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New Moons Found at Uranus and Neptune

Astronomers have found three new moons orbiting our Solar System’s ice giants. One is orbiting Uranus, and two are orbiting Neptune. It took hard work to find them, including dozens of time exposures by some of our most powerful telescopes over several years. All three are captured objects, and there are likely more moons around both planets waiting to be discovered.

This is the first new moon found around Uranus in 20 years and brings the planet’s total to 28. One of the new moons around Neptune is the smallest ever detected with a ground-based telescope, and the pair of new discoveries bring Neptune’s total to 16.

Uranus’ new moon has the provisional title S/2023 U1 and was first observed on November 4, 2023, by Scott Sheppard from Carnegie Science. Like the planet’s other outer satellites, it will eventually be given a name from a Shakespeare play. Other moon names include Oberon, Titania, and Ariel. S/2023 U1 is only 8 km in diameter, tiny compared to the ice giant’s largest moon, Titania, which is almost 800 km. The tiny moon takes 680 days to orbit Uranus.

It’s time to add one more moon to Uranus’ tally. Tiny S/2023 U1 is the ice giant’s 28th moon. Image Credit: Canadian Space Agency.

Neptune’s pair of new moons are likewise tiny. The brightest one has the provisional name S/2002 N5, is about 23 km in diameter, and takes nearly nine years to orbit Neptune. The fainter one has the provisional name S/2021 N1, is about 14 km in diameter, and takes almost 27 years to orbit the planet. They’ll both be given names from Greek mythology.

The newly discovered pair of tiny moons means Neptune now has 16 moons. All of the new moons are likely fragments from collisions that broke much larger moons apart early in the Solar System’s history. Image Credit: Canadian Space Agency.

All of the easy-to-observe moons were found long ago. These small moons required much more work. While Scott Sheppard played a leading role, he had a lot of help.

The newly discovered pair of tiny moons means Neptune now has 16 moons. All of the new moons are likely fragments from collisions that broke much larger moons apart early in the Solar System's history. Image Credit: Canadian Space Agency.
The VLT is a grouping of eight separate telescopes and is one of our most powerful observatories. It includes four 8-meter telescopes that made a critical contribution to the discovery of the new moons. Image Credit: ESO
The Gemini Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii, features a pair of 8.1-meter telescopes. This image shows the Gemini North Telescope. Image Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA
The new moons, along with others orbiting the giant planets, are likely fragments of larger parent moons destroyed by collisions in the Solar System's early, chaotic days. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Some Intelligent Civilizations Will Be Trapped on their Worlds

Evolution has produced a wondrously diverse variety of lifeforms here on Earth. It just so happens that talking primates with opposable thumbs rose to the top and are building a spacefaring civilization. And we’re land-dwellers. But what about other planets? If the dominant species on an ocean world builds a technological civilization of some sort, would they be able to escape their ocean home and explore space?

A new article in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society examines the idea of civilizations on other worlds and the factors that govern their ability to explore their solar systems. Its title is “Introducing the Exoplanet Escape Factor and the Fishbowl Worlds (Two conceptual tools for the search of extra-terrestrial civilizations).” The sole author is Elio Quiroga, a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico Medio in Spain.

We have no way of knowing if other Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETIs) exist or not. There’s at least some possibility that other civilizations exist, and we’re certainly in no position to say for sure that they don’t. The Drake Equation is one of the tools we use to talk about the existence of ETIs. It’s a kind of structured thought experiment in the form of an equation that allows us to estimate the existence of other active, communicative ETIs. Some of the variables in the Drake Equation (DE) are the star formation rate, the number of planets around those stars, and the fraction of planets that could form life and on which life could evolve to become an ETI.

In his new research article, Quiroga comes up with two new concepts that feed into the DE: the Exoplanet Escape Factor and Fishbowl worlds.

Planets of different masses have different escape velocities. Earth’s escape velocity is 11.2 km/s (kilometres per second), which is more than 40,000 km/h. The escape velocity is for ballistic objects without propulsion, so our rockets don’t actually travel 40,000 km/h. But the escape velocity is useful for comparing different planets because it’s independent of the vehicle used and its propulsion.

This figure from the research shows how easy or difficult it would be to reach space from some known exoplanets. Green indicates that escape is possible, orange indicates likely problems, and red indicates the practical impossibility of space travel. Image Credit: Quiroga 2024.
Artist's impression of the surface of a "Hycean" world. According to Quiroga, if a civilization arose on an ocean world, it could end up being a Fishbowl World where the inhabitants have no chance of ever exploring space. Image Credit: University of Cambridge
Jupiter's moon, Europa, has a warm ocean under a thick icy shell. Are there other worlds out there like Europa? What would it be like for intelligent creatures that lived in a world like this? They would never see the stars in the sky, their own stars, or any other planets in their solar systems. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Galileo spacecraft)
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China Names its Capsule and Lander for its Upcoming Human Lunar Missions

In a recent announcement, the Chinese Space Agency (CSA) unveiled the names for its forthcoming lunar mission components. The CSA have been working towards sending humans to the Moon through a series of robotic missions. The 22-tonne capsule that is taking the astronauts to the Moon is called Mengzhuo (translates to ‘dream vessel’) and the lander has been named Lanyue (meaning ‘embracing the Moon’). Assuming all goes to plan, they will send two humans and a rover to the surface of the Moon by 2030.

Despite the fact that the CSA have not published a date for the mission yet, if all goes well then they will become the second country to get humans to the lunar surface. The capsules will launch to the Moon atop their new super-heavy-lift carrier rocket named Long March 10.

According to Chinese state media, the Mengzhou spacecraft will include the re-entry module designed to house the astronauts and will also function as a control centre. In addition to this, there will be the service module that is home to power and propulsion systems.  Overall, Mengzhou will be 9 metres long and weigh in at 22 tons. 

In an attempt to get the public involved in the mission, the names of the craft were picked by a group of experts from nearly 2,000 ideas put forward by the public. The names have history too. ‘Lanyue’ first appeared in a poem written by Mao Zedong (the founder of People’s Republic of China) in 1965. It symbolises the Chinese aspirations and confidences in their exploration of the Universe. The name ‘Mengzhou’ is linked to the Chinese nations dream of landing on the Moon. 

That same dream is shared by President Xi Jinping with the goal of revitalising the nation and establishing itself as a prominent technological country. The aspirations for lunar exploration are on par with many other countries that wish to enhance their space capability.  Doing so may yield scientific discoveries, national prestige and opportunities for identifying resource supplies to facilitate deeper space exploration. 

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If Exoplanets Have Lightning, it’ll Complicate the Search for Life

Discovering exoplanets is almost routine now. We’ve found over 5,500 exoplanets, and the next step is to study their atmospheres and look for biosignatures. The James Webb Space Telescope is leading the way in that effort. But in some exoplanet atmospheres, lightning could make the JWST’s job more difficult by obscuring some potential biosignatures while amplifying others.

Detecting biosignatures in the atmospheres of distant planets is fraught with difficulties. They don’t advertise their presence, and the signals we receive from exoplanet atmospheres are complicated. New research adds another complication to the effort. It says that lightning can mask the presence of things like ozone, an indication that complex life could exist on a planet. It can also amplify the presence of compounds like methane, which is considered to be a promising biosignature.

The new research is “The effect of lightning on the atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets and potential biosignatures,” and it’s been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lead author is Patrick Barth, a researcher from the Space Research Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

While we’ve discovered over 5,500 exoplanets, only 69 of them are in the potentially habitable zones around their stars. They’re rocky planets that receive enough energy from their stars to potentially maintain liquid water on their surfaces. Our search for biosignatures is focused on this small number of planets.

This is an artist’s illustration of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1d, a potentially habitable exoplanet about 40 light-years away. Planets like these are prime targets for JWST’s spectrometry. Image Credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech – Cropped from: PIA22093: TRAPPIST-1 Planet Lineup – Updated Feb. 2018, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76364484

The important next step is to determine if these planets have atmospheres and then what the composition of those atmospheres is. The JWST is our most powerful instrument for these purposes. But in order to understand what the JWST shows us in distant atmospheres, we have to know what its signals tell us. Research like this helps scientists prepare for the JWST’s observations by alerting them to potential false positives and masked biosignatures.

This JWST spectra isn't part of this research, but it shows how the powerful space telescope can examine exoplanet atmospheres. It's a transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-39 b, captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec.) It reveals the first definitive evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System. In the future, the JWST will bring its observation power to bear on more exoplanets as part of the search for biosignatures. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and L. Hustak (STScI). Science: The JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Team
This photograph shows a lightning storm striking a rural area. Here on Earth, lightning produces ozone and may also have been the energetic trigger that got life going. Credit: noaanews.noaa.gov
This image was taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station and shows lightning striking Iran.  This research shows that the rate of lightning can both obscure and produce biosignatures in different atmospheric conditions. Image Credit: ESA/NASA
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Electrodes in Spacesuits Could Protect Astronauts from Harmful Dust on Mars

To quote NASA associate administrator Jim Reuter, sending crewed missions to Mars by 2040 is an “audacious goal.” The challenges include the distance involved, which can take up to six months to traverse using conventional propulsion methods. Then there’s the hazard posed by radiation, which includes increased exposure to solar particles, flares, and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). And then there’s the time the crews will spend in microgravity during transits, which can take a serious toll on human health, physiology, and psychology.

But what about the challenges of living and working on Mars for several months at a time? While elevated radiation and lower gravity are a concern, so is Martian regolith. Like lunar regolith, dust on Mars will adhere to astronauts’ spacesuits and inflict wear on their equipment. However, it also contains harmful particles that must be removed to prevent contaminating habitats. In a recent study, a team of aerospace engineers tested a new electrostatic system for removing Martian regolith from spacesuits that could potentially remove harmful dust with up to 98% efficiency.

The new system was designed by Benjamin M. Griggs and Lucinda Berthoud, a Master’s engineering student and Professor of Space Systems Engineering (respectively) with the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Bristol, UK. The paper that describes the system and the verification process recently appeared in the journal Acta Astronautica. As they explain, the Electrostatic Removal System (ERS) they propose utilizes the phenomenon of dielectrophoresis (DEP) to remove Martian dust from spacesuit fabrics.

Dust flies from the tires of a moon buggy, driven by Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. These “rooster-tails” of dust caused problems. Credit: NASA

Much like its lunar counterpart, Martian regolith is expected to be electrostatically charged due to exposure to cosmic radiation. But on Mars, there’s also the contribution made by dust devils and storms, which have been known to generate electrostatic discharges (aka. lightning). During the Apollo missions, astronauts reported how the lunar regolith would adhere to their suits and get tracked back into their Lunar Modules. Once inside, it would similarly stick to everything and get into their eyes and lungs, causing irritation and respiratory problems.



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Odysseus Moon Lander Sends More Pictures — and We Know Where It Is

Four days after Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander made an off-kilter touchdown on the moon, the mission team is releasing snapshots that were taken during its descent.

The ultra-wide-angle images confirm that the lander is continuing to communicate with flight controllers, even though it’s lying in an awkward angle that limits how much data its antennas can transmit.

Meanwhile, images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have identified Odysseus’ landing spot, within a mile (1.5 kilometers) of its intended target near a crater called Malapert A in the moon’s south polar region. The bad news is that the solar-powered lander may have to go dark sooner than anticipated.

This low-resolution, ultra-wide-angle image from the Odysseus lander shows the lunar terrain with a scrunched view of the lander itself off to the right side of the frame. (Credit: Intuitive Machines)

The lander is the first-ever commercial spacecraft to survive a descent to the moon, and the first U.S-built spacecraft to do so since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972. NASA is paying Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six science payloads to the surface, and there are another six private-sector payloads on board.

Odysseus’ descent wasn’t easy: Just hours before the landing, the Nova Control team had to reprogram the lander to work around a disabled laser range-finding system. The spacecraft instead made use of one of the NASA payloads, an experimental laser range-finding system. Fortunately, the work-around worked.


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Astronomers Discover a New Meteor Shower. The Source is Comet 46P/Wirtanen

Like many of you, I love a good meteor shower. I have fond memories of the Leonid meteor storm back in 1999 when several hundred per hour were seen at peak. Sadly meteor storms are not that common unlike meteor showers of which, there are about 20 major showers per year. Wait, there’s another one and this time it comes from the debris left behind from Comet 46P/Wirtanen with an expected peak on December 12. Last year, 23 meteors were seen on that night that matched the location of the comets trail. 

Comets (and some asteroids) leave a trail of debris behind them like a trail of celestial breadcrumbs. If the orbit of a comet crosses the orbit of the Earth then the particles from the debris (that are often no larger than grains of sand) collide with our atmosphere. At the immense speeds (of the order of 60 km per second, the particles falling through the atmosphere cause the gas to glow giving rise to the classic shooting star we see in the sky. Because the orbits of Earth and comets are relatively fixed, this process repeats itself every time we go through the same part of the orbit giving us the familiar annual meteor showers. 

One such comet that it seems may become host to a new annual shower is Comet 46P/Wirtanen (46P). It nearly hit the headlines previously when it had been initially selected as the target for the Rosetta mission which, as you may recall, visited 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko instead.  46P is known as a short period comet taking 5.4 years to complete one orbit of the Sun. It is among the family of comets known as a Jupiter comet which has a most distant point from the Sun of between 5 and 6 astronomical units (1 AU is the average distance between the Sun and Earth). Observations have suggested it has a diameter of about 1.4km. 

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from Rosetta mission (Credit – NASA)

Due to the high levels of ice present in comets, it’s not unusual for active areas on their surface to appear as the ices sublimate into gasses or pockets of gas escape. Observations using the TRAPPIST telescope (The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope) suggest 40% of the surface is active which is higher than the usual 5-10% for Jupiter family comets. A recent study found the presence of mm sized dust particles in the comet’s coma which should be visible upon entering Earth’s atmosphere. 

The orbit of 46P has a very low minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) to Earth of just 0.071AU. The MOID between two objects that orbit a common point is the distance between the closest points of their orbits. The low MOID and the mm sized particles mean there is a high liklihood it could be the source of a meteor shower. Previous observations however have revealed no positive confirmation of peaks in 2017 and 2019.

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Surprise! Japan’s SLIM Moon Lander Wakes Up After a Freezing Night

Japan’s space agency didn’t expect its wrong-side-up SLIM moon lander to revive itself after powering down for a circuit-chilling lunar night on Feb. 1. But that’s exactly what happened.

“Last night, a command was sent to SLIM and a response received, confirming that the spacecraft has made it through the lunar night and maintained communication capabilities!” the SLIM mission team reported today in a posting to X / Twitter.

This wasn’t SLIM’s first resurrection: The boxy spacecraft touched down and tumbled onto its side on Jan. 19-20, settling in a position where its solar arrays couldn’t charge up its batteries. To conserve power, mission managers put the probe into hibernation and waited for the sun’s rays to hit the panels at a more favorable angle.

The team was able to revive the lander and get a few days’ worth of science data before putting it back into hibernation. Mission managers thought that might have been the end. During the 14-day lunar night, surface temperatures were expected to fall to about 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-130 degrees Celsius) — a deep-freeze that was colder than what SLIM was designed to endure.

The lunar night ended days ago. After giving SLIM’s solar panels a chance to charge up the batteries again, the team at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency decided to check in — and got the good news. The circuitry is warm again. Actually, it’s hot: SLIM’s team members said that when the lander resumed contact, some of its equipment was hotter than 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius). That’s too hot for their liking.

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Titan Probably Doesn’t Have the Amino Acids Needed for Life to Emerge

Does Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, possess the necessary ingredients for life to exist? This is what a recent study published in Astrobiology hopes to address as a team of international researchers led by Western University investigated if Titan, with its lakes of liquid methane and ethane, could possess the necessary organic materials, such as amino acids, that could be used to produce life on the small moon. This study holds the potential to help researchers and the public better understand the geochemical and biological processes necessary for life to emerge throughout the cosmos.

Along with its liquid lakes of methane and ethane, Titan is also strongly hypothesized to possess a subsurface liquid water ocean like Saturn’s icy moon, Enceladus, and Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. For the study, the researchers used data from impact cratering from comets to estimate the number of organic molecules that could relocate from Titan’s surface to its subsurface liquid water ocean. The team hypothesized that when comets strike Titan’s surface, their icy materials would melt from the heat of the impact and mix with the surface organics, resulting in a unique mixture. However, the heavier liquid water would then sink to the subsurface, slowly filling the subsurface ocean over time.

Artist’s cutaway illustration displaying Titan’s subsurface ocean (blue). (Credit: NASA/JPL)

After accounting for a presumed annual number of cometary impacts on Titan’s surface throughout its billions of years of existence, the researchers then calculated how much water would make its way from the surface to the subsurface ocean. In the end, the team concluded that the amount of glycine, which is the most basic amino acid that forms the proteins to create life, was measured at no greater than 7,500 kilograms/year (16,530 pounds/year). This amount approximately equals the size of a smaller African forest elephant, hence indicating number of organic materials that exist on Titan is quite miniscule.

“One elephant per year of glycine into an ocean 12 times the volume of Earth’s oceans is not sufficient to sustain life,” said Dr. Catherine Neish, who is an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Western University and lead author of the study. “In the past, people often assumed that water equals life, but they neglected the fact that life needs other elements, in particular carbon.”

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What Kinds of Astronomy Could Be Done With a Telescope on the Moon?

For decades, astronomers have said that one of the most optimal places to build large telescopes is on the surface of the Moon. The Moon has several advantages over Earth- and space-based telescopes that make it worth considering as a future home for giant observatories. A new paper lists all the advantages, including how telescopes on the lunar surface wouldn’t be blocked by an atmosphere or impacted by wind, and how the low gravity would allow gigantic structures to be built that could be upgraded over time by astronauts.

“Progress on the big questions in astronomy, such as life on certain exoplanets or dark matter, will ultimately require high angular resolution, a large collecting area and access to the full optical spectrum,” write French astronomers Jean Schneider, Pierre Kervella, and Antoine Labeyrie. “All astronomy will benefit from the advantages provided by the localization on the Moon.”  

And even though it might be decades before we have a permanent presence on the Moon, the astronomers suggest we should start with small telescopes now.

Graphic depiction of A Lunar Long-Baseline Optical Imaging Interferometer: Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager (AeSI). Credit: Kenneth Carpenter

Over the years, scientists and engineers have proposed various ideas for lunar observatories as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. Back in 2005 there was a proposal for a deep-field infrared observatory near one of the lunar poles using a rotating liquid mirror. Earlier this year, a team from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center proposed a design for a lunar Long-Baseline Optical Imaging Interferometer (LBI) for imaging at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. Additionally, astronomers have advocated building radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon, since this “radio-quiet” zone always faces away from Earth and would provide the perfect location to study a variety of astronomical phenomena that can’t be observed in low radio frequencies from our planet, or even by Earth-orbiting space telescopes.

In their new paper, Schneider, Kervella and Labeyrie say that Moon offers a combination of three distinct advantages for astronomical observing. Its lack of atmosphere allows access to the entire spectrum, including the visible, ultraviolet, and infrared. Astronomers wouldn’t have to deal with atmospheric turbulence, and the Moon’s low gravity and absence of wind make it possible to install extremely large telescopes with very large instruments. This is impossible for satellites in orbit. Additionally, telescopes on the Moon would allow for the instruments to be upgraded and to have a very long lifetime, which is impractical for space satellites due to their limited amount of fuel.


