KREUZADER (Posts tagged space)

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Gravity, Gizmos, and a Grand Theory of Interstellar Travel Woodward, a physics professor emeritus at Fullerton, slid his van beside the jeep and rolled down his window to pass a box to Fearn. Inside was a collection of metallic devices with wires...

Gravity, Gizmos, and a Grand Theory of Interstellar Travel

Woodward, a physics professor emeritus at Fullerton, slid his van beside the jeep and rolled down his window to pass a box to Fearn. Inside was a collection of metallic devices with wires protruding from their exposed electromechanical guts. They looked like the type of gadgets an action movie villain might carry in his pocket to blow up a city, but their actual function is even more improbable. Woodward believes these devices—he calls them his “gizmos”—may set humans on the path to interstellar travel.

As the pandemic raged across the globe, Woodward and Fearn met regularly in the pancake house parking lot to keep their experiments going. Funded by a grant from a NASA program that also supports research on far-out concepts such as inflatable telescopes and exoplanet photography, the duo has been developing what they call a Mach-effect gravitational assist (MEGA) drive, a propulsion system designed to produce thrust without propellant.

Source: Wired
space mach effect
Moon Shadow Over Jupiter Jupiter’s volcanically active moon Io casts its shadow on the planet in this dramatic image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. As with solar eclipses on the Earth, within the dark circle racing across Jupiter’s cloud tops one would...

Moon Shadow Over Jupiter

Jupiter’s volcanically active moon Io casts its shadow on the planet in this dramatic image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. As with solar eclipses on the Earth, within the dark circle racing across Jupiter’s cloud tops one would witness a full solar eclipse as Io passes in front of the Sun.

Such events occur frequently on Jupiter because it is a large planet with many moons. In addition, unlike most other planets in our solar system, Jupiter’s axis is not highly tilted relative to its orbit, so the Sun never strays far from Jupiter’s equatorial plane (+/- 3 degrees). This means Jupiter’s moons regularly cast their shadows on the planet throughout its year.

Juno’s close proximity to Jupiter provides an exceptional fish-eye view, showing a small fraction near the planet’s equator. The shadow is about 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) wide, approximately the same width as Io, but appears much larger relative to Jupiter.

Source: nasa.gov
juno nasa space jupiter io
First possible “survivor” planet orbiting a white dwarf seen via NASA telescopes A potential planet… where no planet should be. An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and data obtained from the...

First possible “survivor” planet orbiting a white dwarf seen via NASA telescopes

A potential planet… where no planet should be.

An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and data obtained from the now-retired Spitzer space telescope have reported an astounding potential discovery of a surviving planet closely orbiting a white dwarf.

So what’s the big deal?  Scientists have found many exoplanets in close orbits of their parent stars.

Here’s the confusing part: The way a white dwarf is created destroys nearby objects either by incineration or gravitational destruction.

White dwarfs form when stars like the Sun near the end of their life cycles.  They swell up, expand to hundreds and even thousands of times their regular size, forming a red giant.

Eventually, that outer, expanded layer is ejected from the star and only a hot, dense white dwarf core remains.

So how did a planet, known as WD 1856 b, that is Jupiter-like get into such a close proximity that it completes an orbit of the white dwarf (that is only 18,000 km / 11,000 miles across) every 34 hours?

Source: nasaspaceflight.com
astronomy space nasa
OSIRIS-REx: Tracking Bennu’s Unusual Activity OSIRIS-REx, the little spacecraft with the big acronym (standing for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) has been on station for a year and a half at...

OSIRIS-REx: Tracking Bennu’s Unusual Activity

OSIRIS-REx, the little spacecraft with the big acronym (standing for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) has been on station for a year and a half at asteroid Bennu, monitoring the unexpected activity that distinguishes the object. Particle ejection from the surface is the subject of a revised special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets collecting 10 papers on the matter.

Specifically, the spacecraft has found that particles of rock mostly of pebble-size are being ejected repeatedly — one or two per day — from the asteroid’s surface, some of them escaping into space, some moving into a temporary orbit, with the rest falling back onto the surface. Just days after entering orbit on December 31 of 2018, OSIRIS-REx began to spot the activity, which the introduction to the special issue refers to as “ongoing mass shedding” involving millimeter- to centimeter-scale particles. What we have on our hands here is an asteroid that is active.

Source: centauri-dreams.org
asteroid osiris-rex nasa space bennu
nasa
nasa: “Do you believe in magic? ✨ ⁣ While appearing as a delicate and light veil draped across the sky, this @NASAHubble image reminds us of the power of imagination. What does this look like to you?⁣ ⁣ In reality, it’s a small section of a Cygnus...
nasa

Do you believe in magic? ✨
⁣
While appearing as a delicate and light veil draped across the sky, this @NASAHubble image reminds us of the power of imagination. What does this look like to you?⁣
⁣
In reality, it’s a small section of a Cygnus supernova blast wave, located around 2,400 light-years away. The original supernova explosion blasted apart a dying star about 20 times more massive than our Sun between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. Since then, the remnant has expanded 60 light-years from its center. ⁣
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Credit: @ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Blair; acknowledgment: Leo Shatz⁣
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space nasa magic
some star is moving at 8% of light speed in a race car orbit around the central black hole of our galaxy: S62 and S4711: Indications of a population of faint fast moving stars inside the S2 orbit – S4711 on a 7.6 year orbit around Sgr~A* We present...

some star is moving at 8% of light speed in a race car orbit around the central black hole of our galaxy:

S62 and S4711: Indications of a population of faint fast moving stars inside the S2 orbit – S4711 on a 7.6 year orbit around Sgr~A*

We present high-pass filtered NACO and SINFONI images of the newly discovered stars S4711-S4715 between 2004 and 2016. Our deep H+K-band (SINFONI) and K-band (NACO) data show the S-cluster star S4711 on a highly eccentric trajectory around Sgr~A* with an orbital period of 7.6 years and a periapse distance of 144 AU to the super massive black hole (SMBH). S4711 is hereby the star with the shortest orbital period and the smallest mean distance to the SMBH during its orbit to date. The used high-pass filtered images are based on co-added data sets to improve the signal to noise. The spectroscopic SINFONI data let us determine detailed stellar properties of S4711 like the mass and the rotational velocity. The faint S-cluster star candidates, S4712-S4715, can be observed in a projected distance to Sgr~A* of at least temporarily ≤ 120 mas. From these stars, S4714 is the most prominent one with an orbital period of 12 years and an eccentricity of 0.985. The stars S4712-S4715 show similar properties with comparable magnitudes and stellar masses to S4711. The MCMC simulations determine confidently precise uncertainties for the orbital elements of S62 and S4711-S4715. The presence of S4711 in addition to S55, S62, and the also newly found star S4714 implies a population of faint stars that can be found at distances to Sgr~A* that are comparable to the size of our solar system. These short orbital time period stars in the dense cluster around the SMBH in the center of our Galaxy are perfect candidates to observe gravitational effects such as the periapse shift.

Source: arxiv.org
astronomy space black hole