Socks, The Final Frontier

What is the greatest challenge facing humans as we prepare for the first crewed missions to Mars? Solar and cosmic radiation? Atrophying bone and muscle? Growing food? How about laundry? It’s strange but true, right now we don’t have a way to clean laundry in space.

In the microgravity environment of space, just about every single aspect of how we do our laundry here on Earth becomes a deadly hazard with a single point of failure. All that sudsy water, heat cycling, spinning mass, and even the buildup of static electricity, lint, or fumes could compromise a mission or even cost lives. But surely it’s just a matter of engineering, right? If other hygiene activities like showering have been successfully adapted for life in space, why not laundry?

Making Do Without

For shorter missions it’s just not needed. The longest Apollo and Shuttle missions were generally about two weeks long, which you may know from experience you can pack for. Lugging all that laundry around is still lighter and cheaper than bringing a washer and dryer with you, especially if you’d be shipping them to space at a cost of roughly $50,000 per kilogram.

Every space station we’ve built so far has orbited just a few hundred miles above the Earth, so while missions can last up to a year, laundry is just part of the resupply process. Fresh new clothes and linens, rigorously washed many times on Earth to remove lint, are launched aboard a resupply mission. Used clothes and linens are later packed into the resupply vessel which then undocks, de-orbits, and burns up as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. While this sanitizes the clothing with unparalleled effectiveness, it also makes them impossible to wear again.

But for the journey to Mars, which takes six or seven months in microgravity with no chance for resupply, with current methods every astronaut would require at least 35 kilos (75 pounds) of laundry per transit. Certainly to go beyond Mars, we reach a point where cleaning laundry in microgravity, and reclaiming used air and water, becomes more mass- and power-efficient than bringing hundreds of pounds of limited-use garments per person on every mission.

Non-Liquid Solutions

One key strategy is to somehow make clothes soil slower. Simple things like wearing the same clothes on alternating days helps. Spacecraft environments are engineered to maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity, which reduces sweating. Also in microgravity clothes tend to float away from the skin, slowing their absorption of sweat and oils.

Pushing the envelope starts with experiments like NASA’s Intravehicular Activity Clothing Study and Advanced Clothing System (ACS), and JAXA’s J-Wear, which have effectively demonstrated that antimicrobial materials and treatments can make clothing last for weeks instead of days. The two main strategies are including copper oxide or silver in the fabric, or dousing the fabric in antimicrobial compounds.

Another way to save mass is to find ways to use soiled laundry. During the Mir program Russian scientists designed a bacteria farm that could digest cosmonauts’ undergarments and produce methane for power or propulsion. More recently ISS Expedition 6 Science Officer Don Pettit used folded dirty underwear in lieu of actual soil to fashion planters for tomato and basil seeds. Expedition 6 also saw Commander Ken Bowersox wash his shorts in a plastic bag. This never became a common practice on the ISS.

Counterintuitively, fluid-less options like vacuum exposure, ultraviolet, and microwaves have been found to only half work. While they kill many bacteria, they can have trouble penetrating biofilms and do not remove the bacteria’s waste products or physical remains – which is what causes the malodor of used clothing.

Weightless Washing

Perhaps the earliest practical attempt at a microgravity washing machine is the Advanced Microgravity Compatible Integrated Laundry System (AMCILS), conceptualized by UMPQUA Research Company in the 1980s. This washer-dryer combo notably relied on water jets to agitate the clothes and microwaves to dry them. As of 2017 a prototype completed parabolic zero-G testing.

In 2021 six teams of summer interns at NASA’s Glenn Research Center each spent a week designing a space washing machine. The overall Best Design award went to a team that used a central corkscrew rather than a drum, to soak and agitate the laundry. NASA has hinted that the program may grow in the coming years, taking on the scale of programs like the Human Exploration Rover Challenge.

In August of 2020 parties from NASA and Tide’s parent company Proctor and Gamble jointly signed a Space Act Agreement to develop low-toxicity detergent use in microgravity, compatible with the water reclamation system on the ISS. The result of the Agreement is P&G Telescience Investigation of Detergent Experiments (PGTIDE), to-date the most rigorously flight-tested space laundry experiment. 

The PGTIDE experiment consists of three distinct efforts. Launching in December of 2021, Objective 1’s payload is a sample of Tide Infinity, the experimental detergent. In the O-1 experiment Astronauts on the ISS produced a variety of stains on a variety of fabrics and tested the effectiveness of Tide Infinity at removing them. The experiment was repeated on the ground to control for the effect of microgravity on the detergent. Throughout this phase scientists monitored the stability of Infinity during months of microgravity and the higher ambient radiation levels of space.

Objective 2 payloads, including Tide To Go Pens and Wipes and Tide Rescue Spray, launched to the ISS in July of this year. The main O-2 experiment will have astronauts treat a sample group of pre-stained fabrics from Earth and a group of fabrics they stain in flight. The dependent variable will be the stain removal efficacy of unmodified To Go products in space over the course of several months.

Lastly, NASA and Tide researchers may design a combo washer-dryer that uses the Infinity detergent with as little power and water as possible. The washer-dryer would be intended for use in the low-gravity environment of a Moon or Mars colony, so unfortunately we may still be years away from true deep space washing.

Tide Infinity And Beyond

Picture your favorite science fiction scene. Maybe it’s a great battle. Maybe it’s an impassioned speech that has stuck with you for years. Maybe it’s a moment where you realize just how deep a friendship runs between two characters. Now ask yourself, in that scene, are their socks clean?

Doing laundry in space is not as flashy as, for example, a full-flow staged combustion engine. But it may prove equally important for going to Mars and beyond. Both technologies are essentially ways to get more performance for less mass. And in space, dropping mass is the only way forward.

For More Information

• PGTIDE summary on NASA’s Space Station Research Explorer
• IVA Clothing Study summary on NASA’s Space Station Research Explorer
• ISS National Lab article on PGTIDE
• P&G Press Release: announcement of Space Act Agreement
• P&G Press Release: Objective 1 experiment launched
• P&G Press Release: Objective 2 experiment launched

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Source: 

• https://www.universetoday.com/157375/socks-the-final-frontier/

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08-09-2022 om 21:56 geschreven door peter  

Animals That Can Live After Death

For as long as we have been recording our lives in history, humanity has been preoccupied with longevity and immortality. So far, we haven’t even gotten close.

