Posted on by Ken Kremer

Curiosity Wheels Initial Rove in a Week on Heels of Science and Surgery Success

Image Caption: Curiosity’s Wheels Set to Rove soon Mars inside Gale Crater after ‘brain transplant’. This colorized mosaic shows Curiosity wheels, nuclear power source and pointy low gain antennea (LGA) in the foreground looking to the eroded northern rim of Gale Crater in the background. The mosaic was assembled from full resolution Navcam images snapped by Curiosity on Sol 2 on Aug. 8. Image stitching and processing by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. see black & white version below. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Curiosity’s weekend “Brain transplant” proceeded perfectly and she’ll be ready to drive across the floor of Gale Crater in about a week, said the projects mission managers at a NASA news briefing on Tuesday, Aug. 14. And the team can’t wait to get Curiosity’s 6 wheels mobile on the heels of a plethora of science successes after just a week on Mars.

Over the past 4 sols, or Martian days, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) successfully uploaded the new “R10” flight software that is required to carry out science operations on the Red Planet’s surface and transform the car-sized Curiosity from a landing vehicle into a fully fledged rover.

The step by step flight software transition onto both the primary and backup computers “went off without a hitch”, said mission manager Mike Watkins of JPL at the news briefing. “We are ‘Go’ to continue our checkout activities on Sol 9 (today).”
Watkins added that the electronic checkouts of all the additional science instruments tested so far, including the APXS, DAN and Chemin, has gone well. Actual use tests are still upcoming.

“With the new flight software, we’re now going to test the steering actuators on Sol 13, and then we are going to take it out for a test drive here probably around Sol 15,” said Watkins . “We’re going to do a short drive of a couple of meters and then maybe turn and back up.”

See our rover wheel mosaic above, backdropped by the rim of Gale Crater some 15 miles away.

Image Caption: Curiosity landed within Gale Crater near the center of the landing ellipse. The crater is approximately the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. This oblique view of Gale, and Mount Sharp in the center, is derived from a combination of elevation and imaging data from three Mars orbiters. The view is looking toward the southeast. Mount Sharp rises about 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) above the floor of Gale Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS

Curiosity made an unprecedented pinpoint landing inside Gale Crater using the rocket powered “Sky Crane” descent stage just a week ago on Aug. 5/6 and the team is now eager to get the huge rover rolling across the Martian plains towards the foothills of Mount Sharp, about 6 miles (10 km) away as the Martian crow flies.

“We have a fully healthy rover and payload,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) deputy project scientist. “We couldn’t be happier with the success of the mission so far. We’ve never had a vista like this on another planet before.”

“In just a week we’ve done a lot. We’ve taken our 1st stunning panorama of Gale crater with focusable cameras, 1st ever high energy radiation measurement from the surface, the 1st ever movie of a spacecraft landing on another planet and the 1st ground images of an ancient Martian river channel.”

A high priority is to snap high resolution images of all of Mount Sharp, beyond just the base of the 3.4 mile (5.5 km) tall mountain photographed so far and to decide on the best traverse route to get there.

“We will target Mount Sharp directly with the mastcam cameras in the next few days,” said Watkins.

Climbing the layered mountain and exploring the embedded water related clays and sulfate minerals is the ultimate goal of Curiosity’s mission. Scientists are searching for evidence of habitats that could have supported microbial life.

Curiosity will search for the signs of life in the form of organic molecules by scooping up soil and rock samples and sifting them into analytical chemistry labs on the mobile rovers’ deck.

Vasavada said the team is exhaustively discussing which terrain to visit and analyze along the way that will deliver key science results. He expects it will take about a year or so before Curiosity arrives at the base of Mount Sharp and begins the ascent in between the breathtaking mesas and buttes lining the path upwards to the sedimentary materials.

Watkins and Vasavada told me they are confident they will find a safe path though the dunes and multistory tall buttes and mesas that line the approach to and base of Mount Sharp.

