Space
- At the center of nearly all large galaxies in the cosmos sits a supermassive black hole. In new research, a CU Boulder astrophysicist explores what might happen if you put these giants one-by-one on a massive scale.
- The new mini-satellite, called MANTIS, will be designed and built by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. It borrows its name from the mantis shrimp, an undersea creature with famously powerful eyesight.
- One day, small spacecraft could fly around Earth, using devices called electron beams to remove hulking, derelict spacecraft from orbit without ever having to touch. It may sound like science fiction, but aerospace engineers from CU Boulder say they could be ready to test the idea in space in just five to 10 years.
- The asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) measures about two-thirds of a mile across. It will also remain in Earth's vicinity for much of the next 1,000 years. CU Boulder aerospace engineer Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz says its important to study objects like this one to make sure they don't pose a risk to life on our planet.
- Assistant Professor Meredith MacGregor and National Institute of Standards and Technology Physicist Jake Connors taught their graduate students how to build and use radio horn antennas to locate neutral hydrogen in space.
- A team of astrophysicists, including two researchers from CU Boulder, have caught a glimpse of a new and rocky planet called LP 791-18d. There, temperatures on the dayside could climb to more than 250 degrees Fahrenheit, while volcanoes blast the planet's surface.
- New research led by Sascha Kempf of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder finds that Saturn's rings are no more than 400 million years old. That's much younger than Saturn itself, which formed around 4.5 billion years ago.
- For three years at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, CU Boulder students enrolled in "Experimental Physics I" spent an estimated 56,000 hours analyzing the behavior of hundreds of solar flares. Their results could help astrophysicists understand how the sun's corona reaches temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.
- The Emirates Mars Mission, the first interplanetary exploration undertaken by an Arab nation, has unveiled a series of groundbreaking observations of Mars’ smaller moon, Deimos, that reveal new details of Mars’ most mysterious moon and where it came from, as well as the Red Planet’s larger moon, Phobos.
- As early as 2030, engineers and robots from Earth could begin construction on an astronomical observatory that would expand over 77 square miles of the moon’s surface—almost entirely using materials mined from the moon itself.Â