Astronomy Rewind: February 2019
Privately funded rovers, New space projects, Alien DNA breakthrough and much more…
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” — Carl Sagan
Despite being the shortest month of the year, February held a lot of events, discoveries and space missions. With the month coming to an end, here we bring you our insights of the best-curated updates from the last 28 days, all at one place.
Top stories of the month
- White Dwarf doing hula hoops!
Backward worlds: Planet 9 project is a NASA fund citizen scientist project, which aims to discover the brown dwarfs and low mass stars in the vicinity of our solar system in hope to detect the planet 9. Working under this project, a volunteer found something odd, which put our existing planetary models for dwarfs in question.
While looking for brown dwarfs (objects to large to be planets and too small to be stars), they found J2070, which was very bright for a brown dwarf. After taking the help of the WISE infrared data, the team concluded and published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, led by John Debes.
The paper put J2070 as the oldest and coldest known white dwarf (An Earth-sized remnant of a sun-size star) to be encircled with multiple dust rings, which is very unusual for a white dwarf. Usually, the rings are observed around the dwarfs that are one third the age of J2070.
“This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales, Most of the models’ scientists have created to explain rings around white dwarfs only work well up to around 100 million years, so this star is really challenging our assumptions of how planetary systems evolve,” said John Debes.
Now, this scenario is fascinating in studying the future of our solar system. In around 5 billion years, Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth will be swallowed by the Sun as it turns into a red giant, and in further years, it may go the same fate as J2070. We hope that by that time humanity exists and prevail in some far galaxy to observe the death of our Sun.
- Plasmic jet blasts observed — A new piece in an age-old puzzle!
The century-long question that why the upper atmosphere — the corona — is over 200 times hotter than the surface of the sun, might be close to a solution. In the recent paper, after analyzing the data gathered by the IRIS program of NASA, the researchers found tadpole-shaped jets coming out of regions with intense magnetic fields on the Sun (formally called pseudo shocks).
The corona region of the Sun somehow gets superheated and releases highly charged particles, in all possible directions. These particles have a high potential to damage the satellites and other electronics. Understanding the reason behind such disruptions might give us a better idea in predicting these outbursts, and this recent discovery gives us a big push towards the answer!
“We were looking for waves and plasma ejecta, but instead, we noticed these dynamical pseudo-shocks, like disconnected plasma jets, that are not like real shocks but highly energetic to fulfil Sun’s radiative losses,” said Abhishek Srivastava, scientist at IIT BHU, and lead author on the new paper in Nature Astronomy.
With IRIS focusing more on this outbursts and Parker probe gathering more and more data from its journey, will help us in getting a clear picture on what is going on the sun’s surface that causes this jet bursts and how we can predict them!
- The Genesis of free enterprise lunar landers
April 11, 2019, will mark the landing of the first ever privately funded rover on the lunar surface. Beresheet (‘Genesis’) is an Israeli lunar lander, designed by the non-profit organization SpaceIL. It was initially constructed as a contender in Google’s Lunar X Prize competition. Championed as a finalist in X Prize, Beresheet now journeys to the moon surface itself.
An interesting fundamental fact about Beresheet is its space journey. Unlike the Apollo missions in the 1960s that took three earth days to reach the moon, Beresheet is expected to land on lunar soil two months from now. SpaceX ‘s Falcon 9 rocket ferried Beresheet along with an Indonesian satellite on 21st February this year. Beresheet was dropped to a geosynchronous transfer orbit where it will fire its engines, elongating it’s an orbital path more and more until lunar gravity pulls it to orbit. The rover is targeted to land at lunar spot Mare Serenitatis (‘sea of serenity’).
The most important aspect of this mission, however, is economical. Only 10% of Beresheet’s funding came from the Israeli government, the overall cost of the mission is a mere 100 million USD. Since a rocket is yet out of reach in such budget constraints, Beresheet shared Falcon 9 with other space missions, Beresheet’s successful launch will ultimately hint at low-cost space travel and will be a great leap forward for commercial space flights.
- Finally! Hubble’s constant will have a definite value.
Since, the big bang, 13.8 billion years ago, cosmos is racing against itself and expanding continuously. Hubble constant is the measure of that expansion and till now, the two methods used to calculate the value of the Hubble constant gave conflicting results. And this has been a major problem in understanding the future state of the universe.
But recently, an international team that includes University College London (UCL) and Flatiron Institute cosmologists presented a solid way to put an end to these conflicts. With the recent discovery of the gravitational waves, the researchers have calculated that by observing at least 50 binary neutron stars in next decade, they will observe enough mergers and obtain sufficient data of waves to calculate the expansion rate of the universe.
But why is it so necessary to find the expansion rate?
The expansion rate of the universe will not only tell us the future state of the universe but it will also tell us the properties of dark matter, based on if the expansion rate is growing faster or slower. Thus, giving us an account for the 95 per cent of the mass of the universe.
“This, in turn, will lead to the most accurate picture of how the universe is expanding and help us improve the standard cosmological model,” — Professor Peiris.
With the LIGO, detecting the ripples in space-time, it won’t take long for us to solve the mystery behind the growth of the universe!
Space missions
- Curiosity had some hiccups!
February was a bad month for the rovers rolling on Mars!
After a big dust storm, the curiosity came back online in the month of January and started sending data back once again! But now curiosity is taking a hiatus from its mission due to a sudden unknown reboot of its system, which NASA scientist are trying to figure out.
All the functions came back to normal after the reboot, but the scientists have restricted heavy actions, as a precaution to protect the rover from unexpected damage. The team is trying to figure out what triggered such a reset of systems, and the data that curiosity is sending might have a clue! Until they find what actually caused this, the drilling action of the rover is on hold!
Let’s hope that they find the bug soon, and curiosity can carry on its mission without any further delays!
- NASA gives green signal to look back in past!
Recently Nasa picked SPHEREX, out of the three projects finalised for the Middle-class explorer’s programme. One of it’s kind, SphereX, a future observatory, plans to do an all-sky survey at a near-infrared spectrum, which hasn’t been done before. It will make use of a simple instrument with a single mode to map the sky every six months in its 2-year planned mission.
Expected to be launched by 2023, SphereX will help refine the distance parameters of more than 450 million galaxies, while also looking back into the Epoch of Re-ionization, that is 400 million to 1 billion years after the big bang, finding what drove the inflation in the early universe.
Not only will SphereX look into the past, but it will also allow us to map the water and organic molecules in possible places of our own galaxy, cataloguing ices in every stage of star and planet formation from molecular clouds to protoplanetary disks. This sources will help us shortlist the celestial bodies which might have a chance of harbouring extraterrestrial life, as life finds a way, Always! (If water is around!)
In our search for someone other than us in this vast universe and to find out how we came here, SphereX is going to be that golden bridge that will take us close to the answers.
Fun fact — For those wondering what SPHEREX stands for, it’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization and Ices Explorer. (SHIELD sulks back into the corner after seeing this!)
New Discoveries
- An extraterrestrial molecule designed in-home planet!
The search for alien life has always been a shot in the dark from an astrobiological viewpoint. Scientists had a narrow window in considering planets capable of sustaining life similar to that in the earth. The scenario, however, is likely to change due to the fascinating breakthrough by scientists at NASA this month. Astrobiologists at NASA successfully synthesized a molecule mimicking properties of DNA, the building block of life itself.
Storing genetic information of species and transferring them upon generations is crucial for life to thrive on earth. And that task is performed by DNA in all species of flora and fauna on our home planet. The newly synthesized molecule at NASA resembles DNA in structure as well as functions. Chemically DNA is formed by four types of nitrogenous bases mounted on sugar and phosphate. This structure is invariant across all species. The synthesized molecule, however, has eight base pairings instead of four. Scientists termed this alien molecule as “hachimoji” DNA from the Japanese words Hachi (eight) and moji (letter).
So how does the hachimoji DNA help alien exploration?
Scientists believe that this breakthrough can give critical insights into how life is fundamentally formulated on a planet. It makes the search for extraterrestrial life more inclusive and effective. It will also help planetary scientists ask the right questions when searching for alien life on a planet, shifting the paradigm of understanding. If even that does not sound rewarding, this surely will- astrobiologists believe this new molecule can pave ways into engineering instruments best suited for alien life detection on a cosmic scale that is a significant achievement for the progress of humankind.
- Poseidon finds it Hippocamp!
The small, frigid moon of Neptune has its name now — Hippocamp!
Discovered faintly back in 2004 from the data gathered by the Hubble space telescope and then officially given the status of the smallest moon among 14 moons of Neptune in 2013, Hippocamp is no longer just S/2004 N1.
In the new analysis of the moon, published on Feb 20 by Showalter and his team, the moon is believed to have a diameter of 34 kilometres. And following the convention of naming Neptune related bodies in association to the Greek-roman mythology and the sea, Hippocamp was chosen as an apt name for the new moon.
Believed to have a violent history of being separated from a more massive moon body, a long time ago, Hippocamp orbits around the inner circle of Neptune, making it more difficult for us to observe and confirm more facts about it, but with evolving technology, it won’t take us long to learn all the secrets!
- Beyond the reach of our sun, we find another object!
The successor of FarOut (a dwarf planet discovered late last year orbiting at 120 AU), FarFarOut orbits the Sun at 140 AU approximately 3.5 times farther out than Pluto.
Scott Sheppard, Carnegie Institute, leading the search for ‘Planet X’ also discovered The Goblin, at 65 AU and 12 unseen moons of Jupiter. He announced the discovery of a tiny object over 20 billion kilometres from the Sun in his recent talks, which was aptly named FarFarOut, but then these faraway objects are like breadcrumbs in the search of Planet X, supposed to be at 200 AU from the Sun.
“The more of them we can find, the better we can understand the outer Solar System and the possible planet that we think is shaping their orbits — a discovery that would redefine our knowledge of the Solar System’s evolution.”
The discovery of FarFarOut is yet to be confirmed by peer review or put up in a paper. It’s going to be another year or two to understand these incredibly distant objects!
An Eye Candy
It looked like the fictional realm of Martin and Rowling took upon the night sky of Iceland on 18th of February. As much as we want to see fictional creatures up the air, this wasn’t the case (Alas!), it was just Sun sending charged particles towards us, our atmospheric gases interacting with them to produce magnificent lights called Auroras.
But what is interesting about these two specific Auroras?
Other than the fact that one is a green dragon blazing fire, and the other is the Phoenix taking flight up high (Dumbledore and Dany need to keep their pets in control!), is that NASA hasn’t observed any sunspot activity so far in February, making the sudden appearance of the northern lights a little mystifying. But keeping that aside, the beautiful lights up the sky were surely a treat for us. (Even if we only saw a digital print of it.)
Wonder Junkie This Month — Edward Witten
The man behind the M-theory!
“One of the ‘basic things about a string is that it can vibrate in many different shapes or forms, which gives music its beauty. I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong “ — Edward Witten
Bravest of souls and only the highest of intellects attempt at perceiving the elegant M-theory. Championed as the nearest plausible to a “ theory of everything “ the M-theory unifies all possible models of the String Theory. This month we dedicate our first ever Wonder Junkie series to the father of M-theory himself, Dr Edward Witten.
Despite being the founder of M-theory, Edward Witten is perhaps most famous for his unparalleled contributions in the field of both theoretical physics as well as quantum mathematics. Witten is the only physicist in recorded human history (!) to be awarded the Fields medal. So what was so exceptionally unique about Witten’s work? To answer that question we need to dive deep into the realm of dualities and 6-dimensional mathematics.
Duality is a concept in physics, where you can look at a phenomenon in two distinct ways, taking one theory and mapping it to another. By mapping here, we mean topological mapping of two methods. An essential mathematical tool (low-dimensional topology) is required for such mapping. And this very tool was developed by Dr Wittens. Now dualities are quite interesting as they answer questions unresolved by any one theory, be it quantum theory or the latest superstring theory. This is what makes Witten’s work so exceptional as his work hints at a possible “ theory of everything “ mounted on dualities. Witten himself, however, is quite sceptical of the existence of a “ theory of everything “ at all. But all great minds have the magic dust of scepticism which affirms their scientific integrity.
For his revolutionary work, Witten was honoured with many awards, namely the MacArthur Grant, the Henri Poincaré Prize, and the Lorentz medal. An honorary fellow of the royal society, Witten is also famously termed as “the smartest living physicist.” Honestly, it is an honour for us, physics lovers, to be living in the same era as Edward Witten.
To compare thy to the likes of Hawking and Newton, wouldn’t be an exaggeration!
Photo of the month
Bonus News!
It’s high time that we send another rover on the moon to check what’s going on with our favourite natural satellite, and ISRO agrees. The highly anticipated and prepped mission, Chandrayan 2 is finally ready to take flight. The lift-off is planned to take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India. The ISRO chairman said that mission will tentatively happen between March 25 to April 30, so Avengers isn’t the only one going in space, Chandrayan 2 is going too.
Articles this month
- Stellar Ladies: The Astounding Stories of Women Who Conquered Space!
- How the works of Schrodinger, Pauli, and Dirac threw light on the Existence of Antimatter
Stay tuned for the next edition of Astronomy Rewind and do follow Nakshatra to join us in our exploration of the cosmos. Looking Beyond Stars!
“The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.”
― Warren Ellis
This article is co-authored by Manasvita Goswami
