Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.
Artist's conception of a hyperveloctiy star heading out from a spiral galaxy (similar to the Milky Way) and moving into dark matter nearby. Credit: Ben Bromley, University of Utah
Zoom! A star was recently spotted speeding at 1.4 million miles an hour (2.2 million km/hr), which happened to be the closest and second-brightest of the so-called “hypervelocity” stars found so far.
Now that about 20 of these objects have been found, however, astronomers are now trying to use the stars beyond classifying them. One of those ways could be probing the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to bind together much of the universe.
LAMOST-HVS1 (as the object is called, after the Chinese Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope that discovered it) is about three times faster than most other stars found. It’s in a cluster of similar hypervelocity stars above the Milky Way’s disk and from its motion, scientists suspect it actually came from our galaxy’s center.
What’s interesting about the star, besides its pure speed, is it is travelling in a “dark matter” halo surrounding our galaxies, the astronomers said.
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with several prominent arms containing stellar nurseries swathed in pink clouds of hydrogen gas. The sun is shown near the bottom in the Orion Spur. Credit: NASA
“The hypervelocity star tells us a lot about our galaxy – especially its center and the dark matter halo,” stated Zheng Zheng, an astronomy researcher at the University of Utah who led the study.
“We can’t see the dark matter halo, but its gravity acts on the star. We gain insight from the star’s trajectory and velocity, which are affected by gravity from different parts of our galaxy.”
The star is about 62,000 light years from the galaxy’s center (much further than the sun’s 26,000 light years) and is about four times hotter and 3,400 times brighter than our own sun. Astronomers estimate it is 32 million years old, which makes it quite young compared to the sun’s 4.5 billion years.
Image of a hypervelocity star found in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Image via Vanderbilt University.
Readers of Universe Today may also recall a “runaway star cluster” announced a few weeks ago, which shows you that the universe is replete with speeding objects.
“If you’re looking at a herd of cows, and one starts going 60 mph, that’s telling you something important,” stated Ben Bromley, a fellow university professor who was not involved with Zheng’s study. “You may not know at first what that is. But for hypervelocity stars, one of their mysteries is where they come from – and the massive black hole in our galaxy is implicated.”
The study was recently published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Artist's conception of Mars, with asteroids nearby. Credit: NASA
Here’s a finding to give planetary protectionists pause: two species of spores mounted on the International Space Station’s hull a few years back showed a high survival rate after 18 months in space.
Providing that they are shielded against solar radiation, it appears the spores are quite hardy and could easily transport on a spacecraft headed for Mars — which is concerning since so many scientific investigations there these days are focused on habitability of Martian life (whether past or present). The experiment was published in 2012, but highlighted in a recent NASA press release about planetary protection.
The experiment was called PROTECT (an acronym of Resistance of spacecraft isolates to outer space for planetary protection purposes) and studied spores of Bacillus subtilis 168 and Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032. B. pumilus spores were found in an air lock between a “clean room” and entrance floor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and in previous studies were shown to be more resistant to UV radiation and hydrogen peroxide than “wild” strains. B. subtilis is a spore that has been studied in other space environment experiments.
Samples of both spores were mounted on the EXPOSE-E facility on the space station, which provides up to two years of space exposure. The major goal of this European Space Agency experiment is to study “the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the universe,” NASA states, adding that anything mounted outside of there has to survive “cosmic radiation, vacuum, full-spectrum solar light including UV-C, freezing/thawing cycles [and] microgravity.”
The European Technology Exposure Facility (EuTEF) attached to the Columbus module of the International Space Station. Credit: DLR, Institute of Aerospace Medicine/Dr. Gerda Horneck
The experiment found that if the spores were in areas replete with solar UV radiation, most of them were killed. If those rays were filtered out, however, the spores showed a 50 percent survival rate on both space and simulated “Mars” conditions. It is most concerning to scientists when considering a situation where spores could be hiding underneath each other during a spacecraft trip. The ones on the outside would likely die, but the ones on the inside — shielded from solar radiation — could make it there.
One key limitation in this study, however, is that only two types of spores were studied. This does present a case for doing more studies on this matter in the future, however. Space agencies are quite aware of the problem of planetary protection, as evidenced by departments such as NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection and ESA’s Planetary Protection Officer.
Spacecraft designers constantly make decisions to keep the extraterrestrial bodies we study as safe from Earth contamination as possible; one famous example was when the Galileo probe was deliberately sent into Jupiter in 2003 to protect Europa and other potentially life-bearing moons of the giant planet from possible contamination.