In the rest of the animal kingdom, however, we’ve seen amazing instances of death defiance. From animals that keep living even after being cut in half, to animals that can withstand crazy temperatures and radiation, to long-living animals, and immortal beings. Immortal?! Wait for it – we’re getting there.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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08-09-2022 om 21:40 geschreven door peter  

Star Formation in the Center of the Milky Way Started at the Core and Then Worked its way out

One of the biggest questions facing astronomers today concerns star formation and its role in the evolution of galaxies. In particular, astronomers are curious whether the process began in the central regions of galaxies, where stars are more tightly bound. Previous observations have shown that numerous galaxies experienced intense periods of star formation in their centers roughly one billion years after the Big Bang. For some time, astronomers have wanted to conduct similar observations of the Milky Way’s Galactic Center to study rapid star formation more closely.

Unfortunately, it has been very difficult for astronomers to study the center of the Milky Way because of how bright and densely packed the region is, which makes it difficult to discern individual stars and clusters. Thanks to a new analysis of a high-resolution infrared survey, a team of astronomers has created the first reconstruction of the star formation history in the Galactic Center. According to their findings, most young stars in this region formed in loose stellar associations that dispersed outwards to fill the Galactic Disk over the course of many eons (as opposed to tightly-knit massive clusters).

The research was led by Dr. Francisco Nogueras-Lara, an independent Humboldt research fellow with the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). He was joined by Dr. Nadine Neumayer, the leader of the Lise Meitner Group at the MPIA (which specializes in the research of Galactic Nuclei), and Dr. Rainer Schödel – the leader of the Galactic Centre Group at Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC). The paper that describes their findings, titled “Detection of an excess of young stars in the Galactic Centre Sagittarius B1 region,” recently appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy.

While astronomers use our galaxy to learn about the properties of galaxies in general, there are notable differences between the Milky Way and others. For starters, our galaxy has a relatively low rate of stellar formation (only a few solar masses a year), whereas “starburst” galaxies experience episodes that last a few million years where they produce tens or even hundreds of solar masses per year. Interestingly, that high formation rate was the norm among galaxies ten billion years ago, with tens of solar masses produced every year.

But in the Milky Way’s central region, about 1,300 light-years around our galaxy’s supermassive black hole (SMBH), star formation rates over the past 100 million years have been observed to be ten times higher than on average. In short, our galaxy’s core is as productive as a starburst galaxy or as productive as galaxies were ten billion years ago. Astronomers have been hoping to study this region to learn more about the factors influencing star formation in galaxies. Unfortunately, this has been far more difficult than studying other galaxies because of how our Solar System is embedded in the Milky Way’s disk.

Our observatories must contend with the massive amounts of light-obscuring dust between Earth and the Galactic Center. To circumvent this problem, astronomers rely on instruments that observe the Universe in the infrared, millimeter-wave, or radio wavelengths. These can image the radiation absorbed by the dust, or passes through it, thus revealing objects that are otherwise obscured in visible light. Another issue (already mentioned) is how the Galactic Center is so crowded, making it difficult to discern individual stars (except for the very bright ones that stand out from the rest).

Astronomers know that stars continue to form in the Galactic Center, as indicated by ionized radiation and x-ray emissions. But it has been extremely difficult to spot young stars, those that formed in the past few million years. Prior to this analysis, astronomers could only account for two massive star clusters and a few isolated young stars at the center of our galaxy – about 10% of the expected stellar mass. This has left many questions unanswered about the locations of all the other young stars and their properties.

To address this question, Nogueras-Lara, Neumayer, and Schödel consulted data from the GALACTICNUCLEUS campaign, a survey that uses the HAWK-I infrared camera – part of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Together they took nearly 150 short-exposure pictures of the Milky Way’s central region in the J, H, and K_s infrared bands and examined an area totaling 64,000 square light-years around the Galactic Center. These pictures were then combined via holographic imaging to correct for atmospheric distortion and map the region in much finer detail than ever before.

Whereas only a few tens of stars had been previously mapped, the GALACTICNUCLEUS survey provided individual data for 3 million stars in the Galactic Center. Moreover, the team noticed that the area known as Sagittarius B1 contains considerably more young stars than other regions, made evident by the way they ionize surrounding gas clouds. With these high-resolution observations, Nogueras-Lara and his colleagues were able to study the region’s stars in detail for the first time – including the statistical distribution of stellar luminosity.

This is particularly important because luminosity distribution changes gradually (and in a predictable fashion) for stars that formed around the same time. Given such a distribution, it is possible to reconstruct a history of star formation based on those that formed more than 7 billion years ago, between 2 and 7 billion years ago (the “intermediate bracket”), and within the last 2 billion years. Upon analyzing their data, the team found that Sag B1 had an older “intermediate bracket” population and a large population of stars that were 10 million years old or younger. As Nogueras-Lara said in an MPIA press release:

“Our study represents a big step forward in finding the young stars in the Galactic Center. The young stars we found have a total mass of more than 400,000 solar masses. That is nearly ten times higher than the combined mass of the two massive star clusters that were previously known in the central region.”.

The all-sky view that the Gaia survey would have of a simulated Milky-Way-like galaxy.

Credit: Sanderson et al.

Interestingly, the stars were also found to be dispersed and not part of a massive cluster, which suggests they were born in one or more looser stellar associations that rapidly dissolved as they orbited the Galactic Center over several million years. While these results pertain specifically to Sag B1, they could mean that young stars in the Galactic Center were generally born in loose associations that have since dispersed into separate stars. This would explain why the young populations are so much harder to resolve and require high-resolution surveys in multiple wavelengths.

Another interesting finding was that there is also an older population of stars in Sag B1. In the innermost regions of the Galactic Center, there are stars more than 7 billion years old but virtually no stars in the intermediate range. This could mean that star formation began in the innermost part of the Galactic Center and then spread to the “nuclear disk,” the small disk of stars surrounding the center. Indications of this inside-out mechanism of star formation have already been observed in other galaxies, and these latest results suggest this is also true of the Milky Way.

Looking ahead, the team hopes to conduct follow-up observations using the K-band Multi-Object Spectrograph (KMOS) instrument on the VLT. By adding spectral observations to the overall luminosity distribution they observed, they hope to identify some of the very young stars in the Galactic Center directly. In addition, there are plans to track the proper motions of the newly-discovered stars based on data obtained by missions like the ESA’s Gaia Observatory. While stars that formed in the same association get dispersed over time, their motion is still likely to be very similar, indicating a common origin.

