Oumuamua was the first interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System and was believed to be cigar-shaped and about 1000 meters long. Using detailed computer models of asteroidal-type objects between the Sun and Jupiter, two Harvard University researchers find that at least four known objects are likely to have origins from outside our solar …
1. Universe Today – An Extremely Large Hole has Been Dug for the Extremely Large Telescope European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is a next-generation ground telescope. It will have a primary mirror measuring 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. The ELT will collect roughly 200 times as much as light as the …
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) has cleared the last legal hurdle to resume construction on Hawaii’s Big Island. Hawaii’s Board of Land and Natural Resources issued a fresh construction permit in September 2017, which opponents appealed. The latest ruling upholds that permit. This is one of three new giant telescopes for a new era of …
The Carnival of Space 583 is up at Universe Today. Universe Today – Next Generation Telescopes Could Use “Teleportation” to Take Better Images The standard technique of locally recording the light at each telescope results in too much noise to work for weak light sources. As a result, all current optical telescope arrays work by …
An Exoplanet that is several times the mass of Jupiter has a moon that is the size of Neptune. The moon is estimated to be only 1.5 percent the mass of its companion planet. They are both 8000 light years away. The exoplanet is Kepler 1625b. The planet and its satellite are both gaseous. The …
Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System’s edge. They discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X. 2015 TG387 was discovered about 80 …
Devin Crowe gave an update on the NASA NIAC study on one-kilometer space bubble telescopes. The plan is bring liquid and gas and blow a large spherical bubble and then shine a wavelength to solify the material. They would spray part of the bubble with a very thin metal layer to make a reflective telescope. …
Cornell University has a NASA NIAC study for a fully modular self-assembled massive space telescope. They are taking mirrors segments based on the current James Webb space telescope mirror segments and then adding in some adjustments so that each piece can function in any random location. They also add solar sails and velcro attachments so …
Rudranarayan Mukherjee, NASA JPL gave an update on progress to Robotic Assembly of Space Assets: Architectures and Technologies. This is the path to making 100 meter and even multi-kilometer diameter space telescopes and starshades in space. The presentation was at the Future In-Space Operations (FISO) Working Group Presentations at the FISO telecon. They are able …
It is estimated that there may be 200 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt of the outer Solar System and possibly more than 10,000 in the region beyond. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has accepted four as official dwarf planets: Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake, as well as Ceres in the inner Solar System. Philip …
The Keck Planet Finder telescope might start operating in 2019. It will be used to discover exoplanets, particularly around nearby, bright stars and will excel at measuring the masses of planets discovered by transiting programs such as Kepler, TESS, and PLATO. The Keck Planet Finder (KPF) is a spectrometer for the Keck Observatory that will …