Space News and Discussions

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A New Mystery Signal Is Repeating From a Distant Galaxy, and It's a Weird One
by Michele Starr
June 8, 2022

Introduction:

(Science Alert) A newly discovered source of repeating fast radio bursts has deepened the mystery of what, precisely, could be producing these powerful outbursts.

The source, first detected in 2019 and named FRB 190520B, seems to be frequently spitting out millisecond bursts of powerful radio waves.

This has allowed astronomers to perform analyses that reveal information about where it comes from in the Universe, and the space around it. Those analyses suggest that there is probably more than one mechanism in the big wide cosmos capable of producing these strange outbursts.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs), as the name suggests, are very fast bursts of radiation (lasting only milliseconds in duration) that flare brightly in radio wavelengths.

Most of them come from other galaxies (only one source has been detected in the Milky Way), and they're extremely bright, discharging as much energy in an instant as 500 million Suns.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-myst ... a-weird-un

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New insights into neutron star matter
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-insights- ... -star.html
by Technische Universitat Darmstadt

An international research team has for the first time combined data from heavy-ion experiments, gravitational wave measurements and other astronomical observations using advanced theoretical modeling to more precisely constrain the properties of nuclear matter as it can be found in the interior of neutron stars. The results were published in the journal Nature.

Throughout the universe, neutron stars are born in supernova explosions that mark the end of the life of massive stars. Sometimes neutron stars are bound in binary systems and will eventually collide with each other. These high-energy, astrophysical phenomena feature such extreme conditions that they produce most of the heavy elements, such as silver and gold. Consequently, neutron stars and their collisions are unique laboratories to study the properties of matter at densities far beyond the densities inside atomic nuclei. Heavy-ion collision experiments conducted with particle accelerators are a complementary way to produce and probe matter at high densities and under extreme conditions.

New insights into the fundamental interactions at play in nuclear matter

"Combining knowledge from nuclear theory, nuclear experiment, and astrophysical observations is essential to shedding light on the properties of neutron-rich matter over the entire density range probed in neutron stars," said Sabrina Huth, Institute for Nuclear Physics at Technical University Darmstadt, who is one of the lead authors of the publication. Peter T. H. Pang, another lead author from the Institute for Gravitational and Subatomic Physics (GRASP), Utrecht University, added, "We find that constraints from collisions of gold ions with particle accelerators show a remarkable consistency with astrophysical observations even though they are obtained with completely different methods."

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Astronomers may have detected a 'dark' free-floating black hole
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-astronome ... -hole.html
by University of California - Berkeley

If, as astronomers believe, the deaths of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible.

Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object's strong gravitational field—so-called gravitational microlensing.

The team, led by graduate student Casey Lam and Jessica Lu, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy, estimates that the mass of the invisible compact object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun. Because astronomers think that the leftover remnant of a dead star must be heavier than 2.2 solar masses in order to collapse to a black hole, the UC Berkeley researchers caution that the object could be a neutron star instead of a black hole. Neutron stars are also dense, highly compact objects, but their gravity is balanced by internal neutron pressure, which prevents further collapse to a black hole.

Whether a black hole or a neutron star, the object is the first dark stellar remnant—a stellar "ghost"—discovered wandering through the galaxy unpaired with another star.

[caltrek]

NASA Telescope to Help Untangle Galaxy Growth, Dark Matter Makeup
June 14, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study wispy streams of stars that extend far beyond the apparent edges of many galaxies. Missions like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes would have to patch together hundreds of small images to see these structures around nearby galaxies in full. Roman will do so in a single snapshot. Astronomers will use these observations to explore how galaxies grow and the nature of dark matter.

Stellar streams look like ethereal strands of hair extending outward from some galaxies, peacefully drifting through space as part of the halo – a spherical region surrounding a galaxy. But these stellar flyaways are signs of an ancient cosmic-scale drama that serve as fossil records of a galaxy’s past. Studying them transforms astronomers into galactic archaeologists.

Especially elusive stellar streams that formed when the Milky Way siphoned stars from globular star clusters have been detected before, but they’ve never been found in other galaxies. They’re fainter because they contain fewer stars, which makes them much more difficult to spot in other, more distant galaxies.

Roman may detect them in several of our neighboring galaxies for the first time ever. The mission’s wide, sharp, deep vision should even reveal individual stars in these enormous, dim structures. In a previous study, Pearson led the development of an algorithm to systematically search for stellar streams originating from globular clusters in neighboring galaxies.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/955934

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China's lunar lander finds evidence of native water on moon
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-china-lun ... ative.html
by Chinese Academy of Sciences

Samples from the Moon's Oceanus Procellarum, an ancient mare basalt whose name translates to "Ocean of Storms," may be able to help determine the source of lunar water.

