Space: The Final Frontier

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Rare “black widow” stars in deadly cosmic dance

This binary star system has the shortest orbit of any yet observed.

Some species of black widow spiders are known for their deadly mating rituals – females infamously eat their diminutive partners after coitus. But this is an article about stars, right? Right. When a dense neutron star consumes a smaller neighbour, astronomers say they have witnessed a “black widow” binary system.

The powerhouse of black widow binaries are pulsars – rapidly spinning neutron stars which are the collapsed cores of now dead massive stars. Pulsars spin at a dizzying rate, rotating every few milliseconds, and shoot out high-energy radiation in the form of gamma and X-rays. Normally pulsars die down, but can become re-energised when they pick up smaller stars which stray too close to the pulsar’s immense gravitational pull.

The “recycled” pulsar gets new life, destroying the smaller star in the process. This is what eventually happens in black widow binary systems – hence the name and our diversion into the world of arachnids.

There are a couple of dozen known black widow binaries in the Milky Way. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) astronomers in the US have potentially found a new one, named ZTF J1406+1222, about 3,000 light years away. The discovery is the subject of a new Nature article.

The new black widow binary has the shortest orbital period yet observed for this kind of star pair, at just 62 minutes. Three’s a crowd, but it seems this pair is actually a trio with a third star orbiting the two inner stars every 10,000 years.

Such a system raises questions about how it was formed. The team theorises that the triplet was originally a part of a large, dense cluster of stars. As the cluster moved closer to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way, the black hole tore stars from the group, leaving behind the three we see today.

“It’s a complicated birth scenario,” says Kevin Burdge, a Pappalardo Fellow in MIT’s Department of Physics. “This system has probably been floating around in the Milky Way for longer than the Sun has been around.”

Normally, black widow binaries are found by observing the radiation emitted by the central pulsar. This time, the MIT team’s discovery was made by observing the flashing visible light coming from the pulsar’s smaller companion.

“I thought, instead of looking directly for the pulsar, try looking for the star that it’s cooking,” Burdge explains. Cooking is right. The companion star’s “day side” – the side which is perpetually facing the pulsar – can be several times hotter than the other side due to the constant radiation being shot at it by the pulsar.

The team looked through data taken from California’s Zwicky Transient Facility. If a star’s brightness changed by a factor of 10 or more on a timescale of about an hour or less, it was assumed to be a companion star orbiting tightly around a pulsar. The method was validated when the team correctly identified a dozen known black widow binaries.

They then spotted the star labelled ZTF J1406+1222, whose brightness changed by a factor of 13 every 62 minutes. Looking at data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, the team noticed the third star trailing behind the central pair.

“This system is really unique as far as black widows go, because we found it with visible light, and because of its wide companion, and the fact it came from the galactic centre,” Burdge says. “There’s still a lot we don’t understand about it. But we have a new way of looking for these systems in the sky.”

Oddly, though, the team have not detected the usual gamma or X-ray emissions expected from a pulsar in a black widow binary. “The one thing we know for sure is that we see a star with a day side that’s much hotter than the night side, orbiting around something every 62 minutes,” Burdge says. “Everything seems to point to it being a black widow binary. But there are a few weird things about it, so it’s possible it’s something entirely new.”

Further research on the system will be done and the team also plans to use their new method to identify more black widows.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/shortest-orbit-black-widow-binary-stars/

 

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I have the Song of Earth from that video collection as my laptop wallpaper. 

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May 10, 2022

NASA Mission Finds Tonga Volcanic Eruption Effects Reached Space

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, 2022, it sent atmospheric shock waves, sonic booms, and tsunami waves around the world. Now, scientists are finding the volcano’s effects also reached space.

Analyzing data from NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm satellites, scientists found that in the hours after the eruption, hurricane-speed winds and unusual electric currents formed in the ionosphere – Earth’s electrified upper atmospheric layer at the edge of space.

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption on Jan. 15, 2022, caused many effects, some illustrated here, that were felt around the world and even into space. Some of those effects, like extreme winds and unusual electric currents were picked up by NASA’s ICON mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm. Image not to scale.

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith

 

“The volcano created one of the largest disturbances in space we’ve seen in the modern era,” said Brian Harding, a physicist at University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on a new paper discussing the findings. “It is allowing us to test the poorly understood connection between the lower atmosphere and space.”

ICON launched in 2019 to identify how Earth’s weather interacts with weather from space – a relatively new idea supplanting previous assumptions that only forces from the Sun and space could create weather at the edge of the ionosphere. In January 2022, as the spacecraft passed over South America, it observed one such earthly disturbance in the ionosphere triggered by the South Pacific volcano.

“These results are an exciting look at how events on Earth can affect weather in space, in addition to space weather affecting Earth,” said Jim Spann, space weather lead for NASA’s Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Understanding space weather holistically will ultimately help us mitigate its effects on society.”

The GOES-17 satellite captured images of an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022. Crescent-shaped bow shock waves and numerous lighting strikes are also visible.

Credits: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using GOES imagery courtesy of NOAA and NESDIS

 

When the volcano erupted, it pushed a giant plume of gases, water vapor, and dust into the sky. The explosion also created large pressure disturbances in the atmosphere, leading to strong winds. As the winds expanded upwards into thinner atmospheric layers, they began moving faster. Upon reaching the ionosphere and the edge of space, ICON clocked the windspeeds at up to 450 mph – making them the strongest winds below 120 miles altitude measured by the mission since its launch.

In the ionosphere, the extreme winds also affected electric currents. Particles in the ionosphere regularly form an east-flowing electric current – called the equatorial electrojet – powered by winds in the lower atmosphere. After the eruption, the equatorial electrojet surged to five times its normal peak power and dramatically flipped direction, flowing westward for a short period.