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The Kuiper Belt is Much Bigger Than We Thought

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is just over 8.8 billion km away, exploring the Kuiper Belt. This icy belt surrounds the Sun but it seems to have a surprise up its sleeve. It was expected that New Horizons would be leaving the region by now but it seems that it has detected elevated levels of dust that are thought to be from micrometeorite impacts within the belt. It suggests perhaps that the Kuiper Belt may stretch further from the Sun than we thought! 

The Kuiper Belt is found beyond the orbit of Neptune and is thought to extend out to around 8 billion km. Its existence was first proposed in the mid-20th century by Gerard Kuiper after whom the belt has been named.  It’s home to numerous icy bodies and dwarf planets and offers valuable insight into the formation and evolution of the Solar System. 

Launched by NASA in January 2006 atop an Atlas V rocket, the New Horizon’s spacecraft embarked on its mission to explore the outer Solar System. The primary objective was to perform a close flyby of Pluto, which it did 9.5 years after it launched, and continue on to explore the Kuiper Belt.

New Horizons completed its flyby of Pluto in 2015, and has been travelling through the Kuiper Belt since. As it travels through the outer reachers of the region, almost 60 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, its Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (SDC) has been counting dust levels. The instrument was constructed by students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Throughout New Horizon’s journey, SDC has been monitoring dust levels giving fabulous insight into collision rates among objects in the outer Solar System. 

The New Horizons instrument payload that is currently doing planetary science, heliospheric measurements, and astrophysical observations. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The dust particle detections announced in a recent paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by lead author Alex Doner are thought to be frozen remains from collisions between larger Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The results were a real surprise and challenged the existing models that predicted a decline in dust density and KBO population. It seems that the belt extends many billions of miles beyond the current estimates or maybe even that there is a second belt! 

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A Planetary Disk in the Orion Nebula is Destroying and Replenishing Oceans of Water Every Month

Planet-forming disks are places of chaotic activity. Not only do planetesimals slam together to form larger worlds, but it now appears that the process involves the destructive recycling of water within a disk. That’s the conclusion from scientists studying JWST data from a planetary birth crèche called d203-506 in the Orion Nebula.

The data they studied suggest that an amount of water equivalent to all of Earth’s oceans is created and replenished in a relatively short period—about a month. According to study co-lead Els Peeters at Western University in Canada, it was relatively easy to discover this process in the protoplanetary disk. “This discovery was based on a tiny fraction of our spectroscopic data,” she said. “It is exciting that we have so much more data to mine and I can’t wait to see what else we can find.”

The Orion Nebula is a vast active star- and planet-forming region and the d203-506 protoplanetary disk lies within it at a distance of about 1,350 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers study the nebula to understand all aspects of star birth since there are so many newborn stars there. In addition, many are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, called protoplanetary disks (proplyds, for short). Those regions are excellent places to observe planet-formation processes, and particularly the interplay between the young stars and their disks.

The Orion Nebula is one of the most studied objects in the sky. Many of its protostars and their planetary disks likely contain water in some form. Image: NASA

We all know that water is an important ingredient for life. It certainly played a role in creating and sustaining life on our planet. As it turns out, water is a significant fraction of the materials in a proplyd. In the infant Solar System, water existed throughout our proplyd long before any of the planets formed, largely in their icy form, either as icy bodies or locked into asteroids and planetesimals. It also exists in interstellar space.

This view of Earth’s horizon was taken by an Expedition 7 crewmember onboard the International Space Station, using a wide-angle lens while the Station was over the Pacific Ocean. A new study suggests that Earth's water didn't all come from comets, but likely also came from water-rich planetesimals.  Credit: NASA
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Brrr. JWST Looks at the Coldest Brown Dwarf

What are the atmospheric compositions of cold brown dwarf stars? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to investigate the coldest known brown dwarf star, WISE J085510.83?071442.5 (WISE 0855). This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the compositions of brown dwarf stars, which are also known as “failed stars” since while they form like other stars, they fail to reach the necessary mass to produce nuclear fusion. So, what was the motivation behind using JWST to examine the coldest known brown dwarf star?

“The coldest brown dwarfs are brightest at infrared wavelengths and extremely faint and difficult to observe at visible wavelengths, so they are very well suited for JWST,” Dr. Kevin Luhman, who is a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University and lead author of the study, tells Universe Today. “The target of our paper, WISE 0855, is one of the most appealing targets of any kind for JWST because it is the coldest brown dwarf and is very close to our solar system (the fourth closest system). It is such an obvious object to observe with JWST that it was selected (by multiple teams) for guaranteed time observations with all of the instruments on JWST.”

Dr. Luhman was responsible for discovering WISE 0855, which is located approximately 7.43 light-years from Earth, announcing his findings in a 2014 paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. He concluded that WISE 0855 exhibited a surface temperature of approximately 250 Kelvin (K), henceforth dubbing WISE 0855 as the coldest known brown dwarf star. For context, our Sun’s surface temperature is just under 5800 K, making WISE 0855’s surface temperature less than 5 percent of our Sun. Additionally, Dr. Luhman is responsible for discovering the third closest system, Luhman 16, which is a binary brown dwarf system located approximately 6.5 light-years from Earth.

For this study, the researchers used JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to examine the atmospheric composition of WISE 0855, to include making new measurements of the surface temperature, which the team concluded is 285 K using several computer models for their calculations. They also attempted to detect phosphine (PH3), which they note has been identified in Y-class brown dwarf stars, along with searching for evidence of water ice clouds based on previous ground-based research. Therefore, what are the most significant results from this study?

“As discussed in our paper, the spectrum produced by NIRSpec is far superior to previous spectroscopy of WISE 0855, which allows much better characterization of its atmosphere, and better testing of theoretical models for cool, planet-like atmospheres,” Dr. Luhman tells Universe Today. “For instance, the NIRSpec data show that WISE 0855 does not have phosphine (PH3) in its atmosphere, unlike Jupiter’s atmosphere, which is difficult to explain. In addition, there has been a debate in previous studies about whether WISE 0855 shows evidence of water ice clouds (it should be just cold enough that it could have water ice in its atmosphere). We find that the data can be reproduced reasonably well with models that do not have clouds, so it remains unclear whether water ice clouds are present.”

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Cosmic Dust Could Have Helped Get Life Going on Earth

Life on our planet appeared early in Earth’s history. Surprisingly early, since in its early youth our planet didn’t have much of the chemical ingredients necessary for life to evolve. Since prebiotic chemicals such as sugars and amino acids are known to appear in asteroids and comets, one idea is that Earth was seeded with the building blocks of life by early cometary and asteroid impacts. While this likely played a role, a new study shows that cosmic dust also seeded young Earth, and it may have made all the difference.

Although we’ve long known that cosmic dust accumulated on early Earth, it’s not been seen as a major source for early life because of how it accumulates. With comet and asteroid impacts, a great deal of prebiotic material is present at the site of the impact. Dust, on the other hand, is scattered across Earth’s surface rather than accumulating locally. However, the authors of this new work noted that cosmic dust can accumulate and be concentrated in sedimentary deposits, and wanted to see how that might play a role in the early appearance of terrestrial life.

How cosmic dust may have seeded Earth. Credit: Walton, et al

Using estimates of the rate of cosmic dust accumulation in the early period of Earth and computer simulations of how that dust could accumulate in sediment layers over time, the team looked at how concentrated deposits might form. One of the things they noticed was that while cometary impacts could create a local spike in prebiotic material, the amount deposited by cosmic dust was much higher. They also found that the melting and freezing of glacial areas could significantly increase the concentration of chemicals from the dust. For example, for early sub-glacial lakes, the concentration of prebiotic chemistry from dust would have been much higher than that found at impact sites. This means that cosmic dust could have played a much larger role in the appearance of life than impacts.

There is still much we have to learn about early life on Earth and how life can form from prebiotic chemistry, but it is clear that life on Earth is only possible because of extraterrestrial chemistry. From dust came the building blocks of life, and so we and every living thing on Earth can trace its lineage back to the early chemistry of dust in the solar system.

Reference: Walton, Craig R., et al. “Cosmic dust fertilization of glacial prebiotic chemistry on early Earth.” Nature Astronomy (2024): 1-11.

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Odysseus Moon Lander Is Tipped Over But Still Sending Data

The bad news is that Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander is tipped on its side after getting tripped up during its touchdown near the south pole of the moon. The good news? The plucky robotic spacecraft is nevertheless able to send back data.

Mission managers at the Houston-based company and at NASA, which is paying $118 million to support Odysseus’ space odyssey, are working on ways to maximize the scientific payback over the next nine or 10 days. “The vehicle is stable, near or at our intended landing site,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said today during a post-landing briefing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “We do have communications with the lander … so that’s phenomenal to begin with.”

Just by surviving the descent a day earlier, Odysseus made it into the history books as the first commercial lander to arrive safely on the moon — and the first U.S.-built spacecraft to do so since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

It wasn’t easy: Mission managers discovered during a pre-landing maneuver that a safety lock on Odysseus’s laser range-finding system hadn’t been disengaged prior to the probe’s Feb. 15 launch. That rendered the system inoperable.

Altemus said that when he told mission director Tim Crain that the spacecraft would have to land autonomously without its range-finders, “his face got absolutely white, because it was like a punch in the stomach that we were going to lose the mission.” Fortunately, Crain and other mission team members figured out a way to reprogram Odysseus to make use of an experimental laser range-finding system that was included among NASA’s payloads.

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Finally! Webb Finds a Neutron Star from Supernova 1987A

I can remember seeing images of SN1987A as it developed back in 1987. It was the explosion of a star, a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Over the decades that followed, it was closely monitored in particular the expanding debris cloud. Predictions suggested there may be a neutron star or even a black hole at the core but the resolution of the telescopes was insufficient to pick anything up. Now we have the James Webb Space Telescope and using its more powerful technology, signs of a neutron star have been detected. 

Supernova are among the most spectacular and intense explosions in the Universe that signal the end of a massive star’s life. They emit vast amounts of energy and radiation and at the moment of explosion, their light can exceed that of all the stars in the host galaxy put together.  There are the type II supernova and it is this type of phenomenon that brought 1987A to our skies. 

1987A occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud which is approximately 160,000 light years away and was first observed in February 1987.  It continued to brighten until its luminosity peaked three months later in May. It even became visible to the naked eye, the first since Kepler’s Supernova of 1604. Before the visible light signals were detected, three observatories detected short bursts of neutrinos. The bursts were attributed to the supernova and they gave insight into the events leading up to the collapse. Since the event, astronomers have been searching for its existence. 

Part of the SMASH dataset showing an unprecedented wide-angle view of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Image Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/D. Nidever (Montana State University)Acknowledgment: Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin

Observations of similar objects, like the supernova remnant in Taurus, the Crab Nebula , revealed a neutron star at the core of the debris field.  In the years that followed astronomers hunted for evidence but no direct evidence had been found.

The James Webb Space Telescope was focussed onto the 1987A remnant in July 2022, making it one of the earliest objects observed by Webb. The team used the Medium Resolution Spectrograph (MRS) mode of the Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI). It was a tool that had been partly developed by the team that were hunting for the 1987A neutron star. MIRI was a wonderful tool that could simultaneously image an object whilst it was obtaining its spectrum! This allowed observers the ability to detect spectroscopic variations across the object while analysing the Doppler shift at various points to assess velocity at each position.


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A Capsule With Antiviral Drugs Grown in Space Returns to Earth

On Wednesday, February 21st, at 01:40 p.m. PST (04:40 p.m. EST), an interesting package returned to Earth from space. This was the capsule from the W-1 mission, an orbital platform manufactured by California-based Varda Space Industries, which landed at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). Even more interesting was the payload, which consisted of antiviral drugs grown in the microgravity environment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The mission is part of the company’s goal to develop the infrastructure to make LEO more accessible to commercial industries.

Founded in 2020 by former SpaceX employees and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Varda is part of a burgeoning space industry (aka. NewSpace) that is taking advantage of the declining cost of sending payloads to space. In particular, the company’s vision is to develop pharmaceuticals and other products in space and return them to Earth via their proprietary reentry capsules. Traditionally, conducting research in microgravity was something that could only be done by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

With the growing accessibility enabled by reusable rockets and rideshare programs, the situation is rapidly changing. Many industries are looking to get in on this trend, ranging from biomedical and advanced materials research to manufacturing (to name a few). According to Varda, the processing in microgravity dramatically alters buoyancy, natural convection, sedimentation, and phase separation. This has the potential to produce high-quality drugs with more perfect crystalline structures due to the absence of gravitational stresses, leading to improved shelf life and effectiveness.

There’s also the potential that high-hypersonic flight testing has for the development of vehicle subsystems, thermal protective materials, navigation, communication, and sensors. As Varga CEO Will Bruey explained in November last year during an interview with Marketplace:

“We manufacture pharmaceuticals in space. Removing gravity allows us to make medicines you otherwise couldn’t on Earth. Gravity is kind of like a parameter. If you put a temperature knob on an oven, you create a whole world of new recipes and new food you can create. Similarly, if you can change gravity, you can also change the chemical process for drug formulations.”

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The Sun Gets Feisty, Throwing Off Three X-Class Flares Within 24 Hours

The Sun is heading toward solar maximum (which is likely to be about a year away) and as it does, there will be more sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Over the last 24 hours there has been three, yes three X-class flares, the first peaking at X1.9, the second 1.7 and the final one a mighty 6.3. Flares of this magnitude caused radio blackouts, disruption to mobile phones and radio transmissions.  

The solar cycle is an 11 year recurring pattern of activity that is driven by the Sun’s magnetic field. The cycle begins with solar minimum with low levels of sunspot activity focussed mostly around the polar regions. This is followed by solar maximum with the increased sunspot activity that has migrated toward the lower latitudes. The cycle drives space weather too which is an outflow of charged particles from the Sun. Any increase or outbursts there can be an impact on satellites, radio communications and even the climate. 

Sunspots captured by NASAs Solar Dynamic Observatory

Among the different manifestations of solar activity, some of the most powerful are the solar flares. They vary in size and intensity and are caused by a sudden release of magnetic energy. They are powerful emitters of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation and can produce particles energetic enough to be hazardous to astronauts, spacecraft and their systems. Teams of scientists study solar flares to help understand their nature and behaviour. Doing so may help to find ways to limit their impact on our technology and space exploration. The most powerful of the flares are the X-class flares. 

