Space: The Final Frontier

[CaaC (John)+]

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'Incident' delays launch of James Webb Space Telescope

James Webb telescope lifted atop its launch rocket

A "shower curtain" surrounding Webb maintained cleanliness throughout the operation

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been hoisted atop the rocket that will blast it into orbit.

Weighing more than six tonnes, the $10bn successor to the legendary Hubble observatory was lifted by a crane and edged into position using guide lasers.

Webb is the single most expensive space science experiment ever conceived.

Its huge mirror and super-sensitive instruments will try to spy the first stars to shine in the Universe more than 13.5 billion years ago.

Other work will see it probe the atmospheres of distant planets to look for signs of life.

The pictures on this page are among the last we will see of Webb on Earth.

Lift-off remains on schedule for Wednesday 22 December at 12:20 GMT.

FULL REPORT

 

[nudge]

Some of humanity's achievements are truly incredible.

 

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This is incredible. You can actually see the Milky Way, too!

[CaaC (John)+]

1 minute ago, nudge said:

This is incredible. You can actually see the Milky Way, too!

That's bloody haunting watching that, wow. 

[nudge]

Just now, CaaC (John) said:

That's bloody haunting watching that, wow. 

Completely mind-blowing!

[Stan]

8 hours ago, nudge said:

 

This is incredible. You can actually see the Milky Way, too!

Staggering. 

And you see the planets too (Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Earth then Jupiter according to the comments). 

For black and white footage, the impression the Milky Way creates to be so visible is surreal. 

[nudge]

This is incredible.

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Interstellar probe: A mission for the generations

Imagine working on a project you know you have no hope of seeing through to completion. Would you have the motivation to even get it going?

Absolutely, says Ralph McNutt from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL) in the US.

McNutt, with colleagues, has just published a detailed report that envisions a long-lived interstellar probe - a mission to the space between the stars.

Nasa's legendary Voyagers are travelling through this domain right now, but McNutt's probe would go further and faster and would expect still to be working 50-100 years after leaving Earth.

"Suppose this thing launched in 2036, and it got to the end of the nominal mission in 2086," he pondered. "That puts me at about 130 years old. I'm not going to worry about it. You have to hand these things off. I say to people, 'if you're into instant gratification, do not get involved with space exploration'."

FULL REPORT

 

Edited December 21, 2021 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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First results from Hayabusa’s Ryugu asteroid sample

After a 5 billion km journey, Hayabusa’s treasure hunt yields clues to origin of Earth’s water and organic material.

In December 2020, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft dropped its treasure through the Earth’s atmosphere and onto the red dirt carpet of the South Australian desert. This package held the result of Hayabusa2’s 6-year, 5.24-billion-kilometre journey: five grams of dust and rock from the primordial asteroid Ryugu.

This was only the second time that an asteroid sample had been returned to Earth.

Now, the results are in of the first preliminary analysis of this other-worldly material, and they show that we could soon discover whether asteroids like Ryugu brought water and organic materials to the ancient Earth.

How did we get a piece of asteroid back to Earth?

Launched in 2014, Hayabusa2 rendezvoused with Ryugu in 2018 and spent 18 months orbiting the asteroid, before taking samples and heading for home.

Excitingly, Hayabusa2 sampled two different parts of Ryugu: from on the surface and below the surface, picking up material that had never been exposed to the Vacuum of space.

All up, the space probe collected just over five grams of dust, equivalent to about a teaspoonful.

This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a large sample, especially when scientists estimated from images that Hayabusa2 had only grabbed a single gram. Even then, they were stoked about it.

“One gram may sound small for some of you, but for experts, one gram is huge – it’s enough to address the science questions,” explained Masaki Fujimoto from JAXA, who led the team retrieving the return capsule.

In fact, the mission had only aimed to get a tenth of the gram. This far surpassed the only other asteroid sample ever returned to Earth, by the Hayabusa1 mission in 2010. It brought back just 1500 tiny dust grains, weighing less than a milligram in total.

More than five grams means that the sample contained several thousand individual grains, all of which will be exhaustively analysed. But since the grains are irreplaceable, the analysis is starting off cautiously, with non-invasive and non-destructive observations.

