Astronomy and Planetary Science Thread

Oxygen production from dissociation of Europa’s water-ice surface

 
Where will the monks go now?


Scopes
 
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Tidal locking is such a common phenomenon in the universe that we only need to look at the Moon to notice it. Our satellite only shows us its near side face as its rotation on its axis and revolution around the Earth are synchronized. Planets too can get in this state of behavior if they orbit their star too closely – and researchers believe they have confirmed the first super-Earth tidally locked to its star.


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A collection of stars 30,000 light-years away is the faintest and lowest-mass Milky Way satellite ever found, according to the group of scientists who recently observed it. Oh, and it may be dominated by dark matter, the unknown stuff that makes up about 27% of the universe.


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The results confirm that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, they added. However, the findings have also raised the tantalising possibility that dark energy – a mysterious, repulsive force that drives the process – is not constant throughout time as has previously been suggested.

Dr Seshadri Nadathur, a co-author of the work and senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: “What we are seeing are some hints that it has actually been changing over time, which is quite exciting because it is not what the standard model of a cosmological constant dark energy would look like.”


Related video:

View: https://youtu.be/jRYUt9nE9b0


Related preprints:

 
The DESI fly-by POV...high FTL speed by the looks of it...just no relativistic effects.

In space
 
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Today the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration is proud to announce GW230529, the first exceptional #GravitationalWaves event from our fourth observing run (#O4). You can learn more from
@astronerdika
's excellent infographic, or by visiting our detection page! https://ligo.org/detections/GW230529.php

View: https://twitter.com/LIGO/status/1776317857871073444



View: https://youtu.be/3PKsBwH_bJE


View: https://youtu.be/xGl5tVnjwC8
 
NASA's Parker Solar Probe makes 1st-of-its-kind observation within a coronal mass ejection

Now, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has gotten a first-ever peek inside a CME as it erupted from the sun. And what lies inside appears to be a treasure trove for solar physicists. The probe's visible-light-detecting, Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument caught clear, turbulent eddies within the CME.

The eddies are what physicists call Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHI). Physicists think KHI events occur whenever one patch of fast-moving fluid interacts with another. On Earth, KHI occurs in clouds when the wind speed at one end of the cloud is different from that at the other end.

 
New research from Northwestern University investigates the consequences of these collisions. It uncovers a fascinating phenomenon: stars near the galactic center sometimes merge together or lose mass due to near misses. This dynamic process can lead to surprising changes in stars’ appearances and lifespans.


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Scientists have been left perplexed by unprecedented radio signals coming from a previously dormant star.

The star, known as XTE J1810-197, is a magnetar – a type of neutron star that are also the strongest magnets in the universe. It is the closest magnetar to Earth that we know of, at a relatively close 8,000 light years away.



Now scientists say that it appears to be sending out radio pulses that do not fit with expectations.

”Unlike the radio signals we’ve seen from other magnetars, this one is emitting enormous amounts of rapidly changing circular polarisation. We had never seen anything like this before,” said Marcus Lower, a postdoctoral fellow at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, who led the work.


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In October 2022, an international team of researchers, including Northwestern University astrophysicists, observed the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded, GRB 221009A.

Now, a Northwestern-led team has confirmed that the phenomenon responsible for the historic burst — dubbed the B.O.A.T. (“brightest of all time”) — is the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star. The team discovered the explosion, or supernova, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).


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This here is very unusual
They detected collision of two small object via Gravitational Waves,
One object was small Neutron star with 2 solar mass.
The other is 4 solar mass and also very small.

And here lies the problem
There is mass gab between Neutron stars and Black holes
were this object lies in middle, it's neither a Neutron Star not Black hole !
but what is it then ?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emFf4W3WzYI
 
Neutron Hole?

Spinning up the Pointer Sisters right now.
 
Neutron Hole?

Spinning up the Pointer Sisters right now.

This could be first evidence of Micro Black Hole also called primordial black holes.
Theories goes they were created in the high-density environment of the early Universe.
 
What's on the other side of this black hole...that can be imaged with the BH as a gravity lens?

Gravity glitch

More news on space

Lunar landforms

Road to space

ion-drive

the successful commercialization of this new thruster will soon provide at least one such solution to enable the next generation of small spacecraft science missions requiring up to an amazing 8 km/s of delta-v.

New Book
 
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Article looking at the future of the EHT project with ngEHT, and even the proposal to put an aerial in space orbiting the Earth with BHEX. They’ve made a $88 million request to the NSF to fully fund ngEHT, with a decision NET October this year.

 
It’s possible this Brown Dwarf has an exomoon:

However, the aurora of Jupiter and Saturn have a secondary minor driver, in the form of charged particles streaming into the gas giants as a result of their active moons spewing material into space. For instance, Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanic body in the solar system, spewing lava dozens of miles into space, while the Saturn moon Enceladus spits geysers into space that contain water vapor and other material that simultaneously freezes and boils when it hits space.