China's lunar lander Chang'E-5 delivered the first real-time, on-site definitive confirmation of water signal in the basalt's rocks and soil via on-board spectral analysis in 2020. The finding was validated through laboratory analysis of samples the lander returned in 2021. Now, the Chang'E-5 team has determined where the water came from.

The researchers published their results on June 14 in Nature Communications.

"For the first time in the world, the results of laboratory analysis of lunar return samples and spectral data from in-situ lunar surface surveys were used jointly to examine the presence, form and amount of 'water' in lunar samples," said co-corresponding author Li Chunlai from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). "The results accurately answer the question of the distribution characteristics and source of water in the Chang'E-5 landing zone and provide a ground truth for the interpretation and estimation of water signals in remote sensing survey data."

Chang'E-5 did not observe lunar rivers or springs; rather the lander identified, on average, 30 hydroxyl parts per million in rocks and soil on the Moon's surface. The molecules, made of one oxygen and one hydrogen atom, are the main ingredient of water, as well as the most common result of water molecules chemically reacting with other matter. Despite representing what Li called the "weak end of lunar hydration features," hydroxyl is to water what smoke is to fire: evidence.

[caltrek]

Exploring the Evolution of a Galaxy
by Monica Young
June 15, 2022

Introduction:

(Sky and Teelscope) A galaxy in a telescope (or a Hubble image) may seem silent and still, but that’s only because us humans are impatient.
Over millions or even billions of years, gravity builds galaxies — and destroys them. In two studies presented June 14th at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), astronomers show some of the ways galaxies can grow and die.

Given that we can’t watch galaxy evolution unfold in realtime, graduate student Katya Gozman (University of Michigan) became a geologist of sorts, digging deep into the history of the spiral galaxy M94, 16 million light-years away in Canes Venatici.

In geology, it’s the rocks that remember; in astronomy, it’s the stars. When two galaxies collide, the larger one flings the stars of the smaller one to the galactic curb, out to the stellar halo. Compared to the galaxy, the stellar halo is vast, covering more than 10 times the area on the sky as the galaxy itself.

Using the Hyper Suprime Camera on Subaru Telescope, which rests atop Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i, Gozman took long, sensitive observations of this galaxy. These images dig deep to reveal individual stars in its halo. But to the team’s surprise, despite the images’ sensitivity, they found few stars in the halo. Those that are there are ancient, as indicated by their pristine makeup.

Read more here: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy ... fe-death/

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Neutrinos hint the sun has more carbon and nitrogen than previously thought
Figuring out our star’s makeup is crucial for understanding the entire universe
photo of the sun

Made mostly of hydrogen and helium, the sun also has heavier elements such as carbon and nitrogen. But scientists disagree just how much of those heavier elements there are.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neu ... s-elements

By Ken Croswell

18 hours ago

After two decades of debate, scientists are getting closer to figuring out exactly what the sun — and thus the whole universe — is made of.

The sun is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium. There are also heavier elements such as oxygen and carbon, but just how much is controversial. New observations of ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos suggest that the sun has an ample supply of “metals,” the term astronomers use for all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, researchers report May 31 at arXiv.org.

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World's largest plane soars to its highest altitude yet
By Nick Lavars
June 16, 2022
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/worlds-la ... -altitude/

The world's largest flying aircraft has reached new heights, with Stratolaunch today completing the seventh test flight of its gigantic Roc carrier plane and logging a record altitude for the huge aircraft in the process. The exercise was also used to test the in-flight performance of recently installed pylon hardware, which will launch smaller hypersonic aircraft from altitude and send them across the skies at speeds of over Mach 5.

California's Stratolaunch originally designed Roc to carry rockets and satellites into the stratosphere from where they would then be fired into low-Earth orbit. A recent shift in strategy has seen the massive plane, which features six Boeing engines, two side-by-side fuselages and a wingspan of 385 ft (117 m), repurposed as a carrier for hypersonic research vehicles.

In 2020, the company offered a first look at what these vehicles will look like, revealing a concept called the Talon-A. It is designed for swift and repeatable hypersonic flights with an ability to take off and land itself on a runway, in addition to being launched from the Roc carrier aircraft. The company unveiled a test version of this hypersonic vehicle last moth, called the TA-O

[Time_Traveller]

NASA prepares to power-down Voyager spacecraft after more than 44 years

Friday 17 June 2022

After more than 44 years of travelling farther from Earth than any man-made objects have before, the Voyager spacecraft are entering their very final phase.

Both of the Voyagers were launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977 - with Voyager 2 actually the first to take off - taking advantage of a rare alignment (once every 176 years) of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to shoot into interstellar space.

