Monthly Archives: May 2017

NASA is launching another competition for scientists: help pick instruments for a Europa lander.

Jupiters Moon has been a target for scientists for a while, after Voyager 1 and the Galileo spacecraft unveiled a potential ocean back in the 1990s. While a Europa lander mission is still in Phase B and hasnt been officially been approved quite yet, the team is still planning ahead just in case.

"The possibility of placing a lander on the surface of this intriguing icy moon, touching and exploring a world that might harbor life is at the heart of the Europa lander mission," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a press release. "We want the community to be prepared for this announcement of opportunity, because NASA recognizes the immense amount of work involved in preparing proposals for this potential future exploration."

The competition will have two stages to create the instruments and ensure they would work with the mission. Only 10 proposals will make it into Phase A where participants will be limited to 12 full months and $1.5 million to conduct their work. The instruments main duties will be to look for evidence of life on Europa, study the terrain to see if its habitable, and describe the surface and subsurface of the moon.

Along with a hopeful landing mission, a Europa flyby mission, the Europa Clipper mission, is in its preliminary design phase and hopes to launch sometime in the 2020s.

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NASA invites scientists to submit ides for Europa lander - Astronomy Magazine

A new supernova just lit up the sky, and its bright enough for amateur astronomers to search out with their scopes. Named SN 2017eaw, this event marks the death of a massive star and the 10th supernova observed in NGC 6946, otherwise known as the Fireworks Galaxy, in 100 years. If you have a 6-inch scope or larger and access to dark skies, you can find this supernova to the northwest of its host galaxys nucleus as it continues to brighten for up to a week, then remains bright for several more weeks.

The transient object was first announced as a potential supernova by amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins on May 14, who identified it by comparing an image hed taken that day with previous images of the galaxy both one year and two days prior. Neither of the previous images showed an object in the location where the new object had appeared. Wiggins imaged the galaxy through his 14-inch (0.35-meter) f/5.5 reflector from his location near Erda, Utah. The supernova was confirmed five hours later by the Virtual Telescope Project with the 16-inch (0.41m) f/3.75 Tenagra III robotictelescope (called Pearl) at Tenagra Observatories in Arizona. Amateur astronomers can find the supernova at R.A. 20h34m44.24s, Dec. +601135.9, close to the border separating Cygnus and Cepheus.

Spectroscopic observations of the supernova have identified it as a type II-P supernova, one the most common supernova events in the universe. Type II supernovae are core-collapse events, which occur when a massive star reaches the end of its life. Prior to the supernova, the core of the star has been shrinking, as fusion inside slows and reduces the pressure outwards from within the core. Eventually, the core shrinks to a critical point, causing a rebounding shockwave that propagates outward, destroying the outer regions of the star as a type II supernova. In this case, the p stands for plateau, because these supernovae have a brightness profile that grows and then plateaus, staying the same for months before the object fades.

This plateau in brightness is caused by the ionization (stripping of electrons) of the hydrogen in what was once the envelope of the progenitor star. As the shockwave from the supernova moves through the envelope, it heats the hydrogen there to temperatures over 100,000 Kelvin (180,000 degrees Fahrenheit [99,700 degrees Celsius]) Heating ionizes the hydrogen, which then becomes opaque, meaning it absorbs light coming from the inner regions of the supernova. Astronomers can only see radiation from the outermost layers of the star, which remains consistent, for several weeks, and is dominated by hydrogen emission when viewed through a spectrograph. Eventually, the hydrogen cools enough to regain its lost electrons, turning into neutral hydrogen that allows radiation from deeper within to escape.

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Fireworks Galaxy sets off its 10th supernova in a century - Astronomy Magazine

The Dawn spacecraft was launched in 2007 and arrived at the asteroid Vesta in 2011. The craft orbited Vesta for four years, revealing a fascinating world that is likely a smashed dwarf planet that once had running water. Using revolutionary ion thrusters, it was able to detach itself from Vestas gravitational influence and move towards Ceres, inserting itself in a distant orbit before gradually moving closer to the world.

While a potential third target was discussed, NASA scientists decided to keep Dawn at Ceres in order to reveal more about it and its history. The presence of ammonia ices hints that Ceres may not have formed in the asteroid belt, but instead migrated in from the Kuiper Belt, a smattering of rocky bodies bound by Neptunes gravity.

The craft will stay in a safe distant orbit over Ceres in perpetuity once the mission ends. (Of course, NASA has a funny habit of making missions last long past their original shelf life. Just look at Cassini or Opportunity.)

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See a moving global view of Ceres at opposition - Astronomy Magazine

These two images, taken a year apart, reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. Each image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescopes Wide Field Camera 3, shows the companion in a different orbital position around its parent body. Credit: NASA, ESA, C. Kiss (Konkoly Observatory), and J. Stansberry (STScI)

The combined power of three space observatories, including NASAs Hubble Space Telescope, has helped astronomers uncover a moon orbiting the third largest dwarf planet, catalogued as 2007 OR10. The pair resides in the frigid outskirts of our solar system called the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy debris left over from our solar systems formation 4.6 billion years ago.

With this discovery, most of the known dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt larger than 600 miles across have companions. These bodies provide insight into how moons formed in the young solar system.

