An artist’s rendition of the binary stay system, called CPD-29 2176.Illustration: Noir Lab
The universe has no shortage of oddities, and researchers at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab have observed another one in the form of a particular binary star system. The system, called CPD-29 2176, will eventually trigger a kilonova, a celestial event in which two neutron stars collide in a massive explosion that forms heavy elements, including gold and platinum.
CPD-29 2176 is located around 11,400 light-years from Earth and was found by researchers using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Astronomers then conducted more observations at NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. CPD-29 2176 is home to one neutron star and one massive star that is in the process of going supernova, only to become a second neutron star in the future. Eventually, the two neutron stars will collide, producing a kilonova, an explosion that is thought to produce bursts of gamma rays and large amounts of gold and platinum. The paper documenting the research team’s find is published today in Nature.
“We know that the Milky Way contains at least 100 billion stars and likely hundreds of billions more. This remarkable binary system is essentially a one-in-ten-billion system,” said André-Nicolas Chené in a NOIRLab press release. Chené is a NOIRLab astronomer and an author on the study. “Prior to our study, the estimate was that only one or two such systems should exist in a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way.”
While many stars implode was a powerful supernova when they die, the dying star in CPD-29 2176 is becoming an ultra-stripped supernova. An ultra-stripped supernova lacks the vast amount of force that a typical supernova has, since the dying star has had much of its mass stripped by its companion. The researchers think that the neutron star in the system was also formed with an ultra-stripped supernova and argue that this is the reason that CPD-29 2176 is able to remain as a binary—a typical supernova would have enough power to kick a companion star out of its orbit.
“The current neutron star would have to form without ejecting its companion from the system. An ultra-stripped supernova is the best explanation for why these companion stars are in such a tight orbit,” said lead author Noel D. Richardson, a physics and astronomy professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in the NOIRLab release. “To one day create a kilonova, the other star would also need to explode as an ultra-stripped supernova so the two neutron stars could eventually collide and merge.”
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It will take around one million years for the star undergoing ultra-stripped supernova to turn into a neutron star. It is then when the two stars will begin to spiral into each other, eventually resulting in the metal-producing kilonova, according to the research. In these dramatic cosmic endings, we can look forward to the creation of the same elements that make life possible.
More:Watch Four Planets Spin Around a Star 130 Million Light-Years Away
The European Space Agency has released its image of the month for January, and it is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a stunning shot from the Webb Space Telescope.
At the bottom of the image is LEDA 2046648, a spiral galaxy over one billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Hercules. Behind LEDA is a field of more distant galaxies, ranging from spiral shapes to pinpricks of light in the distant universe.
Webb launched from French Guiana in December 2021; its scientific observations of the cosmos began in July. Webb has imaged distant galaxies, exoplanets, and even shed new light on worlds in our local solar system.
Though this image was only just released, it was taken during the commissioning process for one of Webb’s instruments, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), according to an ESA release. While NIRISS was focused on a white dwarf—the core remnant of a star—Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) turned its focus to LEDA 2046648 and its environs in the night sky.
One of Webb’s primary objectives in looking at the distant universe is to better understand how the first stars and galaxies formed. To that end, the telescope is looking at some of the most ancient light in the universe, primarily through its instruments NIRCam and MIRI.
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The image does contains hundreds of light sources our eye can perceive, but the infrared data from which the image was formed certainly records many more galaxies.
Webb’s deep field imagery is what enables scientists to see some of the most ancient light in the universe, often capitalizing on gravitational lensing (the magnification of distant light due to the gravitational warping of spacetime) to see particularly ancient sources.
Though this shot of LEDA 2046648 is not a deep field, it evokes a similar feeling: awe, at the huge scale of the cosmos, and (if only briefly) the realization that our minds can only comprehend a fraction of it.
More: Zoom in on Webb Telescope’s Biggest Image Yet
An exotic green comet that has not passed Earth since the time of the Neanderthals has reappeared in the sky ready for its closest approach to the planet next week.
Discovered last March by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was calculated to orbit the sun every 50,000 years, meaning it last tore past our home planet in the stone age.
The comet, which comes from the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, will come closest to Earth on Wednesday and Thursday next week when it shoots past the planet at a distance of 2.5 light minutes – a mere 27m miles.
