Space News & Blog Articles

We hope this is just as inconsequential as having a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe, but images from the Ingenuity helicopter show it had a piece of debris fluttering from its leg during its most recent flight. A blog post from NASA said a small piece of foreign object debris (FOD) was seen in footage from the Mars helicopter’s navigation camera (Navcam) for a portion of its 33rd flight on September 24, 2022.

This piece of debris was not visible in Navcam footage from the previous flight, number 32. The FOD can be seen during Flight 33 Navcam from most of the earliest frames to approximately halfway through the video, when it fell from the leg and drifted back to the Mars surface.

The Ingenuity team wrote that “all telemetry from the flight and a post-flight search and transfer are nominal and show no indication of vehicle damage. The Ingenuity and Perseverance Mars 2020 teams are working to discern the source of the debris.”

Mostly Likely Explanation

The most likely explanation is that the piece of fabric is something left over from Perseverance’s parachute, or descent stage or even the backshell, which all worked in tandem to bring the rover and helicopter safely to the surface of Mars back in February of 2021.  In July of this year, the rover found a weird string-like piece of debris, which also was likely from the landing system. Ingenuity snapped some amazing pictures of the backshell and parachute in April 2022.

During Ingenuity’s 33rd flight, the rotocraft was in in the air for just under a minute, reaching an altitude of 10 meters (33 feet) and traveled about 111 meters (365 feet).

Everything dies in the end, even the brightest of stars. In fact, the brightest stars are the ones that live the shortest lives. They consume all the hydrogen they have within a few million years, then explode as brilliant supernovae. Their core remains collapse into a neutron star or black hole. These small, dark objects litter our galaxy, like a cosmic graveyard.

Both neutron stars and stellar black holes are difficult to detect. Neutron stars are only about fifteen kilometers across, and unless their magnetic poles are aligned such that we see them as pulsars, they would typically be overlooked. Stellar black holes are even smaller and don’t give off light of their own. Some appear as microquasars when they consume the mass of a companion star, but most would only be seen when they pass between us and a more distant star, so they could be detected by microlensing.

We haven’t observed enough of these stellar remains to create an observed map of their overall location, but a recent study Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has modeled where we might find them. They looked at the distribution of stars in our current galaxy, and simulated how the stellar remains might be tugged and deflected by stellar interactions. Since these “graveyard stars” are typically older than the current stars in the galaxy, they have had more time to move to new orbital paths.

As you might expect, the stellar remains statistically experience a kind of blurring effect in their positions. The distribution of these stars is in a plane three times thicker than that of the visible Milky Way. But the team found one aspect of their distribution that was quite surprising. About a third of these old dead stars are being ejected from the galaxy. In their model, a third of stars have experienced a close stellar encounter that has given them such a speed boost they will eventually escape the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. Put another way, the ghosts are leaving the graveyard.

This means that over time the Milky Way is “evaporating,” or losing mass, which is unexpected. We know that small clusters of stars such as globular clusters can evaporate, but the Milky Way is much more massive, so you would think long-term evaporation would be minimal.

Hubble Space Telescope observes a lot of galaxies. Some of them are wild-looking while others seem fairly placid. Recently, it looked at NGC 5495, which lies about 300 million light-years away from Earth. You wouldn’t know just by looking at it, but this galaxy has some pretty hot action happening in its core.

It’s known as a Seyfert galaxy, which means it has a very active nucleus. There’s a supermassive black hole in there, sucking in gas and dust and releasing bright radiation as it eats. Astronomers want to know more about this monster—in particular, its mass. That’s why they’re using Hubble Space Telescope to observe it. The Wide Field Camera 3 is well-suited to image the bright core and separate out the various light sources nearby so they can zero in on the region around the black hole.

Diving into a Seyfert Galaxy

Galaxies with active nuclei are fascinating places. Most look like pretty normal spirals, particularly through optical telescopes. But, if you observe them in other wavelengths—say x-rays, ultraviolet or infrared, their cores stand out like beacons. The cores are usually brighter than anything else in the galaxy. That tells you something energetic is happening there. That brightness actually is a “death scream” of sorts. Matter accretes onto the black hole and gets superheated by high-speed collisions. That maelstrom is what’s giving off light across much of the electromagnetic spectrum. About 10 percent of all galaxies are Seyferts and they were probably quasars earlier in their histories.

Here’s another Seyfert galaxy as seen by Hubble. It’s called Messier 77. The streaks of red and blue in the image are star formation regions in the arms, with dark dust lanes stretching across the galaxy’s starry centre. This Seyfert has highly ionised gas surrounding an intensely active center. Courtesy NASA/ESA/STScI.

Astronomers classify Seyferts into Type 1 and Type II objects. If you look at their emission lines (that is, the spectra that show the light they emit), the data show that each kind has highly excited gas near the black hole. There are important differences though. The Type 1 Seyferts have very “broad” lines, which means that the gas is moving very quickly around the black hole—at velocities more than 1,000 km/sec. On the other hand, the Type II Seyferts have narrower lines, and that means gas in the core is moving much more slowly.