So, what do the results say?

The two new studies – published in Nature Astronomy – focused on the physical properties and composition of Ryugu.

Together, they confirm that it’s a C-type asteroid – a dark and rocky world, rich in carbon and water. These types of asteroids are ancient, left over from the birth of our Solar System.

Ryugu formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has retained its primitive composition – but C-type asteroids may not have remained completely unchanged during this time.

Funnily enough, evidence for this comes from Earth. While the sample from Hayabusa2 is the first sample ever returned to Earth, asteroid samples rain down on us every day as meteorites. Scientists think that a type of meteorites known as carbonaceous chondrites may have come from C-type asteroids.

These meteorites look like they have been altered by fluids, which could fit with what we know about C-type asteroids – formed in the far reaches of the asteroid belt, they contain ice that could have melted and helped produced clay minerals and carbonates (salts).

“One of the aims of the Hayabusa 2 mission was to investigate the link between C-type asteroids and carbonaceous chondrites,” explains planetary scientist Monica Grady in an article in The Conversation.

“Were C-type asteroids really the parent bodies from which carbonaceous chondrites originated? This is important because carbonaceous chondrites are probably the sort of objects that brought water and organic compounds to Earth, enabling life to emerge here.”

So what are the initial results from the mission?

The first paper found that the sample was darker in colour than expected, reflecting just 2% of solar radiation – less reflective even than asphalt.

The material also had a low density and a high porosity, which is surprising. Hayabusa2 had measured the asteroid itself to have a low density – an expected result, since an asteroid is basically a collection of rubble, with lots of spaces between the rocky components.

But the team thought the density of the sample material would be higher, because the collection and return process should have shaken the material up and collapsed the gaps between grains.

The sample’s density is also much lower than that of carbonaceous chondrites – perhaps because the meteorites that end up on Earth have to be hardy enough to survive a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, and so more fragile chunks don’t make it through.

“Ryugu may also contain more low-density material, such as organic molecules, than such meteorites,” Grady adds.

“This is extremely important, because it implies that the material from Ryugu has preserved a component of carbonaceous material that we have not been able to study before. This should allow us to learn more about the primordial building blocks of life.”

The second group specifically looked at the sample’s composition, and found that it was rich in not only carbon but also hydrated minerals and clays.

But it was a little different to other carbonaceous chondrites that scientists have studied on Earth. The sample had a fine, uniform texture, and didn’t contain any chondrules – molten spherical droplets usually found in carbonaceous chondrites.

This may suggest that Ryugu is the parent body of a type of meteorite called a CI chondrite – which are so rare that only five have ever been found on Earth.

CI chondrites have a chemical composition very similar to the Sun, and give us a snapshot of what the Solar System was like when it first formed.

According to Grady, together these papers “have shown us that the material from Ryugu is primitive and sufficiently different from known meteorites to make us think again about how representative meteorites are of asteroids.

“This might come to change some aspects of our view of early Solar System history.”

But these two studies are just the beginning.

Astronomers around the world are keen to learn more about these precious samples – and to compare them to a sample of the C-type asteroid Bennu, which will arrive back on Earth in 2023.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/first-hayabusa2-results-from-asteroid-sampling-mission/

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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The Boötes void: Why the Universe has a mysterious hole 330 million light-years across

Space is full of holes.

 

In 1981, Robert Kirshner was working with other astronomers at the University of Michigan to calculate the redshifts – a measure of how fast something is moving away from Earth – of a great number of galaxies. Due to the way our Universe is expanding, the farther away a galaxy is the faster it moves, meaning redshift can be used to measure distance. Kirshner and his team were taking advantage of this to create a 3D map of the Universe.

As the map became fleshed out, something strange appeared. At 700 million light-years from Earth was a blank void. In a roughly spherical region around 330 million light-years wide – a region the Milky Way could fit into billions of times over – there were barely any galaxies.

Initially, the region was referred to as The Great Nothing, but later came to be known as the Boötes Void, as it appears to lie in the constellation of Boötes, the herdsman who drives the Plough around the North Pole.

