Space Stories: Solar Probe’s Close Flyby, Cosmic Tunnels, and More Complexities in Planet Formation

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: NASA

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Sky & Telescope: “Parker Solar Probe Swings By Sun in Closest Approach Yet“

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is about to go where no spacecraft has gone before. A final flyby of Venus last month has sped up Parker for the mission’s next solar perihelion, set to occur on December 24 at 6:40 EST / 11:40 UT. At just 6.2 million km (3.9 million miles) from the solar surface — about nine times the Sun’s radius — this perihelion will be the closest for the mission. Parker is breaking its own record to once again become the closest human-made object to ever approach the Sun…the mission is totally autonomous in taking measurements; it should start transmitting data back to Earth within a week after this pass, though it has the capability to carry out operations on its own for up to two months if needed.

—BRG: “Astronomers Say They Found a Tunnel Connecting Our Solar System to Other Stars“

Astronomers have made a startling discovery. Using data from the eRosita X-ray instrument, researchers say they’ve discovered a “cosmic tunnel” that connects our solar system to other stars. Scientists have long known that our solar system exists in a Local Hot Bubble. This bubble is believed to have formed following several supernovas over the past several million years and is estimated to be around 300 light-years across. Using data from the eRosita, researchers from the Max Planck Institute say they found evidence of a cosmic tunnel stretching from our solar system out toward the Centaurus constellation. The tunnel appears to move through the material that makes up the Local Hot Bubble

—Northwestern Now: “Young Exoplanet’s Atmosphere Unexpectedly Differs from its Birthplace“

Just as some children physically resemble their parents, many scientists have long thought that developing planets should resemble the swirling disk of gas and dust that births them. But, in a new study, a Northwestern University-led team of astrophysicists discovered the resemblance might be looser than previously thought. By studying a still-forming exoplanet and its surrounding natal disk using new instrumentation at W.M. Keck Observatory, the researchers uncovered a mismatched composition of gases in the planet’s atmosphere compared to gases within the disk. The surprising finding potentially confirms long-held skepticism that scientists’ current model of planet formation is too simplified.

UFO Panic: Someone Needs a Stargazing Class

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Orion’s Belt. (Davide De Martin & the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator)

The ongoing panic related to drones it getting pretty silly. I am just glad we are not shooting down small airplanes or trying to take out a star system.

For example, Maryland’s former Governor Larry Hogan recently claimed to have “personally witnessed” drones outside his house. However, he was actually looking at Orion’s Belt.

Maybe he should check with employees at the University of Maryland’s observatory to learn about upcoming stargazing events for the public. Oh wait, the observatory is currently closed due to budget cuts.

I wonder who was governor when that happened.

Space Stories: Classifying Supernovae, Non-Water Liquid on Mars, and Understanding Exoplanet Atmospheres

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124), a hot star just about to go supernova, as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)

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.

We Have Moved from Exoplanet to Exomoon

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): An artist’s rendering of a volcanic moon orbiting WASP-49 b. (NASA/ JPL-Caltech)

The search for new exoplanets in our galaxy continues, but now it may include the first exomoon. This was something that was expected to occur at some point as the detection methods became better over time.

The exomoon in question is believed to be a volcanic moon orbiting a giant planet about 635 light-years away. Detected using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the exomoon is discussed in a paper written by researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech in California. The clue was a cloud of sodium that did not appear to come from the host exoplanet.

The new discovery is being compared to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, which is the most volcanically active world in the solar system.

If you want to learn more about exomoons, I recommend a Cool Worlds video narrated by Assistant Professor of Astronomy David Kipping who provides five reasons that the study of exomoons is so important.

Space Stories: NASA’s Probe Explorers, Finding Exoplanet Atmospheres, and an Australian Space Antenna

Posted on by onespaceman2000

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Universe Today: “NASA Announces a New Class of Space Missions: Probe Explorers“

NASA has sent a whole host of spacecraft across the Solar System and even beyond. They range from crewed ships to orbit and to the Moon to robotic explorers. Among them are a range of mission classes from Flagships to Discovery Class programs. Now a new category has been announced: Probe Explorers. This new category will fill the gap between Flagship and smaller missions. Among them are two proposed missions; the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite and the Probe Far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics.

—uChicago News: “UChicago Researchers Use New Method of Finding Atmospheres in Distant Planets“

It is a major goal of astronomical research to find planets other than Earth that might be suitable for sustaining life. There are a number of factors which many scientists agree are essential to a planet being habitable, but an important one is whether or not a planet has an atmosphere. Scientists have found other rocky, Earth-like exoplanets, but none that we can definitively say have atmospheres. Finding these planets will reveal insights into how such atmospheres are formed and retained, so that we can better predict which planets could be habitable. A study conducted by University of Chicago PhD student Qiao Xue with Prof. Jacob Bean’s group has demonstrated a new way to determine if faraway exoplanets have an atmosphere—and showed that it was simpler and more efficient than previous methods. The new technique, when applied to more planets, has the potential to help us learn more about patterns in atmosphere formation.

—European Space Agency: “ESA Crowns New Deep Space Antenna in Australia“

A giant wakes as the Sun sets in Western Australia. The workers can finally rest easy after more than a day spent using an enormous crane to lift the colossal 122-tonne, 35-metre diameter reflector dish and crown ESA’s newest deep space communication antenna. With the dish and its quadrupole now installed, ESA is on track to inaugurate its fourth deep-space antenna, and second at the New Norcia site in Australia, by the end of 2025. Referred to as NNO3, the New Norcia 3 antenna will allow spacecraft to send and receive more valuable data collected from onboard scientific instruments and vital flight instructions for mission operations.