Space: The Final Frontier

[Stan]

9 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Surprised the poor bloke has not bled to death listening to that lot.... 

He's probably wishing he banged his head harder and concussed himself so he didn't have to listen to all of it  

[CaaC (John)+]

Thank fuck he is gone, just hope Trump does not appear now, keep this pic on for a while, it's a breath of fresh air.

[CaaC (John)+]

14 minutes ago, Azeem said:

Any pics ?

You @MUFC in disguise?

[nudge]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

Edited May 31, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[MUFC]

1 hour ago, CaaC (John) said:

You @MUFC in disguise?

Well done Azeem, we need more of this.

[nudge]

[nudge]

Jupiter photographed by NASA's Juno probe last Tuesday. Just look how detailed it is... 

[Stan]

Sensational @nudge. 

I won't lie, I was expecting Jupiter to be more reddish and orange. Good to see the big red spot is still there  

[nudge]

52 minutes ago, Stan said:

Sensational @nudge. 

I won't lie, I was expecting Jupiter to be more reddish and orange. Good to see the big red spot is still there  

Jupiter changes colours and patterns all the time  Granted, it should be noted that the image has a high degree of artistic freedom as people process them from the original JunoCam raw data, so the colours are not by any means accurate...and definitely not as pronounced as in the pic above, whoever processed the image boosted the colour saturation for sure. Nevertheless, it's stunning...

[CaaC (John)+]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

2020 June 7

Halo of the Cat's Eye
Image Credit & Copyright: R. Corradi (Isaac Newton Group), Nordic Optical Telescope

Explanation: The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its haunting symmetries are seen in the very central region of this stunning false-colour picture, processed to reveal the enormous but extremely faint halo of gaseous material, over three light-years across, which surrounds the brighter, familiar planetary nebula. Made with data from the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands, the composite picture shows extended emission from the nebula. Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a Sun-like star. Only much more recently, however, have some planetaries been found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier active episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years.

NASA

[nudge]

China is planning to construct a space station within the next 2 years. The first module will launch next year, 11 launches in total will be conducted to finish it by 2023. The station will host three astronauts for six month rotations, and will have two experiment modules for international projects in the areas of astronomy, space medicine, space life science, biotechnology, microgravity fluid physics, microgravity combustion and space technologies. 6 experiments have been selected already for the first cycle, 3 more have received conditional acceptance. A co-orbiting two-metre-aperture space telescope will also be launched following completion of the basic station configuration.

https://spacenews.com/rocket-arrives-as-china-targets-july-for-tianwen-1-mars-mission-launch/

Selected experiments:

[CaaC (John)+]

 

Saturn's moon Titan is rapidly migrating away from the planet

(CNN)Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is moving away from its planet a hundred times faster than previously established, according to a new study.

The giant moon isn't alone in this behaviour; other moons among the 150 known moons in our solar system are also slowly distancing themselves from the planets they orbit, including our own moon. Earth's moon moves about 1.5 inches away each year, according to NASA.

This is caused by the moon's gravity tugging on the planet, which creates a temporary bulge in the planet. That energy pushes the moon further away.

Saturn's moon Titan is largely covered in organic material, new evidence shows

Data collected during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to study Saturn and some of its moons have revealed that Titan's migration rate equals about 4 inches per year.

The study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Saturn, the second-largest planet in our solar system, likely formed during the infancy of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. But scientists are less certain about when the planet's signature rings and many moons formed. Currently, the planet has 82 moons.

Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury, orbits Saturn at a distance of 759,000 miles away. And if it's been moving away from the planet at a rapid rate each year, Titan was likely much closer to Saturn, in the beginning, billions of years ago before migrating.

This implies that Saturn's entire planetary system also expanded quickly.

Photos: NASA says farewell to Cassini

"This result brings an important new piece of the puzzle for the highly debated question of the age of the Saturn system and how its moons formed," said Valery Lainey, lead study author and scientist at Paris Observatory at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, in a statement.

Lainey worked on the study as a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Background stars in images captured by Cassini helped the researchers track Titan. This was also compared with radio data gathered by Cassini over the course of 10 flybys of Saturn between 2006 and 2016. Together, these showed the shift in Titan's orbit as it moves outward.

"By using two completely different datasets, we obtained results that are in full agreement, and also in agreement with Jim Fuller's theory, which predicted a much faster migration of Titan," said Paolo Tortora, study co-author and professor of aerospace systems and member of the Cassini Radio Science Team at the University of Bologna in Italy, in a statement.

