The spacecraft, which successfully launched in October 2024, is a follow-up mission to NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which deliberately impacted Dimorphos in 2022. Hera’s task is to assess the aftermath of the collision and evaluate the feasibility of asteroid deflection as a method for protecting Earth from potential impacts.

A Farewell Look at Earth

The newly released images were taken just days after Hera’s instruments were activated for the first time in space. Using its Asteroid Framing Camera (AFC), Hera captured a stunning view of Earth and the moon from a distance of 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles). In the images, Earth appears in the bottom left corner, illuminated by bright swirling clouds over the Pacific Ocean, while the moon can be seen near the center. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), ESA shared the image with the caption, "Farewell, Earth!", marking Hera’s departure into deep space.

🌎 Farewell, Earth! 👋

Last week, after we successfully launched our Hera mission, its instruments were switched on for the first time and the asteroid deck was pointed back towards our planet.

This allowed Hera to capture the first images of Earth and the Moon from a distance… pic.twitter.com/usrZtxapRU

— European Space Agency (@esa) October 14, 2024

In addition to the AFC image, another photograph was taken by the spacecraft’s Thermal Infrared Imager (TIRI), which captured Earth from approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) away. In this image, Earth’s north pole is oriented upward, with the Atlantic Ocean and eastern U.S. coast visible, while the moon appears as a bright point in the top right. These early tests of Hera's instruments provide valuable data that will be used later when the spacecraft studies the asteroid system in greater detail.

The Mission to Assess DART’s Success

Hera’s journey will culminate in a detailed study of Dimorphos, the smaller moon of the Didymos asteroid, which was impacted by NASA’s DART mission in 2022. DART’s success in changing Dimorphos' orbit demonstrated that asteroid deflection could be a viable planetary defense strategy. However, many questions remain about the long-term effects of the impact and the exact changes to Dimorphos' structure.

“Hera is going to perform a full characterization of Dimorphos that will allow us to fully understand the effectiveness of the DART’s impact technique,” said Paolo Martino, Deputy Project Manager for the mission. By studying the size and depth of the crater created by the DART collision, Hera will provide crucial data on how different types of asteroids respond to kinetic impacts. This information could help refine future asteroid deflection missions, ensuring that we have a reliable method to protect Earth from potentially hazardous space rocks.

Preparing for Asteroid Exploration

Hera’s mission is not only focused on surface impacts but also on understanding the internal structure of Dimorphos and Didymos. The spacecraft carries a suite of instruments, including the HyperScout H sensor, which can detect mineral compositions by analyzing light wavelengths invisible to the human eye. This technology will help scientists determine the composition of the asteroids, shedding light on their physical properties, such as density and porosity.

Accompanying Hera on this mission are two CubeSats, named Milani and Juventas, which will assist in mapping the surface and interior of Dimorphos. These small satellites will work in tandem with Hera to study the asteroid’s gravitational field and assess how the impact affected its structure.

With Hera set to arrive at its target in 2026, scientists are eager to see the data it will collect. The mission promises to be a major step forward in understanding asteroid dynamics and will provide invaluable insights for planetary defense efforts.

The agency has signed a €63 million contract with OHB Italia to begin preparatory work on the Ramses mission—a bold endeavor to study Apophis as it nears Earth. The mission aims to be ready for launch in early 2028, ensuring the spacecraft can reach Apophis approximately two months before its April 2029 flyby. ESA hopes this planetary defense mission will provide critical insights into asteroid composition and dynamics during this rare encounter.

Apophis: An Asteroid too Close for Comfort

The asteroid Apophis, measuring around 375 meters in diameter, has long been on the radar of scientists due to its exceptionally close approach to Earth. On April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass within geostationary orbit—closer than many satellites. This flyby presents a unique opportunity for scientists to study the asteroid up close, gathering data that could be vital for planetary defense and our understanding of near-Earth objects.

The Ramses mission—named for its role in rapid response to this close encounter—will be designed to study Apophis' composition, structure, and behavior as it flies by Earth. The spacecraft will focus on understanding how tidal forces from Earth's gravity affect the asteroid’s cohesion, giving researchers unprecedented data on how asteroids behave under such extreme gravitational influences.

“We could not wait for the Ministerial,” said Paolo Martino, ESA’s Ramses project manager, referring to the urgency of the mission’s timeline. “To be there on time is very challenging. We asked our member states to make use of available resources to start now because if we miss by one week, the asteroid is gone.”

Preparing for a Tight Deadline

The key challenge for the Ramses mission is time. The mission must be launched in early 2028 to ensure it reaches Apophis ahead of the asteroid’s Earth flyby. Missing this window would mean losing the opportunity to study the asteroid up close. “There will be a different way to deal with mission risks,” explained Roberto Aceti, managing director at OHB Italia, emphasizing the need for fast, efficient project management. “The risk here is delays. If we miss by one week, the asteroid is gone.”

The current contract allows OHB Italia, the prime contractor for both the Hera and Ramses missions, to begin procuring long-lead items and finalizing the spacecraft’s design. The design will be an adapted version of ESA’s Hera mission, which recently launched to study the aftermath of NASA’s DART asteroid impact test. The streamlined Ramses spacecraft will use a simplified architecture to minimize costs and meet the tight launch schedule.

Though the mission has received initial funding, the full €363 million required for the project is still pending. ESA member states will make a final decision on full funding at the 2025 Ministerial Council. Until then, work on Ramses will focus on mission-critical activities, ensuring that if the mission is approved, it can hit the ground running.

International Collaboration and Planetary Defense

The Ramses mission is not just a scientific endeavor—it is also a major step forward for planetary defense. Apophis fits into ESA’s planetary defense framework, as the agency aims to provide a three-week warning for all objects larger than 30 meters and deflect asteroids up to 500 meters in diameter. “This is not only a fascinating mission for us; it’s also a major milestone of our planetary defense activities,” said Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Safety Program.

ESA is also working closely with other international space agencies to ensure the Ramses mission is coordinated with global efforts to study Apophis. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, currently en route back to Earth after collecting samples from asteroid Bennu, will embark on an extended mission—OSIRIS-APEX—to visit Apophis shortly after its Earth flyby. The Ramses mission and OSIRIS-APEX are part of a growing trend of collaboration between space agencies, building on the successful partnership seen in NASA’s DART and ESA’s Hera missions.

“We sincerely welcome participation from international space agencies, research institutions, and educational institutions,” said Li Guoping, China’s CNSA chief engineer, underscoring the importance of global cooperation in studying Apophis and planetary defense.

The FAA had temporarily grounded Falcon 9 launches to review the issue with the rocket's upper stage, which had reentered Earth’s atmosphere outside of its designated disposal zone. With the investigation now complete and corrective measures in place, SpaceX is set to resume its Falcon 9 launch schedule.

Investigation into Falcon 9 Upper Stage Anomaly

The suspension of Falcon 9 launches began after an issue arose during the Crew-9 mission in late September. While the mission itself was a success, the upper stage of the Falcon 9 failed to complete a normal deorbit, causing it to reenter the atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean outside its intended area. This anomaly prompted the FAA to halt Falcon 9 operations until a full investigation could be conducted to ensure public safety.

In a statement, the FAA said it reviewed and accepted SpaceX’s findings from its investigation and the corrective actions put in place to prevent a recurrence. "The FAA notified SpaceX on Oct. 11 that the Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to regular flight operations," the agency said. SpaceX has not released full details of the investigation’s findings, but the company confirmed that the anomaly was resolved to the FAA’s satisfaction.

The big FAA license news today is… they have cleared Falcon 9 to return to flight.

“The FAA notified SpaceX on Oct. 11 that the Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to regular flight operations. The FAA reviewed and accepted the SpaceX-led investigation findings and…

— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 11, 2024

This incident marked the third Falcon 9 mishap in less than three months, heightening concerns about the rocket’s reliability. Earlier issues included a July 11 upper-stage propellant leak, which resulted in the loss of 20 Starlink satellites, and an August 28 booster landing failure after a Starlink launch. Despite these incidents, SpaceX has implemented corrective measures after each, allowing it to return to regular operations.

Falcon 9's Return to Regular Launch Operations

Despite the grounding, the FAA made an exception to allow SpaceX to launch ESA’s Hera asteroid mission on October 7, as the upper stage for that mission did not require reentry. The Hera mission, designed to study the aftermath of NASA’s DART asteroid deflection experiment, was successfully launched without issue.

With the FAA now lifting the overall suspension, SpaceX is preparing to resume its full slate of Falcon 9 missions. While SpaceX has not yet announced the exact timing of its next Falcon 9 flight, preparations are underway for multiple high-profile launches, including NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, scheduled for launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket later in October.

In addition to resuming Falcon 9 operations, SpaceX is preparing for the fifth test flight of its Starship megarocket, a vehicle designed for deep-space missions to the Moon and Mars. The next Starship flight is targeted for October 13, pending final FAA approval. SpaceX stated that it is confident in receiving regulatory approval in time for the launch and has continued launch preparations, including issuing airspace and maritime safety notices.