Images of Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032 spores (seen in an electron micrograph) on aluminum before and after being exposed to space on an International Space Station experiment. Credit: P. Vaishampayan, et al./Astrobiology
The rock study (led by Tuscia University’s Silvano Onofri) takes the question of the spores in a different direction, which is examining the phenomenon of “lithopanspermia” — how organisms might move between planets (say, on a meteor). Since Mars meteorites have been found on Earth, some researchers have wondered if life could have spread between our two planets. If that were to happen, the researchers cautioned, the spores would have to survive for thousands or millions of years.
The other B. pumilus paper (led by NASA’s Parag A. Vaishampayan) noted that those spores mounted outside of the space station that survived, showed higher concentrations of proteins that could be linked to resisting UV radiation.
Location chart for HD 162826, considered a sibling to the sun. Credit: Ivan Ramirez/Tim Jones/McDonald Observatory
Peer about 110 light-years away from our solar system, and you might catch a glimpse of how our own neighborhood came together. The recent discovery that HD 162826 — a star bright enough to be seen in binoculars — could be a “sibling” of our sun could shed more light on the solar system’s formation, astronomers said.
“We want to know where we were born,” stated Ivan Ramirez, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin who led the research. “If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here.”
The star is called a “sibling” because it could have formed from the same gas and dust cloud in which our own solar system was formed, some 4.5 billion years ago. Since life is in our own solar system, a natural next question is whether HD 162826 could also have life-bearing planets. There is a tiny reason for “yes”, the astronomers said.
Basically, the argument goes that when the stars were first born and close together, chunks of matter could have been knocked off protoplanets and travelled between the two solar systems. There’s a small chance that this could have brought primitive life to Earth, although of course there’s a long way to go before that could even be proved.
This artist’s conception shows a newly formed star surrounded by a swirling protoplanetary disk of dust and gas. Credit: University of Copenhagen/Lars Buchhave
That said, no planets have yet been found around HD 162826. (The star was known before, but just recently identified as a “sibling.”) Separate studies by the University of Texas and University of South Wales said there are likely no “hot Jupiters” (Jupiter-sized planets close to the star) nor Jupiter-sized planet in the solar system even further away. Smaller terrestrial planets, however, would have escaped the notice of this particular study.
The star is about 15 percent more massive than our sun and was selected from a list of 30 candidates based on its chemistry and orbit. There could also be more siblings out there to find, with one potential big help coming soon: the Gaia survey from the European Space Agency launched in December, which will chart the Milky Way in three dimensions.
Because Gaia will showcase the distance and motions of a billion stars, this will allow astronomers to look for these “solar siblings” as far in as the galaxy’s center, increasing the number of stars studied by a factor of 10,000. The exciting thing, the astronomers add, is with enough stars pinpointed as siblings to our sun, their orbits can then be traced back to the origin point — showing the location in the cosmos where the sun first came to be.
More information will be available in the June 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. A preprint version is available on Arxiv.
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young on the moon in 1972. Credit: NASA
A few days ago, the Pew Research Center published an article about space exploration support starting with this sentence: “Many Americans are optimistic about the future of space travel, but they don’t necessarily want to pay for it.”
The article’s impetus was this recent Pew Research/Smithsonian study called “U.S. Views of Technology and the Future” that said a third of Americans think there will be manned colonies on other planets by 2064. But long-range statistics from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, Pew argues, demonstrate weak support for paying for space exploration.
“We found that Americans are consistently more likely to say that the U.S. spends too much on space exploration than too little. At no time has more than 20% of the public said that the U.S. spends too little on space exploration,” Pew wrote in the article of the survey, which has been running for about 40 years.
Not everyone agrees with that interpretation of those numbers. In a personal website blog post published in 2013 (after the last GSS came out) NASA employee Dennis Boccippio said that financial support for space exploration has never been higher.
The International Space Station. Credit: NASA
The blog post, which referred to preliminary data from the 2012 survey, showed “an overall higher favorability rating” that was stronger than any GSS survey or at points cited before then from the National Air and Space Museum’s Roger Launius. In particular, look at this graph that Boccippio published on his blog.
“The GSS surveys consistently show a slightly lower favorability rating for the survey question variant ‘space exploration program’ versus ‘space exploration’ – but it’s very small. This may be one way to measure the difference between supporting the concept of exploration and supporting government programs,” Boccippio said in an e-mail to Universe Today. Boccippio is NASA’s manager of the center of strategic development at the Marshall Space Flight Center, but said he wrote the blog post as a private citizen.