Fuller, a theoretical astrophysicist and assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, has a theory that both inner and outer moons of planets migrate away at similar rates. Both types of moons get stuck in orbits related to the planet's wobble, which pushes them away.

Lakes on Saturn's moon may be explosion craters

Fuller's theory, which he published as a research study around four years ago, changed the long-prevailing view that outer moons migrated more slowly than inner moons. This idea was based on the fact that the outer moons are more distant from the gravity of their planet.

He is also a co-author of the new study.

"The new measurements imply that these kinds of planet-moon interactions can be more prominent than prior expectations and that they can apply to many systems, such as other planetary moon systems, exoplanets — those outside our solar system -— and even binary star systems, where stars orbit each other," Fuller said in a statement.

NASA's new mission, Dragonfly, will explore Saturn's moon, Titan

Titan is unique in our solar system. It's the only known moon with a considerable atmosphere and the only planetary body in addition to Earth with liquid rivers and lakes on its surface.

In 2026, NASA will send the Dragonfly mission to further investigate Titan. It will arrive at the moon by 2034. The Mars rover-size drone will be able to fly through Titan's thick atmosphere for about two and a half years.

The ultimate goal is for Dragonfly to visit an impact crater, where they believe that important ingredients for life mixed together when something hit Titan in the past, possibly tens of thousands of years ago.

"Titan has the key ingredients for life," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, when the mission was announced in 2019.

"It has complex organic molecules and the energy required for life. We will have the opportunity to observe processes similar to what happened on early Earth when life formed and potentially conditions that could harbor life today."

CNN

   

Edited June 11, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

Another mysterious radio burst in space is repeating a pattern. This one occurs every 157 days

FRAMES - 1/182

(CNN) For the second time ever, astronomers have detected a pattern in a mysterious fast radio burst coming from space.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long bursts of radio waves in space, and astronomers have been able to trace some radio bursts back to their home galaxies.

They have yet to determine the actual cause of the bursts.

Individual radio bursts emit once and don't repeat. But repeating fast radio bursts are known to send out short, energetic radio waves multiple times.

Previous observations showed that usually when they repeat, it's sporadic or in a cluster.

That all changed earlier this year when astronomers found that FRB 180916.J0158+65 had a pattern in bursts occurring every 16.35 days. Over the course of four days, the signal would release a burst or two each hour. Then, it would go silent for another 12 days.

Now, they have detected a pattern in a second repeating fast radio burst, known as FRB 121102. During this cyclical pattern, radio bursts are emitted during a 90-day window, followed by a silent period of 67 days. This pattern repeats every 157 days.

FRB 121102 has been known as a repeating fast radio burst since 2016. Now, they know it has a pattern.

"Until now, only one other repeating FRB was known to show such a pattern in its bursting activity," said Kaustubh Rajwade, lead study author and a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at the University of Manchester, in an email. "Finding such a pattern reveals important clues as to what could [be] the progenitor of FRBs. A periodicity tells us that the object that is producing FRBs is probably in an orbit with another astrophysical body."

The study published Sunday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

FRB 121102 was the first repeating fast radio burst to be traced back to its source, linked back to a small dwarf galaxy more than 3 billion light-years away in 2017.

The fact that this repeating fast radio burst pattern is at least 10 times longer than the one repeating every 16.4 days shows the potential large range for such activity, the researchers said.

What's behind the burst pattern?

So what could be the cause of FRB 121102's extended pattern? Researchers believed these powerful bursts could be due to the orbit of a massive star, a black hole or a dense neutron star.

One potential explanation for repeating fast radio bursts has been the precession or wobbling top motion, of a highly magnetized neutron star's axis. But that may not explain what astronomers are seeing for this particular burst because it lasts so long, the researchers said. That model may be more suited to bursts that repeat over a few weeks.

Moving forward, the researchers want to find other repeating fast radio bursts, determine if they also have patterns and see if these two represent the range of patterns. They also want to observe FRB 121102 more and see if the patterns change over time.

"Answering these questions will take us closer to the true source of FRBs," Rajwade said.

What's sending mysterious repeating fast radio bursts in space?

The burst pattern in this study was detected while using the Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom over four years. The telescope is sensitive to faint radio signals and capable of regularly monitoring repeating fast radio bursts that have already been identified.

Fast radio bursts were only discovered in 2007, followed by the discovery that some of them can repeat in 2016. Now, researchers know they can have patterns as well.

