Cosmic Log
SpaceX’s Starship and its Super Heavy booster blew through the primary objective for their second test flight today, but both rocket stages blew up sooner than the company hoped.
SpaceX took the day as a win — based not only on a successful liftoff from its South Texas launch pad a little after 7 a.m. CT (5 a.m. PT), but also on the successful execution of a hot-stage separation maneuver two and a half minutes after launch.
Readings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope confirm the presence of carbon-based molecules including methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a distant planet known as K2-18 b — which supports previous suggestions that it might be the kind of ocean-covered world capable of harboring marine life.
K2-18 b, which was first detected in 2015 using data from NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope, lies in the habitable zone of a star system that’s about 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo. It’s about 8.6 times as massive as Earth, and astronomers regard it as a sub-Neptune — a type of planet that doesn’t exist in our solar system.
Since its initial detection, astrobiologists have been interested in the world’s potential for habitability. They suspected it might be what’s called a Hycean planet — a type of world that’s massive enough to hold onto a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a globe-spanning sea. The evidence has been piling up: In 2019, researchers reported the chemical signature of water vapor and clouds in K2-18 b’s atmosphere.
The fact that JWST detected an abundance of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), along with a shortage of ammonia (NH3), is consistent with the atmospheric modeling for Hycean planets.
Nine months ago, astronomers observed a flash that they said came from a mysterious object that seemed to flare with the brilliance of a quadrillion suns, located 8.5 billion light-years from Earth.
Now they say they’ve figured out what that object was.
In a pair of studies published by Nature and Nature Astronomy, researchers report that the event was probably sparked when a supermassive black hole suddenly consumed a nearby star. The event’s violent energy was released in the form of a relativistic jet of blazing-hot material that headed in Earth’s direction.
The jet didn’t do us any damage. But its bull’s-eye directionality produced a phenomenon called “Doppler boosting,” also known as the headlight effect. That made the jet’s flash look brighter than it would have if the jet went in a different direction.
Scientists say the flash, which was designated AT2022cmc when it was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in February, is only the fourth known example of a Doppler-boosted tidal disruption event.
Four and a half months after it was launched, a nanosatellite called Capstone has begun circling the moon — in a peculiar type of orbit where no probe has gone before.
The complex path, known as a near-rectilinear halo orbit, is the same type of trajectory that NASA hopes to use for crewed missions to the moon starting in the mid-2020s. Capstone is an acronym, standing for “Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment.” But it’s also a metaphorical capstone for the Artemis moon program’s mission architecture.
NASA’s biggest rocket is on its Florida launch pad once more, awaiting liftoff on a milestone test mission around the moon.
The 322-foot-tall, 3.5-million-pound Space Launch System rocket rolled out overnight from the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, reaching Launch Complex 39B at around 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT) today after a crawl that lasted nearly nine hours.
Launch teams will continue configuring the SLS rocket and its Orion capsule for the start of the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, now targeted for no earlier than 1:04 a.m. ET on Nov. 16 (10:04 p.m. PT Nov. 13). That time frame is dependent on being able to ride out the effects of Tropical Storm Nicole and getting everything in place after the storm.
NASA had planned to begin the weeks-long test mission in August — but a series of technical glitches, followed by the threat from Hurricane Ian, forced mission planners to bring the rocket back into the Vehicle Assembly Building. During the weeks that followed, engineers worked their way through a list of maintenance tasks that had been put off.
NASA has released the first direct image of an exoplanet taken by the James Webb Space Telescope — and although there’s no chance that this particular alien world could harbor life as we know it, the picture serves as an early demonstration of the observatory’s power.
“We’ve only just begun,” Aarynn Carter, a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz who led the analysis of the JWST image, said today in a NASA image advisory. “There are many more images of exoplanets to come that will shape our overall understanding of their physics, chemistry and formation.”
The planet in question, HIP 65426 b, is about 355 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. Discovered five years ago, it’s a gas giant that’s roughly seven times as massive as Jupiter — and it’s about 100 times farther out from its parent star than Earth is from the sun.
That extreme distance from a dwarf star would make HIP 65426 b a prohibitively chilly ball of gas. But the distance also provides enough separation for JWST to distinguish the planet from the star.
