Astronomy

From ScienceDaily: Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied details of Palaeolithic and Neolithic art featuring animal symbols at sites in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany. They found all the sites used the same method of date-keeping based on sophisticated astronomy, even though the art was separated in time by tens of thousands of years. Researchers clarified earlier findings from a study of stone carvings at one of these sites — Gobekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey — which is interpreted as a memorial to a devastating comet strike around 11,000 BC. This strike was thought to have initiated a mini ice-age known as the Younger Dryas period. They also decoded what is probably the best known ancient artwork Read More ›

Belgian priest Lemaitre apparently got the idea, which “underpins modern cosmology,” two years before Edwin Hubble: The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recommends that the law now be known as the Hubble–Lemaître law. In the 1920s, the Belgian described in French how the expansion of the Universe would cause galaxies to move away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. He did this two years earlier than US astronomer Edwin Hubble used his own data to establish the same relationship. Of the 4,060 astronomers who cast votes (out of around 11,072 eligible members) 78% were in favour of the change.Elizabeth GIbney, “Belgian priest recognized in Hubble law name change” at Nature These name changes, like the downgrading of Pluto to Read More ›

You read the title right. Recently, some astronomers thought they had spotted an “exomoon,” a moon orbiting an exoplanet. There are, of course, bound to be some. But now Gizmodo introduces us to the concept of the moonmoon, a submoon orbiting a moon. One research team is taking on the possibility: The team’s short analysis found that small submoons, perhaps 10 kilometers in radius, could only survive around large moons (such as the ones we see in our Solar System) far away from the host planet, according to the paper published on the arXiv preprint server. Moons that are too close to their host planets or too small might lose their submoons to tidal forces from the planet—shredding the submoon Read More ›

An MIT astronomer is 75% certain that an object previously suspected of being an Intro of exomoon (a moon orbiting an exoplanets) really is that: The first confirmed detection of an exomoon would mark a milestone in exploring planetary systems throughout the Galaxy. It would, among other things, allow scientists to test ideas of moon formation using examples from beyond the Solar System. Teachey’s proposed exomoon is already throwing up some surprises. Evidence suggests the moon is about the size of Neptune, orbiting a planet roughly the size of Jupiter. That would make it unlike anything in the Solar System, where most moons are much smaller than the planets they orbit. “It’s raising new questions about the dynamical processes that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Little was known about a key element in the building blocks, phosphates, until now. University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers, in collaboration with colleagues in France and Taiwan, provide compelling new evidence that this component for life was found to be generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one billion years by meteorites or comets. The phosphorus compounds were then incorporated in biomolecules found in cells in living beings on Earth. The breakthrough research is outlined in “An Interstellar Synthesis of Phosphorus Oxoacids,” authored by UH Manoa graduate student Andrew Turner, now assistant professor at the University of Pikeville, and UH Manoa chemistry Professor Ralf Kaiser in the September issue of Nature Communications. … Read More ›

Why do computers mean we never have to be humble again? We asked our physics color commentator, Rob Sheldon, about the recent deflation of the “expanding blueberry muffin” picture of the universe. That is, as one astrophysicist puts it “Just as cosmological measurements have became so precise that the value of the Hubble constant was expected to be known once and for all, it has been found instead that things don’t make sense.” Sheldon offers a little background: — — — Hubble’s constant is a calculation of the expansion rate of the universe by: a) measuring how far away something is (e.g., parsecs) b) measuring how fast it is moving away from us (e.g., kilometers/second) c) divide speed by distance Read More ›

And cosmologists race to win a “great cosmic bake-off” to produce a new one, says astrophysicist: Just as cosmological measurements have became so precise that the value of the Hubble constant was expected to be known once and for all, it has been found instead that things don’t make sense. Instead of one we now have two showstopping results. On the one side we have the new very precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the afterglow of the Big Bang – from the Planck mission, that has measured the Hubble Constant to be about 46,200 miles per hour per million light years (or using cosmologists’ units 67.4 km/s/Mpc). On the other side we have new measurements of pulsating Read More ›

