Here are some recent stories of interest.
—Caltech: “Zwicky Transient Facility Leads to Classification of 10,000 Supernovae“
Fast forward to now, and Zwicky’s namesake, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)—a National Science Foundation-funded sky survey that began operations in 2017 using the 48-inch telescope—has detected about a hundred thousand supernovae. These detections, in turn, have led to the spectroscopic classification and confirmation of more than 10,000 supernovae, making ZTF the largest supernova survey to date. “There are trillions of stars in the universe, and about every second, one of them explodes. Reaching 10,000 classifications is amazing, but what we truly should celebrate is the incredible progress we have made in our ability to browse the universe for transients, or objects that change in the sky, and the science our rich data will enable,” says Christoffer Fremling, a staff astronomer at Caltech. Fremling leads the Bright Transient Survey (BTS), ZTF project that discovers and classifies new supernovae.
—MIT News: “Liquid on Mars was Not Necessarily All Water“
Dry river channels and lake beds on Mars point to the long-ago presence of a liquid on the planet’s surface, and the minerals observed from orbit and from landers seem to many to prove that the liquid was ordinary water. Not so fast, the authors of a new Perspectives article in Nature Geoscience suggest. Water is only one of two possible liquids under what are thought to be the conditions present on ancient Mars. The other is liquid carbon dioxide (CO2), and it may actually have been easier for CO2 in the atmosphere to condense into a liquid under those conditions than for water ice to melt.
—Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences: “A Rare Venus Solar Transit Helps Unravel Exoplanet Atmospheres“
In the next decade, researchers will start probing the atmosphere of planets as small as Earth and Venus orbiting nearby stars. But although these two solar system planets are similar in size and bulk density—so that some call them “twins”—their atmospheres are nothing alike. Would scientists be able to set them apart if seen from light-years away? A team led by the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA) pretended Venus was faraway in another planetary system—an exoplanet—and asked what kind of information they could extract. The results were published in an article in the journal Atmosphere and prove that techniques being used to study large hot exoplanets can be effectively applied to those with a diameter 10 times smaller.
Our Awesome Universe 