The earlier article on a black hole binary system was pretty amazing, yet the video accompanying the story was created to demonstrate the phenomena. I found an even more amazing real video of stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center or the Milky Way galaxy. You can see the 20-year time-lapse video here from the NaCo instrument on the European Space Telescope’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. This black hole, Sagittarius A*, is about 27 000 light-years away from Earth.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has devised a fun way to ponder extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the galaxy. The adventure, Exotopia, allows you to follow a fictional exoplanet voyage for 30 days utilizing real SETI scientific data. The specially-crafted narrative includes unique digital art along the way illustrating the adventure. You can learn more about this project via this video and the Exotopia website.
It’s a fun way for the Institute to involve and educate the public. The first voyage in June explored the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets. The next Exotopia voyage launches on September 22, 2022.
Here are some recent stories of interest.
—SciTechDaily.com: “Astronomers Have Discovered an Especially Sneaky Black Hole“
VFTS 243 is a binary system, which means it is composed of two objects that orbit a common center of mass. The first object is a very hot, blue star with 25 times the mass of the Sun, and the second is a black hole nine times more massive than the Sun. VFTS 243 is located in the Tarantula Nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 163,000 light-years from Earth.
—SpaceNews.com: “ESA Scaling Back Design of X-ray Astronomy Mission“
Faced within increasing costs, the European Space Agency is looking for ways to revise the design of a large X-ray space telescope, an effort that could have implications for NASA’s own astrophysics programs…That effort will involve potential changes to its instrument configuration as well as creation of a science “redefinition” team to reconsider science objectives. The goal will be to develop a revised concept, called a minimum disrupted mission, that will cost ESA no more than 1.3 billion euros but still perform science expected of a flagship-class mission.
—NASA.gov: “NASA Rocket Mission Using ‘Astronomical Forensics’ to Study Exploded Star“
A NASA-funded sounding rocket mission will observe the remnants of an exploded star, uncovering new details about the eruption event while testing X-ray detector technologies for future missions. The High-Resolution Microcalorimeter X-ray Imaging, or Micro-X, experiment will launch Aug. 21 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The mission’s target of study is some 11,000 light-years away from Earth, off the edge of the W-shaped constellation known as Cassiopeia. There, a massive bubble of radiant material known as Cassiopeia A, or Cas A for short, marks the site of a brilliant stellar death.
Here is another recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This one is a unique close-up view of a spiral galaxy looking from above (or below) rather that from the side. It is NGC 628, which is about 32 million light years away.
You can see more such JWST images by visiting the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) Survey site. The site also includes images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and other sources.
Earlier this year, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory started assembling the Europa Clipper spacecraft so it is ready for its launch in 2024 (you can find the latest update here). Once it arrives at Jupiter, the spacecraft will have at least 50 flybys to study the Jovian moon and learn more about its inside, outside, and atmosphere.
Why Europa? NASA explains it this way:
Extraterrestrial life might exist under all sorts of conditions that humans would struggle to imagine. But we know of one set of conditions in which life flourishes in a multitude of shapes and sizes: the conditions found on Earth. Because we know Earth has the right conditions for life, humans can then sharply narrow down the search for extraterrestrial life by searching only in places that have the conditions that Earth life requires: a source of energy, the presence of certain chemical compounds, and temperatures that allow liquid water to exist. Jupiter’s icy moon Europa seems to be just such a place.
And water exists in abundance, as the NASA graphic shows below.
The Europa Clipper will not make it to Jupiter until 2030, so we have a long wait ahead of us. It also gives us plenty of time to guess about what we will find.
You can follow the status of the Europa Clipper here.
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