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Astronomers Solve Alien Megastructure Mystery By Russell Adam Webb
What’s really behind the so-called ‘alien megastructure’ found by astronomers on NASA’s Kepler Mission? Also Check: Interview with NASA Astronaut Jessica Meir A strange buzz was felt within the scientific and astronomical community in October of 2015 when scientists working on NASA’s Kepler Mission announced they’d found an unusual dimming pattern in a star. Wild theories were thrown around with many suggesting that it simply had to be an ‘alien megastructure’ where advanced aliens were using technology to harness the energy from the star. Unfortunately for extra-terrestrial hunters, a new study has revealed that the odd dimming is almost certainly caused by the star consuming a planet. The paper is due to be published by the Royal Astronomical Society and might finally put to bed the rumors that we’ve found an alien megastructure. This theory of an alien megastructure harnessing the stars energy is known as the Dyson Sphere. The renowned physicist, Freeman Dyson, claimed in the 1960’s that advanced alien civilizations would require phenomenal amounts of energy to power their ships and planets. The most efficient way, her claimed, would be to build a structure around the star that harnesses as much of the energy as possible. He stated that the structure would star small and the grow bigger. The researchers from the University of California, Berkley, and Columbia University have stated that if the star consumed a nearby planet, it would have required a great deal of energy to be spent and the star would need some time to recover to its original state. The debris of the destroyed world would also be passing in front of the star causing a dimming effect.
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The star involved is known as Tabby’s Star, or KIC 8462852, and scientists recorded drops in energy output of 15% and 22%. This kind of cosmic change hadn’t been recorded before and conclusions were quickly jumped to. Many astronomers warned that this probably wasn’t an alien megastructure and we were probably getting excited over nothing. The study tried to use several methods of observation, including the Kozai Mechanism, which uses orbital eccentricity and inclination. They found that the star probably consumed multiple planets in the past, judging from the changes in orbit. These would have also caused the momentary dips in brightness and they think that the star probably ingested a planet the size of Jupiter for the dimming to have occurred in this way. “We estimated that if Tabby’s star were representative, something like 10 Jupiter’s would have to fall into a typical star over its lifetime, or maybe even more. These transits only last a few days, so when we see one, we have to alert all the telescopes and basically point every telescope we have at Tabby’s star. This paper puts a merger scenario on the table in a credible way. I think this moves it into the top tier of explanations.” James Wright – Researcher If these studies are confirmed, as expected, they could have a profound effect on the way we view stellar appetites. We know that stars will sometimes consume planets but the causes aren’t always clear. It is also slightly disappointing that it isn’t an alien megastructure as that would have been far cooler than a greedy, planet-munching star.
By Russell Adam Webb
A research team from San Francisco University has completed and submitted detailed observations of Wolf 1061. The star is relatively close and known to harbor at least 3 large exoplanets. Lying around 14 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, Wolf 1061 is a fairly dim star that hasn’t interested astronomers too much in the past. This all changed, however, when scientists found a few exoplanets orbiting the star, especially when at least one of them is known to lie within the habitable zone. The habitable zone, for those not familiar with exoplanet hunting, is the area surrounding a star at which the temperature would be in a range that allows liquid water to form on the surface. This is thought to be one of the fundamental building blocks for life to exist, although plate tectonics is also thought to be important. The star, Wolf 1061, also known as GJ 628, is now considered extremely important in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. The system hosts 3 super Earths, of which one is certain to be within the habitable zone. “The Wolf 1061 system is important because it is so close and that gives other opportunities to do follow-up studies to see if it does indeed have life.” Dr. Stephen Kane – San Francisco University The team will publish the findings of the report in the Astrophysics Journal. Scientists will be making follow up studies to determine whether the planet might indeed host life in some form. “We present the results from direct measurements of stellar properties for one of the closest known exoplanet host stars; Wolf 1061. Our observations from the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy interferometric array provide a direct stellar radius measurement of 0.3207 solar radii. We also obtained seven years of precise, automated photometry that reveals the correct stellar rotation period of 89.3 days.” Wolf 1061 isn’t much like our own star, the Sun, as its brightness is only around 1% of it. This means the star is far cooler and the habitable zone would be closer to the star than our own. This also means that any planet within this habitable zone might face other factors such as tidal locking or extreme amounts of radiation.