They were designed to last five years and study Jupiter and Saturn but remarkably both spacecraft are still functioning despite escaping beyond the hot plasma bubble known as the heliopause that defines the beginning of the edge of our solar system.

It is certain that at some point the plutonium powering the spacecraft will decay beyond what is capable of keeping the probes functional. Some estimate that could be as soon as 2025, while others hope it may be later.

https://news.sky.com/story/nasa-prepare ... s-12635485

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NASA Moon rocket test met 90% of objectives

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-nasa-moon-rocket-met.html

NASA's Artemis I Moon rocket sits at Launch Pad Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA's fourth attempt to complete a critical test of its Moon rocket achieved around 90 percent of its goals, but there's still no firm date for the behemoth's first flight, officials said Tuesday.

Known as the "wet dress rehearsal" because it involves loading liquid propellant, it is the final item to cross off the checklist before the Artemis-1 mission slated for this summer: an uncrewed lunar flight that will eventually be followed by Moon boots on the ground, likely no sooner than 2026.

Teams at the Kennedy Space Center began their latest effort to complete the exercise on Saturday.

Their objectives were to load propellant into the rocket's tanks, conduct a launch countdown and simulate contingency scenarios, then drain the tanks.

Three previous bids, starting in March, were plagued by glitches and failed to fuel up the rocket with hundreds of thousands of gallons of supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

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Scientists identify a possible source for Charon's red cap
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-scientist ... d-cap.html
by Southwest Research Institute

Southwest Research Institute scientists combined data from NASA's New Horizons mission with novel laboratory experiments and exospheric modeling to reveal the likely composition of the red cap on Pluto's moon Charon and how it may have formed. This first-ever description of Charon's dynamic methane atmosphere using new experimental data provides a fascinating glimpse into the origins of this moon's red spot as described in two recent papers.

"Prior to New Horizons, the best Hubble images of Pluto revealed only a fuzzy blob of reflected light," said SwRI's Randy Gladstone, a member of the New Horizons science team. "In addition to all the fascinating features discovered on Pluto's surface, the flyby revealed an unusual feature on Charon, a surprising red cap centered on its north pole."

Soon after the 2015 encounter, New Horizons scientists proposed that a reddish "tholin-like" material at Charon's pole could be synthesized by ultraviolet light breaking down methane molecules. These are captured after escaping from Pluto and then frozen onto the moon's polar regions during their long winter nights. Tholins are sticky organic residues formed by chemical reactions powered by light, in this case the Lyman-alpha ultraviolet glow scattered by interplanetary hydrogen molecules.

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Astronomers find imprint of the bubbles produced by the explosion of dying stars in our galaxy

by Heidelberg University
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-astronome ... stars.html

An international group of astronomers, led by Juan Diego Soler of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), have found the imprint of the bubbles produced by the explosion of dying stars in the structure of the gas that pervades our galaxy. They made this discovery by applying techniques from artificial intelligence to the HI4PI survey data, which provides the most detailed whole-sky distribution of atomic hydrogen in the Milky Way to date. The scientists analyzed the filamentary structure in the emission from atomic hydrogen gas. They inferred that it preserved a record of the dynamic processes induced by ancient supernova explosions and the rotation of the galaxy. Their results were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Hydrogen is the main component of stars like the sun. However, the process that leads the diffuse clouds of hydrogen gas that spread through our galaxy to assemble into dense clouds from which stars ultimately form is not yet fully understood. A collaboration of astronomers headed by Juan Diego Soler from the INAF-IAPS (Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, an INAF research Institute in Rome) and the ECOgal project has now taken an important step in elucidating the life cycle of the raw material to form stars.

Soler processed data from the most detailed whole-sky survey of the emission from atomic hydrogen in radio waves, the HI4PI survey, which is based on observations obtained with the Parkes 64-meter Radio Telescope in Australia, the Effelsberg 100-meter Radio Telescope in Germany, and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank 110-meter Telescope (GBT) in the United States. "These archival observations of the hydrogen emission line at 21-cm wavelength contain information on the distribution of the gas in the sky and its velocity in the direction of observation, which combined with a model of the Milky Way rotation indicates how far are the emitting clouds," says Sergio Molinari from the INAF-IAPS, principal investigator of the ECOgal project.

To study the distribution of the galactic hydrogen clouds, Soler applied a mathematical algorithm commonly used in the automatic inspection and analysis of satellite images and online videos. Because of the size of these observations, it would have been impossible to do this analysis by eye. The algorithm revealed an extensive and intricate network of slender threadlike objects or filaments. Most of the filaments in the inner part of the Milky Way were found to be pointing away from the disk of our galaxy.

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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spots rocket impact site on moon
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-nasa-luna ... ocket.html
by Mark Robinson, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Astronomers discovered a rocket body heading toward a lunar collision late last year. Impact occurred March 4, with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter later spotting the resulting crater. Surprisingly the crater is actually two craters, an eastern crater (18-meter diameter, about 19.5 yards) superimposed on a western crater (16-meter diameter, about 17.5 yards).

The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may indicate its identity.

No other rocket body impacts on the Moon created double craters. The four Apollo SIV-B craters were somewhat irregular in outline (Apollos 13, 14, 15, 17) and were substantially larger (greater than 35 meters, about 38 yards) than each of the double craters. The maximum width (29 meters, about 31.7 yards) of the double crater of the mystery rocket body was near that of the S-IVBs.

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BepiColombo Spacecraft Lines Up for Second Planet Mercury Flyby

https://scitechdaily.com/bepicolombo-sp ... ury-flyby/
By European Space Agency (ESA) June 21, 2022
BepiColombo First Mercury Flyby

Mercury Flyby

Key moments during BepiColombo’s second Mercury flyby on June 23, 2022. The spacecraft will skim the surface at an altitude of about 200 km (124 miles) at its closest approach, at 09:44 UTC (11:44 CEST). Credit: ESA

The primary purpose of the flyby is to use the planet’s gravity to fine-tune BepiColombo’s trajectory. Having been launched into space on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in October 2018, BepiColombo is making use of nine planetary flybys: one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury, together with the spacecraft’s solar electric propulsion system, to help steer into Mercury orbit against the enormous gravitational pull of our Sun.

Even though BepiColombo is in ‘stacked’ cruise configuration for these brief flybys, meaning many instruments cannot yet be fully operated, it can still grab an incredible taste of Mercury science to boost our understanding and knowledge of the Solar System’s innermost planet. A sequence of snapshots will be taken by BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras showing the planet’s surface, while a number of the magnetic, plasma, and particle monitoring instruments will sample the environment from both near and far from the planet in the hours around close approach.

[caltrek]

Biofinder May Advance Detection of Extraterrestrial Life
June 17, 2022

Introduction:

(Nature) The “Search for life”, which may be extinct or extant on other planetary bodies is one of the major goals of NASA planetary exploration missions. Finding such evidence of biological residue in a vast planetary landscape is an enormous challenge. We have developed a highly sensitive instrument, the “Compact Color Biofinder”, which can locate minute amounts of biological material in a large area at video speed from a standoff distance. Here we demonstrate the efficacy of the Biofinder to detect fossils that still possess strong bio-fluorescence signals from a collection of samples. Fluorescence images taken by the Biofinder instrument show that all Knightia spp. fish fossils analysed from the Green River formation (Eocene, 56.0–33.9 Mya) still contain considerable amounts of biological residues. The biofluorescence images support the fact that organic matter has been well preserved in the Green River formation, and thus, not diagenetically replaced (replaced by minerals) over such a significant timescale. We further corroborated results from the Biofinder fluorescence imagery through Raman and attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopies, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM–EDS), and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM). Our findings confirm once more that biological residues can survive millions of years, and that using biofluorescence imaging effectively detects these trace residues in real time. We anticipate that fluorescence imaging will be critical in future NASA missions to detect organics and the existence of life on other planetary bodies.

Read more here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14410-8

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Biofinder advances detection of extraterrestrial life
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-biofinder ... -life.html
by Marcie Grabowski, University of Hawaii at Manoa

An innovative scientific instrument, the Compact Color Biofinder, developed by a team of University of Hawai'i at Mānoa researchers, may change the game in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Most biological materials, for example, amino acids, fossils, sedimentary rocks, plants, microbes, proteins and lipids, have strong organic fluorescence signals that can be detected by specialized scanning cameras. In a study published in Nature Scientific Reports recently, the research team reported that the Biofinder is so sensitive that it can accurately detect the bio-residue in fish fossils from the 34-56 million year-old Green River formation.

"The Biofinder is the first system of its kind," said Anupam Misra, lead instrument developer and researcher at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). "At present, there is no other equipment that can detect minute amounts of bio-residue on a rock during the daytime. Additional strengths of the Biofinder are that it works from a distance of several meters, takes video and can quickly scan a large area."

Though the Biofinder was first developed in 2012 by Misra, advances supported by the NASA PICASSO program culminated in the latest color version of the compact Biofinder.

Finding evidence of biological residue in a vast planetary landscape is an enormous challenge. So, the team tested the Biofinder's detection abilities on the ancient Green River fish fossils and corroborated the results through laboratory spectroscopy analysis, scanning electron microscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy.