Space News and Discussions

User avatar
wjfox
Site Admin
Posts: 8730
Joined: Sat May 15, 2021 6:09 pm
Location: London, UK
Contact:

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by wjfox »

weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Possible first evidence of coronal rain on a cool, small M-dwarf star
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-evidence- ... dwarf.html
by Sam Sholtis, Pennsylvania State University
High-resolution spectroscopic observations of a stellar flare on a small, cool star indicate the possibility of coronal rain, a phenomenon that has been observed on our sun but not yet confirmed on a star of this size. This faint star, known as vB 10, which is about a tenth the size of the sun and produces less than 1% of the sun's energy, was studied using the Penn State Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) at the large Hobby Eberly Telescope (with its 10 m mirror). These observations with the HPF spectrograph allowed researchers to measure a shift in the wavelength of certain atomic lines from the flare that are consistent with hot plasma raining back down on the star's surface and are similar to observations of coronal rain from the sun.

A paper describing the observations, by a team led by Penn State scientists, includes a time-series analysis of the flare and could help astronomers put constraints on the energy and frequency of such events. The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

"As the name suggests, the Habitable-zone Planet Finder was designed to detect planets by looking for shifts in the light spectra from M-dwarf stars that result from the star 'wobbling' under the gravitational pull of orbiting planets," said Larry Ramsey, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and an author of the paper. "But we knew from the start that we might learn more about stellar activity from these spectra than we do about planets."
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by caltrek »

How Astronomers Decided Where to Point the Most Powerful Space Telescope NASA Ever Built
by Loren Grush
December 20, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/22789561/nasa- ... exoplanets

Introduction:
(The Verge) In late March, Grant Tremblay was sitting at his computer at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, listening in on a Zoom meeting, when he saw a string of emails pop up in his inbox. The title of each email read: “Cycle 1 JWST Notification Letter.”

He knew immediately that this was the day he and his colleagues in the astronomy community had been eagerly awaiting: it was Blacker Friday.
Blacker Friday, to be clear, didn’t have anything to do with discounts, or Fridays. (It was a Tuesday.) It was the day that Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and other astronomers around the world, would learn if they would receive a small amount of time to use the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, one of the most powerful space telescopes ever created.

Blacker Friday is named after Brett Blacker, who co-runs the science policies group at the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI. Each year, the institute is responsible for selecting which astronomers will get time to use NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. And each year, after a lengthy decision-making process, Blacker would send out a flurry of emails to hopeful astronomers, all on the same day at the same time, informing them if their proposals to use the telescope had been accepted or rejected. Thus, Blacker Friday — also sometimes known as the Blacker Apocalypse — was born.

This year the stakes were even higher on Blacker Friday because, for the first time ever, astronomers were being informed if they would get time with JWST, a brand-new space observatory that is significantly larger and more powerful than Hubble. Set to launch to deep space at the end of December, the nearly $10 billion NASA-built telescope promises the ability to peer into the recesses of the Universe like never before. Ahead of JWST’s launch, STScI had the daunting task of figuring out which of the 1,173 proposals for the observatory’s first year of life — known as Cycle 1 — should get time with the telescope. How do you prioritize what the most advanced piece of space equipment in the world should do when it first turns on?
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by Yuli Ban »

Cardiff-based Space Forge, which is pioneering returnable satellites that are designed for manufacturing next generation super materials in space, has secured a £7.7m equity boost in what is Europe’s largest ever seed funding round for a space tech company.

The four times oversubscribed funding round, backed by investor including Type One Ventures, World Fund and SpaceFund, recognises the global potential of Space Forge’s returnable platform for in-space manufacturing to reduce CO2 emissions.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Could acid-neutralizing life-forms make habitable pockets in Venus' clouds?

by Jennifer Chu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-acid-neut ... venus.html
It's hard to imagine a more inhospitable world than our closest planetary neighbor. With an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide, and a surface hot enough to melt lead, Venus is a scorched and suffocating wasteland where life as we know it could not survive. The planet's clouds are similarly hostile, blanketing the planet in droplets of sulfuric acid caustic enough to burn a hole through human skin.

And yet, a new study supports the longstanding idea that if life exists, it might make a home in Venus' clouds. The study's authors, from MIT, Cardiff University, and Cambridge University, have identified a chemical pathway by which life could neutralize Venus' acidic environment, creating a self-sustaining, habitable pocket in the clouds.

Within Venus' atmosphere, scientists have long observed puzzling anomalies—chemical signatures that are hard to explain, such as small concentrations of oxygen and nonspherical particles unlike sulfuric acid's round droplets. Perhaps most puzzling is the presence of ammonia, a gas that was tentatively detected in the 1970s, and that by all accounts should not be produced through any chemical process known on Venus.

In their new study, the researchers modeled a set of chemical processes to show that if ammonia is indeed present, the gas would set off a cascade of chemical reactions that would neutralize surrounding droplets of sulfuric acid and could also explain most of the anomalies observed in Venus' clouds. As for the source of ammonia itself, the authors propose that the most plausible explanation is of biological origin, rather than a nonbiological source such as lightning or volcanic eruptions.
weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Scientists confirm evidence of a new class of galac­tic nebulae
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-scientist ... bulae.html
by University of Innsbruck
For the first time, scientists⁠—starting from a discovery by scientific amateurs⁠—have succeeded in confirm evidence for a fully developed shell of a common-envelope system (CE), the phase of the common envelope of a binary star system.

"Toward the end of their lives, normal stars inflate into red giant stars. Since a very large fraction of stars are in binary stars, this affects the evolution at the end of their lives. In close binary systems, the inflating outer part of a star merges as a common envelope around both stars. However, inside this gas envelope the cores of the two stars are practically undisturbed and follow their evolution like independent single stars," explains astrophysicist Stefan Kimeswenger of the University of Innsbruck. The researchers have now published their results in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Discovery thanks to amateur astronomers

Many stellar systems are known to be remnants of such an evolution. Their chemical and physical properties serve as a fingerprint. Also, stellar systems that are just about to develop a common envelope had already been discovered due to their specific and high brightness. However, the fully developed envelope of a CE and its ejection into interstellar space had not been observed in this form so far.
weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Hundreds of new pulsating variable stars detected
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-hundreds- ... stars.html
by Tomasz Nowakowski , Phys.org
Using the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), astronomers have detected more than 300 pulsating variable stars by observing the Milky Way's satellite galaxy Antlia 2 (or Ant 2 for short). The finding, reported in a paper published December 15 on arXiv.org, could improve our understanding of this galaxy and its surroundings.

Variable stars could offer important hints into aspects of stellar structure and evolution. They could be also helpful for better understanding of the distance scale of the universe. In particular, the so-called RR Lyrae (RRL) variables are a powerful tool for studying the morphology, metallicity and age of galaxies, especially those with low surface brightness. In general, RRLs are pulsating horizontal branch stars of spectral class A or F, with a mass of around half the sun's.

At a distance of about 422,000 light years, Ant 2 is a low-surface-brightness dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It has a half-light radius of 9,450 light years and is some 100 times more diffuse than any known ultra diffuse galaxy (UDG).
weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

The earliest atmosphere on Mercury
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-earliest- ... rcury.html
by David Appell , Phys.org
Mercury is a most unusual planet. The smallest planet in the solar system, and the closest planet to the sun, it is in a 3:2 spin resonance, slowly turning and experiencing scorching heat up to 430 degrees Celsius, and the night side frigid, down to -170 degrees Celsius. Due to its much larger iron-rich core compared to Earth, it has the second-highest average density in the solar system, just 1.5 percent below Earth's. Despite its proximity to the sun, the surface of Mercury was, surprisingly, found to be rich in volatile elements such as sodium and sulfur.

Notably, the planet's separation into an iron-rich core and rocky mantle (the geological region between the core and the crust) suggests Mercury had a magma ocean early in its formation. Like any liquid, this ocean would have evaporated, but in the case of Mercury, the temperatures were likely to have been so high that the vapor was not composed of water, but rock. In a new study published in The Planetary Science Journal, Noah Jäggi and colleagues modeled how the evaporation of the surface of this magma ocean would form an atmosphere and determined whether losses from the atmosphere could alter Mercury's composition, addressing an open question of why moderately volatile elements like sodium have accumulated on Mercury's surface. Their results were surprising, Jäggi, a graduate student at the University of Bern, told Phys.org.

Early planetary magma oceans aren't unusual, explained Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. "We think all rocky planets have one or more—maybe several—magma oceans as they form. The impacts of accretion toward the end of planet formation are just that energetic; they will melt the planets to some depth."
User avatar
Ken_J
Posts: 241
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 5:25 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by Ken_J »

User avatar
raklian
Posts: 1747
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:46 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by raklian »

Perspective, bruh. :shock:

Image
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
Post Reply