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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Students Catch Unexpected Glimpse of Newly Discovered Black Hole University students and researchers working on a NASA mission orbiting a near-Earth asteroid have made an unexpected detection of a phenomenon 30 thousand light years...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Students Catch Unexpected Glimpse of Newly Discovered Black Hole

University students and researchers working on a NASA mission orbiting a near-Earth asteroid have made an unexpected detection of a phenomenon 30 thousand light years away. Last fall, the student-built Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS) onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft detected a newly flaring black hole in the constellation Columba while making observations off the limb of asteroid Bennu.

[…]

The glowing object turned out to be a newly flaring black hole X-ray binary – discovered just a week earlier by Japan’s MAXI telescope – designated MAXI J0637-430. NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope also identified the X-ray blast a few days later. Both MAXI and NICER operate aboard NASA’s International Space Station and detected the X-ray event from low Earth orbit. REXIS, on the other hand, detected the same activity millions of miles from Earth while orbiting Bennu, the first such outburst ever detected from interplanetary space.

nasa space osiris-rex black hole astronomy
First Detection of Sugars in Meteorites Gives Clues to Origin of Life An international team has found sugars essential to life in meteorites. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in...

First Detection of Sugars in Meteorites Gives Clues to Origin of Life

An international team has found sugars essential to life in meteorites. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in meteorites, supporting the hypothesis that chemical reactions in asteroids – the parent bodies of many meteorites – can make some of life’s ingredients. If correct, meteorite bombardment on ancient Earth may have assisted the origin of life with a supply of life’s building blocks.

The team discovered ribose and other bio-essential sugars including arabinose and xylose in two different meteorites that are rich in carbon, NWA 801 (type CR2) and Murchison (type CM2). Ribose is a crucial component of RNA (ribonucleic acid). In much of modern life, RNA serves as a messenger molecule, copying genetic instructions from the DNA molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid) and delivering them to molecular factories within the cell called ribosomes that read the RNA to build specific proteins needed to carry out life processes.

Source: nasa.gov
space asteroids biology astrobiology
In a historic first, one private satellite docks to another in orbit On Tuesday, a spacecraft that was launched four months earlier docked with a communications satellite about 36,000km above the Earth. Northrop Grumman reported the historic docking...

In a historic first, one private satellite docks to another in orbit

On Tuesday, a spacecraft that was launched four months earlier docked with a communications satellite about 36,000km above the Earth. Northrop Grumman reported the historic docking on Wednesday, and the company heralded the mission as an “historic accomplishment” in the field of satellite servicing. Prior to this mission, no two commercial spacecraft had ever docked in orbit before.

Launched on a Proton rocket in October, the Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) has a fairly long history of development under various companies. Ultimately, it was brought to space by SpaceLogistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. After the company’s rideshare launch in October, its MEV-1 spacecraft used electric-propulsion thrusters to raise its orbit 290km above geosynchronous orbit.

Meanwhile, a communications satellite launched in 2001 (Intelsat-901) was pulled from active service in December 2019 as it ran low on fuel. Operators commanded the satellite to move into a “graveyard orbit” above geostationary space. It is here that MEV-1 linked up with the communications satellite on Tuesday.

Source: Ars Technica
satellite space
Observational Signatures of Sub-Relativistic Meteors It is currently unknown whether solid particles larger than dust from supernova ejecta rain down on Earth at high speeds. We develop a hydrodynamic and radiative model to explore the detectability...

Observational Signatures of Sub-Relativistic Meteors

It is currently unknown whether solid particles larger than dust from supernova ejecta rain down on Earth at high speeds. We develop a hydrodynamic and radiative model to explore the detectability of ≳1mm sub-relativistic meteors. We find that a large fraction of the meteor energy during its passage through the Earth’s upper atmosphere powers the adiabatic expansion of a hot plasma cylinder, giving rise to acoustic shocks detectable by infrasound microphones. Additionally, a global network of several hundred all-sky optical cameras with a time resolution of ≲10−4s would be capable of detecting ≳1mm sub-relativistic meteors.

Source: arxiv.org
space planetary defense supernova
New Horizons May Have Solved Planet-Formation Cold Case Not that long ago, it seemed the glory days of NASA’s New Horizons mission were in the rearview mirror, left behind with its historic Pluto encounter in 2015. Then, early last year, the...

New Horizons May Have Solved Planet-Formation Cold Case

Not that long ago, it seemed the glory days of NASA’s New Horizons mission were in the rearview mirror, left behind with its historic Pluto encounter in 2015. Then, early last year, the spacecraft streaked by Arrokoth, a bit of flotsam drifting through the Kuiper Belt—the diffuse ring of primitive icy bodies beyond Neptune, of which Pluto is the largest member. What New Horizons found at Arrokoth—initially reported last year and now reinforced with 10 times more data in three studies published last week in Science—is a critical clue to the greatest cold case in the solar system: the mystery of how planets are born.

