The Falcon9 main stage landing on its drone ship.
Image: SpaceX / Public Domain Image
The age of full-blown reusable rockets is coming another step closer. SpaceX, the private company owned by PayPal founder Elon Musk, has always strove toward reusable rockets. So far, they’ve successfully landed and recovered rockets, but they haven’t actually reused one yet.
In a recent tweet, Musk said he hopes to re-launch all four of his landed rockets this Fall. Initially, he had hoped for a June re-launch, but rocketry and space travel being what it is, a delay is understandable. Still, that’s a seven month turn-around, which seems rather lengthy. SpaceX hopes that eventually it will only take a few weeks reuse a rocket.
SpaceX’s four rockets in the hangar. Image: SpaceX
If successful, this will really change the nature of space travel/exploration/colonisation. The cost of putting payloads into orbit will be lowered dramatically. Who knows? Maybe the lower cost will trickle down to us consumers somehow.
It’s been reported that the first reuse flights will likely be Low Earth Orbit (LEO) flights. LEO’s have less complicated flight profiles, so this makes sense. There’s no official word on payloads for these flights yet, though companies like SES and Iridium are probably keenly interested.
It seems like SpaceX is always in the news lately. The pending re-launch of the Falcon 9 is almost overshadowed by other news from SpaceX: the launching of the Falcon Heavy. The Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket, and its first launch is scheduled for December 2016.
An artist’s drawing of the Falcon Heavy. Credit: SpaceX
Mars. A great place to die. Image: NASA, J. Bell (Cornell U.) and M. Wolff (SSI)
If there were an Olympics for ambition, the Dutch-based non-profit organization Mars One would surely be on the podium.
If you haven’t heard of them, (and we expect you have,) they are the group that plans to send colonists to Mars on a one-way trip, starting in the year 2026. Only 24 colonists will be selected for the dubious distinction of dying on Mars, but that hasn’t stopped 200,000 people from 140 countries from signing up and going through the selection process.
There are 100 people who have made it through the selection process so far. Another five day testing phase will knock that number down to 40, out of which 24 will be chosen as the lucky ones. The latest testing will start soon. According to Mars One, most of their testing is the same as the testing that NASA does on their astronauts.
At least some of the candidates have serious backgrounds. One, Zachary Gallegos, is a geologist and field chemist who works with the Mars Science Laboratory. Here’s what he has to say:
All of this testing and narrowing down is partially funded by a reality show, which adds to the sort of carnival atmosphere around the whole thing, and makes it hard to take it seriously.
But, some people are serious about it.
In a statement, Mars One commented on the upcoming testing:
“Over the course of five days, candidates will face various challenges. It will be the first time all candidates will meet in person and demonstrate their capabilities as a team.”
“In this round the candidates will play an active role in decision making/group formation. Mars One has asked the candidates to group themselves into teams with the people they believe they can work well with.”
A human presence on Mars is a great idea, of course. But it seems fatalistic, and pointless, to choose to die there. And rest assured, these colonists are meant to die there.
Mars One addresses this kind of thinking on their website:
“For anyone not interested to go to Mars, moving permanently to Mars would be the worst kind of punishment. Most people would give an arm and a leg to be allowed to stay on Earth so it is often difficult for them to understand why anyone would want to go.”
“Yet many people apply for Mars One’s mission and these are the people who dream about someday living on Mars. They would give up anything for the opportunity and it is often difficult for them to understand why anyone would not want to go.”
Fair enough. Maybe these are the types of people who really contribute in driving humanity forward.
NASA is planning to get humans to Mars in the 2030s, and Elon Musk says he’ll do it even earlier. But they plan to bring people back. If they can provide return trips, it seems a wasteful sacrifice to die on Mars when they don’t have to. Couldn’t successful colonists contribute a lot to humanity if they were to return to Earth after their successful missions?
Mars One seems to gloss over a lot of problems. Here’s some more from their website:
A new group of four astronauts will land on Mars every two years, steadily increasing the settlement’s size. Eventually, a living unit will be built from local materials, large enough to grow trees.
As more astronauts arrive, the creativity applied to settlement expansion will certainly give way to ideas and innovation that cannot be conceived now. But it can be expected that the human spirit will continue to persevere, and even thrive in this challenging environment.
“A living unit will be built from local materials, large enough to grow trees.” A simple sentence, which obscures so much complexity. Will they mine and refine iron ore? What do they have in mind?
I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer about it. I love the spirit behind the whole thing. But it takes so much rigorous planning and execution to establish a colony on Mars. And money. How will it all work?
In the end, the whole thing is a long shot. Mars One says they have visited and talked to engineering and technological suppliers globally, and that their timeline and planning is based on this feedback. For example, they say they intend to use a Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX to launch their ship. But so much detail is left out. The Falcon Heavy doesn’t even exist yet, and Mars One has no control or input into the rocket’s development.
An artist’s illustration of the Falcon Heavy. Will it send Mars One colonists to Mars?Image: SpaceX
Take a look at the two sentences describing how they will communicate with Earth:
“The communications system will consist of two communications satellites and Earth ground stations. It will transmit data from Mars to Earth and back.”
This radio image of Jupiter was captured by the VLA in New Mexico. The three colors in the picture correspond to three different radio wavelengths: 2 cm in blue, 3 cm in gold, and 6 cm in red. Synchrotron radiation produces the pink glow around the planet. Image: Imke de Pater, Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley), Robert J. Sault (Univ. Melbourne).
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is easily one of the most iconic images in our Solar System, next to Saturn’s rings. The Great Red Spot and the cloud bands that surround it are easily seen with a backyard telescope. But much of what goes on behind the scenes on Jupiter has remained hidden.
When the Juno spacecraft arrives at Jupiter in about a month from now, we will be gifted some spectacular images from the cameras aboard that craft. To whet our appetites until then, astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico have created a detailed radio map of the gas giant. By using the ‘scope to peer 100 km past the cloud tops, the team has brought into view a mostly unexplored region of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
The team of researchers from UC Berkeley used the updated capabilities of the VLA to do this work. The VLA had its sensitivity improved by a factor of ten. “These Jupiter maps really show the power of the upgrades to the VLA,” said Bryan Butler, a member of the team and staff astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico.
In the video below, two overlaid maps alternate back and forth. One is optical and the other is a radio image. Together, the two show some of the atmospheric activity that takes place under the cloud tops.
The team measured Jupiter’s radio emissions in wavelengths that pass through clouds. That allowed them to see 100 km (60 miles) deep into the atmosphere. This allowed them to not only determine the quantity and depth of ammonia in the atmosphere, but also to learn something about how Jupiter‘s internal heat source drives global circulation and cloud formation.
“We in essence created a three-dimensional picture of ammonia gas in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which reveals upward and downward motions within the turbulent atmosphere,” said principal author Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy.
These results will also help shed light on how other gas giants behave. Not just for Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but for all the gas giant exoplanets that have been discovered. de Pater said that the map bears a striking resemblance to visible-light images taken by amateur astronomers and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Two images of the Great Red Spot. The lower one is a Hubble optical image, showing the Spot and the familiar swirling cloud patterns. The upper image is a radio map of the same region, showing the movement of ammonia up to 90 km below the clouds. Credit: Radio image by Michael H. Wong, Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley), Robert J. Sault (Univ. Melbourne). (Optical image by NASA, ESA, A.A. Simon (GSFC), M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley), and G.S. Orton (JPL-Caltech) )
In the radio map, ammonia-rich gases are shown rising and forming into the upper cloud layers. The clouds are easily seen from Earth-bound telescopes. Ammonia-poor air is also shown sinking into the planet’s atmosphere. Hotspots, which appear bright in radio and thermal images of Jupiter, are regions of less ammonia that encircle the planet north of the equator. In between those hotspots, rich upwellings deliver ammonia from deeper in the atmosphere.
“With radio, we can peer through the clouds and see that those hotspots are interleaved with plumes of ammonia rising from deep in the planet, tracing the vertical undulations of an equatorial wave system,” said UC Berkeley research astronomer Michael Wong. Very nice.
“We now see high ammonia levels like those detected by Galileo from over 100 kilometers deep, where the pressure is about eight times Earth’s atmospheric pressure, all the way up to the cloud condensation levels,” de Pater said.
The Juno spacecraft isn’t the first one to visit Jupiter. Galileo went there in the mid 90’s, and Voyager 1 snapped a nice picture of the clouds on its mission. Image: NASA
This is fascinating stuff, and not just because it’s visually stunning. What this team is doing with the improved VLA dovetails nicely with what Juno will be doing when it gets set up in its orbit around Jupiter. One of Juno’s aims is to use microwaves to measure the water content in the atmosphere, in the same way that the VLA was used to measure ammonia.
In fact, the team will be pointing the VLA at Jupiter again, at the same time as Juno is detecting water. “Maps like ours can help put their data into the bigger picture of what’s happening in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” de Pater said.
The team was able to model the atmosphere by observing it over the entire frequency range between 4 and 18 gigahertz (1.7 – 7 centimeter wavelength), which enabled them to carefully model the atmosphere, according to David DeBoer, a research astronomer with UC Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory.
“We now see fine structure in the 12 to 18 gigahertz band, much like we see in the visible, especially near the Great Red Spot, where we see a lot of little curly features,” Wong said. “Those trace really complex upwelling and downwelling motions there.”
The detailed observations the team obtained also help resolve a discrepancy in ammonia measurements in Jupiter’s atmosphere. In 1995, the Galileo probe measured ammonia at 4.5 times greater than the Sun, when it plunged through the atmosphere. VLA measurements prior to 2004 showed much less ammonia than that.
Study co-author Robert Sault, of the University of Melbourne in Australia, explained how this latest imaging solved that mystery. ““Jupiter’s rotation once every 10 hours usually blurs radio maps, because these maps take many hours to observe. But we have developed a technique to prevent this and so avoid confusing together the upwelling and downwelling ammonia flows, which had led to the earlier underestimate.”
Overall, it’s exciting times for studying Jupiter. The Juno mission promises to be as full of surprises as New Horizons was (we hope.)
Universe Today has covered the Juno mission, including an interview with the Principal Investigator, Scott Bolton.
The team’s paper is published in the journal Science, here.
Elon Musk has announced ambitious plans to send humans to Mars by 2024. Image: Artist's drawing of the Dragon capsule at Mars. SpaceX.
Do you get the feeling that Elon Musk likes making bold announcements?
Every space enthusiast’s favorite billionaire-turned-space-entrepreneur has just announced that he hopes his company, SpaceX, will send humans to Mars in 2024. If this sounds outrageous, you’re not keeping up with developments in commercial space. If this sounds a little bit ambitious, you’re probably right. But ambition is what Musk is all about.
“I think, if things go according to plan, we should be able to launch people probably in 2024, with arrival in 2025,” Musk said.
Musk, of course, is the Paypal co-founder who went on to start the Tesla electric car company, and SpaceX, the private space company. SpaceX has achieved a lot in its short time, including developing the Falcon re-usable rocket and the Dragon delivery and re-supply craft. With an even more powerful rocket in development, the Falcon Heavy, it’s fair to say that Musk has a track record of delivering on ambitious projects.
Musk’s announcement, at the Code Conference 2016 in Los Angeles, is definitely exciting news. It comes on the heels of an announcement earlier this spring stating that SpaceX will send a Dragon capsule to Mars in 2018, albeit one with no personnel on board. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of advancing the technologies required to establish a human colony on Mars, so everything seems to be going according to plan.
But a colony needs supplies, and with that in mind Musk also announced the intention of sending a craft to Mars every two years, in order to establish a supply line.
“The basic game plan is we’re going to send a mission to Mars with every Mars opportunity from 2018 onwards,” Musk said Wednesday night. “They occur approximately every 26 months. We’re establishing cargo flights to Mars that people can count on for cargo.”
“That’s what’s necessary to create a self-sustaining, or a growing, city on Mars,” he added.
Of course, there’s lots of work to be done yet. Currently, there is no rocket powerful enough for a mission like this. The most powerful rocket ever built was the Saturn V, used to get the Apollo mission to the Moon. That was 50 years ago.