Comets are balls of primordial dust and ice that swing around the sun in giant elliptical orbits. As they approach the sun, the bodies warm up, turning surface ice into gas and dislodging dust. Together, this creates the cloud or coma which surrounds the comet’s hard nucleus and the dusty tail that stretches out behind.
Images already taken of comet C/2022 E3 reveal a subtle green glow that is thought to arise from the presence of diatomic carbon – pairs of carbon atoms that are bound together – in the head of the comet. The molecule emits green light when excited by the ultraviolet rays in solar radiation.
Astronomers armed with telescopes have captured stunning pictures of the comet in the past month, showing the body’s head, dust tail and the longer, more tenuous ion tail.
But the cosmic ice ball has recently become bright enough to see with the naked eye, at least in very dark, rural areas with minimal light pollution.
Since mid-January, the comet has been easier to spot with a telescope or binoculars. It is visible in the northern hemisphere, clouds permitting, as the sky darkens in the evening, below and to the left of the handle of the Plough constellation.
It is heading for a fly-by of the pole star, the brightest star in Ursa Minor, next week.
The window for spotting the comet does not stay open long. While the best views may be had about 1 and 2 February, by the middle of the month the comet will have dimmed again and slipped from view as it hurtles back out into the solar system on its return trip to the Oort cloud.
Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naive calculations suggest that—coming out of the Big Bang—space should have become crumpled up by gravity and blasted apart by repulsive dark energy.
To explain the cosmos’s flatness, physicists have added a dramatic opening chapter to cosmic history: They propose that space rapidly inflated like a balloon at the start of the Big Bang, ironing out any curvature. And to explain the gentle growth of space following that initial spell of inflation, some have argued that our universe is just one among many less hospitable universes in a giant multiverse.
But now two physicists have turned the conventional thinking about our vanilla universe on its head. Following a line of research started by Stephen Hawking and Gary Gibbons in 1977, the duo has published a new calculation suggesting that the plainness of the cosmos is expected, rather than rare. Our universe is the way it is, according to Neil Turok of the University of Edinburgh and Latham Boyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, for the same reason that air spreads evenly throughout a room: Weirder options are conceivable but exceedingly improbable.
The universe “may seem extremely fine-tuned, extremely unlikely, but [they’re] saying, ‘Wait a minute, it’s the favored one,’” said Thomas Hertog, a cosmologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
“It’s a novel contribution that uses different methods compared to what most people have been doing,” said Steffen Gielen, a cosmologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.
The provocative conclusion rests on a mathematical trick involving switching to a clock that ticks with imaginary numbers. Using the imaginary clock, as Hawking did in the ’70s, Turok and Boyle could calculate a quantity, known as entropy, that appears to correspond to our universe. But the imaginary time trick is a roundabout way of calculating entropy, and without a more rigorous method, the meaning of the quantity remains hotly debated. While physicists puzzle over the correct interpretation of the entropy calculation, many view it as a new guidepost on the road to the fundamental, quantum nature of space and time.
“Somehow,” Gielen said, “it’s giving us a window into perhaps seeing the microstructure of space-time.”
Imaginary Paths
Turok and Boyle, frequent collaborators, are renowned for devising creative and unorthodox ideas about cosmology. Last year, to study how likely our universe may be, they turned to a technique developed in the ’40s by the physicist Richard Feynman.
Aiming to capture the probabilistic behavior of particles, Feynman imagined that a particle explores all possible routes linking start to finish: a straight line, a curve, a loop, ad infinitum. He devised a way to give each path a number related to its likelihood and add all the numbers up. This “path integral” technique became a powerful framework for predicting how any quantum system would most likely behave.
As soon as Feynman started publicizing the path integral, physicists spotted a curious connection with thermodynamics, the venerable science of temperature and energy. It was this bridge between quantum theory and thermodynamics that enabled Turok and Boyle’s calculation.
The South African physicist and cosmologist Neil Turok is a professor at the University of Edinburgh.Photograph: Gabriela Secara/Perimeter Institute
Astronomers have identified 3.32 billion celestial objects in the Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
The galactic panorama of stars, gas, dust and a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* was captured by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Dark Energy Camera on a 4-meter telescope. It’s housed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in northern Chile, which sits at an altitude of 7,200 feet, allowing for one of the clearest views of the night sky.
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“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said
Debra Fischer,
division director of astronomical sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come,” she said.
Gathering the latest batch of data from the project,known as the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, took over two years. It involved around 260 hours of observation with 21,000 exposures, resulting in more than 10 terabytes of data. Along with an earlier data release in 2017, the project has now covered 6.5% of the night sky.
Researchers pointed the telescope at a region of the Milky Way with “an extraordinarily high density of stars,” said
Andrew Saydjari,
a graduate student at Harvard University who worked on the project. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed,” he said.
Images released in the survey show part of the Milky Way’s spiral disk, where most of the stars and dust are located.
The team targeted a region of the Milky Way with ‘an extraordinarily high density of stars,’ a researcher said.
Photo:
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Onesmall portion of the broader panoramic image is entirely filled with celestial objects, illustrating the challenges researchers faced identifying individual stars due to the sheer number that overlap one another.
“By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust,”according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which is affiliated with the project.
The survey data was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
On April 19, 2021, a toaster oven-size helicopter named Ingenuity spun its rotors and rose 10 feet above the surface of Mars, becoming the first craft to perform a powered flight on a world beyond Earth. It won’t be the last.
Three more extraterrestrial fliers are already under development at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other space agencies, and many more uncrewed copters, hoppers and floating machines are on drawing boards. These aerial robots could survey the clouds of Venus, search for life on Saturn’s moon Titan and scout out resources for Mars astronauts who might arrive in the late 2030s.
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Those missions face daunting technological hurdles, says Theodore Tzanetos, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Flying on other worlds requires ultra-lightweight materials, autonomous navigation and adaptations to extreme temperatures and different atmospheres. “With larger flying vehicles things get more complicated,” Mr. Tzanetos says. “How do you get them there? How do you make them reliable?”
But if he and his fellow rocket scientists pull it off, we will soon be touring the solar system like never before.
“There are so many things you can do with aerial mobility that you can’t do with a lander or a rover,” says Geoff Landis, a physicist at NASA’s John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “If you want to do global exploration, from pole to equator, you need something capable of flying.”
NASA’s six-rotor Mars Science Helicopter, currently under study, could be used as an aerial scout carrying scientific instruments.
Photo:
NASA (Rendering)
NASA’s Ingenuity shattered expectations of what a helicopter can achieve on other planets. Conceived as a low-budget technology demonstration and scheduled to make just five flights, the tiny craft so far has taken to the Martian skies dozens of times. Ingenuity proved that miniaturized components and large, counter-rotating rotor blades make controlled flight possible in an atmosphere that is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Along the way, it has provided unprecedented aerial views of the red planet’s surface and supported NASA’s nearby Perseverance rover.
Ingenuity’s achievements led NASA to ditch plans to send a European Space Agency rover to Mars to transport soil samples cached by Perseverance so that they can be returned to Earth for analysis. The agency now says that in 2028 it will launch a pair of new Ingenuity-style fliers, each enhanced with four wheels and a grasping arm to help collect the samples.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter have been exploring the Red Planet since touching down in February 2021. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Working with colleagues at JPL as well as NASA’s Ames Research Center and the company
AeroVironment Inc.,
Mr. Tzanetos has also drawn up a concept for a larger copter with six rotors instead of Ingenuity’s two. The Mars Science Helicopter, as the craft is known, would be able to carry up to about 10 pounds of instruments.
Then there is Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered helicopter in development at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. In 2027, NASA plans to launch Dragonfly toward Titan, where the atmosphere is four times denser and the gravity seven times weaker than Earth’s. Under those conditions, a modest nudge from Dragonfly’s eight rotors should be enough to send the half-ton science lab soaring through the sky.
“Titan’s just calling out to be flown on,” says APL’s Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, a planetary scientist at APL and the principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission.
Plans call for Dragonfly to take to the air once a month for nearly three years, logging up to 10 miles per flight, to explore a landscape dotted with liquid methane lakes, ice boulders and dunes made of grains of tar. Each time it touches down in a new spot, the octocopter will use its suite of instruments to assess the local environment, seeking out carbon compounds of the sort that scientists believe might be precursors of life. If a location seems particularly interesting, Dragonfly will collect surface samples using a pair of drills.
“We want to understand the chemical steps occurring on Titan, ones that may be like the early chemical steps that occurred here on Earth” before the first living things appeared, Dr. Turtle says.
The other moons and small bodies of the solar system lack any significant atmosphere, meaning flight by winged craft is impossible there. Undaunted, aerospace engineers are coming up with flying machines designed for those worlds as well.
