This article was cowritten by Dr. Pamela and Erik. Photo Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani This week we’re doing something we’ve never done before; we’re dedicating the majority of the show to a single story: SpaceX’s recurring failure to follow the rules, regulations, and norms of international spaceflight. We have the receipts, and we hope that you will hear us out before you hit that @ button. I and aerospace correspondent Erik Madaus are taking on this topic knowing it will bring us a certain amount of internet hate because we recognize that accidents in spaceflight happen when engineers and...
Closer Look: The 2024 Carrington Event
On Wednesday, May 8, community member ThirdRock Astronomy brought to my attention a massive sunspot that was growing to resemble the Sunspot that produced the 1859 Carrington Event, which lit the skies with aurora and powered the telegraph grid with induced current. ...
Mars was a badly made Earth 2
How a wet Mars may have appeared based on MOLA data. Credit: Ittiz When we look out across the Universe, or even just our Solar System, we are only seeing a moment in the fast history of space. We see a galaxy fully formed with spiral arms and a nice little bar. We...
Some planets had rough childhoods before getting kicked out
Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects. Credit NASA/ESA/CSA/McCaughrean & Person One of the new weird things planetary science has to explain is the preponderance of free floating planets that JWST has discovered. In October 2023, Samuel Pearson & Mark McCaughrean posted...
JWST measures alien weather
Temperature map of WASP-43b provided by NASA's JWST One of JWST’s raison detres is studying the atmospheres of exoplanets - alien worlds orbiting far off stars. In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, we get spectacular evidence that JWST will achieve its goals. The...
Closer Look: Io and Juno Begin to Part Ways
Jupiter’s four largest satellites, the Galilean moons, are named after consorts of the Roman god Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Credit: NASA/JPL/DLR In Roman mythology, Jupiter is not exactly a faithful god. Some would allege him willing to bed just...
Stellar Winds Spotted on Three Sun-like Stars
Infrared image of the shockwave (red arc) created by the massive giant star Zeta Ophiuchi in an interstellar dust cloud. The tenuous winds of sun-like main-sequence stars are much more difficult to observe. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team...
Massive Object Detected Via Gravitational Puppetry
A screenshot from a visualization of the orbit of the Gaia BH3 system as a whole through the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC- CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgments: Stefan Jordan with Gaia Sky. The universe we see doesn’t always reflect the universe that is out there....
Stars are Messy Cannibals
This image, taken with the VLT Survey Telescope hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, shows the beautiful nebula NGC 6164/6165, also known as the Dragon’s Egg. The nebula is a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a pair of stars called HD 148937. Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team....
The Dying Sun will Take Out the Earth
Clumps of debris from a disrupted planetesimal are irregularly spaced on a long and eccentric orbit around the white dwarf. Individual clouds of rubble intermittently pass in front of the white dwarf, blocking some of its light. Because of the various sizes of the...
When the Sun Zots the Trees That’s a Scary Storm, Eh?
Our planet is constantly changing under the forces of humans, geology, and even the Sun. And while we can see what humans do daily and what geology does through quakes and eruptions almost weekly, catching the Sun being its bad self is a lot harder because it’s a lot...