"This exciting discovery highlights how little we know about the origin of FRBs," said Duncan Lorimer, study coauthor, associate dean for research and professor of physics and astronomy at West Virginia University. "Further observations of a larger number of FRBs will be needed in order to obtain a clearer picture about these periodic sources and elucidate their origin."

CNN

[CaaC (John)+]

NASA's Artemis moon mission aims for an ice economy

© Provided by Quartz A footprint left by one of the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission shows in the soft, powder surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. Commander Neil A. Armstrong and Air Force Col. Edwin E.

The urge to voyage beyond what we know is at the heart of the human experience. Often, this is driven by some rare commodity—spices and silks, gold, or oil.

How about water?

The analogy may sound insane since water is fairly plentiful here on the ground. But the unique physics of space travel means that going to the moon to get water might actually boost the space economy.

The presence of frozen water on the moon is a key motivating factor for plans to send a new wave of robotic and eventually human explorers back to the moon. That ice is one of the first real resources that humans can use in space—for drinking water, for hydroponic agriculture, and once split into its component elements, oxygen to breathe and propellant for rockets.

This week, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine offered a hint as to how access to that water will come about, tweeting that “for the Artemis Moonbase, NASA will establish a cost per ton delivered and once again let private companies innovate.”

Talk of a moon base is a ways off: NASA’s current goal is to get astronauts back on the moon for a brief visit by the end of 2024, but that is unlikely to be realized. The viability of this dream also depends on how exactly the ice, which we’ve only spotted with remote sensors, is distributed on the moon.

A series of robotic explorers expected to arrive in the next several years should help answer that question definitively. Today, NASA announced that the US company Astrobotic received a $199.5 million contract to carry a NASA rover called VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploring Rover) to the moon in 2023.

But the water economy of space is too fascinating not to think about some more. The hinge of the whole idea is gravity. One of the most expensive things about space is getting there—escaping Earth’s gravity requires the use of chemical rockets to generate the massive energy needed to break free. That means paying a premium for anything you need to bring with you.

If those necessities were already available in space, the cost of getting the bare minimum up from Earth would go down significantly.

The chemicals behind rocket propellants are plentiful on Earth, but getting them to low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station (ISS) lives, raises the price significantly. Going further, to geocentric orbits where satellites hang high above the Earth, is even more expensive. Take it to a Lagrange point between the Earth and the moon, a likely spot for a future space platform, or down to the moon, and the costs become astronomical.

Harvesting them on the moon, however, could be comparatively cheap, as is flying them from the moon’s low gravity to various orbits around the Earth. In theory, a market for lunar propellant could make it cheaper and more effective to operate large satellites by refuelling them, instead of making them carry fifteen years’ worth of propellant up from the ground. That implies a host of benefits to life on Earth: Improved satellite internet and navigation services, better remote-sensing data about weather, climate change and economic activity, and the possibility for innovative new products manufactured in low-Earth orbit.

It could also lower the costs of operating the ISS, enable long-term stays on the moon, and make missions to Mars much cheaper, as well.

An analysis performed by the Space Resources Roundtable offers a suggestive depiction of how much it costs to produce and transport propellant—liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen—to various points:

The challenge will be kick-starting the market—the capital investment required to create the infrastructure to extract water from lunar ice will be huge, and there’s no obvious buyer for it now.

That’s why Bridenstine’s statement is so important: If NASA follows through by saying we’ll pay $X for propellant delivered to location Y, that could give hypothetical lunar mining entrepreneurs the market they need to get off the ground and encourage private propellant buyers to make their own plans to use these resources. (One technological wrinkle will be designing spacecraft for regular refuelling.)

“Wow, this is extremely important!!” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, tweeted in response to Bridenstine.

This is a model adapted from the commercial crew program that just saw SpaceX carry astronauts to the space station on the cheapest spacecraft the US has ever built—tell the market what you need and let it provide, rather than develop a NASA-led effort. It’s proven an effective strategy for replicating past NASA accomplishments quickly and efficiently. But when it comes to mining the moon, well, that’s a new frontier.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/nasas-artemis-moon-mission-aims-for-an-ice-economy/ar-BB15mItl#image=1

[CaaC (John)+]

 Is the Betelgeuse star about to explode?

The supergiant star has been behaving strangely in recent months. Could it be about to go supernova?

In the constellation of Orion, something strange is afoot. In October 2019, the red star Betelgeuse – which marks Orion’s right shoulder (or left as we look at it) – began to get unusually dim. During January and February 2020, it reached a record low – around 40 per cent of its usual brightness.

We know that Betelgeuse is a mature star and that it will one day explode in a supernova. But this dimming has led to speculation that a supernova could be imminent. Might this be a moment of calm before the star expires in a cosmic death-blast?

