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  Interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua could still be alien technology, new study hints   'Oumuamua — a mysterious, interstellar object that crashed through our solar system two years ago — might in fact be alien technology. That’s because an alternative, non-alien explanation might be fatally flawed, as a new study argues. But most scientists think the idea that we spotted alien technology in our solar system is a long shot. In 2018, our solar system ran into an object lost in interstellar space. The object, dubbed 'Oumuamua, seemed to be long and thin — cigar-shaped — and tumbling end over end. Then, close observations showed it was accelerating, as if something were pushing on it. Scientists still aren't sure why. One explanation? The object was propelled by an alien machine, such as a lightsail — a wide, millimeter-thin machine that accelerates as it's pushed by solar radiation. The main proponent of this argument was Avi Loeb, a Harvard University astrophy

  The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter   Dark Matter Web In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in a distant cluster were orbiting one another much faster than they should have been given the amount of visible mass they had. He proposed than an unseen substance, which he called dark matter, might be tugging gravitationally on these galaxies. Since then, researchers have confirmed that this mysterious material can be found throughout the cosmos, and that it is six times more abundant than the normal matter that makes up ordinary things like stars and people. Yet despite seeing dark matter throughout the universe, scientists are mostly still scratching their heads over it. Here are the 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter. What is dark matter? First and perhaps most perplexingly, researchers remain unsure about what exactly dark matter is. Originally, some scientists conjectured that the missing mass in the univ

  Why does outer space look black?   Look up at the night sky with your own eyes, or marvel at images of the universe online, and you'll see the same thing: the inky, abysmal blackness of space, punctuated by bright stars, planets or spacecraft. But why is it black? Why isn't space colorful, like the blue daytime sky on Earth ?  Surprisingly, the answer has little to do with a lack of light.  "You would think that since there are billions of stars in our galaxy, billions of galaxies in the universe and other objects, such as planets, that reflect light, that when we look up at the sky at night, it would be extremely bright," Tenley Hutchinson-Smith, a graduate student of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), told Live Science in an email. "But instead, it's actually really dark."  Hutchinson-Smith said this contradiction, known in physics and astronomy circles as Olbers' paradox, can be explained b

  Jupiter Just Got Hit by a Comet or Asteroid ... Again    Amateur astronomer John McKeon was observing the king of planets by telescope from Swords, Ireland, on March 17 when he captured this stunning time-lapse video of something hitting Jupiter . McKeon was recording the transit of Jupiter's moons Io and Ganymede with an 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and his ASI120mm camera when something struck Jupiter, and he struck cosmic pay dirt. "The original purpose of the imaging session was to get this time-lapse, with a happy coincidence of the impact in the second, last capture of the night," McKeon wrote in a YouTube video description . While it's still too early to know exact details on the Jupiter crash, NASA asteroid expert Paul Chodas, who heads the agency's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said there's greater chance that an asteroid, not comet, is the culprit. "It's m

  Hear the 1st sounds from China's Mars rover Zhurong   China's first rover on Mars , the six-wheeled Zhurong, rolled onto the Red Planet's surface late Friday (May 21) to begin exploring its new home: the vast Martian plain of Utopia Planitia. Zhurong, which landed on Mars a week earlier on May 14, drove on to the Martian surface from its landing platform at 10:40 p.m. EDT on Friday (10:40 a.m. Saturday, May 22 Beijing Time). It is expected to spend the next 90 days mapping the area, searching for signs of water ice, monitoring weather and studying the surface composition. Photos from Zhurong released by the China National Space Administration show views from the rover's navigation cameras. In one image, the rover is still atop its lander and looking down at the twin ramps it took to roll onto the Martian surface. A second photo looks back at Zhurong's three-legged lander, which delivered the rover to the Martian surface last week. The 530-lb. (240 k

  Sun erupts with biggest solar flare in 4 years in early Fourth of July fireworks (video) The sun erupted with a surprise solar flare on Saturday (July 3), the largest since 2017, in an early explosion of cosmic fireworks ahead of the Fourth of July.  The solar flare occurred from a sunspot called AR2838 at 10:29 a.m. EDT (1429 GMT) on Saturday and registered as a powerful  X1-class sun event, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) tracking the sun's weather. It caused a brief radio blackout on Earth, center officials said in an update .  A video of the solar flare from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the flare erupting from the upper right limb of the star as seen by the spacecraft, one of many used to monitor the sun's weather.   X-class solar flares are the strongest kind of eruptions on the sun . When aimed directly at Earth, the most powerful ones can endanger astronauts and satellites in space, as well as interfere with powe

  White dwarfs seen eating the remnants of destroyed planets Four distant white dwarfs, the remnants of dead stars, have been spotted consuming what could be the crust of pulverised planets. Mark Hollands at the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues have discovered that the material is similar to Earth’s crust, which could help reveal whether the formation of our own planet is a common process throughout the galaxy. The spectrum of light emitted by … Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2264669-white-dwarfs-seen-eating-the-remnants-of-destroyed-planets/#ixzz6zcekCTP6     Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2264669-white-dwarfs-seen-eating-the-remnants-of-  destroyed-planets/#ixzz6zceL7NEp  