“Curiosity can traverse slopes of 20 degrees and drive over 1 meter sized rocks. The team has already mapped out 6 potential paths uphill from orbital imagery.”

“The science team and our rover drivers and really everybody are kind of itching to move at this point,” said Vasavada. “The science and operations teams are working together to evaluate a few different routes that will take us eventually to Mount Sharp, maybe with a few waypoints in between to look at some of this diversity that we see in these images. We’ll take 2 or 3 samples along the way. That’s a few weeks work each time.”

Caption: Destination Mount Sharp. This image from NASA’s Curiosity rover looks south of the rover’s landing site on Mars towards Mount Sharp. Colors have been modified as if the scene were transported to Earth and illuminated by terrestrial sunlight. This processing, called “white balancing,” is useful for scientists to be able to recognize and distinguish rocks by color in more familiar lighting. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

“We estimate we can drive something like a football field a day once we get going and test out all our driving capabilities. And if we’re talking about a hundred football fields away, in terms of 10 kilometers or so, to those lower slopes of Mount Sharp, that already is a hundred days plus.”

“It’s going to take a good part of a year to finally make it to these sediments on Mount Sharp and do science along the way,” Vasavada estimated.

The 1 ton mega rover Curiosity is the biggest and most complex robot ever dispatched to the surface of another planet and is outfitted with a payload of 10 state of the art science instruments weighing 15 times more than any prior roving vehicle.

Ken Kremer

Image Caption: Curiosity’s Wheels Set to Rove soon Mars inside Gale Crater. This mosaic shows Curiosity wheels, nuclear power source and pointy low gain antennea (LGA) in the foreground looking to the eroded northern rim of Gale Crater in the background. The mosaic was assembled from full resolution Navcam images snapped by Curiosity on Sol 2 on Aug. 8. Image stitching and processing by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo – www.kenkremer.com

Image Caption: Mosaic of Mount Sharp inside Curiosity’s Gale Crater landing site. Gravelly rocks are strewn in the foreground, dark dune field lies beyond and then the first detailed view of the layered buttes and mesas of the sedimentary rock of Mount Sharp. Topsoil at right was excavated by the ‘sky crane’ landing thrusters. Gale Crater in the hazy distance. This mosaic was stitched from three full resolution Navcam images returned by Curiosity on Sol 2 (Aug 8) and colorized based on Mastcam images from the 34 millimeter camera. Processing by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo

Posted on by John Williams

A 360-Degree ‘Street View’ From Mars

360-degree panoramic image of the Martian landscape surrounding NASA’s Curiosity. Credit: Andrew Bodrov

After seeing all the amazing imagery so far from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, I know everyone wants to go there and take in the visual treats of Gale Crater. With the help of a 360-degree panorama you can virtually explore Curiosity’s landing site; sort of like a Martian version of Google’s Street View.

Take a martian minute to explore the panorama at 360pano.eu.

Photographer Andrew Bodrov stitched together images from Curiosity’s navigation cameras to create the panorama. “After seeing some of the stitches of Curiosity’s images at NASA’s website, I decided to stitch the panorama myself,” Bodrov told Universe Today.

He uses PTGui panoramic stitching software from New House Internet Services BV (http://www.ptgui.com) to create the 360-degree view of the mountains and sky surrounding the car-sized rover that successfully landed on Mars on August 6th.

“NASA has still not published enough source material to assemble a complete panorama in color,” Bodrov says. He used a color filter to make the images more representable. He also added that the sky and sun in the panorama were added in Adobe Photoshop. He used the size of the Sun seen in this spectacular image of a Martian sunset from NASA’s Spirit rover taken in 2005 as a guide.

While Bodrov says the high-resolution images themselves are amazing, just seeing a picture of another world is more inspiring. “It’s very nice to see the achievements of humanity which allows you to see a picture of another world,” he said.

Bodrov says he has more than 12 years experience creating panoramas including an awesome panorama (complete with sound) for the Russian Federal Space Agency of a Soyuz/Progress launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in August 2011.

Image caption: Planet Baikonur courtesy of Andrew Bodrov

Posted on by Jon Voisey

Two “b”‘s in the Beehive

Praesepe (aka. the Beehive Cluster)

As astronomers near the 800 mark for confirmed extra solar planets, it seems that notable milestones are becoming fewer and further between. Multi-planet systems aren’t even worth mentioning. Planets less massive than Earth? Already heard about it. Detecting atmospheres? Old news.

But a recent paper manages to sneak in one new first: The first detection of hot Jupiters in an open cluster. This discovery is not simply notable due to the novelty, but clusters have special characteristics that can help astronomers determine more of the history of the system.

The discovery was made by astronomers at Georgia State University using the “wobble” method in which they looked for the spectroscopic wiggle of spectral lines as planets tugged their parent stars around in orbit. The Beehive Cluster was chosen because it is a nearby cluster with over 1,000 member stars, many of which are similar in mass to the Sun. Additionally, the cluster is known to have an above average metallicity which is known to be correlated with planetary systems.

Searches of other open clusters have largely come up empty. Only two stars in open clusters have so far been found to have planets and both of those are around giant stars and as such, the planets are in wide orbits. This paucity is odd since stars are expected to form in clusters, and as such, the frequency of planets in clusters should be nearly the same as isolated stars.

The team used the 1.5-m Tillinghast Reflector at the Fred L. Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona observing a total of 53 stars in the cluster. Their results uncovered two new hot Jupiter planets in tight orbits around the parent, main-sequence stars. The first has an estimated mass of 0.54 times that of Jupiter while the second weighs in at 1.8 Jupiter masses.

The discovery helps to place constraints on how planets form and migrate in fledgling systems. Since massive planets such as these would need to form further out in colder parts of the circumstellar cloud, such planets would have to move inwards. The time period in which this happens has been a difficult question for astronomers to pin down. But since the Beehive cluster is only 600 million years old and these new planets are already in tight orbits, this helps to demonstrate that such migration is possible on short timescales.

While these are the first of their kind discovered in open clusters, this discovery puts the number of hot Jupiters in open clusters in rough agreement with expectations based on the number of such systems of stars that are no longer bound in clusters. This finding bridges the gap between formation and isolated stars that previous searches of open clusters had left open.

Posted on by Jason Major

What Curiosity Looks Like From 200 Kilometers Up

Here’s a look down at Curiosity from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, orbiting approximately  200 km (125 miles) above the surface of Mars. This new image, released today, shows the rover inside Gale Crater surrounded by a skirt of blue-tinted material, including several bright radiating marks –the  result of the descent stage rockets clearing layers of dust from the surface.

In this exaggerated-color view the blue indicates material of a different texture and composition than the surrounding area. HiRISE captures images in visible light wavelengths as well as near-infrared, which we can’t see. To us, the blue material would look grey.

North is up, and Curiosity’s ultimate exploration target, Gale Crater’s central peak, Mount Sharp, is off frame to the lower right.

Click here for a full-size version of the HiRISE image scan, showing the scene above plus some areas further north and south — including portions of the dark dune fields visible in recent images from Curiosity.

It’s nice to know that Curiosity has friends in high places!

Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

 

Posted on by John Williams

Physicists Closing in on Understanding the Primordial Universe

Photo of the ALICE detector at CERN. Photo courtesy of CERN.

Slamming barely nothing together is bringing scientists ever-closer to understanding the weird states of matter present just milliseconds after the creation of the Universe in the Big Bang. This is according to physicists from CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, presenting their latest findings at the Quark Matter 2012 conference in Washington, DC.