The discovery of satellites around all of the known large dwarf planets except for Sedna means that at the time these bodies formed billions of years ago, collisions must have been more frequent, and thats a constraint on the formation models, said Csaba Kiss of the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary. He is the lead author of the science paper announcing the moons discovery. If there were frequent collisions, then it was quite easy to form these satellites.

The objects most likely slammed into each other more often because they inhabited a crowded region. There must have been a fairly high density of objects, and some of them were massive bodies that were perturbing the orbits of smaller bodies, said team member John Stansberry of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. This gravitational stirring may have nudged the bodies out of their orbits and increased their relative velocities, which may have resulted in collisions.

But the speed of the colliding objects could not have been too fast or too slow, according to the astronomers. If the impact velocity was too fast, the smash-up would have created lots of debris that could have escaped from the system; too slow and the collision would have produced only an impact crater.

Collisions in the asteroid belt, for example, are destructive because objects are traveling fast when they smash together. The asteroid belt is a region of rocky debris between the orbits of Mars and the gas giant Jupiter. Jupiters powerful gravity speeds up the orbits of asteroids, generating violent impacts.

The team uncovered the moon in archival images of 2007 OR10taken by Hubbles Wide Field Camera 3. Observations taken of the dwarf planet by NASAs Kepler Space Telescope first tipped off the astronomers of the possibility of a moon circling it. Kepler revealed that 2007 OR10has a slow rotation period of 45 hours. Typical rotation periods for Kuiper Belt Objects are under 24 hours, Kiss said. We looked in the Hubble archive because the slower rotation period could have been caused by the gravitational tug of a moon. The initial investigator missed the moon in the Hubble images because it is very faint.

The astronomers spotted the moon in two separate Hubble observations spaced a year apart. The images show that the moon is gravitationally bound to 2007 OR10because it moves with the dwarf planet, as seen against a background of stars. However, the two observations did not provide enough information for the astronomers to determine an orbit.

Ironically, because we dont know the orbit, the link between the satellite and the slow rotation rate is unclear, Stansberry said.

The astronomers calculated the diameters of both objects based on observations in far-infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory, which measured the thermal emission of the distant worlds. The dwarf planet is about 950 miles across, and the moon is estimated to be 150 miles to 250 miles in diameter. 2007 OR10, like Pluto, follows an eccentric orbit, but it is currently three times farther than Pluto is from the sun.

2007 OR10is a member of an exclusive club of nine dwarf planets. Of those bodies, only Pluto and Eris are larger than 2007 OR10. It was discovered in 2007 by astronomers Meg Schwamb, Mike Brown, and David Rabinowitz as part of a survey to search for distant solar system bodies using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.

The teams results appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

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[ 18 May 2017 ] Hubble spots moon around third largest dwarf planet News - Astronomy Now Online

Universe Today

Could the Closest Extrasolar Planet Be Habitable? Astronomers Plan to Find Out Universe Today According to their study, which appeared recently in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the team conducted a series of simulations using the state-of-the-art Met Office Unified Model (UM). This numerical model has been used for decades to study ... Proxima b: Researchers Take First Steps to Explore Climate of Nearby ExoplanetSci-News.com Computer simulation explores habitability of Proxima bThe Space Reporter all 30 news articles »

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Could the Closest Extrasolar Planet Be Habitable? Astronomers Plan to Find Out - Universe Today

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The find gives backing to the astonishing theory our universe may be part of a wider cosmos where multiple parallel universes co-exist.

Experts believe that they may have found the first solid evidence of this long-standing theory after finding a cold spot in the deep universe.

The cold spot was first discovered in 2015 and is a 1.8 billion light-year wide area where there are an estimated 10,000 galaxies missing.

The mysterious area contains 20 per cent less matter than it should, according to the Standard Model, which left scientists baffled.

UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

However, astronomers believe that they may now have the solution and theorise that the area could be where one universe is encroaching on another.

Experts from Durham University said in a paper that as a parallel universe crashed into ours, much of the galaxies and matter were shoved away from the cold spot.

The team adds that if our universe came to be from seemingly nothing and embarked on what looks like an infinite expansion, then others could have too.

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Professor Tom Shanks in Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy said: One explanation for the Cold Spot is that it might be the remnant signal of the collision of our Universe and one of the trillions of others.

If further, more detailed, analysis proves this to be the case then the Cold Spot might be taken as the first evidence for the multiverse and billions of other universes may exist like our own.

Previously experts had theorised that the cold spot, which is just 0.00015 degrees celsius cooler than its surroundings, was created by the lack of galaxies.

It had been suggested that as the void was so barren it literally sucked energy out of light that travelled through it, leading to the colder temperature.

However, Durham University found that the void is actually made up of many tiny voids which were too small shift light, according to the paper published in arXiv.

Doctoral student Ruari Mackenzie of Durham University said: The voids we have detected cannot explain the Cold Spot.

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Mind blowing theories on how the universe will end

Prof Shanks offered the alternative: Perhaps the most exciting explanation is that the Cold Spot was caused by collision between our universe and another bubble universe, believe it or not.

I remember some scientists suggesting that there could be detectable effects on the galaxy distribution after this cosmic shunt of two universes colliding.

Basically colliding universes could leave a slightly anisotropic galaxy distribution in our own universe - a bit like a pile-up on the motorway. So we can look for this to test how seriously to take these ideas.

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Astronomers claim first evidence of PARALLEL UNIVERSE - 'there could be BILLIONS more' - Express.co.uk