John Michell, Gravity and Black Holes

Newton shows that the gravitational attraction of an object is proportional to its mass.

If light is affected by gravity, a massive enough object will have such a strong gravitational field that no light will be able to escape it.

Einstein explains gravity as a distortion of space-time, meaning that massless light is affected by gravity.

The velocity of light will appear to diminish.

In a 1783 letter to Henry Cavendish at the Royal Society, British polymath John Michell set out his thoughts on the effect of gravity. The letter was rediscovered in the 1970s and found to contain a remarkable description of black holes. Newton’s law of gravity states that an object’s gravitational pull increases with its mass. Michell considered what might happen to light if it is affected by gravity. He wrote: “If the semidiameter of a sphere of the same density with the sun were to exceed the sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height toward it would have acquired at its surface a greater velocity than that of light, & consequently, supposing light to be attracted by the same force… all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it.” In 1796, French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace came up with a similar idea in his Exposition du Système du Monde.

Source: The Science Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (2014) by DK Publishing.

Mysterious ‘Tasmanian devil’ space explosion baffles astronomers

From Nature.com (Nov. 15, 2023):

An explosion in space nicknamed the Tasmanian devil has confused astronomers by   flashing at peak brightness more than a dozen times, months after the initial event. The observation, while posing new questions, could help to narrow down what might cause such explosions, which are known as luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs).

LFBOTs are seen across the Universe and defy explanation. The first, dubbed the Cow after its designation AT2018cow, was spotted in 2018 in a galaxy about 60 million parsecs (200 million light years) from Earth. The Cow was notable for being up to 100 times brighter than a supernova before dimming over just a few days, a process that takes weeks for a supernova.

More than half a dozen LFBOTs have since been found, including ones referred to as the Koala, the Camel and, earlier this year, the Finch. But astronomers are still not sure what is causing them. The leading ideas are that these explosions are either failed supernovae - stars collapsing into a black hole or neutron star before they can explode - intermediate-mass black holes consuming other stars, or the results of objects interacting with hot, bright stars known as Wolf-Rayet stars.

In a study published on 15 November in Nature, a team led by astronomer Anna Ho at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, describes new activity from an LFBOT that had been discovered about 1 billion parsecs away in September 2022; this one, formally called AT2022tsd, is known as the Tasmanian devil. Initially using the Magellan-Baade telescope in Chile, the researchers found that the Tasmanian devil repeatedly flashed at its peak brightness, starting in December 2022. They saw 14 of these flaring events in total, each lasting only minutes.

"Flashes like this haven't been seen before in LFBOTs," says Ho. She adds that each of the unexpected flares was "as powerful as the original LFBOT".

"It's an amazing observation," says Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "This is unprecedented. It opens a lot of questions."

Collapsing star

Ho says that the flaring could support the failed supernova idea, which would involve a massive star about 20 times the mass of the Sun running out of fuel and collapsing, leaving a dense neutron star or black hole inside the remains of the surrounding star. "We think these flashes are probably coming from either a neutron star or a black hole that was formed in the original LFBOT event," she says.

If the neutron star or black hole at the centre of the LFBOT had powerful jets of energy firing from its poles, it could explain the flaring. These jets would fire out into space as the object rotated - and, if they repeatedly pointed in the direction of Earth, that could explain the flashes of light from the Tasmanian devil. "This could be one of the few cases where it was directed to us," says Ho.

Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York City, says that the observation is "quite striking" and "sort of confirms what we had concluded based on other evidence" - namely, that LFBOTs involve electrons that are travelling close to the speed of light being "heated or accelerated in some form of out flow".

Further observations could help to determine the mass of the object, which could definitively explain its origin. "An intermediate mass black hole is a 10,000-solar-mass black hole," says Ho. "A failed supernova is more like 10 or 100 solar masses." The flares could offer a way to work out the mass of the object, she adds. "When you measure a fast-varying signal, you can use how quickly that signal is varying to estimate the size of the object emitting the signal." A high speed would indicate that the object is rapidly rotating - suggesting a lower mass.

Margutti says that the flaring "definitely tells us that LFBOTs are really a different beast than supernova explosions", but she adds that the jets could be powered by accretion onto a black hole, such as from a companion star.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is under construction in Chile and is expected to begin a wide survey of the universe next year, is expected to find "10 to 100 times more of these objects", says Ho. That could help astronomers to narrow down what might be causing them. Finding and studying the objects early after their initial explosion will also be crucial. "Right now, by the time we notice them, they're usually two to three weeks old," says Ho. "We need to ¬nd these a lot more quickly." [source]

NASA Will Launch Artificial Star into Earth’s Orbit, Costing $19.5 Million

From The Gateway Pundit.com (June 21, 2024):

NASA is planning to launch an artificial star into the Earth’s orbit.

According to Futurism, the artificial star will be about the size of a toaster and equipped with eight lasers.

The creation of the star is part of NASA’s $19.5 million space project called Landolt.

The Landolt project aims to help scientists accurately measure real stars in space and are hoping it will assist in studying dark energy.

Per Futurism:

NASA is planning to launch an unusual payload, roughly the size of a toaster and outfitted with eight lasers.

Its job is to imitate stars and other celestial objects like supernovas, Live Science reports, by beaming lasers straight into their instruments back on the surface.

The false star is part of the space agency’s $19.5 million mission dubbed Landolt, and is designed to allow scientists to get more accurate measurements of real stars. Researchers suggest it could even help study dark energy, the mysterious hypothetical form of energy that’s been used to explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

“Even with today’s modern instruments, measurements of the true brightness of stars have only been known to a few percent,” said NASA Exoplanet Science Institute deputy director and Caltech astronomer David Ciardi in a statement. “Landolt will enable an improvement in those measurements by more than a factor of ten.”

The launch date of the artificial star will be in 2029. [source]

Interesting. But I would rather have the private sector (or even a university/universities—they have huge endowments) pay for it other than the taxpayers.

Other NASA news:

• NASA and US Space Force team up for planetary defense, moon trips and more
• NASA strikes asteroid with spacecraft in historic planetary defense mission
• NASA uses GPS on the moon for the first time
• NASA radar picks up frozen, buried Cold War base Camp Century
• NASA’s U-2 spy plane found gamma rays in 90% of lightning storms

Life on Venus and Why ‘Settled Science’ Is Often Hot Air

From John Stonestreet on Breakpoint.org (Sept. 28, 2020):

Hope for E.T. springs eternal, despite the definitive lack of evidence for his existence. After decades of peering through telescopes, listening with giant radio antennae, and hurling probes to distant worlds, astronomers have yet to find even a hint of life beyond Earth. So, instead of looking for actual evidence of life, some scientists have begun looking for conditions that could theoretically be associated with life. And when they find that, they hold press conferences.