“The Pew research article seems fairly written, you’ve seen the graphic on my blog, so it’s a matter of interpretation. The fact that a large (30-40%) number of respondents respond ‘we’re spending too much’, and that the strong advocate/proponent population is small (10-20%) isn’t really news, this has been consistent for decades, and one could as easily state from the same data ‘more than 50% of Americans have consistently said we’re spending the right amount on it.”
SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft berthed to the International Space Station during Expedition 33 in October 2012. Credit: NASA
Boccippio added that what really interested him was two trends in the data: how supporters have gone up in the last two GSS surveys, and declines in people saying there was too much spending in the space program since 1992 (an era where the Hubble Space Telescope’s deformed mirror was high in public consciousness, along with Congressional debates about whether to build the International Space Station, he said.)
After an inquiry from Universe Today, Pew said part of the different interpretations could depend on “data analysis and weighting variations”, and added they made adjustments in the blog post to reflect those interpretations.
“We relied on the Roper Center calculations of the GSS data, the blogger you cite used preliminary data … At the same time, the general point we made still holds. At no time in GSS surveying has the support for more spending topped the figure of those saying there should be reductions in spending,” said Lee Rainie, the director of Pew’s Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, in an e-mail.
Artist’s conception of NASA’s asteroid retrieval mission. Credit: NASA
“You make an interesting observation about the recent upward tick in the number of people who say we are spending too little on space exploration,” he added. “It was also interesting to us that over time these numbers reflect relatively less support for space exploration than for several other possible government priorities.” (Those other priorities, the blog post says, are education, health and alternative energy sources.)
Rainie also clarified that the space colonization survey did not necessarily ask respondents who would pay for it. “Our poll with the Smithsonian Magazine did not mention NASA in our question regarding long-term colonies on other planets, nor did our question suggest in any way who might perform planetary colonization,” he said.
“It’s likely the case that respondents may have had several ideas in mind when they answered the question: NASA, a private entity, an international group, or some combination of them. Our point in mentioning this was that Americans seem expectant and hopeful about further space exploration.”
What do you make of the numbers? Again, you can view the two posts here and here.
The Saturn V rocket bearing Apollo 11 lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center on July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA
A moon rocket thundering from a pad in Florida. Two moons discovered around Mars. Space tourism. These are all things that are part of history today — and which were also predicted in literature years or decades before the event actually happened.
This fun infographic (embedded below) shows a series of fiction books that were curiously prescient about our future, ranging from From The Earth to the Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Submarines, rocket ships and other pieces of technology were all imagined long before they were reality, so what inspired these authors?
“Many writers of the past have predicted the facts of our present society with a level of detail that seems impossibly accurate,” wrote Printerinks, a print and toner shop that produced the graphic.
“Some of them were even derided in their times for what were called outlandish and unbelievable fictions. Yet their imaginations were in reality painting portraits that would eventually be mirrored by history books a century later. Which seems to beg the question, Where does inspiration come from? So to decide for yourself whether these writers were seers or just plain lucky, explore our History of Books that Predicted the Future.”
You can click on the graphic for a larger version. Is it missing anything? Let us know in the comments.
The NASA Z-2 suit will incorporate the "technology" design the public voted on. Credit: NASA
Striking a Buzz Lightyear-like pose above is the winning design for NASA’s Z-2 spacesuit prototype. The version, called “technology”, was by far the popular vote in an online contest the agency held to choose between three prototypes, garnering 62% of 233,431 votes.
While this will never be used in space, NASA said the next-generation prototype will be useful in helping design future spacesuits. And this prototype will go through a “test campaign” that includes vacuum tests, pool tests in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory and in an area at the Johnson Space Center that simulates the surface of Mars.
“With the agency laser focused on a path to Mars, work to develop the technologies astronauts one day will use to live and work on Mars has already begun. Each iteration of the Z-series will advance new technologies that one day will be used in a suit worn by the first humans to step foot on the Red Planet,” NASA stated.
To learn more about the suit and the differences from its predecessor, the Z-1, check out this recent Universe Today article.
Artist's impression of Beta Pictoris b. Credit: ESO L. Calçada/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)
Between the time you got to work this morning and the time you leave today — assuming an eight-hour work cycle — an entire day will have passed on Beta Pictoris b, according to new measurements of the exoplanet.
This daily cycle, mapped for the first time on a planet outside of the solar system, may reveal a link between how big a planet is and how fast it rotates, astronomers stated. That said, caution is needed because there are only a handful of planets where the rotation is known: the eight planets of our Solar System and Beta Pictoris b.
