Podcast: More on the James Webb Space Telescope

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Alan Alda’s podcast Clear & Vivid (Amazon)

I wanted to highlight another astronomy interview from Alan Alda’s Clear+Vivid podcast, in this case involving a mother and daughter team. Astronomers Natalie and Natasha Batalha discuss “Looking for Life on Alien Worlds” using the new James Webb Space Telescope. The two guests discuss upcoming efforts to better understand the 5,000+ planets that have already been discovered. One of their favorites among the exoplanet systems is the TRAPPIST-1 system, noting the parent red star is about the size of Jupiter. This small star has seven exoplanets, with the “Goldilocks zone” being much closer in than is the case in our system.

NASA describes one of the exoplanets in the “Goldilocks zone,” TRAPPIST-1d, in this way:

TRAPPIST-1d is one of seven Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. About 40 light-years from Earth, TRAPPIST-1 is unusual both for its number of small rocky planets and the number in the habitable zone. Several of the artist’s illustrations…portray possible water or ice in the system– the proximity of the planets to their red dwarf star may indicate that any of them could have water on their surface. This artist’s concept shows TRAPPIST-1d with a narrow band of water near the terminator, the divide between a hot, dry day and an ice-covered night side.

You can read more about the TRAPPIST-1 system here.

Image (Credit): Artist’s image of exoplanet TRAPPIST-1d. (NASA)

Space Quote: Not a Hopeful Message

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Very Large Array located at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NROA) site in Socorro, New Mexico, which is used by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. (Alex Savello/NROA)

“There is a real possibility that humans will not exist as a species thousands of years from now, and thus a ‘message in a bottle’ about the very basic details would at least serve as a small reminder that we existed.”

–Statement by Kristen Fahy, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist and co-author on a paper about a message of friendship to alien beings. The paper, A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects, calls for:

An updated, binary-coded message has been developed for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy. The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth’s surface. The message concludes with digitized images of the human form, along with an invitation for any receiving intelligences to respond. 

I am not what the value of a ‘message in a bottle’ would be from a dead civilization. I was hoping for a more hopeful spin about why we want to send a message. Of course, many do not want to send a message at all because the alien response may not be what we want.

Similar Sentiments About Our Place in the Universe

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Book cover of Olaf Staledon’s Star Maker. (Wesleyan University Press)

I was reading the 1937 science fiction classic Star Maker by British writer Olaf Stapledon when I came across this statement:

I perceived that I was on a little round grain or rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.

It reminded me of Carl Sagan’s famous statement from his book Pale Blue Dot:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Mr. Stapledon had only his imagination at hand when he pondered the role of humans. His book has been praised by numerous science fiction writers, including H. G. Wells, Stanisław Lem, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Mr. Sagan was fortunate to have an image from Voyager I that clearly made this same point. We need the combined powers of dreamers and scientists as we face this awesome universe.

Image (Credit): This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. (NASA JP)

Extra: For more background on the image above, visit NASA’s site 10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager’s Famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Photo.

Pic of the Week: Europa in All its Glory

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Hubble images of Jupiter’s moon Europa. (NASA, NASA-JPL, University of Arizona)

This week’s photo of Jupiter’s moon Europa was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in June 1997 (and released by NASA on October 14, 2021). Here is the story about these two images (the left one in natural color and the right one enhanced) from the Hubble site:

This photograph of the Jovian moon Europa was taken in June 1997 at a range of 776,700 miles by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft.

Slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, Europa has a very smooth surface and the solid ice crust has the appearance of a cracked eggshell. The interior has a global ocean with more water than found on Earth. It could possibly harbor life as we know it.

Hubble Space Telescope observations of Europa have revealed the presence of persistent water vapor in its very tenuous atmosphere. Hubble observations, spanning 1999 to 2015, find that water vapor is constantly being replenished throughout one hemisphere of the moon. This is a different finding from Hubble’s 2013 observations that found localized water vapor from geysers venting from its subsurface ocean. This water vapor comes from a different process entirely. Sunlight causes the surface ice to sublimate, transitioning directly into gas.

This color composite Galileo view combines violet, green, and infrared images. The view of the moon is shown in natural color (left) and in enhanced color designed to bring out subtle color differences in the surface (right). The bright white and bluish part of Europa’s surface is composed mostly of water ice, with very few non-ice materials. Long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 1,850 miles long.