Science

NASA engineers developed a power-saving method to extend the Voyager probes' exploration into interstellar space. Since 1977, Voyager 1 and 2's power sources have been decreasing, putting their equipment at risk. Solar power doesn't work in outer space. Engineers gave each Voyager three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). These generate energy from plutonium-238 decay heat. They're nuclear batteries dropping 4 watts each year. The Voyagers don't require that electricity for propulsion, but they do need it to collect scientific data on distant charged particles and magnetic fields—humanity's sole chance to do so in interstellar space. A Power Upgrade Extends Voyager 2's Mission in Space NASA began investigating techniques to extend Voyagers' instrument life two year...

A new study suggests aliens on neighboring stars may detect Earth's radio broadcasts. The University of Manchester and the University of Mauritius used crowd-sourced data to replicate radio leakage from mobile towers to examine what alien civilizations would detect from close stars like Barnard's star, six light years from Earth. Here's Why NASA Signals May Have Reached Aliens, But It May Take 27 Years to Respond. The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal reported that only sophisticated civilizations could detect Earth's mobile tower radio leakage. Despite weaker TV and radio transmitters, mobile communication networks are important worldwide. "While each system represents relatively low radio powers individually, the integrated spectrum of billions of th...

Astronomers have known the fate of planets like Mercury, Venus, and Earth when their host stars die, but they have never seen it in space until now. Scientists in Chile used the Gemini South telescope to see a dying star consuming an exoplanet. A extended, low-energy explosion indicated a planet skimming a star. Astronomers have uncovered stars that swallowed planets by doing a post-mortem autopsy on the dead star. The first direct evidence of star-eats-planet was reported in Nature. The group thinks the occurrence will help researchers find more stars eating planets. Earth's projected end is terrible. "Our interpretation…provides evidence for a missing link in our understanding of the evolution and final fates of planetary systems," the scientists said. According to th...

New research suggests that the iron-depleted, oxidized chemistry typical of the Earth's continental crust did not result from the crystallization of the mineral garnet, as was widely believed in 2018. The low iron content of Earth's continental crust in comparison to oceanic crust caused the continents to be less compact and more buoyant, causing continental plates to reside higher atop the planet's mantle than oceanic plates and making terrestrial life possible. The disparity in density and buoyancy was discovered to be a major factor in why continents have dry land and oceanic crusts are submerged, as well as why continental plates always come out on top when colliding with oceanic plates at subduction zones, where one edge of a crustal plate is forced sideways and downward into ...

Researchers have been trying for a very long time to figure out why it is that migratory songbirds normally take off during the night, but they have not been successful. Now, the results of two separate studies reveal that the birds use the approach of night and the prospect of clear skies in the near future as cues to take flight. The investigations, which were published in the journal Movement Ecology, made use of radio tracking devices and evaluated data from roughly 400 songbirds belonging to nine different migratory species, such as the yellow-rumped warbler, the American redstart, and the Bicknell's thrush.

The first building elements of organic life, amino acids and carboxylic acids, may have been formed by the collision of solar particles from solar eruptions with vapors in the early Earth's atmosphere, according to scientists. In the late 1800s, scientists hypothesized that the origins of life began in a "warm little pond": a soup of chemicals energized by electricity, heat, and other energy sources that could combine to create organic molecules. In 1953, when these conditions were recreated in a laboratory at the University of Chicago, twenty distinct amino acids were discovered to have formed. Life began in a "warm little pond" according to late 1800s biologists. Vladimir Airapetian, a stellar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a...