“It's very surprising to see the electrojet be greatly reversed by something that happened on Earth's surface,” said Joanne Wu, a physicist at University of California, Berkeley, and co-author on the new study. “This is something we’ve only previously seen with strong geomagnetic storms, which are a form of weather in space caused by particles and radiation from the Sun.”

The new research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is adding to scientists’ understanding of how the ionosphere is affected by events on the ground as well as from space. A strong equatorial electrojet is associated with redistribution of material in the ionosphere, which can disrupt GPS and radio signals that are transmitted through the region.

Understanding how this complex area of our atmosphere reacts in the face of strong forces from below and above is a key part of NASA research. NASA’s upcoming Geospace Dynamics Constellation, or GDC, mission will use a fleet of small satellites, much like weather sensors on the ground, to track the electrical currents and atmospheric winds coursing through the area. By better understanding what affects electrical currents in the ionosphere, scientists can be more prepared to predict severe problems caused by such disturbances.  

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/sun/nasa-mission-finds-tonga-volcanic-eruption-effects-reached-space

Edited May 11, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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[Bluewolf]

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Plants grown in moon soil from Apollo missions

The plant Arabidopsis thaliana germinates and grows in lunar soils

If you’re like me and struggle to keep an indoor plant alive, the thought of growing plants in moon soil seems out of this world.

A team of scientists from the University of Florida have shown it can be done, by successfully growing the plant Arabidopsis thaliana in soil samples collected during the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 lunar missions. Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as thale cress, is a small flowering plant belonging to the Brassicaceae family (which includes mustard, cabbage and radish), and is a valuable plant used in numerous plant experiments.

Plants are essential in our ambitions for extended space exploration. As model organisms, they provide insight into space-related phenomena such as gravity and radiation but plants also provide necessary components for human habitation, such as food, oxygen, water recycling, and carbon dioxide sequestration.

While previous extra-terrestrial plant experiments have relied on hydroponic setups, this experiment used lunar soils to understand how plants might grow on the moon’s surface. The researchers also used a sample of compositionally similar lunar soil simulant made from volcanic ash from Earth as a control. The Apollo mission soils each had their own characteristics: samples from Apollo 11 had been exposed to lunar surfaces for longer than those from missions Apollo 12 or 17, as samples were collected from different soil layers during each mission.

So, how did the moon garden grow?

FULL REPORT

 

Edited May 17, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Supermassive black hole in Milky Way’s centre, Sagittarius A*, imaged for the first time

NASA’s Event Horizon Telescope took the picture of Sagittarius A*, helping us understand the mysteries of black holes.

On Thursday last week, NASA’s Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first ever image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The imaging of the supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), provides strong evidence to support the 60-year-old theory that a supermassive black hole lurks at the centre of the Milky Way.

The release of the picture is the latest in a series of developments in our knowledge of these elusive and mysterious objects – and come three years after the imaging of the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy (M87*).

Sagittarius A* lies in the centre of the Milky Way 26,000 lightyears away from Earth and can be seen in the night sky as part of the Sagittarius constellation. Despite being four million times more massive than our Sun, Sagittarius A* is still about 1000 times smaller than the M87 supermassive black hole.

More than 300 astronomers, and hundreds of engineers and support staff from 60 institutions across 20 countries and regions, processed data from a 2017 observation of Sagittarius A*.

Referred to as an “Earth-sized telescope,” the EHT links together 11 telescopes around the world, effectively creating one telescope with a mirror the size of the Earth. The EHT detects radio frequencies to create the image of Sagittarius A*. The bright orange ring in the image is the matter swirling around the black hole, and the dark shadow in the middle is the black hole itself.

“While the Earth is rotating, all telescopes observe the same astronomical object for several hours,” explains Thomas P Krichbaum, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, at a press conference to announce the findings. “At each telescope, the data are recorded on hard disks and are accurately time tagged by precise atomic clocks. After observations, the data are shipped to processing centres where they are combined in supercomputers.

“After a number of quite complex data analysis steps, this results in the high-resolution image of the radio source.”

Though captured at the same time, the image of Sagittarius A* took longer to complete than the image of M87*. This is because Sagittarius A* is constantly changing with matter orbiting it in a matter of minutes. Comparatively, matter orbits M87* over the course of days. So, imaging Sagittarius A* clearly is not easy work.

“The gas in the vicinity of the black holes moves at the same speed – nearly as fast as light – around both Sgr A* and M87*,” says Chi-kwan Chan, an EHT scientist based at the University of Arizona, US. “But where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A* it completes an orbit in mere minutes. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* were changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it – a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail.”

Xavier Barcons, director general of the European Southern Observatory, spoke at the press conference: “This extraordinary result would not have been possible to achieve by one single facility or even the national astronomical community of a single country. It took eight radio observatories around the world, and that network has already expanded to 11 today, many built, funded, operated and supported through international organisations across many countries around the world.”

Barcons added that the discovery “shows what we can achieve when we cooperate, when we work together. This is very important to remember in the times that we are living in, where the world is not running in that direction unfortunately”.

Super dense objects whose gravitational pull not even light can escape, black holes are extreme examples of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

“We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” says EHT scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.”

Other astronomers and black hole experts have reacted to the image of Sagittarius A*.

Science director at Australia’s Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Professor James Miller-Jones, praised the “quite remarkable feat in imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy”.

“Excitingly, the near-perfect agreement of the image with the theoretical predictions shows that Einstein’s General Relativity has passed yet another stringent test, and the similarity of the image with that of M87 provides further confidence in our understanding of how a black hole looks and behaves,” he says. “However, this is only a first glimpse into the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way; ongoing telescope upgrades should provide sharper images, and the next-generation facility being planned is aiming to provide real-time movies of black holes, allowing us to study the turbulent environment around these exotic objects.”

The imaging of Sagittarius A* is another exciting step forward as scientists seek to understand these mysterious and extreme objects.

