Astronomy

Follow the Dave’s Universe blog: www.Astronomy.com/davesuniverse Follow Dave Eicher on Twitter: @deicherstar Artificial intelligence is transforming our world. Will it take on the entire universe? Founded with the rise of computing machines in the 1950s, AI is now actively seeping into more and more places we encounter every day. Robots are routinely operating in factories. They are fulfilling orders in warehouses. Machines are increasingly handling tasks previously performed by humans, and as computing power expands at an increasing rate, the sky seems to be the limit for what AI can take on in place of its human creators. This month, astronomer Ashley Spindler describes how AI is transforming the world of astronomical research. This illuminating story begins on page 36. I think you will be amazed at how widespread computing power is in virtually…

→ We welcome your comments at Astronomy Letters, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187; or email to letters@astronomy.com. Please include your name, city, state, and country. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. In three dimensions In the seventh entry of February’s “Top 10 space stories of 2022,” the four images of the brightening of a star, caused by the possible microlensing of a black hole, triggered my love of 3D. I looked at the images as stereo pairs and noticed that there was some parallax, making the stars seem to be at varying differences. With further inspection, I determined that it was their actual movement over time that was the cause of the apparent parallax. I made a stereo anaglyph of two of the images, one from August 2011 and…

Wolf-Rayet stars like WR 124, which is located some 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagitta the Arrow, are a special breed. These objects are some of the brightest, hottest, and most massive stars in the modern universe, shedding their outer layers via intense stellar winds that can reach millions of miles per hour. Those winds also make Wolf-Rayet stars notoriously difficult to study, shrouding them with ejected gas that eventually cools into obscuring dust. But the James Webb Space Telescope views the cosmos with infrared vision perfect for observing this gas and dust. Its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) picks up WR 124’s bright stellar core, while the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the structure of the surrounding nebula, showing the clumps of gas and dust that were ejected. These observations, captured…

Venus’ landscape is littered with volcanoes that were clearly active in the past. But less clear is whether any are still erupting in the present. Many researchers have suspected this is the case, citing evidence of lava flows that appear relatively recent. But direct before-and-after evidence of an eruption had not emerged — until researchers found it while combing through archival data from NASA’s Magellan mission, which orbited the planet from Aug. 10, 1990, to Oct. 13, 1994. Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks (UAF), reexamined the over 30-year-old data and presented the findings March 15 at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held in The Woodlands, Texas, and virtually. The results were published the same day in Science. Herrick compared February 1991 radar imagery…

THE TRAPPIST-1 system, located some 40 light-years away, hosts at least seven Earth-sized, rocky exoplanets. But new measurements taken by the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) show at least one planet — TRAPPIST-1 b — is likely too hot to host an atmosphere. Despite the news that this planet is inhospitable, the observations are still a major achievement: It is the first time emissions of light have been detected from a rocky planet with a temperature comparable to those in our solar system. “It’s a really important step in the story of discovering exoplanets,” study co-author Pierre-Olivier Lagage of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), who spent more than two decades developing MIRI, said in a press release. The new research was published March 27 in Nature. TRAPPIST-1…

GLASS OF WATER Lunar samples from China’s Chang’e 5 mission suggest that glassy beads on the Moon’s surface may store up to 270 trillion liters of water — over 71 trillion gallons, or more than half the volume of Lake Erie. This water may form when hydrogen from the solar wind bonds with oxygen in mineral oxides. LINK TO THE BLAST Scientists found that a collision of neutron stars detected via gravitational waves April 25, 2019, was followed 2.5 hours later by a fast radio burst (FRB) in the same area. If they were from the same event, it would be the first time an FRB has been linked to a neutron star merger. LUCKY US A single super-Earth located where the main asteroid belt is today could destabilize and eject every planet except Jupiter…