Tag: science

Another study suggests Saturn’s rings are young, much younger than the planet

5:59 pm

Scientists using data from Cassini, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, have confirmed earlier research that said Saturn’s rings are much younger than the planet, only about 400 million years old.

From 2004 to 2017, the team used an instrument called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer aboard NASA’s late Cassini spacecraft to analyze specks of dust flying around Saturn. Over those 13 years, the researchers collected just 163 grains that had originated from beyond the planet’s close neighborhood. But it was enough. Based on their calculations, Saturn’s rings have likely been gathering dust for only a few hundred million years.

Though I cannot cite the earlier research, I distinctly remember a study from about a decade ago that posited the rings being young, only a few hundred million years old. This research confirms this conclusion, and likely firms up the theory considerably.

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Intuitive Machines’ first mission to land on Moon delayed

5:52 pm

Intuitive Machines officials revealed during their quarterly report that the first mission of its Nova-C lunar lander has been delayed from June to late August or September.

The company announced in February plans for a June landing at Malapert A, a crater near the south pole of the moon. That date was a slip from a previously scheduled March launch, which the company said was linked to NASA’s decision to move the landing site to Malapert A.

Altemus said the company made “significant progress” in testing of the lander in recent months, such as structural tests to confirm the vehicle could handle the stresses of launch and cryogenic tanking demonstrations. “We have some functional testing” still to do on the lander, he said, but did not elaborate on the nature of those tests or their schedule ahead of shipping to Cape Canaveral for its Falcon 9 launch.

Two private companies have so far attempted and failed to land on the Moon, Israel’s SpaceIL and Japan’s Ispace. Two American companies, Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are both racing to achieve this goal in the coming months. This delay now puts Astrobotic in the lead, with its launch now targeting the summer.

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Engineers free stuck radar antenna on Juice probe to Jupiter’s big moons

4:24 pm

Engineers have successfully freed the 52-foot wide radar antenna on the Juice probe to Jupiter, shaking it enough to release a pin that was blocking deployment.

The pin was freed by employing “back-to-back jolts”. Imagine when you roll your car back and forth to get it freed from mud or snow. It appears this is what they did with the pin.

Juice will arrive in Jupiter orbit in 2031, where it will make numerous fly-bys of Europa, Calisto, and Ganymede, and then settle into an orbit around Ganymede alone. The radar antenna was essential for probing the ice content of these worlds, below the surface.

Hat tip to reader Mike Nelson.

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Saturn now has 145 known moons

3:41 pm

Using ground-based images analyzed in a new way, astronomers have discovered an additional 62 small moons orbiting Saturn, giving the ringed gas giant a total of 145 known moons.

The data used by the team was collected between 2019 and 2021 in three-hour spans by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on top of Maunakea in Hawaii. It allowed the astronomers to detect moons around Saturn as small as 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) in diameter. That’s about two-thirds the length of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

Though some of the moons had been spotted as early as 2019, it takes more than sighting an object close to a planet to confirm it is a moon and not an asteroid making a brief close passage to that planet. To change these objects from “suspected moons” to “confirmed moons” of Saturn, the astronomers had to track them for several years to ensure each is actually orbiting the gas giant.

Performing a painstaking process of matching objects detected on different nights over the course of 24 months, the team tracked 63 objects that they ended up confirming as moons. One of these satellites was revealed back in 2021, with the remaining 62 moons gradually announced over the past few weeks.

To a certain extent, this declared number of moons around Saturn is utterly irrelevant. Think about it. Every single object in its rings should be defined as a moon, totaling hundreds of thousands. At some point the question of what defines a moon becomes the relevant question.

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Perseverance data suggests a strong river rushed down the delta in Jezero Crater

10:07 am

Skrinkle Haven on Mars
Click for original image.

Based on the images and geology so far gathered by the Mars rover Perseverance as it has climbed up onto the delta that flowed into Jezero Crater sometime in the far past, scientists now think a roaring river once flowed down that delta.