Last week, Cosmos reported that NASA had released the sounds of black holes, including the music produced by M87*. Scientists involved in the sonification projects spoke with Cosmos.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers reproduced the sound produced by the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster. “Clusters of galaxies contain huge amounts of hot gas – with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees – between the galaxies, which produces X-rays detected by Chandra,” explains Peter Edmonds, senior astrophysicist with the Harvard and Smithsonian-based Center for Astrophysics in the US.

“In the case of the Perseus galaxy cluster, astronomers used the Chandra X-ray data to detect a pattern of ripples in the hot gas, which they interpreted as sound waves generated by outbursts from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the cluster. The regular spacing corresponds to an extraordinarily deep note.”

The sounds from the Perseus black hole “tell us that black holes can produce regular, powerful eruptions of material, and they also tell us how long this activity can last,” says Edmonds.

Kim Arcand, also from the Center for Astrophysics says: “Engaging more than visual senses with astrophysical data may be beneficial for both research and communication.

“We are interested in exploring this potential and working on new techniques to squeeze all of the sciencey goodness out of the data available to us of our rather fascinating and certainly mysterious universe.

“It’s a whole other way to consider data of our universe, and I get particularly excited about the potential to breathe some new life into archival data,” Arcand adds.  “We are starting to research some techniques to help us potentially compare the geometries of astrophysical objects through sonification, whether radial slices moving through a cluster, or stepping along an edge-on galaxy, etc.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/sagittarius-a-black-hole-image-nasa/

 

Edited May 17, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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[nudge+]

So there's a very intriguing mystery with the Voyager 1 happening now. Basically, the probe is still operating normally (receiving and executing commands from Earth, gathering and returning science data), but the telemetry/location data it's sending to Earth appears to be completely random and don't reflect the probe's actual position  

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/engineers-investigating-nasas-voyager-1-telemetry-data

 

[CaaC (John)+]

10 minutes ago, nudge said:

So there's a very intriguing mystery with the Voyager 1 happening now. Basically, the probe is still operating normally (receiving and executing commands from Earth, gathering and returning science data), but the telemetry/location data it's sending to Earth appears to be completely random and don't reflect the probe's actual position  

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/engineers-investigating-nasas-voyager-1-telemetry-data

 

Aliens have sneaked into the system 

Nah, serious, things like this happening from 14.5 billion miles away keeps you guessing, it's not as if they can jump on a rocket with all the gear and fly off and fix it in 2 hours, 'Beam me up, Scotty...' I wished 

[nudge+]

1 minute ago, CaaC (John) said:

Aliens have sneaked into the system 

Nah, serious, things like this happening from 14.5 billion miles away keeps you guessing, it's not as if they can jump on a rocket with all the gear and fly off and fix it in 2 hours, 'Beam me up, Scotty...' I wished 

Alien hackers  

It could be some sort of malfunctioning, but I hope it stumbled upon some unexpected, unknown scientific phenomenon in space. My all time favourite space mission; would be great if after 45 years of operating and giving us an immense amount of data and new discoveries, it still finds something that breaks our current knowledge... 

[CaaC (John)+]

12 minutes ago, nudge said:

but I hope it stumbled upon some unexpected,

So do I, stops all this mumbo jumbo about aliens living on Mars etc. it's like it was reported that What Are These "Space Snails" on Pluto?............

Scientific explanation, ice blobs from beneath the surface...

 

[Bluewolf]

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Explore - From Space to Sound

Ever wondered what the music of the spheres would sound like? Hubble brings us cosmic sights, but these astronomical marvels can be experienced with other senses as well. Through data sonification, the same digital data that gets translated into images is transformed into sound.

Elements of the image, like brightness and position, are assigned pitches and volumes. Each translation below begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right. No sound can travel in space, but sonifications provide a new way of experiencing and conceptualizing data. Sonifications allow the audience, including blind and visually impaired communities, to “listen” to astronomical images and explore their data.

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These 4 signs of alien technology could lead us to extraterrestrial life

Pioneering scientists think we should start looking for extraterrestrials in a whole new way: by seeking out alien technology.

Project Galileo is a new mission that will hunt our Solar System and beyond for remnants of alien civilisations. Whether it's potential alien probes – like 'Oumuamua – or even a distant megastructure, these signs of extraterrestrial life will completely change our place in the Universe.

Megastructures

Just as our global energy needs are always increasing, so too will the energy needs of an advanced alien civilisation. In 1960, Anglo-American physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that, eventually, extraterrestrials (ETs) will want to use the entire energy output of their parent star.

They might do this, he argued, by dismantling their asteroid belt and reconstructing it in the form of a spherical shell that completely encloses their sun. Not only would this provide tremendous amounts of energy, it would offer an enormous surface area – the interior of the shell – for living space.

A Dyson sphere would be unstable but an equatorial belt or a vast constellation of satellites could still intercept huge amounts of stellar energy. Such a structure might be detectable because the laws of thermodynamics predict that the intercepted starlight is emitted as heat radiation, or far-infrared.

Also, a large number of bodies in orbit around a star might eclipse its light, causing it to fluctuate wildly. This was seen in the case of KIC 8462852 or ‘Tabby’s star’. Although this was explained by dust within our own Solar System, the possibility remains that the light of other stars might be variable in an unusual manner and explicable only by megastructures in close orbit.

Industrial chemicals

Human civilisation injects polluting chemicals into the atmosphere of Earth, and extraterrestrial civilisations may do the same. Such chemicals are not only potentially detectable but also unambiguously of intelligent origin.

If we observe a planet in a Solar System beyond our own, as the planet moves between us and its parent star, starlight will pass through its atmosphere and bites of light will be taken out at characteristic wavelengths of atmospheric chemicals. This allows astronomers to detect what substances are present in the planet’s atmosphere.