From J. Warner Wallace at Cold Case Christianity: Yesterday I posted a number of scientific consistencies found in the Old Testament. While I think there are good reasons why God might not reveal advanced scientific details in Scripture, I do expect God’s Word to be scientifically consistent with the world we experience. One interesting scientific consistency seems to exist in the ancient book of Job. One of the examples he offers, citing Job 38:31-32, “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?”: The text refers to three constellations, Pleiades, Orion and Arcturus (the fourth, Mazzaroth, is still unknown Read More ›

Plus a bunch of useful stuff. In a month when we have been heard hearing about all things alien, from everything from it’s good news that they probably don’t exist through to they might be hoarding stars… here is a book that has it all in one place: From Sophia Centre press: An anthology of works stemming from the ninth Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena conference. Editors: Nicholas Campion & Chris Impey Series: Studies in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, Vol. 9 Publisher: Sophia Centre Press, 2018 Format: Paperback, 352 pp. ISBN 978-1-907767-11-1 Human beings have long imagined what other worlds are like. They have imagined travelling to them, have endowed them with meaning and mystery, and have fantasised about the beings Read More ›

“…stuck in an unproductive state of arrested development…” From Tim Collins at the Daily Mail: A rare galaxy stuck in a state of arrested development is providing scientists with a unique window into the early days of the universe. The unusual cosmic region has remained frozen for the past 10 billion years, producing no new stars in all of that time. Only one in a thousand galaxies is thought to be like NGC 1277, which comprises approximately a trillion stars in the central zone of the Perseus Cluster, started out very active but then just stopped. From astronomer Michael Beasley, ‘I’ve been studying globular clusters in galaxies for a long time, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen Read More ›

From Mara Johnson-Groh at Astronomy: Despite residing in it, it’s hard for us to know exactly how big the Milky Way is. But new research has found that our galaxy is bigger than previously thought. Using a large survey of stars instead of just models (as previous researchers did), astronomers have now determined the disk of our galaxy to be 200,000 light-years across — twice as large as was believed a decade ago. … With a process known as spectroscopy, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and at the National Astronomical Observatories of Beijing studied the chemical composition of over 4,600 stars from two surveys, APOGEE and LAMOST, and mapped out which stars are part of the disk Read More ›

Suzan Mazur has republished her wide-ranging interview with the Renaissance man (in an age of specialization), first published in Omni in 1981, at Oscillations. The interview as a whole offers insights on how space exploration was viewed back then (for example, habitable planets were not top of mind): Suzan Mazur: Since every last mineral can be found in space fiftyfold, do you think a principal aim should be to recapture the vision of space exploration that we quickly abandoned after we landed on the moon? Malcolm Forbes: These high frontiers are surely exciting, but whether it’s economical to go there to support the Earth’s population, I’m not sure. I think it more immediately feasible to concentrate on the planet we Read More ›

From Cardiff University at Eurekalert: The birth of stars from dense clouds of gas and dust may be happening in a completely unexpected way in our own galaxy and beyond. This is according to an international team of researchers, including scientists from Cardiff University, who have found that long-held assumptions about the relationship between the mass of star-forming clouds of dust and gas and the eventual mass of the star itself may not be as straightforward as we think. The underlying reasons as to why a star eventually grows to a specific mass has puzzled scientists for some time. It has been assumed that a star’s mass mostly depends on the original structure – known as a star-forming core – Read More ›

From Sarah Wild at Physics Today: Irreproducibility and the black box nature of machine learning plague many fields of science, from Earth observation to drug discovery. But astronomy represents a notable case study because the quantity of data is burgeoning at an unprecedented rate. The installation of new data-churning telescopes, combined with marked improvements in pattern-finding algorithms, has led astronomers to turn to sophisticated software to do the data-crunching they can’t do manually. And with more powerful analyses comes less transparency as to how they were performed. More. It could be a symptom of a much bigger problem. See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide