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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Jan 31, 2024
Camera Orion Rising
What does Orion rising look like to a camera? During this time of the year, the famous constellation is visible to the southeast just after sunset. From most Earthly locations, Orion's familiar star pattern, highlighted by the three-stars-in-a-row belt stars, rises sideways. An entire section of the night sky that includes Orion was photographed rising above Śnieżka, a mountain on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic. The long duration exposure sequence brings up many faint features including the Orion and Flame Nebulas, both encompassed by the curving Barnard's Loop. The featured wide-angle camera composite also captured night sky icons including the blue Pleiades star cluster at the image top and the red Rosette Nebula to the left of Orion. Famous stars in the frame include Sirius, Betelgeuse, Rigel and Aldebaran. Orion will appear successively higher in the sky at sunset during the coming months.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
The world’s first metal 3D printer for space is on its way to the ISS
31 January 2024
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an industrial process that has opened up new ways of looking at how parts are designed. It has many uses from the day-to-day to the surprising: from simple repairs to bio-ink implants, from printing whole houses to producing spacecraft parts.
Metal 3D printing makes life easier for astronauts
There are already several plastic 3D printers on board the International Space Station (ISS), the first of which arrived in 2014. Astronauts have already used them to replace or repair plastic parts, since one of the major problems of everyday life in space is the supply of equipment, which can take months to arrive. But not everything can be made from plastic…
This logistical constraint will intensify on future Moon and Mars stations in the next few decades. Even though the raw material still needs to be launched, printing the part is still more efficient than transporting it whole up to its final destination.
Gwenaëlle Aridon, Airbus Space Assembly lead engineer, says: “The metal 3D printer will bring new on-orbit manufacturing capabilities, including the possibility to produce load-bearing structural parts that are more resilient than a plastic equivalent. Astronauts will be able to directly manufacture tools such as wrenches or mounting interfaces that could connect several parts together. The flexibility and rapid availability of 3D printing will greatly improve astronauts’ autonomy.”
The challenges of printing metal in space
While the process of 3D printing has been mastered on Earth, printing metal in space presents its own set of technical challenges. Sébastien Girault, metal 3D printer system engineer at Airbus, explains. “The first challenge with this technology demonstrator was size. On Earth, current metal 3D printers are installed in a minimum ten square metre laboratory, “ he says. “To create the prototype for the ISS, we had to shrink the printer to the size of a washing machine”. This miniaturisation is needed in order to fit inside the rack in which the printer will be housed on board the ISS’ Columbus Laboratory. “At this size, we can print parts with a volume of nine centimetres high and five centimetres wide,” Girault says.
The second challenge is safety: protecting the ISS from the aggressive printing environment caused by the laser and the heat it generates. The printer sits in a sealed metal box, which acts like a safe. The melting point of metal alloys compatible with this process can be far over 1,200°C degrees compared to around 200°C degrees for plastic, which implies drastic thermal control.
“Gravity management is also key, which is why we chose wire-based printing technology. The wire is independent of gravity unlike the powder-based system, which always has to fall to the ground,” Girault says.
Whether it's plastic or metal, fumes are emitted that have to be dealt with by filters and captured inside the machine so that they do not contaminate the air inside the ISS. “Safety and contamination are key drivers for us not only for the ISS, but for future use on the Moon,” Aridon says”.
Is metal printing suited to a microgravity environment?
This is one of the questions the team is setting out to answer. Two printers will be used for this experiment: the ‘flight model’ inside the ISS; and the ‘engineering model’ on Earth. The astronauts will print four samples in space, which will be sent back to Earth for analysis. The same specimens will be manufactured using the engineering model printer. “In order to evaluate the effects of microgravity, ESA and Danish Technical University will perform mechanical strength and bending tests and microstructural analysis on the parts made in space and compare them to the other specimens,” Girault explains.
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-01-the-worlds-first-metal-3d-printer-for-space-is-on-its-way-to-the-iss
Space weather: One major event from a fully funded program
January 30, 2024
Funding for space weather research and operations has grown in recent years.
Still, it remains challenging to convey the potential danger of a significant space weather event to lawmakers and the public “because if we do our job, you are not going to see the impact,” Ken Graham, National Weather Service director and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration assistant administrator, said Jan. 29 at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting here.
Unlike hurricanes and tornadoes, space weather events don’t often leave a trail of damage.
“We need a big visible event on Super Bowl Sunday that wipes out the satellites,” joked Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science. “And now that the Ravens aren’t in the Super Bowl, bring it on.”