Ergo, tracking the proper motion of stars in Sag B1 will allow astronomers to deduce if the young stars observed there were indeed born in one or more loose associations. As Nadine Neumayer summarized:

“Both kinds of measurements will serve to hopefully confirm, but definitely refine, the results of the now-published work. At the same time, we and our colleagues will start exploring what the new insights into star formation in the Galactic Center can tell us about high-productivity star formation in other galaxies.”

Further Reading: 

• MPIA, 
• Nature Astronomy

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08-09-2022 om 21:20 geschreven door peter  

China's Yutu-2 rover spots two intact spheres of translucent GLASS on the far side of the moon that likely formed during lunar meteorite impacts

• Images from Yutu-2 show tiny lunar 'spherules' of glass looking like ball bearings 
• Lunar glass will form when silicate materials are subjected to high temperatures
• Volcanic glasses were returned by NASA Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s
• Yutu-2 made the first soft landing on the far side of the moon on January 3, 2019 

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

China's Yutu-2 rover has spotted two intact spheres of translucent glass up to an inch thick on the far side of the moon.

Images returned by the rover, which landed on the moon in January 2019, show the glass globules looking like a couple of tiny ball bearings. 

Small glass 'spherules' are actually common on the moon, although they're typically less than 0.03 of an inch (3mm) in diameter.  

These newly-found glass spheres are much bigger, measuring around 0.5-inch to 1-inch (1.5 cm to 2.5 cm), according to the scientists. 

Glass forms on the moon when silicate material – rock-forming minerals – are subjected to high temperatures. 

It's known that volcanic glass deposits were formed during explosive eruptions in the moon's history, when it was volcanically active. 

Today, new glass can be formed on the moon due to the heat generated from impacts by meteorites with the lunar surface. 

Pictured are the centimeter-sized glass globules collected by the Apollo 16 missions (a, b) and those observed by Yutu-2 (c, d)

Images returned by the rover show the glass globules looking like a couple of tiny ball bearings

The new findings have been described in a paper authored by a team led by planetary geologist Zhiyong Xiao of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. 

'Transparent and translucent glasses on the Moon are less than 1 mm in diameters, and larger ones are dark and opaque,' they say. 

'The globules were formed or exposed recently as evidenced by their intact shapes and surface exposure.' 

Exact composition of the glass is yet to be determined, however. 

'Glass is ubiquitous in lunar regolith, and volcanism and hypervelocity impacts are the major mechanisms of forming lunar glasses,' the team say. 

'Volcanic glasses on the Moon occur as quenched skin of basaltic rocks or as glass spherules in pyroclastic deposits.' 

Volcanic glasses were returned by NASA's Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, although some of these were darker and larger than the spotted specimens – up to 1.5 inches thick. 

This is not the first time Yutu-2 has come across odd lunar features – last year, it returned photos of a 'mystery hut' in the horizon, which researchers initially had trouble identifying. 

On closer inspection, it was revealed in January that it was a rabbit-shaped rock, surrounded by its own rocky 'droppings' and morsels of food. 

Images show the locations of glass globules along the Yutu-2 rover path on the moon. (a) Red dot marks the location of the Chang'e-4 mission to the moon (which included Yutu-2). (b) Route of the Yutu-2 rover before July 2020, and the landing site is marked in red. Tips of the green arrows point to the locations of the confirmed and possible glass globules

Volcanic glasses were returned by NASA's Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, lunar volcanic glasses are displayed at the Natural History Museum in Vienna from the Apollo 15 mission in 1971

YUTU-2 MISSION 

Yutu-2 is the robotic lunar rover component of China's Chang'e 4 mission to the far side of the Moon. 

It launched on December 7, 2018, entered lunar orbit on December 12, and made the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon January 3, 2019.

Yutu-2 is exploring Von Kármán crater, where an ancient lunar impact may have exposed the Moon's mantle. 

The finding is a coincidence as the name of the rover, Yutu, happens to be Chinese for 'Jade Rabbit'. 

In February 2021, Yutu-2 captured images of  an elongated 'milestone' rock on the lunar surface.

The moon rover spotted the sharp structure sticking out from the ground after awakening from a 14-day slumber during the dangerously cold lunar night.

Because Yutu-2 is solar-powered, it constantly has to keep 'going to sleep' when there's no sunlight, during the 14-day long lunar night. 

In 2019, just months after it landed, Yutu-2 found a mysterious 'gel-like' substance of a dark green colour.  

Yutu-2 has been traversing the 115-mile-wide (186km) Von Kármán crater ever since it landed on the moon attached to the Chang'e-4 spacecraft on January 3, 2019. 

Chang'e 4 was China's fourth mission to the moon and the second to send a rover. 

Glass is ubiquitous in lunar regolith - the dusty blanket of sediment on the moon's surface, according to scientists 

The Yutu 2 rover (pictured) became the first spacecraft to land on the dark side of the moon in January 2019

The Chang'e 1 and 2 missions were orbiters, while Chang'e 3 landed on the near side of the moon with the first Yutu rover.

Beijing also launched Chang'e-5 in November 2020, which successfully returned the first moon samples to Earth in more than 40 years.

China has also just approved three more missions to the Moon – Chang'e 6, 7 and 8 – launching from 2024 onwards. 

China's Yutu 2 team said an oddly-shaped rock looks like a small but 'lifelike' crouching bunny like a statue set in stone, surrounded by its own rocky 'droppings' and morsels of food

NASA, meanwhile, is gearing up to send humans to the moon 'no earlier than 2025', as part of its Artemis mission, a follow-up to the Apollo missions. 

The Artemis mission will be the first to land humans on the moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. 

NASA is also working on a project to build the first lunar space station, codenamed the Lunar Gateway, as part of a long-term project to send humans to Mars.  

NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the moon in 2025 as part of the Artemis mission

Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the moon in Greek mythology. 

NASA has chosen her to personify its path back to the moon, which will see astronauts return to the lunar surface by 2025 -  including the first woman and the next man.

Artemis 1, formerly Exploration Mission-1, is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the moon and Mars. 

Artemis 1 will be the first integrated flight test of NASA’s deep space exploration system: the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.  

Artemis 1 will be an uncrewed flight that will provide a foundation for human deep space exploration, and demonstrate our commitment and capability to extend human existence to the moon and beyond. 