Since then, surveys have managed to create more detailed maps of our Universe. We now know that galaxies are arranged like a giant web. The majority of galaxies in our Universe are found in long structures, known as filaments, that wind through the cosmos. When these meet, they create regions with a high concentration of galaxies, known as clusters.

Between these threads, however, are huge empty voids with hardly any galaxies at all. The voids make up around 80 per cent of the observable Universe, and most are around 30 to 300 million light-years across. Boötes is one of the largest, earning it the title of ‘supervoid’. It’s thought that Boötes is the product of smaller voids merging together.

The cause of these voids is thought to lie in the origin of the Universe. In the early days of the cosmos, all the Universe’s matter was tightly packed together. Initially, this is thought to have been a uniform soup, but random quantum fluctuations soon created small differences in the distribution of matter.

Some areas were now slightly more dense, meaning their gravitational pull was greater so that they pulled matter away from the less dense areas. This made them even more dense, increasing their gravitational pull again so they attracted more matter and so on. At the same time, the Universe was expanding greatly and so these fluctuations that started on a quantum level eventually spanned hundreds of millions of light-years. Meanwhile smaller clumps of matter began to organise themselves into galaxies.

By studying these large structures, astronomers can gain a window into what the Universe looked like in its earliest moments. Today, advancements in both telescope and imaging technology mean they are able to create more detailed versions of Kirshner’s maps, such as the Dark Energy Survey which has mapped out a quarter of the southern sky, examining around 300 million galaxies.

Meanwhile, supercomputers can now create detailed simulations of how the Universe has grown from those first moments after the Big Bang to the cosmos we see today. By comparing these maps with the simulations, astronomers can begin to understand how our Universe came to look the way it does today.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/bootes-void/

 

[Bluewolf]

Rosetta ( Comet 67P ) standing above Los Angeles.... 

Fucking hell... 

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14 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Rosetta ( Comet 67P ) standing above Los Angeles.... 

Fucking hell... 

Nice. Looks like a still image taken straight out of some Roland Emmerich disaster movie  

[Tommy]

21 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Rosetta ( Comet 67P ) standing above Los Angeles.... 

Fucking hell... 

Marco Inaros has gone too far this time. 

[Stan]

YES! 

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Deleted, re-do

 

 

 

 

Edited January 14, 2022 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

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Dark energy survey creates largest 3D map of the universe

New instrument has already mapped more galaxies than all other 3D surveys combined.

On a mountaintop near Tucson, Arizona, a telescope is changing our view of the cosmos. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) – a high-tech, robot-operated device – is in the process of creating the largest 3D map of the universe to date, spanning 11 billion years.

And it’s only 10% through its five-year mission.

Once the detailed map is finished, it will give us a better idea of how the universe evolved – and clue us into its eventual fate.

“There is a lot of beauty to it,” says physicist Julien Guy, from the US’s Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“In the distribution of the galaxies in the 3D map, there are huge clusters, filaments, and voids. They’re the biggest structures in the universe. But within them, you find an imprint of the very early universe, and the history of its expansion since then.”

DESI, which is attached to the Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, was designed to collect detailed spectra from millions of galaxies, spanning a third of the entire sky.

Essentially, the instrument can break the light from each galaxy down to its constituent colours in order to find out how much the light has been redshifted. This occurs as the universe expands: as galaxies get further away from us, their light “stretches” on its way to Earth, shifting towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Measuring this redshift tells us how far away a galaxy is: the greater the redshift, the further the light had to travel to get to us.

By collecting data from tens of millions of galaxies and seeing how far away each one is, DESI can see the depth of the sky and create a 3D map of the distribution of matter across the cosmos. This will show clusters and superclusters of galaxies, which contain “echoes” of their formation.

“Our science goal is to measure the imprint of waves in the primordial plasma,” says Guy. “It’s astounding that we can actually detect the effect of these waves billions of years later, and so soon in our survey.”

The map will also give us more information about dark energy.

About 70% of the universe is made up of dark energy, an enigmatic substance that is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. It will ultimately decide the universe’s fate: will it expand forever, rip itself apart, or collapse?

To understand the fate of our cosmos, researchers must look to the past to see how dark energy has behaved through time. DESI’s 3D map will be instrumental in this.

