Space News and Discussions

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caltrek
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weatheriscool wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 5:37 pm Astronomers capture surprising changes in Neptune's temperatures
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-astronome ... tures.html
by ESO
An international team of astronomers have used ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), to track Neptune's atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period. They found a surprising drop in Neptune's global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole.

"This change was unexpected," says Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and lead author of the study published today in The Planetary Science Journal. "Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we expected temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder."

Like Earth, Neptune experiences seasons as it orbits the Sun. However, a Neptune season lasts around 40 years, with one Neptune year lasting 165 Earth years. It has been summertime in Neptune's southern hemisphere since 2005, and the astronomers were eager to see how temperatures were changing following the southern summer solstice.

Astronomers looked at nearly 100 thermal-infrared images of Neptune, captured over a 17-year period, to piece together overall trends in the planet's temperature in greater detail than ever before.
Prior to viewing this thread, I came across a headline to this effect. Very strange.
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Space balloon company offers first look at luxury cabins
This image rendering handout courtesy of Space Perspective released April 7, 2022 shows the exterior of the spaceship Neptune capsule floating above Florida.

A new entrant in the space tourism market promises customers views of the Earth's curvature from the comfort of a luxury cabin, lifted to the upper atmosphere with a giant balloon.

Space Perspective on Tuesday revealed illustrations of its swish cabins, which it hopes to start launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida from late 2024. More than 600 tickets have so far been sold, at $125,000 each.

With five-feet (1.5 meter) high windows, deep seats, dark, purple tones and subdued lighting, the atmosphere contrasts with the white and sanitized capsules of its competitors.

Wifi connectivity and a drinks bar round out the "Space Lounge" inside the company's Neptune capsule.

Whether it really constitutes spaceflight is a matter of debate.

The balloon reaches an altitude of 20 miles (30 kilometers), much lower than rivals Virgin Galactic, which goes just over 50 miles high, or Blue Origin, which breaches the Karman Line, 62 miles above sea level, the internationally-recognized space border.

SpaceX Crew Dragons fly even deeper into space.
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-space-bal ... abins.html
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MAGIC telescopes observe nova explosion
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-magic-tel ... osion.html
by Max Planck Institute for Physics
Light on, light off—this is how one could describe the behavior of the nova, which goes by the name RS Ophiuchi (RS Oph). Every 15 years or so, a dramatic explosion occurs in the constellation of the Serpent Bearer. Birthplaces of a nova are systems in which two very different stars live in a parasitic relationship: A white dwarf, a small, burned-out and tremendously dense star—a teaspoon of its matter weighs about 1 ton—orbits a red giant, an old star that will soon burn up.

The dying giant star feeds the white dwarf with matter shedding its outer hydrogen layer as the gas flows onto the nearby white dwarf. This flow of matter continues, until the white dwarf over(h)eats itself. The temperature and pressure in the newly gained stellar shells become too large and are flung away in a gigantic thermonuclear explosion. The dwarf star remains intact and the cycle begins again—until the spectacle repeats itself.

Explosion in the high-energy range

It had been speculated that such explosions involve high energies. The two MAGIC telescopes recorded gamma rays with the value of 250 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), among the highest energies ever measured in a nova. By comparison, the radiation is a hundred billion times more energetic than visible light.
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Spy Satellites Confirmed Our Discovery of the First Meteor from Beyond the Solar System
by Amir Siraj
April 12, 2022

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ar-system/

Extract:
(Scientific American) On January 8, 2014, at 17:05:34 UT, an approximately meter-sized rock from space streaked through the sky off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, burning up with an energy equivalent to about 110 metric tons of TNT and raining debris into the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Similar-sized fireballs are not uncommon occurrences in Earth’s skies; in fact, a few dozen of them occur each year. But what was unusual about this particular meteor was the very high speed and unusual direction at which it encountered our planet, which collectively suggested it came from interstellar space.

At Earth’s distance from the sun, any object moving faster than about 42 kilometers per second is in an unbounded, hyperbolic orbit relative to our star, meaning that it is too speedy to be captured by the sun’s gravity. Anything traveling over this local celestial speed limit, then, may come from (and if unimpeded should return to) interstellar space. The CNEOS entry for the 2014 Manus Island fireball indicated the meteor hit the Earth’s atmosphere at about 45 kilometers per second—very promising. However, some of this speed came from the object’s motion relative to the Earth and the Earth’s motion around the sun. Teasing apart these effects with the help of computer programs that I wrote, I found that the object had overtaken the Earth from behind before striking our atmosphere, and likely had a sun-relative speed closer to 60 kilometers per second. The corresponding orbit that I calculated was clearly unbound from the sun—even if there had been large uncertainty errors. If the data were correct, this event would be the first interstellar meteor ever discovered.

The 2014 meteor is … the first recorded interstellar object to be detected in the solar system, predating ‘Oumuamua by over three years, and is one of three interstellar objects confirmed to date, alongside ‘Oumuamua and the interstellar comet Borisov.
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Fuel leak thwarts NASA's dress rehearsal for moon rocket
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-fuel-leak ... arsal.html
by Marcia Dunn
NASA's latest attempt to fuel its huge moon rocket for a countdown test was thwarted Thursday by a hazardous hydrogen leak, the latest in a series of vexing equipment trouble.

The launch team had just begun loading fuel into the core stage of the rocket when the leak cropped up. This was NASA's third shot at a dress rehearsal, a required step ahead of a test flight to the moon.