Years ago, scientists noticed a series of curving bands of layered rock within Jezero Crater that they dubbed “the curvilinear unit.” They could see these layers from space but are finally able to see them up close, thanks to Perseverance.

One location within the curvilinear unit, nicknamed “Skrinkle Haven,” is captured in one of the new Mastcam-Z mosaics [a section of which is posted to the right]. Scientists are sure the curved layers here were formed by powerfully flowing water, but Mastcam-Z’s detailed shots have left them debating what kind: a river such as the Mississippi, which winds snakelike across the landscape, or a braided river like Nebraska’s Platte, which forms small islands of sediment called sandbars.

When viewed from the ground, the curved layers appear arranged in rows that ripple out across the landscape. They could be the remnants of a river’s banks that shifted over time – or the remnants of sandbars that formed in the river. The layers were likely much taller in the past. Scientists suspect that after these piles of sediment turned to rock, they were sandblasted by wind over the eons and carved down to their present size.

The press release say nothing about glacial activity here, but I am willing to bet the scientists have considered this. As it requires a greater leap into the unknown, involving geological processes not yet understood on an alien planet, it is makes sense that they have put it aside at this point. I also am willing to bet that it will pop up again, with time and additional data.

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Astronomers find largest explosion yet discovered

9:26 am

Using a large variety of telescopes, astronomers have confirmed the discovery of the largest and longest explosion ever discovered, dubbed AT2021lwx and more than eight billion light years away yet ten times brighter than any supernovae previously recorded while lasting years rather than months.

The researchers believe that the explosion is a result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly thousands of times larger than our sun, that has been violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole. Fragments of the cloud would have been swallowed up, sending shockwaves through its remnants, as well as into a large dusty doughnut-shaped formation surrounding the black hole. Such events are very rare and nothing on this scale has been witnessed before.

Last year, astronomers witnessed the brightest explosion on record – a gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A. While this was brighter than AT2021lwx, it lasted for just a fraction of the time, meaning the overall energy released by the AT2021lwx explosion is far greater. The physical size of the explosion is about 100 times larger than the entire solar system, and at its brightest, it was about 2 trillion times brighter than the Sun.

The only things in the universe that are as bright as AT2021lwx are quasars – supermassive black holes with a constant flow of gas falling onto them at high velocity.

Any theories at this moment about the cause of this explosion are very tentative, pending acquisition of more data. What is certain is that the tools of astronomers are far more sophisticated today, allowing for such discoveries that were once impossible. And it also appears that the existence of thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit did nothing to hinder this research.

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Is this ice or lava in the death valley of Mars?

12:21 pm

Ice or lava on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

To put it mildly this is strange terrain. The curving east-west feature resembles a glacial flow, but it also has features that say otherwise. For example, what could cause that gap in the middle of the picture? Such things are not usually seen in an ice flow. Then there is that filled crater on the center left edge of the picture, inside the flow. Though filled with material, the flow itself does not flow around the crater, suggesting the impact occurred after the flow. Moreover the crater is a pedestal crater, whereby the surrounding terrain has eroded away so that the crater ends up standing above it.

These facts suggest that this flow is very old, and has not flowed for a very very very long time. This in turn suggests it isn’t ice but solidified lava, though for a lava flow it also has features that are anomalous when compared to typical flood lava on Mars.
» Read more

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Scientists: Stars orbiting close to Milky Way’s supermassive black hole do it alone

10:07 am

The stars orbiting Sag A*
The stars orbiting Sag A*. Click for original image.

Based on a ten year study of the motions of nine stars orbiting close to Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, scientists have concluded that they are single stars, not binaries as would be expected.

Using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, Devin Chu of Hilo, an astronomer with the UCLA Galactic Center Orbits Initiative, led a 10-year survey that found these ‘S-stars,’ where ‘S’ stands for Sagittarius A*, the name of the monster black hole at our galaxy’s core, are all single.

The result is surprising given the S-stars Chu’s team observed included young, massive main-sequence stars that are only about six million years old. Normally, stars at this age that are 10 times more massive than our Sun spend their childhood years paired with a twin in a binary system, or sometimes even as triplets.