So far, the survey has taken data from 7.5 million galaxies, smashing the previous speed record from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. By the end of its observing run in 2026, DESI will have catalogued around 35 million – so we’ll have to wait a while before the map is completed.

And the survey has already been delayed – though first installed on the telescope in 2019, DESI experienced several setbacks due to the pandemic and so only started its survey in May 2021.

The way this instrument works is fascinating: it has 5000 robots that position the instrument’s optical fibres to ensure they are accurate within 10 microns.

“Ten microns is tiny,” says physicist Klaus Honscheid of Ohio State University, an instrument scientist on the project. “It’s less than the thickness of a human hair. And you have to position each robot to collect the light from galaxies billions of light-years away. Every time I think about this system, I wonder how could we possibly pull that off?”

While DESI is busily working on finishing its 3D map of the universe, it will also provide astrophysicists more and more information about the physics of galaxy formation and evolution, as well as data on extreme objects like black holes and quasars.

“We’re finding quite a lot of exotic systems, including large samples of rare objects that we just haven’t been able to study in detail before,” says Victoria Fawcet, a graduate student at Durham University in the UK who is working on understanding quasars.

Stay tuned for 2026.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/dark-energy-survey-creates-largest-3d-map-of-the-universe/

 

[Bluewolf]

On 22/11/2018 at 20:18, CaaC (John) said:

Of all the Astronomy photos over the years, I have seen this is one of my favourites next to the Pillars of Creation.

The Butterfly Nebula from Hubble 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Reprocessing & Copyright: Jesús M.Vargas & Maritxu Poyal

Pillars of Creation 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)

Awesome pictures... From what I am reading the new Webb telescope will not be able to take pictures like this as it only takes pictures in Infrared compared to 4K or Visible... 

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18 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Awesome pictures... From what I am reading the new Webb telescope will not be able to take pictures like this as it only takes pictures in Infrared compared to 4K or Visible... 

It's true that Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, but it's also worth noting that the original images Hubble takes are also very different from the final pictures that get published - the original ones are narrowband images of different wavelengths in black and white, and colours are just added and manipulated during image processing (and they aren't accurate representation of the real image in visible light). Assignment of colours to different narrowband images is even called Hubble Palette because it popularised the technique. So the original image of the Pillars of Creation above would have looked something like this:

 

I'm sure they'll do plenty of image processing to the infrared Webb images too, and we'll still get some absolutely fantastic views. The important part for the telescope is the scientific data it gathers, after all  

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Here, "true colour" image on the left with HSO colour mapping after assigning RGB colours to narrowband channels (Hydrogen as red, Sulfur as green, and Oxygen as blue). That image then gets processed additionally to balance the colours and get the details out, resulting in the image on the right.

[CaaC (John)+]

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Of local bubbles, and star birth and death

New discovery adds to knowledge of how stars are made, and how they die.

Almost all of the young stars within hundreds of light-years of Earth are on the fringe of a giant “local bubble” in the interstellar medium shaped a bit like the crown of a tooth, scientists say.

The bubble, says Catherine Zucker, an astronomer and data visualisation expert who did her work with the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, US, was formed by a chain of events that began with a powerful supernova explosion 14 million years ago.

That explosion created a shock wave that swept gas and dust outward, “sort of like how a snowplough can sweep up snow,” Zucker said on 12 January, in an online press conference sponsored by the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

Subsequent supernova explosions—perhaps as many as 14 more of them – reinforced the process, contributing to the bubble’s expansion, until now it is approximately 1,000 light-years wide.

At the time, the Sun was well outside of the bubble. But about 5 million years ago the combination of the expansion of the bubble and the Sun’s motion carried it bubble-wards, giving us what is now a front-row seat.

“When the first supernovae that created the Local Bubble went off, our Sun was far away from the action,” says Zucker’s colleague, João Alves of the University of Vienna. “Now the Sun sits – just by luck – almost right in the bubble’s centre.”

The existence of the bubble, Zucker says, has long been known to astronomers studying the interstellar medium, but it is only now that 3D mapping of star locations and movements provided by ESA’s Gaia Space Telescope revealed that virtually all nearby young stars and star-forming regions are on its periphery.