SpaceX's Response and Future Plans

SpaceX has been swift in addressing each anomaly, emphasizing its commitment to maintaining a high launch cadence while ensuring safety. The Falcon 9 rocket, known for its reusability, is SpaceX's workhorse vehicle, responsible for launching Starlink satellites, crewed NASA missions, and commercial payloads. Given its heavy reliance on Falcon 9 for current and upcoming missions, maintaining the rocket’s safety and reliability is crucial to SpaceX’s overall success.

Meanwhile, attention is shifting to SpaceX’s Starship system, which has the potential to revolutionize human space exploration. Starship is being developed for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, and is central to SpaceX’s vision of making life multi-planetary. The upcoming test flight of Starship, if approved by the FAA, will be another significant step toward achieving that goal.

The mission will revisit the Didymos asteroid system to study the aftermath of NASA's DART mission, which altered the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022. Hera will provide detailed insights into asteroid deflection, a crucial element in planetary defense strategies.

Mission Overview: A Critical Step in Planetary Defense

The Hera mission aims to conduct an extensive investigation of Dimorphos, focusing on the effects of NASA’s DART impact. The mission will measure the size and depth of the crater created by DART and analyze the asteroid's internal structure and surface composition. This data will help scientists refine asteroid deflection techniques for future planetary defense missions.

Michael Kueppers, Hera's project scientist, emphasized how critical the data from Hera will be for future scenarios: "Once we have Hera and we investigate Dimorphos in detail, we know what its properties are, and in case anything happens, we can extrapolate the results from DART and Hera." Understanding the full impact of DART will enable scientists to better assess how future deflection efforts could be applied to potentially hazardous asteroids.

How to Watch the Launch

The Hera mission is launching aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, with liftoff scheduled for 10:52 a.m. EDT (1452 GMT) today. The launch will be streamed live, and space enthusiasts can follow the event on ESA’s official YouTube channel. The livestream will cover the buildup to liftoff, allowing viewers to watch the mission unfold in real time.

However, weather could pose a challenge for the launch. Hurricane Milton is approaching Florida, and the 45th Weather Squadron has forecast only a 15 percent chance of favorable conditions during the scheduled launch window. Despite the weather uncertainty, teams remain hopeful for a successful launch. If conditions do not improve, the launch window remains open through October 27.

The Falcon 9 booster, designated B1061, will make its 23rd and final flight for this mission. This particular booster has been used for notable missions such as Crew-1 and Crew-2, but due to the interplanetary nature of Hera, it will be expended after this launch.

Hera’s Extended Mission and Cubesat Companions

Once launched, Hera will take a two-year journey to reach Dimorphos. Unlike DART, which impacted the asteroid, Hera will perform a slow, methodical survey, providing detailed data on both the crater left by DART and the overall structure of the asteroid. The mission will also deploy two small cubesats, Milani and Juventas, to assist in gathering scientific data.

Milani will focus on analyzing the asteroid’s surface, while Juventas will measure its internal structure and gravity. Margherita Cardi, Milani’s program manager, explained that while landing on the asteroid is not required for mission success, they aim to attempt it as part of a technological demonstration. Juventas will use a radar system to probe the subsurface of Dimorphos, providing the first direct look inside an asteroid of this kind.

This mission represents a significant leap in planetary defense research. Jan Persson, Juventas’ project lead, explained that their gravimeter will measure the asteroid’s gravity, which is "the size of the pyramid in Egypt," offering unprecedented insight into its properties. Together, Hera and its cubesats will provide a detailed picture of how asteroid deflection can be refined for future missions.

Impact on Future Planetary Defense Missions

Hera’s arrival at Dimorphos in 2026 will allow for a gradual, detailed study of the asteroid. Unlike DART’s high-speed impact, Hera will slowly approach, providing a longer observation window. This slower pace is comparable to ESA’s Rosetta mission, where the spacecraft’s approach to Comet 67P allowed for a sustained and thorough analysis.

Cheryl Reed, a key figure in NASA’s DART mission, emphasized the importance of Hera and DART working in tandem: "These two missions collectively... put planetary defense on the map." Reed added that DART’s impact resonated with the public, raising awareness of asteroid threats, and the follow-up with Hera will deepen our understanding of how such impacts can be managed.

The Hera mission will pave the way for more effective asteroid deflection strategies, marking a significant advancement in our ability to protect Earth from future asteroid threats.

Hera: A Mission Critical to Planetary Defense

The Hera mission is a crucial part of ongoing efforts to develop planetary defense strategies capable of protecting Earth from potential asteroid impacts. The mission follows NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which collided with Dimorphos, the smaller moon of the asteroid Didymos, in 2022. DART was the first experiment in changing the trajectory of a celestial body using a kinetic impactor, a method that could one day be used to divert a potentially hazardous asteroid away from Earth.