Even without widespread appreciation of space weather phenomena, NASA and NOAA are working with the Defense Department, the National Science Foundation, the European Space Agency, U.S. Geological Survey and others to establish a robust space weather program.
It remains difficult, though, to obtain sufficient funding for these endeavors.
“We have 50 years of geostationary observations and 60 years of low-Earth orbit observations with an established user base, customer base and partnerships,” said Stephen Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA’s satellite and information service. “NOAA is starting from nothing in establishing a portfolio approach for space weather observations. It is a struggling enterprise.”
Volz added, “I often joke that we’re one major space weather disaster away from a fully funded program. But we don’t want it to actually get to that.”
https://spacenews.com/space-weather-one-major-event-from-a-fully-funded-program/
NASA's TESS telescope spots 6 exoplanets around 'misbehaving' toddler star
Jan 30, 2024
Astronomers have discovered a rare system of six young planets and a possible seventh that dance around a misbehaving infant star.
Not only could this system provide much-needed insight into how planets form and evolve around an infant star, but its similarity to the solar system could provide astronomers with a snapshot of what our cosmic neighborhood could have looked like around 4 billion years ago.
The six, possibly seven, exoplanets orbit a relatively close dwarf star in the Milky Way called TOI-1136; it's located around 270 light-years from Earth. The large number of exoplanets in the system inspired scientists to investigate deeper.
"Because few star systems have as many planets as this one does, it's getting close in size to our own solar system," Tara Fetherolf, team member and a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of California, said in a statement. "It's both similar enough and different enough that we can learn a lot."
Scientists initially studied the TOI-1136 planetary system using NASA's exoplanet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2019. Fetherolf and colleagues followed up on this initial study with observations from multiple telescopes, revealing the masses of the planets, the shape of their orbits, and even the characteristics of their atmospheres.
The planets in the system, designated names between TOI-1136 b to TOI-1136 g, are classed as "sub-Neptune" planets. The smallest of the six confirmed worlds has a width twice that of Earth, while some of its sibling planets are as large as four times the size of our planet — around the size of the solar system ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
All of the TOI-1136 exoplanets are so close to their parent star that they complete an orbit in less than 88 Earth days. This is significant because 88 days is the orbital period of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, meaning that all these planets may be closer to their star than that tiny planet is to our star.
"They're weird planets to us because we don't have anything exactly like them in our solar system," Rae Holcomb, team member and a physics Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, said in a separate statement. "But the more we study other planet systems, it seems like they may be the most common type of planet in the galaxy."
What really makes TOI-1136 really stand out is how young this planetary and its central dwarf star are. TOI-1136 is just 700 million years old, which may seem ancient, but compared to the 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and its star, the sun, it makes the system a comparative toddler.
"This gives us a look at planets right after they've formed, and solar system formation is a hot topic," Fetherolf said. "Any time we find a multi-planet system it gives us more information to inform our theories about how systems come to be and how our system got here."
Just like an overactive human toddler, these juvenile stars can be difficult to keep track of because of their hyperactivity. For toddler stars, this overactivity comes in the form of intense magnetism, more prevalent and intense sunspots and heightened solar flares.
The radiation blasted out by infant stars doesn't just make them challenging to observe, it also shapes the planets that orbits them, sculpting their atmospheric characteristics in particular.
"Young stars misbehave all the time. They're very active, just like toddlers. That can make high-precision measurements difficult," Stephen Kane, team leader and a professor of planetary astrophysics at the University of California Riverside, said in the statement. "This will help us not only do a one-to-one comparison of how planets change with time, but also how their atmospheres evolved at different distances from the star, which is perhaps the most key thing."
https://www.space.com/nasa-tess-telescope-exoplanets-solar-system-toddler-star
https://www.space.com/seti-expanding-search-for-alien-intelligence
'It's getting closer and closer for sure.' How SETI is expanding its search for alien intelligence (exclusive)
Jan 31, 2024
To spot potential intelligent life out there in the great beyond, first you must cast a net wide by using an array of techniques and technologies.
Any "fishing expedition" for E.T. includes close-in studies of life in extreme environments right here on Earth, to help us recognize any signatures we might find on Mars or deep diving through the icy shell of Jupiter's moon, Europa. The search can also blend in the use of space-based telescopes to inspect Earth-like planets circling their home stars. Then there's cupping a proverbial ear to the cosmos using radio telescopes to pick up any bustling interstellar civilization or perhaps look for far-off laser-pulsed communiqués from extraterrestrial homebodies.