When scientists discovered that liquid water may once have existed on Mars, it was reported with the excitement we’d expect if probes had found Martian guppies. The discovery of a probable ocean under the ice of a Jovian moon is reported as if alien life forms had already been filmed doing backstrokes in there. Just this year, the discovery of an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting a distant red dwarf star was reported by most articles as if Kepler-1649c were a perfect potential host for life.

The latest episode of astrobiological hype involves our nearest planetary neighbor. Venus has long been dismissed in the search for extraterrestrial life due to its hellish climate. After all, it’s wrapped in sulfuric acid, with a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.

Then, just a few weeks ago, an international team of scientists from MIT and Cardiff University published evidence of phosphine gas high in the atmosphere of Venus. On Earth, the only two known sources of phosphine are human industry and microscopic life. So, according to this team, the presence of large quantities of this gas on Venus can only be explained by living things.

The press’s reaction was predictable. Every headline featured the word “life.” Clamor to divert space exploration resources to Venus mounted so quickly that NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine had to issue a statement in which, while praising the insight of these astronomers, he noticeably downplayed Venus, pointing instead to other, more promising missions already on the space agency’s docket and in their budget.

Other critics were more measured: “[T]his can hardly be taken as a biosignature,” one biologist said to the New York Times, “…only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry.” Another professor of planetary sciences who was quoted in the Financial Times sounded even more skeptical: “The scientists can’t think of a way of getting these phosphine levels without it being a byproduct of life,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t another way, and it is a long way from proving that there’s life on Venus.”

So much of the fanfare of stories like this follow a familiar script: scientists rush through the peer-review process and go straight to the press with speculative conclusions. Along the way, “anomalous chemistry” becomes “alien life.” Later, once cooler heads prevail, the same newspapers and websites carrying the fantastical headlines, print a retraction with a less exciting explanation for all that phosphine gas … usually in small print on a back page somewhere.

Of course, proposing and challenging theories is what science is all about. Where science goes wrong is in treating these findings—especially in the early, speculative stages—as if anything is “settled,” much less announcing the speculations as settled conclusion with breathless news reports and demands that NASA rework their budget.

In one of our latest “What Would You Say?” videos, my colleague Brooke McIntire takes on the myth of “settled science.” Proposing and overturning theories is an ongoing part of the process. Even longstanding scientific consensus is vulnerable to new and contrary evidence, and scientists are fallible and biased human beings too. It’s a great video, especially one to share with your kids and grandkids. To watch and share it, just go to whatwouldyousay.org.

None of this means, of course, that life on Venus is impossible. What it does mean is that a pair of papers linking the presence of a particular gas to life doesn’t amount to all the hype it generated. Without more and better evidence, speculation about little E.T.s on Venus is like its sweltering atmosphere … so much hot air. [source]

Science is never settled because unlike God, humans are not omniscience. We are always learning. Seeking the Truth. Always updating our theories with better evidence. Or we should be doing that anyway.

Artemis II Mission Shows There Are No Limits To American Exceptionalism

From The Federalist.com (Apr. 7):

Pushing the boundaries of what was once thought to be impossible is a hallmark of American greatness. And the recent mission to circle the moon is no different.

The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission set a record on Monday for traveling further into space than any humans have ever gone before. As part of their “lunar flyby,” the four-person crew (consisting of three Americans and one Canadian) broke Apollo 13’s record by reaching an estimated 252,756 miles from Earth.

While traveling in their Orion capsule, the team viewed previously unseen surfaces of the moon and captured breathtaking images in the process. Amid their discoveries was a noticeably bright crater, which one of the astronauts suggested naming “Carroll” after mission commander Reid Wiseman’s wife, who died of cancer in 2020.

While the mission has certainly boasted its great moments, there was something the astronauts reportedly said before embarking on their journey that puts a perfect bow on the entire thing. As summarized by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, the Artemis II crew said that they hope their feat “will be remembered as the moment people started to believe that America can once again do the near-impossible and change the world.”

It’s a simple, yet important point to remember given the constant barrage of negativity Americans hear about their country from its most vocal institutions. From higher education to legacy media and Hollywood, everyday citizens are regularly inundated with anti-American rhetoric about why their nation is evil, stupid, and not that great after all.

Why would you want to try your best and work your hardest in a racist, bigoted, oppressive, hateful country like America? or so the conventional leftist groupthink goes.

The Artemis II mission provides a stark contrast to that backwards thinking. It teaches America’s people that adventure and risks are worth taking, that hard work wins, and that there are no limits to what their country can accomplish.

That’s American exceptionalism at its best.

So, dream big. Reach for what others believe to be impossible. Give 110 percent into what you do. And always remember that it could happen nowhere else except in the United States of America. [source]

USA! USA! USA! 

More articles on the mission:

• 16 inspiring Artemis II photos that’ll make you feel like a tiny Earthling
• Artemis II astronauts reflect on historic flight as they wrap up moon mission
• 9 highlights from Artemis II's epic journey around the moon
• NASA’s Artemis II mission’s return to Earth, hour by hour
• Artemis II's Grand Moon Finale Almost Here With a Pacific Splashdown to Cap NASA's Lunar Comeback
• Artemis II splashes down off the coast of San Diego, finishing historic journey around the moon
• Watch a recovery crew open Integrity’s hatch for Artemis II astronauts
  
• NASA Artemis II Zero Gravity Indicator & Moon Mascot 'Rise' Back Home on Earth
• Artemis, the Greatness of God, and Human Exceptionalism

Why We Should Thank God that Our Sun is So ‘Boring’

From Breakpoint.org (May 29, 2020):

Recently, a New York Times article drew attention to a corona that’s not a virus and that makes life possible instead of threatening it. The corona, or outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere, puzzles astronomers because it is, as compared with similar stars, so calm.

We take the sun for granted, unless it disappears for a few cloudy days or burns us at the beach or, less often, disrupts satellite communications. Once every century or so, it might burp enough energy to fry technology and maybe even ignite the Northern Lights over the Caribbean, as happened in 1859.  Aside from instances such as these, it’s easy to forget that the local star that warms our faces and wakens our flowers, this “blazing ball of fusion-powered plasma,” is actually capable, at least in theory, of scorching our planet and all of us to a lifeless cinder.

However, a new paper published in the journal “Science” suggests that’s exactly the sort of thing we should expect from the sun, if it behaved like other stars of its kind. But it doesn’t. The good news is, as the Times put it, the star around which we orbit is downright “boring” compared with its solar siblings.

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, after compiling data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope, which spent years monitoring 150,000 distant stars, concluded that our sun’s relative calm is among the reasons we are here at all.

After identifying 369 comparable stars in our galaxy, these scientists learned something astounding: The magnetic activity that creates the sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections on other stars is, on average, five times more intense than on our sun. On many stars that were studied, disruptions were even twelve times more intense. That level of chaos makes life in their orbits virtually impossible.

So why would our sun behave so differently than all the others? One unsettling theory, especially given the “what else could possibly go wrong” start to 2020, is that our sun is currently asleep, but might, at some point, wake up and blast us with deadly levels of radiation.  Another idea is that our sun is aging, and because it is now over-the-hill, has fewer bursts of energy to give off.

That sounds reasonable to those of us reaching middle age.

Currently, according to researchers, one theory is not to be favored over another, but what is clear, as the Times observes, is that our sun’s relative tranquility has unquestionably “benefited our species.” As the study’s lead author put it, “It may be no coincidence that we live around a very inactive star.”

Of course, coincidence is the only reason that anyone already committed to naturalism can feasibly offer. If, however, the blinders of that particular worldview are removed, there’s a third possible explanation: Our host star is uniquely friendly to life because it was finely-tuned by God to support life.

In the marvelous book, “The Privileged Planet,” Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez list the many features that make our Earth, sun, and our corner of the universe uniquely suited for life.

Not only do we have the right kind of star, we are just the right distance from that star. We are at the right location in the galaxy. We are in a solar system with gas giants that shield us from wandering asteroids and comets. We have a moon just the right size to stabilize our axis and create tides and seasons. We are on a planet with land, liquid water, oxygen, plate tectonics, and a molten iron core to generate a magnetosphere.

Tally up all these factors, as Richards and Gonzalez do, and it’s a dizzying improbability that we would be here at all: something like 1 out of 1 followed by 15 zeroes.

And yet, here we are, bathed in the warmth of a star scientists increasingly recognize as rare and hospitable. Our brightest minds could hardly imagine, much less attempt to design, a better solar system. All of which is why we ought to thank the brightest of all minds, the One who also made our own minds bright enough to discover all of these remarkable things about our privileged planet, our privileged place in the universe, and our blessedly boring sun. [source]

Thank God the sun is “boring.”

Multiplanet system around sunlike star photographed for 1st time ever

From Live Science.com (July 24, 2020):

For the first time ever, astronomers have directly imaged multiple planets orbiting a sunlike star.

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile photographed two giant planets circling TYC 8998-760-1, a very young analogue of our own sun that lies about 300 light-years from Earth, a new study reports.

"This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our solar system, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution," study lead author Alexander Bohn, a doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in a statement.

Before this historic cosmic portrait, only two multiplanet systems had ever been directly imaged, and neither of them features a sunlike star, study team members said. And snapping a photo of even a single exoplanet remains a rare achievement.

"Even though astronomers have indirectly detected thousands of planets in our galaxy, only a tiny fraction of these exoplanets have been directly imaged," study co-author Matthew Kenworthy, an associate professor at Leiden University, said in the same statement.

Bohn, Kenworthy and their colleagues studied the 17-million-year-old star TYC 8998-760-1 with the VLT's Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research instrument, or SPHERE for short. SPHERE uses a device called a coronagraph to block a star's blinding light, allowing astronomers to see and study orbiting planets that would otherwise be lost in the glare.

The newly reported SPHERE imagery revealed two planets in the system, TYC 8998-760-1b and TYC 8998-760-1c. Astronomers already knew about TYC 8998-760-1b — a team led by Bohn announced its discovery late last year — but TYC 8998-760-1c is a newfound world.

The two planets are huge and farflung. TYC 8998-760-1b is about 14 times more massive than Jupiter and orbits at an average distance of 160 astronomical units (AU), and TYC 8998-760-1c is six times heftier than Jupiter and lies about 320 AU from the host star. (One AU is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers. For comparison: Jupiter and Saturn orbit our sun at just 5 AU and 10 AU, respectively.)

It's unclear whether the two worlds in TYC 8998-760-1 formed at their present locations or were pushed out there somehow. Further observations, including those made by huge future observatories such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), could help to solve that mystery, study team members said.

Other questions remain about the TYC 8998-760-1 system as well. For example, do the two gas giants have company? Might several rocky planets circle relatively close to the star, as they do in our solar system?

"The possibility that future instruments, such as those available on the ELT, will be able to detect even lower-mass planets around this star marks an important milestone in understanding multiplanet systems, with potential implications for the history of our own solar system," Bohn said.

The new study was published online July 22 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. [source]

More planet articles:

• These 10 extreme exoplanets are out of this world
• A massive cotton candy-like exoplanet stumps astronomers
• This strange lava-rich alien planet is making itself a new atmosphere
• Astronomers detect first known ‘death wish’ planet
• Astronomers discover new moons orbiting Uranus and Neptune

Mystery Object Blurs Line between Neutron Stars and Black Holes

 From Scientific American.com (June 30, 2020):

For more than a decade astrophysicists have wondered why nature appears to show an odd restraint in the way it slays stars. In life, they range from pip-squeaks to behemoths. Small ones simply burn out and fade away, but something more curious happens to the jumbo-size variety. When such a star dies, its great bulk causes its innards to implode as a core-collapse supernova. The process sparks a cataclysmic explosion and compresses some of the remains into astrophysical exotica—often a neutron star or, for the very heaviest suns, a black hole. Yet a pronounced rift appears to divide the weight classes of these two types of massive stellar corpses. Although astronomers have spotted neutron stars weighing up to around two solar masses and black holes as light as five, middleweight cadavers have gone entirely missing—until now.

In June 2020 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration announced the first conclusive detection of a stellar remnant falling into the so-called mass gap between neutron stars and black holes. After months of calculations, researchers at LIGO and the Virgo gravitational-wave detector in Italy concluded that such waves rippling through Earth in August 2019—an event dubbed GW190814 that was initially classified as a black hole consuming a neutron star—actually came from a 23-solar-mass black hole swallowing a mysterious 2.6-solar-mass object. Whether the smaller body is the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole—or a truly exotic beast, such as a star made of particles distinct from those of normal stars—its existence suggests that the theories describing the most extreme stellar fates need updating.

