would be for scientists to shove anomalies of 3I/ATLAS under the carpet of traditional thinking." "We are used to finding icy rocks which exhibit familiar cometary tails in the solar system," he added, "but an encounter with objects from interstellar space is a blind date on astronomical scales." To Loeb, it's still too early to definitively conclude that 3I/ATLAS is a comet. To the astronomer, who previously authored a book about the possibility that 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object first observed in 2017, may have been an sent to us by an alien civilization, there's still enough compelling evidence suggesting otherwise. In a follow-up blog post, he pointed out a separate paper, showing that the first images taken of the object by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope showed a nucleus "surrounded by a much larger cloud of dust," and a "diffuse emission ahead of its motion towards the Sun rather than a trailing tail as expected from a typical comet." Loeb has also suggested that 3I/ATLAS' highly unusual trajectory is "fine-tuned to get unusually close to Jupiter, Mars and Venus," an exceedingly improbable path. Loeb and his colleagues have also posited that the object's large size — roughly 12.4 miles in diameter, according to his calculations — makes it an immensely rare, once-in-only-10,000-years encounter. To neatly summarize his stance on the chance that we're looking at a visitor from an interstellar civilization, Loeb and his colleagues constructed the "Loeb Scale," which ranks the chance of a given object being alien technology on a scale of one to ten, where one is "likely natural," and 10 is "confirmed technology" of "extraterrestrial artificial origin." The scale takes "incorporates multiple observable characteristics, including trajectory anomalies, spectroscopic signatures, geometric properties, and other observable characteristics that could distinguish natural from potentially artificial objects" into account. This week, Loeb gave 3I/ATLAS his "Loeb Scale" rating. "As of now, I give 3I/ATLAS a rank of 6, but note that this rank is time-dependent as it reflects the limited data we have so far," he wrote in his blog post. He also took the opportunity to once again warn that the scientific community shouldn't dismiss the possibility of a first encounter, no matter how far-fetched. "The scientific method allows for all possible questions, which are later answered by collecting data and ruling out possibilities," he wrote. "It is anti-scientific to suppress curiosity-driven questions about anomalies before conclusive data is gathered to explain them." More on the object: Existing NASA Spacecraft Could Intercept the Weird Interstellar Object Cruising Into Our Star System
Gizmodo
6 days ago
- Science
- Gizmodo
Scientists Recreated the Universe's First Molecule
Seconds after the Big Bang, the newborn universe gave rise to the first elements—ionized forms of hydrogen and helium. These particles combined, forging helium hydride—the first ever molecule. It would take another several hundred million years for the first stars to be born, and scientists have long puzzled over the exact nature of the chemical processes that led to their formation. To try and tease apart the stellar origin story, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany recreated helium hydride in the lab. They found that it likely played a much larger role in star birth than they had previously thought, helping primordial gas clouds shed enough heat to collapse into stars. In the study, the researchers recreated collisions between helium hydride and deuterium in what they believe to be a first-of-its-kind experiment, according to a press release. Their findings, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on July 24, indicate that the rate of the reaction remains constant as the temperature drops, contradicting earlier work. 'Previous theories predicted a significant decrease in the reaction probability at low temperatures, but we were unable to verify this in either the experiment or new theoretical calculations by our colleagues,' Holger Kreckel, who is a researcher at Max Planck and the lead author on the study, said in a statement. 'The reactions of [helium hydride] with neutral hydrogen and deuterium therefore appear to have been far more important for chemistry in the early universe than previously assumed,' he added. Two helium hydride reactions produce molecular hydrogen, and likely aided star formation in the early universe. In the first—replicated in the study—deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that contains a neutron in addition to a proton, collides with helium hydride to yield hydrogen deuteride, a form of molecular hydrogen composed of a hydrogen atom and a deuterium atom. The other reaction occurs when helium hydride collides with a neutral hydrogen atom, producing neutral molecular hydrogen. Both forms of molecular hydrogen act as coolants, helping nebulae lose heat, condense, and ultimately collapse into stars. The researchers used Max Planck's Cryogenic Storage Ring to carry out their experiment. This low-temperature reaction chamber allows scientists to study molecular and atomic reactions in space-like conditions. The team stored helium hydride ions inside the chamber for up to a minute at roughly -450 degrees Fahrenheit (-267 degrees Celsius), then superimposed them with a beam of neutral deuterium atoms. To observe how the collision rate varies with collision energy—directly related to temperature—they adjusted the relative speeds of the two particle beams. Scientists previously believed rate of reactions would slow down as temperature dropped, but the results of this experiment suggest otherwise. The researchers found that the rate remained almost constant despite decreasing temperatures. This surprising result suggests that helium hydride remains chemically active even in cold conditions, a finding that the scientists argue in their paper should prompt a reevaluation of helium chemistry in the early universe.
News.com.au
30-05-2025
- General
- News.com.au
3 city-killing asteroids could strike Earth within weeks without warning
Good things don't come in threes. Venus is concealing at least three city-killer asteroids that could strike Earth in weeks without warning, potentially wreaking havoc upon our planet before we can react. 'Twenty co-orbital asteroids [space rocks in the orbit of two celestial bodies] of Venus are currently known,' the authors warned in the arockcalyptic study, which was published in the journal 'Astronomy & Astrophysics.' The international research team, led by Valerio Carruba of São Paulo University in Brazil, wrote that at least three of the asteroids — 2020 SB, 524522 and 2020 CL1 — that circle the sun in tandem with our twin planet have unstable orbits that take them dangerously close to Earth, the Daily Mail reported. If this shaky trajectory is shifted only slightly by a small gravitational change or other force, the asteroids could be set on a collision course with our planet, per the study. 'Co-orbital status protects these asteroids from close approaches to Venus, but it does not protect them from encountering Earth,' the researchers warned, according to the Daily Galaxy. Carruba & Co. came to this conclusion by using imitation space rocks to simulate a range of possible outcomes over 36,000 years, finding that there is a sizeable population of low-eccentricity asteroids — those previously thought to be harmless — that could be propelled toward Earth via gravitational shifts and other factors. To make matters worse, the aforementioned cosmic rocks' orbits make them almost invisible to Earthly detection devices. While scientists at NASA and other space agencies routinely track potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, the telescopes can't spot rocks in a suborbital path with Venus due to the sun's glare, which shields them like a cosmic cloaking device, WION reported. Due to this interstellar blind spot, the Rubin Observatory in Chile would have only two to four weeks to spot deadly asteroids, leaving us little time if they were on a collision course. For reference, a mission to engineer something that could deflect a killer space rock generally takes years to formulate. 'Low-e [low eccentricity] Venus co-orbitals pose a unique challenge, because of the difficulties in detecting and following these objects from Earth,' the authors wrote in their conclusion. It would be bad news if one of these intergalactic gravelstones hit home. Asteroids 2020 SB, 524522 and 2020 CL1 measure between 330 and 1,300 feet in diameter, making each one capable of destroying entire cities and causing massive fires and tsunamis, the Daily Mail reported. An impact would leave a crater over two miles wide and generate 1 million times more energy than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of terrestrial monitoring equipment, we may have to look to the stars for a solution. 'We believe that only a dedicated observational campaign from a space-based mission near Venus could potentially map and discover all the still 'invisible' PHA [potentially hazardous asteroids] among Venus' co-orbital asteroids,' the authors wrote. However, the powers that be better hurry, as researchers predict that co-orbital asteroids' orbits could become unpredictable in just more than 150 years — a blip in the interstellar timescale.
