AlphaRocketry

  There is a layer of Earth's atmosphere that scientists know very little about. Dubbed the "ignorosphere," this layer at the edge of space plays a huge role in determining the intensity of space weather events.  A new space mission is in the works that will attempt to shed more light on the processes that take place there, but it won't be ready before the current solar cycle ends.  When bursts of charged particles from the sun that form the solar wind hit Earth, strange things happen in the planet's gaseous coat. Those heavy particles (protons, electrons and heavy ions) collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere, energizing them, Juha Pekka Luntama, the head of space weather at the European Space Agency (ESA), told. Most of this energy exchange happens in the thermosphere, the second-highest layer of Earth's atmosphere that extends between altitudes of 60 miles to 360 miles (100 to 600 kilometers). The excess energy warms up ...

our Instagram page Multiple star systems are very common in the Milky Way. While most of these systems are binary systems consisting of two stars, others contain three, four, or even six stars. These systems tend to be pretty stable since unstable systems tend to break apart or merge fairly quickly, but sometimes you can get a kind of meta-stable system. One that lasts long enough for stars to evolve while still being stable in the end. And that end could be a supernova. It all comes down to gravitational dynamics. In Newtonian physics, two orbiting masses in isolation are always stable. The only paths they can have are elliptical orbits. This is why simple binaries are the most common multiple star systems. Once you have three or more masses, things get more complicated. So complicated that there isn’t an exact solution to the three-body problem, much less four or more. Fortunately, we can make highly accurate orbital models. So while we don’t have an exact solution for multiple star ...

Astronomers have spied three whole systems of exoplanets being born around one binary star. SVS 13 is a binary star system 980 light-years away, and the complex structures of dust around it are shedding light on how planetary systems are born in these fascinating environments. Since a large proportion of stars is bound up in multiple-star systems, this has implications for our understanding of planet formation and evolution. "Our results have revealed that each star has a disk of gas and dust around it and that, in addition, a larger disk is forming around both stars," says astronomer Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Spain and the ALMA Regional Centre at the University of Manchester in the UK. "This outer disk shows a spiral structure that is feeding matter into the individual disks, and in all of them planetary systems could form in the future. This is clear evidence for the presence of disks around both st...

  A dance of death is taking place at the heart of a galaxy in the distant Universe. Some 10 billion light-years away, two supermassive black holes are locked in an orbit so tight that they will collide with each other and form one much larger black hole in the relatively short time of just 10,000 years. That equates to an orbital distance of just 0.03 light-years, around 50 times the average distance between the Sun and Pluto. Yet, so fast are they moving that it takes just two Earth years for the two objects to complete a binary orbit, compared to Pluto's 248 years. There are multiple reasons why supermassive black hole binaries are of interest to astronomers. Supermassive black holes are found at the centers of most galaxies, the nuclei around which everything else whirls. When two are found together, it indicates that two galaxies have come together. We know this process occurs, so finding a supermassive black hole binary can tell us what it looks like in the final ...