Astronomy and Planetary Science Thread

An interesting theory but I do not know how it will work as you rightly say with FRBs that repeat, there will be other scientists out there with their own theories as well.
 
Tangential, there's on-going arguments in New Scientist's 'Letters' about time-keeping on Mars, dividing day/night usefully...

IMHO, they're all over-thinking it:
In harbours and small ports, marinas and inshore fishing boats / lobster pots etc, people use two distinct time systems for tide-state and weather reports.

For one, an analogue time-clock, single 'hand' tracking high / low tides, ebb and flow. The exact time of such will vary due spring/neap / season / weather etc. Repeats every ~12 hr 25 mins approx. Typically set at top of a Spring tide, after which good for another month.
For the other, a clock reliable enough to remind to turn on radio for essential hourly / daily radio bulletins...

By analogy, a Martian expedition would need an analogue 'sol-clock', repeating ~24hr 40 min,s to track dawn/day/dusk/night, plus digital UTC for comms...

Or am I missing something ??
 
TRAPPIST-1's innermost planets, b & c, are most likely airless. These are too hot to be habitable for life like ours in any case but the outer planets, particularly e, f, & g, might have been able to hold on to their atmospheres.

Relevant links in the post:

 
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Scientists baffled by a mysterious planet that should have been destroyed believe they have discovered why it survived.

The planet - 8 Ursae Minoris b - was identified in 2015 in the Milky Way.

But we should never have been able to see it because it should have been engulfed by a nearby dying star.

Researchers now believe 8 Ursae Minoris b escaped that fate because the dying star once had a companion that stopped its growth.
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www.bbc.co.uk

Mystery of planet that escaped death may be solved - BBC News

A planet that should have been eaten by a huge star has baffled scientists until now.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk

Related paper:

www.nature.com

A close-in giant planet escapes engulfment by its star - Nature

The giant planet 8 Ursae Minoris b seems to have avoided engulfment by its giant host star through a stellar merger that either affected the evolution of the host star or produced 8 Ursae Minoris b as a second-generation planet.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
Scientists are reporting the first evidence that our Earth and the universe around us are awash in a background of spacetime undulations called gravitational waves. The waves oscillate very slowly over years and even decades and are thought to originate primarily from pairs of supermassive black holes leisurely spiraling together before they merge.
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www.caltech.edu

Scientists Find Evidence for Slow-Rolling Sea of Gravitational Waves

NANOGrav team releases new analysis based on 15 years of data.
www.caltech.edu www.caltech.edu
 
Scientists have traced the galactic origins of thousands of "ghost particles" known as neutrinos to create the first-ever portrait of the Milky Way made from matter and not light — and it's given them a brand-new way to study the universe.
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By feeding more than 60,000 detected neutrino cascades collected over 10 years into a machine-learning algorithm, the physicists built up a stunning picture: an ethereal, blue-tinged image showing the neutrinos' sources all across our galaxy.

The map showed that the neutrinos were being overwhelmingly produced in regions with previously detected high gamma-ray counts, confirming past suspicions that many ghost particles are summoned as byproducts of cosmic rays smashing into interstellar gas. It also left the physicists awestruck.
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www.livescience.com

'Ghost particle' image is the 1st view of our galaxy in 'anything other than light'

Scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have used 60,000 neutrinos to create the first map of the Milky Way made with matter and not light.
www.livescience.com www.livescience.com

Related paper:


And related video:

View: https://youtu.be/GzdXXrRTFcw
 
Comet C/2023 E1 ATLAS was discovered in March 2023 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which is funded by NASA and operated by the University of Hawaii. This array of four telescopes spread out in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa scans the sky for near-Earth objects in order to warn of any potential hazards heading Earth's way.
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By the time July's new moon arrives on July 17, the comet will be approaching its maximum brightness and will have moved eastward toward the constellation Cetus, the Whale. If you go looking for the comet yourself, don't expect to see a bright green snowball with a well-pronounced tail; through most backyard optics, the comet will likely appear as a hazy, greenish smudge.
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www.space.com

How to see comet E1 ATLAS high in the night sky in July near the Little Dipper

While not particularly bright, the comet will be fairly easy to spot for Northern Hemisphere skywatchers.
www.space.com www.space.com
 
In regards to comet E1 ATLAS, so there will be no show stopping moments like Hale-Bopp then by the looks of things?
 
Recent discoveries about the Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called 'the world's first computer' (it isn't, because its sophistication indicates that it was the result of long development and refinement). This is the inspiration for the McGuffin in the latest Indiana Jones film.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ebB0tyrMa8


www.scientificamerican.com

An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets

Scientists have a new understanding of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism that challenges assumptions about ancient technology
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com

www.nature.com

A Model of the Cosmos in the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism - Scientific Reports

The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical calculator, has challenged researchers since its discovery in 1901. Now split into 82 fragments, only a third of the original survives, including 30 corroded bronze gearwheels. Microfocus X-ray Computed Tomography (X-ray CT) in 2005...
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
Apparently Betelgeuse maybe much closer to its death than previously estimated. That it may have less than 300 years of fuel left to burn through at its core. It’s based on the idea that it’s actually bigger than most observations make it to be and that it has already started burning Carbon at its core.

www.space.com

Is the puzzling star Betelgeuse going to explode in our lifetime after all?

What is the evidence for Betelgeuse being in its death throes?
www.space.com www.space.com

Here’s the paper itself.

 
Betelgeuse going supernova will be a truly once in a lifetime event Flyaway, what I want to know is what remnant will remain of Betelgeuse once it does go supernova a neutron star or black hole?
 
Researchers said on Monday they have spotted a truly extreme planet beyond our solar system, a blazingly hot world a bit bigger than Neptune that orbits a sun-like star every 19 hours and appears to be wrapped in metallic clouds made of titanium and silicates that reflect most incoming light back into space.
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www.reuters.com

Alien planet with metallic clouds resembles 'a giant mirror in space'

It is a planet astronomers say probably should not even exist.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

Related paper:

The extremely high albedo of LTT 9779 b revealed by CHEOPS - An ultrahot Neptune with a highly metallic atmosphere | Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A)

Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) is an international journal which publishes papers on all aspects of astronomy and astrophysics
www.aanda.org www.aanda.org
 
There are likely many more exoplanets with liquid water than previously thought, according to a new science paper published today. That massively increases the chances of life existing elsewhere in the galaxy, say the authors.

“It was estimated that around one rocky planet around every 100 stars would have liquid water,” said lead researcher Dr Lujendra Ojha from Rutgers University, New Jersey, today at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Lyon, France. “The new model shows that if the conditions are right, this could approach one planet per stars—so we are a hundred times more likely to find liquid water than we thought.”
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www.forbes.com

Earth-Like Planets Are 100 Times More Common Than We Thought, Say Scientists

A new analysis shows that there are probably many more Earth-like exoplanets with liquid water than had been thought, significantly increasing the chance of finding life.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com

Related paper:

www.nature.com

Liquid water on cold exo-Earths via basal melting of ice sheets - Nature Communications

Liquid water is key for life as we know it. Here, the authors show even with a modest geothermal heat flow, subglacial oceans of liquid water can form at the base of and within the ice sheets on exo-Earths, which may provide habitable conditions for an extended period.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
A trio of astrophysicists, two from Colgate University and the third from the University of Texas, has found possible evidence of dark stars, courtesy of data from the James Webb Space Telescope. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cosmin Ilie, Jillian Pauline and Katherine Freese, describe their study of data surrounding three galaxies spotted by the JWST and how they might relate to dark stars.
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phys.org

James Webb Space Telescope finds possible evidence of dark stars

A trio of astrophysicists, two from Colgate University and the third from the University of Texas, has found possible evidence of dark stars, courtesy of data from the James Webb Space Telescope. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cosmin Ilie, Jillian...
phys.org phys.org

Related paper:

 
Interesting find Flyaway, looks like the infant solar system was extremely lucky to have not been damaged by that supernova explosion 4 billion years ago were it not for the molecular gas cloud, though many scientists think that the great dying was caused by another nearby supernova 250 million years ago that almost wiped out all life on Earth.
 
Astronomers from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei report the discovery of a new faint tidal disruption event (TDE). The newfound TDE, designated AT 2023clx is the faintest and closest optical TDE so far detected. The finding was published July 10 on the preprint server arXiv.
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phys.org

New tidal disruption event discovered by Chinese astronomers

Astronomers from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei report the discovery of a new faint tidal disruption event (TDE). The newfound TDE, designated AT 2023clx is the faintest and closest optical TDE so far detected. The finding was published July 10 on the preprint server...
phys.org phys.org

Related paper:

 
Most planetary systems we've found out there in the wider galaxy also seem to follow this trend. According to theory, though, two planets could share the same orbit – and now, for the first time, astronomers think we might have evidence of this in a baby planetary system some 370 light-years from Earth.
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www.sciencealert.com

We Just Got The First Evidence of Two Planets Sharing The Same Orbit

The Solar System is a fairly tidy place.
www.sciencealert.com www.sciencealert.com

Related video:

View: https://youtu.be/T7-cp8Om_qU
 
That would be one strange Solar System, I would not be surprised if the planets collided at some point in the future it would only be a matter of time.
 