Thus, the aurora of W1935 with no star or stellar winds indicates that the brown dwarf might be orbited by an active moon.


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Scientists say they have found new evidence that there is a hidden planet in our solar system.

For years, some astronomers have been suggesting that unusual behaviour on the edge of our solar system is best explained by another, undiscovered planet. That helps explain the orbits of objects that lie at the very far reaches of our solar system, more than 250 times away from the Sun than we are.

Now Konstantin Bogytin, an astronomer who helped popularise the theory, says that he and his team have found yet more evidence that suggests that planet exists. The new work represents “the strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there”, he said.



The best explanation was from the model that included Planet Nine, however, Dr Bogytin said. They noted that there were other explanations for the behaviour of those objects – including the suggestion that other planets once influenced their orbit, but have since been removed – but claim that the theory of Planet Nine remains the best explanation.


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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson defended the agency’s plans to cut back or cancel some agency programs at a House hearing, placing much of the blame at the feet of Congress.
Those hard choices, he reminded appropriators, were the result of the budget caps enacted last year as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a government default. “That’s the compromise you had to do,” he said. “If I had been a member, I would have voted for that, too, to save the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.”
 
Earlier this year, researchers discovered that a vast liquid ocean lurks beneath the icy shell of Saturn's tiny moon, Mimas. Now the same team may have discovered how it was created.

New research suggests that as Mimas' orbit around Saturn became less flattened, or less "eccentric" due to the ringed planet's pull, its icy shell melted and thinned. This would have created a vast ocean somewhere between 2 million and 25 million years ago, making this subsurface sea relatively young for a solar system feature.


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Certainly is an interesting discovery about Mimas. Time for another Saturn mission that concentrates on Enceladus and Mimas, that would be worth thinking about for sometime in the future.
 
Various tweets by Konstantin Batygin concerning his new statistical paper on Planet Nine.

In the new study, we explored the opposite end: the most unstable, long-period TNOs (perihelion <30 AU) near the solar system's plane. There are 17 such objects with a>100AU, and notably, their perihelion distribution is almost flat between ~15 to 30 AU.

View: https://twitter.com/kbatygin/status/1780971504454221868


Given their dynamic instability, only two scenarios can maintain this population of TNOs in a steady state: they're either driven inward by interplay between the Galactic tide and Neptune's scattering, or they result from dynamics induced by Planet 9 (as shown on the figure).

View: https://twitter.com/kbatygin/status/1780971507142762992


We carried out detailed calculations for both the P9 scenario and the Galactic-tide model. Results show that while Planet 9 produces a flat perihelion distribution of Neptune-crossers (mirroring observed data), the model without P9 results in a distribution peaked around 30 AU.

View: https://twitter.com/kbatygin/status/1780971509659349129


But what about observational bias? After adjusting for it, the data favor the Planet 9 model at a striking 5 sigma level. Surprisingly, this "unexotic" group of TNOs provides the strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there...

View: https://twitter.com/kbatygin/status/1780971512163344791
 
In new research, scientists have modeled an impact in space that may explain half of Pluto’s iconic heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio. The Sputnik Planitia basin is shaped like an upside down pear, which the researchers say could be from an impact with a celestial object up to 400 miles in diameter. In their proposed model, an “impactor” composed of ice and rock strikes Pluto’s icy surface, travels through it, and creates a “splat” (technical term!) that lingers to this day.


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NASA’s planet-hunting telescope Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first free-floating, or rogue, planet. It is a terrestrial object, likely bigger than Earth but not by too much. This candidate object was discovered within the analysis of 1.3 million light curves collected by the space observatories over its years in orbit.


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Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

 
However, scientists aren’t exactly sure when Earth’s magnetic field first formed, but a new study from the University of Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) details the earliest known evidence of the field’s existence embedded in well-preserved 3.7 billion-year-old iron rocks in Isua, Greenland.



The iron composition of these rocks is key as the element can essentially lock in magnetic field direction and strength when it crystallizes. The study, published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research, details an Eoarchean (4 billion to 3.6 billion years ago) magnetic field strength of 15 microteslas—roughly half as strong as the magnetic field of today.


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The Earth's magnetic field has changed direction many times over millions of years, sometimes accompanied by temporary weakening. A much longer period in which the field diminished took place between 591 and 565 million years ago. Shortly thereafter, the first fossils of complex animals appear in the geologic record. A new study suggests it might be that weakening that made this possible, despite the apparent contradiction with the field's role in making life possible.


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In a major advancement in space science, astronomers and citizen scientists have discovered an exoplanet within the habitable zone of a binary star system. This system features not only two stars but potentially another exoplanet as well.



The new planet, officially named TOI 4633 c but also known as Percival, breaks the mold with its lengthy 272-day orbit. This makes it a rare find due to its relatively distant position from its star.


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