NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Feb 20, 2024

AM1054: Stars Form as Galaxies Collide

When galaxies collide, how many stars are born? For AM1054-325, featured here in a recently released image by the Hubble Space Telescope, the answer is millions. Instead of stars being destroyed as galaxy AM1054-325 and a nearby galaxy circle each other, their gravity and motion has ignited stellar creation. Star formation occurs rapidly in the gaseous debris stretching from AM1054-325’s yellowish body due to the other galaxy’s gravitational pull. Hydrogen gas surrounding newborn stars glows pink. Bright infant stars shine blue and cluster together in compact nurseries of thousands to millions of stars. AM1054-325 possesses over 100 of these intense-blue, dot-like star clusters, some appearing like a string of pearls. Analyzing ultraviolet light helped determine that most of these stars are less than 10 million years old: stellar babies. Many of these nurseries may grow up to be globular star clusters, while the bundle of young stars at the bottom tip may even detach and form a small galaxy.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?

Nasa's private IM-1 mission is carrying Hindu guru Pramukh Swami Maharaj to Moon

Feb 20, 2024 12:30 IST

Nasa's private spacecraft, Odysseus, which is currently cruising towards the Moon is carrying a unique tribute to Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the fifth guru of the BAPS Swaminarayan organisation.

The IM-1 mission is flying an etching on its surface developed by Relative Dynamics that honours the life and service of Pramukh Swami Maharaj, a Hindu spiritual leader who championed the universal human value of selfless service.

"Such a cultural engagement between nations and corporations allows for the development of shared values, efforts, and responsibility in the pursuit of space exploration," Intuitive Missions said in an update.

Born on December 7, 1921, in the state of Gujarat, Pramukh Swami Maharaj became a prominent figure in the BAPS organisation, playing a crucial role in the growth and development of BAPS, both in India and internationally. He emphasised the principles of Hinduism and the teachings of Swaminarayan, the founder of the Swaminarayan tradition. Under his leadership, BAPS expanded its activities in various fields, including education, healthcare, social services, and humanitarian efforts.

Pramukh Swami Maharaj was widely respected for his efforts in promoting religious harmony, community service, and philanthropy.

The Odysseus spacecraft will attempt to land close to the South Pole of the Moon on February 22, aiming to be the first American mission to do so in over 50 years.

The lander carries a suite of six payloads for Nasa under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, including scientific instruments to measure the plasma environment and provide data for future Artemis astronauts.

Additionally, it will test new technologies such as a LIDAR-based sensor for descent velocity and range sensing, and an electrostatic dust-removal system that could revolutionise spacesuit technology.

https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/nasas-private-odysseus-is-carrying-hindu-guru-pramukh-swami-maharaj-to-moon-2504531-2024-02-20

Australia seeks public help to design its 1st moon rover, Roo-ver

Feb 19, 2024

Australia's first lunar rover has a name — now, it needs a design.

The Australian Space Agency is building a semi-autonomous rover, called "Roo-ver," that will launch to the moon as early as 2026 in partnership with NASAs Artemis lunar program. The rover will collect samples of lunar "soil," specifically known as regolith, from which NASA will attempt to extract oxygen — a key step toward establishing a sustainable human presence on the moon and producing rocket fuel to support future missions to Mars.

Recently, Australia hosted a naming competition for its first lunar rover concept, through which the name Roo-ver (as in Kangaroo) was chosen from more than 8,000 entries. The shortlist of names, including "Coolamon," "Kakirra" and "Mateship" were subject to a public vote between Nov. 20 and Dec. 1.

Now, the public is invited to help design the rover's Regolith Sample Acquisition Device, which will be responsible for collecting and transporting regolith samples to an In-situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) facility managed by NASA on the moon itself.

Hosted by the Australian freelancing marketplace "Freelancer.com" and in collaboration with space consortium ELO2, the "ELO2 Big Dipper Lunar Regolith Acquisition Challenge" encourages innovators to contribute to the mission through proposed design concepts and recommendations. Winners from Phase 1 of the design challenge were recently announced, bringing Roo-ver — named in honor of the country's next "leap" into space — one step closer to realization.

"We are impressed with the number and quality of submissions we received in Phase 1," Joseph Kenrick, ELO2 technical director, said in a statement from Freelancer.com. "The different perspectives and insights from the teams is helping inform our own designs for the regolith acquisition device. We can’t wait to see what comes out of Phase 2!"

The Phase 1 winners included a variety of designs for the rover's lunar arm to scoop and store regolith samples from the surface of the moon. Each winning concept was subjected to testing to demonstrate the feasibility of the design. Three first place winners were selected and awarded $2,100 each; three second place winners were chosen and awarded $1,600 each; and four third place winners were selected and awarded $975 each, according to the statement.

"We're excited to be part of history in helping ELO2 design a regolith collector for Australia’s first lunar rover," Trisha Epp, program manager at Freelancer.com, said in the statement. "Phase 1 winners demonstrated creative ingenuity and innovative thinking in addressing the unique challenge brief. They're a real showcase of how open innovation challenges can help crowdsource new ideas. We look forward to seeing how these ideas come to life in Phase 2 and are adopted in the final lunar rover design."

Phase 2 of the challenge is now underway and invites Australian residents and citizens, regardless of whether they participated or won in Phase 1, to share insights and design recommendations for the rover’s future regolith acquisition device by creating a one-page infographic. The deadline for submissions is March 8 and winners will be announced April 1, sharing a prize pool of $3,000.

Weighing roughly 44 pounds (20 kilograms), Roo-ver is expected to land near the lunar south pole, where it will spend 14 Earth days (or about half of one lunar day) scouring the moon's surface. As part of Phase 2, participants are asked to provide design recommendations that account for the harsh lunar environment, the unique characteristics of regolith, operational longevity and energy efficiency.

https://www.space.com/australia-seeks-public-insight-moon-rover-design

Massive underground laboratory in China joins the quest to find dark matter

Feb 19, 2024

Dark matter — an invisible substance that somehow makes up over 80 percent of all matter in the universe — is a phenomenon that frustratingly eludes scientists. Despite being sought after for decades, and providing us with clues that it does indeed exist, dark matter has never been directly detected.

But now, the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL) — crowned the world's largest and deepest underground facility after its upgraded phase, CJPL-II — promises to take scientists a step further. It became operational in early December of last year.

Built inside repurposed tunnels running through the Jinping Mountains in China's Sichuan Province, the lab is buried beneath 2,400 meters (1.49 miles) of rock. The reason for its deep, lonely location is that so much rock can reduce background noise found in dark matter data, typically induced by things like cosmic rays (another space mystery for another time.)

Spread across 330,000 cubic meters, the enormous new facility is home to two upgraded dark matter detectors. The lab also has exceptional horizontal access. "One can drive a bus to the caverns," said Wick Haxton, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who has toured CJPL-II as well as the original laboratory, and was on the laboratory's advisory committee until last year.

This impressive aspect "makes the construction of large facilities underground less costly and more efficient," Haxton said. "I do not believe there is any other site that combines such great depth with such access."

Scientists think the dark matter content that permeates our universe doesn't experience many of the interactions that charged particles, like protons and electrons, would, meaning particles thought to make up the mysterious substance could very well glide right through Earth's rock and pass through detectors located even below the surface at China's Jinping lab.

After all, a key characteristic of dark matter is the fact that it doesn't interact with light, unlike "normal," or baryonic, matter composed of protons and electrons. That's actually why it's fully invisible to us.

In the lab, however, scientists hope potential dark matter particles collide with material in detectors designed to flag these elusive particles. At Jinping, this search is spearheaded by two dark matter experiments, named the Particle and Astrophysical Xenon Experiments (PandaX) and the China Dark Matter Experiment (CDEX).

Potential dark matter particles colliding with atoms of liquid xenon maintained by the PandaX detector would be flagged by sensors as light flashes. Meanwhile, CDEX's higher-sensitivity germanium detector would tag these mysterious particles as electrical signals. The idea is that, even if nearly every dark matter particle whizzes past the detectors, at least one will accidentally come into contact with either of them.

Specifically, the detectors are hunting for a leading dark matter candidate called WIMPS (short for weakly interacting massive particles), a hypothetical class of particles predicted over three decades ago that have eluded the most sensitive experiments so far. Their presence, known only through the weak nuclear force and gravity, is within the understanding of how we think the universe evolved. In 2021, however, the world's most sensitive WIMP detectors at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy as well as Jinping reported a null finding.

Another leading alternative for the dark matter particle include axions, also a category of hypothetical particles thought to flood the universe and behave exactly like dark matter. Other exotic interpretations remain, such as the popular but unconfirmed theory that dark matter particles somehow interact with themselves (self-interacting dark matter or SIDM).

Dark matter experts say the upgraded Jinping lab could also help answer more fundamental questions, such as whether "particles" really constitute dark matter. A commonly held notion is that dark matter is primarily made of as yet undetected subatomic particle (or a group of them). But alternate popular (but imperfect theories) of gravity that don't require dark matter to be made up of particles persist.

"At a basic level, we don't know because we've never detected a particle interaction," said Matthew Walker, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As ambitious as the goal is, detecting a dark matter particle would settle the issue once and for all. "To me, that's the most important thing this experiment could do."

"I'm rooting for them," he added. "We've been waiting a long time to learn what dark matter is."

https://www.space.com/china-renovated-underground-laboratory-hunt-dark-matter

Brightest quasar ever seen is powered by black hole that eats a 'sun a day'

Feb 19, 2024

A newly discovered quasar is a real record-breaker. Not only is it the brightest quasar ever seen, but it's also the brightest astronomical object in general ever seen. It's also powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen — one that consumes the equivalent of over one sun's mass a day.

The quasar, J0529-4351, is located so far from Earth that its light has taken 12 billion years to reach us, meaning it is seen as it was when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just under 2 billion years old.

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar is estimated to be between 17 billion and 19 billion times the mass of the sun; each year, it eats, or "accretes" the gas and dust equivalent to 370 solar masses. This makes J0529-4351 so luminous that if it were placed next to the sun, it would be 500 trillion times brighter than our brilliant star.

"We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and eats just over a sun per day," team leader and Australian National University astronomer Christian Wolf said in a statement. "This makes it the most luminous object in the known universe."

J0529-4351 was spotted in data over 4 decades ago but was so bright that astronomers failed to identify it as a quasar.

Quasars are regions at the hearts of galaxies that host supermassive black holes surrounded by the gas and dust these voids feed on. The violent conditions in disks of matter around such active black holes, called accretion disks and generated by the immense gravity of the objects, heat the gas and dust and cause it to glow brightly.

Additionally, any matter in these disks that doesn't get accreted by a black hole is channeled to the poles of the cosmic titan, where it is blasted out as a jet of particles at near the speed of light, also generating powerful light. As a result, quasars in these Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) regions can shine brighter than the combined light of billions of stars in the galaxies around them.

But even for these exceptionally bright events, J0529-4351 stands out.

The light of J0529-4351 comes from the massive accretion disk that feeds the supermassive black hole, which the team estimates has a diameter of around 7 light-years. That means crossing this accretion disk would be equivalent to traveling between Earth and the sun around 45,000 times.

"It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now," team member and Australian National University scientist, Christopher Onken, said in the statement.

J0529-4351 was initially spotted in the Schmidt Southern Sky Survey, which dates back to 1980, but it took decades to confirm it was a quasar to begin with. Large astronomical surveys deliver so much data that astronomers need machine-learning models to analyze them and sort quasars from other celestial objects.

These models are also trained using currently discovered objects, which means they can miss candidates with exceptional properties like J0529-4351. Indeed, this quasar is so bright that models passed it over believing it to be a star located relatively close to Earth.

