Space Stories: Launch of the Euclid Space Telescope, Mercury Flyby, and a Super Hot Brown Dwarf

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Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope. (ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—NASA/JPL: “NASA to Provide Coverage for Launch of ESA ‘Dark Universe’ Mission“

The ESA (European Space Agency) and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 11:11 a.m. EDT (8:11 a.m. PDT) Saturday, July 1, to launch the Euclid spacecraft. Euclid is an ESA mission with contributions from NASA that will shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two of the biggest modern mysteries about the universe.

—Sky&Telescope: “BepiColombo Mission Makes Third Mercury Flyby“

An intrepid space mission had another brief glimpse of its final destination this week, as the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo flew past Mercury for a third time. The team confirms that the spacecraft is in good health post flyby, and that all instruments performed as planned. “Everything went very smoothly with the flyby and the images from the monitoring cameras taken during the close-approach phase of the flyby have been transmitted to the ground,” said Ignacio Clerigo (ESA) in a recent press release. “While the next Mercury flyby isn’t until September 2024, there are still challenges to tackle in the intervening time.”

—Phys.org: “Discovery of a Brown Dwarf Hotter than the Sun“

An international team of astronomers has discovered a planet-like object that is hotter than the sun. Their report has been accepted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy and is currently available on the arXiv pre-print server. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars and do not qualify for the category of either a planet or a star. In this new effort, the researchers have identified one that orbits a star so closely that its temperature is hotter than our sun.

Remember International Asteroid Day

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Credit: United Nations

This Friday, June 30th, is International Asteroid Day as adopted by the United Nations to “…observe each year at the international level the anniversary of the Tunguska impact over Siberia, Russian Federation, on 30 June 1908, and to raise public awareness about the asteroid impact hazard.”

NASA has set up page to celebrate the day, as has the European Space Agency. And the Asteroid Foundation is sponsoring a few days of activities leading up to the July 1 Asteroid Day Festival in Luxembourg.

Or you can simply watch your favorite asteroid disaster film on Friday evening.

However you mark the day, enjoy yourself, and look up!

Credit: Asteroid Foundation

Pic of the Week: Jellyfish Galaxy JO206 

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Image (Credit): The jellyfish galaxy JO206 trails across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team)

This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the jellyfish galaxy JO206, which is about 700 million light-years away. A close-up of the galaxy iteself is provided below.

Here is more about the image from the European Space Agency (ESA):

[Galaxy JO206 is] showcasing a colorful star-forming disk surrounded by a pale, luminous cloud of dust. A handful of foreground bright stars with crisscross diffraction spikes stands out against an inky black backdrop at the bottom of the image…

Jellyfish galaxies are so-called because of their resemblance to their aquatic namesakes. In the bottom right of this image, long tendrils of bright star formation trail the disk of JO206, just as jellyfish trail tentacles behind them. The tendrils of jellyfish galaxies are formed by the interaction between galaxies and the intra-cluster medium, a tenuous superheated plasma that pervades galaxy clusters. As galaxies move through galaxy clusters, they ram into the intracluster medium, which strips gas from the galaxies and draws it into the long tendrils of star formation.

The tentacles of jellyfish galaxies give astronomers a unique opportunity to study star formation under extreme conditions, far from the influence of the galaxy’s main disk. Surprisingly, Hubble revealed that there are no striking differences between star formation in the disks of jellyfish galaxies and star formation in their tentacles, which suggests the environment of newly formed stars has only a minor influence on their formation.

Image (Credit): Close-up of the jellyfish galaxy JO206 from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team)

A Day in Astronomy: The Founding of the European Space Agency

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On this day in 1975, the European Space Agency (ESA) was founded after the combination of  the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) and the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). Ten countries were part of this new organization, which has since grown to 22 members (noted below). The Agency also has associate members and other cooperating partners.

You can find a list of the ESA’a past, present, and planned space missions here, which includes:

Note: According to the International Astronautical Federation, the ESA member include Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia are Associate Members. Canada takes part in certain programmes under a cooperation agreement. ESA has signed European Cooperating States Agreements with Bulgaria, Cyprus and Slovakia, and cooperation agreements with Croatia and Malta.

Podcast: Two Worlds Collide in This Episode

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Image (Credit): Artist’s rending of exoplanet GJ 1132b. (MIT News)

If you are looking for a fun podcast this week, you cannot go wrong with Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Startalk podcast when it hosts Cool Worlds‘ creator David Kipping. The episode, Cosmic Queries – Cool Worlds with David Kipping, covers questions related to exoplanets, exomoons, and more. It is fun to hear the two scientists play off each other.

You will also learn from this podcast that Cool Worlds should be releasing its own podcast in the near future. Its Youtube videos are already a great source of information, so I expect more of the same in these podcasts.

At the end of the podcast, Professor Kipping also mentioned a few upcoming space missions related to exoplanets, including the European PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (Plato) mission in 2026. You can learn more about the mission from this European Space Agency factsheet, which notes:

Does a second Earth exist in the Universe? Planet hunter Plato will focus on the properties of rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars. In particular, Plato will discover and characterise planets in orbits up to the habitable zone – the ‘goldilocks’ region around a star where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface.

Plato will characterise hundreds of rocky (including Earth twins), icy or giant planets by providing exquisite measurements of their radii (3% precision), masses (better than 10% precision) and ages (10% precision). This will revolutionise our understanding of planet formation and the evolution of planetary systems, as well as the potential habitability of these diverse worlds.

As well as looking at these planets, Plato will analyse their host stars. Using data from the mission, scientists hope to perform stellar seismology, gathering evidence of ‘starquakes’ in the imaged stars. This will give insight into the characteristics and evolution of the stars, improving our understanding of entire planetary systems.

It’s a fun, fact-filled show worth your time.