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India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, known as MOM, has ended after eight years – even though it was designed for a six-month lifespan, the Indian Space Research Organization announced this week.

The Mars orbiter launched on Nov. 5, 2013 and made it into orbit about 10 months later. It was an enormous feat to have reached Mars’ orbit successfully in the first attempt, Dr. K. Radhakrishnan, a member of India’s space commission, said during an address Monday.

In 2014, more than half of the world’s attempts at such a mission – 23 out of 41 – had failed, according to the Associated Press. The U.S. was successful with a Mars flyby in 1964, when a spacecraft called Mariner 4 returned with 21 images of the surface of the planet. Other successful missions include the Soviet Union’s in 1971 and the European Space Agency’s in 2003.

A team of 86 scientists from 13 countries recently carried out extensive high-time resolution optical monitoring of a distant active galaxy, BL Lacertae (BL Lac). Mike Joner, BYU research professor of physics and astronomy, was one of the astronomers contributing to the project.

Dr. Joner and BYU undergraduate student Gilvan Apolonio secured over 200 observations of the galaxy using the 0.9-meter reflecting telescope at the BYU West Mountain Observatory. Their measurements were combined with observations made by other scientists around the world in a collaboration known as the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT). The WEBT network makes it possible to monitor objects around the clock from different locations during times of high variability.

Using the WEBT observations made in the summer of 2020, astronomers discovered surprisingly rapid oscillations of brightness in the central jet of the galaxy BL Lac. The scientists attribute these cycles of brightness change to twists in the jet’s magnetic field. Their study was recently published in Nature.

Astronomers have discovered a rare binary star system with an orbital period of just 51 minutes – a blazing new record.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. (opens in new tab) The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A glowing blob known as “the cocoon,” which appears to be inside one of the enormous gamma-ray emanations from the center of our galaxy dubbed the “Fermi bubbles,” has puzzled astronomers since it was discovered in 2012.

A NASA X-ray spacecraft delivers new dimensions to the first images from the Webb telescope.

Images touch people in a way that words cannot. The unprecedented clarity of the Webb telescope’s first scientific images dazzled people across the world when they became public on July 12, 2022. Three months later, the team working on NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory released new images of the same target objects: Stephan’s Quintet, galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.3–7327, and the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula. An image that Webb later took of the Cartwheel Galaxy also got an update. All these visuals add more “turbulent” information about these structures and give the originals a whole new dimension.

Continue reading “Enhanced! NASA reveals turbulent hot spots within Webb’s famous images” »

From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic ones, solving any of these puzzles could unlock our understanding of the Universe.

A fluid dynamics theory that violates causality would always generate paradoxical instabilities—a result that could guide the search for a theory for relativistic fluids.

The theory of fluid dynamics has been successful in many areas of fundamental and applied sciences, describing fluids from dilute gases, such as air, to liquids, such as water. For most nonrelativistic fluids, the theory takes the form of the celebrated Navier-Stokes equation. However, fundamental problems arise when extending these equations to relativistic fluids. Such extensions typically imply paradoxes—for instance, thermodynamic states of the systems can appear stable or unstable to observers in different frames of reference. These problems hinder the description of the dynamics of important fluid systems, such as neutron-rich matter in neutron star mergers or the quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions.

Scientists have used a supercomputer to simulate the dramatic creation of Earth’s Moon following a collision with the Mars-sized body Theia.

Clouds are made of silicate minerals.

The clouds of the distant brown dwarf contain silicate material, making it a quite unusual atmospheric composition.