An artist’s interpretation of NASA’s Space Launch System Block 1 configuration with an Orion vehicle. Image: NASA
NASA’s Space Launch System will have the power for a Mars mission, but that’s a ways away, and they probably won’t be giving SpaceX one. SpaceX has developed the Falcon rocket, and are working on the Falcon Heavy, but it won’t be enough to establish and maintain a presence on Mars. Still, this obstacle is anything but insurmountable, even though there has been no announcement on the building of this required rocket.
This whole endeavour will be enormously expensive, of course. But with a growing customer base for SpaceX, including the US military, NASA, and commercial communications customers, it seems like the money will be there.
As for the timeline, Musk acknowledges that it is a fairly aggressive one. “When I cite a schedule, it’s actually a schedule I think is true,” Musk said. “It’s not some fake schedule I don’t think is true. I may be delusional. That is entirely possible, and maybe it’s happened from time to time, but it’s never some knowingly fake deadline ever.”
The announcement itself sounds so simple. But Musk knows, as does everyone else involved in planning these kinds of missions, that there is an enormous amount of complex detail behind it all. The food required, the energy needed, and all of the other things that a sustained human presence on Mars will require in order to succeed, are all waiting to be addressed. Musk plans to address some of these details in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.
We’ve been dreaming about a Mars colony for a long time, as the lovely retro drawing shows. Will SpaceX finally give us one? Image: NASA
Musk generates a lot of headlines when he makes these announcements. That’s as it should be. But there are other plans to reach Mars, too.
NASA is planning to get to Mars, but they’re going about it differently. They plan on using their SLS and the Orion to explore what’s called cis-lunar space, near the Moon, to test deep space operations, life support systems, solar-electric thrusters, and habitats. All of this activity could start as soon as 2021, and would support an eventual round-trip mission to Mars in the 2030s.
For a long time, it seemed that a mission to Mars was out of reach, off the table, and nobody was really talking about it. Now, we have two separate programs aiming toward an eventual mission to Mars.
Could this be the new space race? But instead of capitalism versus communism, as in the original space race, it’s government versus private?
In the end, it won’t really matter. We just want someone to get there. And we want an established presence. A colony.
A team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found that the current rate of expansion of the Universe could be almost 10 percent faster than previously thought. Image: NASA, ESA, A. Feild (STScI), and A. Riess (STScI/JHU)
Just when we think we understand the Universe pretty well, along come some astronomers to upend everything. In this case, something essential to everything we know and see has been turned on its head: the expansion rate of the Universe itself, aka the Hubble Constant.
A team of astronomers using the Hubble telescope has determined that the rate of expansion is between five and nine percent faster than previously measured. The Hubble Constant is not some curiousity that can be shelved until the next advances in measurement. It is part and parcel of the very nature of everything in existence.
“This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious parts of the universe that make up 95 percent of everything and don’t emit light, such as dark energy, dark matter, and dark radiation,” said study leader and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland.
But before we get into the consequences of this study, let’s back up a bit and look at how the Hubble Constant is measured.
Measuring the expansion rate of the Universe is a tricky business. Using the image at the top, it works like this:
Within the Milky Way, the Hubble telescope is used to measure the distance to Cepheid variables, a type of pulsating star. Parallax is used to do this, and parallax is a basic tool of geometry, which is also used in surveying. Astronomers know what the true brightness of Cepheids are, so comparing that to their apparent brightness from Earth gives an accurate measurement of the distance between the star and us. Their rate of pulsation also fine tunes the distance calculation. Cepheid variables are sometimes called “cosmic yardsticks” for this reason.
Then astronomers turn their sights on other nearby galaxies which contain not only Cepheid variables, but also Type 1a supernova, another well-understood type of star. These supernovae, which are of course exploding stars, are another reliable yardstick for astronomers. The distance to these galaxies is obtained by using the Cepheids to measure the true brightness of the supernovae.
Next, astronomers point the Hubble at galaxies that are even further away. These ones are so distant, that any Cepheids in those galaxies cannot be seen. But Type 1a supernovae are so bright that they can be seen, even at these enormous distances. Then, astronomers compare the true and apparent brightnesses of the supernovae to measure out to the distance where the expansion of the Universe can be seen. The light from the distant supernovae is “red-shifted”, or stretched, by the expansion of space. When the measured distance is compared with the red-shift of the light, it yields a measurement of the rate of the expansion of the Universe.