It was a startling discovery, she adds. “We didn’t have a hypothesis that said we wanted to find out the relationship between the local bubble and star formation.”

Rather, she says, all that her team was doing was using a computer program called Glue to organise the GAIA data into a nice 3D map. “We were just dragging and dropping data, when this popped out,” she says.

It was a discovery, though, that instantly made sense and contributes to our understanding of star formation not only in our local vicinity, but throughout the Milky Way, and probably the universe—including the role dying stars play in giving birth to new ones in a vast, interstellar, cycle of death and birth.

What’s happening, Zucker says, is that the edges of the bubble, with their accumulations of gas and dust, are perfect places for star formation. The gas is difficult to see, but the stars aren’t, and once formed, they retain the momentum of the gas and dust clouds from which they condensed. That means they continue to move with the bubble’s edge as it continues to expand, making them handy tracers of the process that gave them birth.

Meanwhile, the search is on for new bubbles, because if one exists in our neighborhood, it is likely, Zucker says, that there are many others, colliding, interacting, and in general helping to produce the Milky Way galaxy as we know it today.

Zucker’s research was published on 12 January in Nature and is summarised on her team’s website.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/massive-local-bubble-drives-star-formation-near-sun/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

@nudge, @Bluewolf, a day late but wow 

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Huge 1km-wide asteroid will pass by Earth today

Asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1, which measures the same as three Eiffel Towers, will make its closest approach at 9:51pm tonight.

By Alice Lipscombe-Southwell
Published: 18th January, 2022 at 12:29

The 1km-wide asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 will make its closest approach to Earth at 9:51pm UTC this evening (18 January).

But don’t worry if the film Don’t Look Up has got you all twitchy about the possibility of a catastrophic collision with our planet: 1994 PC1 will safely pass at a distance of 1,982,172km (1,231,664 miles). That’s about five times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
 

What do we know about 1994 PC1?

FULL REPORT

 

 

Edited January 19, 2022 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

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Tardigrades could be the first interstellar space travellers

A team of physicists, philosophers and biologists have come up with a list of organisms that could withstand the harsh conditions of interstellar space, and tardigrades take the top spot.

 

In 2019 a spacecraft containing strange, microscopic organisms crash-landed on the Moon. The Beresheet Lunar Lander was the first non-governmental craft to attempt landing on the lunar surface, and it carried a collection of items including a digital copy of Wikipedia, human DNA samples, an Israeli flag, and thousands of tiny animals called tardigrades. We can’t say for sure if any of the so-called ‘water-bears’ survived the crash, but if they did, they are the only Earthlings to have spent years away from their home planet. Until now.

We spoke to Stephen Lantin, who is part of a team funded by NASA that have drawn up plans to send these ‘water-bears’ to distant stars.

How did the team choose which organisms to send into space?

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Edit: Not sure if I have already posted something like this before?

 

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Australia scientists find 'spooky' spinning object in Milky Way

Australian scientists say they have discovered an unknown spinning object in the Milky Way that they claim is unlike anything seen before.

The object - first discovered by a university student - has been observed to release a huge burst of radio energy for a full minute every 18 minutes.

Objects that pulse energy in the universe are often documented. But researchers say something that turns on for a minute is highly unusual.

The team is working to understand more.

The object was first discovered by Curtin University Honours student Tyrone O'Doherty in a region of the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array, using a telescope and a new technique he had developed.

Mr O'Doherty was part of a team led by astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

"[It] was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations," she was quoted as saying in a media release from ICRAR that documented the discovery.

"That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that."

Objects that turn on and off in the Universe are not new to astronomers—they call them "transients".

But an object that turned on for a full minute was "really weird," ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist Dr Gemma Anderson, was quoted as saying in the release.

ICRAR added that after trawling back through years of data, the team was able to establish that the object is about 4,000 light-years from Earth, is incredibly bright and has an extremely strong magnetic field.

Theories around what the object might be include a neutron star or a white dwarf - a term used for the remnants of a collapsed star. However, much of the discovery remains a mystery.

"More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we'd never noticed before," Dr Hurley-Walker said. "I'm looking forward to understanding this object and then extending the search to find more."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-60150542

 

Edited January 27, 2022 by CaaC (John)