White dwarf star is the size of the moon but more massive than the sun The smallest white dwarf star ever found is about the same size as Earth’s moon, but more massive than the sun. It appears to be shrinking, which could lead to a colossal explosion. Ilaria Caiazzo at the California Institute of Technology and her colleagues discovered this star, called ZTF J190132.9+145808.7, using the Zwicky Transient Facility in California. They then performed additional observations with other telescopes to confirm its properties. The researchers found that it rotates extraordinarily quickly , spinning once every 6.9 minutes. The magnetic field strength at its surface ranges between 600 and 900 megagauss – more than 1 billion times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. The star, which is about 130 light years from Earth, has a radius of about 2140 kilometres, only 400 kilometres bigger than the moon. But it also has a mass about 1.3 times that of the sun, close to the limit for ho

  Scientists catch 1st glimpse of a black hole swallowing a neutron star After more than four years of exploring a menagerie of cosmic happenings through gravitational waves , scientists have finally spotted the third expected variety of collision — twice. The new flavor of collision includes one black hole and one neutron star, making it a mash-up of sorts. Scientists have observed dozens of mergers of pairs of black holes , and a couple mergers of pairs of neutron stars , the superdense stellar corpses. But a crash between a black hole and neutron star, while predicted by scientists, had not been definitively detected.  Now, researchers say they have done just that, observing the unique ripples in space-time caused by such a collision. "With this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary," Astrid Lamberts, a CNRS researcher at Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France, said in a statement. &qu

  Newly found mega comet may be the largest seen in recorded history     A giant comet found far out in the solar system may be 1,000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it potentially the largest ever found in modern times. The object, officially designated a comet on June 23 , is called  Comet C/2014 UN271 or Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discoverers, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and astronomer Gary Bernstein.  Astronomers estimate this icy body has a diameter of 62 miles to 124 miles (100 to 200 km), making it about 10 times wider than a typical comet . This estimate is quite rough, however, as the comet remains far away from Earth and its size was calculated based on how much sunlight it reflects. The comet will make its closest approach to our planet in 2031 but will remain at quite a distance even then. We have the privilege of having discovered perhaps the largest comet ever seen — or at least larger than any well-st

  Astronomers spot 3,000 light-year 'light echo' of dying supermassive black hole At the dark hearts of galaxies like the Milky Way lie supermassive black holes , with millions or even billions of times the sun's mass.  Some of those supermassive black holes are what scientists call active galactic nuclei (AGN), which spew out copious amounts of radiation like X-rays and radio waves. AGN are responsible for the twin jets of ionized gas you see shooting away in pictures of many galaxies . As all things must pass, so too must every AGN one day shut off. But scientists have never quite understood how or when that happens. Now, researchers led by Kohei Ichikawa, an astronomer at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, may have found a clue. Looking at the distant galaxy Arp 187, those researchers have seen what they think is an AGN in its very last days. Ichikawa and his colleagues observed Arp 187 with the radio telescopes at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter

  Space miners may use rockets to harvest the moon's water ice  Rockets may help humanity explore the solar system in more ways than one. Three companies — Masten Space Systems, Lunar Outpost and Honeybee Robotics — are developing a new system that would use rockets to mine water ice on the moon . Water ice is thought to be abundant in the moon's polar regions, especially on the permanently shadowed floors of some craters. Harvesting this resource is crucial to establishing a permanent human presence on the moon , NASA officials and exploration advocates say, and not just because it will help keep astronauts alive. Water ice can be broken into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel, allowing spacecraft to top up their tanks away from Earth To spur development of moon mining tech, NASA recently established the " Break the Ice Lunar Challenge ." The contest will award up $500,000 total to the most promising resource-harves

 IC 1101- Biggest Galaxy in observed universe IC 1101 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster and is one of the largest known galaxies. Its halo extends about 600 kiloparsecs (2 million light-years) from its core, and it has a total of about 100 trillion stars. The galaxy is located 320 megaparsecs (1.04 billion light-years) from Earth. The galaxy was discovered on 19 June 1790, by the British astronomer Frederick William Herschel   Characteristics The galaxy is classified as a supergiant elliptical (E) to lenticular (S0) and is the brightest galaxy in A2029 (hence its other designation A2029-BCG; BCG meaning brightest cluster galaxy ). The galaxy's morphological type is debated due to it possibly being shaped like a flat disc but only visible from Earth at its broadest dimensions. However, most lenticulars have sizes ranging from 15 to 37  kpc (50 to 120 thousand  ly ). IC 1101 is among the largest known galaxies , but there

The Black Knight Satellite: A Hodgepodge of Alien Conspiracy Theories The Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory claims that a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin is in near- polar orbit of the Earth, and that NASA is covering up its existence and origin. This conspiracy theory combines several unrelated stories into one narrative. A photo taken during the STS-88 mission claimed by some to show the Black Knight satellite is catalogued by NASA as a photo of space debris, and space journalist James Oberg considers it as probable debris of a thermal blanket confirmed as lost during the mission.                    Take a good look at the photograph above. NASA captured this image of a mysterious black object orbiting the Earth in 1998, during the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The space agency refers to the strange entity as item STS088-724-66 in its catalogue of space junk floating in low-Earth orbit (within 1,200 miles ). Jerry Ros