Researchers estimate that the number of captured free-floating planets in the outer solar system with mass strictly greater than that of Mars is ∼1.2 and that the number of such planets with a strict cutoff at the mass of Mercury is ∼2.4. When they instead adopt logarithmic bins centered at the Mars mass and the …
Felix Schlang at What About It?, ercxspace on twitter and adonaisf have rendered a space telescope built inside the structure of a SpaceX Starship. Elon Musk has said SpaceX is working on designing a Space Telescope built into a Starship. The Hubble space telescope mirror is 2.4 meters across. The James Webb Space Telescope’s primary …
Tiny gram-scale interstellar probes pushed by laser light are likely to be the only technology capable of reaching another star this century and a NASA NIAC phase 1 study wants to work out the additional issues to coordinate several thousands one gram solar sails into a coordinated mission that can communicate back to Earth from …
Nextbigfuture commenter, Goat Guy, verified the resolution of very large hypertelescopes and optical interferometers. The highest angular resolutions for telescopes can be achieved by arrays of telescopes called astronomical interferometers. Hypertelescopes are being worked on that would combine many, many telescopes into very large arrays of tens, hundreds and even space based arrays of one …
The James Webb Space Telescope had a weak detection of the microbial life biomarker, dimethyl sulfide. There is a 1 in 66 chance that it was instrument noise. There will be a follow up analysis with the MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) on the James Webb. This should scan the exoplanet K2-18B at the wavelengths for …
NASA’s James Web found trace of dimythyl suflide (DMS) in th atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b and DMS is a biomarker of life. K2-18b’s atmosphere consists of mainly hydrogen, along with small amounts of methane and carbon dioxide. On Earth, the DMS molecule is only associated with microbial life. We have to wait for the existence …
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed K2-18 b whic an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth. It is showing the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere …
Our current space telescopes have found thousands of exoplanets based upon the slight variation in movement that they cause to the stars they are orbiting, but we have not seen the reflected light from those exoplanets. NASA has a count of exoplanets and candidate exoplanets. We need better and larger space telescopes so that we …
The solar wind can push against a drag device, called a Wind Rider, for fast trip times across the solar system. A small spacecraft can go from Earth orbit to more than 500 times that distance from the sun in about 7 years. It would take the Voyager probes about 25 times longer to reach …
In late 2023, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory project will start a 10-year inventory of the solar system (LSST). It should increase the number of known objects in the solar system by over ten times. LSST will deliver a 500 petabyte set of images and data products that will address some of the most pressing …
NASA is sharing the James Webb Space Telescope images at this flickr account. There are higher-resolution images of the Carina Nebula and some other known great astronomical views. It can also image individual stars in certain distant galaxies. The James Webb space telescope had massive delays and cost overruns. It is good that it is …