AstroWil | Space News Podcast

Best Space Documentaries 2019

If you are into space, science and tech like I am you are always on the hunt ...

By AstroWilJuly 9, 2019

astrobiology

Can we make a space ship powered by black holes?

Can we harness the power of a black hole to produce thrust for a vehicle to travel ...

By AstroWilJuly 9, 2019

Magellantv – Birth of a Black Hole Review

Disclaimer: I was paid an advertising fee to write this article. That being said, I would have ...

By AstroWilJuly 8, 2019

Ronald Reagan Saw a UFO

In 1974, while in a Cessna Citation aircraft, then governor of California, President Ronald Reagan saw a UFO. ...

By AstroWilJune 12, 2019

Trump didn’t say the moon is part of Mars

Washington – President Donald Trump posted a tweet that got the world in an uproar about the ...

By AstroWilJune 8, 2019

Lunar

NASA plans to send equipment to moon in 2020

WASHINGTON – For the first time since the 1970s, the United States will be sending equipment to the ...

By AstroWilJune 2, 2019

Commercial Space

SpaceX to Launch Super Fast World-Wide Satellite Internet

SpaceX has been given the go-ahead from the FCC to start building global internet service via thousands ...

By AstroWilMay 2, 2019

SpaceX

What is The Most Expensive Thing in The Galaxy?

16 Psyche is mainly metal, made up of iron, nickel and precious metals On Earth, the iron ...

By AstroWilMay 2, 2019

China unveils colossal Mars training base camp in Gobi desert

Most Advanced Mars Training Facility in China Costs $373 million dollars Named Mars Base 1 Geography as ...

By AstroWilApril 20, 2019

Image of planetary nebula NGC 7027 with illustration of helium hydride molecules. In this planetary nebula, SOFIA detected helium hydride, a combination of helium (red) and hydrogen (blue), which was the first type of molecule to ever form in the early universe. This is the first time helium hydride has been found in the modern universe. | Photo Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Processing: Judy Schmidt

Elusive Universe kick-starting Molecule Found

Helium hydride ion, the first molecule that formed almost 14 billion years ago, was detected by NASA’s ...

By AstroWilApril 19, 2019

Stonehenge Secrets Revealed: DNA Origin of builders

A new University of Oxford research collaboration, published in Nature Scientific Reports, suggests that a number of ...

By AstroWilApril 17, 2019

Earth

SpaceIL Moon Lander Crashes onto Lunar Surface

SpaceIL just accomplished something amazing, sending a lander into orbit around the Moon. This is the first ...

By AstroWilApril 13, 2019

Lunar

Audio Only Podcast Version of Black Hole Announcement

By AstroWilApril 10, 2019

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole

ESO, ALMA, and APEX contribute to paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of ...

By AstroWilApril 10, 2019

Where to watch black hole press conference

The European Commission, the European Research Council and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project will hold a ...

By AstroWilApril 9, 2019

DARPA to Build Nuclear Rocket in Space

DARPA plans to demonstrate a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system that can be assembled on orbit according ...

By AstroWilApril 6, 2019

Thin section of ALH-77005: poikilitic texture of olivine with pyroxene cumulate grains, the studied melt pocket (rectangle) mostly composed of olivine. Image credit: Gyollai et al, doi: 10.1515/astro-2019-0002.

Researchers Find Biosignatures in Martian Rock

ALH-77005, a Martian rock found in Antarctica, contains numerous mineralized ‘biosignatures,’ including coccoidal, filamentous structures and organic ...

By AstroWilApril 5, 2019

What are Saturn’s Rings Made Of?

Saturn’s rings are made of billions of pieces of ice, dust and rocks. Some of these particles ...

By AstroWilApril 3, 2019