“I would rank this as definitely the most exciting announcement we’ve seen from LIGO since the original binary black hole discovery and then the first detection of a neutron star collision,” says Duncan Brown, a gravitational-wave astronomer at Syracuse University, who was not involved in the research. “We’re probing a new piece of astrophysical understanding of the universe.”

The new finding hints that the cosmos may enjoy a wider freedom in how it disposes of stars than researchers had supposed. Whether that leeway means atomic building blocks have enough brawn to support more monstrous neutron stars or that supernovae can forge tinier black holes, LIGO’s detection shrinks the gulf between those two most plausible scenarios.

“The idea of a mass gap as a true gap with nothing in it, I think, is getting progressively destroyed,” says Philippe Landry, a LIGO member at California State University, Fullerton. “This is going to be one nail in the coffin.”

From a fundamental physics perspective, the line separating neutron stars from black holes is razor-thin. If you toss an apple onto a neutron star at the limit of what its constituent neutrons can bear, it will abruptly collapse into a black hole. The heftiest known neutron star weighs 2.14 times the mass of our sun. And nuclear theorists suspect the objects can grow somewhat heavier, with the most optimistic models putting the complete breakdown of matter at 2.5 solar masses. Based on such theories, the LIGO collaboration calculated that the chance of the lighter partner in GW190814 being a neutron star is less than 3 percent. A neutron star that heavy, Landry says, would be a “complete game changer.” [read more]

A 'monster' star 2 million times brighter than the sun disappears without a trace

From Live Science.com (June 30, 2020):

In 2019, scientists witnessed a massive star 2.5 million times brighter than the sun disappear without a trace.

Now, in a new paper published today (June 30) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of space detectives (see: astrophysicists) attempt to solve the case of the disappearing star by providing several possible explanations. Of these, one twist ending stands out: Perhaps, the researchers wrote, the massive star died and collapsed into a black hole without undergoing a supernova explosion first — a truly "unprecedented" act of stellar suicide.

"We may have detected one of the most massive stars of the local universe going gently into the night," Jose Groh, an astronomer at Trinity College Dublin and a co-author of a new paper on the star, said in a statement.

"If true, this would be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner," study lead-author Andrew Allan, also of Trinity College, said in the statement.

The star in question, located about 75 million light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, was well studied between 2001 and 2011. The bloated orb was a superb example of a luminous blue variable (LBV) — a massive star approaching the end of its life and prone to unpredictable variations in brightness. Stars like this are rare, with only a handful confirmed in the universe so far. In 2019, Allan and colleagues hoped to use the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to learn more about the distant LBV's mysterious evolution, only to discover that the star had seemingly completely vanished from its host galaxy.

Normally, when a star much larger than our sun reaches the end of its life, it erupts in an enormous supernova explosion. These explosions are easy to spot, as they stain the sky around them with ionized gas and powerful radiation for many light-years in every direction. (Sometimes, this looks downright beautiful.) Following the blast, the dense core of leftover stellar material may collapse into a black hole or a neutron star — two of space's most massive and mysterious objects.

The missing LBV left no such radiation. It simply disappeared.

To investigate this mystery, the researchers looked back at previous observations of the star taken in 2002 and 2009. They discovered that the star had been undergoing a strong outburst period during this time, jettisoning enormous amounts of stellar material at a much faster rate than usual. LBVs can experience multiple outbursts like this in their temperamental old age, the researchers wrote, causing them to glow much more brightly than usual. The outburst likely ended sometime after 2011, the team said.

This could explain why the star appeared so bright during those early observations — still, it does not explain what happened after the outburst that caused the star to vanish. One explanation could be that the star dimmed considerably after its outburst, and was then further obscured by a thick veil of cosmic dust. If this were the case, then the star could reappear in future observations.

The weirder and more exciting explanation is that the star never recovered from its outburst, but instead collapsed into a black hole without going supernova. This would be a rare event, the team conceded. Given the star's estimated mass before its disappearance, it could have created a black hole measuring 85 to 120 times the mass of Earth's sun, though how this could have happened without a visible supernova is still an open question.

Further observations of the distant, star-eating galaxy are required before this case can be officially closed. [source]

Yes, a chunk of the space station crashed into a house in Florida

From Pop Sci.com (Apr. 16, 2024):

The “object from the sky” that pierced through a home in Naples, FL. last month wasn’t a meteorite after all.

On April 15, NASA said the mysterious metallic cylinder—which tore through homeowner Alejandro Otero’s ceiling and floor—was actually part of a cargo pallet that contained “aging nickel hydride batteries.” The agency jettisoned the pallet from the International Space Station back in 2021, after installing new lithium-ion batteries on the artificial satellite.

NASA expected the hardware to “fully burn up during entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024,” yet things turned out quite differently for the Otero family.
“It was a tremendous sound, and it almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all,” Otero told Florida broadcaster WINK News. After prying the object out from between mangled floorboards, Otero said he suspected it was a meteorite.

According to NASA, the debris was actually made of a nickel- and chromium-based superalloy called Inconel. The object originally functioned as part of a battery mount; after hitting Otero’s home, the surviving cylinder clocked in at 1.6 pounds, 4 inches tall and 1.6 inches in diameter.

In 2021, NASA anticipated the pallet would “orbit Earth between two to four years before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere.” This week, NASA said the ISS will investigate the incident to “determine the cause of the debris survival,” adding that it’s “committed to responsibly operating in low Earth orbit, and mitigating as much risk as possible to protect people on Earth when space hardware must be released.”

While a space-junk crisis may sound like science fiction, debris left by humans in low-Earth orbit is rapidly piling up. The European Space Agency estimates there are 36,500 debris objects greater than 10 cm in Earth’s orbit. The agency reports that the total mass of all known space objects exceeds 11,500 metric tons (or more than 25 million pounds). Such junk includes everything from paint flecks and bolts to dead satellites and spent rocket boosters. Much of this stuff originates from governmental space programs, but it also comes from private companies, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Around a dozen objects reenter the atmosphere on a daily basis, Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a call with PopSci. “It’s not uncommon for these things to survive and make it to the surface,” explained Jah, though typically they crash into the ocean. However, as satellite launches rapidly increase, the professor cautioned that “statistically, [falling debris] will kill somebody at some point.”

According to Professor Jah, solving this problem will require more reusable and recyclable tech. Today, “we have a linear space economy where the end state of any given satellite is to become junk.” Governments need to embrace a circular approach and “mandate that satellites can’t be launched if they’re going to be single use,” Jah argued.