This time, the launch team managed to load some super-cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen into the core stage of the 30-story Space Launch System rocket, but fell far short of the full amount. Liquid hydrogen is extremely hazardous, with officials noting that the systems had been checked for leaks prior to the test.
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Missing-Link Black Hole Found Lurking in Plain Sight

April 14, 2022

An international research team has discovered a supermassive black hole in the early Universe that could provide the missing link in the evolution of quasars, some of the brightest objects in space. This new object was discovered in the most unlikely place: already archived observations of one of the most intensively studied regions of the sky. This result is important for understanding the evolution of supermassive black holes, like the one hiding at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy. And the method of discovery suggests that there are more surprises waiting to be discovered in the archive data.

Quasars, extremely bright objects powered by matter falling into a supermassive black hole, formed early in the history of the Universe, only 700-800 million years after the Big Bang. It is believed that quasars evolved from supermassive black holes in dusty starburst galaxies, a class of galaxies that has also been confirmed to have appeared early on. But there has been no direct evidence linking the two.

Researchers found evidence for the missing link while analyzing archived Hubble Space Telescope data for a region of the sky known as the “Hubble GOODS North field” in the constellation Ursa Major. This field has been studied extensively by Hubble and other world-leading telescopes. The team noticed an object, nicknamed GNz7q, that appears to be a black hole just starting to overpower its host galaxy in the process of becoming a quasar. Additional archive data including the Subaru Telescope, which can see farther into infrared wavelengths than Hubble, allowed astronomers to distinguish the black hole from its host galaxy.

Seiji Fujimoto, lead author of the paper describing the discovery, explains his vision for future research, “Subaru Telescope’s Hyper Suprime-Cam has also discovered a large number of quasars in the early universe, and further observations with the ALMA radio telescope and the James Webb [Space Telescope] have been scheduled. Detailed analysis at multiple wavelengths with a combination of these telescopes may find even more objects like GNz7q in the future.”

These results appeared as Fujimoto et al. “A dusty compact object bridging galaxies and quasars at cosmic dawn” in Nature on April 13, 2022.

https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2 ... ubaru.html


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A Powerful 'Space Laser' Has Been Detected Beaming from Deep Space
by Michelle Starr
April 8, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/extreme-me ... deep-space

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Powerful, radio-wavelength laser light has been detected emanating from the greatest distance across deep space yet.

It's a type of massless cosmic object called a megamaser, and its light has traveled for a jaw-dropping 5 billion light-years to reach us here on Earth. The astronomers who discovered it using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have named it Nkalakatha – an isiZulu word meaning "big boss".

The discovery has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available on preprint server arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02523).

"It's impressive that, with just a single night of observations, we've already found a record-breaking megamaser," said astronomer Marcin Glowacki of the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia.

"It shows just how good the telescope is."
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Researchers find 12 semidetached mass-transfer massive binaries in galaxy M31

by Chinese Academy of Sciences
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-semidetac ... alaxy.html
Recently, PhD student Li Fuxing, Prof. Qian Shengbang and their colleagues from Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered 12 semidetached mass-transfer massive binaries from a total of 437 eclipsing binaries in Andromeda galaxy (M31). The secondary (less massive) components filled their Roche lobes, while the more massive ones were detached from the lobes.

Their findings were published in The Astronomical Journal on April 8.

M31 is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and the largest galaxy in the Local Group. Its structure and metallicity are very close to that of the Milky Way.

Since M31 is far away from the Earth, most of the eclipsing binaries obtained in M31 are massive binaries, and only a few binaries have been investigated for the distance modulus of M31. Therefore, whether the structural characteristics and evolutionary state of these binaries are the same as those of massive binaries in the Milky Way remains poorly understood.

In this study, the researchers have found that the relationship between the mass ratio and the fill-out factor of the primary star reveals that they are in the stage of slow mass transfer from less massive components to their companions with the reversed mass ratio.
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Spy Satellites Confirmed Our Discovery of the First Meteor from Beyond the Solar System...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ar-system/
Apparently, their is some controversy about this "confirmation."

Extract:
(Inverse) (Chris) Lintott (a professor of astronomy at the University of Oxford) points to a refutation of Loeb and Siraj’s claims published in a paper in Research Notes of the AAS.

“Note the last line which the blog ignores: Just because something is on an inbound trajectory, doesn’t mean it is interstellar,” he says.

Michele Bannister, a small Solar Systems object expert at the University of Canterbury, is also skeptical of the results — partly because of how little the object has been brought up to the scientific community. The Space Force letter in and of itself is also not a big enough backup, to her, to verify the claims.

“That doesn’t seem like a situation where an appeal to authority helps in evaluating a potential candidate,” Bannister tells Inverse. “I also haven’t seen this candidate brought to any scientific conferences for discussion.”

One problem, she says, is that finding trajectories of meteors in the atmosphere is very hard. Whereas an object like ‘Oumuamua can be tracked with enough time to figure out a trajectory, the Loeb and Siraj paper relies, for the most part, on the speed of the object.

Source: https://www.inverse.com/science/interst ... -discovery
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Chinese astronauts land after 6 months on space station
Source: AP
BEIJING (AP) — Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after six months aboard their country’s newest orbital station in the longest crewed mission to date for China’s ambitious space program.

The Shenzhou 13 space capsule landed in the Gobi desert in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, shown live on state TV.

During the mission, astronaut Wang Yaping carried out the first spacewalk by a Chinese woman. Wang and crewmates Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu beamed back physics lessons for high school students.

China launched its first astronaut into space in 2003 and landed robot rovers on the moon in 2013 and on Mars last year. Officials have discussed a possible crewed mission to the moon.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/space-explor ... 19a6049d09
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