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Using the updated stellar parameters, we estimate the inner and outer boundaries of the conservative habitable zone to be 0.11 AU and 0.21 AU, respectively. When scientists search for planets that could sustain life, they are basically looking for a planet with nearly identical properties to Earth. Like Earth, the planet would have to exist in a sweet spot often referred to as the ‘Goldilocks zone’ where conditions are just right for life. Simply put, the planet can’t be too close or too far from its parent star,” he added. A planet that’s too close would be too hot. If it’s too far, it may be too cold and any water would freeze, which is what happens on Mars. Conversely, when planets warm, a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’ can occur where heat gets trapped in the atmosphere. Planetary researchers believe this is what happened on Venus. They believe Venus once had oceans, but because of its proximity to the Sun the planet became so hot that all the water evaporated. Since water vapor is extremely effective in trapping in heat, it made the surface of the planet even hotter.” Dr. Stephen Kane – San Francisco University Wolf 1061c, the exoplanet that has astronomers interested, lies within the habitable zone of its star but at the end which is closer to the star. It might, therefore, have similar conditions to Venus if similar amounts of Carbon Dioxide were present. So it could be another ferociously hot Venus, where a tropical ocean planet once existed before it turned into a barren landscape. It all depends on whether the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere is allowed to runaway which would make the conditions quite chaotic. Another theory states that the planet might actually go through very quick phases of freezing over and then heating up. The scientists studying the planet fully admit that whilst on a galactic scale, Wolf 1061 is fairly close to us, it is still a long way for even our most advanced instruments. It is, therefore, hard to study and confirm what conditions might be like. We can, however, expect to hear more about this system as our imaging equipment and techniques improve over time. And, one day we might be taking trips to these exoplanets for our vacations.
What is that bright object in the evening sky? By Rhodri Evans
A number of people have been asking me over the last two or three weeks what the (very) bright object is in the evening sky. It is Venus, the brightest of all the planets. If you look towards the west (the same part of the sky as where the Sun has set) on any clear(ish) evening over the next two months, within a few hours of sunset, you should easily be able to see Venus. Here is a diagram showing the evening sky for this evening (12 January 2017) as seen from Cardiff, and I have set it up to show the sky at 6pm. In Cardiff today the Sun sets at 16:29. Venus will not set until 20:51, nearly 3.5 hours after the Sun has set. This is why it is visible for such a long time after sunset. The western sky at 6pm as seen from Cardiff. Today the Sun will set in Cardiff at 4:29pm, with Venus not setting until 8:51pm. This is nearly 3.5 hours after sunset, and today is the day of maximum eastern elongation. In fact, today (12 January) is the day when the time between the Sun setting and the time at which Venus sets is at its greatest. That is why I chose today to blog about Venus. This is called maximum eastern elongation, and it is shown in the diagram below. When the angle between a line from Earth to Venus and Venus to the Sun is a right angle, we have maximum elongation. As Venus is currently to the East of the Sun (rising after and setting after the Sun), it is today at maximum eastern elongation.
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Venus will dominate the evening sky for another 6 weeks or so, although it will start setting closer and closer to the time of sunset now that we have passed maximum eastern elongation. It will swing in front of the Sun (something called inferior conjunction) on 25 March, so will be lost in the glow of the Sun for a few weeks before that. A few weeks after inferior conjunction, it will reappear as a morning object, becoming increasingly visible before sunrise as opposed to after sunset. So, enjoy the wonderful sight of Venus in the evening sky over the next 6 weeks or so. And, if you can get hold of a pair of binoculars or a small telescope, you will see that Venus exhibits phases. Currently it is a quarter phase (half of it is illuminated), but as it approaches inferior conjunction it will become more and more crescent, but also appear to get larger in your viewing device (this cannot be seen with the naked eye). It was observations like these which enabled Galileo to show in 1610/1611 that Venus could not be orbiting the
Meet The Women Of NASA Astronaut Group 21 By Russell Adam Webb
Half of the 8 successful candidates of NASA Astronaut Group 21 were women. This is a monumental success in an industry that was once dominated by the male sex. These women weren’t selected because NASA thought it would be politically correct; they were selected solely because they had the right skills for future missions into space. Back in the 1960’s, this would have been completely unheard of. Whilst the Russians had female cosmonauts involved in their space program from the start, every astronaut on the Apollo and Gemini missions was male and it took until 1983 to get Sally Ride into space. NASA has since vastly improved its ratio and does far exceed any other countries number of women successfully sent into space. The men and women of NASA Astronaut Group 21 went through rigorous testing and training to prove their spaceworthiness and eventually completed all of the courses in