Space: The Final Frontier

[CaaC (John)+]

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Baby planet born to proud planetary disk mother observed by astronomers using new method

The baby planet is 518 lightyears from Earth.

A planet-in-the-making has been discovered in a protoplanetary disk 518 lightyears away. The discovery of the small gas planet comes out of a newly developed way of detecting newborn planets.

A protoplanetary disc is a rotating “disk” of dense gas surrounding a young newly formed star.

Astronomers agree that planets are born in these protoplanetary disks. Hundreds of these rings of dust and gas have been spotted throughout the universe. However, seeing an actual planetary birth is much more difficult as the planets are often outshone by the material surrounding them.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA) astronomers have used a new method to find evidence of a small Neptune – or Saturn-like planet – lurking in one of these planetary disks. Their results are published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Directly detecting young planets is very challenging and has so far only been successful in one or two cases,” says lead author Feng Long, a postdoctoral fellow at the CFA. “The planets are always too faint for us to see because they’re embedded in thick layers of gas and dust.”

Because the baby planets are too faint to observe directly, astronomers must look for indications that they are there in the protoplanetary disk.

“In the past few years, we’ve seen many structures pop up on disks that we think are caused by a planet’s presence, but it could be caused by something else, too” Long says. “We need new techniques to look at and support that a planet is there.”

Long used new high-resolution data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile to re-examine the protoplanetary disk known as LkCa 15. The disk sits in the Taurus constellation and has previously been subject to studies indicating planet formation. But the astronomers were missing the “smoking gun.” Until now.

Two faint features from the 2019 ALMA data stood out to Long — two bright clusters of material within a dusty ring about 42 times further out from the disk’s central star than Earth is from the Sun. The material had come together into a small clump and a larger arc. Using computer models, Long found that the geometry matched that which would be expected in the presence of a baby planet.

Long recognised in the data positions in space known as “Lagrange points” where two bodies in motion – such as a star and orbiting planet – produce regions where gravity generates matter accumulation.

“We’re seeing that this material is not just floating around freely, it’s stable and has a preference where it wants to be located based on physics,” Long says.

The planet is roughly the size of Neptune or Saturn, and around one to three million years old. For a planet, that is very young indeed. By comparison, the Earth is believed to be up to be around 4.5 billion years old.

While it may not be possible to take a direct image of the planet any time soon, Long believes further observations will provide evidence to support her theory that this is a baby planet.

Long also hopes her new approach for detecting planets which focuses on Lagrange points will continue to be used by astronomers. “I do hope this method can be widely adopted in the future. The only caveat is that this requires very deep data as the signal is weak.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/baby-planet-planetary-disk/

 

 

[Tommy]

[nudge+]

11 minutes ago, Tommy said:

Sounded almost as if it fell into water  

[Tommy]

1 hour ago, nudge said:

Sounded almost as if it fell into water  

Blub blub. 

[CaaC (John)+]

1 hour ago, Tommy said:

Sounds like me when I down a glass of wine or 2 

[nudge+]

It's SLS cryogenic test day today before the next launch attempt, and would you guess what - there's a hydrogen leak AGAIN. This rocket is so fucked.

[nudge+]

[CaaC (John)+]

56 minutes ago, nudge said:

It's SLS cryogenic test day today before the next launch attempt, and would you guess what - there's a hydrogen leak AGAIN. This rocket is so fucked.

That's poing to cost them a lot of money again, with all there technology and expertise you think they could get ir right by now? 

Edited September 21, 2022 by CaaC (John)

[nudge+]

3 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

That's poing to cost them a lot of money again, with all there technology and expertise you think they could get ir right by now? 

They have now completed the purge and the warmup of the fuel line  in hopes to reseal the leak and will try to resume the refill attempt again, this time starting at a lower pressure and then increasing it.

[CaaC (John)+]

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Amateur astronomers invited to new exoplanet detection program for citizen scientists

Search for life BEYOND earth wants life ON earth to help

The SETI Institute and its partner Unistellar have launched a new exoplanet detection program for citizen scientists worldwide.

Known as the “Unistellar Exoplanet Campaign” amateur astronomers will be able to help confirm exoplanets – a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system – identified by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

They’ll do this by observing possible exoplanet transits which occur when a planet passes between its star and the observer, resulting in a temporary dimming of the star which can be recorded by ground based telescopes. Most known exoplanets have been detected using the transit method.

There are more than 5,100 confirmed exoplanets. With thousands more detections that still need to be confirmed, and some estimates suggesting that TESS will identify more than 10,000 exoplanet candidates, the demand for follow-up observations is greater than ever.

These are essential to determine whether unconfirmed exoplanet candidates are potentially “false positives” because a drop in brightness of a star over a period of time may also be caused by another object passing in front of it.

For instance, in an eclipsing binary system where two stars orbit each other, the light of the one can sometimes be hidden behind the other.

It’s also necessary to re-observe confirmed exoplanets using ground-based systems so their “orbital ephemerides” – their trajectory in the sky over time – can remain updated.

This is where citizen scientists come into the picture.

Observing three gaseous exoplanets

The campaign will provide professional mentoring and curated targets focusing on exo-Jupiters specifically – gas giant planets that are physically similar to Jupiter.

One of the network’s most recent achievements is the detection of the exoplanet candidate TOI 1812.01. It comes from a multi-planet system 563 lightyears from Earth that consists of three gaseous planets: a 3-Earth radii planet on an 11-day orbit;  a 5-Earth radii on a 43-day orbit;  and an outer 9-Earth radii planet (TOI 1812.01) on what was previously an unknown orbit.

Over three possible transit windows in July and August 2022, 27 data sets were contributed to the project by 20 amateur astronomers across seven countries. With this they were able to confirm TOI 1812.01 has an orbital period of 112 days.

This work, including the Unistellar observations, is being prepared for a manuscript to officially confirm the nature of the planetary system and will be presented at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris, France.

“Observing exoplanets like TOI 1812.01 as they cross in front of, or transit, their host stars is a crucial component of confirming their nature as genuine planets and ensuring our ability to study those planetary systems in the future,” says Dr Paul Dalba, SETI Institute research scientist. “The specific properties of this planet, namely its long orbit and long transit duration, put it in a category where citizen science coordinated on a global level like the Unistellar Network can be extremely effective.”

“This early success shows the power of putting science directly into people’s hands; a core principle of this SETI Institute, Unistellar, and NASA partnership,” adds Dr Tom Esposito, SETI Institute research assistant and Space Science Principal at Unistellar. “Citizen astronomers worldwide, uniting to teach humanity about new planets discovered so many trillions of miles away, is, simply put, amazing.”

Observation targets will be regularly announced here.

Other citizen science programs are available through the Unistellar Network if you’re more interested in detecting near-Earth objects for planetary defence or detecting asteroids flying in front of distant stars.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/exoplanet-detection-citizen-scientists/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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DART camera snaps Jupiter ahead of fatal collision

NASA spaceship tests imaging technology ahead of asteroid impact next week.

NASA’s DART spacecraft is completing its final acts before a scheduled collision with an asteroid on Tuesday 27 September (AEST), with mission controllers releasing images of Jupiter taken during a test of the ship’s onboard camera.

DART (short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is a mission that will determine whether the trajectory of an asteroid can be changed using a kinetic impact. The target is a 160-metre-wide asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits the larger Didymos asteroid every 12 hours.

The mission is part of NASA’s foray into ‘planetary defence’ – investigating solutions for potentially catastrophic events like an earth-bound asteroid impact.

Hello Jupiter

Camera technology is critical to the DART mission’s success, and the spacecraft has now completed a series of milestone instrumentation tests ahead of the collision.

This includes the ship’s onboard camera ‘DRACO’ capturing a series of composite images showing Jupiter and its largest moons Ganymede, Europa, Io and Callisto.

The images show Europa emerging from behind the gas giant on July 1 and August 2. The camera will observe Dimorphos in a similar way when the moonlet visually separates from its parent asteroid Didymos in the lead-up to impact.

Visual separation refers to camera’s perspective of Dimorphos moving either in front or behind the larger asteroid during its 12-hour orbit.

Capturing images of Europa performing the same movement around Jupiter is an important final check of DART’s navigation in the final days before impact. Previously, these camera checks were undertaken by NASA on Earth using ground-based simulations.

CubeSat released ahead of impact

DART has also jettisoned a tiny satellite that will photograph the DART impact from afar.

The LICIACube is an Italian-made CubeSat that has been programmed to photograph Dimorphos’ surface while DART smashes into the moonlet at over 26,000 km/h. After impact, if all goes well, LICIACube will continue to take images of the crater and debris ejected from the blast.

“We are excited to have LICIACube on its way,” says Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory planetary scientist and DART investigator Andrew Cheng.

“We hope [it] will make a valuable contribution to DART. What it will witness and document will provide us unique and important information that we otherwise wouldn’t get to see.”

In the same way that NASA tested the DRACO camera by photographing Jupiter and its moons, the LICIACube team will calibrate the satellite’s cameras by taking images of astronomically near objects.

The cameras are named after Star Wars characters LUKE (for LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid).

DART is scheduled to impact the moonlet Dimorphos on 26 September at 11:14pm (UTC)/27 September 9:14am (AEST).

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/dart-captures-jupiter-before-asteroid-crash/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

@nudge, in reference to the above, you will like this   

The cameras are named after Star Wars characters LUKE (for LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid).