During this flight, the spacecraft will launch on the most powerful rocket in the world and fly farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown.

It will travel 280,000 miles (450,600 km) from Earth, thousands of miles beyond the moon over the course of about a three-week mission. 

Artemis 1, formerly Exploration Mission-1, is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the moon and Mars. This graphic explains the various stages of the mission

Orion will stay in space longer than any ship for astronauts has done without docking to a space station and return home faster and hotter than ever before. 

With this first exploration mission, NASA is leading the next steps of human exploration into deep space where astronauts will build and begin testing the systems near the moon needed for lunar surface missions and exploration to other destinations farther from Earth, including Mars. 

The will take crew on a different trajectory and test Orion’s critical systems with humans aboard. 

Together, Orion, SLS and the ground systems at Kennedy will be able to meet the most challenging crew and cargo mission needs in deep space.

Eventually NASA seeks to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon by 2028 as a result of the Artemis mission.

The space agency hopes this colony will uncover new scientific discoveries, demonstrate new technological advancements and lay the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy. 

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08-09-2022 om 20:56 geschreven door peter  

China rover spots strange glass spheres on far side of the moon

08-09-2022 om 20:37 geschreven door peter  

Besides hexagon and circular objects, a huge rectangular craft with possible docking station for incoming and outgoing smaller UFOs at the rear of the mothership has been caught at the moment it passing the sun. 

The video show some of these possible alien craft.

  

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08-09-2022 om 18:38 geschreven door peter  

Jalisco, Mexico UFO sighting September 7-Sep-2022

This strange UFO event happened over Jalisco, Mexico on 7th September 2022!

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08-09-2022 om 17:46 geschreven door peter  

Two F-14 fighter jets chased a large triangular UFO and disappeared, Puerto Rico, December 28, 1988

On December 28, 1988, at approximately 7:45 pm, a large triangle craft roughly the size of a baseball field was seen moving steadily along in the region near the naval air station in Puerto Rico, according to many witnesses (over a hundred). Three F-14s intercepted the moving UFO and apparently tried to force it to change its course.

As the navy fighter planes engaged the large craft, it slowed down its forward speed almost to a standstill. One plane, in particular, stayed mostly to the right of the UFO and another stayed behind the UFO making close approaches at times. The third plane apparently stayed a bit farther out. The F-14 in the rear came close to the object, but as it flew either over or under the object, it was not seen again. Small red lights were also seen at times flying outside the large craft and may have served to protect the craft. It was as if the fighter plane had somehow been drawn into the large craft. The second aircraft made a sweep closer to the large object and was seen by one ground witness—using binoculars—to suddenly disappear—possibly being taken in by the UFO. The third F-14 reportedly high-tailed it out of the area on afterburner with glowing red lights chasing after it apparently in pursuit, according to ground witnesses.

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08-09-2022 om 15:53 geschreven door peter  

James Webb ST just captured massive clouds on an Alien Planet in unprecedented detail

A weird alien world cloaked in clouds of sand-like silicate granules has been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The exoplanet finding, revealed in a recent paper as the first of its kind, was made by the NIRSpec and MIRI instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers discovered indications of silicate-rich clouds surrounding a brown dwarf roughly 20 times the size of Jupiter in the data. The discovery backs up several previous speculations concerning these strange planet-like planets.

Brown dwarfs are weird objects that are not quite large enough to ignite into stars but are also not small enough to be considered planets. Brown dwarfs, while unable to consume normal hydrogen, can generate their own light and heat by burning deuterium (a less common isotope of hydrogen that contains an extra neutron).

VHS 1256 b is a brown dwarf that orbits two tiny red dwarf stars 72 light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus, or the Crow, in the southern sky. Astronomers spotted the odd exoplanet in 2016, and its reddish glow has perplexed them ever since. They suspected that the glow was created by some kind of atmosphere. According to Forbes, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have now corroborated those predictions, demonstrating that VHS 1256 b must be surrounded in dense clouds filled of sand-like silicate grains.

Water, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sodium, and potassium were also found in the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b by Webb.

"We will know more from iterations on the data reduction," said Brittany Miles, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine and the project's principal researcher, in an email to Space.com. "So far, it appears to be pretty close to theoretical expectations."

The Webb data were so thorough that they revealed that the ratio of the various gases changes throughout the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b, implying that the atmosphere is not static, but rather chaotic and turbulent.

"There is an expected ratio of, example, methane and carbon monoxide in a tranquil atmosphere," Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and one of the study's co-authors, told Forbes (opens in new tab). "However, we're finding that this ratio is significantly skewed in many planetary atmospheres, implying that there is turbulent vertical mixing in these atmospheres, dredging up carbon dioxide from deep down to mix with methane higher up in the atmosphere."

VHS 1256 b is small for a brown dwarf, suggesting that the body is young. The exoplanet orbits its two parent stars 360 sun-Earth distances apart in an oval-shaped orbit that takes 17,000 years to complete.

Reference(s): arXiv

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08-09-2022 om 01:26 geschreven door peter  

“One of a Kind” Massive Triple Star System Detected

Earlier this year, researchers revealed the discovery of an extraordinarily compact “one-of-a-kind” system of three stars. A partnership between two young researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen is currently focusing on how this unusual combination of a binary set of stars and a revolving larger star can form.

Tertiary star formation on a massive scale

The star system is made up of a binary set of stars, two stars that orbit each other, and one more massive star that orbits the binary.

“As far as we know, it is the first of its kind ever detected”, Alejandro Vigna-Gomez says. “We know of many tertiary star systems (three star systems), but they are typically significantly less massive. The massive stars in this triple are very close together – it is a compact system. The orbital period of the binary (~1 d) is the same as that of the rotation of Earth (1 day). The combined mass of the two of them is twelve times the mass of our Sun – so rather big stars. The tertiary star is approximately 16 times the mass of our Sun, so even bigger! The inner orbit is circular in shape with close to six revolutions of the tertiary star around the binary per year. Pretty fast, when you consider the size of them – unsurprisingly, the system is very luminous, so at first they were detected as a stellar binary”.

Alejandro Vigna-Gomez from Mexico and Bin Liu from China in front of the blackboard in the old auditorium A at Blegdamsvej.

Credit: Ola J. Joensen/NBI

The dedication of amateurs led to the discovery of the star system

The initial discovery of the unusual nature of this highly peculiar system was equally remarkable in that it was discovered by amateur astronomers.