In a separate call, John L. Crassidis—a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo—argued to PopSci that readers shouldn’t be too worried, for now, about death by space junk. “I think I’d be a lot more concerned about getting struck by lightning than having a piece of space debris fall on me,” said Crassidis. However, the professor said the risk will grow in the coming decades. The more space junk we have, the greater the chance that “somebody’s going to be eventually hurt.”

According to estimates by the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation, the likelihood of space debris injuring a particular person is less than one in a trillion. However, a 2022 University of British Columbia study predicts there’s a 10% chance that falling space debris will result in “one or more casualties” by 2032.

To mitigate worst-case scenarios, Crassidis pointed to the need for “hard international treaties” that require space-faring nations to follow UN space debris guidelines. “No matter what anybody tells you, we do not have the technology to take out space debris right now,” argued Crassidis, who acknowledged that Europe has some “nice experiments” in the works.

In the coming decades, “if our technology can’t catch up to the point of making that reality, and if we keep doing what we’re doing, then we’re for sure they are well on our way to Kessler syndrome,” Crassidis said, referring to a worst-case scenario in which space-junk collisions become so likely that they render low-Earth orbit useless for generations. [source]

Look out below! Glad no one or no animal was hurt. Well, I guess if you had a choice having space junk crash into your house would be better than having frozen toilet waste land on your house from a plane. Which actually happened.

Mysterious burst of gravitational waves hit Earth, baffling astronomers

From Fox News.com (Jan. 22, 2020):

A mysterious deep space event could have stretched and squeezed Earth last week.

Astronomers observed a split-second burst of gravitational waves on Jan. 14, but they can't figure out precisely where the burst came from.

These waves are disturbances in space-time that are generally caused by accelerated masses, such as black holes or neutron stars, colliding with each other.

However, astronomers are unsure because this particular burst didn't last very long. In addition, gravitational waves usually change in frequency over time, Andy Howell, a scientist at Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, told Live Science.

The burst still "seems a little too short for what we expect from the collapse of a massive star," he said. "On the other hand, we've never seen a star blowing up in gravitational waves before, so we don't really know what it would look like."

The scientist, who is also an adjunct faculty member in physics at the University of California Santa Barbara, suggested that the burst could be from two intermediate-mass black holes having merged.

Researchers are now pointing their telescopes to that same region to pinpoint the wave's source.

"The universe always surprises us," Howell added. "There could be totally new astronomical events out there that produce gravitational waves that we haven't really thought about." [source]

The universe will always be mysterious to mankind, but not to God.

Astronauts Return Safely After 9 Months in Space

From Newsmax.com (Mar. 18):

After nine months stuck in space, NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore splashed down in the Gulf of America shortly before 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

In a mission that was supposed to last eight days, Williams and Wilmore were stranded at the International Space Station when their Boeing Starliner suffered thruster problems. NASA opted to bring them home via Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Williams and Wilmore came home via SpaceX Dragon, parachuting down off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle at 5:57 p.m. ET to complete their 17-hour trek home.

After being retrieved and initial safety checks, Williams and Wilmore will be flown to Houston to begin a 45-day rehabilitation program. Challenges such as muscle and bone loss, fluid shifts that can lead to kidney stones and vision issues, and the readjustment of balance upon returning to a gravity environment are well understood and effectively managed.

The Trump administration blamed the Biden administration for marooning Williams and Wilmore, asserting that former President Joe Biden didn't want Musk to get the glory for rescuing the pair.

Wilmore and Williams ended up spending 286 days in space — 278 days longer than anticipated when they launched. They circled Earth 4,576 times and traveled 121 million miles by the time of splashdown.

Joining them on SpaceX Dragon were NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. [source]

Great news! Happy for them. It's too bad the previous president didn't rescue the astronauts but I guess they weren't a priority for him.

Other articles and videos on the rescue:

• Stranded Astronaut in Space Proclaims Gospel Before Historic Rescue Back to Earth
• Experts reveal how long it will take NASA astronauts to recover after nine months stranded in space
• Elon Musk Confirms That He Offered to Return Astronauts Sooner But Was Turned Down by Biden Admin ‘For Political Reasons’ (VIDEO)
• Trump offers to pay stranded astronauts out of his pocket after finding out how little overtime they are paid
• Federal Judge Orders Astronauts Be Returned To Space Station
• Stranded Astronauts Splash Down to Massive Cheers [video]

Megyn Kelly to Newsmax: Biden's Border Killed Laken Riley

From Newsmax.com (Feb. 27):

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly criticized the Biden administration's open border policies Tuesday on Newsmax, linking them to the murder of Laken Riley.

"The border policies this guy [Jose Ibarra] came in under Biden, he committed this murder under Biden because we have an open border, and nobody's enforcing the laws against people like this," Kelly stated on "Eric Bolling The Balance."

Kelly described the White House's response to the tragedy as generic condolences.

"People should be held accountable, and then they say, 'Well, it's a state prosecution, so we shouldn't say more,'" Kelly said, expressing frustration with what she perceived as a lack of attention from the administration.

"Really, in this case, you decide to hold your tongue?" she queried.

Jose Ibarra, accused of Riley's murder, faces multiple charges, including murder and assault. Details surrounding the 22-year-old Riley's death remain limited, with authorities stating that her death resulted from blunt force trauma. Ibarra, a Venezuelan citizen, unlawfully crossed into the United States in 2022, according to immigration authorities, reported CBS News.

Conservatives criticized the Associated Press for allegedly downplaying the immigration and criminal law aspects of the case. The AP's focus on Riley's solo jogging instead of Ibarra's immigration status drew scrutiny.

Americans can see right through a media cover-up. Kelly added, "They're doing their level best, but they see the truth. It's too late for that. Those tactics were yesterday's; they don't work anymore."

Kelly highlighted the need for policy change, citing the situation's urgency.

"We have to stop the sanctuary city policies. People are getting hurt, and they're starting to feel it firsthand," Kelly asserted.

She emphasized the importance of maintaining attention on such issues through media coverage, suggesting that failure to address them adequately could result in more tragedies like Riley's.

"It doesn't matter what the New York Times leaves out. The story is ubiquitous," she said, "and if Republicans were smart, they would make sure that this stays, at least in the right-wing media, all the way through November because how else do you affect change if we don't?" [source]

She's right. Biden and the Left only care about potential Democrat votes. If someone gets killed by an illegal, that's too bad. It's just a "one-off." Bill O'Reilly says Riley's family should sue DHS and other gov't agencies indirectly responsible for her murder. Her family should seriously consider that. Actually, since she isn't a "one-off" there could even be a class action lawsuit too.

