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Tag: Space and Astronomy

  • Photosynthesis: Martian habitation & sustainable space travel

    Photosynthesis: Martian habitation & sustainable space travel

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    Newswise — In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists assess a new technique which could convert renewable, green energy from outside the Earth’s atmosphere. They are taking advantage of photosynthesis – the chemical process plants undergo every day to create energy – to help the space industry become more sustainable.

    The research led by the University of Warwick evaluates the use of a special device known as semiconductor to absorb sunlight on Moon and Mars. It is hoped that the devices could promote Martian life support systems.

    These “artificial photosynthesis devices” undergo the same processes which keeps plants alive on Earth – they convert water into oxygen using only sunlight whilst recycling carbon dioxide. These integrated systems have the advantage of directly using solar power and could save on weight on long-term space travels in comparison to traditional systems currently in use on the International Space Station – making space travel more efficient.

    There is a need for efficient and reliable energy sources in space to enable the exploration of our solar system. It is hoped that the technology could be installed on the Moon and Mars to harvest green energy to help power rockets and complement life support systems for the production of oxygen and other chemicals as well as the recycling of carbon dioxide. The insights gained in this study with respect to improving device efficiencies also feed back into their optimization for Earth applications and also provide insights into the performance of traditional solar cells in space.

    Assistant Professor Katharina Brinkert, Department of Chemistry, said: “Human space exploration faces the same challenges as the green energy transition on Earth: both require sustainable energy sources. With sunlight being so abundantly available in space, we have shown how this source could be used to harvest energy – much like plants back on Earth – for life support systems for long-term space travel. The technology could provide ample oxygen production and carbon dioxide recycling on both Moon and Mars.”

    Associate Professor Sophia Haussener, at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, added: “In this study, we finally quantify the potential of such devices for extra-terrestrial use and provide initial design guidelines for their potential implementation.”

    The research project was funded by the European Space Agency via the Open Space Innovation Platform – https://ideas.esa.int.

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    University of Warwick

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  • Secondary supermassive black hole found in binary system

    Secondary supermassive black hole found in binary system

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    Newswise — Supermassive black holes that weigh several billion times the mass of our Sun are present at the centres of active galaxies. Astronomers observe them as bright galactic cores where the galaxy’s supermassive black hole devours matter from a violent whirlpool called accretion disk. Some of the matter is squeezed out into a powerful jet. This process makes the galactic core shine brightly across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

    In a recent study, astronomers found evidence of two supermassive black holes circling each other through signals coming from the jets associated with the accretion of matter into both black holes. The galaxy, or a quasar as it is technically called, is named OJ287 and it is most thoroughly studied and best understood as a binary black hole system. In the sky, the black holes are so close together that they merge into one dot. The fact that the dot actually consists of two black holes becomes apparent by detecting that it emits two different types of signals.

    The active galaxy OJ 287 lies in the direction of the constellation Cancer at a distance of about 5 billion light years and has been observed by astronomers since 1888. Already more than 40 years ago, astronomer from University of Turku Aimo Sillanpää and his associates noticed that there is a prominent pattern in its emission which has two cycles, one of about 12 years and the longer of about 55 years. They suggested that the two cycles result from the orbital motion of two black holes around each other. The shorter cycle is the orbital cycle and the longer one results from a slow evolution of the orientation of the orbit.

    The orbital motion is revealed by a series of flares which arise when the secondary black hole plunges regularly through the accretion disk of the primary black hole at speeds that are a fraction slower than the speed of light. This plunging of the secondary black hole heats the disk material and the hot gas is released as expanding bubbles. These hot bubbles take months to cool while they radiate and cause a flash of light – a flare – that lasts roughly a fortnight and is brighter than a trillion stars.

    After decades of efforts at estimating the timing of the secondary black hole’s plunge through the accretion disk, astronomers from the University of Turku in Finland led by Mauri Valtonen and his collaborator Achamveedu Gopakumar from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Mumbai, India, and others were able to model the orbit and to predict accurately when these flares would occur.

    Successful observational campaigns in 1983, 1994, 1995, 2005, 2007, 2015 and 2019 allowed the team to observe the predicted flares and to confirm the presence of a supermassive black hole pair in OJ 287.

    “The total number of predicted flares now number 26, and nearly all of them have been observed. The bigger black hole in this pair weighs more than 18 billion times the mass of our Sun while the companion is roughly 100 times lighter and their orbit is oblong, not circular,” Professor Achamveedu Gopakumar says.

    In spite of these efforts, astronomers had not been able to observe a direct signal from the smaller black hole. Before 2021, its existence had been deduced only indirectly from the flares and from the way it makes the jet of the bigger black hole wobble.

    “The two black holes are so close to each other in the sky that one cannot see them separately, they merge to a single point in our telescopes. Only if we see clearly separate signals from each black hole can we say that we have actually “seen” them both,” says the lead author, Professor Mauri Valtonen.

    Smaller black hole directly observed for the first time

    Excitingly, the observational campaigns in 2021/2022 on OJ 287 using a large number of telescopes of various types allowed researchers to obtain observations of the secondary black hole plunging through the accretion disk for the first time, and the signals arising from the smaller black hole itself.

    “The period in 2021/2022 had a special significance in the study of OJ287. Earlier, it had been predicted that during this period the secondary black hole will plunge through the accretion disk of its more massive companion. This plunging was expected to produce a very blue flash right after the impact, and it was indeed observed, within days of the predicted time, by Martin Jelinek and associates at the Czech Technical University and Astronomical Institute of Czechia,” says Professor Mauri Valtonen.

    However, there were two big surprises – new types of flares which had not been detected before. The first of them was seen only by a detailed observation campaign by Staszek Zola from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Poland, and for a good reason. Zola and his team observed a big flare, producing 100 times more light than an entire galaxy, and it lasted only one day.

    “According to the estimates, the flare occurred shortly after the smaller black hole had received a massive dose of new gas to swallow during its plunge. It is the swallowing process that leads to the sudden brightening of OJ287. It is thought that this process has empowered the jet which shoots out from the smaller black hole of OJ 287. An event like this was predicted ten years ago, but has not been confirmed until now,” Valtonen explains.

    The second unexpected signal came from gamma rays and it was observed by NASA’s Fermi telescope. The biggest gamma ray flare in OJ287 for six years happened just when the smaller black hole plunged through the gas disk of the primary black hole. The jet of the smaller black hole interacts with the disk gas, and this interaction leads to the production of gamma rays. To confirm this idea, the researchers verified that a similar gamma ray flare had already taken place in 2013 when the small black hole fell through the gas disk last time, seen from the same viewing direction.

    “So what about the one-day burst, why have we not seen it before? OJ287 has been recorded in photographs since 1888 and has been intensively followed since 1970. It turns out that we have simply just had bad luck. Nobody observed OJ287 exactly on those nights when it did its one-night stunt. And without the intense monitoring by Zola’s group, we would have missed it this time as well,” Valtonen states.

    These efforts make OJ 287 the best candidate for a supermassive black hole pair that is sending gravitational waves in nano-hertz frequencies. Further, OJ 287 is being routinely monitored by both the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA) consortia to probe for additional evidence for the presence of supermassive black hole pair at its centre and, in particular, to try to get the radio image of the secondary jet.

    The instruments that were part of the 2021-2022 campaign include NASA’s Fermi gamma ray telescope and the Swift ultraviolet to x-ray telescope, optical wavelength observations by astronomers in Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, India, China, Great Britain and USA, and radio frequency observations of OJ287 at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.

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    University of Turku (Turun yliopisto)

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  • Everything Evaporates, Including Black Holes

    Everything Evaporates, Including Black Holes

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    Newswise — Recent theoretical research conducted by Michael Wondrak, Walter van Suijlekom, and Heino Falcke from Radboud University has confirmed Stephen Hawking’s assertion regarding black holes, albeit with some nuances. The study reveals that black holes do undergo evaporation over time due to Hawking radiation, but it challenges the previously held belief that the event horizon is the decisive factor. Gravity and the curvature of spacetime also contribute to this radiation. Consequently, all substantial entities in the cosmos, such as stellar remnants, will eventually experience evaporation.

    Stephen Hawking utilized a brilliant fusion of quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity to present his argument that the event horizon, the boundary beyond which gravitational forces prevent escape from a black hole, is a site where the spontaneous formation and annihilation of particle pairs takes place. These pairs, consisting of a particle and its antiparticle, briefly emerge from the quantum field before annihilating each other. However, occasionally, one of the particles plunges into the black hole while the other manages to escape. This phenomenon, known as Hawking radiation, would eventually lead to the gradual evaporation of black holes, as postulated by Hawking.

    Spiral

    In this recent research conducted at Radboud University, scientists delved into the process described above and reexamined the significance of the event horizon. Employing a combination of methodologies from physics, astronomy, and mathematics, they explored the consequences of particle pairs being generated in the vicinity of black holes. The study unveiled a remarkable finding: particles can be created at distances well beyond the traditional notion of the event horizon. Michael Wondrak, one of the researchers involved, remarked, “Our findings demonstrate the existence of a previously unrecognized form of radiation alongside the well-known Hawking radiation.”

    Everything evaporates

    Van Suijlekom elaborates on the research findings, stating, “We have revealed that the curvature of spacetime significantly contributes to the generation of radiation, even at far distances from a black hole. The tidal forces of the gravitational field already cause separation between the particles in those regions.” The previous belief that radiation could only occur within the confines of the event horizon has been challenged by this study, demonstrating that the presence of the event horizon is not a prerequisite for radiation to occur.

    Falcke emphasizes the implications of the study, stating, “Consequently, entities in the universe lacking an event horizon, such as remnants of deceased stars and other sizable objects, exhibit this radiation phenomenon as well. Over an extensive timeframe, this process would lead to the eventual evaporation of everything in the universe, akin to black holes. This revelation not only alters our comprehension of Hawking radiation but also reshapes our perspective on the universe and its future.”

     The study was published on 2 June in the leading journal “Physical Review Letters” of the American Physical Society (APS).  Michael Wondrak is excellence fellow at Radboud University and an expert in quantum field theory. Walter van Suijlekom is a Professor of Mathematics at Radboud University and works on the mathematical formulation of physics problems. Heino Falcke is an award-winning Professor of Radio Astronomy and Astroparticle Physics at Radboud University and known for his work on predicting and making the first picture of a black hole.

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    Radboud University Nijmegen

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  • North Korea says satellite launch fails, plans to try again | CNN

    North Korea says satellite launch fails, plans to try again | CNN

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    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    North Korea’s attempt to put a military reconnaissance satellite in space failed Wednesday when the second stage of the rocket malfunctioned, state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said, adding that Pyongyang planned to carry out a second launch as soon as possible.

    “The new satellite vehicle rocket, Chollima-1, crashed into the West Sea ​​as it lost propulsion due to an abnormal startup of the engine on the 2nd stage after the 1st stage was separated during normal flight,” KCNA said.

    The report said “the reliability and stability of the new engine system” was “low” and the fuel used “unstable,” leading to the mission’s failure.

    North Korea’s National Space Development Agency said it would investigate the failure “urgently” and carry out another launch after new testing, KCNA reported.

    The South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said it identified an object presumed to be part of what North Korea claims to be its space launch vehicle in the sea about 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Eocheong Island at around 8:05 a.m. and is in the process of obtaining it.

    Earlier, South Korea’s military said Pyongyang fired a “space projectile,” triggering emergency alerts in Seoul and Japan, weeks after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered officials to prepare to launch the country’s first military reconnaissance satellite.

    Both countries later canceled those alerts when it became clear there was no danger to civilian areas from the North Korean launch.

    Analysts said Wednesday morning’s events illustrated problems for both North and South Korea, for Pyongyang in its space program and for Seoul in its public alert process.

    “North Korean space efforts have consistently failed, indicating that whereas its military ballistic capabilities are being developed, its space launch capabilities are not proceeding at the same pace of development,” said Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at The Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

    South Korea identified what it believes to be a part of a fallen North Korean space vehicle

    “That is curious because space launch capabilities and ballistic missile systems are essentially similar technologies in many respects, and North Korean testing of ballistic missile systems have been more successful,” Davis said.

    North Korea has performed dozens of ballistic missile tests over the past two years, which analysts have said have shown a maturation in the program.

    The test of a new solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in April showed that Pyongyang could launch the missiles more quickly in the event of any nuclear confrontation, analysts said.

    The North Korean launch sparked air raid sirens around Seoul about 6:30 a.m., causing confusion among residents who are used to pre-announced tests of the warning system in the middle of the day.

    The sirens were followed by a text sent to cell phones, telling people to prepare to seek shelter.

    The alert was canceled about 20 minutes after it was issued.

    Who implemented the alert remains uncertain. The Interior Ministry said it was issued by the Seoul city government in error.

    Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon apologized to the citizens for “causing confusion” over sending a citywide alert, adding that efforts will be made to refine the system to avoid similar situations.

    Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said any criticism of government leaders for the alert may be unwarranted.

    “The government would receive more criticism if it did not make every effort for public safety,” Easley said.

    In fact, he said the alert could help shake South Korean residents from complacency about the dangers posed by Pyongyang’s missile programs.

    “The Yoon administration will likely promise improvements to the alert system but may also expect that greater awareness of the North Korean threat will increase support for the government’s military deterrence policies,” Easley said.

    Both the South Korean and Japanese governments condemned the North Korean launch as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

    “Whether it was a success or not (it was) a serious provocation that threatens peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and the international community,” according to a statement from Yoon’s office.

    In Japan, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Tokyo “vehemently protested” to North Korea. He promised continued “vigilance and surveillance” from the Japanese government.

    Japan’s Defense Ministry had warned on Monday it would destroy any North Korean missile that entered its territory after Pyongyang notified the country of plans to launch a “satellite.”

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  • Researchers create high-temp, extreme environment sensors

    Researchers create high-temp, extreme environment sensors

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    Newswise — Extreme environments in several critical industries – aerospace, energy, transportation and defense – require sensors to measure and monitor numerous factors under harsh conditions to ensure human safety and integrity of mechanical systems.

    In the petrochemical industry, for example, pipeline pressures must be monitored at climates ranging from hot desert heat to near arctic cold. Various nuclear reactors operate at a range of 300-1000 degrees Celsius, while deep geothermal wells hold temperatures up to 600 degrees Celsius.

    Now a team of University of Houston researchers has developed a new sensor that was proven to work in temperatures as high as 900 degrees Celsius or 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the temperature mafic volcanic lava, the hottest type of lava on Earth, erupts.

    “Highly sensitive, reliable and durable sensors that can tolerate such extreme environments are necessary for the efficiency, maintenance and integrity of these applications,” said Jae-Hyun Ryou, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UH and corresponding author of a study published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

    The article, which was featured on the cover of the journal, is titled “Piezoelectric Sensors Operating at Very High Temperatures and in Extreme Environments Made of Flexible Ultrawide-Bandgap Single-Crystalline AlN Thin Films.”

    Making It Work

    The UH research team previously developed III-N piezoelectric pressure sensor using single-crystalline Gallium Nitride, or GaN thin films for harsh-environment applications. However, the sensitivity of the sensor decreases at temperatures higher than 350 degrees Celsius, which is higher than those of conventional transducers made of lead zirconate titanate (PZT), but only marginally.

    The team believed the decrease in sensitivity was due to the bandgap – the minimum energy required to excite an electron and supply electrical conductivity – not being wide enough. To test the hypothesis, they developed a sensor with aluminum nitride or AlN.

    “The hypothesis was proven by the sensor operating at about 1000 degrees Celsius, which is the highest operation temperature among the piezoelectric sensors,” said Nam-In Kim, first author of the article and a post-doctoral student working with the Ryou group.

    While both AlN and GaN have unique and excellent properties that are suitable for use in sensors for extreme environments, the researchers were excited to find that AlN offered a wider bandgap and an even higher temperature range. However, the team had to deal with technical challenges involving the synthesis and fabrication of the high-quality, flexible thin film AlN.

    “I have always been interested in making devices using different materials, and I love to characterize various materials. Working in the Ryou group, especially on piezoelectric devices and III-N materials, I was able to use the knowledge I learned in my studies,” said Kim, who earned his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from UH in 2022. His award-winning dissertation was on flexible piezoelectric sensors for personal health care and extreme environments.

    “It was very interesting to see the process leading to the actual results and we solved the technical challenges during the development and demonstration of the sensor,” he added.

    What’s Next?

    Now that the researchers have successfully demonstrated the potential of the high-temperature piezoelectric sensors with AlN, they will test it further in real-world harsh conditions.

    “Our plan is to use the sensor in several harsh scenarios. For example, in nuclear plants for neutron exposure and hydrogen storage to test under high pressure,” Ryou said. “AlN sensors can operate in neutron-exposed atmospheres and at very high-pressure ranges thanks to its stable material properties.”

    The flexibility of the sensor offers additional advantages that will make it useful for future applications in the form of wearable sensors in personal health care monitoring products and for use in precise-sensing soft robotics.

    The researchers look forward to their sensor being commercially viable at some point in the future. “It’s hard to put a specific date on when that might be, but I think it’s our job as engineers to make it happen as soon as possible,” Kim said.

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    University of Houston

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  • Terrestrial World Outside Solar System Discovered, Covered in Volcanoes

    Terrestrial World Outside Solar System Discovered, Covered in Volcanoes

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    Newswise — A large international team led by astronomers at the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal (UdeM) today announced in the journal Nature the discovery of a new temperate world around a nearby small star.

    This planet, named LP 791-18 d, has a radius and a mass consistent with those of Earth. Observations of this exoplanet and another one in the same system indicate that LP 791-18 d is likely covered with volcanoes similar to Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in our Solar System.

    “The discovery of this exoplanet is an extraordinary find,“ said Professor Björn Benneke from UdeM’s Department of Physics. “The similarity in the properties of LP 791-18 d and Earth as well as the prospect of detectable geological activity and volcanism on it make it a key object to better understand how terrestrial worlds form and evolve.”

    Thanks to the very small size of the star – which is only slightly bigger than planet Jupiter – it should be possible to detect the atmosphere of this exoplanet, if it has one, using the James Webb Space Telescope. 

    A new terrestrial world in a multi-planetary system

    The planet discovery was led by Merrin Peterson, a graduate student in Benneke’s team at the Trottier Institute. It was found and studied using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), as well as a suite of ground-based observatories all over the world.

    LP 791-18 d orbits a small red dwarf star about 86 light-years away in the southern constellation Crater. The Spitzer Telescope saw the star’s infrared light dim slightly when the planet passed in front of its disc a phenomenon called a transit. The observations of the system in October 2019 were among the last Spitzer collected before it was decommissioned.

    Benneke’s team used the data to determine that the planet is virtually the same size as Earth. With an orbital period of only 2.8 days, the exoplanet LP 791-18 d is located very close to its host star. However, the star is much smaller and less bright than our Sun. The temperature on LP-791-18 d is thus only slightly higher than on Earth.

    Astronomers have known about two other worlds in this system, planets LP 791-18 b and c, since 2019, when they were detected by the TESS satellite. Planet b is about 20% bigger than Earth and circles its star in a little less than a day, while Planet c is about 2.5 times Earth’s size and has a period of about 5 days. The newly found exoplanet d is thus the smallest in the family and orbits between planets b and c at an intermediate distance from the star. 

    Intense volcanic activity

    By precisely tracking the movement of the planet, the team realised that planets c and d pass very close to each other as they trace their orbits. At their closest, they are only 1.5 million kilometres apart, which is 33 times closer than Mars and Earth ever get to each other. Each close passage between the planets produces a gravitational tug on planet d, making its orbit less circular and more elliptical. Along this elliptical path, planet d is slightly deformed every time it goes around the star. The astronomers computed that this deformation produces a lot of heat in the interior of the planet that needs to be transported to the surface via intense volcanic activity. Due to this phenomenon called tidal heating, LP 791-18 d is likely carpeted with volcanoes.

    “The significant friction generated by tidal heating in the planet is responsible for heating its interior to a considerable extent, ultimately enabling the existence of a subsurface magma ocean,” explained Caroline Piaulet, an UdeM Ph.D. student who was involved in the discovery. “In our Solar System, we know that Jupiter’s moon Io is affected by Jupiter and its other moons in a similar way, and that world is the most volcanic we know.”

    Planet d sits on the inner edge of the temperate (or “habitable”) zone, the traditional range of distances from a star where scientists hypothesise liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. If the planet is as geologically active as UdeM’s team suspects, it could maintain an atmosphere. Given the right conditions, temperatures could even drop low enough on the planet’s night side for water to condense on the surface.

    Measuring the masses of the planets

    The proximity of Planets c and d also helped scientists measure their masses. When approached by Benneke with this discovery, many members of the TESS Follow-up Observing Program turned their ground-based telescopes to the LP 791-18 system, allowing them to collect observations of 67 transits from Planets c and d. 

    In these data, the team at UdeM was able to detect transit timing variations, which are slight differences in the exact times of the planets’ transits caused by the gravitational tug they exert on each other. 

    “This technique allowed us to estimate the masses of Planets c and d using only the transit data,” Piaulet explained. “By combining this information with the size of the planets – an information readily available from the same data – we can estimate the density of the planets and thus get an idea of their composition and nature.”

    Comparing these values with planet interior models, astronomers were thus able to determine that the newly-found planet has a mass comparable to that of Earth. Its density is thus also consistent with a rocky composition like Earth. Planet c, which has a mass of about 7 times that of Earth’s, has probably retained a significant amount of gas or lighter materials, akin to Neptune’s composition.

    ‘Crucial to analyse the atmosphere’

    Planet c, the largest of the system, has already been approved for observing time on the Webb Telescope, as part of the Canadian NEAT program, dedicated to the study of exoplanets. Pierre-Alexis Roy, another Ph.D. student on Benneke’s team at UdeM, will be in charge of analysing these observations. “Having a precise constraint on the mass of Planet c will be crucial to analyse the substantial atmosphere we’re expecting to find on this mini-Neptune”, he explains. 

    In the future, the small size of the star may even allow the detection of a much less extended atmosphere on the newly found planet d. Scientists expect that an atmosphere like that of the Earth, Venus, or Saturn’s moon Titan could exist on Planet d. This system represents an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about small rocky planets, much like the TRAPPIST-1 system, which hosts seven Earth-sized planets, and is already being closely scrutinized by Webb.It is thus a prime target for Webb in the next few years that represents a similar opportunity to the TRAPPIST-1 system, which hosts seven Earth-sized planets. 

    “This system provides astronomers with a precious laboratory for testing various hypotheses related to the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets,” said Benneke. “The newly found planet d, an Earth-size world likely covered in volcanoes in a multiplanetary system, provides unprecedented opportunities to advance not only astronomy but many other fields of science, notably geology, planetary sciences, atmospheric sciences, and possibly astrobiology.”

    About this study

    “A temperate Earth-sized planet with tidally-heated interior transiting an M6 star” by Merrin Peterson et al., was published on May 17, 2023, in Nature.

    In addition to Merrin Peterson, Björn Benneke, Caroline Piaulet, and Pierre-Alexis Roy, members of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal, the team also includes Jonathan Gagné, an UdeM adjunct professor and scientific ddvisor at the Space for Life Montreal Planetarium and member of iREx; Mohamad Ali-Dib, a former Trottier postdoctoral fellow at iREx, now at NYU Abu Dhabi; Ryan Cloutier, a former iREx graduate student and now assistant professor at McMaster University; Lauren Weiss, a former Trottier postdoctoral fellow at iREx who is now assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame; as well as 66 other co-authors from the United States, France, Spain, Belgium, Japan and Morocco.  

    Source

    NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets – Université de Montréal

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    University of Montreal

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  • Mae Jemison to speak at University of Delaware commencement

    Mae Jemison to speak at University of Delaware commencement

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    Newswise — Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space, will share her insights and perspective at the University of Delaware’s 2023 Commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 27, UD President Dennis Assanis announced earlier this month.

    “We are delighted to host Dr. Jemison to deliver this year’s Commencement address to our graduates and their families and friends,” Assanis said. “Her accomplished career has been one of commitment and impact, as a scientist, as a physician, as an engineer and as an educator. She is an exemplar of someone dedicated to exploring endless possibilities and infinite frontiers—always finding meaningful ways to make a difference in the world. This commitment is one we strive to instill in our graduates.”

    The Commencement ceremony, scheduled at 9:30 a.m., May 27, in Delaware Stadium on the University’s Newark campus, is a ticketed event, open only to graduating students and up to four guests. Some 4,000 graduates are expected to attend, with approximately 16,000 family and friends. The ceremony also will be livestreamed.

    About Mae Jemison

    Dr. Mae C. Jemison leads 100 Year Starship (100YSS), a bold, far reaching nonprofit initiative to assure the capabilities exist for human travel beyond our solar system to another star within the next 100 years.  Jemison is building a multi-faceted global community to foster the cultural, scientific, social and technical commitment, support and financial framework to accomplish the 100YSS vision — An Inclusive, Audacious Journey (that) Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond.  100YSS programs include: Annual public conference NEXUS- Pathway to the Stars: Footprints on Earth; the Canopus Awards for Excellence in Interstellar Writing; the 100YSS Crucibles-Invitation only, transdisciplinary workshops to generate new disciplines to disrupt technological and systemic hurdles; and 100YSS True Books to engage elementary students.  The 100YSS Way Research Institute seeks to generate the radical leaps that accelerate knowledge, technology, design, and thinking not just for space travel, but to enhance life on Earth.  Jemison led the team that won the competitive, single awardee seed funding grant in February 2012 from premiere research agency DARPA.

    Jemison, the first woman of color in the world to go into space, served six years as a NASA astronaut.  Aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS-47 Spacelab J mission in September 1992, she performed experiments in material science, life sciences and human adaptation to weightlessness.

    Jemison started The Jemison Group, Inc. (JG), a technology consulting firm integrating critical socio-cultural issues into the design of engineering and science projects, such as satellite technology for health care delivery and solar dish Stirling engine electricity in developing countries. JG researches and develops stand-alone science and technology companies.  BioSentient Corporation, a medical devices and services company focused on improving health and human performance is such a company.  An environmental studies professor at Dartmouth College, Jemison worked on sustainable development and technology design particularly for the developing world.  Before joining NASA she was the Area Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia and a general practice physician in Los Angeles.

    In 1994 Jemison founded the international science camp The Earth We Share™ (TEWS) for 12-16 year old students from around the world, a program of the nonprofit Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence (DJF).  From 2011 to 2014, DJF held TEWS-Space Race in collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District training hundreds of middle school teachers in experiential science education and over thousands of middle school students.  Other foundation programs include Reality Leads Fantasy-Celebrating Women of Color in Flight that highlighted women in aviation and space from around the world.  EXPO Inspire is a hands-on public STEM fair.  LOOK UP™ announced in September 2017 an international movement to galvanize people worldwide, on a single day, to acknowledge that we are Earthlings.

    Jemison was Bayer Corporation USA’s national science literacy ambassador. She is one of the series hosts for National Geographic’s “One Strange Rock” and space operations advisor for its global miniseries MARS.

    Jemison is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and is on the boards of directors of Kimberly–Clark, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and the Texas Medical Center.  She was the Founding Chair of the Texas state Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board, chair the Texas State Biotechnology and Life Sciences Industry Cluster, chair of the Greater Houston Partnership Disaster Planning and Recovery Task Force, and served on the board of Scholastic, Inc. and Valspar Corporation.  Jemison is a inductee of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the National Medical Association Hall of Fame and Texas Science Hall of Fame, International Space Hall of Fame as well as a recipient of the National Organization for Women’s Intrepid Award, The Kilby Science Award and National Association of Corporate Directors’ Directorship 100 most influential people in the boardroom in 2014, Honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and the New York Academy of Sciences, among many honors. She was a featured panelist on the CNBC special “The Business of Science” (9/2011) and was one of the teachers on “The Dream School.”  Jemison is an author including Find Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life True Books series on space exploration.  She was the first real astronaut to appear on the Star Trek TV series and is a Lego figurine in the Lego Women of NASA kit.

    For more information about UD’s Commencement ceremony, visit www.udel.edu/commencement.

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    University of Delaware

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  • Tidal shocks from black hole can illuminate shredded star remnants

    Tidal shocks from black hole can illuminate shredded star remnants

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    Newswise — A new study sheds light on the bright outbursts of radiation that are created when a star is destroyed by a supermassive black hole. The outbursts do not necessarily form in the close vicinity of the black hole, but are created by tidal shocks that occur when gas from the destroyed star hits itself while circling the black hole.

    The Universe is a violent place where even the life of a star can be cut short. This occurs when a star finds itself in a “bad” neighbourhood, specifically near a supermassive black hole.

    These black holes weigh millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun and typically reside in the centres of quiet galaxies. As a star moves closer to the black hole, it experiences the ever-increasing gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole until it becomes more powerful than the forces that keep the star together. This results in the star being disrupted or destroyed, an event known as a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE).

    “After the star has been ripped apart, its gas forms an accretion disk around the black hole. The bright outbursts from the disk can be observed in nearly every wavelength, especially with optical telescopes and satellites that detect X-rays,” says Postdoctoral Researcher Yannis Liodakis from the University of Turku and the Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO (FINCA).

    Until recently, researchers knew only of a few TDEs, as there were not many experiments capable of detecting them. In recent years, however, scientists have developed the necessary tools to observe more TDEs. Interestingly, but perhaps not too surprisingly, these observations have led to new mysteries that the researchers are currently studying.

    “Observations from large-scale experiments with optical telescopes have revealed that a large number of TDEs do not produce X-rays even though the bursts of visible light can be clearly detected. This discovery contradicts our basic understanding of the evolution of the disrupted stellar matter in TDEs,” Liodakis notes.

    A study published in the journal Science by an international team of astronomers led by the Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO suggests that the polarised light coming from TDEs might hold the key to solving this mystery.

    Instead of the formation of an X-ray bright accretion disk around the black hole, the observed outburst in the optical and ultraviolet light detected in many TDEs can arise from tidal shocks. These shocks form far away from the black hole as the gas from the destroyed star hits itself on its way back after circling the black hole. The X-ray bright accretion disk would form much later in these events.

    “Polarisation of light can provide unique information about the underlying processes in astrophysical systems. The polarised light we measured from the TDE could only be explained by these tidal shocks,” says Liodakis, who is the lead author of the study.

    Polarised light helped researchers to understand the destruction of stars

    The team received a public alert in late 2020 from the Gaia satellite of a nuclear transient event in a nearby galaxy designated as AT 2020mot. The researchers then observed AT 2020mot in a wide range of wavelengths including optical polarisation and spectroscopy observations conducted at the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), which is owned by the University of Turku. The observations conducted at the NOT were particularly instrumental in making this discovery possible. In addition, the polarisation observations were done as part of the observational astronomy course for high school students.

    “The Nordic Optical Telescope and the polarimeter we use in the study have been instrumental in our efforts to understand supermassive black holes and their environments,” says Doctoral Researcher Jenni Jormanainen from FINCA and the University of Turku who led the polarisation observations and analysis with the NOT.

    The researchers found that the optical light coming from AT 2020mot was highly polarised and was varying with time. Despite several attempts, none of the radio or X-ray telescopes were able to detect radiation from the event before, during, or even months after the peak of the outburst.

    “When we saw how polarised AT2020mot was, we immediately thought of a jet shooting out from the black hole, as we often observe around supermassive black holes that accrete the surrounding gas. However, no jet was there to be found,” says Elina Lindfors, an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Turku and FINCA.

    The team of astronomers realised that the data most closely matched a scenario where the stream of stellar gas collides with itself and forms shocks near the pericenter and apocenter of its orbit around the black hole. The shocks then amplify and order the magnetic field in the stellar stream which will naturally lead to highly polarised light. The level of the optical polarisation was too high to be explained by most models, and the fact that it was changing over time made it even harder.

    “All models we looked at could not explain the observations, except the tidal shock model,” notes Karri Koljonen, who was an astronomer at FINCA at the time of the observations and is now working at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

    The researchers will continue to observe the polarised light coming from TDEs and may soon discover more about what happens after a star is disrupted.

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  • Mysterious rumblings were recorded in Earth’s stratosphere | CNN

    Mysterious rumblings were recorded in Earth’s stratosphere | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Giant solar balloons were sent 70,000 feet up in the air to record sounds of Earth’s stratosphere — and the microphones picked up some unexpected sounds.

    The stratosphere is the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, and its lower level contains the ozone layer that absorbs and scatters the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, according to NASA. The thin, dry air of the stratosphere is where jet aircraft and weather balloons reach their maximum altitude, and the relatively calm atmospheric layer is rarely disturbed by turbulence.

    Daniel Bowman, principal scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, was inspired in graduate school to explore the soundscape of the stratosphere after being introduced to the low-frequency sounds that are generated by volcanoes. Known as infrasound, the phenomenon is inaudible to the human ear.

    Bowman and his friends had previously flown cameras on weather balloons “to take pictures of the black sky above and the Earth far below” and successfully built their own solar balloon.

    He proposed attaching infrasound recorders to balloons to record the sounds of volcanoes. But then he and his adviser Jonathan Lees of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “realized that no one had tried to put microphones on stratospheric balloons for half a century, so we pivoted to exploring what this new platform could do,” Bowman said. Lees is a professor of Earth, marine and environmental sciences who researches seismology and volcanology.

    The balloons can take sensors twice as high as commercial jets can fly.

    “On our solar balloons, we have recorded surface and buried chemical explosions, thunder, ocean waves colliding, propeller aircraft, city sounds, suborbital rocket launches, earthquakes, and maybe even freight trains and jet aircraft,” Bowman said via email. “We’ve also recorded sounds whose origin is unclear.”

    The findings were shared Thursday at the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Chicago.

    A recording shared by Bowman from a NASA balloon that circled Antarctica contains infrasound of colliding ocean waves, which sounds like continual sighing. But other crackles and rustling have unknown origins.

    Listen to the sounds of the stratosphere

    Solar balloons captured a multitude of sounds in the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, including colliding ocean waves — as well as sounds with unidentified origins.

    Source: Daniel Bowman/Sandia National Laboratories

    In the stratosphere, “there are mysterious infrasound signals that occur a few times per hour on some flights, but the source of these is completely unknown,” Bowman said.

    Bowman and his collaborators have conducted research using NASA balloons and other flight providers, but they decided to build their own balloons, each spanning about 19.7 to 23 feet (6 to 7 meters) across.

    The supplies can be found at hardware and pyrotechnic supply stores, and the balloons can be assembled on a basketball court.

    “Each balloon is made of painter’s plastic, shipping tape, and charcoal dust,” Bowman said via email. “They cost about $50 to make and a team of two can build one in about 3.5 hours. One simply brings it out to a field on a sunny day and fills it up with air, and it will carry a pound of payload to about 70,000 ft.”

    The charcoal dust is used inside the balloons to darken them, and when the sun shines on the dark balloons, the air inside them warms up and becomes buoyant. The inexpensive and easy DIY design means the researchers can release multiple balloons to collect as much data as possible.

    “Really, a group of high schoolers with access to the school gym could build a solar balloon, and there’s even a cellphone app called RedVox that can record infrasound,” Bowman said.

    Bowman estimated that he launched several dozen solar balloons to collect infrasound recordings between 2016 and April of this year. Microbarometers, originally designed to monitor volcanoes, were attached to the balloons to record low-frequency sounds.

    The researchers tracked their balloons using GPS, since they can travel for hundreds of miles and land in inconvenient locations.

    The longest flight so far was 44 days aboard a NASA helium balloon, which recorded 19 days worth of data before the batteries on the microphone died. Meanwhile, solar balloon flights tend to last about 14 hours during the summer and land once the sun sets.

    The advantage of the high altitude reached by the balloons means that noise levels are lower and the detection range is increased — and the whole Earth is accessible. But the balloons also present challenges for researchers. The stratosphere is a harsh environment with wild temperature fluctuations between heat and cold.

    “Solar balloons are a bit sluggish, and we’ve wrecked a few on bushes when trying to launch them,” Bowman said. “We’ve had to hike down into canyons and across mountains to get our payloads. Once, our Oklahoma State colleagues actually had a balloon land in a field, spend the night, and launch itself back in the air to fly another whole day!”

    Lessons learned from multiple balloon flights have somewhat eased the process, but now the greatest challenge for researchers is identifying the signals recorded during the flights.

    “There are many flights with signals whose origin we do not understand,” Bowman said. “They are almost certainly mundane, maybe a patch of turbulence, a distant severe storm, or some sort of human object like a freight train — but it’s hard to tell what is going on sometimes due to the lack of data up there.”

    Sarah Albert, a geophysicist at Sandia National Laboratories, has investigated a “sound channel” — a conduit that carries sounds across great distances through the atmosphere — located at the altitudes Bowman studies. Her recordings have captured rocket launches and other unidentified rumblings.

    Sandia National Laboratories geophysicists (from left) Daniel Bowman and Sarah Albert display an infrasound sensor and the box used to protect the sensors from extreme temperatures.

    “It may be that sound gets trapped in the channel and echoes around until it’s completely garbled,” Bowman said. “But whether it is near and fairly quiet (like a patch of turbulence) or distant and loud (like a faraway storm) is not clear yet.”

    Bowman and Albert will continue to investigate the aerial sound channel and try to determine where the stratosphere’s rumbles are originating — and why some flights record them while others don’t.

    Bowman is eager to understand the soundscape of the stratosphere and unlock key features, like variability across seasons and locations.

    It’s possible that helium-filled versions of these balloons could one day be used to explore other planets like Venus, carrying scientific instruments above or within the planet’s clouds for a few days as a test flight for larger, more complex missions.

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  • Hundreds of rockets fired at Israel amid deadly IDF airstrikes in Gaza | CNN

    Hundreds of rockets fired at Israel amid deadly IDF airstrikes in Gaza | CNN

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    Gaza and Jerusalem
    CNN
     — 

    Israel’s army and Palestinian militants exchanged heavy cross-border fire on Wednesday, with hundreds of rockets launched from Gaza towards Israel after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out deadly strikes on what it says are Islamic Jihad organization targets along the strip.

    The latest violence came after Israeli military airstrikes earlier in the week killed three leaders of the Palestinian militant group and 10 other Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza and led to threats of retaliation.

    In a new update early Thursday, the IDF said it had targeted another Islamic Jihad commander who was a “central figure” in the Palestinian militant group.

    “We just targeted Ali Ghali, the commander of Islamic Jihad’s Rocket Launching Force, as well as two other Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza,” the IDF said in a tweet, adding that Ghali was “responsible for the recent rocket barrages launched against Israel.”

    Israel has been bombarding the Islamic Jihad’s operatives and infrastructure, using unmanned drones for surveillance as it monitors militant preparations to propel rockets, IDF chief spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Wednesday.

    At least six Palestinians were killed in Wednesday’s airstrikes, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said, revising down its earlier count.

    Hamas, the Palestinian militant movement that runs Gaza, issued a statement Wednesday strongly suggesting that its forces were releasing rockets towards Israel, shortly after the IDF said firmly it believed Hamas was not doing so.

    “The Palestinian resistance with all its factions, led by the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, is participating now in a unified manner by teaching the enemy a lesson that it will not forget and confirming that Palestinian blood is not cheap,” said the statement, issued by Muhammad al-Buraim, an official in the joint resistance committees in Palestine.

    The statement appeared designed to reject an assertion by IDF chief spokesman Hagari that the IDF saw only Islamic Jihad, not Hamas, firing rockets.

    Nearly 500 rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel in the recent barrage, according to the IDF, as of 9:30 p.m. local time. Of those, 153 were intercepted by Israeli missile defenses and 107 fell short, landing in Gaza.

    The IDF said fighter jets and helicopters targeted over 40 rocket and mortar shells launchers belonging to Islamic Jihad terrorist across the Gaza Strip, adding that it is continuing to target launchers and additional posts belonging to the militant organization.

    Civilians in Israel have been asked to act according to the special instructions posted on the National Emergency Portal.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials Wednesday downplayed the idea that a ceasefire with Islamic Jihad was imminent, with Netanyahu saying: “The campaign is not over yet.”

    National Security Council chair Tzachi Hanegbi said that rumors of a ceasefire were “premature,” while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant struck a slightly more optimistic note, saying: “I hope we’ll bring it to an end soon, but we’re ready for the option that it will be prolonged.”

    Over half a million Israelis were in or near shelters, the IDF spokesman Hagari said just after 2 p.m. local time (7 a.m. ET) on Wednesday.

    Medics transport a victim to Shifa Hospital following the deadly Israeli airstrikes launched into Gaza on Tuesday.

    International leaders have condemned the hostilities. The United Nations Secretary-General urged all parties to exercise “maximum restraint” over the escalation of violence in Gaza, a statement by Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the Secretary-General, said on Wednesday.

    “The Secretary General condemns the civilian loss of life, including that of children and women, which he views as unacceptable and must stop immediately,” the statement said.

    “Israel must abide by its obligations under international humanitarian law, including the proportional use of force and taking all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects in the conduct of military operations. “

    The statement continued to say the Secretary-General also condemns the “indiscriminate launch” of rockets from Gaza into Israel, adding it “violates international humanitarian law and puts at risk both Palestinian and Israeli civilians.”

    Qatar has been engaged in “intensive and continuous calls” to stop Israel’s “brutal aggression” on the Gaza Strip to avoid “more losses,” the spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Majed Al-Ansari said in a statement on Wednesday.

    Meanwhile, Egyptian state-affiliated XtraNews said there are “intensive efforts” to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, citing Egyptian sources, without clarifying which parties have been communicated with. The news was carried on Egyptian state newspaper’s Al Ahram’s online website.

    Hamas said in a statement that the head of its political bureau, Ismail Haniya, spoke with officials from Egypt, Qatar and the UN.

    Rockets fired from Gaza into Israel streak across the sky on Wednesday.

    The Ministry of Health in Gaza said one person was killed in Wednesday’s attack. It named him as Muhammad Yusuf Saleh Abu Ta’ima, 25, and said he was killed in the bombing east of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

    A CNN producer in Gaza reported explosions in Khan Younis, Rafah and northern Gaza.

    Shortly after, he saw at least six rockets fired from Gaza towards Israel. Sirens warning of incoming rockets sounded in the southern Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon and the Lachish area, all near the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said. Sirens later sounded in Tel Aviv, Israel’s main city on the Mediterranean coast, warning of potential incoming rocket fire.

    Several locations in Israel suffered direct hits by rockets from Gaza, authorities said, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. A rocket landed near buildings and caused extensive damage in Ashkelon, pictures distributed by Israel Fire & Rescue Authority showed. A building in Kibbutz Nir Am also was hit, and a rocket landed in the garden of a house in Sderot.

    One of the three Islamic Jihad commanders killed on Tuesday was working on capabilities to launch rockets from the West Bank toward Israel, IDF chief spokesman Hagari said at the time.

    Rockets have never been fired from the West Bank into Israel.

    Islamic Jihad confirmed three of its commanders were killed in the overnight operation along with their wives and children.

    The commanders killed were Jihad Shaker Al-Ghannam, secretary of the Military Council in the al Quds Brigades; Khalil Salah al Bahtini, commander of the Northern Region in the al Quds Brigades; and Ezzedine, one of the leaders of the military wing of the al Quds Brigades in the West Bank, the group said.

    Hagari said the operation had been planned since last Tuesday, when Islamic Jihad fired more than 100 rockets toward Israel following the death of its former spokesman while on hunger strike in an Israeli prison.

    But, the IDF did not have the “operational conditions” until overnight Tuesday.

    The IDF launched a further strike on Tuesday, saying its air force targeted “a terrorist squad” belonging to Islamic Jihad in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

    The Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza said two people were killed and two others injured in that attack east of Khan Younis, although they have yet to identify them, bringing the death toll in Gaza to 15 on Tuesday.

    Gaza is one of the most densely packed places in the world, an isolated coastal enclave of almost two million people crammed into 140 square miles.

    Governed by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, the territory is largely cut off from the rest of the world by an Israeli blockade of Gaza’s land, air and sea dating back to 2007. Egypt controls Gaza’s southern border crossing, Rafah.

    Israel has placed heavy restrictions on the freedom of civilian movement and controls the importation of basic goods into the narrow coastal strip.

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  • Ohio State professor elected to National Academy of Sciences

    Ohio State professor elected to National Academy of Sciences

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    Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – An Ohio State University astronomy professor has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors a scientist can receive in the U.S. 

    David Weinberg, Distinguished University Professor and chair of astronomy, is among 120 new members and 23 international members from 13 countries who were inducted this year in recognition of distinguished and continuing achievement in original research inside their chosen field.

    “I have been lucky to have great students and great colleagues throughout my 28 years at Ohio State,” said Weinberg. “It’s just very gratifying to know that your colleagues really recognize and appreciate the work that you do.”

    Throughout his career, Weinberg’s work in cosmology has investigated the matter and energy contents of the universe, the formation of galaxies, and the origin of the chemical elements. He is also known for his theoretical work, using supercomputer simulations of dark matter and galaxy clustering, and for his leading roles in cosmological surveys, especially the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys.

    “Professor Weinberg’s election into the highly prestigious National Academy of Sciences is a testament of his career dedicated to research, scholarship and to deepening our understanding of the universe around us,” said Peter Mohler, interim executive vice president of research, innovation and knowledge at Ohio State. 

    Weinberg becomes the first astronomer from Ohio State to have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. According to Weinberg, it was possible to flourish because Ohio State is an ideal space for the exchange of ideas. 

    “What has made Ohio State astronomy so great is that we recruit terrific people and create an environment where they can do better science here than they could anywhere else,” said Weinberg. “As I now become someone who can elect members in the future, I hope to nominate some other great people from public universities.”

    Weinberg received his B.S in physics at Yale University and his Ph.D. in astrophysics at Princeton University. His previous recognitions include the 2021 Dannie Heineman Prize awarded by the American Astronomical Society and the American Institute of Physics. 

    Weinberg joins 11 other Ohio State faculty who are members of the National Academy of Sciences. 

    A private, nonprofit society, the National Academy of Sciences was originally established by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to provide scientific advice to the government. Now an advisory body with more than 2,500 active members, its various committees and panels have helped direct a number of scientific and military projects, including future NASA missions and potential telescope proposals. 

    #

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  • Princeton University awards plasma physics graduate student Suying Jin a highly selective honorific fellowship

    Princeton University awards plasma physics graduate student Suying Jin a highly selective honorific fellowship

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    Jin expressed deep appreciation on receiving the fellowship. “I feel truly honored, and I’m fortunate to be at an institution that lifts up its students in this way,” she said. “I am also deeply grateful for all the support, academic and otherwise, that has made this possible.”

    The Program in Plasma Physics is based at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and is a graduate program within the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. Graduates of the program have shaped the field of plasma physics in recent decades, working in academia, national laboratories, industry and beyond.

    Spontaneously arising order

    Jin’s dissertation is investigating the challenging question of how plasmas self-organize in the presence of magnetic fields. “You see it happening all the time, everywhere in the universe, where you have order spontaneously arising from turbulence or chaos,” she said. “I like to go after things that defy intuition and much about the mechanism by which this self-organization occurs remains mysterious.  

    When her advisor, principal research physicist Ilya Dodin, offered Jin several thesis topics to choose from, “Suying fearlessly chose the most challenging project over low-hanging fruits,” Dodin said. “She felt that although immediate rewards were not to be expected, the results of that project would be more important in the long run. I have much respect for that attitude,” he said. “Suying is an outstanding researcher and a classic role model who strongly deserves a Princeton honorific fellowship.”

    Jin traces her passionate interest in plasma science to her preparation for a final exam at the University of California, Los Angeles  (UCLA), where she graduated in physics with honors in 2018. “I was working my way through an electrodynamics textbook, and I came across this problem that introduced me to the whole idea of plasma,” she said. “It was my first time thinking about what would happen if you had a bunch of charged particles together and it seemed like anything would be possible in a medium like that.”

    Basic Science

    While her thesis topic “is basic science and not fusion focused, ultimately, I think the fusion effort will benefit greatly from just fundamental plasma research,” she said. “There’s a lot we still need to understand about plasmas, period.”

    Her dedication to learning extends to teaching, which she has pursued as a teaching assistant at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She’s taught in Dodin’s graduate class in plasma waves, where “she was very proactive and did a great job,” he recalls. She also helped teach an undergraduate course in fusion and fission that has expanded her interest in real-world problems.

    Her research has led to frequent peer-reviewed publications, including five papers as a first author and two as a co-author. In addition, she shares a patent disclosure with two PPPL physicists.

    Outside the classroom, Jin has been an active participant in plasma programs. She was a cofounder of Princeton Women in Plasma Physics (PWiPP), whose mission includes promoting “a supportive community for women and gender minorities in plasma physics at Princeton.”  She has lectured at plasma physics workshops and been a panelist and discussion leader at a local conference for undergraduate women in physics.

    Tae Kwon Do

    When not deeply engaged in plasma physics, Jin pursues long-time hobbies including the Korean martial art Tae Kwon Do, in which she holds a black belt and has practiced for 15 years. She also enjoys cooking and playing the piano.

    Looking ahead, Jin says she would prefer a teaching job to a purely research position and sees herself “continuing down the path of academia. “I’ve had such fantastic mentors from day one when I entered this field, and I would really like to work with students to pass that mentorship along.”

    The Program in Plasma Physics has graduated more than 300 students since it began in 1959.
    In an environment that, over the past few decades, has seen enormous changes in the fields of plasma physics and controlled fusion, the program has consistently focused on fundamentals in physics and mathematics and on intense exposure to contemporary experimental and theoretical research in plasma physics. Learn more.

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  • UTEP Awarded Numerous Grants to Support NASA Space Research

    UTEP Awarded Numerous Grants to Support NASA Space Research

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    Newswise — EL PASO, Texas (May 4, 2023) – Researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso will help build a robotic device for welding in space, prepare astronauts for a mission to the Moon and more, thanks to a slew of new grants from NASA.

    The burst of grants awarded to faculty across various departments and colleges highlight UTEP’s strong partnership with NASA and the critical scientific and engineering contributions made by the University for space exploration.

    “These joint initiatives between UTEP and NASA strengthen UTEP’s reputation as a premier research institution,” said Stephen Aley, Ph.D., associate vice president of research and special projects with the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects. “The work and research performed by our faculty will impact NASA’s future space exploration and beyond.”

    The grants include:

    Lunar Regolith Simulants Study

    Professors Reza Ashtiani, Ph.D. and Darren Cone will perform research on the granular mechanics of lunar soils. Under this grant, UTEP will become the repository of lunar regolith simulants, materials developed in the lab to represent physical, chemical and mineralogical characteristics of planetary soils. The study aims to provide valuable insights into the complex challenges of constructing infrastructure on other planets. 

    Development of a Robotic System for In-Space Welding

    Professors Angel Flores-Abad, Ph.D., Joel Quintana, Ph.D., and John Bird, Ph.D., will support the development of a digital and hardware robotic system for in-space welding by characterizing process motion and forces and generating real and synthetic performance data.

    Artemis Lunar Operations Support

    This grant will allow professor Jose Hurtado, Ph.D., to continue his long-time work of providing geology expertise to NASA, including mission simulations and intensive field training for NASA astronauts at locations on Earth that resemble the Moon. 

    Lunar Soil, Rock Simulant Analysis

    Through this grant, UTEP professors Carlos Cabrera Martinez, Ph.D., and Cone, along with Alejandro Metta, Ph.D., manager of the X-Ray Core Facility within UTEP’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, will study imitation planetary regolith, the layer of rock on top of bedrock. The research this team will conduct will help analyze important structures in imitation lunar dust, helping to identify lunar resources that could support future bases of people living on the Moon.

    “It’s important to learn about what types of oxides, water and other types of resources may be available on the Moon,” said Carlos Cabrera Martinez, Ph.D., professor and chair of the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UTEP. “This can give you an idea of where you can get, for example, oxygen and other metals and water — and that’s important to know for people staying on the Moon for a long time.”

    Cabrera is hopeful that all of these grants are paving the way for UTEP to continue providing expertise and assistance to NASA for lunar research and other expeditions.

    About The University of Texas at El Paso

    The University of Texas at El Paso is America’s leading Hispanic-serving university. Located at the westernmost tip of Texas, where three states and two countries converge along the Rio Grande, 84% of our 24,000 students are Hispanic, and half are the first in their families to go to college. UTEP offers 169 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs at the only open-access, top-tier research university in America.

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    University of Texas at El Paso

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  • Camera array detects optical emission of gamma-ray burst

    Camera array detects optical emission of gamma-ray burst

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    Newswise — Researchers led by Dr. XIN Liping from the Space-based Multi-band Astronomical Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) research team, National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), have detected the prompt optical emission and its transition to the early afterglow of a gamma-ray burst (GRB 201223A), using the Ground Wide Angle Camera Array (GWAC) located at Xinglong Observatory of NAOC.

    The study was published in Nature Astronomy on April 10.

    Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are produced by the collapse of massive stars or the merger of binary neutron stars. They are accompanied by extreme relativistic jets emitting enormous amounts of energy within a few seconds of the bursts. This phenomenon includes the prompt emission caused by the shock in the jet and the afterglow produced by interaction between the jet and external medium.

    Typical high-energy emission lasts only a few milliseconds to tens of seconds, and it is difficult to follow up in real time when ground-based optical telescopes receive alerts triggered by space-based high-energy instruments. Up till now, only a few cases of optical emission have been detected before the end of prompt high-energy emission. These GRBs have longer duration of high-energy emission (>30 seconds). Furthermore, all these measurements were contaminated with reverse shock, making it difficult to clearly review the transition from prompt emission to afterglow.

    GWAC, proposed and led by Prof. WEI Jianyan, principal investigator of the SVOM mission, is one of the key ground-based telescopes for the SVOM project. It can cover an ultra-large sky area with a temporal resolution of 15 seconds and a detection capability of magnitude 16. Its scientific purpose is to conduct systematic research on the prompt optical emission of GRBs discovered by the SVOM mission.

    In this study, GWAC recorded the entire process—before, during and after the trigger time of the burst. The duration of the high-energy emission was 29 seconds. The emergence of optical and gamma-ray emissions was detected simultaneously.

    “The prompt optical emission is far brighter than expected by about four orders of magnitude, if only gamma-ray emission is analyzed, which requires a special physical interpretation for these measurements,” said by Dr. XIN.

    According to joint analysis using the follow-up observations by F60A, an optical telescope jointly operated by NAOC and Guangxi University, the complete transition from prompt optical emission to afterglow was clearly achieved without any contamination from reverse shock.

    The extremely early unique data provided by GWAC place a fine constraint on the characteristics of the progenitor. Scientists expect strong stellar winds around a massive star, which is thought to be the ideal progenitor of a gamma-ray burst. However, the stellar wind is quite small for this event, even at a very close distance from the burst, thus suggesting the progenitor has a small stellar mass.

    After the launch of SVOM, simultaneous observations by GWAC and SVOM space-based instruments will have the potential to provide essential data for GRB studies, and finally a large sample with prompt optical observations will be built during SVOM mission.

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    Chinese Academy of Sciences

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  • Rare element found in exoplanet’s atmosphere

    Rare element found in exoplanet’s atmosphere

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    Newswise —

    The planet KELT-9 b holds the record for being the hottest exoplanet in the galaxy, located approximately 670 light years away from Earth and orbiting a distant star. With an astounding average temperature of 4,000 degrees Celsius, this celestial entity has captured the attention of astronomers worldwide since its initial discovery in 2016. Recently, a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics has uncovered novel insights regarding the peculiar and searingly hot planet’s atmosphere.

    Nicholas Borsato, a PhD student in astrophysics at Lund University, explains that they have devised a fresh approach that enables them to gather more comprehensive data. Through this innovative technique, they have identified seven elements, among them the uncommon element terbium, which has never been detected in the atmosphere of any other exoplanet.

    Terbium is categorized as a rare earth metal and is classified as one of the lanthanoids. The element was first discovered by Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander in 1843, at the Ytterby mine situated in the Stockholm archipelago. Terbium is exceedingly scarce in the natural environment, and currently, approximately 99 percent of the world’s terbium production occurs in the Bayan Obo mining district located in Inner Mongolia.

    “Finding terbium in an exoplanet’s atmosphere is very surprising”, says Nicholas Borsato.

    The majority of exoplanets are typically detected through measurements of their host stars’ luminosity. During an exoplanet’s transit, its passage in front of the host star leads to a reduction in the star’s brightness. With their sophisticated measurement technique, the scientists have successfully eliminated the primary signals from KELT-9 b’s atmosphere. This breakthrough allows for the potential discovery of additional information regarding other exoplanets’ atmospheres.

    Nicholas Borsato elucidates that gaining further knowledge about the denser elements can aid in ascertaining crucial information such as the exoplanet’s age and the manner in which it was created.

    Exoplanets, also known as extrasolar planets, refer to planets that exist in solar systems other than our own. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet was made in 1992, which was orbiting a neutron star. Subsequently, in 1995, the first exoplanet revolving around a sun-like star was discovered. To date, scientists have documented over 5,000 exoplanets. The presence of exoplanets often raises inquiries about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life in the universe.

    The identification of dense elements within the atmospheres of ultra-hot exoplanets marks another milestone in comprehending the mechanics of planetary atmospheres. As we continue to deepen our understanding of these celestial bodies, we enhance our likelihood of discovering a “second Earth” in the future. This optimistic sentiment is conveyed by Nicholas Borsato to conclude his remarks.

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  • Pioneering research sheds new light on the origins and composition of planet Mars

    Pioneering research sheds new light on the origins and composition of planet Mars

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    Newswise — A new study has uncovered intriguing insights into the liquid core at the centre of Mars, furthering understanding of the planet’s formation and evolution.

    The research, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, reveals the first-ever detections of sound waves travelling into the Martian core. Measurements from this acoustic energy, called seismic waves, indicate its liquid core is slightly denser and smaller than previously thought, and comprises a mixture of iron and numerous other elements.

    The findings are all the more remarkable, as the research mission was initially only scheduled to last for a little over one Mars year (two Earth years). Despite Martian storms hastening the accumulation of dust and reducing power to the NASA InSight Mars lander, NASA extended its stay, so geophysical data, including signals of marsquakes, continued to be gathered until the end of last year.

    Lead author Dr Jessica Irving, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: “The extra mission time certainly paid off. We’ve made the very first observations of seismic waves travelling through the core of Mars. Two seismic signals, one from a very distant marsquake and one from a meteorite impact on the far side of the planet, have allowed us to probe the Martian core with seismic waves. We’ve effectively been listening for energy travelling through the heart of another planet, and now we’ve heard it.

    “These first measurements of the elastic properties of Mars’ core have helped us investigate its composition. Rather than being just a ball of iron, it also contains a large amount of sulfur, as well as other elements including a small amount of hydrogen.”

    The team of researchers used data from NASA’s InSight lander, a robotic spacecraft designed to probe the interior of Mars, to compare seismic waves travelling through the planet’s core with those transiting Mars’ shallower regions, and modelled properties of its interior.

    The InSight lander deployed a broadband seismometer on the Martian surface in 2018, allowing for the detection of seismic events, including marsquakes and meteorite impacts.  The multi-disciplinary team of scientists, including seismologists, geodynamicists and mineral physicists, used observations of two seismic events located in the opposite hemisphere from the seismometer to measure the travel times of seismic waves that passed through the core relative to seismic waves that remained in the mantle. 

    Dr Irving said: “So-called ‘farside’ events, meaning those on the opposite side of the planet to InSight, are intrinsically harder to detect because a great deal of energy is lost or diverted away as waves travel through the planet. We needed both luck and skill to find, and then use, these events. We detected no farside events in the first Martian year of operations. If the mission had ended then, this research couldn’t have happened.

    “The sol 976 marsquake was the most distant event found during the mission. The second farside event, S1000a – the first event detected on day 1,000 of operations – was particularly useful because it turned out to be a meteorite impact which we heard all the way through the planet, so we knew where the seismic signals came from. These events came after the Marsquake Service (MQS) had honed their skills on hundreds of days of Martian data; it then took a lot of seismological expertise from across the Insight Team to tease the signals out from the complex seismograms recorded by the lander.”  

    The authors used these measurements to build models describing physical properties of the core, including its size and elastic wave-speed. The results suggested Mars’ core is slightly denser and smaller than previous estimates, with a radius of approximately 1,780–1,810 km. These findings are consistent with the core having a relatively high fraction of light elements alloyed with iron, including abundant sulfur and smaller amounts of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.

    Co-author Ved Lekic, Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Maryland College Park, in the US, said: “Detecting and understanding waves that travel through the very core of another planet is incredibly challenging, reflecting decades of efforts by hundreds of scientists and engineers from multiple countries. We not only had to utilise sophisticated seismic analysis techniques, but also deploy knowledge of how high pressures and temperatures affect properties of metal alloys, leveraging the expertise of the InSight Team.”

    Dr Irving added: “The new results are important for understanding how Mars’ formation and evolution differ from those of Earth. New theories about the formation conditions and building blocks of the red planet will need to be able to match the core’s physical properties as revealed by this new study.”

    Dr Jessica Irving and co-author Dr Anna Horleston, a seismologist from the University of Bristol, were supported with funding from the UK Space Agency.

    Paper

    ‘First observations of core-transiting seismic phases on Mars’ by Jessica Irving et al in PNAS 

    Image

    Sol 980: Instrument Context Camera (ICC) – NASA’s InSight Mars Lander

     

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  • Life-Friendly Environments Found in Metal-Poor Stars

    Life-Friendly Environments Found in Metal-Poor Stars

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    Newswise —

    Researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Solar System Research and for Chemistry, together with the University of Göttingen, have discovered that stars rich in heavy elements are less conducive to the development of complex life than stars with low metal content. The team demonstrated the correlation between a star’s metallicity and the ability of its planets to create an ozone layer for protection against harmful ultraviolet light emitted by the star. This finding provides valuable information for scientists searching for habitable star systems using space telescopes. Additionally, the study suggests a surprising conclusion: the universe becomes progressively less hospitable to the emergence of complex life on newly formed planets as it ages.

    Over the past few years, researchers have increasingly concentrated on the gas envelopes of distant planets in their search for habitable or inhabited worlds. They examine observational data to determine whether these planets possess an atmosphere, and whether it includes gases like oxygen or methane, which are primarily produced by lifeforms on Earth. In the coming years, the James Webb Telescope, developed by NASA, will expand these observations to unprecedented levels. It will allow researchers to not only characterize the atmospheres of large gas giants, such as Super-Neptunes, but also to scrutinize the much fainter spectrographic signals emanating from rocky planet atmospheres for the first time.

    The study, which was recently published in Nature Communications, employed numerical simulations to examine the ozone content of exoplanet atmospheres. Like on Earth, this molecule, composed of three oxygen atoms, can safeguard the planet’s surface and its resident life forms against harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Therefore, an ozone layer is a critical prerequisite for the emergence of complex life. “Our aim was to determine the characteristics of a star that must exist for its planets to generate a protective ozone layer,” Anna Shapiro, the first author of the study and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, stated in outlining the study’s fundamental concept.

    As is often the case in scientific research, the concept of the current study was prompted by a previous discovery. Three years ago, a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research examined the variations in the Sun’s brightness in comparison to those of hundreds of similar stars. The outcome revealed that the visible light intensity of many of these stars fluctuated significantly more than that of the Sun. Alexander Shapiro, who participated in both studies, remarked, “We observed enormous intensity spikes,” and he suggested that the Sun might be capable of producing similar fluctuations. “In such cases, the ultraviolet light intensity would also increase significantly,” he added. Sami Solanki, co-author of both studies and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

    Dual role of UV radiation

    The researchers focused their calculations on the subgroup of stars, approximately half of all stars, around which exoplanets have been observed to orbit, and whose surface temperatures range from approximately 5,000 to 6,000 degrees Celsius. The Sun, with a surface temperature of around 5500 degrees Celsius, is also a member of this subgroup. “Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun plays a dual role in the atmospheric chemistry of Earth,” explains Anna Shapiro, whose previous research has concentrated on the effects of solar radiation on the Earth’s atmosphere. Ozone can be created and destroyed through reactions with individual oxygen atoms and oxygen molecules. Long-wave UV-B radiation destroys ozone, while short-wave UV-C radiation generates protective ozone in the middle atmosphere. “It was therefore plausible to assume that ultraviolet light might have a similarly intricate impact on exoplanet atmospheres,” the astronomer notes. The precise wavelengths of radiation are critical.

    To determine the impact of ultraviolet light on exoplanet atmospheres, the researchers conducted calculations that precisely identified the wavelengths of the ultraviolet light emitted by stars. They also took into account the effect of metallicity, a property that characterizes the ratio of hydrogen to heavier elements, which are often referred to as “metals” by astrophysicists. The Sun, for example, has a ratio of more than 31,000 hydrogen atoms to one iron atom. The study also considered stars with lower and higher iron content. This is the first time that metallicity has been factored in to such calculations.

    Simulated interactions of UV radiation with gases

    After identifying the ultraviolet light wavelengths emitted by stars and considering the effect of metallicity, the researchers went on to investigate how this calculated UV radiation would impact the atmospheres of planets orbiting at a life-friendly distance around these stars. Life-friendly distances refer to those orbits where the temperature is moderate enough to support liquid water on the planet’s surface. Using computer simulations, the team investigated the processes triggered in the planet’s atmosphere by the parent star’s characteristic UV light.

    To compute the composition of planetary atmospheres the researchers used a chemistry-climate model that simulates the processes that control oxygen, ozone, and many other gases, and their interactions with ultraviolet light from stars, at very high spectral resolution. This model allowed the investigation of a wide variety of conditions on exoplanets and comparison with the history of the Earth’s atmosphere in the last half billion years. During this period the high atmospheric oxygen content and the ozone layer were established that allowed the evolution of life on land on our planet. “It is feasible that the history of the Earth and its atmosphere holds clues about the evolution of life that may also apply to exoplanets” says Jos Lelieveld, Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, who was involved in the study.

    Promising candidates

    The simulations yielded unexpected results for the researchers. It was found that in general, stars with lower metallicity emit more ultraviolet (UV) radiation than their higher metallicity counterparts. However, the proportion of UV radiation that produces ozone (UV-C) compared to that which destroys it (UV-B) is critically dependent on the metallicity. In stars with lower metallicity, UV-C radiation dominates, resulting in the formation of a dense ozone layer. In contrast, in stars with higher metallicity, UV-B radiation predominates, resulting in a much sparser protective envelope. “These findings suggest that, contrary to expectations, stars with lower metallicity may offer more conducive conditions for the emergence of life,” concludes Anna Shapiro.

    The researchers were surprised by the outcomes of their simulations, which revealed that, in general, stars with lower metallicity emit more ultraviolet (UV) radiation than their higher metallicity counterparts. However, the ratio of UV radiation that produces ozone (UV-C) to that which destroys it (UV-B) is critical and varies based on metallicity. Stars with lower metallicity exhibit higher levels of UV-C radiation, which leads to the formation of a denser ozone layer. In contrast, stars with higher metallicity have more UV-B radiation, which results in a sparser protective envelope. “These findings suggest that stars with lower metallicity may offer more favorable conditions for the emergence of life, contrary to expectations,” says Anna Shapiro.

    Paradoxical conclusion

    In addition, the study draws an almost paradoxical conclusion: as the universe evolves, it may become less hospitable to life. Heavy elements and metals are synthesized in stars towards the end of their multi-billion-year lifetimes and are then released into space either via stellar wind or a supernova explosion. This material becomes the building blocks for the formation of the next generation of stars. “Thus, each new star has more metal-rich material available than its predecessors, and stars in the universe become more metal-rich with each generation,” explains Anna Shapiro. The new study indicates that the likelihood of star systems producing life decreases as the universe ages. However, there is still hope in the search for life, as many host stars of exoplanets have similar ages to our Sun, which is known to support complex and diverse lifeforms on at least one of its planets.

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  • Elon Musk sets low expectations before first SpaceX launch of Starship, most powerful rocket ever built | CNN

    Elon Musk sets low expectations before first SpaceX launch of Starship, most powerful rocket ever built | CNN

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     — 

    Just a few months after NASA introduced the world to the most powerful rocket ever flown to orbit, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is prepared to set off its own creation — which could pack nearly twice the power of anything flown before.

    SpaceX’s vehicle, called Starship, is currently sitting on a launch pad at the company’s facilities on the southern Texas coastline. The company is targeting liftoff at 8 a.m. CT (9 a.m. ET) on Monday, although it has the ability to take off anytime between 8 a.m. CT (9 a.m. ET) and 9:30 a.m. CT (10:30 a.m. ET).

    “I guess I’d like to just set expectations low,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during a Twitter “Spaces” event for his subscribers Sunday evening. “If we get far enough away from launch pad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don’t blow up the pad.”

    He added: “There’s a good chance that it gets postponed since we’re going to be pretty careful about this launch.”

    It will be SpaceX’s first attempt to launch a fully assembled Starship vehicle, building on a years-long testing campaign.

    Musk has talked about Starship — making elaborate presentations about its design and purpose — for half a decade, and he frequently harps on its potential for carrying cargo and humans to Mars. Musk has even said that his sole purpose for founding SpaceX was to develop a vehicle like Starship that could establish a human settlement on Mars.

    Additionally, NASA has already awarded SpaceX contracts and options worth several billions of dollars to use Starship to ferry government astronauts to the surface of the moon under the space agency’s Artemis program.

    The inaugural flight test will not complete a full orbit around Earth. If successful, however, it will travel about 150 miles above Earth’s surface, well into altitudes deemed to be outer space.

    Starship consists of two parts: the Super Heavy booster, a gargantuan rocket that houses 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft, which sits atop the booster during launch and is designed to break away after the booster expends its fuel to finish the mission.

    The massive Super Heavy rocket booster will give the first blast of power at liftoff.

    Less than three minutes after takeoff, it’s expected to expend its fuel and separate from the Starship spacecraft, leaving the booster to be discarded in the ocean. The Starship will use its own six engines, blazing for more than six minutes, to propel itself to nearly orbital speeds.

    The vehicle will then complete a partial lap of the planet, reentering the Earth’s atmosphere near Hawaii. It’s expected to splash down off the coast about an hour and a half after liftoff.

    Starship’s ultimate success or failure immensely consequential. Not only is it crucial to SpaceX’s future as a company — it also underpins the United States government’s ambitions for human exploration.

    But it’s not all riding on this inaugural test flight. SpaceX has long established its willingness to embrace mishaps, mistakes and explosions in the name of refining the design of its spacecraft.

    In the lead-up to the first launch of the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket in 2018, which held the title of most powerful rocket before NASA’s SLS took flight last year, Musk foresaw only a 50-50 chance of success.

    “People (came) from all around the world to see what will either be a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they’ve ever seen,” Musk told CNN at the time.

    The inaugural Falcon Heavy launch was ultimately successful.

    Development of Starship has been based at SpaceX’s privately held spaceport about 40 minutes outside Brownsville, Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Testing began years ago with brief “hop tests” of early spacecraft prototypes. The company began with brief flights that lifted a few dozen feet off the ground before evolving to high-altitude flights, most of which resulted in dramatic explosions as the company attempted to land them upright.

    One suborbital flight test in May 2021, however, ended in success.

    SpaceX workers on February 8 make final adjustments to Starship's orbital launch mount, and the booster's matrix of Raptor engines within, ahead of the company's engine test.

    Since then, SpaceX has also been working to get its Super Heavy booster prepared for flight. The massive, 230-foot-tall (69-meter-tall) cylinder is packed with 33 of the company’s Raptor engines.

    Fully stacked, Starship and Super Heavy stand about 400 feet (120 meters) tall.

    SpaceX has been waiting more than a year to get FAA approval for this launch attempt.

    The company, and federal regulators tasked with certifying SpaceX launches won’t pose risks to people or property in the area surrounding the launch site, have faced significant pushback from the local community, including from environmental groups.

    But the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, announced Friday, April 14, that it granted the company’s request for an uncrewed flight test of the rocket out of the SpaceX facilities in South Texas.

    “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement.

    During a call with reporters last week, an FAA official, who declined to be named for publication, said that the agency has been overseeing SpaceX’s compliance with the mitigating actions, some of which are still in the works, even as the company prepares for launch.

    The FAA official said government personnel will be on the ground to ensure SpaceX complies with its license during the test launch.

    SpaceX’s contract with NASA to use Starship for the space agency’s Artemis III moon landing later this decade leaves much of Starship’s development work to SpaceX. A $2.9 billion deal, inked in April 2021, was awarded to SpaceX over several competitors. It was later expanded to include a second lunar landing mission in 2027.

    NASA has been working over the past year to hash out a work flow between the space agency and SpaceX. It’s a dynamic the two organization have had to iron out in previous SpaceX-NASA projects, including an ongoing partnership that uses SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

    A moon mission, however, involves more powerful and complex hardware.

    NASA is not, however, involved in planning the flight profile for this test flight or directing SpaceX on what to do, according to Lisa Hammond, NASA’s associate program manager of the Human Landing System at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    Hammond did not share a specific checklist of tests or flights that NASA hopes to see before Starship is entrusted with a moon landing mission.

    “I would not put it with a number,” she said, adding that the Artemis II mission, slated for next year, will see humans fly atop the SLS rocket after only one uncrewed test flight.

    “The confidence comes in the design, the confidence comes in the safety of the vehicle for the crew,” Hammond said.

    SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell previously said she hopes the company will conduct more than 100 orbital test flights of Starship before putting humans on board, as the company will need to do in order to help NASA carry out its moon landing with the Artemis III mission, slated for 2025.

    “I think that would be a great goal,” Shotwell said Wednesday, when asked whether that target was still feasible. “I don’t think we will do 100 flights of Starship next year, but maybe (in) 2025 we will do 100 flights.”

    NASA’s current timeline targets 2025 for the first lunar landing mission, which will see astronauts transfer from their Orion capsule, which will launch atop a NASA Space Launch System rocket, and into a Starship spacecraft already in lunar orbit. It will be the Starship vehicle that ferries the crew down to the lunar surface.

    It’s not clear, however, if 2025 is feasible. NASA’s inspector general has already suggested it is not. Delays, according to comments from the inspector general in March 2022, could revolve around Starship.

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  • SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, receives government approval for launch | CNN

    SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, receives government approval for launch | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    SpaceX has cleared the final regulatory hurdle standing before the inaugural launch of its Starship rocket — the most powerful rocket ever constructed.

    The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, announced Friday that it granted the company’s request for an uncrewed flight test of the rocket out of the SpaceX facilities in South Texas. The vehicle, which has already undergone preflight ground testing, is poised to take off as soon as Monday.

    “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement.

    Earlier Friday, the FAA issued an air traffic restriction for the area surrounding the launch. The Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, orders planes and other air traffic to steer clear of the launch area — which lies due East of Brownsville, Texas — on Monday between 7 a.m. and 10:05 a.m. CT (8 a.m. and 11:05 a.m. ET).

    This will be SpaceX’s first attempt to put Starship into orbit, building on a yearslong testing campaign to work out the design of the rocket.

    SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked about Starship for about a decade, making elaborate presentations about its design and describing it as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX’s founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time.

    Additionally, NASA has already awarded SpaceX contracts and options — worth more than $3 billion — to use Starship to ferry government astronauts to the surface of the moon under the space agency’s Artemis program.

    The inaugural flight test will not complete a full orbit around Earth. If successful, however, it will reach orbital speeds and travel about 150 miles above Earth’s surface, well into altitudes deemed to be outer space.

    Starship consists of two parts: the Super Heavy booster, a gargantuan rocket that houses 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft, which sits atop the booster during launch and is designed to break away after the booster expends its fuel to finish the mission.

    On this flight, the rocket booster will be discarded into the ocean shortly after liftoff. In future flights, however, SpaceX plans to recover the vehicle by guiding it to an upright landing back at the launch site. The Starship spacecraft will complete nearly one full lap of the planet, ending its flight with a splashdown off Hawaii.

    Development of Starship has been based at SpaceX’s privately held spaceport about 40 minutes outside Brownsville, Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Testing began years ago with brief “hop tests” of early spacecraft prototypes. The company began with brief flights that lifted a few dozen feet off the ground before evolving to high-altitude flights, most of which resulted in dramatic explosions as the company attempted to land them upright.

    One suborbital flight test in May 2021, however, ended in success.

    SpaceX workers on February 8 make final adjustments to Starship's orbital launch mount, and the booster's matrix of Raptor engines within, ahead of the company's engine test.

    Since then, SpaceX has also been working to get its Super Heavy booster prepared for flight. The massive, 230-foot-tall (69-meter-tall) cylinder is packed with 33 of the company’s Raptor engines.

    Fully stacked, Starship and Super Heavy stand about 400 feet (120 meters) tall.

    SpaceX has been waiting more than a year to get FAA approval for an orbital launch attempt.

    The company, and federal regulators tasked with certifying SpaceX launches won’t pose risks to people or property in the area surrounding the launch site, have faced significant pushback from the local community, including from environmental groups.

    In June, the FAA granted SpaceX one key approval for launching Starship, though it laid out a list of “mitigating actions” the company would need to take before the first launch.

    During a call with reporters this week, an FAA official, who declined to be named for publication, said that the agency has been overseeing SpaceX’s compliance with the mitigating actions, some of which are still in the works, even as the launch license is issued.

    The FAA official said government personnel will be on the ground to ensure SpaceX complies with its license during the test launch.

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  • Fuzzy first photo of a black hole gets a sharp makeover | CNN

    Fuzzy first photo of a black hole gets a sharp makeover | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The first photo ever taken of a black hole looks a little sharper now.

    Originally released in 2019, the unprecedented historic image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 captured an essentially invisible celestial object using direct imaging.

    The image presented the first direct visual evidence that black holes exist, showcasing a central dark region encapsulated by a ring of light that looks brighter on one side. Astronomers nicknamed the object the “fuzzy, orange donut.”

    Now, scientists have used machine learning to give the image a cleaner upgrade that looks more like a “skinny” doughnut, researchers said. The central region is darker and larger, surrounded by a bright ring as hot gas falls into the black hole in the new image.

    In 2017, astronomers set out to observe the invisible heart of the massive galaxy Messier 87, or M87, near the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years from Earth.

    The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first photograph of a black hole. More than 200 researchers worked on the project for more than a decade. The project was named for the event horizon, the proposed boundary around a black hole that represents the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape.

    To capture an image of the black hole, scientists combined the power of seven radio telescopes around the world using Very-Long-Baseline-Interferometry, according to the European Southern Observatory, which is part of the EHT. This array effectively created a virtual telescope around the same size as Earth.

    Data from the original 2017 observation was combined with a machine learning technique to capture the full resolution of what the telescopes saw for the first time. The new, more detailed image, along with a study, was released on Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    “With our new machine learning technique, PRIMO, we were able to achieve the maximum resolution of the current array,” said lead study author Lia Medeiros, astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in a statement.

    “Since we cannot study black holes up-close, the detail of an image plays a critical role in our ability to understand its behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now smaller by about a factor of two, which will be a powerful constraint for our theoretical models and tests of gravity.”

    Medeiros and other EHT members developed Principal-component Interferometric Modeling, or PRIMO. The algorithm relies on dictionary learning in which computers create rules based on large amounts of material. If a computer is given a series of images of different bananas, combined with some training, it might be able to tell if an unknown image does or doesn’t contain a banana.

    Computers using PRIMO analyzed more than 30,000 high-resolution simulated images of black holes to pick out common structural details. This allowed the machine learning essentially to fill in the gaps of the original image.

    “PRIMO is a new approach to the difficult task of constructing images from EHT observations,” said Tod Lauer, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab. “It provides a way to compensate for the missing information about the object being observed, which is required to generate the image that would have been seen using a single gigantic radio telescope the size of the Earth.”

    Black holes are made up of huge amounts of matter squeezed into a small area, according to NASA, creating a massive gravitational field that draws in everything around it, including light. These powerful celestial phenomena also have a way of superheating the material around them and warping space-time.

    Material accumulates around black holes, is heated to billions of degrees and reaches nearly the speed of light. Light bends around the gravity of the black hole, which creates the photon ring seen in the image. The black hole’s shadow is represented by the dark central region.

    The visual confirmation of black holes also acts as confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In the theory, Einstein predicted that dense, compact regions of space would have such intense gravity that nothing could escape them. But if heated materials in the form of plasma surround the black hole and emit light, the event horizon could be visible.

    The new image can help scientists make more accurate measurements of the black hole’s mass. Researchers can also apply PRIMO to other EHT observations, including those of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

    “The 2019 image was just the beginning,” Medeiros said. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, the data underlying that image have many more stories to tell. PRIMO will continue to be a critical tool in extracting such insights.”

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