A group of amateur astronomers who were combing through a public data set from NASA’s TESS observatory (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) discovered something unusual.

The level of professionalism can be quite high among amateurs, and they made the professional astronomers aware of anomalies in the detection. It was discovered that what had previously been thought to be two stars were really three. These kinds of communities are known as citizen scientists.

The combination of expertise in dynamics and stellar evolution proved to be fruitful

Postdoc Alejandro Vigna-Gomez explains that when investigating the formation of the star system, several options were considered.

• If, for instance, the bigger star formed first, it would likely have ejected material that would have disrupted the formation of a binary that close.
• Another possibility is that the binary and the third star formed separately from each other and eventually encountered and locked in their orbits because of gravity.
• – or a third possibility, where two binaries formed and one merged into one, bigger star.

This is where the combined efforts of Bin Liu, an expert on dynamics, and Alejandro Vigna-Gomez’s knowledge of star formation came in handy. They coded the options and ran more than 100.000 iterations on the computer, in order to assess the most likely outcome of this scenario.

The result turned out to be in favor of the two binary systems forming initially and one of them merging with one star. Their results show that the two binary scenario could in fact explain the origin of the triple system.

The way forward requires the expertise of an astronomer specializing in observations

“Now we have a model of the most likely scenario on this unique system. But a model is not enough. And there are two ways in which we can prove or disentangle our theory on this formation”, postdoc Alejandro explains. ”One is studying the system in detail and the other is to make statistical analysis on a population of stars. If we go into the system in detail, we shall have to rely on the expertise of an astronomer. We already have some preliminary observations, but we still need to go through the data, and make sure we are interpreting it well”.Bin Liu continues: “We also encourage people in the scientific community to look at the data deeply”, Postdoc Bin Liu says. “Maybe there are more compact systems buried in the data. What we really want to know is whether this kind of system is common in our universe”.Alejandro Vigna-Gomez and Bin Liu have now mapped ut quite a lot of work for themselves. “We need to find an adequate telescope with available observing time somewhere in the world and talk to someone who is really an expert from the observational point of view. The data from telescopes needs to be understood correctly. What you see in a telescope is not entirely what you get, so to say. It must be interpreted”.

So more collaboration is underway, very much in the spirit of Niels Bohr, Alejandro says:

“A Chinese and a Mexican with each their different fields, dynamics, and star formation, meet at the Niels Bohr Institute and are now on the way to yet more scientific collaboration”.

Reference:

• “Mergers prompted by dynamics in compact, multiple-star systems: a stellar-reduction case for the massive triple TIC 470710327” by Alejandro Vigna-Gómez, Bin Liu, David R Aguilera-Dena, Evgeni Grishin, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and Melinda Soares-Furtado, 29 June 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

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{ https://blog.sci-nature.com/ }

08-09-2022 om 00:47 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS

Ufo's bestaan écht en dit is waarom | UITGEZOCHT #14

Boven Nederland zijn de laatste tijd opvallend veel ufo's gespot. Bij elkaar al meer dan 900. Zijn het buitenaardse wezentjes die hier even komen rondneuzen? Of is er een andere verklaring? #uitgezocht #ufo #spacex

"Ik weet dat buitenaards leven bestaat" | De outsiders | NPO 3 TV

Tim den Besten ontmoet Anton, die er zeker van is dat we geregeld bezocht worden door buitenaards leven. Samen gaan ze op zoek naar aliens en ufo’s.

Toen Anton 23 jaar was zag hij enkele geruisloze lichtbollen over zich heen scheren. Sindsdien heeft hij vaker dergelijke verschijningen gezien en is hij er van overtuigd dat er buitenaardse wezens op aarde zijn. Hij heeft er zelfs een gesproken - veel aliens hebben immers een menselijke vorm. De inmiddels zeventigjarige Anton brengt in kaart waar en wanneer de wezens op aarde verschijnen.

⭐ Wil je meer outsiders leren kennen? Kijk op https://npo3.nl/de-outsiders

Ook in het tweede seizoen van De outsiders gaat Tim den Besten op zoek naar mensen die bewust kiezen voor een leven buiten de gebaande paden. Wat zeggen de verhalen van deze en andere outsiders over de manier waarop de meesten van ons leven?

NASA gaat officieel onderzoek doen naar ufo's | Op1

De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA gaat officieel onderzoek doen naar ufo's. Ruimtevaartjournalist Marjolijn van Heemstra: “Dit is echt historisch. Normaal wordt er onderzoek gedaan door Defensie, wat niet toegankelijk is voor publiek.”

UFO te Zien op Livestream NASA!?

VS: geen bewijs dat ufo's van aliens zijn

Er is geen bewijs dat ufo's van buitenaardse wezens zijn. Dat zeggen Amerikaanse experts. Toch kunnen ze niet met zekerheid zeggen dat de vliegende objecten niet toch van aliens zijn. #jeugdjournaal #ufo #aliens

Area 51: hysterie, mysterie en 1001 complotten

Een geplande bestorming, twee gearresteerde Nederlanders. Area 51 is al weken, zo niet jaren, een veel besproken stukje aarde. Wat is toch die aantrekkingskracht van die zwaarbeveiligde militaire basis in de Amerikaanse staat Nevada? En wat weten we erover?

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

07-09-2022 om 23:53 geschreven door peter  

Ufo-meldpunt legt uit: 'Kregen heel bijzondere melding binnen'

Het blijft een mysterieus fenomeen: ufo's. De Unidentified flying objects worden bijna altijd in een zin genoemd met buitenaards leven of tijdreizigers. Maar is dat ook zo?

Abonneer je hier gratis: http://bit.ly/AbonneerTelegraaf

Bij De Telegraaf vind je het laatste nieuws uit binnen- en buitenland. Je krijgt alles te weten op het gebied van entertainment, misdaad, geld, verkeer en royalty. Ook delen wij de meest opmerkelijke video's die je niet gemist moet hebben. Wil je meer (exclusieve) video's? Meld je dan hier aan voor onze video-nieuwsbrief: https://telegraaf.nl/videoupdate

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07-09-2022 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

Caught in the Webb! NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captures a stunning photograph of thousands of never-before-seen young stars in the Tarantula Nebula, 161,000 light-years away from Earth

• NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured a stunning look at the Tarantula Nebula 
• The stellar nursery, officially known as 30 Doradus, sits 161,000 light-years away in the Large Megallanic Cloud galaxy 
• 'Take a moment to stare into thousands of never-before-seen young stars in the Tarantula Nebula,' NASA said. [The James Webb] reveals details of the structure and composition of the nebula.' 
• The Tarantula Nebula has been fascinating astronomers for years because it has a similar type of chemical composition as the huge star-forming regions seen in the universe's so-called 'cosmic noon' 

By CHRISTOPHER CARBONE U.S. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured thousands of never-before-seen young stars in a spider-shaped stellar nursery known as the Tarantula Nebula.