These and other efforts are actively pursued by the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, right there in the high-tech heartbeat of Silicon Valley. More than a hundred institute scientists are busily carrying out research in astronomy and astrophysics, astrobiology, as well as exoplanets, climate and bio-geoscience and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Space.com caught up with Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute for an exclusive, mind-stretching close-encounter discussion regarding the mounting evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Spoiler alert! It's not that old tried, true and tired query "are we alone?" Rather, it's more like "just how crowded is it?"
Early stages
There's a lot going on today in terms of searching for and trying to understand potential extraterrestrial life in the universe, Diamond said.
"Much of the first several decades of SETI, the effort has been quite minimal, looking with fairly 'insensitive' instruments in fairly narrow parts of the radio spectrum in random parts of the sky. So hardly anything that could be considered a comprehensive endeavor," said Diamond.
But even today, in many ways, SETI work is still in the early stages. However, more and more is taking place with an increasing number of instruments and technologies around the world. "There's an extensive and expanded effort ongoing now," Diamond said.
COSMIC collaboration
For example, there's the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — mercifully shortened to COSMIC SETI.
All 27 antennas that constitute the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico have been outfitted with new gear to perform 24/7 SETI observations under a collaboration between the SETI Institute and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the group that operates the VLA.
Yes, that's the same VLA showcased in the 1997 sci-fi film "Contact," replete with actress Jodie Foster adorned with a tight-fitting stereo headset. In reality, the VLA was never used for SETI, Diamond noted, but now it is.
Detectable signatures
"COSMIC is really the most comprehensive SETI search on a single instrument in history. That's very exciting," Diamond said, and gives the COSMIC effort access to a complete and independent copy of the data streams from the entire VLA.
COSMIC will analyze data for the possible presence of "technosignatures" - detectable signatures and signals that shout out the presence of distant advanced civilizations.
In scientific circles, technosignatures are viewed as a subset of the far more established search for "biosignatures" — evidence of microbial or other primitive life loitering on some of the billions of exoplanets we now know exist.
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Newly augmented
"For classical radio SETI, there's more going on now around the world than there has ever been," Diamond said. That uptick also includes the SETI Institute's newly augmented Allen Telescope Array situated northeast of San Francisco. It was named after Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, given his generous financial backing of the facility in its early phases.
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) has undergone antenna redesign and now is outfitted with high-end computers, signal processors, and other electronics making it far faster than ever before, Diamond adds. "The instrument is performing at a level that it has never performed at since it was built. All of that is fairly new in the two to three years."
One output from ATA has been its use by SETI Institute scientists to delve into powerful Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), a head-scratching phenomenon wanting of explanation.
Philanthropic gift
A passionate booster in ATA's overhaul was Franklin Antonio, a co-founder of Qualcomm, a communications chip company. Antonio's support as an institute technical advisor continues with his philanthropic gift to the SETI Institute of $200 million after his passing last May.
That bequest is sparking an action plan that will enhance the institute's multi-disciplinary, multi-center research, education and outreach make-up, Diamond said.
Also on the institute's agenda is taking in and evaluating ideas from SETI researchers anywhere in the world to tap into a pool of money for such things as technology, software, or to run an experiment.
"If we like what you're doing, we'll fund it," Diamond said. "We will kind of take the place of NASA for the time being as the only place in the world where you can submit a proposal to do SETI work."
Those three words
Roll back time to Columbus Day in 1992 when NASA initiated a formal, more intensive, SETI program. But less than a year later, Congress short-circuited the program.
Is it time for the government to re-embrace the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
"Yes, absolutely," Diamond responded. NASA, he said, has a trio of science questions it's spearheading: How does the Universe work? How did we get here? Are we alone?
Almost every time NASA leadership publicly speaks, said Diamond, they invoke those three words — Are we alone?
"We all want to know. NASA clearly wants to know as it's one of their science priorities," Diamond said. "So isn't it time they get back in the business of trying to answer that question?"
Planets are everywhere
NASA's own Kepler space telescope served as the space agency's first planet-hunting mission. During nine years of deep space scoping, Diamond emphasized, it showed our galaxy contains billions of exoplanets. "It told us that planets are everywhere and a lot of them are potentially habitable."
NASA is starting to chip away at SETI work, Diamond noted. A NASA-funded grant to a SETI Institute scientist is using observations from the space agency's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The intent is to purge out of the TESS data possible technosignatures aided by artificial intelligence/machine learning tools.
"So yes, I think the winds of change are blowing a little bit in favor of the government getting back into this business. And, in my opinion, I think they should step up and do it," Diamond said.
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https://www.space.com/black-holes-tidal-disruption-events-spaghettifying-stars
Astronomers witness 18 ravenous black holes ripping up and devouring stars
Jan 31, 2024
It's a cosmic jungle out there for stars that venture too close to black holes. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found 18 new examples of black holes that are ripping apart stars and feasting upon their remains.
This result more than doubles the number of gruesome, star-shredding Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) seen in the local universe. The findings could help astronomers better estimate the number of TDEs occurring across the universe, bringing the rate closer to theoretical predictions.
TDEs occur when a star gets too close to a black hole, and the latter object's gravitational influence generates tidal forces in the star so great that the stellar body is stretched vertically while squashed horizontally, a process called "spaghettification."
The material from the star forms a flattened disk around the black hole, with some of it accreting to the black hole's heart, while other stellar matter is channeled to the poles by powerful magnetic fields and blasted out as near-light speed jets.
Previously, astronomers had believed that black holes rip apart and devour stars while blasting out highly energetic jets in galaxies that have recently undergone periods of intense star birth called "starbursts."
This research, however, implies TDEs can occur across a wider range of galaxies and could help explain the extreme physics seen around such events.
"People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them," Erin Kara, team member and an assistant professor of physics at MIT, said in a statement.
How the Tidal Disruption Event hunt began
The MIT team began searching for more star-devouring black holes after they discovered the closest TDE to Earth ever seen. It was witnessed in the form of a flare from the galaxy NGC 7392, located around 137 million light-years from Earth.
This opened up an entirely new way to spot actively feeding black holes, they said. It involves using infrared light and an algorithm that hunts for patterns in infrared data that indicate brief or "transient" bursts of radiation. The technique completed was based on historical data collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE). Since its launch in 2009, NEOWISE has been searching the sky over Earth for brief bursts of infrared light.
The team then cross-referenced the transients they found with a catalog of galaxies within a distance of 600 million light-years of Earth, revealing that the infrared bursts could be traced back to about 1,000 galaxies.
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Zooming in on these galaxies, the researchers attempted to discover if the signals they had detected came from TDEs or if they could have been triggered by other violent events, such as the supernova explosion of a massive dying star. It'd also have been possible for them to come from supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies as they feed on in falling dust and gas.
This ultimately led to the discovery of 18 legitimate TDE signals that were the result of the gravitational influence of black holes generating tidal forces in stars that eventually led to some gory stellar deaths.
Surprisingly, the team found that TDEs seem to occur across a range of galaxies across the entire sky, including ones that are filled with thick clouds of dust.
"If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them," research lead author and MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research graduate student Megan Masterson said.
Hiding cosmic crimes
In the grand scheme of things, this research helps settle some major questions surrounding tidal disruption events.
Previously, astronomers had mainly seen these star-shredding occurrences happening in post-starburst galaxies with stellar factories that'd recently shut down.
Such galaxies are fairly rare, and scientists were confused as to why TDEs seemed restricted to them. This research alleviates that confusion by finding gory TDEs in a spread of galaxy types.
The reason TDEs were seemingly absent from other galaxies is that, whereas post-starburst galaxies are devoid of thick gas and dust because they exhausted the materials while creating a wealth of new stars, other galaxies still have the material in abundance. Gas and dust are adept at absorbing or blocking optical and X-ray light, but infrared slips through the matter more easily.
Thus, X-ray and optical emissions were fine for spotting TDEs in dust-depleted galaxies, but infrared observations were key in finding star-shredding black holes in dusty galaxies.
"It's not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches," Masterson added. "If you want to understand TDEs as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band."
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https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/ufos-listen-as-pilots-describe-bizarre-lights-and-triangle-formation-over-canadian-prairies-1.6748300
UFOs: Listen as pilots describe 'bizarre' lights and 'triangle formation' over Canadian Prairies
Jan. 31, 2024 3:19 a.m. PST
Early on Jan. 19, several pilots reported "multiple lights sometimes in a triangle formation(opens in a new tab)" high above the Canadian Prairies.
"I had a company aircraft over Thunder Bay suggest, he thinks it possibly could be satellites," an air traffic controller in Winnipeg told aviators around 4:45 am local time, according to audio obtained by CTVNews.ca.
"I'm certainly no expert, but they're moving side-to-side and then going away from each other and then forming triangles," an Air Canada pilot from Seattle to Winnipeg replied while flying over Saskatchewan. "That doesn't really seem like they're in any type of orbit. But I mean, I'm no expert."