Hera’s role is to provide detailed follow-up analysis of this unprecedented event. The spacecraft will arrive at the Didymos-Dimorphos system in late 2026, and over the course of a six-month mission, it will measure the size and shape of the crater created by DART’s impact. Hera’s instruments will also collect data on the amount of material ejected from the surface of Dimorphos and investigate the overall structural changes in the asteroid. This information will be critical in evaluating the effectiveness of kinetic impact as a planetary defense technique.

As Ian Carnelli, Hera’s project manager, emphasized, the primary goal is to understand “how efficient the impact was.” Hera will calculate how much momentum DART transferred to Dimorphos by measuring the asteroid’s mass and assessing how much its orbit changed. This will provide a clearer picture of the force required to alter the course of an asteroid in the event of an actual threat to Earth. According to Michael Kueppers, Hera’s project scientist, “We will learn a whole lot about how the impact process works,” and this knowledge will be invaluable if such techniques are ever needed in a real-world planetary defense scenario.

Preparing for Launch amid Challenges

Although Hera’s preparations continue to move forward, the mission has faced a significant complication due to the grounding of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the vehicle scheduled to launch the spacecraft. The issue arose after an “off-nominal deorbit burn” during a mission in late September 2024, which caused the Falcon 9’s upper stage to reenter Earth’s atmosphere outside its designated zone in the South Pacific. Following this anomaly, SpaceX temporarily halted all Falcon 9 launches to investigate the cause, while the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required the company to submit a full report before allowing the rocket to resume flight operations.

Despite this delay, ESA officials remain confident that Hera’s launch schedule can still be met. Carnelli has been in close contact with SpaceX and reported that the investigation into the Falcon 9 issue is progressing well. “We are very happy with the progress they are showing to us, which proves their commitment to launch us,” Carnelli said. The Hera spacecraft was encapsulated in its payload fairing on October 3, as planned, and the mission remains on track for an October 7 launch, pending final approval from the FAA.

ESA is also prepared to make Hera the first mission to fly aboard Falcon 9 after the rocket’s grounding is lifted. Carnelli noted that ESA would be willing to proceed with Hera as Falcon 9’s return-to-flight mission, even though it is common for SpaceX to resume launches with less complex missions, such as those carrying Starlink satellites. The launch window for Hera extends until October 27, allowing some flexibility if additional delays are necessary. However, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch on October 10 aboard a Falcon Heavy, will also need to be factored into the timing, as the agencies have agreed to a 48-hour standdown between the two missions.

CubeSats and Scientific Payloads

In addition to the main spacecraft, the Hera mission will deploy two small CubeSats, named Juventas and Milani, which will play important roles in enhancing the scientific return of the mission. CubeSats are miniature satellites, typically measuring just a few centimeters in each dimension, and they are increasingly used in deep space exploration due to their low cost and versatility. Juventas and Milani represent ESA’s first deep-space CubeSat missions, and both will conduct close-up studies of the Didymos-Dimorphos system.

Juventas is tasked with geophysical investigations of Dimorphos, focusing on understanding the moon’s internal structure and composition. This data will be crucial for interpreting how the DART impact affected the asteroid and how such small bodies in space respond to kinetic energy. Milani, on the other hand, will focus on dust detection and visual inspection, providing high-resolution images of the surface of Didymos and Dimorphos. Milani will also monitor the debris cloud left behind by DART’s impact, assessing the spread and density of the particles ejected from the asteroid.

One of the significant challenges for the Hera mission was the development of European-built components for the CubeSats. ESA’s procurement policies require the use of European-made technology, which meant that new systems had to be developed for deep-space communications and propulsion. As Carnelli explained, “We had to develop European radio, deep space radios. We had to develop specific propulsion systems in Europe.” These new technologies will ensure that Juventas and Milani are capable of carrying out their complex tasks while maintaining communication with Earth over vast distances.

A Critical Step in Planetary Defense

With a total mission cost of 363 million euros (approximately $401 million), Hera represents a significant investment in the future of planetary defense and the broader scientific community. The data it collects will not only advance our understanding of asteroid dynamics but also provide valuable insights into how we might protect Earth from future asteroid threats. The success of the Hera mission could lead to the development of more sophisticated planetary defense systems in the coming decades.

Hera’s findings will complement those from NASA’s DART mission, offering a more complete picture of the Didymos-Dimorphos system and how kinetic impactors can be used to deflect potentially hazardous asteroids. By closely analyzing the crater left by DART and measuring the changes in Dimorphos’ orbit, Hera will help scientists refine models of asteroid behavior and determine the best methods for future asteroid deflection missions.