According to astrophysicist Prof Avi Loeb, some promising industrial chemicals to look for in these alien atmospheres are tetrafluoromethane (CF₄) and trichlorofluoromethane (CCl₃F). Both of these chemicals are refrigerants and are the two easiest chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to detect.

“If CCl₃F and CF₄ exist at 10 times current terrestrial levels, they should be detectable in 1.2 and 1.7 days of observing, respectively, with the James Webb Space Telescope [which was launched on Christmas Day 2021],” Loeb says.

Light sails

Aliens will face the same problem as we do if they cross interplanetary or interstellar space. Large amounts of fuel are needed in order to drive a spaceship. But this problem goes away if the spaceship’s power source is left at home.

This was the proposal of Robert Forward of Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. In 1984, he described a laser-pushed light sail. A payload would be attached to a large, ultra-thin sail of reflective material and this would be pushed by a solar-powered laser based in the Solar System. Forward calculated that a one-tonne probe attached to a 3.6km-wide light sail could be accelerated by a 65GW laser to 11 per cent of the speed of light and fly by the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in just 40 years.

This idea has been recently revived for the Breakthrough Starshot programme. It’s at an early stage, but the aim is to use a 100GW laser array to push a far more modest, one-gram (!) payload to 20 per cent of the speed of light and flyby and photograph the planet around Proxima Centauri.

If ETs use similar laser-pushed light sails to zip around their planetary systems or the Galaxy, we may be able to pick up the flashes of light when their lasers are turned on and off.

Wormhole transport systems

A sufficiently advanced civilisation might be able to manipulate space-time itself to create wormholes. These shortcuts through space-time – which are permitted to exist by Einstein’s theory of gravity – could enable a galaxy to be crossed in the blink of an eye.

Intrinsically unstable, a wormhole would need ‘stuff’ with repulsive gravity to hold open each mouth, and the energy equivalent to that emitted by an appreciable fraction of the stars in a Galaxy. We know such stuff exists because it is speeding up the expansion of the Universe in the guise of dark energy, though its gravity is too weak to prop open a wormhole.

If ETs have created a network of wormholes, it might be detectable by gravitational microlensing. This occurs when a celestial object passes between us and a distant star and its gravity briefly magnifies the light of the star.

If the object is a wormhole, the pattern of brightening and fading of the star is distinctly different, according to Prof Fumio Abe of Nagoya University in Japan. “If the wormholes have throat radii between 100 and 10 million kilometres, are bound to our Galaxy, and are as common as ordinary stars, detection might be achieved by reanalysing past data,” he says.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/signs-of-alien-tech/

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by CaaC (John)

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Neutron stars might be more numerous than thought

The discovery of a neutron star emitting slower radio signals than ever recorded suggests there are more to be found.

It is estimated that the Milky Way galaxy is home to several hundred billion stars, which come in all shapes and sizes. Our Sun is a medium-sized, yellow star. There are the massive blue giants and small, cold, brown dwarfs. Then there are stranger kinds, such as neutron stars.

New research published in Nature Astronomy shows that many neutron stars may have literally gone under the radar, and that there could be more of them than previously thought.

When giant stars die, they supernova and their core collapses in on itself. The energy involved in the core collapse causes the electrons and protons in the atoms making up the core to fuse together, forming neutrons. Hence, a neutron star is born. These objects are usually only tens of kilometres across, but they are super dense – they can weigh more than the Sun.

Pulsars are neutron stars that emit twin beams of radio waves from their magnetic poles. This radiation jets out across the galaxy. As pulsars rotate, their radio signals are seen as pulses when observed from Earth.

Normally, pulsars rotate every few milliseconds or in the order of seconds. As they age, pulsars begin to spin more slowly, and astronomers theorise that their radio emission ceases.

But now a neutron star has been observed with a rotation period of 76 seconds – three times longer than the usual range. The team believes that this means there could be far more neutron stars in the galaxy than previously thought.

The neutron star, named PSR J0901-4046, was serendipitously discovered in 2020 by the Meer(more) TRAnsients and Pulsars (MeerTRAP) and ThunderKAT projects at the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

Neutron stars with longer rotation times indicate to astronomers the potential presence of others with similarly longer rotation periods. Until now, astronomers have largely been searching for neutron stars in the usual range, with pulses up to 10 or 20 seconds, but the existence of PSR J0901-4046 suggests there may be more outside this range waiting to be discovered.

“Detecting similar sources is observationally challenging, which implies a larger undetected population,” the authors, headed by lead author Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney, write.

The Australian-based team of international researchers believes the result also suggests a link between different cosmic bodies, and may deepen our understanding of neutron-star evolution. “Our discovery establishes the existence of ultra-long-period neutron stars, suggesting a possible connection to the evolution of highly magnetized neutron stars, ultra-long-period magnetars [another type of neutron star] and fast radio bursts [FRBs],” the authors write. “Future image and time domain searches for similar long-period objects could prove vital to our understanding of the Galactic neutron star population and potential links to FRBs.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/neutron-star-more-numerous/

 

Edited June 5, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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How a bacterial species in extraterrestrial kombucha cultures can survives outer space.

Scientists think that’s thanks to its cellulose-based biofilm.

When Kombucha cultures were blasted into space and sent to the International Space Station (ISS) it wasn’t so health-conscious astronauts could make a refreshing drink, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

Although the challenges of growing food in space are well documented (space lettuce, anyone?), scientists sent the cultures up there in 2014 to investigate the survival of the kombucha microbial species under space conditions.

Here on Earth, it’s grown and sold as a drink produced from fermenting sugared tea with a kombucha symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) – also called the kombucha microbial community (KMC).

The KMC cultures were attached to the outside of the ISS and subjected to the vacuum of space and to simulated Mars-like conditions for 18 months. Then they were brought back and reactivated on Earth.

