Astronomy by Pratyush Khare

China’s first journey to Mars is one of the most anticipated space missions of the year. But with parts of the country in some form of lockdown because of the coronavirus, the mission teams have had to find creative ways to continue their work. Researchers involved in the mission remain tight-lipped about its key aspects, but several reports from Chinese state media say that the outbreak will not affect the July launch — the only window for another two years. “The launch is so important politically that they will make it happen,” says Raymond Arvidson, a planetary geologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who has been involved with several US Mars missions. The centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party is in 2021, and a successful launch will be a “100-year anniversary gift”, says Wang Chi, a space physicist and director general of the National Space Science Center (NSSC) in Beijing, who is in charge of the scientific payloads involved in the mis...

Paul M. Sutter  is an astrophysicist at  The Ohio State University , host of  Ask a Spaceman  and  Space Radio , and author of " Your Place in the Universe. " Sutter contributed this article to   Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights .  Gravitational waves  slosh throughout the universe as ripples in space-time produced by some of the most cataclysmic events possible.  With facilities like the  Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory  (LIGO) and Virgo, we can now detect the strongest of those ripples as they wash over the Earth. But gravitational waves leave behind a memory — a permanent bend in space-time — as they pass through, and we are now on the verge of being able to detect that too, allowing us to push our understanding of gravity to the limits. Despite the fact that it's over a century old,  Einstein's theory of general relativity  is our current understanding of how gravity operates. I...

BEIJING, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese astronomers have detected repeated fast radio bursts (FRB) - mysterious signals believed to be from a source about 3 billion light years from Earth - with the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built. Scientists detected the signals with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) and they are carefully cross-checking and processing them, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). FRBs are the brightest bursts known in the universe. They are called "fast" because these blips are very short, only several milliseconds in duration. But there is no reasonable explanation for their origin. The detection of the repeated bursts might help shed light on the origin and physical mechanisms of FRBs, said researchers. Chinese scientists have installed a highly sensitive FRB backend on a 19-beam receiver on the giant telescope, and used it to...

That star system, MAXI J1621−501, first turned up on Oct. 9, 2017, in data from the Swift/XRT Deep Galactic Plane Survey as an odd point in space flashing unpredictably with X-rays. That was a sign, researchers wrote in a new paper, of a binary system containing both a normal star and either a neutron star or black hole. Both neutron stars and black holes can create unpredictable X-ray patterns as they absorb matter from their companion stars, but in very different ways. In black holes, as Live Science has previously reported, the X-rays come from  matter accelerating to extreme speeds and generating enormous friction  as it falls toward the gravity well. In neutron stars — superdense corpses of giant stars that exploded but haven't collapsed into singularities — the X-rays come from thermonuclear explosions on their outer crusts. Something is causing atoms to fuse on the outermost parts of these strange stars, releasing enormous energies usually found only deep inside stars...

An artist's illustration depicts a quasar, or supermassive, ultra-luminous black hole. About 13 billion years ago, when our universe was still just a scrappy startup, the cosmos hit a creative streak and churned out supermassive black holes left, right  and center . Astronomers can still sneak a peek at these relics of the early universe when they look at  quasars , incredibly large, outstandingly bright objects thought to be powered by old black holes billions of times more massive than Earth's sun. However, the very existence of these ancient objects poses a problem. Many quasars appear to originate from the first 800 million years of the universe, long before any stars could grow big or old enough to collapse under their own mass, explode in a  supernova  and form a black hole. So, where are these old holes in the fabric of space-time coming from? According to one popular theory, maybe all it takes is a whole lot of gas. In a new study, published June ...

What looks like a delicate dance between two galaxies is actually a slow-motion collision of colossal proportions in this Hubble Space Telescope photo. The two galaxies, called UGC 2369, are merging into one about 424 million light-years from Earth. Two  galaxies  are caught in a crazy cosmic dance, pulling at each other in a fresh image from a space telescope icon. Their mutual gravitational attraction is pulling the galaxies closer and closer together in this view from the  Hubble Space Telescope  released Aug. 13. The slow-motion galaxy collision, which scientists call UGC 2369, is about 424 million light-years away. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, roughly 6 trillion miles or 10 trillion kilometers). The two collections of stars, gas and dust are so close to each other that a faint bridge of material spans the intergalactic gap. This material came from the "diminishing divide" between the two galaxies, the European Space Agency...

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows dust and gas swirling around the spiral galaxy NGC 3169. (Image: © ESA/NASA/Hubble/L. Ho) A new galactic image from the  Hubble Space Telescope  shows some interesting stuff lurking in cosmic dust, all from an unusual point of view. The venerable observatory turned its attention to NGC 3169, a spiral galaxy about 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Sextans, the Sextant. (One light-year is the distance light travels in a year, which is about 6 trillion miles or 10 trillion kilometers.) The "sharply angled perspective" that the space telescope imaged shows a sort of cosmic barrier that makes the viewer feel as though they're peering over the edge to see the galaxy's center, Hubble scientists said in  a description of the image . What's in the dust barrier is a mix of world-formation materials, including water ice, silicates and hydrocarbons. On a planet or moon, if you mix these...