The dimming of Betelgeuse (the name of the star has its origins in Arabic, and there’s no consensus on how to pronounce the Westernised version, but ‘Beet-el-joos’ is one of the more common variants – as popularised in the 1988 film Beetlejuice) is not completely unexpected.

It’s what’s known as a ‘variable’ star, whose brightness fluctuates. In Betelgeuse’s case, this fluctuation follows a roughly 420-day cycle, and – in line with this cycle – there are now signs that the star is slowly brightening again.

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“But even if Betelgeuse perks up, it still leaves us with questions,” says Dr Emily Levesque, an astronomer who studies the physics of massive stars at the University of Washington. “It’s got so much dimmer than normal – way more than we would expect.”

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant – the largest class of stars in the Universe in terms of volume. It has a radius of around 600 million kilometres: if you plonked Betelgeuse in the middle of the Solar System – where the Sun is – it would reach almost to Jupiter, engulfing Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

Red supergiants form when a massive star runs out of hydrogen in its core and can no longer convert hydrogen into helium via nuclear fusion. At this point, the core begins to contract, which raises the star’s internal temperature and ignites a shell of hydrogen fusion around the core, causing the star’s outer layers to expand and cool.

The temperature inside Betelgeuse’s core is so hot that the helium there has begun to fuse into carbon. Once the helium is exhausted, the core will rapidly work its way through heavier elements, all the way to iron. At this point, the star can generate no more energy, so the core will collapse. The outer layers will follow, bouncing off the core and exploding in a supernova.

Why is Betelgeuse dimming?

So could the dimming be a sign of an imminent supernova? Levesque admits that we still know very little about what a star will do in the final days and weeks before it explodes. But she says that the best guess for when Betelgeuse will die, according to where scientists think it is in its life cycle, is in 100,000 years.

“A supernova tomorrow is not flat out impossible,” she says, “But it’s unlikely.”

So what’s responsible for the recent dimming? Betelgeuse’s usual 420-day pulsation cycle – which is caused by variations in the star’s size – cannot alone account for the dimming, says Levesque, so there’s probably at least one other mechanism going on.

One possibility is that the star is being obscured, making it appear dimmer.

“We know that stars like Betelgeuse periodically shed mass from their surface, which condenses into dust around the star,” she says. “This would effectively block our view.”

“We also know that red supergiants have big convective zones on their surfaces,” says adds. Hot gas from deep inside the star rises to the surface, where it cools and sinks again. Changes in this circulation could be altering the star’s surface temperature, and hence its brightness – another possible explanation for what’s going on.

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Whatever Betelgeuse is currently doing, there’s no question that it’ll explode at some point.

“It’ll be absolutely unmissable,” says Levesque. “The star is only a few hundred light-years away, so the light from the supernova will be incredibly bright – comparable to Venus or the Moon.”

We’ll see it in the sky as a pinprick of light – even during daytime – and our telescopes will be able to see the nebulous ‘supernova remnant’ in all its glory. But don’t worry: although Betelgeuse is relatively close to us, it’s still far enough away that there’ll be no danger from the supernova’s high-energy radiation. As for Betelgeuse, it’ll most likely become an ultra-dense neutron star.

In the meantime, astronomers are getting all the data they can.

“As we study more of these red supergiants, we should get better at pinpointing what stage of their evolution they’re in, and when they’re likely to die,” says Levesque.

“We know that stars like this make most of the elements in the Universe – both when they’re alive and when they die as supernovae. Understanding how this works will tell us more about how the make-up of the Universe evolved. These stars seeded the chemistry that made life possible.”

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/is-the-betelgeuse-star-about-to-explode/

Edited June 13, 2020 by CaaC (John)
Spelling

[CaaC (John)+]

NASA spacecraft sends back images of stars from 4.3 billion miles away

Photos - 1/50 - New Horizons explores Pluto, Arrokoth

(CNN) - From its unique vantage point 4.3 billion miles from Earth, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has captured images of nearby stars — and the stars appear to be in different positions than where we see them from Earth.

This is the first time this kind of "parallax effect" has been captured using a spacecraft. You can mimic this by holding a finger about an arm's length from your face and see how it appears to jump when you close your left or right eye, according to a release by NASA.

"It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," said planetary scientist Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement.

"That has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before — to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth."

New Horizons is on a course to interstellar space, much like the Voyager probes. It previously flew by Pluto and its moons in 2015 before conducting a flyby of the distant Kuiper Belt object, known as Arrokoth, in January 2019.