“I never expected that our encounter with Arrokoth would be shoulder to shoulder with the Pluto flyby in terms of its importance,” says New Horizons principal investigator and study co-author Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “I didn’t expect to make an earth-shattering discovery about planet formation in the Kuiper Belt, and yet we have. At Arrokoth, we stumbled onto maybe the biggest prize of the entire New Horizons mission.”

Source: scientificamerican.com
new horizons space nasa arrokoth
The Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) spacecraft has a planned launch date in JFY 2024 (Japan financial year) and will visit the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Phobos has been selected for surface operations, with the spacecraft landing for...

The Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) spacecraft has a planned launch date in JFY 2024 (Japan financial year) and will visit the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Phobos has been selected for surface operations, with the spacecraft landing for several hours to collect a sample of at least 10g using a corer that can gather material from a minimum of 2cm below the moon’s surface. The spacecraft will then leave the Martian system and return the sample to Earth, completing the first round-trip to the Martian system.

Source: mmx-news.isas.jaxa.jp
mars space jaxa
‘Radical Change’ Needed After Latest Neutron Star Collision Last summer, the gravitational wave observatory known as LIGO caught its second-ever glimpse of two neutron stars merging. The collision of these incredibly dense objects — the hulking cores...

‘Radical Change’ Needed After Latest Neutron Star Collision

Last summer, the gravitational wave observatory known as LIGO caught its second-ever glimpse of two neutron stars merging. The collision of these incredibly dense objects — the hulking cores of long-ago supernova explosions — sent shudders through space-time powerful enough to be detected here on Earth. But unlike the first merger, which conformed to expectations, this latest event has forced astrophysicists to rethink some basic assumptions about what’s lurking out there in the universe. “We have a dilemma,” said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of the University of California, Santa Cruz.The exceptionally high mass of the two-star system was the first indication that this collision was unprecedented. And while the heft of the stars alone wasn’t enough to cause alarm, it hinted at the surprises to come.In a paper recently posted to the scientific preprint site arxiv.org, Ramirez-Ruiz and his colleagues argue that GW190425, as the two-star system is known, challenges everything we thought we knew about neutron star pairs. This latest observation appears to be fundamentally incompatible with scientists’ current understanding of how these stars form, and how often. As a result, researchers may need to rethink years of accepted knowledge.

Source: quantamagazine.org
astronomy gravitational astronomy space
Dynamics of Planetary Systems Within Star Clusters: Aspects of the Solar System’s Early Evolution “ Most planetary systems – including our own – are born within stellar clusters, where interactions with neighboring stars can help shape the system...

Dynamics of Planetary Systems Within Star Clusters: Aspects of the Solar System’s Early Evolution

 Most planetary systems – including our own – are born within stellar clusters, where interactions with neighboring stars can help shape the system architecture. This paper develops an orbit-averaged formalism to characterize the cluster’s mean-field effects as well as the physics of long-period stellar encounters. Our secular approach allows for an analytic description of the dynamical consequences of the cluster environment on its constituent planetary systems. We analyze special cases of the resulting Hamiltonian, corresponding to eccentricity evolution driven by planar encounters, as well as hyperbolic perturbations upon dissipative disks. We subsequently apply our results to the early evolution of our solar system, where the cluster’s collective potential perturbs the solar system’s plane, and stellar encounters act to increase the velocity dispersion of the Kuiper belt. Our results are two-fold: first, we find that cluster effects can alter the mean plane of the solar system by ≲1°, and are thus insufficient to explain the ψ≈6° obliquity of the sun. Second, we delineate the extent to which stellar flybys excite the orbital dispersion of the cold classical Kuiper belt, and show that while stellar flybys may grow the cold belt’s inclination by the observed amount, the resulting distribution is incompatible with the data. Correspondingly, our calculations place an upper limit on the product of the stellar number density and residence time of the sun in its birth cluster, ητ≲2×104Myr/pc3.
Source: arxiv.org
space
Periodic activity from a fast radio burst source “ Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright, millisecond-duration radio transients originating from extragalactic distances. Their origin is unknown. Some FRB sources emit repeat bursts, ruling out...

Periodic activity from a fast radio burst source

 Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright, millisecond-duration radio transients originating from extragalactic distances. Their origin is unknown. Some FRB sources emit repeat bursts, ruling out cataclysmic origins for those events. Despite searches for periodicity in repeat burst arrival times on time scales from milliseconds to many days, these bursts have hitherto been observed to appear sporadically, and though clustered, without a regular pattern. Here we report the detection of a 16.35±0.18 day periodicity from a repeating FRB 180916.J0158+65 detected by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB). In 28 bursts recorded from 16th September 2018 through 30th October 2019, we find that bursts arrive in a 4.0-day phase window, with some cycles showing no bursts, and some showing multiple bursts, within CHIME’s limited daily exposure. Our results suggest a mechanism for periodic modulation either of the burst emission itself, or through external amplification or absorption, and disfavour models invoking purely sporadic processes.
Source: arxiv.org
radio radio astronomy space fast radio burst