By smashing ions of lead together within CERN’s lesser-known ALICE heavy-ion experiment, physicists said Monday that they created the hottest man-made temperatures ever. In an instant, CERN scientists recreated a quark-gluon plasma — at temperatures 38 percent hotter than a previous record 4-trillion degree plasma. This plasma is a subatomic soup and the very unique state of matter thought to have existed in the earliest moments after the Big Bang. Earlier experiments have shown these particular varieties of plasmas behave like perfect, frictionless liquids. This finding means that physicists are studying the densest and hottest matter ever created in a laboratory; 100,000 times hotter than the interior of our Sun and denser than a neutron star.

CERN’s scientists are just coming off of their July announcement of the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson.

“The field of heavy-ion physics is crucial for probing the properties of matter in the primordial universe, one of the key questions of fundamental physics that the LHC and its experiments are designed to address. It illustrates how in addition to the investigation of the recently discovered Higgs-like boson, physicists at the LHC are studying many other important phenomena in both proton–proton and lead–lead collisions,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer.

According to a press release, the findings help scientists understand the “evolution of high-density, strongly interacting matter in both space and time.”

Meanwhile, scientists at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), say they have observed the first glimpse of a possible boundary separating ordinary matter, composed of protons and neutrons, from the hot primordial plasma of quarks and gluons in the early Universe. Just as water exists in different phases, solid, liquid or vapor, depending on temperature and pressure, RHIC physicists are unraveling the boundary where ordinary matter starts to form from the quark gluon plasma by smashing gold ions together. Scientists are still not sure where to draw the boundary lines, but RHIC is providing the first clues.

The nuclei of today’s ordinary atoms and the primordial quark-gluon plasma, or QGP, represent two different phases of matter and interact at the most basic of Nature’s forces. These interactions are described in a theory known as quantum chromodynamics, or QCD. Findings from RHIC’s STAR and PHENIX show that the perfect liquid properties of the quark gluon plasma dominate at energies above 39 billion electron volts (GeV). As the energy dissipates, interactions between quarks and the protons and neutrons of ordinary matter begin to appear. Measuring these energies give scientists signposts pointing to the approach of a boundary between ordinary matter and the QGP.

“The critical endpoint, if it exists, occurs at a unique value of temperature and density beyond which QGP and ordinary matter can co-exist,” said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven’s Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics, who leads the RHIC research program. “It is analogous to a critical point beyond which liquid water and water vapor can co-exist in thermal equilibrium, he said.

While Brookhaven’s particle accelerator cannot match CERN’s record-setting temperature conditions, scientists at the U.S Energy Department lab say the machine maps the “sweet spot” in this phase transition.

Image caption: The nuclear phase diagram: RHIC sits in the energy “sweet spot” for exploring the transition between ordinary matter made of hadrons and the early universe matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

John Williams is a science writer and owner of TerraZoom, a Colorado-based web development shop specializing in web mapping and online image zooms. He also writes the award-winning blog, StarryCritters, an interactive site devoted to looking at images from NASA’s Great Observatories and other sources in a different way. A former contributing editor for Final Frontier, his work has appeared in the Planetary Society Blog, Air & Space Smithsonian, Astronomy, Earth, MX Developer’s Journal, The Kansas City Star and many other newspapers and magazines.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Curiosity Getting Ready to Rove

Here’s a look at what the Curiosity team has planned for the rover this week. Team member Jessica Samuels provides an update on developments and status of the mission now that it’s preparing to explore Gale Crater. Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on NASA’s Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks’ elemental composition from a distance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curiosity will use a drill and scoop, which are located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover’s analytical laboratory instruments.
Continue reading “Curiosity Getting Ready to Rove”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Carnival of Space #262

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Markus Hammonds over at Supernova Condensate.

Click here to read Carnival of Space #262.

And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.

Posted on by Jason Major

“The Hobbit” Author Gets a Crater on Mercury

Here’s a little something to please fans of space, art and fantasy alike (and those who enjoy all three): on August 6 the International Astronomical Union approved names for 9 craters on Mercury, one of which is named for J.R.R. Tolkien, revered author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (among other seminal fantasy works.)