As ESA continues its collaboration with NASA and other international partners, Hera is set to play a key role in shaping humanity’s response to one of the most fundamental threats from space. Carnelli reflected on the project’s achievements, saying, “It really was an amazing project and I can only be extremely proud of what we have achieved together.” With the Hera mission poised for launch, ESA is taking a major step forward in planetary defense, ensuring that the tools are in place to protect our planet from asteroid impacts in the future.

The Science Behind Deflecting Asteroids with Nuclear Explosions

Historically, movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact depicted the use of nuclear bombs to obliterate incoming asteroids. However, scientists now believe this approach could be dangerous, as blowing up an asteroid might break it into several lethal fragments, creating a shotgun blast effect rather than eliminating the threat. Instead of directly hitting or destroying the asteroid, recent studies suggest that detonating a nuclear warhead a mile or more away from the asteroid could produce enough X-rays to vaporize part of the asteroid’s surface. This controlled vaporization would create thrust, nudging the space rock onto a new trajectory and away from Earth.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have been leading this cutting-edge research. Using the lab’s Z Pulsed Power Facility, one of the most powerful pulse-generating machines on Earth, they were able to simulate the effects of a nuclear explosion on a small-scale asteroid-like object. According to Nathan Moore, a physicist involved in the research, “I started working through the logic of how I could deflect a miniature asteroid in a laboratory just like in outer space." These experiments allowed the scientists to observe how the X-ray pulse impacted the object, stripping away micrometers of material and simulating the deflection that might occur in space.

Precision is Key: Avoiding Fragmentation

One of the primary concerns with using nuclear explosions for asteroid deflection is the risk of creating dangerous fragments. A large asteroid shattered into pieces could still cause widespread destruction, possibly on a larger scale than a single impact. Moore explained this risk by saying, "The trick is to use just enough force to redirect the flying rock without splitting it into several equally deadly subsections advancing toward Earth."

To address this, the team’s research focuses on precise detonation techniques that would only vaporize a small portion of the asteroid’s surface, altering its trajectory without causing fragmentation. This is a significant advancement over previous asteroid deflection concepts, which lacked the nuance necessary to avoid creating multiple hazardous objects.

While smaller asteroids can be deflected with kinetic impacts, as demonstrated by NASA's DART mission, larger, more solid asteroids present a different challenge. X-rays generated by nuclear explosions offer a viable alternative, especially for larger asteroids, as the radiation can vaporize material without requiring direct contact with the asteroid itself.

Real-World Implications and NASA’s Role

The potential threat from asteroids is real, even if it seems remote. A National Academy of Sciences report from last year declared planetary defense a priority, emphasizing the importance of being prepared for asteroid threats. According to the NASA sky survey, about 25,000 objects near Earth are large enough to cause significant destruction, but only about a third of these have been detected and tracked. Many near-Earth asteroids remain hidden in the glare of the sun, leaving Earth vulnerable to unexpected impacts.

The danger is not merely theoretical. In 2013, a relatively small asteroid, about 20 meters across, exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, causing significant damage and injuries. Larger asteroids, like the one that caused the Chicxulub impact, which is linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs, could cause global devastation.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully demonstrated that a kinetic impact could slightly alter the course of a small asteroid, but the mission raised questions about the scalability of this method for larger or more solid asteroids. The DART spacecraft hit Dimorphos, a small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos, causing a measurable change in its orbit. However, as promising as the results are, more research is needed before this technique can be relied upon for all asteroid types.

Scaling Up: How Nuclear Explosions Could Be Our Last Line of Defense

The experiments conducted at Sandia National Laboratories are part of ongoing efforts to understand how nuclear explosions can be adapted for planetary defense. The research team used a technique called X-ray scissors, which effectively removes the influence of gravity and friction for a few microseconds, allowing the synthetic asteroid to float freely in the laboratory environment, as it would in space. Moore's team fired bursts of X-rays at the synthetic asteroid to simulate the effect of a nuclear explosion in space. The results were promising, with the X-ray pulse vaporizing parts of the asteroid's surface and creating a measurable deflection.

While the experiments were conducted on a very small scale, the researchers believe the concept could be scaled up to move larger asteroids. In their paper, the team notes, “More detailed models, such as the radiation-hydrodynamic model illustrated here and those in other studies can be tested against experimental data acquired with this technique and used to refine the predictions for different asteroid intercept missions.”

This research provides a critical framework for future asteroid deflection missions. By simulating nuclear explosions in the lab, scientists can refine their models and predictions, ensuring that any future deployment of such technology would be both safe and effective. The goal is to develop a versatile system that can deal with different asteroid compositions, shapes, and sizes.

The Future of Planetary Defense

While no imminent asteroid threat has been identified, planetary defense experts warn that it is only a matter of time before Earth encounters a dangerous near-Earth object. The NASA sky survey continues to track potentially hazardous asteroids, and the Sandia experiments are an essential step in ensuring we are ready when the time comes. "We don’t want to wait for a large asteroid to show up and then scramble for the right method to deflect it,” Moore emphasized.

For now, the focus remains on refining the technology and gathering more data. Using nuclear explosions as a tool for asteroid deflection may seem extreme, but it could be the only option if a large asteroid is discovered on a collision course with Earth.

In the meantime, ongoing NASA missions and lab-based experiments are helping to develop a clearer picture of how we might avert such a catastrophe. Although the research is still in its early stages, the possibility of using X-ray blasts to deflect asteroids could play a key role in future planetary defense strategies.

Navigating Mercury’s Gravity: A Critical Maneuver

BepiColombo’s fourth flyby was a key moment in its complex journey toward Mercury’s orbit. The spacecraft is currently using a series of gravity assist flybys to gradually adjust its speed and path, relying on Mercury’s gravitational pull to slow down relative to the Sun. According to Frank Budnik, Flight Dynamics Manager for the BepiColombo mission, "The main aim of the flyby was to reduce BepiColombo’s speed relative to the Sun, so that the spacecraft has an orbital period around the Sun of 88 days, very close to the orbital period of Mercury." These flybys are essential for aligning BepiColombo’s orbit with that of Mercury, a feat that requires precise navigation and a deep understanding of orbital mechanics.

The spacecraft came incredibly close to the planet—just 165 kilometers above its surface—passing over Mercury’s nightside to minimize the risk posed by extreme heat from the Sun. This close approach not only achieved the necessary orbital changes but also provided the mission team with an opportunity to capture stunning images of Mercury's surface. The mission's three monitoring cameras snapped photos as the planet’s cratered surface gradually emerged into sunlight, offering detailed views of craters and geological features that had never been seen at such close range before.

Stunning New Images: Unveiling Mercury’s Surface

Although BepiColombo’s monitoring cameras were not designed for scientific imaging, they delivered some of the most detailed images yet of Mercury’s southern hemisphere. The spacecraft’s cameras captured breathtaking views of the planet’s cratered terrain, which was illuminated as BepiColombo passed from the dark side into daylight. These images highlighted some of Mercury’s most intriguing geological features, including the Vivaldi crater, a 210-kilometer-wide impact crater named after the famed Italian composer. Seen in the low-angle light near Mercury's sunrise, the crater’s central peaks and ringed walls were beautifully emphasized by the shadows cast across its floor.

Another standout feature from the flyby was the newly named Stoddart crater, which spans 155 kilometers. Named after Margaret Olrog Stoddart, a renowned New Zealand artist, this crater is of particular interest to planetary scientists due to its well-preserved structure. "Mercury’s peak ring basins are fascinating because many aspects of how they formed are currently still a mystery," explained David Rothery, a planetary scientist and member of the BepiColombo imaging team. The Stoddart crater, like others on Mercury, shows signs of volcanic activity, with lava flows filling much of its floor, adding to the planet’s complex geological history.

Preparing for BepiColombo’s Main Science Phase

The images captured during this flyby are just a glimpse of what BepiColombo will be able to accomplish once it enters Mercury’s orbit in 2026. While the monitoring cameras provide detailed, black-and-white images, BepiColombo’s main science camera will offer much higher-resolution, color images once the spacecraft reaches its final orbital position. In addition to high-resolution imaging, the mission will deploy a comprehensive suite of scientific instruments designed to study Mercury’s magnetic field, surface composition, and geological evolution.

BepiColombo's primary science mission is set to begin in 2027, after its two scientific orbiters—ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter—are deployed. These orbiters will work together to explore Mercury’s interior, surface, and surrounding magnetic environment. "The images and science data collected during the flybys offer a tantalizing prelude to BepiColombo's orbital phase," said Jack Wright, ESA Research Fellow and planetary scientist. "Once in orbit, BepiColombo will help solve Mercury's outstanding mysteries, from its origins to its extreme environment."

Next Steps: Future Flybys and Mission Objectives

BepiColombo’s journey to Mercury is far from over. The spacecraft has two more gravity assist flybys scheduled for December 2024 and January 2025, each one bringing the mission closer to its target orbital insertion. These flybys are crucial for fine-tuning BepiColombo’s trajectory, ensuring that the spacecraft can smoothly transition into its final orbit around Mercury by November 2026.