The cosmic nursery is officially called 30 Doradus and is located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Megallanic Cloud galaxy, which happens to be the biggest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group - the galaxies closest to our Milky Way.

'Take a moment to stare into thousands of never-before-seen young stars in the Tarantula Nebula,' NASA shared on Twitter. [The James Webb] reveals details of the structure and composition of the nebula, as well as background galaxies.'

'The Tarantula Nebula gets its name from its dusty filaments. The largest and brightest star-forming region near our galaxy, it's home to the hottest, most massive stars known!' the space agency said. 

Scroll down for video's 

'Take a moment to stare into thousands of never-before-seen young stars in the Tarantula Nebula,' NASA shared on Twitter. [The James Webb] reveals details of the structure and composition of the nebula, as well as background galaxies.' The stellar nursery is officially called 30 Doradus - but is known as the Tarantula Nebula - and is located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Megallanic Cloud galaxy

This nebula gives us information about what star formation might have looked like at its peak in our cosmic history. 

Viewed with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the region resembles a burrowing tarantula’s home, lined with its silk. The nebula’s cavity centered in the NIRCam image appears to be hollowed out by blistering radiation from a cluster of massive young stars, which sparkle pale blue in the image.

Only the densest surrounding areas of the nebula can resist erosion by these stars’ powerful stellar winds, forming pillars that appear to point back toward the cluster. These pillars contain forming protostars, or very young stars, which will eventually emerge from their dusty cocoons and take their turn shaping the nebula.

The Tarantula Nebula has been fascinating astronomers for years because it has a similar type of chemical composition as the huge star-forming regions seen in the universe's so-called 'cosmic noon' - meaning when the cosmos was only a few billion years old and such star formation was at a peak. 

The cosmic region takes on a different appearance when viewed in the longer infrared wavelengths detected by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). In this image (above), the hot stars fade and the cooler gas and dust seem to glow. Embedded within the stellar nursery clouds are protostars that are still gaining mass. The shorter wavelengths of life absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the nebula - and don't reach Webb to be detected

Star-forming regions in the Milky Way don't have the same chemical composition and are not producing at that same super-fast rate as the Tarantula Nebula. 

The cosmic region takes on a different appearance when viewed in the longer infrared wavelengths detected by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

In this image, the hot stars fade and the cooler gas and dust seem to glow.   

Embedded within the stellar nursery clouds are protostars that are still gaining mass. The shorter wavelengths of life absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the nebula - and don't reach Webb to be detected - while the longer mid-infrared wavelengths penetrate that dust and reveal details that scientists may not have seen before. 

'Despite humanity’s thousands of years of stargazing, the star-formation process still holds many mysteries – many of them due to our previous inability to get crisp images of what was happening behind the thick clouds of stellar nurseries,' NASA shared in a statement.

Just a few days ago, the James Webb captured its first image on an exoplanet located just 385 light-years from Earth, showing incredible details never seen by human eyes. 

The exoplanet known as HIP 65426 is just 15 to 20 million years old, which is much younger to our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth. 

The telescope used its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) that can block out surrounding starlight to snap epic images of the exoplanet HIP 65426.

The alien world was first discovered in 2017 by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, in Chile, but the long wavelengths were blocked by Earth's atmosphere.

However, since Webb is soaring through space, it was able to take direct shots of the planet that astronomers can process to remove the starlight and uncover the planet. 

NASA said it is a gas giant that is without a rocky surface and therefore could not host life. 

'But Webb's first capture of an exoplanet already hints at future possibilities for studying distant worlds, NASA shared in a statement. 

NASA's James Webb Telescope captured detailed images of its first exoplanet that sits outside of our solar system. The telescope used its powerful technologies to 'see' the exoplanets longer wavelengths that are missed by Earth-based telescopes. The exoplanet is just 15 to 20 million years old, which is much younger to our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth

The 'Cosmic Cliffs' of the Carina Nebula are seen in an image divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion, with data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Telescope: NASA's $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies

The James Webb telescope has been described as a 'time machine' that could help unravel the secrets of our universe.

The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and observe the sources of stars, exoplanets, and even the moons and planets of our solar system.

The vast telescope, which has already cost more than $7 billion (£5 billion), is considered a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope

The James Webb Telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of roughly 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).

It is the world's biggest and most powerful orbital space telescope, capable of peering back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will work in tandem for a while. 

The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

It circles the Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude. 

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07-09-2022 om 23:21 geschreven door peter  

07-09-2022 om 22:55 geschreven door peter  

A footage out of England shows what appears to be a perfectly cube-shaped cloud hovering in the sky. 

The rare sky phenomenon was captured earlier this week by Megan Coombs during a visit to a National Trust site in Surrey with the appropriately spooky name 'Devil's Punch Bowl.' 

Megan said that "there is something mega suspicious" about the box-like cloud in the sky that seems to have one of its sides illuminated by the sun, reports CoasttoCoast. 

It is not the first time square or rectangular clouds have been observed. It looks like these clouds are formed as a result of geoengineering/weather modification.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

07-09-2022 om 21:16 geschreven door peter  

5 UFOs flying over Hamilton, New Zealand 2022

This UFO sighting was filmed over Hamilton in New Zealand ion 18th March 2022 but it was just recently submitted to MUFON.

