KREUZADER (Posts tagged space)

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Water ice lines and the formation of giant moons around super-Jovian planets“Most of the exoplanets with known masses at Earth-like distances to Sun-like stars are heavier than Jupiter, which raises the question of whether such planets are...

Water ice lines and the formation of giant moons around super-Jovian  planets

Most of the exoplanets with known masses at Earth-like distances to Sun-like stars are heavier than Jupiter, which raises the question of whether such planets are accompanied by detectable, possibly habitable moons. Here we simulate the accretion disks around super-Jovian planets and find that giant moons with masses similar to Mars can form. Our results suggest that the Galilean moons formed during the final stages of accretion onto Jupiter, when the circumjovian disk was sufficiently cool. But in contrast to other studies, with our assumptions, we show that Jupiter was still feeding from the circumsolar disk and that its principal moons cannot have formed after the complete photoevaporation of the circumsolar nebula. To counteract the steady loss of moons into the planet due to type I migration, we propose that the water ice line around Jupiter and super-Jovian exoplanets acted as a migration trap for moons. Heat transitions, however, cross the disk during the gap opening within 10^4 yr, which makes them inefficient as moon traps. This indicates a fundamental difference between planet and moon formation. We find that icy moons larger than the smallest known exoplanet can form at about 15 - 30 Jupiter radii around super-Jovian planets. Their size implies detectability by the Kepler and PLATO space telescopes as well as by the European Extremely Large Telescope.

Source: arxiv.org
astronomy space
“A small, recently discovered asteroid - or perhaps a comet - appears to have originated from outside the solar system, coming from somewhere else in our galaxy. If so, it would be the first “interstellar object” to be observed and confirmed by...

A small, recently discovered asteroid - or perhaps a comet - appears to have originated from outside the solar system, coming from somewhere else in our galaxy. If so, it would be the first “interstellar object” to be observed and confirmed by astronomers.

This unusual object - for now designated A/2017 U1 - is less than a quarter-mile (400 meters) in diameter and is moving remarkably fast. Astronomers are urgently working to point telescopes around the world and in space at this notable object. Once these data are obtained and analyzed, astronomers may know more about the origin and possibly the composition of the object.

A/2017 U1 was discovered Oct. 19 by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala during the course of its nightly search for Near-Earth Objects for NASA. Rob Weryk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), was first to identify the moving object and submit it to the Minor Planet Center. Weryk subsequently searched the Pan-STARRS image archive and found it was present in images taken the previous night, but was not initially identified by the moving object processing.

Weryk immediately realized this was an unusual object. “Its motion could not be explained using either a normal solar system asteroid or comet orbit,” he said. Weryk contacted IfA graduate Marco Micheli, who had the same realization using his own follow-up images taken at the European Space Agency’s telescope on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. But with the combined data, everything made sense. Said Weryk, “This object came from outside our solar system.”  

“This is the most extreme orbit I have ever seen,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It is going extremely fast and on such a trajectory that we can say with confidence that this object is on its way out of the solar system and not coming back.”

space asteroid astronomy
Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes“The flurry of findings started last year with a paper that reported the first traversable wormhole that doesn’t require the insertion of exotic material to stay open. Instead, according to...

Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes

The flurry of findings started last year with a paper that reported the first traversable wormhole that doesn’t require the insertion of exotic material to stay open. Instead, according to Ping Gao and Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Aron Wall of Stanford University, the repulsive negative energy in the wormhole’s throat can be generated from the outside by a special quantum connection between the pair of black holes that form the wormhole’s two mouths. When the black holes are connected in the right way, something tossed into one will shimmy along the wormhole and, following certain events in the outside universe, exit the second. Remarkably, Gao, Jafferis and Wall noticed that their scenario is mathematically equivalent to a process called quantum teleportation, which is key to quantum cryptography and can be demonstrated in laboratory experiments.

John Preskill, a black hole and quantum gravity expert at Caltech, says the new traversable wormhole comes as a surprise, with implications for the black hole information paradox and black hole interiors. “What I really like,” he said, “is that an observer can enter the black hole and then escape to tell about what she saw.” This suggests that black hole interiors really exist, he explained, and that what goes in must come out.

Source: quantamagazine.org
wormhole black hole space physics
Dawn Mission Extended at Ceres“NASA has authorized a second extension of the Dawn mission at Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. During this extension, the spacecraft will descend to lower altitudes than ever...

Dawn Mission Extended at Ceres

NASA has authorized a second extension of the Dawn mission at Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. During this extension, the spacecraft will descend to lower altitudes than ever before at the dwarf planet, which it has been orbiting since March 2015. The spacecraft will continue at Ceres for the remainder of its science investigation and will remain in a stable orbit indefinitely after its hydrazine fuel runs out.

The Dawn flight team is studying ways to maneuver Dawn into a new elliptical orbit, which may take the spacecraft to less than 120 miles (200 kilometers) from the surface of Ceres at closest approach. Previously, Dawn’s lowest altitude was 240 miles (385 kilometers).

A priority of the second Ceres mission extension is collecting data with Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, which measures the number and energy of gamma rays and neutrons. This information is important for understanding the composition of Ceres’ uppermost layer and how much ice it contains.

[…]

Dawn is the only mission ever to orbit two extraterrestrial targets. It orbited giant asteroid Vesta for 14 months from 2011 to 2012, then continued on to Ceres, where it has been in orbit since March 2015.

Source: nasa.gov
dawn ceres asteroid space nasa
Hubble Traces Subtle Signals of Water on Hazy Worlds“Using the powerful­ eye of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. The presence of atmospheric water...

Hubble Traces Subtle Signals of Water on Hazy Worlds

Using the powerful­ eye of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets.

The presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds.

The five planets – WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b – orbit nearby stars. The strengths of their water signatures varied. WASP-17b, a planet with an especially puffed-up atmosphere, and HD209458b had the strongest signals. The signatures for the other three planets, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b, also are consistent with water.

Source: nasa.gov
astronomy space nasa
Ion Thruster Prototype Breaks Records in Tests, Could Send Humans to Mars“ A thruster that’s being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during recent tests, suggesting that the technology is on track to take humans to the...

Ion Thruster Prototype Breaks Records in Tests, Could Send Humans to Mars

A thruster that’s being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during recent tests, suggesting that the technology is on track to take humans to the Red Planet within the next 20 years, project team members said.

The X3 thruster, which was designed by researchers at the University of Michigan in cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Air Force, is a Hall thruster — a system that propels spacecraft by accelerating a stream of electrically charged atoms, known as ions. In the recent demonstration conducted at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio, the X3 broke records for the maximum power output, thrust and operating current achieved by a Hall thruster to date, according to the research team at the University of Michigan and representatives from NASA.

“We have shown that X3 can operate at over 100 kW of power,” said Alec Gallimore, who is leading the project, in an interview with Space.com. “It operated at a huge range of power from 5 kW to 102 kW, with electrical current of up to 260 amperes. It generated 5.4 Newtons of thrust, which is the highest level of thrust achieved by any plasma thruster to date,” added Gallimore, who is dean of engineering at the University of Michigan.

Source: space.com
nasa space ion engine hall thruster
humanoidhistory
humanoidhistory

TODAY IN HISTORY: On October 18, 1989, the Galileo space probe launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, heading out on a decade-plus mission to explore Jupiter and its neighbors. This early ‘80s NASA simulation footage shows how the spacecraft would eventually release a probe for a one-way trip into the turbulent Jovian atmosphere.

Source: humanoidhistory
space nasa galileo jupiter
Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months“An 8.5-tonne Chinese space station has accelerated its out-of-control descent towards Earth and is expected to crash to the surface within a few months. The Tiangong-1 or “Heavenly...

Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

An 8.5-tonne Chinese space station has accelerated its out-of-control descent towards Earth and is expected to crash to the surface within a few months.

The Tiangong-1 or “Heavenly Palace” lab was launched in 2011 and described as a “potent political symbol” of China, part of an ambitious scientific push to turn China into a space superpower.

It was used for both manned and unmanned missions and visited by China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012.

But in 2016, after months of speculation, Chinese officials confirmed they had lost control of the space station and it would crash to Earth in 2017 or 2018. China’s space agency has since notified the UN that it expects Tiangong-1 to come down between October 2017 and April 2018.

Source: Business Insider
cnsa space station space

NASA’s New Horizons mission revolutionized our knowledge of Pluto when it flew past that distant world in July 2015. Among its many discoveries were images of strange formations resembling giant blades of ice, whose origin had remained a mystery. Now, scientists have turned up a fascinating explanation for this “bladed terrain”: the structures are made almost entirely of methane ice, and likely formed as a specific kind of erosion wore away their surfaces, leaving dramatic crests and sharp divides.

nasa space new horizons pluto
Neutron-Star Collision Shakes Space-Time and Lights Up the Sky“On Aug. 17, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected something new. Some 130 million light-years away, two super-dense neutron stars, each as small...

Neutron-Star Collision Shakes Space-Time and Lights Up the Sky

On Aug. 17, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected something new. Some 130 million light-years away, two super-dense neutron stars, each as small as a city but heavier than the sun, had crashed into each other, producing a colossal convulsion called a kilonova and sending a telltale ripple through space-time to Earth.

[…]

LIGO’s pair of ultrasensitive detectors in Louisiana and Washington state made history two years ago by recording the gravitational waves coming from the collision of two black holes — a discovery that earned the experiment’s architects the Nobel Prize in Physics this month. Three more signals from black hole collisions followed the initial discovery.

Yet black holes don’t give off light, so making any observations of these faraway cataclysms beyond the gravitational waves themselves was unlikely. Colliding neutron stars, on the other hand, produce fireworks. Astronomers had never seen such a show before, but now LIGO was telling them where to look, which sent teams of researchers like Berger’s scurrying to capture the immediate aftermath of the collision across the full range of electromagnetic signals. In total, more than 70 telescopes swiveled toward the same location in the sky.

They struck the motherlode. In the days after Aug. 17, astronomers made successful observations of the colliding neutron stars with optical, radio, X-ray, gamma-ray, infrared and ultraviolet telescopes. The enormous collaborative effort, detailed today in dozens of papers appearing simultaneously in Physical Review Letters, Nature, Science, Astrophysical Journal Letters and other journals, has not only allowed astrophysicists to piece together a coherent account of the event, but also to answer longstanding questions in astrophysics.

Source: quantamagazine.org
astronomy physics astrophysics space