A robotic probe that’s meant to blaze a trail for astronauts has begun a slow and steady trek to the moon, thanks to a launch from New Zealand on a commercial rocket.
NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, also known as Capstone, lifted off from Rocket Lab’s launch pad on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula atop an Electron rocket at 2:55 a.m. PT (9:55 p.m. local time) today.
Because Rocket Lab’s Electron has far less oomph than, say, a Saturn V or Space Launch System rocket, the microwave oven-sized spacecraft will be sent along a leisurely, looping route that takes advantage of the gravitational pulls of the moon, the sun and Earth.
NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket is back at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B for another dress rehearsal aimed at clearing the way for a round-the-moon mission.
This time, NASA hopes the full-up rehearsal will include a fill-up.
The SLS rocket had its first rollout to the pad in mid-March, and NASA went through several rounds of pre-launch tests in April. But the team wasn’t able to fill the rocket’s tanks with super-chilled hydrogen and oxygen propellants due to a series of problems.
NASA had to transport the 322-foot-tall, 3.5 million-pound rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building and fix the glitches. Early today, the rocket made the 4-mile, eight-hour journey back to the pad to begin preparations for another “wet dress rehearsal,” including the tank-filling operation.
If all goes according to plan, NASA will go all the way through the countdown to the moment of ignition in two weeks. And if the reviews of the rehearsal are sufficiently glowing, the first-ever SLS launch would send NASA’s Orion spaceship on an uncrewed mission around the moon and back in August.
That mission, known as Artemis 1, could be considered a robotic rehearsal for a crewed Artemis 2 mission around the moon. The Artemis 2 launch is scheduled for no earlier than 2024. NASA’s plan calls for the mission after that, Artemis 3, to land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 — 50 years ago.
After years of observation and weeks of rumor-mill rumblings, astronomers today unveiled their first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*.
Technically, the picture from the Event Horizon Telescope project doesn’t show light from the black hole itself. After all, a black hole is a gravitational singularity so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its grip. Rather, the picture shows the “shadow” of a black hole, surrounded by the superheated, glowing gas that surrounds it.
And technically, the picture may not match what folks might see with their own eyes up close. Rather, the readings come from eight observatories around the world that combined their observations in radio wavelengths.
Nevertheless, the new view of Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short (pronounced “sadge-ay-star”), serves to confirm in graphic terms what astronomers have long suspected: that our galaxy, like many others, has a supermassive black hole at its heart.
Today’s revelations follow up on the Event Horizon Telescope’s first-ever black hole image, which was released in 2019 and showed the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, an elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years away.
Sgr A* is much closer — a mere 27,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius. But there’s nothing to fear from this black hole: It’s relatively quiescent, in contrast to the galaxy-gobbling behemoths that are standard science-fiction fare.
Our galaxy’s black hole is thought to hold the mass of 4 million suns within an area that’s roughly as big around as Mercury’s orbit. Checking those dimensions against the image data serves as a test of relativity theory. Spoiler alert: Albert Einstein was right … again.
“We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s theory of general relativity,” EHT project scientist Geoffrey Bower said in a news release. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.”
The EHT’s findings about Sgr A* are the subject of a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters — and to whet your appetite for all that reading material, here are three videos that summarize the past, present and future of black hole imaging:
NASA brought its Space Launch System rocket back to one of the world’s biggest repair shops — the 526-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida — to fix some flaws that turned up during rehearsals for a mission beyond the moon.
It took 10 hours to roll the 322-foot-tall, 3.5 million-pound rocket on its mobile launch platform from Launch Complex 39B to the VAB. The 4-mile journey, which made use of a giant crawler-transporter handed down from the Apollo and space shuttle programs, was basically a rewind of the rocket’s trip to the pad on March 17-18.
NASA had hoped to conduct a “wet dress rehearsal” for the launch of the SLS and its Orion deep-space capsule on an uncrewed trip around the moon. That mission, known as Artemis 1, is meant to set the stage for a crewed round-the-moon mission in 2024 and the first crewed landing on the moon since the Apollo era in 2025 or 2026.
Unfortunately for NASA, the practice runs came across some issues that need to be addressed in the days and weeks ahead.