The crater Tolkien is approximately 30 miles (48 km) in diameter. All 9 newly-named craters are located in Mercury’s north polar region and exhibit radar evidence of water ice hidden in their shadowy pocketses.

IAU procedure for craters on Mercury has them named after “deceased artists, musicians, painters, and authors who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field and have been recognized as art historically significant figures for more than 50 years.” Find out who all 9 new craters are named for after the jump:

Egonu, for Uzo Egonu (1931-1996), a Nigerian-born painter who at 13 was sent to England to study art, first at a private school in Norfolk and later at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Exile, alienation, and the pain of displaced peoples were recurrent themes in his work.

Gaudí­, after Antoni Gaudí­ (1852-1926), a Spanish architect whose work concentrated largely on the Catalan capital of Barcelona. He was very skilled with ceramics, stained glass, wrought-iron forging, and carpentry and integrated these crafts into his architecture.

Kandinsky, for Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a Russian painter and art theorist credited with painting the first purely abstract works.

Petronius, for Titus Petronius (c. AD 27-66), a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian era.

Prokofiev, for Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor who is considered one of the major composers of the 20th century. His best-known works include the ballet Romeo and Juliet — from which “Dance of the Knights” is taken — and Peter and the Wolf.

Tolkien, for John Ronald Reuel (J. R. R.) Tolkien (1892-1973), an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Tryggvadóttir, for Nina Tryggvadóttir (1913-1968), one of Iceland’s most important abstract expressionist artists and one of very few Icelandic female artists of her generation. She primarily worked in painting, but she also created collages, stained glass work, and mosaics.

Qiu Ying, for Shifu Qiu Ying (1494-1552), a Chinese painter who specialized in the gongbi brush technique, a careful realist method in Chinese painting. He is regarded as one of the Four Great Masters of the Ming Dynasty.

Yoshikawa, for Eiji Yoshikawa (1892-1962), a Japanese historical novelist best known for his revisions of older classics including The Tale of the Heike, Tale of Genji, Outlaws of the Marsh, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

“These designations expand the opportunities to recognize the contributions to the arts by the most creative individuals from many cultures and eras. The names of those individuals are now linked in perpetuity to the innermost planet.”

– Sean Solomon, MESSENGER Principal Investigator

The craters were imaged by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, currently in extended mission around Mercury. Learn more about the preciousss MESSENGER mission here. (Gollum! Gollum!)

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington 

Posted on by Jason Major

New Satellites Will Tighten Knowledge of Earth’s Radiation Belts


Surrounding our planet like vast invisible donuts (the ones with the hole, not the jelly-filled kind) are the Van Allen radiation belts, regions where various charged subatomic particles get trapped by Earth’s magnetic fields, forming rings of plasma. We know that the particles that make up this plasma can have nasty effects on spacecraft electronics as well as human physiology, but there’s a lot that isn’t known about the belts. Two new satellites scheduled to launch on August 23 August 24 will help change that.

“Particles from the radiation belts can penetrate into spacecraft and disrupt electronics, short circuits or upset memory on computers. The particles are also dangerous to astronauts traveling through the region. We need models to help predict hazardous events in the belts and right now we are aren’t very good at that. RBSP will help solve that problem.”
– David Sibeck, RBSP project scientist, Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission will put a pair of identical satellites into eccentric orbits that take them from as low as 375 miles (603 km) to as far out as 20,000 miles (32,186 km). During their orbits the satellites will pass through both the stable inner and more variable outer Van Allen belts, one trailing the other. Along the way they’ll investigate the many particles that make up the belts and identify what sort of activity occurs in isolated locations and across larger areas.

“Definitely the biggest challenge that we face is the radiation environment that the probes are going to be flying through,” said Mission Systems Engineer Jim Stratton at APL. “Most spacecraft try to avoid the radiation belts — and we’re going to be flying right through the heart of them.”