[CaaC (John)+]

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Asteroid Ryugu definitely from the outer Solar System, says new analysis

A space rock like no other.

Scientists across the world are excited about findings from the 5.4 gram sample of rock from the asteroid known as “Ryugu”. It’s absolutely no ordinary dirt.

The dirt was brought back from the asteroid on the spacecraft Hayabusa2 and landed in the sands of South Australia almost two year ago. It has allowed researchers unprecedented insights into the history of our Solar System.

The sample of space dust is the culmination of a six-year, 5-billion-kilometre journey, and has now been analysed by an international team of more than 200 researchers. They used ultrabright X-ray beams, finding inside the rock, tiny water ‘inclusions’ with carbon dioxide inside.

The researchers say this is more evidence that Ryugu’s parent body formed in the outer Solar System, just  2 million years after the Solar System started forming.

“There is enough evidence that Ryugu started in the outer Solar System,” Argonne National Laboratory physicist Esen Alp says.

“Asteroids found in the outer reaches of the Solar System would have different characteristics than those found closer to the Sun.”

“For planetary scientists, this is first-degree information coming directly from the Solar System, and hence it is invaluable.”

At its closest orbit, Ryugu is only a quarter of the distance to Earth of the Moon, which might suggest that the asteroid would have been formed in the inner Solar System.

However, this research, and a study from earlier this year which backs up this finding, seems to suggest otherwise.

The team explain that the grains that make up the asteroid are much finer than you would expect if it was formed at higher temperatures found closer to the sun.

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•  Ryugu asteroid samples drop-shipped into South Australia contain super-rare space dirt

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Earlier this year, researchers determined that the structure was incredibly similar to a rare type of asteroid from the outer Solar System called CI chondrites.

“We’ve had other samples come back from other planetary bodies before, but never the most primitive material in the Solar System,” Curtin University astrogeologist Prof Gretchen Benedix explained at the time.

“On earth we have 70,000 meteorites (that we know of) – of these, only nine are classified as CI.”

These asteroids are assumed to form in the outer asteroid belt, more than four times the distance to Earth. This is because ‘4 AU’ is past the ‘snow line’ where the temperature is so low that all water will automatically freeze, but it’s also cold enough for volatile components like CO2 to condense into these grains of ice.

These asteroids also are more abundant in evidence of organic molecules and water in those little inclusions. Think of inclusions like the holes inside a sponge, rather then actual ‘drops’ of water.  

“Take the hydrogen and helium out of the sun and what you have is a CI chondrite,” said Phil Bland, director of the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University.

“Because most of the mass of the Solar System is in the Sun, if you want to pick a composition for average Solar System stuff, it’s CI chondrite. It’s what everything was made from.”

With the finely tuned spectroscopy capabilities of a machine called the Advanced Photon Source, the new team was able to measure the amount of oxidation that the samples had undergone. This was especially interesting since the fragments themselves had never been exposed to oxygen — they were delivered in vacuum-sealed containers, in pristine condition from their trip across space.

The team also discovered something that set the Ryugu fragments apart from other CI chondrites – a large amount of an iron sulphide called pyrrhotite. This result also helps scientists put a limit on the temperature and location of Ryugu’s parent asteroid at the time it was formed.

“Our results and those from other teams show that these asteroid samples are different from meteorites, particularly because meteorites have been through fiery atmosphere entry, weatherization and in particular oxidation on Earth,” said Argonne National Laboratory physicist Michael Hu.

“This is exciting because it’s a completely different kind of sample, from way out in the Solar System.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/asteroid-ryugu-outer-solar-system/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[nudge+]

8 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

 

I'm telling you, that rocket is cursed...  

[nudge+]

Also, the DART mission's happening tonight and will crash into the asteroid Dimorphos in roughly 12 hours.

[nudge+]

 

Back to Vehicle Assembly Building.

[nudge+]

Test was successful.

 

[CaaC (John)+]

3 minutes ago, nudge said:

Test was successful.

Hope it does not land on Mars 

[nudge+]

7 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

Hope it does not land on Mars 

Hope it doesn't crash into some faraway alien planet and they find out it was us who sent it their way

[nudge+]

This is a fantastic video of the impact...

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

REACTION: What do we know after DART’s crash into asteroid Dimorphos?

Months-long wait for official confirmation of new asteroid orbit.

[CaaC (John)+]

10 minutes ago, nudge said:

This is a fantastic video of the impact...

 

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

[nudge+]

Just now, CaaC (John) said:

I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't fly this year. If that happens though, the rocket will have to be destacked again, which will delay the launch even further. Those solid rocket boosters are not supposed to be stacked for so long; the certification is for a year, and I believe they have already extended it by getting a waiver. Structural integrity of the joints is going to be a worry.