July 2015. They are now ready and waiting for missions to become available and will be selected for a mission depending on which particular field of expertise is required. Just to put into perspective how good these guys are, 6372 applications were received from potentially Starting with Jessica Meir because I recently had the suitable candidates who all believed they stood a chance. opportunity to interview her, Jessica Meir is a passionate scientist and wanted to become an astronaut from a very early age. She comes from Maine and has the attitude of an explorer. She hopes to get the opportunity to visit the International Space Station in the near future and she thinks another lunar mission is the next logical step for the space program. She also plays a mean piccolo. Check out her NASA bio “I had a fantastic view of the stars from the teeny town in Maine where I grew up. Maybe that’s why I wanted to be an astronaut from such a young age. I’ve always been drawn to remote places—and extreme challenges. While doing research on emperor penguins for my Ph.D. in marine biology, I lived and worked in Antarctica, where I also went scuba diving under several feet of ice.” Nicole Mann was born in California and quickly developed and aptitude for both mechanical engineering and flight. She is a keen pilot and has flown for more than 2000 hours using 22 different types of aircraft. She has performed over 200 carrier arrestments and 47 combat missions during tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. Read her full NASA bio. Check out her NASA bio “I have one of the best jobs in the world. I didn’t always realize it was a possibility. I thought, ‘who are these people who are astronauts.’ I was an active duty marine in Iraq where I flew F-18s when I met Colonel Bresnik who had recently been selected to be an astronaut and that’s when I realized I could do that.”
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Christina Hammock Koch is a native of Michigan and another space fanatic who dreamt of going into space from a young age. She is currently assigned to the International Space Station Crew Operations Branch where she is involved in crew conferences and IT related issues onboard the station. Her expertise is in both electrical engineering and physics. Check out her NASA Bio She credits her parents for her love of science and space: “I credit my parents for that because they are both from scientific backgrounds. My mom studied biology and my dad studied chemistry and some physics and he is a physician, but he had a very strong interest in astronomy and astrophysics and exploration in general. We always had National Geographic and Astronomy magazines and Popular Mechanics lying around the house. I got interested in exploration and different parts of the world and different parts of the universe just from seeing those things around the house and the different discussions we had as a family. I’m really proud of my parents.” Anne McClain grew up in Spokane, Washington and always had a love of flying and sciences. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical/Aeronautical Engineering and then a Master of Sciences award in the same field. She had an illustrious career in the military and flew more than 2000 hours in 20 different types of aircraft.
Check out her NASA bio “There were more than 6,100 other applicants for our class of eight, and I’d made my peace with not getting in. I still remember getting the call that I’d been selected. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t talk. I started crying. I grew up in Spokane, Washington, and I can’t recall ever not wanting to be an astronaut. I learned a lot [serving 15 months] in Iraq, flying attack helicopters at the front of the front lines. I joined the Army out of a deep sense of duty, but wanting to be an astronaut feels more like my destiny. With so much conflict in the world, space exploration can be a beacon of hope. No one cares about race or religion or nationality in space travel. We’re all just part of Team Human.”
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A Private Space Station Might Be Born From the ISS Edited by Matthew Dibble
What's going to happen to the International Space Station (ISS) after it has retired? While international agreements work out how long the station will last after its planned budget end in 2024, one private sector company has a vision that could begin to build a new station on pieces of the old one. A company called Axiom Space, and its chief executive is Michael Suffredini, the former NASA program manager of the ISS. The company has ambitious plans to send up a module in 2020 to attach to the space station, then it plans to remove that same module when the space station program comes to an end. Depending on what the partners want, Axiom space could then even remove pieces of the ISS along with their own module. Amir Blachman, Axiom's vice-president of strategic development has suggested that such pieces could be salvaged and put to a new use, including a storage module, the Canadarm (a robotic arm used for spacewalks and snagging robotic spacecraft) and even the Cupola, a 360-degree window that faces Earth. "It's more interesting technology," he told Seeker. But, he emphasized, this is all an early-stage speculation so far. Axiom space right now is focusing on getting its module launched on time. And if all goes to plan, Module 1 will have a capacity for seven astronauts and will then be fully self-sufficient. Including such items as a galley, sleeping quarters, experiment racks and life support systems. It would then attach to Node 2's docking adapter, but also come equipped with its own docking adapters for spacecraft so it able to dock (if feasible, considering sightlines, loads and other considerations).
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NASA has now completed a first-phase study with Axiom space and now they are conducting a deeper study that may be completed within the next few months. The module will hopefully launch on a heavy-lift cargo rocket and would have an advantage over most ISS modules: in that most of the equipment is inside the shell, removing the need for any spacewalks. It also would have more miniaturized computers that are able to do more, this is simply because the module is much newer than the rest of the ISS modules. "As a private company, we can do other things like accepting tourists more frequently, or doing advertising sponsorships," Blachman said. But those are future streams of revenue. In the near term, the company is more focused on training astronauts from multiple countries (whose nations would pay) as well as doing additive or 3-D manufacturing in space under an agreement with the company Made In Space, which already does that work in other parts of the ISS. Startup funding first came from a seed round in 2016, when Axiom space was first founded. The $3 million round was led by Kam Ghaffarian, the chief executive of Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT) — a company that trains NASA astronauts and completes ISS mission preparations.
Axiom space is now doing a Series A round that they plan to close early this year. And in future years, Blachman noted, Axiom space has plans to spread much further into the solar system. "What we're talking about is the true commercialization and industrialization of low Earth orbit," he said. Step one is to begin manufacturing stuff in low Earth orbit. Whilst step two would be to put a module around say, the moon to test life support for further deep space exploration systems. According to Blachman, the vision is to go where the customers need — even as far as Mars, if that's where the demand lies in future decades.
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We Know All About The Speed Of Light, But What Is The Speed Of Dark? By Russell Adam Webb
Most of us were taught at school that light travels at an unimaginably fast speed, but what about darkness? As Terry Pratchett said, light travels fast but the darkness got there first. I’ve always enjoyed Terry Practchett books and the Discworld series as he had a way to bring characters to life that many writers just don’t have. There isn’t much in the way of science in the books, real-life science, in any case, but every now and then I find a little something that gets me interested. I recently read Reaper Man and a quote in the book caught my eye: “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” – Terry Pratchett Does ‘dark’ travel and is ‘dark’ a thing? Or is it just the absence of light? Elon Musk had a brilliant way of explaining how he conquered his own fear of the dark: “When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength–400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that.” First of all, we should understand the concept of the speed of light. In 1676, Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer concocted some experiments and cooked up a theory that the speed of light is a measurable factor. Although it wasn’t until Albert Einstein came along and practically wrote the laws of physics that we started to fully understand the concept of how light moves. What about darkness? Is darkness merely an absence of photons or is it a tangible product that moves in a similar way to light? So I did some research and found some answers that have been given by people with more abbreviations after their name and more scientific understanding than me. George Musser Contributing editor for Scientific American and Nautilus magazines The speed of dark? The easy answer is that it’s just the speed of light. Switch off the sun and our sky would go dark eight minutes later. But easy is boring! For starters, what we commonly call the “speed of light” is the speed of propagation, and that’s not always the deciding factor. A shadow swoops across the landscape at a speed governed by the object that casts it. For instance, as a lighthouse beacon rotates, it lights up the surroundings at regular intervals. The ground speed of its shadow increases with distance from the lighthouse. And what about speed in general—is there such a thing? It presupposes a framework of space, and scientists see phenomena in quantum physics where spatial concepts seem not to apply—suggesting, to some, that space is derived from a more fundamental level of reality where these is no such as thing as position, distance, or speed. It must be the level that Steven Wright operates on.
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson (No introduction needed) The speed of dark… Consider dark getting erased by light. The light erases it at the speed of light so the speed of dark would be negative the speed of light. If light is a vector, it has magnitude and direction, so… to call it negative means it’s in a negative direction. The dark is receding rather than advancing. I’d call it negative the speed of light. David Reitze Executive Director of LIGO Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology Basically, it depends on whether you’re the matter being consumed by the infinite abyss of a black hole or you’re far enough away to be a dispassionate observer watching someone else falling into the infinite abyss. If you happen to be the unlucky matter falling in, the speed is potentially very large, in principle approaching the speed of light.