Take a deep breath and read all that again.
The great part of all of this is that we have an even more accurate measurement of the rate of expansion of the Universe. The uncertainty in the measurement is down to 2.4%. The challenging part is that this rate of expansion of the modern Universe doesn’t jive with the measurement from the early Universe.
The rate of expansion of the early Universe is obtained from the left over radiation from the Big Bang. When that cosmic afterglow is measured by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the ESA’s Planck satellite, it yields a smaller rate of expansion. So the two don’t line up. It’s like building a bridge, where construction starts at both ends and should line up by the time you get to the middle. (Caveat: I have no idea if bridges are built like that.)
This Hubble Telescope image shows one of the galaxies used in the study. It contains two types of stars used to measure distances between galaxies. The red circles are pulsing Cepheid variable stars, and the blue X is a Type 1a supernova. Image: NASA, ESA, and A. Riess (STScI/JHU)
“You start at two ends, and you expect to meet in the middle if all of your drawings are right and your measurements are right,” Riess said. “But now the ends are not quite meeting in the middle and we want to know why.”
“If we know the initial amounts of stuff in the universe, such as dark energy and dark matter, and we have the physics correct, then you can go from a measurement at the time shortly after the big bang and use that understanding to predict how fast the universe should be expanding today,” said Riess. “However, if this discrepancy holds up, it appears we may not have the right understanding, and it changes how big the Hubble constant should be today.”
Why it doesn’t all add up is the fun, and maybe maddening, part of this.
What we call Dark Energy is the force that drives the expansion of the Universe. Is Dark Energy growing stronger? Or how about Dark Matter, which comprises most of the mass in the Universe. We know we don’t know much about it. Maybe we know even less than that, and its nature is changing over time.
“We know so little about the dark parts of the universe, it’s important to measure how they push and pull on space over cosmic history,” said Lucas Macri of Texas A&M University in College Station, a key collaborator on the study.
The team is still working with the Hubble to reduce the uncertainty in measurements of the rate of expansion. Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope might help to refine the measurement even more, and help address this compelling issue.
The Egyptian Pyramids; instantly recognizable to almost anyone. Image: Armstrong White, CC BY 2.0
The spread of metallurgy in different civilizations is a keen point of interest for historians and archaeologists. It helps chart the rise and fall of different cultures. There are even names for the different ages corresponding to increasingly sophisticated metallurgical technologies: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.
But sometimes, a piece of evidence surfaces that doesn’t fit our understanding of a civilization.
Probably the most iconic ancient civilization in all of history is ancient Egypt. Its pyramids are instantly recognizable to almost anyone. When King Tutankhamun’s almost intact tomb was discovered in 1922, it was a treasure trove of artifacts. And though the tomb, and King Tut, are most well-known for the golden death mask, it’s another, little-known artifact that has perhaps the most intriguing story: King Tut’s iron dagger.
King Tutankhamun’s Golden Death Mask, one of the most stunning human artifacts in existence. Image: Carsten Frenzl, CC BY 2.0
King Tut’s iron-bladed dagger wasn’t discovered until 1925, three years after the tomb was discovered. It was hidden in the wrappings surrounding Tut’s mummy. It’s mere existence was a puzzle, because King Tut reigned in 1332–1323 BC, 600 years before the Egyptians developed iron smelting technology.
King Tut’s iron dagger was concealed in the wrappings surrounding the boy-king’s mummy. Image: Daniela Comelli/Polytechnic University of Milan
It was long thought, but never proven, that the blade may be made of meteorite iron. In the past, tests have produced inconclusive results. But according to a new study led by Daniela Comelli, of the Polytechnic University of Milan, and published in the Journal of Meteoritics and Planetary Science, there is no doubt that a meteorite was the source of iron for the blade.
The team of scientists behind the study used a technique called x-ray fluorescence spectrometry to determine the chemical composition of the blade. This technique aims x-rays at an artifact, then determines its composition by the spectrum of colors given off. Those results were then compared with 11 other meteorites.