In April, at a distance of 4.3 billion miles from Earth, New Horizons aimed its long-range telescopic camera to nearby stars Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. They are still 4.2 and 7.795 light-years away from us, respectively.

Stereoscopic milestone

The stars appeared to be in different locations through the parallax effect, meaning that the stars seemed to shift against the background since New Horizons was viewing it from a different viewpoint. Scientists use the parallax effect to measure the distances to stars.

The New Horizons image of star Wolf 359 is on the left. If you have a stereo viewer, you can use it on this image. If not, look at the centre of the image and let your focus shift to see the combined third image.

"The New Horizons spacecraft is truly a mission of firsts, and this demonstration of stellar parallax is no different," said Kenneth Hansen, New Horizons program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, in a statement. "The New Horizons spacecraft continues to speed away from Earth toward interstellar space and is continuing to return exciting new data for planetary science."

The images were created by New Horizons' Lauer, New Horizons Deputy Project Scientist John Spencer and astrophysicist, team collaborator and Queen guitarist Brian May.

"It could be argued that in astro-stereoscopy — 3D images of astronomical objects — NASA's New Horizons team already leads the field, having delivered astounding stereoscopic images of both Pluto and the remote Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth," May said.

"But the latest New Horizons stereoscopic experiment breaks all records. These photographs of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 — stars that are well-known to amateur astronomers and science fiction aficionados alike — employ the largest distance between viewpoints ever achieved in 180 years of stereoscopy!"

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/14/world/nasa-new-horizons-nearby-stars-scn/index.html

[CaaC (John)+]

Solar Orbiter: Europe's Sun mission makes first close pass

VIDEO

Europe's Solar Orbiter (SolO) probe makes its first close pass of the Sun on Monday, tracking by at a distance of just over 77 million km.

SolO was launched in February and is on a mission to understand what drives our star's dynamic behaviour.

The close pass, known as a perihelion, puts the probe between the orbits of Venus and Mercury.

In the coming years, SolO will go nearer still, closing to within 43 million km of the Sun on occasions.

As it stands today, only five other missions have dived deeper into the inner Solar System: Mariner 10, Helios 1 & 2, Messenger, and Parker Solar Probe.

Earth orbits 149 million km (93 million miles) on average from the Sun.

SolO is a European Space Agency (Esa) craft that was assembled in the UK by the aerospace company Airbus.

FULL REPORT

[CaaC (John)+]

Giant space chamber installed in Oxfordshire

The largest vessel in the UK to test spacecraft has just been installed at the National Satellite Test Facility (NSTF) in Oxfordshire.

The 98-tonne, 16m by 8m chamber is so big, it was brought to the Harwell complex in segments and then assembled in place.

A roof and walls are now being added.

The vessel will check the readiness of spacecraft for flight by putting them in a vacuum and at temperatures that range from -180C to +100C.

It's part of a package of testing procedures to be offered by the NSTF and the associated labs it shares with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) on the same Oxfordshire campus.

Anything from components, through sensors and instruments to completed satellites, will make use of what is being billed as a one-stop testing shop for British spacecraft manufacturers.

"There was a study done by the UK Space Agency to look at what was needed to stimulate the growth of the space industry," explained Prof Chris Mutlow, the director of RAL Space.

"One of the things that was identified was the requirement for a place where you could go to test everything.

"All too frequently in this country, we've been packing stuff off to Europe to test - with all the difficulty and expense that involves. We now have a sovereign capability," he told BBC News.

FULL REPORT

 

[Stan]

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

A breathtaking new map of the X-ray Universe

Behold the hot, energetic Universe.

A German-Russian space telescope has just acquired a breakthrough map of the sky that traces the heavens in X-rays.

The image records a lot of the violent action in the cosmos - instances where the matter is being accelerated, heated and shredded.

Feasting black holes, exploding stars, and searingly hot gas.

The data comes from the eRosita instrument mounted on Spektr-RG.

This orbiting telescope was launched in July last year and despatched to an observing position some 1.5 million km from Earth. Once commissioned and declared fully operational in December, it was left to slowly rotate and scan the depths of space.

eRosita's first all-sky data-set, represented in the image at the top of this page, was completed only last week. It records over a million sources of X-rays.

"That's actually pretty much the same number as had been detected in the whole history of X-ray astronomy going back 60 years. We've basically doubled the known sources in just six months," said Kirpal Nandra, who heads the high-energy astrophysics group at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany.