While a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021, Oliver Jia-Richards came up with a concept for a glider that would electrically charge the ground and repel itself against it, like two magnets pushing against each other. Now an aerospace engineer at the University of Michigan, Dr. Jia-Richards continues to test components for a levitating glider. He envisions a two-pound, saucer-shaped explorer that could cruise smoothly over rugged terrain in airless settings.
While at MIT, Oliver Jia-Richards came up with a concept for a space glider that would levitate by charging the ground below it.
Photo:
MIT (Rendering)
NASA’s Dr. Landis has conceptualized zero-atmosphere fliers that pack more punch, powered by bursts from a rocket engine. These “hoppers,” capable of covering dozens of miles at a time, might scavenge local resources so they wouldn’t need to carry propellant from Earth. On Pluto, for instance, “we could scoop up nitrogen snow, heat it up and use it to fuel our rocket,” Dr. Landis says.
Venus presents an opposite challenge for flying machines: an extremely dense atmosphere that crushes the surface with pressure equivalent to that 3,000 feet underwater on Earth. And ground temperatures on Venus hover around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. No helicopter, glider or hopper would last long there.
In July, a one-third scale prototype of a balloon probe for use on Venus was tested in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Photo:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The solution proposed by Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, is to build an altitude-adjustable balloon probe and park it 35 miles above the Venusian surface, where temperatures and pressures are surprisingly Earthlike. The so-called aerobot would feature a high-pressure chamber filled with helium to maintain buoyancy surrounded by a lower-pressure chamber that expands or contracts to change the craft’s altitude, dodging storms and avoiding the heat as needed.
Dr. Byrne has been collaborating with a team from the Jet Propulsion Lab and Near Space Corp. in Tillamook, Ore., to develop a one-third scale prototype of the aerobot. In July, it flew successfully over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Now Dr. Byrne is working on a proposal for a full-size version, which would resemble a huge silvery peanut, roughly 45 feet wide and 60 feet tall.
An aerobot could fly for months atop the Venusian clouds, engineers suggest, investigating one of the solar system’s greatest puzzles: Why did Venus turn hellish while Earth became lush, though the two planets are so similar in size and composition? Could the same fate lie ahead for our planet? “If it were to fly, we would rewrite the textbooks—for Venus, for Earth and for rocky planets in general,” Dr. Byrne says.
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MIT astronomer Sara Seager wonders if ancient life on Venus might have taken refuge in the clouds, and if it might still be there today. She has helped draw up plans for a mission to find out. It would send a rocket-equipped aerobot to Venus to collect samples of the clouds and return them to Earth for analysis.
A concept for a Venus airship to support a crew of two for 30 days and a permanent outpost that could operate miles above the surface.
Photo:
NASA (Rendering)
Then again, maybe the scientists will go there instead. Giant airships could enable crewed missions to Venus, Dr. Landis says. Looking further ahead, he can imagine aerial cities on the planet, with people living inside oxygen-filled habitats that float atop the dense atmosphere.
“You could do a settlement on Venus probably more easily than almost any other place in the solar system,” he says.
An artist’s concept of LUVOIR, a 15-meter telescope that was an early NASA concept for a future space telescope. The newly described Habitable Worlds Telescope wouldn’t be quite as large as this.
NASA officials disclosed information about a planned next-generation space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, during a recent session of the American Astronomical Society,
In the session, Mark Clampin, the Astrophysics Division Director NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, offered a few details about the telescope, which could be operational in the early 2040s.
The need for such an observatory is outlined in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s decadal survey on astronomy and astrophysics, a report assembled by hundreds of industry experts that serves as a reference document for the fields’ future goals.
One of the key findings of the most recent decadal survey was the necessity of finding habitable worlds beyond our own, using a telescope tailored specifically for such a purpose. The report suggested an $11 billion observatory—one with a 6-meter telescope that would take in light at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths. (Hubble Space Telescope sees mostly in optical and ultraviolet light, while the more recently launched Webb Space Telescope images at mid-infrared and near-infrared wavelengths.)
The authors of the decadal survey suggested the Habitable Worlds Observatory as the first in a new Great Observatories program; basically, the linchpin in the next generation of 21st-century space telescopes. As Science reported, the decadal report’s suggestion of an exoplanet-focused space telescope falls somewhere between two older NASA proposals, telescope concepts named HabEx and LUVOIR.