This finding suggests that the black hole’s massive gravitational field causes the binaries to be pulled apart, or somehow to merge during their formation.

This data point and the questions it raises pales before the more fundamental question that astronomers have been asking since these stars were first discovered in the 1990s: How is it possible for any stars to form so close to such a disruptive gravitational field?

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A rash on Mars

4:25 pm

A Martian rash
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 30, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labeled this a “Circular Outcrop of Bright Rock.

What I see is a Martian skin rash. Based on the ripple pattern below the ridge one might think we are looking at sand dunes, except that the rash above the cliff has no such pattern. Instead, the ground in this one particular area looks very roughened in a random sort of way.

The location at 27 degrees south latitude suggests there is little near surface ice at this location to cause this feature. The overview map below provides another but not very helpful possibility.
» Read more

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Scientists: Real women are better to send to Mars than real men

11:10 am

Gee, I thought there was no difference: According to a study done for the European Space Agency (ESA), scientists have concluded that sending a four person all-female crew to Mars would have significant advantages over either a mixed sex crew or an all-male crew.

From the paper’s conclusion:

These estimated differences result from lower resting and exercising O2 requirements (based on available astronaut data) of theoretical female astronauts, who are lighter than theoretical male astronauts at equivalent statures and have lower relative VO2max values. These data, combined with the move towards smaller diameter space habitat modules, suggest that there may be a number of operational advantages to all-female crews during future human space exploration missions.

While there may be some minor operational advantages to only flying female astronauts on long missions, those advantages pale in comparison to the loss to humanity in the long run. You can’t settle a new world with one sex. Nor can you learn how to get there if you build your spacecraft capable of only meeting the minimum requirements.

If you go, everyone must go, or else the goal is not inclusive and diverse. Or as reader Milt noted to me when he sent me this story:

Of course, every research finding that is reported in this article flies in the face of the woke conventional wisdom that “there are no differences between men and women,” and — even better — male astronauts who wish to transition to being women must then be accepted as female in terms of mission planning, etc., lest NASA or the ESA be accused of transphobia.

In other words, this study and the entire “transgender” movement reveal the real leftist goal: Power and control. In the first case, the study says: “Give the job only to our favored oppressed sex!” In the second case the “transgender” movement says: “Obey our whims no matter what!”

Facts only matter when they help this leftist movement gain power and control. When the facts are inconvenient, the facts are tossed aside and it is the emotions that must rule.

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UAE asteroid mission will rendezvous with seven asteroids and will include lander

10:08 am

Though the mission was first announced in 2021, the UAE only recently revealed at a science conference the mission’s specific targets and plan.

From the conference poster [pdf]:

The mission will launch in 2028 and visit 7 main belt asteroids, including 6 high-speed flyby encounters en route to a rendezvous with the asteroid 269 Justitia. The mission is enabled by solar electric propulsion and gravity assist flybys of Venus, Earth, and Mars, bringing the total number of mission encounters to 10. The trajectory design presented will include the overall timeline of the mission, launch targets, launch period, overall duration of the encounters, design of the encounters, and trajectory modeling. Mission design analyses include designing the Deep space maneuvers (DSMs) prior to the rendezvous with Justitia and design Justitia’s orbits and maneuvers to accomplish the lander deployment.

As with the UAE’s Al-Amal Mars Orbiter, the country is relying on an American university, the University of Colorado, as well as the commercial company, Advanced Space, to design, build, and operate the spacecraft. In this sense the UAE is paying these American entities to fly the mission while requiring them to train its own engineers and scientists.

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Meteorite crashes through roof of NJ home

9:53 am

On May 8, 2023 a family in New Jersey returned home to discover a 4×6 inch meteorite on the floor of one bedroom, having crashed through the roof of their home.

Suzy Kop, a resident of the home, told CBS Philadelphia that meteorite landed in her father’s bedroom, but no one was home. “I thank God that my father was not here, no one was here, we weren’t hurt or anything,” Kop told the station.

She found the object, she said, amid debris in the room after it came through the ceiling. At first, she said she believed it had been thrown. “I did touch the thing, because I thought it was a random rock, I don’t know, and it was warm,” she told CBS Philadelphia.

Though not unprecedented, there are only a few recorded examples of meteorites landing in populated areas like this.

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Momentus and Astroscale team up to propose Hubble servicing mission

11:29 am

Capitalism in space: The two orbital tug companies Momentus and Astroscale announced today that they have partnered to propose a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, designed to boost the telescope and extend its life.

The proposed mission concept, a commercial solution to extend the life of this important national asset without risk to humans, includes launching a Momentus Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle (OSV) to low-Earth orbit on a small launch vehicle. Once on orbit, Astroscale’s RPOD technology built into the OSV would be used to safely rendezvous, approach and then complete a robotic capture of the telescope. Once mated, the OSV would perform a series of maneuvers to raise the Hubble by 50 km. Removal of surrounding and threatening space debris in Hubble’s new orbit using the Vigoride and Astroscale’s RPOD capabilities will be prioritized after the completion of the primary reboost mission.

As I have written repeatedly, Hubble is a telescope that refuses to die. I predicted that come the 2030s, when its orbit had decayed to a point that it either had to be de-orbited (NASA’s preferred option in the past when it ran everything) or be lifted to a higher orbit to extend its life, people would find a way to lift it.

Now that private enterprise is running the show, NASA is taking advantage of that to ask for private solutions to save Hubble, and not surprisingly it is quickly getting them.

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Paperwork on Mars

11:20 am

Paperwork on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 15, 2023 by the close-up camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. From the caption:

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took this close-up view of a rock nicknamed “Terra Firme” that looks like the open pages of a book, on April 15, 2023, the 3,800th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, using the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the end of its robotic arm. The rock is about an inch across (2.5 centimeters).

Strange looking rocks like this have not been rare during Curiosity’s travels in Gale Crater, though it seems to me that the variety and strangeness has increased as the rover has climbed higher on Mount Sharp. In this case, the tall flake in the center — as well as the shorter flakes to the left — were among the many thin layers seen in this area. These layers however were clearly made of much harder material than the layers above and below. Those weaker layers eroded away over the eons, leaving behind these thin sheets.

Also, if you own red-blue 3D glasses, take a look at the anaglyph here.

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Webb takes infrared image of the disk of dust and debris surrounding Fomalhaut

4:57 pm

Fomalhaut debris disk as seen in the infrared by Webb
Click for original image.

Using the mid-infrared instrument on the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have obtained a new high resolution infrared image of the disk of dust and debris that surrounds the star Fomalhaut, and (surprise!) have it to be more complex than they previously believed.

That image is to the right, annotated by the science team.

Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that’s 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system’s Kuiper Belt of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune. The inner belts – which had never been seen before – were revealed by Webb for the first time.

The dust cloud identified in the outer ring is possibly left over from a recent collusion of larger bodies.

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Sinuous ridge inside Martian canyon

9:25 am

Sinuous ridge inside a Martian canyon
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 7, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the camera team labels a “sinuous ridge within valley.”

The location is at 30 degrees south latitude, right on the edge of the southern of the two 30-60 degree mid-latitude bands where orbital images show many glacial features. Closer to the equator and there is little or no evidence of near surface ice on Mars. Farther from the equator from this latitude and the evidence of near surface ice increases, becoming very dominant the closer to the poles you get.

At this spot, it appears there is little near surface ice. The channel has ripple sand dunes inside it, and the sinuous ridge appears to be bedrock. Similarly, the plateau above the channel also appears like bedrock, the craters showing no evidence of splatter that is common where there is near surface ice.

What made the channel? And what made that a sinuous ridge inside it?
» Read more

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Rocket Lab successfully launches two NASA hurricane monitoring cubesats

6:11 pm

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket today successfully placed NASA’s two Tropics hurricane monitoring cubesats into orbit, lifting off from New Zealand ((May 8th New Zealand time).

This is the first of two Rocket Lab launches to get the entire four-satellite Tropics constellation into orbit, with the second schedule for two weeks from now.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

29 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 33 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 33 to 28.

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Brain terrain on top of Martian mountains

12:28 pm

Brain terrain at high elevation on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 26, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is labeled by the scientists “Brain Terrain on Floor of Crater in Warrego Valles.”

Brain terrain is a geological feature entirely unique to Mars that remains unexplained in any way by geologists. The scientists know it is almost certainly related to near-surface ice and its sublimation into gas, but their theories as to its precise formation process remain incomplete and unconvincing, even to them.

In this case the brain terrain’s interweaving nodules seem to show flow patterns, but strangely those patterns go around depressions and hollows. Yet, the overall flow direction also seems to point downhill towards the slope on the image’s right edge.
» Read more

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Hubble captures shadows on star’s outer accretion disk cast by inner accretion disk

11:07 am

Shadows cast on star's accretion disk
Click for original image.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope’s images taken five years apart have captured the changing shadows cast by a star’s inner accretion disk onto its outer accretion disk.

Those images are to the right, reduced and rearranged to post here. From the caption:

Comparison images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, taken several years apart, have uncovered two eerie shadows moving counterclockwise across a disc of gas and dust encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The discs are tilted face-on as seen from Earth and so give astronomers a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening around the star.

The [top] image, taken in 2016, shows just one shadow [A] at the 11 o’clock position. This shadow is cast by an inner disc that is slightly inclined to the outer disc and so blocks starlight. The picture on the [bottom] shows a second shadow that emerged from yet another nested disc at the 7 o’clock position, as photographed in 2021. What was originally the inner disc is marked [B] in this later view.

The shadows rotate around the star at different rates like the hand on a clock. They are evidence for two unseen planets that have pulled dust into their orbits. This makes them slightly inclined to each other. This is a visible-light photo taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. Artificial colour has been added to enhance details.

An artist’s conception of the system, as seen from an oblique angle, is available here. All told, this solar system of disks kind of resembles a spinning gyroscope, with its different rings tilted at different angles to conserve angular momentum.

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Weird dome near Starship candidate landing zone on Mars

1:47 pm

Weird dome near Starship candidate landing zone on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as domes in Arcadia Planitia, one of the many large northern lowland plains of Mars.

This to me is a “What the heck?” image. I won’t dare try to explain the warped concentric ringed pattern at the top of the mesa, nor the bright and dark splotch that surrounds it. The small craters around it appear to have glacier material within them, and the terrain here likely has a lot of near surface ice, being at 37 degrees north latitude in a region where the data suggests such ice exists. The different colors here likely indicate the difference between dust (orange) and coarser material (aqua).

The location, as shown in the overview map below, makes this mesa more tantalizing.
» Read more

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Two interacting galaxies, both with active supermassive black holes at their center

10:20 am

Interacting galaxies
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. From the caption:

This new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows interacting galaxies known as AM 1214-255. These galaxies contain active galactic nuclei, or AGNs. An AGN is an extraordinarily luminous central region of a galaxy. Its extreme brightness is caused by matter whirling into a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s heart.

Hubble observed the galaxy [on the right] as part of an AGN survey, with the aim of compiling a dataset about nearby AGNs to be used as a resource for astronomers investigating AGN physics, black holes, host galaxy structure, and more.

Note how the outer arms of both galaxies appear warped, with long streams of stars being pulled towards the other galaxy. Imagine living on a planet orbiting one of those stars as it finds itself over time farther and farther from its home galaxy, out in the vast emptiness of intergalactic space. While this sounds lonely, it has advantages for life, because isolated from the galaxy the star will not be threatened by supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and the host of other events that happen inside galaxies that can threaten biology.

It also means your night sky will be heralded by the rising and setting of two nearby giant galaxies.

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In a Martian cold cauldron, boil and bake

1:25 pm

bubbles and boiling ground
Click for original image.

Cool image time! My headline paraphrases slightly the witches’ chant from Shakespeare’s MacBeth, if only to make it more accurately describe the picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. Taken on January 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a patch of mid-latitude terrain in the icy northern lowland plains of Mars.

While some of the craters here were certainly caused by impact, it is also likely that most were instead cryo-volcanic in nature, whereby ice bubbles up from below as changing temperature conditions — none of which need to be very warm — cause it to either melt temporarily into liquid or sublimate directly into a gas. The dark pimplelike hole on the picture’s right edge is a perfect example, with the hole sitting at the top of a cone.
» Read more

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SuperBIT balloon circling Antarctica snaps more high resolution astronomical pictures

9:39 am

Sombrero Galaxy
Click for full image.

The Super-Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (Super-BIT) that has been circling Antarctica for the last two weeks has now obtained two more more high resolution wide-field astronomical pictures.

The picture to the right, cropped to post here, is of Messier 104 (the Sombrero Galaxy). While the telescope cannot zoom in closer than this to such objects, it is able to get much wider and sharp pictures, covering an entire galaxy or nebula that ground-based telescope using adaptive optics (designed to counter the fuzziness caused by the atmosphere) cannot. Adaptive optics only work on very small fields of view, thus making it unable to observe some of the larger nearby astronomical objects like galaxies and nebulae.

If you look at the live stream of the balloon’s track, it has now almost completed its second circuit of Antarctica.

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Astronomers record moment star eats planet

9:25 am

Animation of a star eating a planet
Click to watch full animation.

Using data from a variety of space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers now think they have recorded the moment a star similar to our Sun actually swallowed a planet thought to be comparable to Jupiter or smaller.

Once the science team put all the evidence together, they realized the dust they were seeing with NEOWISE [in orbit] was being generated as the planet spiraled into the star’s puffy atmosphere. Like other older stars, the star had begun to expand in size as it aged, bringing it closer to the orbiting planet. As the planet skimmed the surface of the star, it pulled hot gas off the star that then drifted outward and cooled, forming dust. In addition, material from the disintegrating planet blew outward, also forming dust.

What happened next, according to the astronomers, triggered the flare of optical light seen by ZTF [survey telescope in California]. “The planet plunged into the core of the star and got swallowed whole. As it was doing this, energy was transferred to the star,” De explains. “The star blew off its outer layers to get rid of the energy. It expanded and brightened, and the brightening is what ZTF registered.”

Some of this expanding stellar material then escaped from the star and traveled outward. Like the boiled-off layers of the star and planet that previously drifted outward, this material also cooled to form dust. NEOWISE is detecting the infrared glow of all the newly minted dust.

The picture above is a screen capture from a short artist’s animation created to illustrate what happened. The most amazing aspect of this event is how long the planet skimmed the surface of that star. It appears it did so for several orbits at least.

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The cliff wall of ancient Martian lava channel

3:32 pm

The cliff wall of an ancient Martian lava channel
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 17, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) by the camera team not as part of any particular research project but in order to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature. In such cases the camera team tries to pick potentially interesting spots.

This cliff, about 1,100 feet high, is the north wall of a major volcano channel flowing across the Tharsis Bulge, the lava plains that surround Mars’ giant volcanoes. Located in the dry equatorial regions, there is no near surface ice here, but a lot of dust, much of it likely volcanic ash. In the full picture are several ancient craters, all of which are almost entirely buried by this dust and ash.

The cliff wall itself is made up of numerous layers, each representing a past volcanic flood lava event that covered this region with a new flow of material. These events occurred over more than a billion years.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: April activity drops steeply

2:19 pm

NOAA this week once again published an update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with some additional details included to provide some context.

In April the number of sunspots dropped again, for the second time in the past three months. The high activity previously had suggested that the solar maximum was going to be much higher than predicted, or possibly would come sooner than expected. The drop however now suggests that the fast rise in sunspot activity that we have seen since the beginning of the ramp up to solar maximum in 2020 might finally be abating.
» Read more

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A nearby aging galaxy with an active supermassive black hole at its center

9:44 am

aging galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. It shows a galaxy only 30 million light years away, making almost our neighbor. From the caption:

NGC 3489 has an active galactic nucleus, or AGN. The AGN sits at the center of the galaxy, is extremely bright, and emits radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum as the black hole devours material that gets too close to it.

This lenticular galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy, which is a class of AGN that is dimmer than other types of AGNs. They generally don’t outshine the rest of the galaxy, so the galaxy surrounding the black hole is clearly visible. Other types of AGNs emit so much radiation that it is almost impossible to observe the host galaxy.

That active nucleus is the bright dominate sphere at the galaxy’s center, large enough to overwhelm a large percentage of the rest of the galaxy. Its existence and dominance suggests that this galaxy is aging, and is beginning the transition from a spiral to an elliptical. In fact, its arms have already mostly vanished, and there is at present little star-formation on-going.

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Suborbital rocket explodes four seconds after launch in New Mexico

9:15 am

An UP Aerospace suborbital rocket exploded yesterday only four seconds after launch in New Mexico, destroying a number of private and NASA science and commercial payloads.

An UP Aerospace rocket, 20 feet tall and carrying a NASA payload, exploded moments after liftoff today. The unfortunate event not only affected the NASA TechRise Student Challenge payloads but also delayed a poignant tribute to the late NASA astronaut, Phillip K. Chapman, and chemist Louise Ann O’Deen.

The rocket was set to launch the cremated remains of Chapman, NASA’s first Australian-born American astronaut, finally granting him his long-awaited journey to space.

Chapman and O’Deen’s remains were payloads from the commercial company Celestis. The thirteen NASA payloads were part of its TechRise Student Challenge program for 6th to 12th grade students.

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Exploring just one small corner of Valles Marineris, Mars’ Grand Canyon

2:11 pm

One corner of Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the many many many layers that are found in the cliffs of Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon in the solar system and far far larger that Earth’s Grand Canyon.

The elevation difference between the red dots is just under 4,000 feet. Yet that high point is still more than 7,000 feet below the rim of the canyon, more than thirty miles to the south. And the lower dot is still about 18,000 feet above the low point in this side canyon of Valles Marineris, about thirty miles away to the northeast.

In other words, in sixty miles from rim to floor the canyon at this location drops about 25,000 feet, only 4,000 feet less than the height of Mount Everest. Compare that with the Grand Canyon’s slopes, which drops in eleven miles about 5,000 feet, beginning at the main south rim lookout at the start of Bright Angel trail.
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Galaxies without end

9:44 am

Galaxies without end
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right has been significantly reduced but also significantly sharpened to post here. It was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a recent survey of “jellyfish” galaxies, galaxies located in galaxy clusters where there is a large concentration of galaxies whose combined gravity and intergalactic environment acts to pull material or “tendrils” out from the galaxy.

Rather than crop the image to focus on that single large central jellyfish galaxy, I have instead sharpened the much-reduced full photo to bring out clearly the number of surrounding galaxies. There is only one Milky Way star in this picture, the object with the four diffraction spikes in the lower-right. Every other dot is a galaxy, many of which can be seen to be very strangely shaped in the original full resolution image. In fact, I strongly recommend you click on the picture to explore that original image, just to see the variety of galaxy shapes.

The point of this picture today however is not to illustrate the wide variety of galaxies that can exist, but to underline the vast and largely incomprehensible scale of the universe. The large galaxy is thought to be 650 million light years away, which means it took light traveling at 186,000 miles per second that many years to get here. The surrounding galaxies are also all tens to hundreds of millions of light years from each other. Yet, their combined gravity, almost infinitesimal in strength, is enough to warp the shape of each.

We understand these numbers and facts intellectually, but do we understand them in reality? I think it is difficult, even if you work hard to come up with a scaled comparison. For example, it took nine years for the New Horizons spacecraft to get from Earth to Pluto, a distance of about 4.5 light hours. And New Horizons was the fastest traveling probe ever launched, moving at 36,400 miles per hour when it left Earth. Yet, this distance is nothing compared to the distance between these galaxies.

The vastness of existence really is beyond our comprehension. That we try to comprehend it speaks well of the human desire to achieve the impossible.

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