Over 100 astronomers from leading U.S. universities have signed an open letter calling for an assessment of potential impacts of satellite megaconstellations on Earth’s environment. The researchers urge the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which approves satellite deployments in the U.S., to halt megaconstellation launches and conduct a thorough assessment of their possible environmental impacts…

Credit: NASA The next president of the United States could be the first in that office to accept a phone call from the Moon and hear a woman’s voice on the line. To do so, they’ll first need to make a series of strategic space policy decisions. They’ll also need a little luck. Enormous government…

How fast can a neutron star spin? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as an international team of more than a dozen researchers have identified one of the fastest-spinning neutron stars to date, named 4U 1820-30. Neutron stars are remnants of a collapsed supergiant star often between…

<a href="https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1-11-2024-binary-brown-dwarf.jpg" data-fancybox data-src="https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1-11-2024-binary-brown-dwarf.jpg" data-caption="Twirling pair Artist’s impression of Gliese 229Ba and Gliese 229Bb orbiting each other to create Gliese 229B. The brown dwarf pair orbit a cool M-dwarf star (shown in the distance) every 250 years. (Courtesy: K Miller/R Hurt/Caltech/IPAC)”> Twirling pair Artist’s impression of Gliese 229Ba and Gliese 229Bb orbiting each other to…

The ghosts of stars are up to their usual mischief. The erupting black hole, center, of V404 Cygni, which lies 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, captured over five days in 2015 emitting X-rays, in red and green.Andrew Beardmore (Univ. of Leicester) and NASA/Swift Just in time for Halloween, two black holes are in…

What materials can be produced from 3D printing for space exploration? This is what a recent study published in Additive Manufacturing hopes to address as an international team of researchers led by the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) successfully produced a durable 3D-printed metal alloy that could potentially be used for space exploration. This…

Could a moon that orbits Uranus billions of miles away have an interior ocean? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated if Uranus’ moon, Miranda, could have possessed an interior ocean at some point in its history, which could explain its…

A team led by researchers at MIT in the United States has discovered large molecules containing carbon in a distant interstellar cloud of gas and dust. This is exciting for those of us who keep lists of known interstellar molecules in the hope that we might work out how life arose in the universe. But it’s more…

Carbon is the building block for all life on Earth and accounts for approximately 45–50% of all dry biomass. When bonded with elements like hydrogen, it produces the organic molecules known as hydrocarbons. When bonded with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, it produces pyrimidines and purines, the very basis for DNA. The carbon cycle, where…

Astronomical observations involve a sequence of stages, each of which may impose constraints on the type of information attainable. Radiant energy is collected with telescopes and brought to a focus on a detector, which is calibrated so that its sensitivity and spectral response are known. Accurate pointing and timing are required to permit the correlation…