Mercury has long been one of the least-explored planets in the inner solar system, largely due to its proximity to the Sun and the complexities of reaching it. With only two previous missions—NASA’s Mariner 10 and Messenger—having visited the planet, BepiColombo represents a major opportunity to gain new insights into this enigmatic world. Once the mission reaches its full operational capacity, it is expected to shed light on fundamental questions about Mercury’s formation, magnetic field, and its place in the evolution of the solar system.

As BepiColombo continues its journey, each flyby brings new data and images that offer a deeper understanding of Mercury’s mysteries, while also preparing the spacecraft for the comprehensive scientific studies that will begin once it settles into orbit.

The asteroid, roughly 1 meter (3 feet) in size, was spotted by Jacqueline Fazekas of NASA’s Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona only eight hours before impact. This discovery marks only the ninth time that an asteroid has been detected pre-impact, showcasing significant advancements in asteroid tracking and planetary defense.

The European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed that 2024 RW1 would enter Earth's atmosphere at approximately 12:46 p.m. ET (16:46 UTC) and burn up harmlessly over the western Pacific Ocean near Luzon Island. Residents in the Philippines were advised to look out for a bright fireball, although tropical storm Yagi may obstruct visibility.

Discovery and the Importance of Planetary Defense

The late discovery of 2024 RW1 is a milestone for the ongoing efforts to detect and track near-Earth objects (NEOs). Although the asteroid poses no danger due to its small size, its detection highlights the improving capabilities of systems like the Catalina Sky Survey. "We’re getting better at spotting asteroids before they hit us," an ESA spokesperson said, referencing the asteroid's rapid discovery just hours before impact.

While larger, more dangerous asteroids have been the focus of planetary defense initiatives, events like this one illustrate how even small space rocks can be tracked in real-time. NASA’s Asteroid Watch program and ESA’s planetary defense teams are actively monitoring space for more significant threats. In a tweet, NASA Asteroid Watch noted, "2024 RW1 is no threat but gives us another opportunity to refine our detection techniques for future NEOs."

Impact Predicted Over the Philippines

According to ESA’s projections, 2024 RW1 will enter the atmosphere at around 12:46 p.m. ET (16:46 UTC), resulting in a bright fireball over Luzon Island. Though tropical storm Yagi may limit visibility, those in the region could still witness a stunning celestial event. The asteroid will disintegrate harmlessly, leaving no threat to people or property. ESA shared an impact prediction map via social media, showing the exact area of atmospheric entry.

⚠️☄️Incoming!

A roughly 1 metre asteroid will strike Earth’s atmosphere over the Philippines near Luzon Island at 17:08 UTC today, 4 September.

The object is harmless, but people in the area may see a spectacular fireball!

Discovered this morning by the Catalina Sky Survey,… pic.twitter.com/UjQLbh3fFr

— European Space Agency (@esa) September 4, 2024

This kind of event is known as a bolide, where a small asteroid creates a bright fireball in the sky as it burns up. The International Meteor Organization (IMO) noted that this fireball event could also lead to potential meteorite recoveries in the area. "We expect a dramatic and scientifically valuable event," the IMO stated, encouraging observers to report sightings to its network.

A Rare and Valuable Event

This marks only the ninth known instance of an asteroid being detected before its impact, making the event significant in the field of planetary defense. Astronomers and planetary scientists have long worked on improving early detection systems to better monitor potential asteroid threats. NASA’s Catalina Sky Survey is one of the key observatories scanning the skies for small, fast-moving objects like 2024 RW1.

The detection of this asteroid is part of broader global efforts to ensure that larger asteroids—those capable of causing widespread damage—are detected long before potential impacts. ESA and NASA have invested heavily in missions like the DART mission and upcoming NEO Surveyor, both of which are designed to detect and, if necessary, deflect hazardous objects before they reach Earth.

"Small asteroids like this serve as a test for our global network," ESA shared on Twitter, noting that 2024 RW1 provides an opportunity to refine techniques for spotting and tracking these near-Earth objects.

This launch represents a significant step in China's ongoing efforts to enhance its space-based capabilities, particularly in the realm of remote sensing and potentially classified military applications. The satellites were carried into orbit by a Long March-4B rocket, a reliable workhorse of the Chinese space program, marking the 533rd mission in the storied history of the Long March rocket series.

Details of the Yaogan-43 Launch: A Classified Mission

The launch occurred at precisely 9:22 a.m. Beijing Time (1:22 UTC), with the Yaogan-43 (02) satellites successfully reaching their designated orbits. The Long March-4B, a three-stage carrier rocket powered by liquid fuel, is capable of delivering payloads of up to 2.5 tonnes to a sun-synchronous orbit, which is ideal for Earth observation satellites. This particular rocket is known for its versatility and reliability, having been used in numerous launches over the years to deploy various types of satellites into orbit.