This misclassification was spotted in 2023, when astronomers realized J0529-4351 is, in fact, a quasar after having a look at the object's region using the 2.3-meter telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

The new discovery that this is actually the brightest quasar ever was made when the X-shooter spectrograph instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile followed up on J0529-4351.

Astronomers aren't done with J0529-4351 just yet.

The team thinks the supermassive black hole at the heart of this quasar is feeding near the Eddington limit, or the point at which the radiation it puts out should push away gas and dust, cutting off this black hole's cosmic larder.

Confirming this will require a further detailed investigation. Fortunately, however, the greedy supermassive black hole is the perfect target for an upgraded GRAVITY + instrument at the VLT, which will improve the high-contrast precision on bright objects.

J0529-4351 will also be investigated by the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Atacama Desert.

However, it is the thrill of finding something new and exciting that drives the leader of the team behind this record-breaking discovery.

"Personally, I simply like the chase. For a few minutes a day, I get to feel like a child again, playing treasure hunt, and now I bring everything to the table that I have learned since," Wolf concluded.

https://www.space.com/brightest-quasar-ever-powered-black-hole-solar-mass-accretion-disk

Kim Jong-un receives luxury car as gift from Vladimir Putin

Tue 20 Feb 2024 06.09 EST

Vladimir Putin gave Kim Jong-un a luxury Russian Aurus limousine as a gift because the North Korean leader liked the car when the Russian president showed it to him last year, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.

When Kim visited eastern Russia in September, Putin showed Kim one of the black armoured limousines that he uses. Kim sat beside Putin in the car at the Vostochny cosmodrome and appeared to enjoy it.

“When the head of the DPRK [North Korea] was at the Vostochny cosmodrome, he looked at this car, Putin showed it to him personally, and like many people, Kim liked this car,” the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said when asked about the gift.

“So this decision was made,” Peskov said. “North Korea is our neighbour, our close neighbour, and we intend, and will continue, to develop our relations with all neighbours, including North Korea.”

Russia has stepped up ties with North Korea and other countries hostile to the US, such as Iran, since the start of the war with Ukraine – relations that are a source of concern to the west.

The US has accused North Korea of supplying Russia with artillery shells and missiles used in Ukraine. Moscow and Pyongyang deny the US accusations but vowed last year to deepen military relations.

The Russian-made limousine was delivered to Kim’s top aides by the Russian side on Sunday, North Korea’s official KCNA news agency said.

Kim’s sister “courteously conveyed Kim Jong-un’s thanks to Putin to the Russian side, saying that the gift serves as a clear demonstration of the special personal relations between the top leaders”, KCNA reported.

South Korea’s foreign ministry said it was closely monitoring the cooperation between Russia and North Korea while urging both countries to comply with UN security council resolutions.

“Security council sanctions on North Korea prohibit directly or indirectly supplying, selling or moving all transportation vehicles internationally categorised as HS code 86 through to 89, regardless of their origin, to North Korea, including luxury cars,” a ministry spokesperson, Lim Soo-suk, told a media briefing.

According to the carmaker’s website, the car is Russia’s first full-size luxury sedan. It is also Putin’s presidential car.

For Kim’s visit to the Vostochny cosmodrome, Kim himself drove to the site in a Maybach limousine brought onboard a special train he had travelled in from Pyongyang.

Kim is believed to be an avid automobile enthusiast and has a large collection of luxury foreign vehicles, which are probably smuggled in. The Maybach and others he has been seen in, including several Mercedes limousines, a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a Lexus sports utility vehicle, fall under the category of luxury goods that UN security council resolutions ban from export to North Korea.

On Tuesday, KCNA separately reported that a delegation of North Korean ruling party officials had returned from Russia and three delegations, representing information technology, fisheries and sports, had departed for Russia.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/20/kim-jong-un-receives-car-as-gift-from-vladimir-putin