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Exoplanets are found with regularity; it’s finding worlds with conditions that can host life as we know it that’s tricky. Webb has spotted exoplanets and deduced aspects of their atmospheric chemistry, and other telescopes (even planned ones, like the Roman Space Telescope) are turning their gaze toward these alien worlds.
Unlike other telescopes—both operational and those still on the drawing board—the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory would look specifically for so-called Goldilocks planets, worlds with conditions that could foster life.
The search for extraterrestrial life is a relentless goal of NASA. The Perseverance rover on Mars is collecting rock samples on Mars to learn, among other things, whether there’s any evidence for ancient microbial life in a region of the planet that once was a flowing river delta. (An environment, it’s important to note, that scientists believe was similar to that where Earth’s first known life materialized.)
Beyond Mars, scientists harbor hope that future probes can poke around for signs of life in the subsurface ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa or the methane sea on Saturn’s moon Titan.
But those are just venues—and hostile ones, compared to Earth—within our solar system. Missions like TESS and the Kepler Space Telescope have detected thousands of exoplanets, but the fraction that are Earth-like is vanishingly small.
Like the Webb telescope, the future observatory will be located at L2, a region of space one million miles from Earth that allows objects to remain in position with relatively little fuel burn. (By saving fuel, the missions’ lifespans are prolonged.)
As reported by Science, Clampin said that the Habitable Worlds Observatory would be designed for maintenance and upgrades, which Webb is not. That could make the next observatory a more permanent presence in NASA’s menagerie of space telescopes.
Hubble was famously serviced by humans in low-Earth orbit multiple times, due to a number of mechanical snafus and issues that have arisen over the telescope’s 32-year tenure in space.
The Habitable Worlds Observatory repairs and upgrades (which would take place a million miles from Earth—a little far for human repairs) would be done robotically, more in the style of a Star Wars droid than a hand from the IT department.
Space News reported that NASA will imminently begin seeking out nominations for people to join the Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START) for the new observatory. The first phase of the observatory’s development is slated for 2029.
In November, Clampin told a House subcommittee that the Webb telescope had suffered 14 strikes from micrometeoroids—very small bits of fast-traveling space rock that can damage the telescope’s mirrors. Clampin said the NASA team was “making some operational changes to make sure we avoid any future impacts,” and the telescope was slightly repositioned to reduce the risk of future strikes.
One of the telescope’s mirror segments was damaged by a micrometeoroid strike, but an analysis by the team found the telescope “should meet its optical performance requirements for many years.”
Of paramount importance to the astronomical community is that the budget and timeline of the new observatory stay on track. The Webb project was years late and way over budget. Space News reports that some scientists are calling for an expedited timeline that could see the Habitable Worlds Observatory launch by 2035.
The ball is well and truly rolling on the telescopes of the future. The question is how Sisyphean the roll of the ball will be.
More: Webb Telescope Spots Ancient Galaxy Built Like the Milky Way
The TitanAir concept for exploring Saturn’s moon Titan. Illustration: Quinn Morley
The future of space exploration requires big ideas, and NASA has no objection to considering some of the biggest ideas out there. The space agency’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program exists for this very purpose, and it has chosen the next crop of concepts worthy of an initial study.
The latest round of NIAC grants were awarded to 14 research teams, each receiving $175,000 to further develop their concepts, NASA announced yesterday. Of the 14, 10 are first-time NIAC recipients. These are all preliminary Phase I studies, which need to be completed within nine months.
“These initial Phase I NIAC studies help NASA determine whether these futuristic ideas could set the stage for future space exploration capabilities and enable amazing new missions,” Michael LaPointe, program executive for NIAC, said in the statement.
Success in Phase I could see some of these concepts move to Phase II, in which the researchers are granted more funding and two more years to further develop their ambitious schemes. Only a select few make it to third base: Phase III.
NIAC grants typically cover a wide spectrum of space-based interests, and the selections for this year are no different. NASA strikes a balance between Earth and space science, space exploration, and, of particular importance to the space agency, the furthering of its Artemis agenda, under which NASA is seeking a sustainable and prolonged return to the Moon.
Fly AirTitan
Among the more eye-catching concepts is the AirTitan project envisioned by planetary scientist Quinn Morley of Planet Enterprises. Various concepts for exploring Saturn’s moon Titan have been proposed before, and NASA is already in the midst of preparing the Dragonfly mission, but Morley’s idea is discernibly next level. The autonomous AirTitan vehicle would be just as comfortable flying in Titan’s thick atmosphere as it would be sailing on its methane lakes.