In the dagger’s case, the results indicated Fe plus 10.8 wt% Ni and 0.58 wt% Co. This couldn’t be a coincidence, since iron meteorites are mostly made of Fe (Iron) and Ni (Nickel), with minor quantities of Co (Cobalt), P (Phosphorus), S (Sulphur), and C (Carbon). Iron found in the Earth’s crust has almost no Ni content.
Testing of Egyptian artifacts is a tricky business. Egypt is highly protective of their archaeological resources. This study was possible only because of advances in portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, which meant the dagger didn’t have to be taken to a lab and could be tested at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo.
Iron objects were rare in Egypt at that time, and were considered more valuable than gold. They were mostly decorative, probably because ancient Egyptians found iron very difficult to work. It requires a very high heat to work with, which was not possible in ancient Egypt.
Iron meteorites like this one would have attracted the attention of ancient Egyptians. This one is the Bendego meteorite from Brazil. Image: Jorge Andrade – Flickr: National Museum, Rio de Janeiro CC BY 2.0
Even without the ability to heat and work iron, a great deal of craftsmanship went into the blade. The dagger itself had to be hammered into shape, and it features a decorated golden handle and a rounded rock crystal knob. It’s golden sheath is decorated with a jackal’s head and a pattern of feathers and lilies.
Ancient Egyptians probably new what they were working with. They called meteorite iron from the sky in one hieroglyph. Whether they knew with absolute certainty that their iron meteorites came from the sky, and what that might have meant, they did value the iron. As the authors of the study say, “…our study confirms that ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects.”
The authors go on to say, “Moreover, the high manufacturing quality of Tutankhamun’s dagger blade, in comparison with other simple-shaped meteoritic iron artifacts, suggests a significant mastery of ironworking in Tutankhamun’s time.”
The "Canarias Einstein Ring." The green-blue ring is the source galaxy, the red one in the middle is the lens galaxy. The lens galaxy has such strong gravity, that it distorts the light from the source galaxy into a ring. Because the two galaxies are aligned, the source galaxy appears almost circular. Image: This composite image is made up from several images taken with the DECam camera on the Blanco 4m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile.
A rare object called an Einstein Ring has been discovered by a team in the Stellar Populations group at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain. An Einstein Ring is a specific type of gravitational lensing.
Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicted the phenomena of gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing tells us that instead of travelling in a straight line, light from a source can be bent by a massive object, like a black hole or a galaxy, which itself bends space time.
Einstein’s General Relativity was published in 1915, but a few years before that, in 1912, Einstein predicted the bending of light. Russian physicist Orest Chwolson was the first to mention the ring effect in scientific literature in 1924, which is why the rings are also called Einstein-Chwolson rings.
Gravitational lensing is fairly well-known, and many gravitational lenses have been observed. Einstein rings are rarer, because the observer, source, and lens all have to be aligned. Einstein himself thought that one would never be observed at all. “Of course, there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly,” Einstein wrote in 1936.
The team behind the recent discovery was led by PhD student Margherita Bettinelli at the University of La Laguna, and Antonio Aparicio and Sebastian Hidalgo of the Stellar Populations group at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain. Because of the rarity of these objects, and the strong scientific interest in them, this one was given a name: The Canarias Einstein Ring.
There are three components to an Einstein Ring. The first is the observer, which in this case means telescopes here on Earth. The second is the lens galaxy, a massive galaxy with enormous gravity. This gravity warps space-time so that not only are objects drawn to it, but light itself is forced to travel along a curved path. The lens lies between Earth and the third component, the source galaxy. The light from the source galaxy is bent into a ring form by the power of the lens galaxy.
When all three components are aligned precisely, which is very rare, the light from the source galaxy is formed into a circle with the lens galaxy right in the centre. The circle won’t be perfect; it will have irregularities that reflect irregularities in the gravitational force of the lens galaxy.
Another Einstein Ring. This one is named LRG 3-757. This one was discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, but this image was captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Image: NASA/Hubble/ESA
The objects are more than just pretty artifacts of nature. They can tell scientists things about the nature of the lens galaxy. Antonio Aparicio, one of the IAC astrophysicists involved in the research said, “Studying these phenomena gives us especially relevant information about the composition of the source galaxy, and also about the structure of the gravitational field and of the dark matter in the lens galaxy.”