Two-faced star exposed in first for astronomy

An unusual white dwarf star is made of hydrogen on one side and helium on the other.

In a first for white dwarfs, the burnt-our cores of dead stars, astronomers from institutions including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Warwick have discovered that at least one member of this cosmic family is two faced. The findings, that one side of the white dwarf is composed of hydrogen, while the other is made up of helium, were published today in Nature.
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Two-faced star exposed in first for astronomy

An unusual white dwarf star is made of hydrogen on one side and helium on the other.
warwick.ac.uk warwick.ac.uk
 
They don’t have any real clue what this, for a start physics won’t allow it to be a pulsar as it’s too slow and it’s highly unlikely to be a Magnetar or a White Dwarf either.

On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM J1839–10, behaves a bit like a pulsar, sending out regular bursts of radio energy. But the physics that drives pulsars means that they'd stop emitting if they slowed down too much, and almost every pulsar we know of blinks at least once per minute.

GPM J1839–10 takes 22 minutes between pulses. We have no idea what kind of physics or what kind of objects can power that.
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arstechnica.com

Something in space has been lighting up every 20 minutes since 1988

We have no explanations for this sort of slow repeat.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Related paper:

www.nature.com

A long-period radio transient active for three decades - Nature

The discovery of a long-period radio transient, GPM J1839–10, prompted a search of radio archives, thereby finding that this source has been repeating since at least 1988.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
So I take it that it will be a new class of object. And I thought that Magnetars were weird.
 
But until recently it was assumed that 55 Cancri e would be rotationally, tidally locked with its parent star, so that one side of the planet would remain in perpetual daylight.
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New observations reveal that in fact 55 Cancri e may have a day and night cycle.

Using both NASA’s Webb Space Telescope observations as well as observations using ESA’s (European Space Agency) Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS), Stockholm University astronomer Alexis Brandeker and colleagues found that 55 Cancri e has more temperature and orbital variations than they ever expected.
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But the team has seen temperature variations around the planet which could indicate that it has a normal day-night cycle. That’s a possibility, says Brandeker, because 55 Cancri e may have a slightly eccentric orbit due to long-term gravitational perturbations caused by other members of the planetary system.
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www.forbes.com

Crazy, Close-Orbiting Lava World May Still Have Day-Night Cycles, Says Astronomer

Bizarre rocky exoworld —- with what appears to be a normal day-night cycle —- orbits so close to its parent star that the morning heat melts its surface.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com

Related video interview:

View: https://youtu.be/CEg2qGl4WKo
 
A strange dark stone found recently in a remote section of the Sahara desert could be the first ever known case of a rock launched from the Earth that returned to the planet as a meteorite thousands of years later.

The reddish-brown dark stone, found in Morocco in 2018, may have been ejected into space about 10,000 years ago following an asteroid collision with Earth, and remained in orbit before crashing back onto the planet, suspect scientists, including Jerome Gattacceca from CNRS in France.
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www.independent.co.uk

Rock launched from Earth likely ‘boomeranged’ back as meteorite, suspect researchers

Reddish-brown stone may have been ejected into space about 10,000 years ago in first such case discovered
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
 
There is the old saying that what goes up must come down, but to have remained in space for that length of time? I am stunned.
 
I have no idea what Avi Loeb takes for breakfast everyday, but it must be strong stuff. And of course the dumbarse media support him. That UFO thing in the Pacific is truly ridiculous...
What's wrong with Loeb ? he seems to be a decent scientist, not some crackpot fringe science nazi-UFO idiot.
Is it a case of badly inflated head and ego ?
 
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By the way the odds of a big planet nine have dropped recently due to the pulsar timing discovery of a gravitational wave background. This meant knowing the position of the Solar System barycentre to within a few 100 metres, and this puts very strong constraints on the mass of any additional planet.

For example Mike Brown (the guy who killed Pluto as a planet) thinks there's a bigger Planet 9 out there and is supposed to be 460AU and 6.3 times the mass of the Earth. That would put the barycenter of the solar system about 32000km offset from where it is now.
 
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I wonder could the James Webb Space Telescope observe the ninth planet? If we knew what part of the sky to point the JWST.
 
As long as the Solar Flare does not point towards the Earth then there is nothing to worry about.
 

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