Category: space

But RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) calls the hypothesis “very much disputed.”
YouTubing-astrophysicist Dr Becky considered this report a couple of months ago (2023-Nov-09), under the title “HUGE blow for alternate theory of gravity MOND”. At the very least, astrophysicists and cosmologists are deeply undecided whether this data supports or discourages MOND. (Shortened comment because verification problem.)

Last week, I updated my annual count of MOND and other “alternative gravity” publications. While research on MOND (and others) continues, and any “suppression” the tin-foil-hat brigade want to scream about is ineffective, it remains an unpopular (not-equal-to “suppressed”) field. Generally, astronomical publication counts are increasing, and MOND sticks with that trend. If anything is becoming more popular, it’s the “MOG” type of “MOdified Gravity”.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv describes a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) whose light arrived late last year as one of the strongest ever observed. GRB 221009A was detected on October 9 last year (yes, that number is a date), so 5 and a bit months from event to papers published is remarkably quick, and I anticipate that there will be a lot more papers on it in the future. Stand-out points are :
– it lasted for more than ten hours after detection (a space x-ray telescope had time to orbit out of the Earth’s shadow and observe it)

– it could (briefly) be observed by amateur astronomers.
– it is also one of the closest gamma-ray bursts seen and is among the most energetic and luminous bursts.

It’s redshift is given as z= 0.151, which Wikipedia translates as occurring 1.9 billion years ago, at a distance of 2.4 billion light-years from Earth.
Observations have been made of the burst in radio telescopes (many sites, continuing), optical (1 site ; analysis of HST imaging is still in work), ultraviolet (1 space telescope), x-ray (2 space telescopes) and gamma ray (1 sapce telescope) — over a range of 1,000,000,000,000,000-fold (10^15) in wavelength. It’s brightness is such that radio observatories are expected to continue to detect it for “years to come”.
The model of the source is of several (3~10) Earth-masses of material ejected from (whatever, probably a compact body (neutron star or black dwarf) merger) and impacting the interstellar medium at relativistic speeds (Lorentz factor 9, velocity >99.2% of c). The absolute brightness of the burst is high (about 10^43 J) and it is made to seem brighter by being close, and also by the energy being emitted in a narrow jet (“beamed”), which we happen to be near the axis of.
General news sites are starting to notice the reports, including the hilarious acronym of “BOAT — Brightest Of All Time”. Obviously, with observations having only occurred for about 50 years. we’re likely to see something else as bright within the next 50 years.
The brightness of the x-rays from this GRB is such that the x-rays scattered from dust in our galaxy creates halos around the source — which are bright enough to see, and to tell us things about the dust in our galaxy (which is generally very hard to see). Those images are more photogenic than the normal imagery for GRBs — which is nothing — so you’ll see them a lot.

The lights lasted about 40 seconds, remembered one witness who filmed the lights while enjoying a local brewery. The brewery then asked on Instagram if anyone could solve the mystery, the report continues:

Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he’s 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris.

McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added….

He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour. The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added.

“These objects are way more massiveâ than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

Using the first dataset released from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the international team of scientists discovered objects as mature as the Milky Way when the universe was only 3% of its current age, about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang…. In a paper published February 22 in Nature, the researchers show evidence that the six galaxies are far more massive than anyone expected and call into question what scientists previously understood about galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe. “The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” said Leja. “We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far.”

Leja explained that the galaxies the team discovered are so massive that they are in tension with 99% of models for cosmology. Accounting for such a high amount of mass would require either altering the models for cosmology or revising the scientific understanding of galaxy formation in the early universe — that galaxies started as small clouds of stars and dust that gradually grew larger over time. Either scenario requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of how the universe came to be, he added. “We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”
“My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives,” Leja says in the statement. “But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying.”

“While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change.”

Phys.org got a more detailed explantion from one of the paper’s co-authors:
It took our home galaxy the entire life of the universe for all its stars to assemble. For this young galaxy to achieve the same growth in just 700 million years, it would have had to grow around 20 times faster than the Milky Way, said Labbe, a researcher at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology. For there to be such massive galaxies so soon after the Big Bang goes against the current cosmological model which represents science’s best understanding of how the universe works. According to theory, galaxies grow slowly from very small beginnings at early times,” Labbe said, adding that such galaxies were expected to be between 10 to 100 times smaller. But the size of these galaxies “really go off a cliff,” he said….

