Private space exploration companies have faced difficulties in recent days: SpaceX saw the Starship explode on its first suborbital flight test and Japan’s ispace failed to land a lander on the lunar surface.
But we had good news during the week, such as important discoveries on Mars. Check out the main ones in our weekly summary.
The impacts of the Starship explosion
With the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, craters were opened below the launch pad and pieces of metal and concrete were hurled into the distance. Some debris hit a vehicle and the cameras of a team of journalists near the scene.
Now, Elon Musk’s company is undergoing an investigation by the control bodies, a standard procedure after accidents like this one. The CEO of SpaceX even admitted that the launch pad was not yet ready and that the next attempt should take place soon, but this will depend on revisions and approval by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The failure of the Japanese spacecraft on the Moon
The ispace lander Hakuto-R tried to land on the lunar surface on Tuesday (25) but things did not go as planned: the loss of the communication signal indicated that the spacecraft probably crashed into the surface of the Moon.
If the landing was successful, Japan would have entered the list of countries that have already managed to carry out such a maneuver. With the failure, only China, the Soviet Union and the United States are the nations that have already managed to complete the task.
Einstein Rings and Dark Matter
Einstein Rings, a special type of gravitational lens that forms a circle of distorted light, could help research into dark matter. The authors of the new research simulated Einstein Rings, each formed by one of two hypothetical particles that are candidate components of dark matter: axions and WIMPs.
Thus, they found that the rings formed by axions matched much more with reality, while the lenses created by WIMPs did not resemble the images of real Einstein Rings.
The intense burst of solar radio
An eruption and a coronal mass ejection from the Sun on the 23rd caused a chain of events, including aurora borealis and radio bursts. First, the explosion generated shock waves that accelerated high-energy protons towards us at about 580 km/s.
Radio bursts are common events, but this time, the intensity was well above normal and interrupted radio transmissions on the Earth’s surface.
The origin of the power of quasars
Putting an end to a 60-year mystery, scientists have discovered how quasars, the active supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, manage to obtain so much energy. It was already known that it takes a lot of material to power black holes for this glow to be emitted, but where does all this matter come from?
According to the new study, the “banquet” of black holes in quasars are provided by a collision between galaxies, which ends up “squeezing” a large amount of gas and dust, and even stars, towards the black hole in the galactic center.
The composition of the core of Mars
For the first time, scientists have found data on seismic waves traveling through the core of Mars. This made it possible to determine the composition at the center of the Red Planet: an alloy of liquid iron mixed with sulfur and oxygen.
This data was obtained by NASA’s InSight spacecraft. Although the instrument has since been retired, there is still a lot of data collected for scientific studies.
The first images of the telescope that flies in a balloon
The SuperBIT telescope, which flies through the Earth’s atmosphere in a balloon with the aim of mapping the universe’s dark matter, recorded its first images: one of the Tarantula Nebula and another of the Athena galaxies, which are in the process of colliding.
In addition to being incredible, ultraviolet photos are important for the study of dark matter, especially of colliding galaxies, since they can, in theory, “crush” the invisible substance and reveal some clue about it.