A young potential life ended.

Other articles on the matter:

• Laken Riley’s blood is on Joe Biden’s hands as migrant crime rises
• Don’t Blame JUST the Border Crisis for the Murder of Laken Riley [video]
• Laken Riley’s suspected killer linked to bloodthirsty Venezuelan gang behind terror in NYC: court docs
  

NASA to Voyage to 'Golden Asteroid' Worth Quadrillions

From Newsmax.com (June 19):

The long-awaited NASA mission to explore the 140 mile wide gold-rich asteroid named after the Greek goddess of the soul, Psyche, has been greenlit for a new launch date.

Originally planned for August 2022, the journey of 280 million miles to asteroid 16 Psyche, by a spacecraft of the same name, has been given a launch window of Oct. 5 to Oct. 25.

Spacecraft 16 Psyche will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the space rock, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter. The initial trip was delayed due to institutional issues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which have since been resolved.

"The independent review board is extraordinarily impressed by the accomplishments of the total JPL organization and Caltech," report from JPL read. "Engagement in and leadership of the overall response process by the JPL director and senior leadership is deemed 'world class.'"

Psyche, an asteroid first discovered in 1852, is composed mostly of iron, nickel, gold, and other rare metals. Experts believe it could be worth $10,000 quadrillion, and could be the metallic core of a planetesimal or a newly forming planet.

The spacecraft is set to arrive at 16 Psyche in August 2029 to begin studies on the astral goldmine so as to gain a better understanding of Earth's interior and the history of the solar system, according to the Houston Chronicle. [source]

Intere$ting. The trick is in the landing.

Object over 10 million times brighter than sun baffles scientists

From Washington Examiner.com (May 10):

Scientists are scrambling to understand a celestial object that glows over 10 million times brighter than the sun and is upending the current understanding of physics.

Scientists have ruled that ultraluminous X-ray sources, or ULXs, shouldn't exist because they are so bright that they should explode. The anomaly is roughly 100 times brighter than should be possible considering the Eddington limit, which puts a limit on how bright an object can be based on its mass, according to NASA.

One hypothesis suggested that the apparent brightness was only an illusion. A new study published in the Astrophysical Journal rejected this hypothesis, finding that ULXs are just as bright as seen.

The study used NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array to study the ULX M82 X-2, the first ever discovered. The findings present a new hypothesis that ULXs form on neutron stars, which are hyperdense tiny stars that absorb immense energy at rapid speeds. The hypothesis holds that the brightness is due to the intense magnetic field of the neutron star changing the shape of atoms.

“These observations let us see the effects of these incredibly strong magnetic fields that we could never reproduce on Earth with current technology,” Matteo Bachetti, an astrophysicist with the National Institute of Astrophysics’s Cagliari Observatory in Italy and lead author on the recent study, told NASA.

“This is the beauty of astronomy. Observing the sky, we expand our ability to investigate how the universe works. On the other hand, we cannot really set up experiments to get quick answers; we have to wait for the universe to show us its secrets,” he added.

However, the full truth of the phenomenon can only be guessed because the magnetic field is incalculably powerful. A neutron star's magnetic field is estimated to be several billion times more powerful than the most powerful magnet produced on Earth. [source]

The universe will always be mysterious. That’s not a bad thing. It keeps life interesting.

This supermassive black hole sucks big time

From PopSci.com (April 26):

Black holes remain among the most enigmatic objects in the universe, but the past few years have seen astronomers develop techniques to directly image these powerful vacuums. And they keep getting better at it.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, the international team that took the first picture of a black hole in 2017, followed up that work with observations highlighting the black hole’s magnetic field. And just this month, another team of astronomers created an AI-sharpened version of the same image.

Now a new study published today in the journal Nature describes how images of that black hole, named after its galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), has a much larger circle of debris around it than the 2017 observations would suggest.

Though long hypothesized to exist in theory, for many decades astronomers could only find indirect evidence of black holes in the sky. For instance, they would look for signs of the immense gravity of a black hole influencing other objects, such as when stars follow especially tight or fast orbits that imply the presence of another massive, but invisible partner.

But that all changed in 2017, when the EHT’s global network of radio telescopes captured the first visible evidence of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy 57 million light-years away from Earth. When the image was released in 2019, the orange ring of fire around a central black void drew comparisons to “The Eye of Sauron” from Lord of the Rings.

EHT would go on to directly image Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, releasing another image of a fiery orange doughnut around a black center in May 2022.

Such supermassive black holes, which are often billions of times more massive than our sun—M87 is estimated to be 6.5 billion times bigger and Sagittarius A*  4 million times bigger—are thought to exist at the centers of most galaxies. The intense gravity of all that mass pulls on any gas, dust, and other excess material that comes too close, accelerating it to incredible speeds as it falls toward the lip of the black hole, known as the event horizon.

Like water circling a drain, the falling material spirals and is condensed into a flat ring known as an accretion disk. But unlike water around a drain, the incredible speed and pressures in the accretion disk heat the inflating material to the point where it emits powerful X-ray radiation. The disk propels jets of radiation and gas out and away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. 

The EHT team already figured that M87 produced forcible jets. But the second set of results show that the ring-like structure of collapsing material around the black hole is 50 percent larger than they originally estimated.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” Kazunori Akiyama, an MIT Haystack Observatory research scientist and EHT collaboration member, said in a statement. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated, and many other mysteries around the black hole, more deeply.”

The new observations were made in 2018 using the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, a network of a dozen radio telescopes running east to west across Europe and the US. To get the resolution necessary for more accurate measurements, however, the researchers also included observatories in the North and South: the Greenland Telescope along with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, which consists of 66 radio telescopes in the Chilean high desert.

“Having these two telescopes [as part of] the global array resulted in a boost in angular resolution by a factor of four in the north-south direction,” Lynn Matthews, an EHT collaboration member at the MIT Haystack Observatory, said in a media statement. “This greatly improves the level of detail we can see. And in this case, a consequence was a dramatic leap in our understanding of the physics operating near the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy.”

The more recent study focused on radio waves around 3 millimeters long, as opposed to 1.3 millimeters like the original 2017 one. That may have brought the larger, more distant ring structure into focus in a way the 2017 observations could not.

“That longer wavelength is usually associated with lower energies of the emitting electrons,” says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved with the new study. “It’s possible that you get brighter emission at longer wavelengths farther out from the black hole.”

Going forward, astronomers plan to observe the black hole at other wavelengths to highlight different parts and layers of its structure, and better understand how such cosmic behemoths form at the hearts of galaxies and contribute to galactic evolution.

Just how supermassive black holes generate jets is “not a well-understood process,” Loeb says. “This is the first time we have observations of what may be the base of the jet. It can be used by theoretical physicists to model how the M87 jet is being launched.”

He adds that he would like to see future observations capture the sequence of events in the accretion disk. That is, to essentially make a movie out of what’s happening at M87.

“There might be a hotspot that we can track that is moving either around or moving towards the jet,” Loeb says, which in turn, could explain how a beast like a black hole gets fed. [source]

Other articles about black holes:

• The Black Hole at the Center of the Galaxy Is Forging a Strange New Kind of Star
• Our galaxy's supermassive black hole is closer to Earth than we thought
• Thousands of Earthlike 'blanets' might circle the Milky Way's central black hole
• 8 ways we know that black holes really do exist
• Can energy be sucked out of a black hole?
• What would happen if a black hole fell into a wormhole?
• Lab-grown black hole analog behaves just like Stephen Hawking said it would
• Are some black holes wormholes in disguise? Gamma-ray blasts may shed clues.
• Black holes could be dark stars with 'Planck hearts'
• Black holes warp the universe into a grotesque hall of mirrors
• 28 'cocooned' black holes found hiding in plain sight
• Mysterious force destroys monster black hole's ring of plasma
• Largest black hole collision ever detected
• Black holes so big we don't know how they form could be hiding in the universe
• Supermassive Black Holes May Form From Dark Matter, Study Suggests
• A supermassive black hole is speeding through space, and astronomers don't know why
• Scientists Discover Unprecedented ‘Runaway’ Black Hole
• Astronomers Spy a Giant Runaway Black Hole’s Starry Wake
• Supermassive black holes could host giant, swirling gas 'tsunamis'
• Supermassive black hole devours a star, blasts its remains at Earth
• Astronomers capture largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed
• 'Ultramassive' black hole discovered by Durham astronomers
• Dangerous 'naked' black holes could be hiding in the universe
• Black holes could become massive particle accelerators
• Astronomers find the fastest spinning black hole to date
• Scientists spot earliest-known supermassive black hole 'storm'
• Scientists catch 1st glimpse of a black hole swallowing a neutron star
• Most complete map of black holes captured by German X-ray space telescope
• Astronomers see back of a black hole for first time, proving Albert Einstein was right
• Powerful X-ray burst from black hole ripples through galactic dust in new NASA image
• Astronomers announce discovery of black hole, the closest to Earth ever discovered
• First Evidence that Black Holes are the Source of Dark Energy

Neptune is mysteriously cooling down and scientists don’t know why

From Strange Sounds.org (Apr. 13, 2022):

Two decades worth of observations revealed unexpected cooling of the solar system’s most distant planet Neptune amid its astronomical summer.

Neptune is orbiting 30 times farther away from the sun than Earth with one year lasting 165 Earth years. The ice giant’s seasons, too, last much longer than those on Earth — more than 40 Earth-years each.

As the planet moved into its southern summer over the past two decades, astronomers observed its average global temperatures plummet by a staggering 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius).

“This change was unexpected,” Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester and lead author on the new paper, said in a statement. “Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we would expect temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder.”

The team analyzed observations in the heat-carrying infrared part of the light spectrum obtained from 2003 to 2018 by some of the world’s best telescopes including the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Keck and Subaru Telescopes in Hawai’i, and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The observed cooling, however, wasn’t uniform, the researchers said in the statement.

Measurements of Neptune’s stratosphere, the second lowest layer of the planet’s atmosphere, revealed a warming trend above Neptune’s south pole. This data set, which only contained data from a two-year period between 2018 and 2020, revealed a speedy warming of about 20 degrees F (11 degrees C). The scientists said that such polar warming has never been observed on Neptune before.

However, observations of the distant Neptune have only been possible for the past few decades and scientists know very little about the natural passing of the seasons on the planet.

“Our data cover less than half of a Neptune season,” Glenn Orton, Senior Research Scientist at JPL and co-author on the study said in the statement. “So no one was expecting to see large and rapid changes.”

Scientists don’t know yet what drives the unexpected temperature fluctuations, but think it could have something to do with the 11-year cycle of the sun’s activity, the periodic ebb and flow of sunspot generation by the star.

“The temperature variations may be related to seasonal changes in Neptune’s atmospheric chemistry, which can alter how effectively the atmosphere cools,” Roman said. “But random variability in weather patterns or even a response to the 11-year solar activity cycle may also have an effect.”

Previous studies suggested there might be a link between the amount of sunspots and Neptune’s brightness. The new study also found some evidence of a possible connection between the solar cycle, the brightness of clouds in Neptune’s atmosphere and the temperature of its stratosphere.

Scientists hope that future observations will shed more light on the distant planet’s mysteries. The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space observatory ever built, is expected to make major leaps in the understanding of Neptune, as well as of the other solar system ice giant, Uranus.

“The exquisite sensitivity of [JWST’s] mid-infrared instrument, MIRI, will provide unprecedented new maps of the chemistry and temperatures in Neptune’s atmosphere, helping to better identify the nature of these recent changes,” Leigh Fletcher, Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Leicester, a co-author of the new study, said in the statement.

The study was published on Monday (April 11) in the Planetary Science Journal. [Space, PSJ]

It’s notable that whilst overall Neptune is cooling there has been a noticeable warming trend at the poles. A similar change has has been documented on earth… Weird, no? [source]

Is China really plotting to take over the moon?

From Washington Examiner.com (June 28, 2022):

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson recently accused China of plotting a military takeover of the moon. He noted the several successful landings the Chinese have achieved on the lunar surface. Through its English-language mouthpiece, the Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party hotly denied any such ambitions and accused the United States of “hypocrisy” and harboring imperial ambitions of its own concerning Earth’s nearest neighbor.

First, we can dispense with any protestations on behalf of the CCP of high-mindedness concerning its space program. China has been fortifying islands in the South China Sea. It is casting a covetous eye on Taiwan, the inhabitants of which consider themselves citizens of an independent country, while China regards it as a “breakaway province.” China is developing a “belt and road” system of infrastructure investments designed to bind much of the developing world to itself. China is busily stealing intellectual property all over the world. It is committing human rights atrocities that rival those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, including the genocide of the Uyghur minority.