Researchers found that while the microbial ecology of the kombucha culture was destroyed, a cellulose-producing bacterial genus survived and the genome of one of its key species remained stable, most likely due to its protective biofilm.

“Based on our metagenomic analysis, we found that the simulated Martian environment drastically disrupted the microbial ecology of kombucha cultures,” says co-author Bertram Brenig, professor of molecular biology of livestock and director of the Institute of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

“However, we were surprised to discover that the cellulose-producing bacteria of the genus Komagataeibacter survived.”

This is the first evidence that bacterial cellulose could be a biomarker for life in outer space, and suggests that cellulose-based membranes or films could be a promising biomaterial for protecting life and producing consumer goods in off-Earth settlements.

Why send kombucha microbes to space?

The original kombucha culture used in this study was maintained in filter-sterilised black tea (Lipton to be exact) with white sugar, but a dehydrated KMC biofilm was sent to the ISS.

Scientists wanted to understand the capability of organisms to survive the harsh conditions in outer space, including exposure to cosmic radiation, microgravity, temperature extremes, and the vacuum.

They subjected the KMC to these conditions using the EXPOSE-R2 platform – a miniature photochemistry laboratory installed on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS).

After 18 months of exposure, the samples were brought back to Earth, reactivated and cultivated for two years. The surviving bacterial genomes were then sequenced to understand genome stability under extraterrestrial conditions by comparing them with a ground-based culture.

“Our results show that K. oboediens was able to survive being exposed to the space environment for 18 months and that its genome remains mainly conserved after spaceflight,” they say.

In fact, the genetics behind cellulose synthesis, nitrogen-fixation, hopanoid lipids biosynthesis, and stress-related pathways were not affected, and only minor changes were observed in central carbohydrate and energy metabolism pathways.

Because its metabolic pathways remained unaffected, the authors say that this species may have potential for space applications: “This suggests that K. oboediens is a strong candidate for cellulose production in Mars colonies’ industry.”

According to the researchers, the ability of K. oboediens to maintain its genome’s stability and functionality when exposed to the space environment is either due to a recovery of most of its functions after successive cultures in the lab back on Earth, or due to the protective role of the cellulose-based KMC biofilm in space.

So, the KMC biofilm needs future research to explore its potential for space-related technologies.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/kombucha-bacteria-survive-outer-space/

 

Edited June 7, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Fast radio bursts just keep getting weirder

Discovery of rare pulsing high-energy radio burst may help cosmologists to learn more about these mysterious cosmic phenomena.

Astronomers from The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US have found that a fast radio burst (FRB), FRB190520, that was first discovered in 2019 shares an odd characteristic with just one other FRB of the 500-plus that have so far been discovered. It’s hoped their findings may help shed new light on the origins of these mysterious cosmic phenomena.

Fast radio bursts are exactly what the name implies – an intense but short-lived burst of energy in the radio spectrum. Exactly how intense and short-lived are we talking here? Try emitting as much energy in a couple of milliseconds as the Sun does in three days on for size!

FRBs are a relatively new area of study – the first was only discovered in 2007, lurking in radio telescope data that had been gathered in 2001, and scientists had never actually observed one taking place 'live' (or rather, seen the resulting afterglow) until a team at Australia’s Parkes Observatory did just that in 2015. As such, there is still much about them that is unknown – not least what actually causes them.

Various points of origin have been mooted for FRBs, including neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, black holes, star collisions and magnetars, a subset of neutron stars that are magnetically ultra-charged, but scientists have yet to pin down a precise cause.

It may even be that more than one type of cosmological object or event can cause the phenomenon – not least because while most FRBs appear to be one-off events, some repeat in a regular, predictable cycle. Which is where FRB190520 comes in.

Like most bursts, FRB190520 was discovered by trawling through archived telescope data – the burst occurred on 19 May 2019, but wasn’t ‘seen’ until November that year. But astronomers soon realised that this was one of the rarer ‘repeater’ class; what has only more recently been discovered is that, in-between those regular high-energy bursts, whatever is causing FRB190520 is also the source of constant, much lower-energy radio emissions, a characteristic it shares only with FRB121102.

The scientists now hope that by studying the differences between these two FRBs and all the others, they may be able learn more about the phenomenon’s origins.

"The FRB field is moving very fast right now and new discoveries are coming out monthly. However, big questions still remain, and this object is giving us challenging clues about those questions," said Sarah Burke-Spolaor, of WVU.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/fast-radio-bursts-just-keep-getting-weirder/

 

Edited June 8, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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EXPLORE - OUR UNIVERSE | SKYMAP

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Australian researchers discover the fastest-growing black hole of the last 9 billion years

Visible to a backyard astronomer, and yet only just discovered.

Black holes are the densest, most mysterious objects in the universe. These super-compressed objects are millions or billions of times larger than our own Sun, with gravitational pulls so great that not even light can escape.

But not all black holes are created equal. Some are larger than others and, while they all absorb the matter around them, some grow faster.

Led by researchers at the Australian National University (ANU), an international team has found the fastest-growing black hole of the last 9 billion years. The discovery was published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

Lead author Chris Onken, an astrophysicist at ANU, explains that we can tell how fast a black hole is growing by measuring its brightness, or luminosity. “As more stuff is falling into the black hole, that material – like a ball rolling down the hill – increases speed and there’s a lot of friction within the gas falling into the black hole. The gas then gets very hot, and shines across, in this case, more than half the universe. This black hole is eating the equivalent of 80 of our Suns every year, or an Earth every second.”

The observations we make in the universe come in the form of light, which takes time to travel across the vast expanse of space. The light from the new black hole, SMSS J114447.77-430859.3 (J1144 for short), took 7 billion years to reach Earth.

Early in the universe’s history, fast black-hole growth rates are not unusual. But, comparing the newly discovered object with others found over the past 60 years, the team found none with comparable growth in the last 9 billion years.

