Space News and Discussions

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Researchers capture the fastest optical flash emitted from a newborn supernova

by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-capture-f ... wborn.html
A team of astronomers has discovered the fastest optical flash of a Type Ia supernova, and reports a study in Astrophysical Journal Letters published on December 8.

Many stars end their lives through a spectacular explosion. Most massive stars will explode as a supernova. Though a white dwarf star is the remnant of an intermediate mass star like our sun, it can explode if the star is part of a close binary star system, where two stars orbit around each other. This type of supernovae is classified as Type Ia supernovae.

Because of the uniform and extremely high brightness of the Type Ia supernova, which is about 5 billion times brighter than our sun, they are widely used by researchers as a standard candle for distance measurements in astronomy. As the most successful example Type Ia supernovae helped researchers discover the accelerating expansion of our universe. But despite the great success of the Type Ia supernova cosmology, researchers are still puzzled by basic questions such as what the progenitor systems of Type Ia supernovae are, and how Type Ia supernova explosions are ignited.
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"Newer, nimbler, faster:" Venus probe will search for signs of life in clouds of sulfuric acid
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-nimbler-f ... -life.html
by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

With multiple rovers landed and a mission set to return samples to Earth, Mars has dominated the search for life in the solar system for decades. But Venus has some fresh attention coming its way.

In a new report published today, a team led by MIT researchers lays out the scientific plan and rationale for a suite of scrappy, privately-funded missions set to hunt for signs of life among the ultra-acidic atmosphere of the second planet from the sun.

"We hope this is the start of a new paradigm where you go cheaply, more often, and in a more focused way," says Sara Seager, Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and principal investigator for the planned Venus Life Finder Missions. "This is a newer, nimbler, faster way to do space science. It's very MIT."

The first of the missions is set to launch in 2023, managed and funded by California-based Rocket Lab. The company's Electron rocket will send a 50-pound probe on board its Photon spacecraft for the five-month, 38-million-mile journey to Venus, all for a three-minute skim through the Venusian clouds.
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Parker Solar Probe: A spacecraft has 'touched' the sun for the first time
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-parker-so ... t-sun.html
by American Physical Society
On April 28, 2021, at 0933 UT (3:33 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time), NASA's Parker Solar Probe reached the sun's extended solar atmosphere, known as the corona, and spent five hours there. The spacecraft is the first to enter the outer boundaries of our sun.

The results, published in Physical Review Letters, were announced in a press conference at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2021 on December 14. The manuscript is open-access and freely available to download.

"This marks the achievement of the primary objective of the Parker mission and a new era for understanding the physics of the corona," said Justin C. Kasper, the first author, Deputy Chief Technology Officer at BWX Technologies, and a professor at the University of Michigan. The mission is led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL).

The probe made the first direct observations of what lies within the sun's atmosphere, measuring phenomena previously only estimated.
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NASA promotes East Coast Starship option at LC-49 following SpaceX interest

Image

The prospect of Starship making its mark on the Space Coast entered another level this week when NASA revealed it would conduct environmental assessments on LC-49 to support Starship launch and landing operations.

With SpaceX already confirming they will restart work on a Starship pad inside 39A, the potential of a second site at LC-49 could provide a considerable increase in Starship launch cadence from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/12 ... lc-49-ksc/
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Juno spacecraft 'hears' Jupiter's moon
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-juno-spac ... -moon.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Sounds from a Ganymede flyby, magnetic fields, and remarkable comparisons between Jupiter and Earth's oceans and atmospheres were discussed during a briefing today on NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans.

Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio has debuted a 50-second audio track generated from data collected during the mission's close flyby of the Jovian moon Ganymede on June 7, 2021. Juno's Waves instrument, which tunes in to electric and magnetic radio waves produced in Jupiter's magnetosphere, collected the data on those emissions. Their frequency was then shifted into the audio range to make the audio track.

"This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel as if you were riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades," said Bolton. "If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents entry into a different region in Ganymede's magnetosphere."

Detailed analysis and modeling of the Waves data are ongoing. "It is possible the change in the frequency shortly after closest approach is due to passing from the nightside to the dayside of Ganymede," said William Kurth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, lead co-investigator for the Waves investigation.

At the time of Juno's closest approach to Ganymede—during the mission's 34th trip around Jupiter—the spacecraft was within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of the moon's surface and traveling at a relative velocity of 41,600 mph (67,000 kph).
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Stunning close-up reveals secrets of Milky Way's neighbour
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-stunning- ... milky.html
by Australian National University
A stunning image captured by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) and Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, shows one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors in new detail.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Nickolas Pingel, says it is the clearest ever picture of hydrogen emitted from the Small Magellanic Cloud.

"The clarity of this image is unprecedented," he said.

"We're able to see all of the small-scale structures for the first time. It's an important step in understanding the role hydrogen plays in the evolution of galaxies.

"For example, you can see holes within the gas. This shows us that hydrogen interacts with supernovae."

This study focused on the Small Magellanic Cloud—the nearest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

The team used the CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope and high-tech software to capture and process 100 hours of data.
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Colossal 'Fossil' Structures Have Been Detected Lurking on The Outskirts of Our Galaxy
by Michele Starr
December 18, 2021

https://www.sciencealert.com/colossal-f ... -milky-way

Introduction:
(Science Alert) From Earth's vantage point in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms, the structure of our galaxy is pretty difficult to reconstruct.
That's because gauging the distance to something in space when you don't know its intrinsic brightness is really, really hard. And there are a lot of objects in the Milky Way whose brightness is unknown to us. This means that sometimes, we can totally miss huge structures that you'd think should be right under our noses.

A new set of such enormous structures has now been unveiled at the outer regions of the Milky Way disk: massive, spinning filaments with unclear provenance. Astronomers will be conducting follow-up surveys to try and solve the mystery.

The discovery came about thanks to the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory, a project to map the Milky Way in three dimensions with the highest precision yet.

Gaia orbits the Sun with Earth, in a looping orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrangian point, a gravitationally stable pocket of space created by the interactions between the two bodies.
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