Science Cosmos

  A prototype of Starship, a huge rocket made by SpaceX, sits on a launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas in February 2022 Starship, the most potent rocket ever built and the vehicle that SpaceX hopes to use to launch astronauts to the Moon and possibly beyond, will make its first test flight on Monday. The launch is slated to occur at 7:00 am (1200 GMT) from the expansive Texas base of Elon Musk's privately owned space firm. If Monday's attempt is postponed, fallback times are planned for later in the week.     As part of the Artemis III mission, scheduled for late 2025 at the earliest, the US space agency NASA has chosen the Starship capsule to transport its humans to the Moon.     The first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket and a reusable capsule carrying crew and cargo make up the Starship. The 230-foot-tall Super Heavy rocket is atop the 164-foot (50-meter) tall Starship spacecraft.   In February, SpaceX successfully tested the 33 Raptor engines on the Starshi

  Several small satellites were launched by SpaceX early on Saturday (April 15) morning, and the rocket that returned to Earth was then safely landed.   The Transporter-7 rideshare mission was launched at 2:48 a.m. EDT on Saturday (0648 GMT; 11:48 p.m. on April 14 California time) by a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 51 satellites as its payload.   About 7 minutes and 45 seconds after launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9 successfully executed a vertical touchdown at Vandenberg, returning to Earth as intended. According to a SpaceX mission description, it was the booster's tenth launch and landing overall. The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket comes in for a landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on April 15, 2023 shortly after launching the Transporter-7 rideshare mission.  (Image credit: SpaceX) The upper stage of the rocket carried the 51 satellites to orbit in the meantime. Around an hour after liftoff, the payloads are supposed to be dispersed over a rou

  A timelapse of images from the Subaru Telescope showing the motion of HIP-99770b around its star.   (T. Currie/Subaru Telescope/UTSA) The discovery of a brand-new extraterrestrial world is due to the velocity of a star as it travels across the cosmos.   Astronomers have discovered a kink in the path of a star called HIP-99770, suggesting the presence of a nearby planet, using data from the Gaia satellite that is mapping the Milky Way. A rare, direct image of the purported exoplanet, which was later given the label HIP-99770b, was then discovered through following observations. It's the first time that direct imaging and astrometry, which tracks a star's motion, have been combined to find an orbiting planet.   These initiatives represent a fresh and successful approach to looking for planets outside the Solar System, helping us to better comprehend the variety of planetary systems out there as well as seek for potential new homeworlds for life. Astronomer Thayne Cu

  A supercomputer has given a distant supermassive black hole a makeover, making it look crisp.   With the use of machine learning, the "fuzzy orange donut" visible in the first black hole image ever obtained has shrunk to a slimmer "skinny golden ring."   The supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) could be more clearly understood by redefining this image, which could also be applied to the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first-ever picture of the M87 supermassive black hole, also known as M87*, and released it to the public in 2019. The EHT gathered the information across a number of days in 2017 in order to produce the image.   At left is the famous image of the M87 supermassive black hole originally published by the Event  Horizon Telescope collaboration in 2019. At right is a new image of the black hole generated by the PRIMO algorithm using the sa

  It Europe's JUICE spacecraft will make two flybys at Jupiter's moon Europa, which might host microbial life in its subsurface ocean.   (Image credit: ESA/ ATG MediaLab) it's doubtful that we will know for sure whether life is present near the solar system's largest planet by the time Europe's Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) mission is over in more than ten years.   According to experts, life can exist anywhere in the cosmos as long as there is liquid water, an energy source, and nutrients. It is more likely for certain of Jupiter's moons than others to offer all three of these components. This week's scheduled launch of the JUICE mission by the European Space Agency intends to aid researchers in better understanding which of these moons has the necessary components to support life and which doesn't. However, according to scientists, JUICE will not be able to identify life or its immediate traces. We won't know for sure whether life, even if

  Uranus, as imaged by the JWST's NIRCam.   (NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/J. DePasquale) We recently learned about what is conceivably the strangest object in the Solar System from an amazing new angle.   The mysterious Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, has come under the golden, infrared gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the image it has returned shows the turquoise planet in all its glittering splendour. Moons, rings, everything.   Every planet and dwarf planet in the Solar System has unique characteristics that define them apart, but Uranus is very strange. At first sight, the chilly, gelid world appears to be quite uninteresting, but as you come closer, you notice that it is both weirder and more fascinating. However, you need to go past the colours that our eyes can see, in which Uranus looks to be a featureless pale blue sphere. The physical characteristics of Uranus' weak, ice rings have been measured by scientists using thermal imaging, which uses radio

  (Pobytov/Getty Images) The small object XMMU J173203.3-344518 is undoubtedly amazing, packing around three-quarters of the mass of our Sun into a ball large enough to fit within Manhattan. strange, even. Maybe strange. Is it odd, though? According to a recent study by physicists at the Federal University of ABC and the University of So Paulo in Brazil, this mind-bogglingly dense ball of star material may be weird after all, but perhaps not in the way you might expect.   The distance between Earth and the tiny star-crasher HESS J1731-347 was recalculated last year by scientists from the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Tübingen in Germany.   The updated proximity was only 8,150 light-years distant, which was less than the earlier prediction of 10,000 light-years. Recalculating the compact object's attributes, particularly its size and mass, was necessary to account for the new distance. That's when things started to get a little excitin

  A stunning image of Uranus, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), reveals the ice giant's ring system, brightest moons, and dynamic atmosphere in remarkable detail.   The latest discovery, made on February 6, comes in the wake of a magnificent photo of Neptune, the second ice giant in the solar system, that JWST recently took.   11 of the planet's 13 known rings are visible in the most recent photograph of Uranus, some of which are so bright that they overlap significantly. The fact that JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) equipment is sensitive enough to have recorded the innermost two of Uranus' hazy rings, however, will truly surprise astronomers. A full-sized wide shot of Uranus captured by the James Webb Space Telescope on Feb. 6, 2023 shows six of the planet's 27 known moons.  (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI)) Only two other astronomical observers have caught a glimpse of these dim rings: the Voyager 2 spacecraft

  In this representation of the underground imaging, seismic waves from earthquakes in the southern hemisphere sample the ULVZ structure along the Earth’s core-mantle boundary and are recorded by sensors in Antarctica. Figure courtesy of Drs. Edward Garnero and Mingming Li at Arizona State University. Greater than the difference between solid rock and air is the absolute shift in physical qualities (such as temperature, density, and viscosity) from the mantle to the core. As a result, the Earth's core-mantle boundary (CMB) is home to a variety of phenomena, such as narrow, enigmatic regions known as ultralow velocity zones that have drastically reduced P- and S-wave velocities and increased density. The structures in the interior of the Earth that are the most anomalous are called ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs). However, the origins of ULVZs have been a topic of discussion for decades due to the vast variety of related parameters (thickness and composition) documented by prior i