"The data is truly stunning and I think what we're doing here will revolutionise X-ray astronomy," he told BBC News.

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The map uses the so-called Aitoff projection, which unwraps the sphere of the sky on to an ellipse. The band across the middle is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, with the centre of the galaxy in the middle of the ellipse.

The image has been encoded with colour to help describe what's going on. Blues represent higher energy X-rays (1-2.3 kiloelectron volts, keV); greens are mid-range (0.6-1 keV); and reds are lower energy (0.3-0.6 keV).

Much of the galaxy's plane is dominated by highly energetic sources. In part, that's because copious amounts of gas and dust have absorbed and filtered out the lower energy radiation. Sources include stars with strong, magnetically active and extremely hot atmospheres.

The greens and yellows that draw a kind of mushroom feature covering a great swathe of the map represent hot gas inside and just outside our galaxy. This material imprints information about the formation and evolution of the Milky Way.

Some of the bigger splodges are well-known actors in the sky. The bright yellow patch just above the plane on the far right is a concentration of supernova remnants - the wreckage of stars that have exploded and whose shockwaves have super-heated a surrounding cocoon of dust and gas. This particular patch is dominated by the Vela supernova remnant. This was an explosion that happened thousands of years ago but a mere 800 light-years from Earth.

Look next at the diffuse red glow at the top and bottom of the map. This is largely X-ray emission from hot gas well beyond our galaxy. And in the white speckles, we are seeing principally the signature of super-massive black holes. Indeed, about 80% of all the sources contained in the new map are the gargantuan black holes that reside at the centres of distant galaxies. They pump out X-rays as their immense gravitational pull draws in and eviscerates matter.

Some of super-massive black holes making an appearance in the map are seen when the Universe was younger than one billion years old, less than 10% of its present age.

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Spektr-RG and its eRosita instrument intend to gather seven more all-sky surveys over the next 3.5 years. This will enable the telescope to refine its data, to remove artefacts and noise, but also to sense deeper into the cosmos and pick up the faint sources that would otherwise be beyond detection.

One key goal is to map the distribution of the hot, X-ray-emitting gas that illuminates the great clusters of galaxies.

Astronomers hope this information can lead them to some fresh insights on how the Universe is structured and how it has changed through time. It's possible there may be some clues in this project about the nature of dark energy, the mysterious "force" that appears to be pushing the cosmos apart at an ever-accelerating rate.

"That's the big prize, but it would only come at the end of the mission," explained Prof Nandra.

"Eight surveys allows us to go really deep into the distant Universe. Basically, we're trying to detect all of the clusters of galaxies in the Universe above a certain mass limit. We've got a nice sample already - maybe around 10,000. But we're hoping to get at least 100,000 clusters of galaxies."

eRosita is the German element on Spektr-RG. It takes up most of the room on the spacecraft bus, or chassis. But it sits next to a Russian instrument known as ART-XC, which is sensitive to higher energies, up to 30 keV.

Both eRosita and ART-XC use a cluster of seven tubular mirror modules to corral X-ray light down on to their sensitive camera detectors.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53102718

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Space Hub Sutherland recommended for approval

Highland Council officials have recommended councillors give planning permission for a spaceport.

Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) wants to build the satellite launch site on peatland on the Moine Peninsula near Tongue.

Council officials have said launches should be limited to 12 per year.

Among the reasons for this is the amount of plastic and metal debris falling into the sea during rocket launches.

Twelve would see an estimated five tonnes of carbon fibre reinforced plastic and seven tonnes of metal alloy dropping into the sea each year, according to the officials' report.

Councillors on Highland Council's north planning applications committee will consider the proposals for Space Hub Sutherland on Friday.

The local authority has received 457 objections to the plans and 118 representations in support of them.

Impact on the environment and risk to human health are among the reasons for the objections.

Local community councils have supported the project because it is expected to create new jobs.

HIE has said by the year 2024 the spaceport would support 177 jobs across Scotland - 139 in the Highlands with more than 40 of these posts in and around the launch site.

HIE has approved up to £17.3m in funding towards designing and building the space hub. HIE would contribute £9.8m, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority £5m and the UK Space Agency £2.5m.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is involved because of its work to help create new jobs to replace those lost from the eventual closure of the Dounreay nuclear power site near Thurso in Caithness.

Designed by Norr Architects, the facility would comprise a launch control centre, a single launch pad and associated infrastructure, including roadways, fuel storage, office premises and antennas.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-53136212

[CaaC (John)+]

China launches a final satellite in GPS-like Beidou system

BEIJING (AP) — China on Tuesday launched the final satellite in its Beidou constellation that emulates and may seek to compete with the U.S. Global Positioning System, marking a further step in the country's advance as a major space power.