Witness report: 

While my partner and I were in our lounge watching a UFO documentary, my partner had some sort of sudden inclination to look out the window, perhaps as a result of the doco we were watching.
She saw glowing lights tracing a path across the sky.
Initially we only saw 3, but then 2 more started catching up to the first 3 from beyond the horizon to the southwest.
The 5 amber glowing lights seemed to speed up and slow down as they traced a path across the sky.
Perhaps with the exact time info off the video, you will be able to more easily confirm the air traffic from that date and time.
We live in a city where it is common for hot air balloons to fly at night as part of a local festival, which had concluded around that time, but they do not fly as high as what we saw, the colouring of the light seemed too bright, large and consistently visible to be the occasional flame of a hot air balloon. I could also find no report or event listing of any flying at night. Hot air balloons do not have the flight control capabilities we saw:
The lights seemed to speed up and slow down in relationship to eachother to move as a group, as well as at least one of them changing its flight direction to circle back for the others.
From visual comparisons I first thought it might have been starlink satellites, but these seemed too low, the wrong colour, and too oddly spaced. Also starlink satellites would not stop or reverse course in the sky I presume.
I got my cellphone and filmed the lights for 4 minutes exactly, and stopped filming as they started to fade once they had flown over us. It looked as though they became obscured by cloud cover that was impossible for us to see against the night sky, as they seemed to just disappear of their own accord.
After that we went inside to try and find out whether we could explain what we saw through conventional means, but did not manage to, regardless we presumed that we had simply seen something with a mundane explanation and mostly moved on and forgot about it. The more time goes on the more I keep coming back to the fact that I never managed to successfully explain what it was.
This is not the first time my partner has suddenly felt compelled to look out a window and immediately sees an amber light moving strangely in the sky. Last time she did so in the early hours of the morning and woke up suddenly, instantly knowing specifically that there was a “UFO” in the sky for her to look at, but that night for whatever reason we both didn’t feel compelled to get a phone and film it.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

07-09-2022 om 21:09 geschreven door peter  

Supermassive black hole 12 billion Times more Enormous than our Sun Discovered

Astrophysicists have found an out-of-place supermassive black hole -- 12 billion times more enormous than the sun -- that mysteriously formed when the cosmos was less than 900 million years old.

Such behemoths are usually found in the more modern cosmos, which seemingly offers more feeding material. Black holes are areas of space so condensed with matter that not even photons of light can discharge their gravitational fists. They are sensed as they pull and eat neighbouring stars and dust, making a cosmic zoo of noticeable phenomenon, such gas jets and rapidly spinning accretion disks.

“Before this finding the most enormous black hole identified within 1 billion years after the Big Bang was about 5 billion solar mass, less than half the mass of the new discovery,” Bram Venemans, research staff researcher with Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
The finding, reported in this week’s Nature, offers a serious challenge to theories about how black holes grew in the early cosmos.

Researchers previously expected young black holes started off with between 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the sun and matured from there by consuming in intergalactic matter and/or merging with other black holes.

It may need either very extraordinary ways to grow the black hole within a very short time, or the presence of a huge seed black hole when the first generation of stars and galaxies formed,” lead scientist Xue-Bing Wu, with China’s Peking University in Beijing, said in an email to Discovery News.

Neither clarification fits with present theories. “A very stimulating feature of this work is that the outcomes hint that in the early cosmos the supermassive black holes and their host galaxies did not co-evolve,” said astrophysicist Akos Bogdan, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the study.
It is improbable the black hole’s parent galaxy would be as big as what calculations based on existing theories would conclude. “This would propose that -- at least in this case -- the black hole is developing faster than the galaxy, questioning the often expected co-evolution of galaxies and their central black holes through cosmic time,” added Venemans. The newly discovered black hole exists in in an enormously bright quasar that existed when the cosmos was about 857 million years old – about 6% of the cosmos’s current 13.8-billion-year age.

“We can comparatively easily sense this object because it is brighter than others at the same distance,” Wu said.
Observations with numerous ground- and space-based telescopes carry on, as well as a search for any comparable giant siblings.

“These objects are so far away from us so most of them look (very) faint even if their inherent brightness is large,” Wu said.

{ https://blog.sci-nature.com/ }

07-09-2022 om 01:05 geschreven door peter  

Planet Nine may be responsible for tilting the Sun

How our possible rogue planet may be messing with our solar system

Earlier this year an announcement raised a tantalizing possibility: a ninth planet lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. The announcement turned the astronomy and planetary science world upside down.

Caltech astronomer Michael Brown and theoretical astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin found evidence for a possible 10 Earth mass planet that may be tilting long-orbiting dwarf planets on their sides and shepherding them into clusters far past the orbit of Neptune in highly eccentric orbits. In the last several months, more and more papers have been published about the possible planet and how it might prove an explanation for other strange things happening in our solar system.

At a press conference held this afternoon, at the AAS Division of Planetary Sciences annual meeting in Pasadena Ca, another announcement was made about Planet Nine’s effects on the spin-axis tilt of our Sun. This time, the paper titled Solar Obliquity Induced by Planet Nine is lead by Caltech graduate student Elizabeth Bailey, with Brown and Batygin as co-authors.

We’ve known that the Sun is tilted for about 200 years, but scientists have never known why. Only the catch here is, the Sun isn’t actually tilted at all. We are. To explain this oddity and what’s happening to our solar system we spoke with co-author and theoretical astrophysicist, Konstantin Batygin.

Astronomy Magazine: What’s happening with the alignment in our solar system?

Konstantin Batygin: When planetary systems form, they form from very flat discs.  The motion that everything in our entire planetary system forms in a very proto planetary flat disc is one of the basic principles of planetary formation theory. The planetary orbits themselves are fully consistent- If you look at how inclined the planets are with respect to each other they are only inclined by no more than one degree so the planets of the solar system are remarkably flat.

AM: What about the Sun?

KB: The Sun’s rotation was measured for the first time in 1850 and something that was recognized right away as that its spin axis, its north pole, is tilted with respect to the rest of the planets by 6 degrees. So even though 6 degrees isn’t much, it is a big number compared to the mutual planet-planet misalignments. So the Sun is basically an outlier within the solar system. This is a long-standing issue and one that is recognized but people don’t really talk much about it. Everything in the solar system rotates roughly on the same plane except for the most massive object, the Sun which is kind of a big deal.

Hypothetical Planet 9, and 9 related eTNOs

WikiMedia Commons

AM: Why is there this misalignment between the Sun and the orbits of the planets?

KB: We asked ourselves, “what obliquity, what misalignment would Planet Nine induce in the solar system?” because it must induce some. We know that Planet Nine’s orbit in inclined. As a result, when Planet Nine torques the rest of the solar system, the two sort of act as two precessing tops. Planet Nine being in its own plane induced a precession on the remainder of the solar system as if the plane of the solar system was a flat top on the surface of a table.

AM: So Planet Nine’s gravitational influence is forcing the solar system to wobble?