If you’re the observer and you’re far enough away, the speed with which matter is consumed is dramatically slowed down due to an effect known as gravitational time dilation—clocks run slower in gravitational fields, and much slower in the immense gravitational fields near the event horizon of the black hole. By ‘far enough away’, I mean that in your local reference frame, your stationary relative to the black hole (i.e, not getting sucked in) and your local clock is not affected by the gravitational field of the black hole. In fact, to the far away person it will take an infinite amount of time for something to travel to the event horizon of the black hole. Niayesh Afshordi Associate Professor of Astrophysics and Gravitation in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. I believe the speed “of dark” is infinite! In classical physics, the vast darkness of space could be just empty vacuum. However, we have learnt from quantum mechanics that there is no real dark or empty space. Even where there is no light that we can see, electromagnetic field can fluctuate in and out of existence, especially on small scales and short times. Even gravitational waves, the ripples in the geometry of spacetime that were recently observed by the LIGO observatory, should have these quantum fluctuations. The problem is that the gravity of these quantum ripples is infinite. In other words, currently there is no sensible theory of quantum gravity that people could agree on. One way to avoid the problem is if the speed “of dark”, i.e. the quantum ripples, goes to infinity (or becomes arbitrarily big) on small scales and short times. Of course, that’s only one possibility, but is a simple (and my favourite) way to understand big bang, black holes, dark energy, and quantum gravity. What do you think about these views?
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Edited By Katie-Louise Dibble
An asteroid roughly the size of a 10 story building passed particularly close to earth on the morning of Monday 25th January. At 4:47am PT. The fly-by happened not long after scientists at the Catalina Sky Survey first discovered the space rocket on Saturday. Asteroid 2017 AG13 came within half the distance from earth to the moon. The asteroid barely misses us as it passes by, Earth had well over 100,000-mile (161,000 kilometer) buffer of distance. 2017 AG13 isn’t that big which would have been extinction levels had it been a direct hit. However if a chunk of the asteroid had of made it through earth’s atmosphere then we could have seen the same level of damage that was seen in 2013 when a bolide collided with the atmosphere over Russian city of Chelybinsk. In this incident a fireball streaked over the city, Whilst releasing 500 kilotons of energy as it ran against some serious resistance from the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded, it blew out windows all over the town in the process. There have been other close calls on the past. The asteroid itself is roughly around 36 to 111 feet (11 to 34 Meters) across, and according to Slooh Observatory, and moving fast relative to the Earth at 10 miles (16 Kilometers) per second. This speed coupled with AG13’s dim level of brightness made it difficult to see with telescopes.
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Different types of telescopes and sky surveys constantly scan Earth’s neighborhood and to track nearby asteroids. Most asteroids pass the Earth at a distance that is several times farther away that the moon is to us. Therefore this was a particularly close call incomparison to other asteroids that have passed the Earth before then.
Astronomer Biography of the Month Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Entering the professional world as a woman has never been easy. It is not because women are inefficient or lack quick learning power, but simply because she is not a man. For ages women have stayed and worked at their homes. Although today things have modernized to a great extent, the world still carries over some of these inferior feelings towards women. Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an exception to these feelings, setting a great example for other women. She is a bright and talented woman in one of the most maledominated fields, Science. She is a British astrophysicist who is famous for her discovery of the first radio pulsars with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle. Early life, Education and Career: Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born on July 15, 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. Her father was an architect for the Armagh Observatory, where Jocelyn spent much time as a child. At a young age she read a number of books on astronomy and her interest in the subject was encouraged by the staff of the Armagh Observatory. She attended Lurgan College and went on to earn a Physics degree at Glasgow University, Scotland in 1965. In 1969 completed her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where under the supervision of Antony Hewish, she also constructed and operated a 81.5 megahertz radio telescope. She studied interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources. In 1967 Bell, while analyzing literally miles of print-outs from the telescope, noted a few unusual signals which she termed as “scruff”. These “bits of scruff” seemed to indicate radio signals too fast and regular to come from quasars. Both Jocelyn and Hewish ruled out orbiting satellites, French television signals, radar, finally even “little green men.” Looking back at some papers in theoretical physics, they determined that these signals must have emerged from rapidly spinning, super-dense, collapsed stars. The media named these as collapsed stars pulsars and published the story.
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In 1968, soon after her discovery, Bell married Martin Burnell (divorced 1993). Her husband was a government worker, and his career took them to various parts of England. She worked part-time for many years while raising her son, Gavin Burnell. During that period she began studying almost every wave spectrum in astronomy and gained an extraordinary breadth of experience. She held a junior teaching fellowship from 1970 to 1973 at the University of Southampton where she developed and calibrated a 1-10 million electron volt gamma-ray telescope. She also held research and teaching positions in x-ray astronomy at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London, and studied infrared astronomy in Edinburgh. Jocelyn did not share the Nobel Prize awarded to Hewish for the discovery of pulsars, but has received numerous awards for her professional contributions. She was first chosen as a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969 and has served as its Vice President. Among many of her awards she received the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1987 and the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989. She also won the Oppenheimer Prize and The Michelson Medal. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. Also Jocelyn is the current President of the Institute of Physic