In short, China is the new evil empire. The ruling Chinese Communist Party has no moral impediment against seizing control of the moon if it is able to do so.

Why would China or anyone else want to control the moon? The answer: resources.

A recent article in Science Focus divides the moon’s resources into three categories: rare-earth metals, helium 3, and water.

Rare-earth metals are an increasingly important part of many high-tech products, especially those related to green energy. Unfortunately, China has the vast majority of rare earths. While the United States strives to develop domestic sources of rare-earth metals, environmental concerns are stymieing attempts to set up mining and processing facilities. Concern for the environment would be less of a problem on the moon.

Helium 3 is rare on Earth but plentiful in lunar soil, where it has been deposited over billions of years by solar wind. The isotope has long been touted as a fuel for nuclear fusion. Scientists at the Fusion Technology Institute are developing a reactor that would fuse deuterium with helium 3 to create a reaction that, unlike conventional deuterium to tritium fusion, creates little or no radioactive byproducts. The drawback of such a reactor is that it must run considerably hotter than a conventional fusion reactor.

Water is the third important lunar resource. As the late Paul Spudis, a lunar geologist and advocate of a return to the moon, noted a few months before his death, the lunar poles contain an abundance of ice water in permanently shadowed craters. Water can be used for drinking, agriculture, and sanitation by future lunar settlers. It can also be refined into rocket fuel, making the moon a way station for the rest of the solar system.

Mining lunar resources and transporting them back to Earth or to orbital factories would be a formidable task. However, companies such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab have reduced the cost of space flight. That progress should continue, especially as humans return to the moon and start prospecting for its treasures. The moon contains the key to supporting a technological civilization based on clean energy.

Contrary to the complaints the Chinese Communist Party has levied against the United States, NASA has been quite open about its desire to establish an international regime to regulate the moon and its resources, hence the Artemis Accords . American law has mandated that while no one can own lunar territory, private companies have the right to own resources that they extract.

If China is serious about eschewing sole control of the moon, perhaps it would like to sign the Artemis Accords. No other act China could undertake would better prove its assertion that it does not intend to extend the imperialist strategy it is undertaking on Earth to the heavens. Nelson should publicly invite China to do so. Its response, if it cares to give one, would be illuminating. [source]

With the Biden regime in control, I wouldn’t be surprised if China tried this.

This newly spotted massive alien planet is confusing astronomers

From Popsci.com (Dec. 9, 2021):

Astronomers have discovered a massive exoplanet orbiting around the binary star system b Centauri. The two stars are so hot and huge that researchers previously thought that no planet could exist around them.

B Centauri sits in the Centaurus constellation, some 325 light-years outside of our solar system. Its main star is more than three times hotter than our sun, and its two stars have a combined weight of roughly 6 to 10 suns. Until now, no planet has been found orbiting stars more than three  times our sun’s mass. The new exoplanet, b Centauri b, is also a whopper—it probably has a similar gaseous composition to Jupiter, but it’s at least 10 times more massive. It’s one of the biggest exoplanets ever discovered. And with a distance of 52 billion miles separating b Centauri b from its stars, it has one of the widest orbits ever detected. Astronomers captured images of the planet using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the findings were published in Nature on Wednesday.

“Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting since it completely changes the picture about massive stars as planet hosts,” lead study author Markus Janson, an astronomer at Stockholm University, Sweden, said in a statement.

The stars of b Centauri are relatively very young—just 15 million years old, compared to our sun’s 4.6 billion years. “The planet in b Centauri is an alien world in an environment that is completely different from what we experience here on Earth and in our solar system,” co-author Gayathri Viswanath, a PhD student at Stockholm University, said in a statement. “It’s a harsh environment, dominated by extreme radiation, where everything is on a gigantic scale: the stars are bigger, the planet is bigger, the distances are bigger.”

B Centauri now has planetary scientists rethinking the parameters around planet formation—the binary stars’ combined size and heat, and the tremendous amount of radiation they must emit, should create an environment inhospitable to planets. “It poses quite a challenge to our models,” Michael Meyer, a University of Michigan astronomer and co-author of the new study, said in another statement. “But this is what makes it exciting—when you are proven wrong, you learn something.”

Astronomers have yet to figure out how b Centauri b came to be, and will now be working to untangle this unlikely system’s origin story, a “mystery at the moment” that will be “an intriguing task to try to figure out,” Janson said in a statement.

Since 1992, scientists have confirmed the existence of thousands of exoplanets, revealing the often surprising diversity of conditions where planets can form. “It seems that no matter where we look—around small or big stars, single stars or binary stars, alive stars or dead stellar remnants—we always find planets in some form,” Janson told Gizmodo, “even in places we didn’t think possible.” [source]

Scientists: Space Travel Could Bring Alien Organisms to Earth

From Newsmax.com (Nov. 29, 2021):

When we make forays into outer space, there is a chance we may bring back something harmful to Earth.

"In the face of increasing space missions (including those intended to return samples to Earth), it is crucial to reduce the risks of biological contamination in both directions," said Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion biology at McGill University in Montreal, according to The Independent.

Any invasive species encountered on an alien planet would probably be microbial and resemble bacteria on Earth, he explained. While the likelihood of any extraterrestrial life form traveling through space is low owing to the harsh conditions of interstellar travel, scientists caution that biological invasions have often been devastating for the plants and animals in these systems.

Speaking with Live Science, Ricciardi said: "We argue that planets and moons potentially containing life should be treated as if they were insular systems." Ricciardi's research was published in the journal BioScience.

The team of researchers noted that insular ecosystems that evolve in geographical isolation, like on islands and Australia, are particularly vulnerable to invasive species, because the native wildlife hasn't evolved adaptations to contend with invaders, Live Science reported.

Humanity should focus on the early detection of biological contaminates and make plans for a rapid response.

NASA has had contingencies for biological risks from outer space since the 1960s, but the "new era of space exploration aimed at targeting areas most likely to contain life," create new challenges, Ricciardi said.

SpaceX, for example, aims to travel to Mars and beyond with its SpaceX Starship program.

Biosecurity protocols associated with space travel could be increased, focusing on the early detection of potential biological contaminants and developing plans for a rapid response to detections.

Space exploration could accelerate contamination, Jennifer Wadsworth, an astrobiologist at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland, told Live Science.

"The line between exploration and conservation is a thin one," Wadsworth said. "One shouldn't be abandoned at the cost of the other, but both require careful consideration and, most importantly, compliance." [read more]

Doesn’t sound good. Andromeda Strain anyone?