KB: If you imagine that the Sun and the planets were co-planar, meaning they were locked into the same plane 4 billion years ago, and allow the clock to run forward in the presence of Planet Nine, then 4 billion years later the Sun would have been apparently tilted by exactly it’s current obliquity, or 6 degrees. But what’s actually going on is that the Sun is staying put in its fixed reference frame and it’s the planetary orbits that are being tilted by Planet Nine. So Planet Nine has tilted the entire disk of the solar system by 6 degrees and because we live on that disc … to us it looks like the Sun is tilted, but it’s actually the other way around.

AM: How could Planet Nine have that much influence on our entire solar system when it’s so far out?

KB: Here’s why: Planet Nine is only 10 Earth masses as compared to Jupiter’s 300 Earth masses, but its orbit is huge. So it’s an argument that is basically like an asymmetrical see-saw or a dolly. Planet Nine has a really long orbit so it can assert quite a bit of torque on the inner planets without having to apply so much force. Planet Nine has as much angular momentum as the entire solar system combined, because it’s orbit is so big.

AM: Have there been other theories about how this tilt may have happened before your theory of Planet Nine?

KB: I actually had theorized this in 2012 and wrote about it and the theory was almost exactly the same, except for it wasn’t Planet Nine doing the torqueing but a companion star. I theorized that a young star was bound to the Sun, and tilting the entire proto-planetary disc from which planets form. It’s believed that most stars are born binary but most of them lose their companions by the time they come out of the birth cluster.

AM: Does this help us better understand planet formation or solar system formation?

KB: It does help us understand planet formation because planet formation theory dictates that all things must start out co-planar, in the same plane. The fact that the Sun is tilted with respect to the rest of the solar system is almost a violation of that very fundamental principle, so understanding what’s going on there is important. But there’s also a second component to why this calculation is interesting. We very quickly realized that Planet Nine must do something, it must tilt the solar system by some angle and we thought to ourselves what if this angle was really big? What if the Sun was tilted by 40 degrees in our calculations? That would actually be evidence against Planet Nine, instead we got this beautiful agreement of the theory.

AM: Has this new data helped with your search for Planet Nine?

KB: What we’ve found is that the direction into which the Sun is tilted by Planet Nine is intimately related to the orbit of Planet Nine itself.  This is more or less a consistency check, it doesn’t help us or really provide too much new information but it gives us more confidence that we are actually barking up the right tree

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07-09-2022 om 00:19 geschreven door peter  

Top 4 Insane Alien Encounters

Check out these extra strange alien encounters that will leave you shocked. See more in this The Proof Is Out There compilation.

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{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

06-09-2022 om 22:07 geschreven door peter  

Webb telescope wows with first image of an exoplanet

Astronomers see it as the start of a bonanza of studies exploring planets outside the Solar System.

Alexandra Witze

The James Webb Space Telescope has taken its first picture of a planet beyond the Solar System — opening a window to understanding other worlds and underscoring the telescope’s immense capabilities.

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• 

  Webb telescope spots CO2 on exoplanet for first time: what it means for finding alien life

The image is of a planet called HIP 65426 b, an object similar to Jupiter, but younger and hotter, that lies 107 parsecs from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is the first exoplanet image ever taken at deep infrared wavelengths, which allow astronomers to study the full range of a planet’s brightness and what it is made of.

“It gives us wavelengths we’ve never seen planets at before,” says Beth Biller, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a member of the discovery team. The image was reported in a paper on the arXiv preprint server on 31 August¹; the report has not been peer reviewed.

The finding confirms how powerful Webb will be for studying exoplanets. Launched in December as a collaboration between NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, the telescope began doing science in June, using its 6.5-metre-wide primary mirror to observe the Universe from a spot around 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. The fact that it was able to take such a sharp picture of HIP 65426 b suggests that it will be able to photograph even smaller planets, the size of Saturn or even Neptune, orbiting other stars. That would drastically improve scientific understanding of far-away planetary systems.

Astronomers know of more than 5,000 exoplanets, but they have taken pictures of only around 20. Imaging exoplanets directly is difficult, because they are often lost in the glare of the star around which they orbit.

But observing them at infrared wavelengths, as Webb does, helps to boost the contrast between star and planet. “You’re in the regime where planets are brightest and stars are dimmest,” says Aarynn Carter, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead author of the preprint.

‘Baby Jupiter’

Carter and his colleagues chose to study HIP 65426 b after other astronomers discovered it in 2017² using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. In July this year, Carter’s team used instruments on Webb to physically block the light from HIP 65426 b’s star, allowing the planet to pop into view. HIP 65426 b orbits its star at roughly twice the distance that Pluto orbits the Sun.

Unlocking the additional infrared wavelengths allowed the astronomers to better understand how much energy the planet’s atmosphere radiates. That, in turn, allowed them to use models of stellar evolution to pin down its mass to 7 times, and its radius to 1.45 times, that of Jupiter.

RELATED

• 

  Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies

HIP 65426 b is probably around 14 million years old, making it “a baby Jupiter”, Biller says. It’s “like Jupiter, but right after it formed”. Our Solar System is around 4.5 billion years old.

Future studies will probably probe how HIP 65426 b formed and evolved over time. Meanwhile, other astronomers are planning to use Webb to study many other exoplanets, especially big ones that lie relatively far from their host star and can thus be imaged directly.

Such work complements other ways in which Webb can observe exoplanets, such as analysing the starlight passing through a planet’s atmosphere to see what chemical compounds the atmosphere contains. Astronomers can’t use that technique on HIP 65426 b, because it lies too far away from its star. But Carter’s team is applying spectral analysis to a different planet, which is substantially larger than Jupiter and is known as VHS 1256 b. It lies 22 parsecs away from Earth in the constellation Corvus.

The findings of that analysis were reported on arXiv on 1 September³, and include signs of silicate grains — essentially, hot sand — in the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b. “That’s a hugely exciting result,” Carter says. It is the first time that sandy grains have been spotted in the atmosphere of a planet beyond the Solar System.

Such sand clouds can form when temperatures on the planet are hot enough to vaporize rock-forming minerals.

• doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02807-4

References

1. Carter, A. L. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.14990 (2022).

2. Chauvin, G. et al. Astron. Astrophys. 605, L9 (2017).

   Article Google Scholar 

3. Miles, B. E. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00620 (2022).

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06-09-2022 om 02:28 geschreven door peter