The launch of the satellite onboard a Long March-3 rocket was broadcast live from the satellite launch base of Xichang, deep in the mountains of southwestern China, shortly before 10 a.m. About half an hour later, the satellite was deployed in orbit and extended its solar panels to provide its energy.

An initial launch scheduled for last week was scrubbed after checks revealed unspecified technical problems.

The third iteration of the Beidou Navigation Satellite System promises to provide global coverage for timing and navigation, offering an alternative to Russia’s GLONASS and the European Galileo systems, as well as America’s GPS.

The launch of the 55th satellite in the Beidou family shows China's push to provide global coverage has been “entirely successful," the system's chief designer Yang Changfeng told state broadcaster CCTV.

“In actual fact, this also signifies that we are moving from being a major nation in the field of space to becoming a true space power," Yang said.

China’s space program has developed rapidly over the past two decades as the government devotes major resources toward developing independent high-tech capabilities — and even dominating in fields such as 5G data processing.

The first version of Beidou, meaning “Big Dipper,” was decommissioned in 2012. Future plans call for a smarter, more accessible and more integrated system with Beidou at its core, to come online by 2035.

The now complete current system, known as BDS-3, consists of 30 satellites and began providing navigation services in 2018 to countries taking part in China's sprawling “Belt and Road" infrastructure initiative, along with others, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. It largely relies on medium earth orbit satellites, but also operates six geosynchronous orbit satellites such as the one launched Tuesday, Xinhua said.

Along with being a navigation aid, the system offers “short message communication, satellite-based augmentation, international search and rescue, as well as precise point positioning," Xinhua said. The short messaging systems allow for communications up to 1,200 Chinese characters long, as well as the ability to transmit images, it said.

While China says it seeks cooperation with other satellite navigation systems, Beidou could ultimately compete against GPS and others in the same way Chinese cell phone makers and other producers of technically sophisticated hardware have taken on their foreign rivals.

In 2003, China became just the third country to independently launch a crewed space mission and has since constructed an experimental space station and sent a pair of rovers to the surface of the moon.

Future plans call for a fully functioning permanent space station and a possible crewed flight to the moon, with its first attempt to send an orbiter and rover to Mars possibly coming as early as next month. If successful, it would be the only other country besides the U.S. to land on Earth’s closest planetary neighbour.

The program has suffered some setbacks, including launch failures, and has had limited cooperation with other countries’ space efforts, in part because of U.S. objections to its close connections to the Chinese military.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/china-launches-final-satellite-in-gps-like-beidou-system/ar-BB15QS5R

Edited June 23, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

'Black neutron star' discovery changes astronomy

Scientists have discovered an astronomical object that has never been observed before.

It is more massive than collapsed stars, known as "neutron stars", but has less mass than black holes.

Such "black neutron stars" were not thought possible and will mean ideas for how neutron stars and black holes form will need to be rethought.

The discovery was made by an international team using gravitational wave detectors in the US and Italy.

Charlie Hoy, a PhD student from Cardiff University, UK, involved in the study, said the new discovery would transform our understanding.

"We can't rule out any possibilities," he told BBC News. "We don't know what it is and this is why it is so exciting because it really does change our field."

• A breathtaking new map of the X-ray Universe
• Dancing gargantuan black holes perform on cue
• Cosmic vibrations sensed from unusual star merger

Mr Hoy is part of an international team working for the Ligo-Virgo Scientific Collaboration.

The international group, which has strong UK involvement backed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, has laser detectors several kilometres long that are able to detect minute ripples in space-time caused by the collision of massive objects in the Universe.

The collected data can be used to determine the mass of those objects involved.

Last August, the instruments detected the collision of a black hole 23 times the mass of our Sun with an object of 2.6 solar masses.

That makes the lighter object more massive than the heaviest type of dead star, or neutron star, previously observed - of just over two solar masses. But it was also lighter than the lightest black hole previously observed - of around five solar masses.

Astronomers have been searching for such objects in what they've come to call the "mass gap".

Writing in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the research team believes that of all the possibilities, the object is most likely to be a light black hole, but they are not ruling out any other possibilities.