The planet’s day is shorter than any other planet in our Solar System, which at first blush makes sense because the planet is also larger than any other planet in our Solar System. Beta Pictoris b is estimated at 16 times larger and 3,000 times more massive than Earth. (For comparison, Jupiter is about 11 times larger and 318 times more massive than Earth.)
“It is not known why some planets spin fast and others more slowly,” stated says co-author Remco de Kok, “but this first measurement of an exoplanet’s rotation shows that the trend seen in the Solar System, where the more massive planets spin faster, also holds true for exoplanets. This must be some universal consequence of the way planets form.”
Planets in our Solar system size comparison. Largest to smallest are pictured left to right, top to bottom: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Astronomers mapped the planet’s equatorial rotation using the CRIRES instrument on the Very Large Telescope. What helped was not only the planet’s large size, but also its proximity to Earth: it’s about 63 light-years away, which is relatively close to us.
As the planet ages (it’s only 20 million years old right now) it is expected to shrink and spin more quickly, assuming no other external forces. The Earth’s rotation is slowed by the moon, for example.
The study (“Fast spin of a young extrasolar planet” will soon be up on Nature’s website and was led by Leiden University’s Ignas Snellen.
Screen capture from NASA TV of the Soyuz approaching the International Space Station with the Expedition 35/36 crew. Via NASA TV
Facing sanctions from the United States government, a high-ranking Russian official took to Twitter today (April 29) to express his frustration, warning that NASA has few options should Soyuz flights to the International Space Station cease.
“After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline,” wrote Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s deputy prime minister, in a Russian-language tweet highlighted by NBC News.
The jibe points to the fact that only the Russians can bring crews up to the space station right now. Rogozin also linked to a story in Russian RT where he is quoted as saying (if Google Translate is correct) that the Americans will see a “boomerang” of sanctions laid upon Russian officials.
On April 2, as part of a larger policy of the Obama administration, NASA announced it would cease most connections with Russia except for those essential ones related to the International Space Station. NASA administrator Charles Bolden has repeatedly said that things are normal with the Russians when it comes to the station.
Structure arms for Soyuz TMA-11M (the launching vehicle for Expedition 38) raise into place in this long-exposure photograph taken in Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
The United States is dependent on the Russian Soyuz to bring astronauts to the space station. The U.S. method of transportation ceased in 2011 after the space shuttle retired, and commercial spacecraft — though being developed — are not expected to be ready until about 2017.
That said, one of the developers of these spacecraft — SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — wrote on Twitter that the public will soon see the unveiling of the human-rated Dragon spacecraft that the company has been working on with contract money from NASA. (The other funded spacecraft proposals are Boeing’s CST-100 and Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser).
Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on w @NASA. No trampoline needed — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2014
Cover drops on May 29. Actual flight design hardware of crew Dragon, not a mockup.
The Russian situation is expected to weigh heavily on NASA budget discussions for fiscal 2014 and 2015 as agency officials try to make their case that commercial funding should be sustained, or even increased, for Americans to be able to launch from their own soil again quickly.
First ever image of Earth Taken by Mars Color Camera aboard India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft while orbiting Earth and before the Trans Mars Insertion firing on Dec. 1, 2013. Image is focused on the Indian subcontinent. Credit: ISRO
While astronomers are trying to figure out which planets they find are habitable, there are a range of things to consider. How close are they to their parent star? What are their atmospheres made of? And once those answers are figured out, here’s something else to wonder about: how many minerals are on the planet’s surface?
As more information is learned about these distant worlds, it will be interesting to see if it’s possible to apply his findings — if we could detect the minerals from afar in the first place.
“We live on a planet of remarkable beauty, and when you look at it from the proximity of our moon, you see what is obviously a very dynamic planet,” Hazen told delegates at “Habitable Worlds Across Time and Space”, a spring symposium from the Space Telescope Science Institute that is being webcast this week (April 28-May 1).
His point was that planets don’t necessarily start out that way, but he said in his talk that he’d invite comments and questions on his work for alternative processes. His team believes that minerals and life co-evolved: life became more complex and the number of minerals increased over time.
Artist’s impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming. Credit: ESO
The first mineral in the cosmos was likely diamonds, which were formed in supernovas. These star explosions are where the heavier elements in our cosmos were created, making the universe more rich than its initial soup of hydrogen and helium.
There are in fact 10 elements that were key in the Earth’s formation, Hazen said, as well as that of other planets in our solar system (which also means that presumably these would apply to exoplanets). These were carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, carbon, titanium, iron and nitrogen,which formed about a dozen minerals on the early Earth.