Read: The Van Allen Belts and the Great Electron Escape

Each 8-sided RBSP satellite is approximately 6 feet (1.8 meters) across and weighs 1,475 pounds (669 kg).

The goal is to find out where the particles in the belts originate from — do they come from the solar wind? Or Earth’s own ionosphere? — as well as to find out what powers the belts’ variations in size and gives the particles their extreme speed and energy. Increased knowledge about Earth’s radiation belts will also help in the understanding of the plasma environment that pervades the entire Universe.

Read: What Are The Radiation Belts?

Ultimately the information gathered by the RBSP mission will help in the design of future science and communications satellites as well as safer spacecraft for human explorers.

The satellites are slated to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station no earlier than 4:08 a.m. EDT on August 24.

Find out more about the RBSP mission here.

Video/rendering: NASA/GSFC.

Posted on by Jason Major

A Star’s Dying Scream May Be a Beacon for Physics

When a star suffered an untimely demise at the hands of a hidden black hole, astronomers detected its doleful, ululating wail — in the key of D-sharp, no less — from 3.9 billion light-years away. The resulting ultraluminous X-ray blast revealed the supermassive black hole’s presence at the center of a distant galaxy in March of 2011, and now that information could be used to study the real-life workings of black holes, general relativity, and a concept first proposed by Einstein in 1915.

Within the centers of many spiral galaxies (including our own) lie the undisputed monsters of the Universe: incredibly dense supermassive black holes, containing the equivalent masses of millions of Suns packed into areas smaller than the diameter of Mercury’s orbit. While some supermassive black holes (SMBHs) surround themselves with enormous orbiting disks of superheated material that will eventually spiral inwards to feed their insatiable appetites — all the while emitting ostentatious amounts of high-energy radiation in the process — others lurk in the darkness, perfectly camouflaged against the blackness of space and lacking such brilliant banquet spreads. If any object should find itself too close to one of these so-called “inactive” stellar corpses, it would be ripped to shreds by the intense tidal forces created by the black hole’s gravity, its material becoming an X-ray-bright accretion disk and particle jet for a brief time.

Such an event occurred in March 2011, when scientists using NASA’s Swift telescope detected a sudden flare of X-rays from a source located nearly 4 billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. The flare, called Swift J1644+57, showed the likely location of a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy, a black hole that had until then remained hidden until a star ventured too close and became an easy meal.

See an animation of the event below:

The resulting particle jet, created by material from the star that got caught up in the black hole’s intense magnetic field lines and was blown out into space in our direction (at 80-90% the speed of light!) is what initially attracted astronomers’ attention. But further research on Swift J1644+57 with other telescopes has revealed new information about the black hole and what happens when a star meets its end.

(Read: The Black Hole that Swallowed a Screaming Star)

In particular, researchers have identified what’s called a quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) embedded inside the accretion disk of Swift J1644+57. Warbling at 5 mhz, in effect it’s the low-frequency cry of a murdered star. Created by fluctuations in the frequencies of X-ray emissions, such a source near the event horizon of a supermassive black hole can provide clues to what’s happening in that poorly-understood region close to a black hole’s point-of-no-return.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity proposes that space itself around a massive rotating object — like a planet, star, or, in an extreme instance, a supermassive black hole — is dragged along for the ride (the Lense-Thirring effect.) While this is difficult to detect around less massive bodies a rapidly-rotating black hole would create a much more pronounced effect… and with a QPO as a benchmark within the SMBH’s disk the resulting precession of the Lense-Thirring effect could, theoretically, be measured.

If anything, further investigations of Swift J1644+57 could provide insight to the mechanics of general relativity in distant parts of the Universe, as well as billions of years in the past.

See the team’s original paper here, lead authored by R.C. Reis of the University of Michigan.

Thanks to Justin Vasel for his article on Astrobites.

Image: NASA. Video: NASA/GSFC