• Gravitational waves are a prediction of the Theory of General Relativity
• It took decades to develop the technology to directly detect them
• They are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by violent events
• Accelerating masses will produce waves that propagate at the speed of light
• Detectable sources include merging black holes and neutron stars
• Ligo/Virgo fire lasers into long, L-shaped tunnels; the waves disturb the light
• Detecting the waves opens up the Universe to completely new investigations

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Having collided with the large black hole, the object no longer exists. However, there should be further opportunities to learn more about these mass-gap objects from future collisions, according to Prof Stephen Fairhurst, also at Cardiff.

"It is a challenge for us to determine what this is," he told BBC News. "Is this the lightest black hole ever, or is it the heaviest neutron star ever?"

If it is a light black hole then there is no established theory for how such an object could develop. But Prof Fairhurst's colleague, Prof Fabio Antonioni, has proposed that a solar system with three stars could lead to the formation of light black holes. His ideas are receiving increased attention following the new discovery.

If, however, this new class of object is a heavy neutron star then theories for how they form may also need to be revised, according to Prof Bernard Schutz of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany.

"We don't know a lot about the nuclear physics of neutron stars. So, people who are looking at exotic equations that explain what goes on inside them might be thinking, 'maybe this is evidence that we can get much heavier neutron stars'."

Both black holes and neutron stars are thought to form when stars run out of fuel and die. If it is a very large star, it collapses to form a black hole, an object with such strong gravitational force that not even light can escape its grasp.

If the starting star is below a certain mass, one option is for it to collapse into a dense ball composed entirely of particles called neutrons, which are found inside the heart of atoms.

The material from which neutron stars are composed is so tightly packed that one teaspoonful would weigh 10 million tonnes.

A neutron star also has powerful gravity pulling it together, but a force between the neutrons, called the nuclear strong force, pushes the particles apart, counteracting the gravitational force.

Current theories suggest that the gravitational force would overcome the nuclear force if the neutron star were much larger than two solar masses - and cause it to collapse into a black hole.

According to Prof Nils Andersson of Southampton University, if the mystery object is a heavy neutron star then the theorists will have to rethink what goes on in these objects.

"Nuclear physics is not a precise science where we know everything," he said.

"We don't know how the nuclear strong force operates under the extreme conditions you need inside a neutron star. So, every single current theory we currently have of what goes on inside of one has some uncertainty."

Prof Sheila Rowan, director of the University of Glasgow's Institute for Gravitational Research (IGR), said the discovery challenges current theoretical models.

"More cosmic observations and research will need to be undertaken to establish whether this new object is indeed something that has never been observed before or whether it may instead be the lightest black hole ever detected."

• A laser is fed into the machine and its beam is split along two paths
• The separate paths bounce back and forth between damped mirrors
• Eventually, the two light parts are recombined and sent to a detector
• Gravitational waves passing through the lab should disturb the set-up
• The theory holds they should very subtly stretch and squeeze its space
• This ought to show itself as a change in the lengths of the light arms
• The photodetector captures this signal in the recombined beam

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53151106

Edited June 24, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

Mary Jackson: Nasa to name HQ after first black female engineer

Nasa is to name its headquarters in Washington DC after its first black female engineer, Mary Jackson.

Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine said Jackson had helped to break down barriers for African Americans and women in engineering and technology.

The story of Mary Jackson was told in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Born in Hampton, Virginia, she died in 2005.

Last year, Nasa renamed the street outside its headquarters as Hidden Figures Way.

"Hidden no more, we will continue to recognise the contributions of women, African Americans, and people of all backgrounds who have made Nasa's successful history of exploration possible," Mr Bridenstine said in a statement.

How Nasa hired its first black women 'computers'

"Mary W Jackson was part of a group of very important women who helped Nasa succeed in getting American astronauts into space," Mr Bridenstine added.

"Mary never accepted the status quo, she helped break barriers and open opportunities for African Americans and women in the field of engineering and technology."

The move comes at a time of introspection across the US about historical injustices suffered by African Americans.

The recent death in police custody of George Floyd triggered protests around the world and renewed demands for an end to institutional racism.

Nasa began recruiting some college-educated African American women in the 1940s as "human computers", but they experienced both racial and gender discrimination at work.

Mary Jackson was recruited in 1951 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which was succeeded by Nasa in 1958. She worked under Dorothy Vaughan - whose story was also told in Hidden Figures - in the segregated West Area Computing Unit at Langley, Virginia.

Jackson died in 2005 and in 2019 she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

Her daughter, Carolyn Lewis, said the family was honoured that Nasa was continuing to celebrate Mary Jackson's legacy.

"She was a scientist, humanitarian, wife, mother, and trailblazer who paved the way for thousands of others to succeed, not only at Nasa, but throughout this nation," she said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53177623