Artist’s concept of a lake at the north pole of Saturn’s moon Titan.Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Morley envisions daily flights for AirTitan, as it seamlessly transitions from watercraft (er, methanecraft?) to aircraft. In addition to sampling Titan’s complex atmosphere, the probe would collect and analyze liquid samples. Indeed, Titan is of significant astrobiological interest, as it may host prebiotic organic chemistry. That said, the thick oily lakes could present a problem, but an inflatable wing liner could “offer resiliency and mitigate sludge buildup problems,” according to Morley.
Satellite megaconstellations for astronomy
NASA is also interested in the Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (GO-LoW) concept proposed by Mary Knapp from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This space-based observatory would consist of thousands of identical satellites working at the fifth Earth-Sun Lagrange point (L5). By hunting for radio emissions at frequencies between 100 kHz and 15 MHz, the satellite array could study the magnetic fields of distant exoplanets and detect rocky exoplanets similar to our own.
Depiction of Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (GO-LoW) with low-frequency vector sensors.Graphic: Mary Knapp
The “fail fast, fail cheap approach is a drastic departure from traditional practices,” Knapp writes, adding that “SpaceX and other new entrants to the launch vehicle market have pushed the market to lower and lower costs, through manufacturing innovations and the economics of scale behind mega-constellations.”
Pellet-beam propulsion
NASA wants Artur Davoyan from the University of California, Los Angeles, to further develop his pellet-beam propulsion system concept, which the mechanical and aerospace engineer envisions as means for transporting heavy spacecraft to targets across the solar system and even into interstellar space. The proposed propulsion system would employ a pellet beam—a beam of microscopic hypervelocity particles propelled by lasers—to push spacecraft to desired locations. Unlike other concepts, the pellet beam allows for the transport of heavy spacecraft, which Davoyan says “substantially increases the scope of possible missions.”
Depiction of Pellet-Beam Propulsion for Breakthrough Space Exploration Graphic: Artur Davoyan
Pellet-beam propulsion could take payloads to the outer planets in less than a year and to distances farther than 100 times the Earth-Sun distance (au) in about three years, he claims. For the current study, Davoyan will consider the efficacy of using the pellet-beam to transport a 1-ton payload to 500 au in less than 20 years. For reference, Pluto is “just” 35.6 au from Earth, while NASA’s Voyager 2, which launched 45 years ago, is now roughly 133 au from Earth.
An oxygen pipeline at the lunar south pole
A key priority for NASA’s Artemis program is to maintain a sustainable presence on the Moon, a challenge that the space agency could overcome by using on-site resources, such as extracting oxygen from the lunar regolith (soil) and water-ice. Peter Curreri from Lunar Resources in Houston agrees, but he’s not a fan of NASA’s current plan, as he explains:
Current funded efforts for in-situ [on-site] oxygen extraction consists of bottling the oxygen in compressed gas tanks or to liquefy and store it in dewars. Either approach requires trucking tanks or dewars to various facilities for use. The process of moving this oxygen on rovers is more energy intensive than the extraction process and is thought to be the MOST expensive aspect in obtaining in-situ oxygen for use on the Moon considering the long distances a resource extraction area will be from a human habitat or liquification plant.
Instead, Curreri proposes a lunar pipeline, which would be built at the lunar south pole, as that’s where most of the Moon’s water-ice is located. The concept attracted NASA’s attention, resulting in the Phase I research grant.
Depiction of the Lunar South Pole Oxygen Pipeline.Image: Peter Curreri
The pipelines would provide settlers with constant access to precious oxygen, while also linking scattered settlements. “A lunar pipeline has never been pursued and will revolutionize lunar surface operations for the Artemis program and reduce cost and risk,” Curreri says.
Growing bricks on Mars
NASA also has its sights set on Mars, so it wants Congrui Grace Jin, an engineer from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, to flesh out her idea for growing bricks on Mars, as opposed to importing them from Earth. Indeed, settlers will need to build structures on Mars, but that would require the launching of materials on separate missions, adding to costs. More practically, Jin’s research “proposes that, rather than shipping prefabricated outfitting elements to Mars, habitat outfitting can be realized by in-situ construction using cyanobacteria and fungi as building agents.”