The cause of J1144’s fast growth is still not clear, says Onken. “The fact that this is such an outlier that’s so much brighter than the other black holes at that age of the universe means that maybe it’s something like the collision of two big galaxies, which is suddenly able to feed the black hole and let it grow that rapidly.

“If you look at those systems much earlier in the history of the universe, that’s when there were many more mergers between galaxies. And so you have lots of growth of black holes, lots of growth of the galaxies in which they live. Looking back about 7 billion years, just past the halfway point in the universe’s life, we don’t see other black holes growing as rapidly as J1144. And the brightest ones that we know of are a few times fainter than this one.”

J1144 was found by Adrian Lucy, a PhD student at Columbia University, US, and now a postdoc in Baltimore, who was looking for close pairs of stars in our own galaxy. Using the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey based at ANU, Lucy found several hundred candidates and one object that didn’t look like the others.

While working with Lucy, ANU professor Christian Wolf noticed the object resembled a quasar – the bright indicator of the presence of a black hole.

“The very first such quasar was found in the 1960s, when they were first able to identify that this extremely luminous object that’s at a very large distance had an energy source much more efficient than just fusion at the centers of stars,” says Onken. “The fact that this new one that hadn’t been discovered over 60 years of searching was only a little bit fainter than the very first one was discovered back in the ‘60s, and it was so much further away, must mean that it’s incredibly luminous and growing at a very fast rate.”

But why has it taken so long to find such a bright object – one a backyard astronomer with a decent telescope could see?

Onken says previous searches have avoided looking close to the plane of the Milky Way, where there’s so much stuff it can get very messy. Earlier surveys stopped at between 30 and 20 degrees from the plane of our galaxy, but J1144 sits at 18 degrees.

“That motivated us to actually go back and see how many more there might be like this that have escaped discovery so far,” says Onken. “We haven’t found any quite as bright as J1144, but our current count is up to 80 sources that have escaped previous detection but are unusually bright, so I’m working to complete that survey and find all the bright quasars that are out there.”

Onken hopes to study J1144 further in the ultraviolet spectrum.

“Getting above the atmosphere gives you access to that ultraviolet portion of the spectrum and that could tell us a lot more about the regions close to the black hole,” he says. “And it could even tell us something about our own Milky Way. You can use these bright, distant objects as headlights shining through the gas around the Milky Way to understand more about our own local system.”

Because J1144 is so bright, it is ionising – removing electrons from – a very large region of the gas around the black hole. Using telescopes in Chile, Onken believes it may be possible to see the rotation of the gas around the black hole.

The team has also used historical observations, which serendipitously captured J1144 without realising.

“It’s really been a lot of fun to look at photographic plates from 1901 that have pictures of this very black hole about as bright as we see it now. This shows it is not a transient phenomenon. It’s been going on for quite a long time. It’s been fun to build in that historical aspect to this cutting-edge research.

“We are excited to learn more about this object in particular, but also trying to complete that census for these really bright objects that will tell us more about how it is that a massive black hole can be fed at such a large rate.

“We can get a better understanding of how that may have happened early in the universe by studying these more nearby examples.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/fastest-growing-black-hole-anu/

 

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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The supernova explosion that failed to kill it’s star

Mystery star survived catastrophic blast.

Scientists studying a galaxy 120 million light years away have found remnants of a star that appears to have survived a supernova explosion.

Curtis McCully of Las Cumbres Observatory told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society last week that the find was startling because it was a type of supernova, known as a type 1a supernova, generally believed to be caused by a titanic thermonuclear explosion.

Such blasts, McCully said, occur in white dwarf stars, in which a star the size of the Sun had collapsed to a white-hot remnant about the size of Earth.

Usually, McCully said, these blasts signalled the complete destruction of the white dwarf. But in this case, not only did follow-up observation reveal a star at the site of the blast, but that star was actually brighter after the explosion than it had been beforehand.

The blast, known as SN 2012Z, occurred in the galaxy NGC 1309, in the constellation Eridanus. It was spotted in 2012 (hence the 2012 in its name). Like all supernovas, it caught attention at the time, but when McCully’s team took a look at it afterward, they were not only able to find Hubble Space Telescope images taken of the progenitor star before the blast, but also ones taken of the same area in 2016, four years later.

“This was very fortuitous, because it gave us a chance to see the entire life cycle of the supernova from before it exploded to much later,” McCully says.

It was from these images that his team was able to find that the original star was not only still there, but brighter than ever.

One of McCully’s colleagues, Andy Howell (also of Las Cumbres Observatory), compared it to the resurrection of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: “Nature tried to strike this star down, but it came back more powerful than we could have imagined.”

                

The reason is a bit of a mystery, but it appears to have been a “failed” supernova in which the blast wasn’t quite strong enough to destroy the star.

Why this type of supernova occurs at all isn’t quite clear, but a leading theory is that the white dwarf has a more normal-sized companion star, which it orbits closely enough to be able to “steal” mass from it. Eventually, the stolen mass reaches a point where a cascade of thermonuclear reactions ignite in the white dwarf’s core, leading to a runaway explosion that blasts it to smithereens.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/supernova-failed/

 

Edited June 18, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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“Blue blobs” discovered by astronomers are a new star system not bound to any galaxies

The star systems are full of very blue, very young stars.

High school science tells us that planets orbit stars and stars are found in galaxies. For the most part, that’s right. But astronomers have identified a new type of star system which doesn’t emerge in any galaxies.

In a press release, University of Arizona astronomers have noted their identification of five examples of the new stellar system. The new system is not quite a galaxy and seems to exist only in isolation – outside any parent galaxy.

And the systems have a fun name. After their appearance as seen through telescopes, the astronomers have been referring to the structures as “blue blobs”.