Here’s the thing, though. Today there are more than 4,900 minerals on Earth that are formed from 72 essential elements. Quite a change.
Hazen’s group proposes 10 stages of evolution:
Primary chondrite minerals (4.56 billion years ago) – what was around as the solar nebula that formed our solar system cooled. 60 mineral species at this time.
Planetesimals — or protoplanets — changed by impacts (4.56 BYA to 4.55 BYA). Here is where feldspars, micas, clays and quartz arose. 250 mineral species.
Planet formation (4.55 BYA to 3.5 BYA). On a “dry” planet like Mercury, evolution stopped at about 300 mineral species, while “wetter” planets like Mars would have seen about 420 mineral species that includes hydroxides and clays produced from processes such as volcanism and ices.
Granite formation (more than 3.5 BYA). 1,000 mineral species including beryl and tantalite.
Plate tectonics (more than 3 BYA). 1,500 mineral species. Increases produced from changes such as new types of volcanism and high-pressure metamorphic changes inside the Earth.
The official poster of the World Space Week Association 2013 campaign. Credit: World Space Week Association
These stages above are about as far as you would get on a planet without life, Hazen said. As for the remaining stages on Earth, here they are:
Anoxic biosphere (4 to 2.5 BYA), again with about 1,500 mineral species existing in the early atmosphere. Here was the rise of chemolithoautotrophs, or life that obtains energy from oxidizing inorganic compounds.
Paleoproterozoic oxidation (2.5 to 1.5 BYA) — a huge rise in mineral species to 4,500 as oxygen becomes a dominant player in the atmosphere. “We’re trying to understand if this is really true for every other planet, or if there is alternative pathways,” Hazen said.
And the final three stages up to the present day was the emergence of large oceans, a global ice age and then (in the past 540 million years or so) biomineralization or the process of living organisms producing minerals. This latter stage included the development of tree roots, which led to species such as fungi, microbes and worms.
‘The Moon rising behind a couple of palm trees with cows grazing in the foreground. As you can see in the image, the bottom half of the moon has a different tint due to the earths atmosphere.’ Credit: Tom Connor, Parrish, FL
It should be noted here that oxygen does not necessarily indicate there is complex life. Fellow speaker David Catling from the University of Washington, however, noted that oxygen rose in the atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago, coincident with the emergence of complex life.
Animals as we understand them could have been “impossible for most of Earth’s history because they couldn’t breathe,” he noted. But more study will be needed on this point. After all, we’ve only found life on one planet: Earth.
Artist's rendering of Kepler-186f (Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/Caltech)
It wasn’t so long ago that we found out there is an Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone of a star. But how many others are out there, and do we know if planets like this are truly habitable?
“Looking towards the future, what we really want to do eventually is transform our knowledge from planets in the habitable zone to [characterizing] planetary environments,” said Natalie Batalha, a co-investigator on NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, in a webcast presentation today (April 28) .
This means that astronomers will be able to, from a distance, look at “biosignatures” of life in the atmosphere. What a biosignature would be is still being characterized, but it could be something like an unusually high proportion of oxygen — as long as abiotic processes are not accounted for, of course.
Batalha identified these parameters for finding other Earths in a presentation at the “Habitable Worlds Across Time and Space” conference presented by the Space Telescope Science Institute:
Detections of planets in the habitable zone: other telescopes (left) vs. the Kepler space telescope. Credit: Natalie Batalha / NASA (screenshot)
– The telescope must be sensitive to an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a G, K or M-type star (which are stars that are like the sun);
– A uniform and reliable detection catalog with well-understood sizes, orbital periods and insolation fluxes (energy received from the sun);
– Knowledge of Kepler’s detection efficiency and the planetary catalog’s reliability;
– Well-documented and accessible data products for other community members to analyze.
What would also be helpful to planetary scientists is learning more about how a planet forms in the habitable region of its star.
Meet Kepler-22b, an exoplanet with an Earth-like radius in the habitable zone of its host star. Unfortunately its mass remains unknown. Image Credit: NASA
In a presentation at the same conference, the University of Toronto’s Diana Valencia (an astrophysicist) pointed out there is no single predictor for how large a planet will get. It depends on how close a planetesimal disc is to its star, the rate of accretion in the area and dust opacity, among other factors.
She also gave a brief overview of processes that demonstrate how hard it is to predict habitability. Earth had at least two atmospheres in its past, presentation slides said, with the first atmosphere lost and the second built from volcanism and impacts. Valencia also pointed to complexities involving the Earth’s mantle and plate tectonics.