These microbes would be coaxed into generating biominerals and polymers for gluing the Martian regolith into building blocks. “These self-growing building blocks can later be assembled into various structures, such as floors, walls, partitions, and furniture,” Jin writes.
These are only a few of the 14 concepts chosen by NASA for this year’s NIAC grant. You can learn more about the other research proposals here. And to be clear, these concepts haven’t been approved as actual projects—they all still need to pass NASA’s sniff test. Some and possibly all of these ideas may die on the vine, but these sorts of speculations are always worthwhile and a sneak preview to what may eventually be possible.
Scientists just announced that they’ve detected what might be some of the earliest galaxies to form in the universe, a tantalizing discovery made thanks to NASA’s new flagship James Webb Space Telescope.
“This is the first large sample of candidate galaxies beyond the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope,” astronomer Haojing Yan said yesterday at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. Yan, who is at the University of Missouri, led the newly published study. Because the more sensitive JWST can see further into deep space than its predecessor Hubble does, it essentially sees further back in time. In the new catalog of 87 galaxies astronomers have spotted using it, some could date back to about 13.6 billion years ago, just 200 million years after the Big Bang. That’s when the galaxies emitted the light that we’re seeing today—although those systems of stars, gas, and dust would have changed dramatically since then, if they still exist at all.
While scientists have studied other faraway galaxies that date back to when the universe was still young, the discoveries by Yan and his colleagues could break those records by a few hundred million years or so. But at this point, they are all still considered “candidate galaxies,” which means that their birthdates still need confirmation.
Dating a galaxy can be a challenging matter: It involves measuring its “redshift,” how much the light it emits is stretched toward longer red wavelengths, which tells astronomers how fast the galaxy is moving away from us in the quickly expanding universe. That, in turn, tells astronomers the galaxy’s distance from Earth—or more exactly, the distance that the photons from its stars had to travel at the speed of light before reaching a space telescope near the Earth, like JWST. Light from stars in the most distant galaxy in this collection may have been emitted 13.6 billion years ago, likely fairly soon after the young galaxy came together.
These newly estimated distances will have to be confirmed with spectra, which means measuring the light the galaxies emit across the electromagnetic spectrum and pinpointing its unique signatures. Still, Yan expects many of them to be correctly dated to the early days of the cosmos: “I’ll bet $20 and a tall beer that the success rate will be higher than 50 percent,” he said.
Yan’s team imaged these galaxies with JWST’s NIRCam at six near-infrared wavelengths. To estimate their distances, the astronomers used a standard “dropout” technique: Hydrogen gas surrounding galaxies absorbs light at a particular wavelength, so the wavelengths at which an object can or can’t be seen puts a limit on how far away it is likely to be. These 87 candidate galaxies mostly look like blobs that can only be detected in the longer (and therefore redder) near-infrared wavelengths detectable by NIRCam, which could mean they’re very distant, and therefore very old.
However, it’s possible that some of them could be much closer than expected—which would mean they aren’t so old after all. For example, it could be that their light is just too faint to be detected at some wavelengths. Until Yan can collect more detailed data, he won’t know for sure.
A bright green comet will appear in the night skies above Earth, visible for the first time in 50,000 years.
The recently discovered comet, which was given the catchy name C/2022 E3 (ZTF), will soar its closest to the sun on Jan. 12, and will become visible in the Northern Hemisphere in the morning sky.
In Australia, though, it will become visible from early February as it makes its closest pass by Earth on Feb. 2 when it will be a mere 42 million kilometers away.
Comets can be distinguished from stars by their streaking tails of dust and energized particles – which will cause this one to glow bright green. The glow is caused by an envelope that firms around the comet as it passed by the sun and its icy exterior instantly turns into gas.
The comet will soar its closest to the sun on Thursday.Getty Images
Discovered in March last year by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility’s wide-field survey camera in southern California, the comet passes by the far outer reaches of the solar system each time it orbits the sun – which is why it’s taken so long to swing by Earth once more.
It last made its appearance over our blue planet about 50,000 years ago, when a mere two million humans roamed and our ancestors the Neanderthals were not yet extinct.
According to NASA, the comet – though notoriously unpredictable – has been steadily brightening as it approaches the sun, and should be easy to spot with binoculars.
If we’re lucky, it may even become visible to the naked eye in dark skies, NASA said.
