The sky is not the limit | Solar storm, diamonds on Mercury and more

Our planet was hit last week by solar storms and an asteroid about 3 meters high, but neither event posed any danger to people. Meanwhile, new discoveries about the universe were announced.

If you haven’t been following space news in the past few days, enjoy this ‘summary’ and stay up to date on all this news!

Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of solar storms, as the Sun, in its current cycle, will enter its peak activity in the coming years. On March 14 and 15, some of them, classified as light and medium, reached our planet.

Solar storms like these can cause a few minor effects on Earth, such as an increased occurrence of auroras at certain latitudes on the planet and brief problems with high-frequency radio signals. The solar maximum is expected to occur in July 2025.

It appears that the impacts of comets and asteroids falling on Mercury at high speeds may have turned the carbon that covers most of the planet’s surface into diamond. According to a new study, the thickness of the graphite layer on the innermost planet in the solar system can be more than 90 meters.

With the pressure of the asteroid impact, about 60% of the graphite can be converted into “shock diamond”. That represents about 16 quadrillion tons of diamonds there. But this is unlikely to lead the miners on a final adventure into space: the diamonds on Mercury are likely to be impure, with a chaotic mixture with graphite and other carbon phases.

While there are no potentially dangerous asteroids on a collision course with Earth, no one can assure you that there are no other undiscovered space rocks ready to collapse on our planet before any telescope can detect them. This is more or less what happened on Friday (11).

Astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky discovered a small asteroid last Friday (11), and only two hours later the object crossed the Earth’s atmosphere. Fortunately, it was about 3 meters in diameter and should disintegrate as it passed through the atmosphere. A few Icelanders reported seeing any glare in the sky during the event.

The James Webb Telescope has completed the stage of fine-tuning its instruments, that is, all optical parameters have been verified and tested, and they are working according to expectations (possibly further). at the end of the process, James Webb star record 2MASS J17554042 + 6551277 As well as the objects in the background.

As we can see in the photo above, the sensitivity of the optical system and the on-board camera made it possible to capture the stars and galaxies in the background. There is still an alignment to be made before scientific work with the telescope can begin. Meanwhile, the Photographed by James Webb by Gaia Observatory.

The two stars of SVS 13, located 980 light-years away, were observed with disks of gas and dust around them. These disks appear to be sufficient to form new planets and have been identified in unprecedented detail. They discovered nearly 30 different molecules and 13 complex organic molecules that were a precursor to life.

This is evidence that planet-forming disks can indeed exist around stars in binary systems. But it’s still not clear exactly how new planets might form, mainly because the gravitational interactions between the two stars are complex. In addition, a larger disk is forming around both stars.

# helicopter on fire! Ingenuity has successfully completed its 21st flight to the Red Planet. The small helicopter traveled 370 meters at 3.85 meters per second and stayed aloft for 129.2 seconds. https://t.co/TNCdXWcKWE pic.twitter.com/rNMaodihxa

– NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) March 11, 2022

a A brilliant helicopter made its twenty-first flight, it travels 370 m at a speed of 3.85 m/s. Altogether, it has already traveled more than 4.6 km since its first flight on the Red Planet. On its last “round”, the plane remained in the air for 129.2 seconds.

With the success of his adventures on Mars, The Creativity mission will be extended until September. The helicopter is expected to spend the next few months assisting the rover Perseverance as it tests its flight capabilities in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

astronaut NASA Mark Vandy broke the record for the longest US space flight on Thursday (15). It arrived at the Space Station (ISS) in April of last year and passed the 340-day mark on board. Its mission was expected to last six months, but the astronaut’s stay was extended, giving NASA an opportunity to assess the effects of microgravity on long spaceflights.

The dark matter in the universe, likely formed from some kind of hitherto unknown particle, may have been multiplied in the early universe by collisions with “ordinary” matter particles. This process could explain how dark matter has become more abundant in the universe than the matter we see.

According to a new study, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe will be compact enough for a chain of particle interactions to occur. Thus, a dark particle and a particle of ordinary matter can collide and produce two particles of dark matter. This would have caused the exponential multiplication of dark matter until the expansion of the universe carried it away, thus stopping the collision process.

The controversial and hypothetical Planet 9 was not found in a re-examination of the farthest region of the solar system. Astronomers have scanned nearly 87% of the sky with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in search of the object, which could exist outside Neptune’s orbit. This led them to exclude the presence of Planet 9 in the studied region, with 95% certainty.

If it existed, this planet would be between 5 and 10 Earth masses, and would orbit the Sun at a distance of up to 800 astronomical units. But the new findings are disappointing, insofar as the existence of this object can explain the strange orbits of other objects already out there.

Read also: