Space: The Final Frontier

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

NASA, SpaceX Adjust Next Space Station Crew Rotation Launch Date

 

 

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts participate in a countdown dress rehearsal at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 28, 2021, to prepare for the upcoming Crew-3 launch. The astronauts are at Launch Pad 39A with the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon behind them during the rehearsal. Photo credit: SpaceX

NASA and SpaceX now are targeting 1:10 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Nov. 3, for the agency’s Crew-3 launch to the International Space Station due to a large storm system meandering across the Ohio Valley and through northeastern United States this weekend, elevating winds and waves in the Atlantic Ocean along the Crew Dragon flight path for the Oct. 31 launch attempt.

Weather conditions along the ascent corridor are expected to improve for a Nov. 3 launch attempt, and the 45th Weather Squadron forecast predicts an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions at the launch site.

NASA astronauts Raja Chari, mission commander, Tom Marshburn, pilot, and Kayla Barron, mission specialist and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Matthias Maurer, also a mission specialist, will launch on the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Crew-3 astronauts are scheduled for a long-duration science mission aboard the orbiting laboratory, living and working as part of what is expected to be a seven-member crew.

Launch Nov. 3 would have Crew-3 arriving at the space station later the same day about 11 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 3, for a short handover with the astronauts that flew to the station as part of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission.

Crew-2 NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet are currently targeting return in early November. Crew-3 astronauts are set to return in late April

2022.https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2021/10/30/nasa-spacex-adjust-next-space-station-crew-rotation-launch-date-2/

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Elon Musk is building Starbase, a city with a spaceport to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Here’s what’s inside
If successful, the ambitious spaceport could become the site of multiple annual launches to the Moon and to Mars.If successful, the ambitious spaceport could become the site of multiple annual launches to the Moon and to Mars.

 

Elon Musk has made no secret of his intention to found a settlement on Mars, but his latest venture is to establish a city on Earth. Sited around the SpaceX South Texas launch site at Boca Chica, Musk’s idea is to call the city Starbase, Texas. It would house all those who work at the launch site, those who intend to fly on the rocket, and be a tourist destination for those wanting to witness the awesome power of a launch.

Eventually, Musk hopes, it will be the point of departure for people travelling to Mars, with each mighty ‘Starship’ vehicle capable of transporting around 100 people at a time to the Red Planet. As they prepare for their flight, they will require the kind of living space and infrastructure that only a town or city can provide. Hence, transforming the village of Boca Chica into the city of Starship, Texas, may be essential for Musk’s to realise his vision of space exploration.

Musk began the process of establishing his city in late February/early March 2021 when he officially approached the Cameron County administration. A press release from the County Judge’s office made it clear that Musk was to abide by all relevant statutes and that any application would ultimately be judged against applicable laws.

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

'Perfect' James Webb telescope on track for launch

The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is on track for a launch in mid-December, officials say.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has cost $10bn to develop and will be one of the grand scientific endeavours of the 21st Century.

Its mission is to image the very first stars to shine in the Universe.

Webb will be sent to orbit on an Ariane rocket from French Guiana. Engineers there began assembling the vehicle's various components over the weekend.

The Ariane's 30m-tall main core stage was lifted into the vertical to allow its side boosters to be attached. The rocket's upper-stage, which will drive the latter part of Webb's ascent, will be bolted on in a few days.

JWST itself is likely to be placed atop the rocket a week before lift-off on 18 December.

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

VIDEO

The space telescopes inspired by lobsters

X-ray space telescopes can be used to study big events like the formation of black holes.

But, until recently, their field of vision has been relatively narrow – making it difficult to capture this unexpected activity.

By mimicking the way lobsters’ eyes work, scientists around the world have designed new telescopes that can survey much larger areas.

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

More gravitational waves detected than ever before

Signals from cosmic collisions hint at the life and death of stars.

Credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty Images

Somewhere out there in the universe, neutron stars and black holes regularly collide, causing cosmic ripples in space and time – gravitational waves – to bounce their way across the cosmos to Earth.

Now, an international team of researchers, including those from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), have collaborated to present a whopping 90 detections – the largest number of gravitational wave detections to date.

Each detection represents some form of violent celestial event, such as supernova explosions or brutal crashes between stars and black holes as they hurtle along the cosmic highway.

There have been three rounds of observations, and the most recent detections were collected between November 2019 and March 2020. Of the 35 detections in the third round, 32 were caused by two black holes merging, two were likely caused by a neutron star – a dense, city-sized star that’s heavier than our own Sun – smashing into a black hole, and one had mysterious origins.

“Each new observing run brings new discoveries and surprises,” says co-author Dr Hannah Middleton, of OzGrav and the University of Melbourne.

“The third observing run saw gravitational wave detection becoming an everyday thing, but I still think each detection is exciting!

“As we continue to observe more gravitational-wave signals, we will learn more and more about the objects that produce them, their properties as a population, and continue to put Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to the test.”

This final round brings the total to 90 detections from 2015 to 2020.

“These discoveries represent a tenfold increase in the number of gravitational waves detected [observatories] since they started observing,” says OzGrav chief investigator Professor Susan Scott, from the Australian National University (ANU).

“We’ve detected 35 events. That’s massive! In contrast, we made three detections in our first observing run, which lasted four months in 2015–16.

“This really is a new era for gravitational wave detections and the growing population of discoveries is revealing so much information about the life and death of stars throughout the universe.

“Looking at the masses and spins of the black holes in these binary systems indicates how these systems got together in the first place.

“It also raises some really fascinating questions. For example, did the system originally form with two stars that went through their life cycles together and eventually became black holes? Or were the two black holes thrust together in a very dense dynamical environment such as at the centre of a galaxy?”

____________________________________________________________________________________

---

Top detection highlights

●     Two mergers between possible neutron star-black hole pairs. These are called GW191219_163120 and GW200115_042309, the latter of which was previously reported in its own publication. The neutron star in GW191219_163120 is one of the least massive ever observed.

●     A merger between a black hole and an object that could either be a light black hole or a heavy neutron star called GW200210_092254

●     A massive pair of black holes orbiting each other, with a combined mass 145 times heavier than the Sun (called GW200220_061928)

●     A pair of black holes orbiting each other, in which at least one of the pair is spinning upright (called GW191204_171526)

●     A pair of black holes orbiting each other which have a combined mass 112 times heavier than the Sun, which seems to be spinning upside-down (called GW191109_010717)

●     A ‘light’ pair of black holes that together weigh only 18 times the mass of the Sun (called GW191129_134029)

________________________________________________________________________

---

Secrets of life and death

The detections showed how unique each event was, which gives important clues as to how massive stars live and later die in supernova explosions.

“It’s fascinating that there is such a wide range of properties within this growing collection of black hole and neutron star pairs,” says study co-author and OzGrav PhD student Isobel Romero-Shaw, of Monash University. “Properties like the masses and spins of these pairs can tell us how they’re forming, so seeing such a diverse mix raises interesting questions about where they came from.”

But each event can also be seen as a larger ‘population’.

“By studying these populations of black holes and neutron stars we can start to understand the overall trends and properties of these extreme objects and uncover how these pairs came to be,” says OzGrav PhD student Shanika Galaudage, of Monash University, who was a co-author on a companion publication released today.

“There are features we are seeing in these distributions which we cannot explain yet, opening up exciting research questions to be explored in the future.”

Graphic depicting the gravitational wave mergers detected since the historic first discovery in 2015. Credit: Carl Knox OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology

Detecting gravitational waves

All of these detections were made possible by the global coordinated efforts from the LIGO (USA), Virgo (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan) gravitational-wave observatories.

“Upgrades to the detectors, in particular squeezing and the laser power, have allowed us to detect more binary merger events per year, including the first ever neutron star-black hole binary recorded in the GWTC-3 catalogue,” says OzGrav student Disha Kapasi, of ANU.

“This aids in understanding the dynamics and physics of the immediate universe, and in this exciting era of gravitational wave astronomy, we are constantly testing and prototyping technologies that will help us make the instruments more sensitive.”

The next observational round will begin in August 2022 after LIGO and Virgo have been further upgraded. In the meantime, the researchers will continue to analyse the data to learn more about undiscovered properties of gravitational waves.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/more-gravitational-waves-detected-than-ever-before/

 

Edited November 9, 2021 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Hidden black hole found in extragalactic star cluster

Stellar detection method used to find a black hole outside of our galaxy for the first time.

Astronomers have just unveiled a black hole from another galaxy, hiding deep within a bright cluster of a thousand stars. The black hole doesn’t emit any light visible to telescopes; its presence was betrayed by its gravitational influence on the nearby stars.

This marks the first time that a black hole has been spotted outside of the Milky Way using this detection method.

FULL REPORT

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Near-Earth asteroid could be a piece of the Moon

An asteroid called Kamo`oalewa likely has lunar origins, according to US astronomers, who analysed its composition and found that it matches lunar rocks from NASA’s Apollo missions.

About the size of a fairground Ferris wheel, Kamo`oalewa is classified as a “quasi-satellite” – a subcategory of asteroids that orbit the Sun but stick close to Earth. Only five quasi-satellites are known, and this one’s orbital path is another clue to its origins.

“It is very unlikely that a garden-variety near-Earth asteroid would spontaneously move into a quasi-satellite orbit like Kamo`oalewa’s,” says study co-author Renu Malhotra, from the University of Arizona. “It will not remain in this particular orbit for very long, only about 300 years in the future, and we estimate that it arrived in this orbit about 500 years ago.”

Malhotra and colleagues speculate that Kamo`oalewa may have originated as debris from the original impact that created the Moon.

The research is published in Nature Communications.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/near-earth-asteroid-could-be-a-piece-of-the-moon/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Aussie telescope to find planets next door

New precision space telescope will search for worlds around Alpha Centauri using astrometry.

A University of Sydney-led project is set to build a space telescope to look for rocky planets in the “Goldilocks” zone around Alpha Centauri – where the conditions are just right for liquid water to exist.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to the Sun, at just 4.3 light-years (a mere 40 trillion kilometres) away. It’s a triple-star system, consisting of Sun-like stars Centauri A and B, and Proxima Centauri, a faint red dwarf.

This system is ripe for planetary exploration from the new telescope project, named TOLIMAN (Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood). In 2016, an Earth-sized exoplanet was found in the habitable (or Goldilocks) zone around Proxima Centauri, and another in 2019. It’s also possible that Centauri A has a Neptune-sized planet in the habitable zone, though this is not yet confirmed.

“Our nearest stellar neighbours – the Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri systems – are turning out to be extraordinarily interesting,” says Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which is partnering with the University of Sydney, Saber Astronautics and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the project.

“The TOLIMAN mission will be a huge step towards finding out if planets capable of supporting life exist there.”

The project is being led by astronomer Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney, who says that although we have discovered thousands of exoplanets around distant stars, we know little about the ones on our own doorstep.

“Getting to know our planetary neighbours is hugely important,” Tuthill says. “These next-door planets are the ones where we have the best prospects for finding and analysing atmospheres, surface chemistry and possibly even the fingerprints of a biosphere – the tentative signals of life.”

Other telescopes, like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, are also aiming to find terrestrial planets in the habitable zone – so what makes TOLIMAN different?

It all comes down to precision.

“Our TOLIMAN mission will launch a custom-designed space telescope that makes extremely fine measurements of the position of the star in the sky,” explains Eduardo Bendek, team member from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“If there is a planet orbiting the star, it will tug on the star betraying a tiny, but measurable, wobble.”

This detection method is called astrometry. It works by measuring the position of the star on the sky. A star’s proper motion is normally in a straight line, but if there’s an unseen planet around it, this will cause the star to wobble in relation to the background stars.

Only a handful of exoplanets have been found using the astrometric method so far, but it will likely be a big player in the future of exoplanet hunting. In particular, it’s sensitive to planets far from their stars, and it’s also great for looking for exoplanets in nearby star systems.

This is in contrast to the transit method – the most successful exoplanet-hunting technique to date – which watches for a small dip in a star’s brightness as a planet transits in front of it. The method works better for planets with tighter orbits, and it also relies on a lucky alignment of planets in front of their stars – more difficult to capture when stars are near to Earth.

The power of astrometry is currently being demonstrated by ESA’s Gaia satellite, which is in orbit making precise measurements of hundreds of thousands of stars. The mission’s main aim to create a 3D stellar map of the Milky Way. But astronomers will also be able to hunt through the dataset of stellar movements to search for telltale signs of exoplanets.

The TOLIMAN telescope will be a dedicated exoplanet mission, focused on finding rocky planets in the habitable zone through the astrometric method. It will use a diffractive pupil lens: a mirror that spreads incoming starlight into a complex, flower-like pattern, making it easier for astronomers to spot the movements of stars that betray the influence of planets.

TOLIMAN is projected to deliver results by the mid-2020s.

Pete Klupar from the Breakthrough Initiatives says that it’s important to further study the Alpha Centauri system because it may be the first destination we hit up on an interstellar journey.

“These nearby planets are where humanity will take our first steps into interstellar space using high-speed, futuristic, robotic probes,” he says.

“If we consider the nearest few dozen stars, we expect a handful of rocky planets like Earth orbiting at the right distance for liquid surface water to be possible.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/aussie-telescope-to-find-exoplanets-around-alpha-centauri/

 

Edited November 16, 2021 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[nudge+]

A new one after a while...

Dolphin Nebula (Sh2-308) & Wolf-Rayet star EZ Canis Majoris.

Taken with a 50cm F3.6 reflector telescope using narrowband filters (HOO), processed with DeepSkyStacker and PS. 2 hours total observation time.

 

[CaaC (John)+]

2 hours ago, nudge said:

Dolphin Nebula (Sh2-308) & Wolf-Rayet star EZ Canis Majoris.

The Dolphin & Butterfly Nebula are my 2 favourites. 

[CaaC (John)+]

2 hours ago, nudge said:

Dolphin Nebula (Sh2-308) & Wolf-Rayet star EZ Canis Majoris.

Have a go at finding this, please, madam, please, XXXXX 

IC 1318: The Butterfly Nebula in Gas and Dust
Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Pham

Explanation: In the constellation of the swan near the nebula of the pelican lies the gas cloud of the butterfly next to a star known as the hen. That star, given the proper name Sadr, is just to the right of the featured frame, but the central Butterfly Nebula, designated IC 1318, is shown in high resolution. The intricate patterns in the bright gas and dark dust are caused by complex interactions between interstellar winds, radiation pressures, magnetic fields, and gravity. The featured telescopic view captures IC 1318's characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to the red, green, and blue hues of the popular Hubble Palette. The portion of the Butterfly Nebula pictured spans about 100 light years and lies about 4000 light years away.

 

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210316.html

[nudge+]

11 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

Have a go at finding this, please, madam, please, XXXXX 

IC 1318: The Butterfly Nebula in Gas and Dust
Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Pham

Explanation: In the constellation of the swan near the nebula of the pelican lies the gas cloud of the butterfly next to a star known as the hen. That star, given the proper name Sadr, is just to the right of the featured frame, but the central Butterfly Nebula, designated IC 1318, is shown in high resolution. The intricate patterns in the bright gas and dark dust are caused by complex interactions between interstellar winds, radiation pressures, magnetic fields, and gravity. The featured telescopic view captures IC 1318's characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to the red, green, and blue hues of the popular Hubble Palette. The portion of the Butterfly Nebula pictured spans about 100 light years and lies about 4000 light years away.

 

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210316.html

Haha, will give it a go...  It's a Southern hemisphere object though, so will have to wait for the night time and hope the weather conditions are good enough  

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Dart: Mission to smack Dimorphos asteroid set for launch

A spacecraft is set to launch and test technology that may one day be needed to tip a dangerous asteroid off course.

Nasa's Dart mission will evaluate a longstanding proposal for neutralising a sizeable space rock headed for Earth.

The spacecraft will crash into an object called Dimorphos to see how much its speed and path can be altered.

If a chunk of cosmic debris measuring a few hundred metres across were to collide with our planet, it could unleash continent-wide devastation.

It's the first attempt to deflect an asteroid for the purpose of learning how to protect Earth, though this particular asteroid presents no threat.

"Dart will only be changing the period of the orbit of Dimorphos by a tiny amount. And really that's all that's needed in the event that an asteroid is discovered well ahead of time," said Kelly Fast, from Nasa's planetary defense coordination office,

At 06:20 GMT on Wednesday, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dart spacecraft will blast off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

'Incident' delays launch of James Webb Space Telescope

 

Webb is being prepared for launch on a European Ariane rocket from French Guiana

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been put back by at least four days to allow for more checks.

It was to have been sent into orbit on 18 December and will now go up no earlier than the 22nd of the month.

A US space agency statement said an "incident" had occurred during launch preparations that may have caused a sudden vibration in the observatory.

A firm date for lift-off, on an Ariane rocket, would be confirmed following the investigation, Nasa added.

JWST is the $10bn (£7.5bn; €9bn) successor to the veteran Hubble telescope. It's been designed to look deeper into the Universe than its predecessor and, as a consequence, detect events occurring further back in time - more than 13.5 billion years ago.

Scientists also expect to use its more advanced capabilities to study the atmospheres of distant planets in the hope that signs of life might be detected.

FULL REPORT

[CaaC (John)+]

On 23/11/2021 at 04:34, CaaC (John) said:

Dart: Mission to smack Dimorphos asteroid set for launch

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Exoplanets dodge bombardment in their infancy

The fragile orbits of the TRAPPIST-1 planets confirm their gentle start to existence.

In 2017, NASA announced the discovery of seven rocky, Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zone of a star called TRAPPIST-1. Now, new research has used their harmonious orbits to determine just how much bombardment the planets could have withstood in their infancy.

“After rocky planets form, things bash into them,” says astrophysicist Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux in France. “It’s called bombardment, or late accretion, and we care about it, in part, because these impacts can be an important source of water and volatile elements that foster life.”

This happened during the formation of our own solar system. The planets coalesced out of the disk of gas and dust leftover from the formation of the Sun, and all the extra bits of debris continued careering around, smashing into the planets and moons.

Here on Earth, it’s possible for astronomers to look back in time to study the impacts that occurred billions of years ago by measuring certain types of elements in rocks and comparing them with meteorites.

But how can they study this for planets across nearly 40 light-years of space?

“We’ll never get rocks from them,” says Raymond. “We’re never going to see craters on them. So what can we do? This is where the special orbital configuration of TRAPPIST-1 comes in. It’s a kind of a lever we can pull on to put limits on this.”

The seven TRAPPIST-1 planets are in orbital ‘resonance’ with each other, which means they have orbital periods that form ratios of whole numbers, circling their parent star in a mathematically predictable pattern. For example, for every eight orbits completed by the innermost planet, the next one completes five, the next three, the next two, and so on.

Researchers think that resonant chains like these form as young planets migrate towards their parent star, shepherded into place by the gravitational influence of all the leftover matter from the formation of the solar system – the stuff that also crashes into them.

In the study, led by Raymond and published in Nature Astronomy, researchers created a computer model to see just how much early asteroids and impactors could have crashed into the planets without knocking them out of their harmonious orbits.

“We can’t say exactly how much stuff bashed into any of these planets, but because of this special resonant configuration, we can put an upper limit on it,” says Raymond.

And that limit was pretty low.

“We figured out that after these planets formed, they weren’t bombarded by more than a very small amount of stuff.”

The study was co-authored by researchers from the CLEVER Planets project at Rice University in the US, which explores the ways planets could acquire the necessary elements to support life. In a previous study, they showed that a large proportion of Earth’s volatile elements came from the massive impact that formed the Moon.

“If a planet forms early and it is too small, like the mass of the Moon or Mars, it cannot accrete a lot of gas from the disk,” says co-author Rajdeep Dasgupta from CLEVER Planets. “Such a planet also has much less opportunity to gain life-essential volatile elements through late bombardments.”

The researchers think that these Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system formed fairly early, and could have had a hydrogen atmosphere. They also may never have experienced a massive impact late in the game – like the one that formed our Moon.

“This might change a lot of the evolution in terms of the interior of the planet, outgassing, volatile loss and other things that have implications for habitability,” says co-author Andre Izidoro from Rice University.

These kinds of computational studies about the bombardment, he adds, will be useful to future telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescopes or the Extremely Large Telescope, which will be able to directly peer into the atmospheres of exoplanets.

“For instance, if one of these planets has a lot of water – let’s say 20% mass fraction – the water must have been incorporated into the planets early, during the gaseous phase,” Izidoro explains. “So you will have to understand what kind of process could bring this water to this planet.”

In the meantime, researchers will continue to listen to the harmonious melodies of the planets.

The orbital periods of the TRAPPIST-1 planets form near-perfect ratios, in a resonant arrangement reminiscent of musical notes. Credit: SYSTEM sounds

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/trappist-1-exoplanets-dodge-bombardment-in-their-infancy/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[nudge+]

 

Aliens?

Secret Nazi moon base?

Monolith?

 

[CaaC (John)+]

3 hours ago, nudge said:

 

Aliens?

Secret Nazi moon base?

Monolith?

 

Quote

 

Science & Astronomy

China's Yutu 2 rover spots cube-shaped 'mystery hut' on far side of the moon

It's likely a large boulder excavated by an ancient lunar impact.

China’s Yutu 2 rover has spotted a mystery object on the horizon while working its way across Von Kármán crater on the far side of the moon.

Yutu 2 spotted a cube-shaped object on the horizon to the north and roughly 260 feet (80 meters) away in November during the mission's 36th lunar day, according to a Yutu 2 diary published by Our Space, a Chinese language science outreach channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

Our Space referred to the object as a "mystery hut" (神秘小屋/shenmi xiaowu), but this a placeholder name rather than an accurate description.

https://www.space.com/china-yutu-2-moon-rover-cube-shaped-object-photos?utm_campaign=socialflow

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[Tommy]

On 06/12/2021 at 00:45, nudge said:

 

Aliens?

Secret Nazi moon base?

Monolith?

 

The guy who secretly built a hut on the moon to get away from humanity:

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Dragon-star spews fire at nearby planets

Superflare may hold the answer to one of our own solar system’s great unknowns.

Astronomers spying on a nearby stellar system have observed a massive burst of energy and charged particles, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), bigger than anything we’ve ever seen – and it hints at how volatile our own early solar system might have been.

The offending star, known as EK Draconis, burns dozens of light-years from Earth – relatively close in cosmic terms. It’s much younger than our sun, though, at 100 million years.

“It’s what our sun looked like 4.5 billion years ago,” says astrophysicist Yuta Notsu of the University of Colorado, US, co-author of a study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy that describes the apocalyptic event.

The researchers set their sights on EK Draconis because they wanted to know whether these events are more common and more volatile in younger stars. They observed the star for 32 nights in winter and spring 2020 using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Kyoto University’s SEIMEI Telescope. On 5 April, the research team was treated to a cosmic light show, as the star burst into a superflare. About 30 minutes after this initial observation, the team saw a CME erupt from the star’s surface, and a monster one at that, travelling at roughly 1.6 million kilometres an hour.

CMEs can be bad news. These clouds of hot particles or plasma can hurtle through space at breakneck speed, and should they encounter an unsuspecting planet that depends on electrical systems, those systems will likely fry. In fact, a suspected CME hit earth in September 1859 in what was later known as the Carrington Event. The event caused sparking and fires in telegraph systems and, if repeated today, would lead to widespread electrical disruption and blackouts.

“Coronal mass ejections can have a serious impact on Earth and human society,” says Notsu.

So, what are the chances of Earth being hit with an event as dramatic as the one from EK Draconis?

The study suggests that the April 2020 EK Draconis CME was more than 10 times larger than the most powerful ejection ever recorded from a star like our sun, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen in our neck of the woods.

“This kind of big mass ejection could, theoretically, also occur on our sun,” says Notsu.

CMEs happen when a star lets out a flare, or a sudden burst of radiation. But such a massive superflare, while theoretically possible in a star such as our sun, would likely be a rare, once-in-several-millennia event. In fact, Notsu’s previous research suggests such superflares are much less common among older stars.

Instead, Notsu explains, the event provides a potentially telling window into the early years of our solar system’s existence: “This observation may help us to better understand how similar events may have affected Earth and even Mars over billions of years.”

In fact, giant CMEs may have helped shape planets like Earth and Mars. They may even hold the answer to one of astronomy’s most compelling questions.

“The atmosphere of present-day Mars is very thin compared to Earth’s,” says Notsu. “In the past, we think that Mars had a much thicker atmosphere. Coronal mass ejections may help us to understand what happened to the planet over billions of years.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/dragon-star-ek-draconis-spews-fire-at-nearby-planets/