The examples discovered are located within the relatively nearby Virgo galaxy cluster (a mere 54 million light years away) – a collection of more than 2000 galaxies. The blue blobs are “tiny” – the size of “dwarf galaxies” which contain anywhere from 1000 to several billion stars (compared with our Milky Way galaxy and its 200–400 billion stars).

But, beguilingly, the blue blobs of bloated gas balls belong to no “parent” galaxy. Some of the blue blobs are as much as 300,000 light years from the nearest potential host.

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Blue blobs are made predominantly of very blue and very “going” stars – an indication that the systems contain very little hydrogen gas. But atomic hydrogen gas is the stuff which condenses to form stars in the first place.

So, where did the blue blobs come from and how did they form? This remains a mystery.

The blue blobs were discovered by accident when another research group based in the Netherlands compiled a list of gas clouds which may give rise to new galaxies. The University of Arizona team and others analysed the list, looking for stars in the gas clouds using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico and the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

The first collection of stars, named SECCO1, was found to be further away than originally thought – the first of the “blue blobs”.

Lead author of a study on the blue blobs, University of Arizona postdoctoral fellow Michael Jones presented the findings at the 240^th American Astronomical Society meeting, which wrapped up at the Pasadena Convention Center on June 16.

“It’s a lesson in the unexpected,” Jones says. “When you’re looking for things, you’re not necessarily going to find the thing you’re looking for, but you might find something else very interesting.

“We observed that most of the systems lack atomic gas, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t molecular gas.

 “In fact, there must be some molecular gas because they are still forming stars. The existence of mostly young stars and little gas, signals that these systems must have lost their gas recently.”

Gas can be stripped from stellar systems, like a galaxy, in two main ways: tidal stripping, when big galaxies pass and tear gas and stars away from each other gravitationally; and ram pressure stripping. “This is like if you belly flop into a swimming pool,” Jones explains. “When a galaxy belly flops into a cluster that is full of hot gas, then its gas gets forced out behind it.

“That’s the mechanism that we think we’re seeing here to create these objects.”

The team believes blue blobs formed in this latter method because the speed of the process explains the systems’ isolation.

Also surprising is the lack of older, redder stars in the systems.

“Stars that are born red are lower mass and therefore live longer than blue stars, which burn fast and die young, so old red stars are usually the last ones left living,” Jones says.

“And they’re dead because they don’t have any more gas with which to form new stars. These blue stars are like an oasis in the desert, basically.”

Jones says that the abundance of metal in the systems may hint at how they might have formed.

“To astronomers, metals are any element heavier than helium,” Jones says. “This tells us that these stellar systems formed from gas that was stripped from a big galaxy, because how metals are built up is by many repeated episodes of star formation, and you only really get that in a big galaxy.”

As the blue blobs drift through space, astronomers predict they will break apart into individual star clusters.

Lead researcher and co-author David Sand, astronomy associate professor at the University of Arizona, says the team’s findings add to the broader “story of recycling of gas and stars in the universe”. “We think that this belly flopping process changes a lot of spiral galaxies into elliptical galaxies on some level, so learning more about the general process teaches us more about galaxy formation,” Sand says.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/blue-blobs-star-system/

 

 

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Rare five-planet alignment to dazzle the night sky

Get set for a planetary parade when Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will sequentially align for the first time in 18 years.

We had the strawberry supermoon earlier in the month, the summer solstice on the 21 June, and now we’re being treated to an exciting planetary alignment.

The last time the planets aligned in a similar way was back in 2004, and it won’t happen again until 2040, so it’s worth getting a glimpse if you can.

One of the best things about this planetary alignment is the brightness. Under clear skies, it should even be visible from cities and towns, and you’ll need an unobstructed view of the eastern and southern horizon.

But when exactly can you see these planets performing their majestic line-up? And which constellations will each of the planets appear in? Answers to these questions, and more, are below.

If you’re looking forward to making the most of clear nights this year, why not plan ahead with our full Moon UK calendar and astronomy for beginners guide? There are also plenty more meteor showers due to light up the skies in 2022, including the Perseids, Orionids and Geminids. We’ve rounded them all up in this handy meteor shower calendar.

Which planets will I be able to see?

The five bright planets will be visible with the naked eye, and rather excitingly for stargazers, will appear in the same order as they are in their orbits around the Sun.

From the east-northeast horizon looking towards the right, you’ll be able to see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with the naked eye. If you have a pair of good binoculars or a telescope, you may also be able to glimpse Uranus between Venus and the Moon, although it is difficult to see, and conditions will need to be near-pristine for this.

A waning crescent Moon will join the party from 23 to 25 June and will mark Earth’s relative position between Venus and Mars. From 26 June, the Moon will start to shift closer to the horizon, appearing to move backwards through the planetary line-up, moving first past Venus and then Mercury before slipping below the horizon to the left of the planets.

When can I see the planetary alignment?

You’ll need to get up early to see this planetary parade at its best, around an hour before dawn on the morning of the 23 and 24 June 2022, when Mercury rises above the horizon.

The best time to see the planets align will be between 3:39am and sunrise at 4:43am on the morning of 24 June 2022.

Saturn will be the first of the planets to appear, rising above the horizon just before midnight. Saturn’s rings contribute to its brightness (and therefore our ability to see it with the naked eye) and like much in astronomy, the appearance of Saturn’s rings is cyclical. As viewed from the Earth, the planet is gradually becoming more edge-on, and will be completely edge-on by 2025. During the planetary line-up in 2022, Saturn will appear in its classic representation with its northern hemisphere tilted towards us, and the rings clearly visible through a telescope, sitting between the constellations Aquarius and Capricornus.

Jupiter will be next to rise, around 1:07am in the early morning of the 24 June. It will shine brightly, more than twice as brightly as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, and will sit in the constellation Pisces.

Next, Mars will rise at around 1:37am, and you’ll be able to recognise it by the distinctive orangey-yellow hue. Mars will join Jupiter in the constellation Pisces.

