In this column, staff writer J.E. Reich rounds up the most important and fascinating space news of the past week in bite-sized summaries to keep you up to date on what's happening way up above us.
This week in space, we caught a glimpse of a sunset on Pluto, took one more step forward in proving the existence of dark matter, wondered if someone can possibly lay a claim to owning outer space and much, much more.
Pluto's Unforgettable Sunset
Everyone's favorite space probe, New Horizons, took a picture of Pluto at sunset during the day it came closest to the proximity of the dwarf planet's surface during its much-reported epic flyby. The spacecraft also took pictures of some of Pluto's fantastical mountain ranges and a vapor or mist made mostly of nitrogen.
The Hubble Telescope Took a Picture of an Exploding Star; Here's What Happened
The Hubble Telescope has captured images of the debris of a star, which astronomers named the Veil Nebula and that exploded around 8,000 years ago. According to NASA, the remnants of the Veil Nebula are 2,100 light-years away and about as wide as six of the Earth's moon side by side.
Is it Possible to Own Outer Space?
While it isn't technically breaking news, it's certainly the first of a list of questions posed by the BBC's Yasmin Ali about if it's possible to privatize space for commercial use despite precedented international space law. The piece is a pretty solid rundown of the history of these laws themselves, which began in 1967 when the Outer Space Treaty was signed into law and overseen by the relatively newly-minted United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. According to this de facto constitution, it's a purely peaceful zone where weapons are outlawed; but when it comes to commercial use, the laws get a bit blurry, especially when it comes to ventures like mining our moon for precious resources.
European Satellite May Point To Dark Matter
A satellite owned and run by the European Space Agency (ESA) might have pointed us in the right direction to dark matter (i.e., matter that is invisible to the eye via telescope but might account for what makes up the foundation of everything in the universe). Dutch scientists and the Leiden University in the Netherlands tracked the ESA satellite XMM-Newton, which was collecting data for "signs of particles weighing a few thousand electron-volts — a millionth as massive as WIMPs" — which is theorized to create X-rays by helping to dissipate celestial and/or galactic hubs and centers — and finally did it. Then again, it's only the first step.
"We can't prove that dark matter is coming from the center of the Milky Way because we don't know the physics around the galactic center well enough," said one of the lead scientists, Alexey Boyarsky, in a paper that details their findings to be published in Physical Review Letters.
