What’s Up November 2017

evosia Chasing auroras is much like living life: if you show up, always be prepared for the amazing to happen.

The Largest Black Hole Merger Of All-Time Is Coming, And Soon

“Over in Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, a number of unusual systems have been found.  One of them, J0045+41, was originally thought to be two stars orbiting one another with a period of just 80 days. When additional observations were taken in the X-ray, they revealed a surprise: J0045+41 weren’t stars at all.”

When you look at any narrow region of the sky, you don’t simply see what’s in front of you. Rather, you see everything along your line-of-sight, as far as your observing power can take you. In the case of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury, where hundreds of millions of stars were captured in impressive fashion, background objects thousands of times as distant can also be seen. One of them, J0045+41, was originally thought to be a binary star system that was quite tight: with just an 80 day orbital period. Follow-up observations in the X-ray, however, revealed that it wasn’t a binary star system after all, but an ultra-distant supermassive black hole pair, destined to merge in as little as 350 years. If we build the right observatory in space, we’ll be able to observe the entire inspiral-and-merger process for as long as we like!

Come get the full story, and some incredible pictures and visuals, on today’s Mostly Mute Monday!

Astronomy and Astrophysics: Facts

Here is a list of some curiosities of astronomy and astrophysics. From our solar system to interstellar space.

Rings of Saturn: With an estimated local thickness of as little as 10 m and as much as 1 km, they are composed of 99.9% pure water ice with a smattering of impurities that may include tholins or silicates. The main rings are primarily composed of particles ranging in size from 1 cm to 10 m.

Valhalla (crater): Valhalla is the largest multi-ring impact crater on Jupiter’s moon Callisto and in the Solar System. It is named after Valhalla, the God Odin’s hall in Norse mythology where warriors are taken after death. 

Europa (lineae):  Europa’s most striking surface features are a series of dark streaks crisscrossing the entire globe, called lineae (English: lines). Close examination shows that the edges of Europa’s crust on either side of the cracks have moved relative to each other. The larger bands are more than 20 km (12 mi) across, often with dark, diffuse outer edges, regular striations, and a central band of lighter material. The most likely hypothesis states that the lineae on Europa may have been produced by a series of eruptions of warm ice as the Europan crust spread open to expose warmer layers beneath. The effect would have been similar to that seen in Earth’s oceanic ridges.

Tartarus Dorsa: The western part of Pluto’s northern hemisphere consists of an extensive, highly distinctive set of 500-meter-high mountains informally named Tartarus Dorsa; the spacing and shape of the mountains looks similar to scales or tree bark. 

Mountain in Ceres: Ahuna Mons is the largest mountain on the dwarf planet and asteroid Ceres. It protrudes above otherwise smooth terrain, it is not an impact feature, and it appears to be the only mountain of its kind on Ceres. Bright streaks run top to bottom on its slopes; these streaks are thought to be salt, similar to the better known Cererian bright spots, and likely resulted from cryovolcanic activity from Ceres’s interior. It is named after the traditional post-harvest festival Ahuna of the Sumi Naga people of India.

Pluto has a tenuous atmosphere consisting of nitrogen (N2), methane (CH4), and carbon monoxide (CO), which are in equilibrium with their ices on Pluto’s surface. According to the measurements by New Horizons, the surface pressure is about 1 Pa(10 μbar), roughly one million to 100,000 times less than Earth’s atmospheric pressure. It was initially thought that, as Pluto moves away from the Sun, its atmosphere should gradually freeze onto the surface; studies of New Horizons data and ground-based occultations show that Pluto’s atmospheric density increases, and that it likely remains gaseous throughout Pluto’s orbit.  

Sagittarius A*: Sagittarius A*  is a bright and very compact astronomical radio source at the center of the Milky Way, near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. It is part of a larger astronomical feature known as Sagittarius A. Sagittarius A* is thought to be the location of a supermassive black hole, like those that are now generally accepted to be at the centers of most spiral and elliptical galaxies.

Double Pulsar: PSR J0737−3039 is the only known double pulsar. It consists of two neutron stars emitting electromagnetic waves in the radio wavelength in a relativistic binary system. The two pulsars are known as PSR J0737−3039A and PSR J0737−3039B. It was discovered in 2003 at Australia’s Parkes Observatory by an international team led by the radio astronomer Marta Burgay during a high-latitude pulsar survey.

IC 1101: IC 1101 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster, approximately 320 megaparsecs (1.04 billion light-years) from Earth. IC 1101 is among the largest known galaxies, but there is debate in the astronomical literature about how to define the size of such a galaxy.

A rogue planet (also termed an interstellar planet, nomad planet, free-floating planet, orphan planet, wandering planet, starless planet, sunless planet, or Planemo) is a planetary-mass object that orbits the galaxy center directly. Such objects have been ejected from the planetary system in which they formed or have never been gravitationally bound to any star or brown dwarf. The Milky Way alone may have billions of rogue planets.

souce: wikipedia

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SwRI, Ted Stryk, John Rowe Animations, commons.wikimedia 

Oct. 4, 1957 - Sputnik, the Dawn of the Space Age via NASA http://ift.tt/2hNf1Yq

Ghost Nebula

False color image of Uranus taken with the Hale Telescope and the Palomar Observatory. The rings are the red pieces.

Image credit: Palomar Observatory & Hale telescope

Eight curiosities about black holes

In this post contains some facts and curiosities about one of the most extreme objects in the universe - Black Holes. Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.

1° A Massive Star Collapsing In Upon Itself

Say you have a star that’s about 20 times more massive than the Sun. Our Sun is going to end its life quietly; when its nuclear fuel burns out, it’ll slowly fade into a white dwarf. That’s not the case for far more massive stars. When those monsters run out of fuel, gravity will overwhelm the natural pressure the star maintains to keep its shape stable. When the pressure from nuclear reactions collapses, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute, gravity violently overwhelms and collapses the core and other layers are flung into space. This is called a supernova. The remaining core collapses into a singularity — a spot of infinite density and almost no volume. That’s another name for a black hole.

2° Black holes come in a range of sizes.

There are at least three types of black holes, ranging from relative squeakers to those that dominate a galaxy’s center. Primordial black holes are the smallest kinds, and range in size from one atom’s size to a mountain’s mass. Stellar black holes, the most common type, are up to 20 times more massive than our own Sun and are likely sprinkled in the dozens within the Milky Way. And then there are the gargantuan ones in the centers of galaxies, called “supermassive black holes.” They’re each more than one million times more massive than the Sun. How these beasts formed is still being examined.

3° The first black hole wasn’t discovered until X-ray astronomy was used

Cygnus X-1 was first found during balloon flights in the 1960s, but wasn’t identified as a black hole for about another decade. According to NASA, the black hole is 10 times more massive to the Sun. Nearby is a blue supergiant star that is about 20 times more massive than the Sun, which is bleeding due to the black hole and creating X-ray emissions.

4° Black holes are only dangerous if you get too close

Like creatures behind a cage, it’s okay to observe a black hole if you stay away from its event horizon — think of it like the gravitational field of a planet. This zone is the point of no return, when you’re too close for any hope of rescue. But you can safely observe the black hole from outside of this arena. By extension, this means it’s likely impossible for a black hole to swallow up everything in the Universe (barring some sort of major revision to physics or understanding of our Cosmos, of course.)

5° We aren’t sure if wormholes exist

A popular science-fiction topic concerns what happens if somebody falls into a black hole. Some people believe these objects are a sort of wormhole to other parts of the Universe, making faster-than-light travel possible. But as this Smithsonian Magazine article points out, anything is possible since we still have a lot to figure out about physics. “Since we do not yet have a theory that reliably unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics, we do not know of the entire zoo of possible spacetime structures that could accommodate wormholes,” said Abi Loeb, who is with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

6°  Black holes will spaghettify you and everything else

If a person was able to survive long enough to describe falling into a black hole, he would at first experience weightless as he goes into free fall, but then feel intense “tidal” gravitational forces as he got closer to the center of the black hole. In other words, if his feet were closer to the centre than his head, then they would feel a stronger pull until he eventually is stretched and then ripped apart. As he falls in he may observe distorted images as the light bends around him and he will also still be able to see beyond the black hole as light continues to reach him from the outside.

7° Weird time stuff happens around black holes

This is best illustrated by one person (call them Unlucky) falling into a black hole while another person (call them Lucky) watches. From Lucky’s perspective, Unlucky’s time clock appears to be ticking slower and slower. This is in accordance with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which (simply put) says that time is affected by how fast you go, when you’re at extreme speeds close to light. The black hole warps time and space so much that Unlucky’s time appears to be running slower. From Unlucky’s perspective, however, their clock is running normally and Lucky’s is running fast.

8° Massive Black Hole in The Center Of Milky Way 

It is now thought that most galaxies are held together by supermassive black holes at their centers, which cluster hundreds of solar systems around them. In fact, 30,000 light years away at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy is a black hole with 30 million times the mass of our own sun.

Source: space.com, universetoday.com, sciencealert.com & astronomytrek.com

Planet Jupiter, observed by the Juno probe on September 1, 2017.

Chasing the Shadow of Neptune’s Moon Triton

Our Flying Observatory

Our flying observatory, called SOFIA, carries a 100-inch telescope inside a Boeing 747SP aircraft. Scientists onboard study the life cycle of stars, planets (including the atmosphere of Mars and Jupiter), nearby planetary systems, galaxies, black holes and complex molecules in space.

AND in just a few days SOFIA is going on a special flight to chase the shadow of Neptune’s moon Triton as it crosses Earth’s surface!

In case you’re wondering, SOFIA stands for: Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.

Triton

Triton is 1,680 miles (2,700 km) across, making it the largest of the 13 moons orbiting Neptune. Unlike most large moons in our solar system, Triton orbits in the opposite direction of Neptune, called a retrograde orbit. This backward orbit leads scientists to believe that Triton formed in an area past Neptune, called the Kuiper Belt, and was pulled into its orbit around Neptune by gravity. 

The Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Neptune and Triton in 1989 and found that Triton’s atmosphere is made up of mostly nitrogen…but it has not been studied in nearly 16 years!

Occultations are Eclipse-Like Events

An occultation occurs when an object, like a planet or a moon, passes in front of a star and completely blocks the light from that star. As the object blocks the star’s light, it casts a faint shadow on Earth’s surface. 

But unlike an eclipse, these shadows are not usually visible to the naked eye because the star and object are much smaller and not nearly as bright as our sun. Telescopes with special instruments can actually see these shadows and study the star’s light as it passes near and around the object – if they can be in the right place on Earth to catch the shadow.

Chasing Shadows

Scientists have been making advanced observations of Triton and a background star. They’ve calculated exactly where Triton’s faint shadow will fall on Earth! Our SOFIA team has designed a flight path that will put SOFIA (the telescope and aircraft) exactly in the center of the shadow at the precise moment that Triton and the star will align. 

This is no easy feat because the shadow is moving at more than 53,000 mph while SOFIA flies at Mach 0.85 (652 mph), so we only have about two minutes to catch the shadow!! But our SOFIA team has previously harnessed the aircraft’s mobility to study Pluto from inside the center of its occultation shadow, and is ready to do it again to study Triton!

What We Learn From Inside the Shadow

From inside the shadow, our team on SOFIA will study the star’s light as it passes around and through Triton’s atmosphere. This allows us to learn more about Triton’s atmosphere, including its temperature, pressure, density and composition! 

Our team will use this information to examine if Triton’s atmosphere has changed since our Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past it in 1989. That’s a lot of information from a bit of light inside a shadow! Similar observations of Uranus in 1977, from our previous flying observatory, led to the discovery of rings around that planet!

International Ground-Based Support

Ground-based telescopes across the United States and Europe – from Scotland to the Canary Islands – will also be studying Triton’s occultation. Even though most of these telescopes will not be in the center of the shadow, the simultaneous observations, from different locations on Earth, will give us information about how Triton’s atmosphere varies across its latitudes. 

This data from across the Earth and from onboard SOFIA will help researchers understand how Triton’s atmosphere is distorted at different locations by its high winds and its strong tides!

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A Hitchhiker’s Ride to Space

This month, we are set to launch the latest weather satellite from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Joint Polar Satellite System-1, or JPSS-1, satellite will provide essential data for timely and accurate weather forecasts and for tracking environmental events such as forest fires and droughts.

Image Credit: Ball Aerospace

JPSS-1 is the primary satellite launching, but four tiny satellites will also be hitchhiking a ride into Earth orbit. These shoebox-sized satellites (part of our CubeSat Launch Initiative) were developed in partnership with university students and used for education, research and development. Here are 4 reasons why MiRaTA, one of the hitchhikers, is particularly interesting…

Miniaturized Weather Satellite Technology

The Microwave Radiometer Technology Acceleration (MiRaTA) CubeSat is set to orbit the Earth to prove that a small satellite can advance the technology necessary to reduce the cost and size of future weather satellites. At less than 10 pounds, these nanosatellites are faster and more cost-effective to build and launch since they have been constructed by Principal Investigator Kerri Cahoy’s students at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (with lots of help). There’s even a chance it could be put into operation with forecasters.

The Antenna? It’s a Measuring Tape

That long skinny piece coming out of the bottom right side under MiRaTA’s solar panel? That’s a measuring tape. It’s doubling as a communications antenna. MiRaTA will measure temperature, water vapor and cloud ice in Earth’s atmosphere. These measurements are used to track major storms, including hurricanes, as well as everyday weather. If this test flight is successful, the new, smaller technology will likely be incorporated into future weather satellites – part of our national infrastructure.

Tiny Package Packing a Punch MiRaTA will also test a new technique using radio signals received from GPS satellites in a higher orbit. They will be used to measure the temperature of the same volume of atmosphere that the radiometer is viewing. The GPS satellite measurement can then be used for calibrating the radiometer. “In physics class, you learn that a pencil submerged in water looks like it’s broken in half because light bends differently in the water than in the air,” Principal Investigator Kerri Cahoy said. “Radio waves are like light in that they refract when they go through changing densities of air, and we can use the magnitude of the refraction to calculate the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere with near-perfect accuracy and use this to calibrate a radiometer.” 

What’s Next?

In the best-case scenario, three weeks after launch MiRaTA will be fully operational, and within three months the team will have obtained enough data to study if this technology concept is working. The big goal for the mission—declaring the technology demonstration a success—would be confirmed a bit farther down the road, at least half a year away, following the data analysis. If MiRaTA’s technology validation is successful, Cahoy said she envisions an eventual constellation of these CubeSats orbiting the entire Earth, taking snapshots of the atmosphere and weather every 15 minutes—frequent enough to track storms, from blizzards to hurricanes, in real time.

Learn more about MiRaTA

Watch the launch!

The mission is scheduled to launch this month (no sooner than Nov. 14), with JPSS-1 atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta II rocket lifting off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. You’ll be able to watch on NASA TV or at nasa.gov/live.

Watch the launch live HERE on Nov. 14, liftoff is scheduled for Tuesday, 4:47 a.m.! 

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