These X-class flares are classified according to their peak X-ray levels within the 1 to 8 Angstroms (1 angstrom = 10-10 metres). The scale used typically spans from X1-X9 with each letter depicting a tenfold rise in intensity.  An X2 flare for example is twice as intense as an X1 flare and an X3 flare, ten times stronger than X2 and so it goes on. On rare occasions, flares can exceed X10 but this is a rare event indeed. 

Sunspot region 3590, which is at a relatively high solar latitude, has generated to X-class events. The initial flare reached its peak at X1.9 followed a few hours later by an X1.7 flare. Both of these flares resulted in a brief radio blackout on the day time side of Earth. 

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A Star Passed Through the Oort Cloud Less Than 500,000 Years Ago. It Wasn’t the Only One.

As stars in the Milky Way move through space, some of them have an unexpected effect on the Solar System. Over time, one comes closer to the Sun during its orbit in the galaxy. Some of them actually get within a light-year of our star and pass through the Oort Cloud. Such close flybys can affect the orbits of the outer planets and send cometary nuclei on a long inward rush to the Sun.

Astronomer Igor Yu Potemine at the Université Paul Sabatier in France, and his colleagues decided to look for likely “close-passing” stars and so-called “Nemesis” stars. Their tool was the SIMBAD database, which contains updated stellar parallaxes and proper motions from ESA’s Gaia satellite. They found a number of possible candidates. These stars drifted through the outer Oort Cloud and then went back out to interstellar space. Their actions set off gravitational perturbations responsible for cometary visits to the inner Solar System over the past billions of years. It’s important to note that gravitational influences from the giant planets, as well as something called the “Galactic tide” can also perturb objects in the Oort Cloud. For purposes of his study, Potemine restricted his search to nearby stars as candidates for Oort Cloud disturbances.

When we look at which stars could cause a comet swarm from the Oort Cloud region, a couple of types of stellar candidates come to mind. The first is what some researchers call a “Nemesis” star. That’s the name for a still-theoretical companion star to the Sun. It’s thought to be a dwarf star that occasionally (like every 25-30 million years) passes too close to the Sun. That action sends a swarm of comets to the inner solar system. Astronomers continue to look for candidates for this solar Nemesis, although the search hasn’t identified “the one” as yet. They also look for other stars that periodically get too close to the Solar System and even pass through the inner regions of the Oort Cloud.

A comparison of the Solar System and its Oort Cloud. 70,000 years ago, Scholz’s Star and companion passed along the outer boundaries of our Solar System (Credit: NASA, Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester)

The Oort Cloud/outer solar system region is a still-largely unknown place. It’s not one monolithic cloud but several regions with populations of icy cometary bodies. The outer edge of the region could extend out 3.2 light-years away from the Sun. Inside the Oort Cloud is the Kuiper Belt, which also contains cometary bodies and a population of small worlds such as Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and others. There’s also a sort of intermediate population of cometary objects thought to exist between the Oort cloud and the Kuiper Belt, sometimes referred to as the Hills Cloud. This region may be populated with many more cometary nuclei than the actual Oort Cloud. So, there’s plenty of material “out there” for passing stars to perturb, and it’s likely many have in the billions of years that the Solar System has existed.

70,000 years ago, Scholz's star, a red dwarf, came as close as 1 light-year to our Solar System. It could have perturbed the Oort Cloud. At that time, Neanderthals were still around. Image: Credit: José A. Peñas/SINC
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A New Space Telescope will Map the Universe and Help Protect the Earth from Asteroids

Can we secure our place in the Solar System? Not in any absolute sense because nature can be very unpredictable. But we can make the effort to safeguard our civilization by cataloguing potentially dangerous asteroids. An upcoming space telescope will help.

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission will launch no later than April 2025. The orbiting telescope will conduct a two-year all-sky survey in optical and infrared light. The main focus of the mission is to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way. But SPHEREx will also add to our knowledge of Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs).

A new paper examines SPHEREx’s capabilities and how the mission can contribute to Planetary Defense (PD.) Its title is “Planetary Defense Use of the SPHEREx Solar System Object Catalog.” It’s currently in pre-print, and the lead author is Carey Lisse from the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

SPHEREx “provides a unique space-based opportunity to detect, spectrally categorize, and catalogue
hundreds of thousands of solar system objects at NEOWISE sensitivities,” the authors write. NEOWISE is NASA’s successful asteroid-finding mission that just reached ten years of operation and has found over 3,000 NEOs (Near-Earth Objects). “By leveraging SPHEREx data, scientists and decision-makers can enhance our ability to track and characterize PHOs, ultimately contributing to the protection of our planet,” the authors of the new paper explain.

Among the many calamities that have struck life on Earth, asteroid impacts are the most dramatic. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. That asteroid was about 10 km in diameter and wreaked havoc on Earth’s biosphere at the time. The odds of another asteroid strike are never zero, and less massive impactors could still alter civilization forever. It could cause unimaginable suffering and strife.

NASA's "Eyes on Asteroids" site maps the known Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and shows the population of these objects. Some are parent bodies of meteorites found on Earth. Courtesy NASA.
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