"Yeah, it's quite bizarre," a pilot on a nearby Flair Airlines flight from Vancouver to Toronto added. "There's around six of them just randomly in formation flying at a high altitude at 12 o'clock."
"Definitely not satellites," a pilot on a Morningstar Air Express cargo flight from Calgary to Toronto interjected. "It's unlike anything I've ever seen in the 15 years of night flying that I've done."
You can listen to their conversation here.
The 13-minute clip was culled from 2.5 hours of raw audio downloaded from two feeds at LiveATC.net(opens in a new tab), a website that streams and archives air traffic control radio. Edited for length, the original conversations between pilots and air traffic controllers took place from approximately 4:20 a.m. to 6 a.m. CST.
"There's no active airspace, military airspace, anything like that we're aware of," an air traffic controller said on Jan. 19. "I honestly have no idea what that might be."
At least four aircraft reported seeing the lights that morning, including Flair and Morningstar jets, and two Air Canada flights. They estimated the lights were well above them, as high as 100,000 feet (30,480 metres), which is beyond the reach of most fighter jets. Two other crews also chimed in to say they've recently had similar sightings over Canada.
"I haven't seen them tonight, but we've been seeing those lights for probably the last 18 months or so, just for your information," a pilot on a Cargojet flight from Hamilton, Ont. to Winnipeg reported.
"Wow, that's interesting," a WestJet pilot flying from Winnipeg to Toronto replied. "I've had it but only ever going westbound, with three or four like that over the last month or so."
"I've never seen them eastbound, only westbound," the Cargojet pilot added. "And yeah, same thing too: movement all over, sometimes they make a triangle, sometimes they make a diamond and square. They're bright and they just appear all over."
"Sure be nice to get answers on that, for sure," another pilot said.
'Vital intelligence sightings'
CTVNews.ca first became aware of the sightings when a report appeared on Jan. 23(opens in a new tab) in an online aviation incident database maintained by Transport Canada, the federal transportation department.
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Known as CADORS, the Transport Canada database contains reports on everything from bird strikes(opens in a new tab) to unruly passengers(opens in a new tab). It is also peppered with nearly three decades of strange sightings from civilians(opens in a new tab), soldiers(opens in a new tab), police officers(opens in a new tab), air traffic controllers(opens in a new tab) and pilots on medical(opens in a new tab), military(opens in a new tab), cargo(opens in a new tab) and passenger(opens in a new tab) flights operated by WestJet(opens in a new tab), Air Canada Express(opens in a new tab), Porter Airlines(opens in a new tab), Delta(opens in a new tab) and more(opens in a new tab).
Transport Canada cautions that such "reports contain preliminary, unconfirmed data which can be subject to change."
"Reports of unidentified objects can rarely be followed up on as they are as the title implies, unidentified," a Transport Canada spokesperson told CTVNews.ca. "The department is reviewing the circumstances of this incident and will take appropriate action if non-compliance with the regulations is identified."
Reports like the Jan. 19 one are usually provided to federal transportation officials by Nav Canada, a private non-profit company that owns and operates Canada's civilian air navigation infrastructure.
The company's Canadian aviation guidelines(opens in a new tab) direct pilots to immediately report "a vital intelligence sighting of any airborne and ground objects or activities that appear to be hostile, suspicious, unidentified or engaged in possible illegal smuggling activity." Known as CIRVIS reports, short for "Communication Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings," Nav Canada even puts "unidentified flying objects" at the front of a list of examples that also includes foreign submarines and warships.
According to both the audio and written report, Nav Canada air traffic controllers also alerted the military's Canadian Air Defence Sector in North Bay, Ont., which is tasked with monitoring the continent's northern approaches as part of Norad, the joint Canada-U.S. defence group.
Canada's military routinely states that it does "not typically investigate sightings of unknown or unexplained phenomena outside the context of investigating credible threats, potential threats, or potential distress in the case of search and rescue."
At least four incidents(opens in a new tab) appear to have met that criteria between 2016 and February 2023, when a high-altitude Chinese balloon(opens in a new tab) and three unidentified objects(opens in a new tab) were shot down over North America.
"NORAD detects radar tracks and if required, provides a threat assessment of those tracks based on a variety of factors," a Canadian NORAD and Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) spokesperson told CTVNews.ca. "For operational security reasons, we do not discuss how NORAD assesses threats."
The RCAF, Transport Canada and Nav Canada all declined to provide additional details on the Jan. 19 case and any potential responses.
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