Space news topic and space related news

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Txantsan, wish I were there

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Txantsan, wish I were there

Me too

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Caught speeding: Clocking the fastest-spinning brown dwarfs
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=302522&org=NSF&from=news

Gemini North observations help identify rotational speed limit for brown dwarfs

Astronomers have discovered the most rapidly rotating brown dwarfs -- three brown dwarfs that each complete a full rotation roughly once every hour. The rate is so extreme that if they rotated any faster, they could come close to tearing apart.

Brown dwarfs are, simply put, failed stars. They form like stars but are less massive and more like giant planets.

Astronomers first measured the rotation speeds of these brown dwarfs using the Spitzer Space Telescope and confirmed them with follow-up observations with the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea in Hawaii and the Magellan Baade telescope in Chile. Gemini North is one of the pair of telescopes that make up the international Gemini Observatory, a program of  NSF's NOIRLab.

"We seem to have come across a speed limit on the rotation of brown dwarfs," said Megan Tannock of Western University. "Despite extensive searches, by our own team and others, no brown dwarfs have been found to rotate any faster. In fact, faster spins may lead to a brown dwarf tearing apart."

Tannock and Western University astronomer Stanimir Metchev worked with international collaborators to find three rapidly rotating brown dwarfs. They spin approximately 10 times faster than normal, and about 30% faster than the most rapid rotations previously measured.

The astronomers confirmed the rapid rotations by measuring alterations in the brown dwarfs' light and using a computer model to match those alterations to spin rates. The researchers found that these brown dwarfs spin with speeds of about 350,000 kilometers per hour (around 220,000 miles per hour) at their equator, which is 10 times faster than the spin of Jupiter.

"These unusual brown dwarfs are spinning at dizzying speeds," said Sandy Leggett, an astronomer at Gemini North who studies brown dwarfs. "At about 350,000 kilometers per hour, the relatively weak gravity of the brown dwarfs is barely holding them together. This exciting discovery has identified rotational limits beyond which these objects may not exist."

The team's results, funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, will appear in an upcoming issue of The Astronomical Journal.

"Through its combination of near infrared sensitivity and nimble reaction to new astronomical finds, the Gemini-North telescope has confirmed and further characterized the fascinating nature of these valuable discoveries," said Martin Still, a program director in NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences.

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One Idea to Explain Dark Matter – Ultralight Bosons – Fails the Test
https://www.technology.org/2021/04/21/one-idea-to-explain-dark-matter-ultralight-bosons-fails-the-test/

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NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover Extracts First Oxygen from Red Planet
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet

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Using exoplanets as dark matter detectors
https://news.osu.edu/using-exoplanets-as-dark-matter-detectors/

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Giant Planet is Found at an Extreme Distance From its Star
https://www.universetoday.com/150988/giant-planet-is-found-at-an-extreme-distance-from-its-star/

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NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Flies Faster, Farther on Third Flight
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-flies-faster-farther-on-third-flight

The craft's April 25 flight was conducted at speeds and distances beyond what had ever been previously demonstrated, even in testing on Earth.

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther on Sunday, April 25, 2021 than in any tests it went through on Earth. The helicopter took off at 4:31 a.m. EDT (1:31 a.m. PDT) , or 12:33 p.m. local Mars time, rising 16 feet (5 meters) – the same altitude as its second flight. Then it zipped downrange 164 feet (50 meters), just over half the length of a football field, reaching a top speed of 6.6 feet per second (2 meters per second).

After data came back from Mars starting at 10:16 a.m. EDT (7:16 a.m. PDT), Ingenuity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California was ecstatic to see the helicopter soaring out of view. They're already digging through a trove of information gathered during this third flight that will inform not just additional Ingenuity flights but possible Mars rotorcraft in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNx9hcrUpww

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Aboard NASA's Perseverance rover, MOXIE creates oxygen on Mars
https://news.mit.edu/2021/aboard-nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-moxie-creates-oxygen-0421

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Campfires on the Sun
https://www.mpg.de/16788408/0427-aero-solar-corona-a-close-look-at-the-smallest-flares-151060-x?c=2249

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft detects a surprising number of tiny and bright flares in the gas atmosphere of our star

[Vawmataw]

Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins dead at age 90
American astronaut Michael Collins, who stayed behind in the command module of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin travelled to the lunar surface to become the first humans to walk on the moon, died on Wednesday at age 90, his family said.

A statement released by his family said Collins died of cancer.

Often described as the "forgotten" third astronaut on the historic mission, Collins remained alone for more than 21 hours until his two colleagues returned in the lunar module. He lost contact with mission control in Houston each time the spacecraft circled the dark side of the moon.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/michael-collins-1.6005675

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Astronomers detect first ever hydroxyl molecule signature in an exoplanet atmosphere
https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/astronomers-detect-first-ever-hydroxyl-molecule-signature-in-an-exoplanet-atmosphere/

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Eltur tìtxen si:

NASA is now Planning a Mission to go 1,000 AU From the Sun, Deep Into Interstellar Space
https://www.universetoday.com/151029/nasa-is-now-planning-a-mission-to-go-1000-au-from-the-sun-deep-into-interstellar-space/

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Researchers discover new type of ancient crater lake on Mars
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-03-30/crater-lake

An ancient crater lake in the southern highlands of Mars appears to have been fed by glacial runoff, bolstering the idea that the Red Planet had a cold and icy past.

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The Arecibo Observatory, UCF, TACC, the University of Puerto Rico, EPOC, Globus, CICoE Pilot partner to move telescope data to Ranch system
https://www.technology.org/2021/05/04/the-arecibo-observatory-ucf-tacc-the-university-of-puerto-rico-epoc-globus-cicoe-pilot-partner-to-move-telescope-data-to-ranch-system/

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New telescope at ESO's La Silla joins effort to protect Earth from risky asteroids
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2107/

Part of the world-wide effort to scan and identify near-Earth objects, the European Space Agency's Test-Bed Telescope 2 (TBT2), a technology demonstrator hosted at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, has now started operating. Working alongside its northern-hemisphere partner telescope, TBT2 will keep a close eye on the sky for asteroids that could pose a risk to Earth, testing hardware and software for a future telescope network.

"To be able to calculate the risk posed by potentially hazardous objects in the Solar System, we first need a census of these objects. The TBT project is a step in that direction," says Ivo Saviane, the site manager for ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The project, which is a collaboration between the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the European Space Agency (ESA), "is a test-bed to demonstrate the capabilities needed to detect and follow-up near-Earth objects with the same telescope system," says ESA's Head of the Optical Technologies Section Clemens Heese, who is leading this project.

The 56-cm telescope at ESO's La Silla and TBT1, its identical counterpart located at the ESA's deep-space ground station at Cebreros in Spain, will act as precursors to the planned 'Flyeye' telescope network, a separate project that ESA is developing to survey and track fast-moving objects in the sky. This future network will be entirely robotic; software will perform real-time scheduling of observations and, at the end of the day, it will report the positions and other information about the objects detected. The TBT project is designed to show that the software and hardware work as expected.

"The start of observations of TBT2 at La Silla will enable the observing system to work in its intended two-telescope configuration, finally fulfilling the project's objectives," says Heese.

While seriously harmful asteroid impacts on Earth are extremely rare, they are not inconceivable. The Earth has been periodically bombarded with both large and small asteroids for billions of years, and the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor event, which caused some 1600 injuries, most due to flying splinters and broken glass, further raised the public's awareness of the threat posed by near-Earth objects. Larger objects do more damage, but are thankfully easier to spot and the orbits of known large asteroids are already thoroughly studied. However, it is estimated that there are large numbers of smaller, yet-undiscovered objects we are unaware of that could do serious damage if they were to hit a populated area.

That's where TBT and the future planned network of Flyeye telescopes come in. Once fully operational the network's design would allow it to survey the night sky to track fast-moving objects, a significant advancement in Europe's capacity to spot potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.

TBT is part of an ongoing inter-organisational effort to build a more complete picture of these objects and the potential risks they pose. This project builds on ESO's previous involvement in protecting the Earth from potentially dangerous near-Earth objects. Both ESO and ESA are active in the United Nations-endorsed International Asteroid Warning Network and many observations of these objects have been performed with ESO's telescopes. ESO's New Technology Telescope at La Silla, for example, has been used for observations of small near-Earth asteroids in support of the European NEOShield-2 project.

The ongoing inter-organisational collaboration between ESO and ESA is particularly significant in the study of near-Earth objects. While TBT is the first telescope project to be realised under a cooperation agreement between the two organisations, ESO has been helping ESA track potentially dangerous objects since 2014, by using its Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory to observe very faint objects. These efforts combined are a significant leap forward for the worldwide search and management of asteroids, and have already proved useful in ruling out collisions of asteroids with the Earth.

The installation and first light of TBT2 at ESO's La Silla Observatory was achieved under strict health and safety conditions. ESO's observatories temporarily stopped operations last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but have since resumed science observations under restrictions that ensure the safety and protection of everyone at the sites.

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60 Years Ago: Alan Shepard Becomes the First American in Space
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/60-years-ago-alan-shepard-becomes-the-first-american-in-space

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Supernovae Twins Open Up New Possibilities for Precision Cosmology
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2021/05/06/supernovae-twins/

Cosmologists have found a way to double the accuracy of measuring distances to supernova explosions – one of their tried-and-true tools for studying the mysterious dark energy that is making the universe expand faster and faster. The results from the Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) collaboration, led by Greg Aldering of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will enable scientists to study dark energy with greatly improved precision and accuracy, and provide a powerful crosscheck of the technique across vast distances and time. The findings will also be central to major upcoming cosmology experiments that will use new ground and space telescopes to test alternative explanations of dark energy.

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Physicists describe new type of aurora
https://now.uiowa.edu/2021/05/physicists-describe-new-type-aurora

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NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Completes First One-Way Trip
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-completes-first-one-way-trip