Looking at these objects is like looking back in time, too. The source galaxy is 10 billion light years from Earth. Expansion of the Universe means that the light has taken 8.5 billion light years to reach us. That’s why the ring is blue; that long ago, the source galaxy was young, full of hot blue stars.
The lens itself is much closer to us, but still very distant. It’s 6 billion light years away. Star formation in that galaxy likely came to a halt, and its stellar population is now old.
The discovery of the Canarias Einstein Ring was a happy accident. Bettinelli was pouring over data from what’s known as the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) of the 4m Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Observatory, in Chile. She was studying the stellar population of the Sculptor dwarf galaxy for her PhD when the Einstein Ring caught her attention. Other members of the Stellar Population Group then used OSIRIS spectrograph on the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) to observe and analyze it further.
The four new, but as yet unconfirmed, exoplanets. Image: University of British Columbia
A student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, has discovered four new exoplanets hidden in data from the Kepler spacecraft.
Michelle Kunimoto recently graduated from UBC with a Bachelor’s degree in physics and astronomy. As part of her coursework, she spent a few months looking closely at Kepler data, trying to find planets that others had overlooked.
In the end, she discovered four planets, (or planet candidates until they are independently confirmed.) The first planet is the size of Mercury, two are roughly Earth-sized, and one is slightly larger than Neptune. According to Kunimoto, the largest of the four, called KOI (Kepler Object of Interest) 408.05, is the most interesting. That one is 3,200 light years away from Earth and occupies the habitable zone of its star.
“Like our own Neptune, it’s unlikely to have a rocky surface or oceans,” said Kunimoto, who graduates today from UBC. “The exciting part is that like the large planets in our solar system, it could have large moons and these moons could have liquid water oceans.”
Her astronomy professor, Jaymie Matthews, shares her enthusiasm. “Pandora in the movie Avatar was not a planet, but a moon of a giant planet,” he said. And we all know what lived there.
On its initial mission, Kepler looked at 150,000 stars in the Milky Way. Kepler looks for dips in the brightness of these stars, which can be caused by planets passing between us and the star. These dips are called light curves, and they can tell us quite a bit about an exoplanet.
“A star is just a pinpoint of light so I’m looking for subtle dips in a star’s brightness every time a planet passes in front of it,” said Kunimoto. “These dips are known as transits, and they’re the only way we can know the diameter of a planet outside the solar system.”
Michelle Kunimoto and her prof., Jaymie Matthews, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Image: Martin Dee/UBC
One of the limitations of the Kepler mission is that it’s biased against planets that take a long time to orbit their star. That’s because the longer the orbit is, the fewer transits can be witnessed in a given amount of time. The “warm Neptune” KOI 408.05 found by Kunimoto takes 637 days to orbit its sun.
This long orbit explains why the planet was not found initially, and also why Kunimoto is receiving recognition for her discovery. It took a substantial commitment and effort to uncover it. Kepler has discovered almost 5,000 planet and planet candidates, and of those, only 20 have longer orbits than KOI 408.05.
Kunimoto and Matthews have submitted the findings to the Astronomical Journal. They may be the first of many submissions for Kunimoto, as she is returning to UBC next year to earn a Master’s Degree in physics and astronomy, when she will hunt for more planets and investigate their habitability.
The fun didn’t end with her exoplanet discovery, however. As a Star Trek fan (who isn’t one?) she was lucky enough to meet William Shatner at an event at the University, and to share her discovery with Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
It makes you wonder what other surprises might lie hidden in the Kepler data, and what else might be uncovered. Might a life-bearing planet or moon, maybe the only one, be found in Kepler’s data at some future time?
The International Space Station. As if you didn't recognize it. Image: NASA
Have you heard of Facebook? And it’s young billionaire leader? It’s a groovy computer thing where people share pictures of what they had for breakfast, their cats, and where they argue with strangers.
Today, Facebook will actually serve some purpose other than stranger-arguing and whatnot. Today, at 12:55 PM ET (9:55 AM PT), Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s fearless leader, will conduct a live video call with astronauts aboard the ISS. The entire 20 minute event will be streamed live at NASA’s Facebook page, here.