The newly discovered galaxies could indicate that things sped up far faster in the early universe than previously thought, allowing stars to form “much more efficiently,” said David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission not involved in the research. is could be linked to recent signs that the universe itself is expanding faster than we once believed, he added.

This subject sparks fierce debate among cosmologists, making this latest discovery “all the more exciting, because it is one more indication that the model is cracking,” Elbaz said.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. “Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long,” NASA says. “Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist.”

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and “short broad” dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see “intricate tail structure” in the comet’s plasma tail, he said, and “conditions are improving.”

About 47 million light-years from where you’re sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 is spitting out streams of enigmatic particles. These “neutrinos” are also known as the elusive “ghost particles” that haunt our universe but leave little trace of their existence…. Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. When any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube stands ready.

In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 “high-energy neutrino emissions” coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. “Neutrino astronomy,” scientists call it.

It’d be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.

Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet’s atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube’s first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056. With this newfound neutrino source, we’re entering a new era of the particle’s story. In fact, according to the research team, it’s likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can’t tell….

Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn’t even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe’s backstage. They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we’re unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place…. Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.

The team says their data can provide information on two great unsolved mysteries in astronomy: why black holes emit sporadic blasts of light, and neutrinos’ suspected role in the origin of cosmic rays.

But it’s not the first rumor we’ve heard about phone vendors and satellites. “Cringley Predicts Apple is About to Create a Satellite-Based IoT Business ,” read the headline in June. Long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely predicted that Apple would first offer some limited satellite-based functionality,

But he’d also called those services “proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. “After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole…. Ubiquity (being able to track anything in near real time anywhere on the planet) signals the maturity of IoT, turning it quickly into a $1 TRILLION business — in this case Apple’s $1 TRILLION business.” And beyond that, “in the longer run Cupertino plans to dis-intermediate the mobile carriers — becoming themselves a satellite-based global phone and data company [and] they will also compete with satellite Internet providers like Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon’s Kuiper.”

So how did Cringely react last week when Apple announced “Emergency SOS” messaging for the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus — via communication satellites — when their users are out of range of a cell signals? He began by wondering if Apple was intentionally downplaying the satellite features:

They limited their usage case to emergency SOS texts in the USA and Canada, sorta said it would be just for iPhone 14s, and be free for only the first two years. They showed a satellite app and very deliberately tried to make it look difficult to use. They gave no technical details and there was no talk of industry partners.

Yet there were hints of what’s to come. We (you and I, based on my previous column) already knew, for example, that ANY iPhone can be made to work with Globalstar. We also knew the deal was with Globalstar, which Apple never mentioned but Globalstar confirmed, more or less, later in the day in an SEC filing. But Apple DID mention Find My and Air Tags, notably saying they’d work through the satellites even without having to first beseech the sky with an app. So the app is less than it seems and Apple’s satellite network will quickly find its use for the Internet of Things [Cringely predicts]….

Apple very specifically said nothing about the global reach of Find My and Air Tags. There is no reason why those services can’t have immediate global satellite support, given that the notification system is entirely within Apple’s ecosystem and is not dependent on 911-type public safety agreements.

Maybe it will take a couple years to cover the world with SOS, but not for Find My, which means not for IoT — a business headed fast toward $1 trillion and will therefore [hypothetically] have a near-immediate impact on Apple’s bottom line.

Speculating further, Cringely predicts that Globalstar — which has ended up with vast tracts of licensed spectrum — will eventually be purchased by a larger company. (“If not Apple, maybe Elon Musk.”)

And this leads Cringely to yet another prediction. “If Elon can’t get Globalstar, he and his partners will push for the regulatory expansion into space of terrestrial 5G licenses, which will probably be successful.”

This will happen, frankly, whether SpaceX and T-Mobile are successful or not, because AST&Science and its investors AT&T, Verizon and Zodafone need 5G in space, too, to compete with Apple. So there WILL eventually be satellite competition for Apple and I think the International Telecommunication Union will eventually succumb to industry pressure.
And by the end Cringely is also speculating about just how Apple will come up with innovative new satellite designs on a faster schedule…

Black holes were an unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which attributes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper. Einstein’s insight led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole, an entity with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it. Einstein disapproved of this idea, but the universe is now known to be speckled with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars that collapsed inward on themselves and just kept going. But there seems to be a black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, ours included, that can be millions or billions of times as massive than our sun. Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.

Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage of the Electron after this launch. The company said in November that, after three launches where it recovered Electron boosters after splashing down in the ocean, it was ready to attempt a midair recovery of a booster by catching it with a helicopter, the final step before reusing those boosters. The company has not announced when that recovery will take place, but hinted it would take place soon….

Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22…added that the company has a “full manifest” of Electron launches this year, including the first from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, with a goal of launching on average once per month. “We’re keeping pace with the market. We’re trying not to get too far ahead.”

Meanwhile, in mid-March Space.com reported that the launch-service provider Astra “bounced back from last month’s launch failure with a groundbreaking success, deploying satellites in Earth orbit for the first time ever” with its low-cost two-stage launch vehicle, LV0009. (Watch video of the launch here.)
It was a huge moment for Astra, which suffered a failure last month during its first-ever launch with operational payloads onboard…. Astra aims to break into the small-satellite launch market in a big way with its line of cost-effective, easily transported and ever-evolving rockets.

The company had conducted five orbital flights before today, four of them test missions from Kodiak. Astra reached orbit successfully on the most recent of those four test flights, a November 2021 mission that carried a non-deployable dummy payload for the U.S. Department of Defense. But the company stumbled on its next mission, its first with operational payloads onboard…

Astra investigators soon got to the bottom of both problems, tracing the fairing issue to an erroneous wiring diagram and the tumble to a software snafu. The company instituted fixes, clearing LV0009’s path to the pad… LV0009 rose into the Alaska sky smoothly and ticked off its early milestones as planned. Stage separation and fairing deploy went well, and the rocket’s second stage cruised to the desired orbit with no apparent issues. LV0009 deployed its payloads successfully about nine minutes after liftoff….

One of the known payloads is OreSat0, a tiny cubesat built by students at Portland State University in Oregon that is designed to serve as a testbed for future cubesats that will study Earth’s climate and provide STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach opportunities.

Other times, Werner opts for dryly funny narration of how bleak certain space colonization efforts may turn out. “The reality of life on Mars would be sobering,” he says. “Astronauts would hunker down in radiation-proof bunkers, enjoying drinks of recycled urine….”

For most of the film, Rudolph focuses on two options for where humans might travel, land, and establish space colonies: Mars or an exoplanet in the Alpha Centauri system. Along the way, Last Exit: Space follows a pattern. First, it lists a problem that might make a certain space travel proposition impossible. Then it briefly explains the most promising solution to that problem as developed by modern science and engineering. Finally, it brings the interstellar dream crashing back down to Earth with a grim recounting of why the solution won’t work…. “We know the next planet outside of our solar system is at least 5,000 years away,” Werner tells Ars. “It’s very hard to do that, and [whatever is there is] probably uninhabitable. And we know that on Mars, there’s permanent radiation that will force us underground in little bunkers….”

As Last Exit: Space explores the logistics of a possible 5,000-year journey to Alpha Centauri, the film asks wild questions that touch matters of the human spirit, each with a diverse pool of optimistic and pessimistic answers. Is hibernation feasible? Could a non-hibernating skeleton crew function in a sane way? And how would the human act of copulation play out — both mechanically, in terms of being a reduced-gravity exercise, and genetically, in terms of possible in-breeding if a ship can’t hold at least 40,000 colonists to keep the gene pool diverse…? [Werner Herzog adds] “But as you hear it from Lucian Walkowicz, an astronomer in the film, it’s very clear that we take her position: We shouldn’t behave like locusts who are grazing everything empty here, then move on to the next planet. There’s something not right to shift, to move our population to other planets, and it’s a part of all these ethical questions….

[Space colonization] will fail. It is inevitable. You cannot travel to the next [Alpha Centauri exoplanet] that is 200,000 years away. Period. Good luck….”

The filmmakers make it clear that they admire and appreciate efforts to understand space and our universal neighbors. But in describing “space colonization” as “a dirty word,” Rudolph paraphrases Walkowicz’s film-ending pitch: “There is already a cross-generational spaceship operating right now — and we’re already on it. Earth is a luxuriously furnished, wonderfully self-rejuvenating place, so we’d better treat it well….”

Werner admits that he does have some interest in space travel. “I would love to go out on Mars on a mission… if I had a camera with me,” he says.

Rudolph immediately interrupts: “Yes, but I want to stop my dad. Don’t encourage him on this, please. I want him to stay on Earth.”