Venus will be the penultimate of the planets to rise at 3:03 am, becoming the brightest member of the line-up. Venus will sit in the constellation Taurus, and on a clear night, you might also be able to make out the Pleiades star cluster above it.

Mercury is the fifth, and last, planet to join the heavenly hurrah, which starts to peep above the horizon from 3:39am. The small planet will join Venus in Taurus and will remain near to the horizon until the sunrise at 4:43am washes all planets from the sky.

Over the next few months, the planets will spread out, and the line will disperse.

When was the last time the planets aligned?

It’s not unusual to see two or three planets in the night sky, but planetary alignments of this kind are pretty rare. Because of the orientation and tilt of their orbits, the eight major planets of the Solar System can never come into perfect alignment. The last time they appeared even in the same part of the sky was over 1,000 years ago, in the year AD 949, and they won’t manage it again until 6 May 2492.

Fortunately, roughly every half a century or so, the brightest planets take up positions in the night sky, creating the impression of being in (more or less) a straight line.

We were witness to a rather nice planetary line-up earlier this year, however, the planets were not sequentially organised. The last time the fab five lined up was back in March 2004 (although Jupiter and Saturn were the ‘wrong’ way around) and will not align again in this way until August 2040. Although they will appear closer together in 2040, it will be harder to spot Mercury as it will be closer to the Sun in the morning sky.

How will the planetary alignment affect me?

In case you’re worried about the gravitational effects of such an alignment, don’t be. The extra pull on the Earth is negligible. Certain alignments are useful, however. During the 1970s, NASA exploited a special alignment of the planets to send space probes on a ‘grand tour’ of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with minimal effort. Such an alignment occurs just once every 175 years. Fortunately, it came just after NASA scientists figured out how to put it to use.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/planetary-alignment-2022/

 

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Pluto’s friend Charon has a red hat – now we think we know why

Experiment on Earth replicates otherworld conditions

Pluto may have been demoted from planetary status in 2006 (it was 16 years ago, Pluto fans – get over it!), but that doesn’t mean we’re not still looking at our little friend on the solar system’s outskirts.

Let’s turn our attention to the dwarf planet’s constant companion, Charon. Pluto and Charon orbit each other, though Charon is about half Pluto’s diameter.

Though Charon was discovered in 1978, it wasn’t until 2015 when NASA’s New Horizons mission to the outer solar system revealed Charon has a red region on its north pole. On an otherwise icy and – let’s be honest – relatively bland-looking rock, questions emerged about what Pluto’s friend’s red beanie is and how it was formed.

Now, New Horizons images plus novel laboratory experiments and modelling have revealed the likely story behind Charon’s cherry headwear. The team at the US Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) behind the research published their results in Geophysical Research Letters.

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“Prior to New Horizons, the best Hubble images of Pluto revealed only a fuzzy blob of reflected light,” says SwRI’s Randy Gladstone. “In addition to all the fascinating features discovered on Pluto’s surface, the flyby revealed an unusual feature on Charon, a surprising red cap centred on its north pole.”

Not long after the 2015 flyby, scientists proposed that the reddish patch could be due to ultraviolet light breaking down methane molecules. Methane from Pluto would freeze on the moon’s polar regions during the exceedingly chilly winter nights on Charon, which check in at -273°C. The substance would be like tholin – a sticky organic residue formed by light-powered chemical reactions.

“Our findings indicate that drastic seasonal surges in Charon’s thin atmosphere, as well as light breaking down the condensing methane frost, are key to understanding the origins of Charon’s red polar zone,” says the lead author of a related Science Advances paper on the research, SwRI’s Dr. Ujjwal Raut. “This is one of the most illustrative and stark examples of surface-atmospheric interactions so far observed at a planetary body.”

The team attempted to replicate Charon’s surface conditions at SwRI’s new Center for Laboratory Astrophysics and Space Science Experiments (CLASSE).

They were able to measure the composition and colour of hydrocarbons that could be produced over the winter hemisphere of the dwarf planet when methane freezes under Lyman-alpha ultraviolet light – the kind that would be scattered onto the moon by the hydrogen in Pluto’s atmosphere.

“Our team’s novel ‘dynamic photolysis’ experiments provided new limits on the contribution of interplanetary Lyman-alpha to the synthesis of Charon’s red material,” Raut said. “Our experiment condensed methane in an ultra-high vacuum chamber under exposure to Lyman-alpha photons to replicate with high fidelity the conditions at Charon’s poles.”

SwRI scientists then fed these results into their newly developed computer simulation to model Charon’s thin methane atmosphere.

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“The model points to ‘explosive’ seasonal pulsations in Charon’s atmosphere due to extreme shifts in conditions over Pluto’s long journey around the Sun,” says Dr Ben Teolis, lead author the Geophysical Research Letters paper. From the experimental data and their model, the researchers were able to estimate where the produced hydrocarbons (molecules made of carbon and hydrogen like methane) would end up on Charon’s surface.

But the model shows that Charon’s polar zones primarily generate ethane which is colourless. So, how did Charon get its crimson coloration?

“We think ionizing radiation from the solar wind decomposes the Lyman-alpha-cooked polar frost to synthesize increasingly complex, redder materials responsible for the unique albedo on this enigmatic moon,” Raut explains. “Ethane is less volatile than methane and stays frozen to Charon’s surface long after spring sunrise. Exposure to the solar wind may convert ethane into persistent reddish surface deposits contributing to Charon’s red cap.”

“The team is set to investigate the role of solar wind in the formation of the red pole,” says SwRI’s Dr Josh Kammer.

So, Charon’s funky scarlet bonnet may be due to frozen ethane being burned by solar radiation. Now, that’s a fire hat.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/pluto-charon-red-hat/

 

Edited June 26, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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