The best part about it, is that Zuckerberg will be asking the astronauts questions submitted by people who post them on NASA’s Facebook page. So check out NASA on Facebook and submit an interesting question.
Don’t read this caption, read his sign. Image: NASA
The three astronauts involved are Tim Kopra and Jeff Williams, of NASA, and the ESA’s Tim Peake. I’m sure they’re hoping for some interesting questions, so don’t disappoint them, Universe Today readers.
As a publicity stunt, this one’s a doozy. I wonder who courted who for this one? I suppose it doesn’t really matter; it’s a fun idea for everyone involved, and who knows what will come of it.
So go ahead and visit https://www.facebook.com/NASA/?fref=nf and check out other people’s questions and ask one of your own. Get their quick before the loonies and the conspiracy theorists clog it up. Seriously.
This is an example of the kind of thing being asked so far:
“The ISS is fake. NASA is fake and this Zionist puppet Zuckerberg is fake. My question: Why does NASA keep lying to the public about EVERYTHiNG since they were formed in 1958?”
So please, we’re begging you. Ask something intelligent. Just please don’t ask them to post pictures of their breakfast.
Mission art for NROL-37. The Delta-IV Heavy kind of looks like three cigarettes. Credit: United Launch Alliance
Next weekend’s launch of the Delta-4 Heavy has been postponed. The launch, which was to take place at Cape Canaveral, has been delayed due to unspecified payload issues. The launch is for the National Reconnaissance Office, a fairly secretive branch of the U.S. Government that’s in charge of the nation’s spy satellites. As such, they aren’t revealing too many details about the launch, or the postponement.
The Delta-4 Heavy rocket is a combination of three booster cores from the Delta Medium. Each one of these cores is a liquid hydrogen-fuelled engine that forms the Delta-4 Medium’s first stage. They’re mounted together to make a trio of engines, capped with a cryogenic upper stage.
The Delta-4 Heavy weighs 725000 kg (1.6 million lbs.) when it’s fully fuelled. It’s 71.6 meters (235 ft.) tall, and when it’s ignited it unleashes a whopping 2.1 million lbs. of thrust.
A Delta-4 Heavy blasting off in 2013.
This configuration makes it the USA’s largest rocket, and it carries critical payloads for the government. These include not only spy satellites, but also an un-crewed test flight of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.
The cancelled mission, named NROL-37, was supposed to lift an Orion 9 satellite into orbit. Orion satellites are signal interception satellites, and are placed in geo-stationary orbits to collect radio emissions. One of the Orion satellites is believed to be “… the largest satellite in the world,” according to Bruce Carlson, NRO Director. This probably refers to the size of the satellites antenna, which is over 100m (330ft.) in diameter.
The Delta-4 Heavy (D4H) is considered the largest rocket in the world. The D4H can lift a whopping 28,790 kg into Low Earth Orbit (LEO.) Contemporaries like the Ariane 5 (ECA & ES versions) can lift 21,000 kg into LEO.
It won’t be the most powerful rocket for much longer though. The upcoming Falcon Heavy from SpaceX will lift an enormous 54,400 kg into LEO. Also being developed is the US Space Launch System (SLS), which, in its Block2 configuration, will lift 130,700 kg. The Chinese are in on the most powerful rocket game too, with their Long March 9 rocket. Under development now, it is projected to lift 130,000 kg into LEO, just a shade less than the SLS.
Oddly enough, the old Saturn V could lift 140,000 kg, putting all its successors to shame. The Saturn V was developed for the Apollo Program, and was also used to launch Skylab. Saturn V was in use from 1967 to 1973. To date, the Saturn V is the only rocket capable of transporting human beings beyond LEO.
A Saturn IV launching the historic Apollo 11 mission. Image: NASA/Michael Vuijlsteke. Public Domain image.
As for the cancelled launch, no date has been set yet for the next launch. Once it is launched, it will mark the 9th D4H configuration to fly, and the 32nd Delta 4 launch since 2002. It will also be the 6th time the D4H has launched for the NRO.
Universe Today’s Ken Kremer is at Cape Canaveral for this launch, and will report on it, and no doubt provide some stunning photos. Check back with us to see Ken’s coverage.