The mission details provided by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and Chinese state media were sparse, with the satellites being described only as "mainly used for carrying out tests on new technologies for low-orbit constellation systems." This vague description, coupled with the overall secrecy surrounding the mission, suggests that these satellites may serve dual purposes, likely including military applications. The Yaogan series has a history of being associated with both civilian and military tasks, including land survey, crop yield estimation, environmental monitoring, and, more critically, intelligence gathering.

The lack of transparency in the mission's objectives and the classified nature of the Yaogan-43 satellites are indicative of the strategic importance China places on space-based surveillance and intelligence operations. As with previous launches in the Yaogan series, it is likely that these satellites are equipped with advanced optical imaging, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and electronic intelligence (ELINT) capabilities. These technologies enable the satellites to perform high-resolution imaging, all-weather and all-day/night surveillance, and the collection of electronic signals from various sources, including radar and communication systems.

Expanding the Yaogan Satellite Constellation: Strategic Implications

The Yaogan-43 (02) satellites join a growing constellation of Yaogan satellites in low Earth orbit. The first group of Yaogan-43 satellites was launched in August 2024, and with this recent addition, China continues to expand its capacity for Earth observation and intelligence gathering. These satellites are positioned in similar orbits to other Yaogan series satellites, including Yaogan-35, 36, 39, and 42, all of which are in roughly circular low Earth orbits at an altitude of about 500 kilometers with inclinations of 35 degrees.

The strategic implications of this expanding satellite network are significant. The Yaogan satellites are believed to provide comprehensive coverage of both land and sea, offering critical data for military and civilian use. The combination of optical, radar, and electronic intelligence capabilities allows China to monitor global activities in real-time, contributing to its national security and defense strategies. The deployment of these satellites enhances China's ability to conduct reconnaissance, track maritime movements, and gather intelligence on a global scale, solidifying its position as a major player in space-based surveillance.

Moreover, the involvement of various organizations in the development and launch of these satellites underscores China's collaborative approach to advancing its space capabilities. The participation of entities like GalaxySpace, a commercial satellite manufacturer, and the Harbin Institute of Technology, a leading technical university, highlights the integration of commercial and academic resources into China's broader space strategy. This collaboration not only accelerates technological development but also supports China's ambitious plans to expand its satellite constellations and enhance its space infrastructure.

The Long March Rocket Series: A Pillar of China's Space Program

The Long March-4B rocket, used in this mission, is a testament to the robustness and versatility of China’s Long March rocket series, which has become a cornerstone of the country's space program. Developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), the Long March-4B is designed to launch various types of payloads into different orbits, making it a crucial component in China's satellite deployment strategy. The rocket's ability to carry multiple satellites in a single launch, combined with its capacity to reach sun-synchronous orbits, makes it ideal for missions like the Yaogan-43.

The Long March-4B's payload fairing, which in this mission had a wider 4.2-meter diameter, is designed to accommodate larger and more complex satellite arrays. This capability is essential for launching multiple satellites that need to be precisely deployed into specific orbits. The success of this launch further solidifies the Long March series' reputation as a reliable and effective vehicle for expanding China's presence in space.

The continued success of the Long March rocket series also reflects China's broader ambitions in space exploration and utilization. As the country aims to conduct around 70 launches in 2024, with additional missions planned by commercial space actors, the Long March rockets will remain central to these efforts. The planned debut of the new Long March 12 rocket later in September 2024 is a clear indication of China's ongoing commitment to advancing its launch capabilities and achieving greater autonomy in space.

Potential Meteor for the Next 100 Years, but No Threat to Earth

While the idea of asteroid debris heading our way might sound alarming, experts assure that these fragments pose no risk to our planet. Most of the debris, averaging around 15 cm in size, is expected to burn up upon entering Earth's atmosphere, resulting in harmless shooting stars rather than any ground impact.

The study suggests that some of these fragments could reach Mars as soon as seven years from now, while smaller particles might begin entering Earth's vicinity within the next decade.

Once the first debris arrives, scientists predict that Earth and Mars could experience periodic meteor showers for at least the next 100 years. This phenomenon would be the result of debris gradually dispersing from the asteroid's surface.

Observations and Future Missions

In July, a cloud of rocks—accounting for about 2% of the material on Dimorphos' surface—was observed drifting through space. The rocks, moving slowly at approximately 1 km/h, are expected to be closely studied by the European Space Agency's Hera mission, scheduled for 2026. This mission aims to further inspect Dimorphos and the scattered debris, offering more insights into the long-term effects of NASA's Dart mission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-OvnVdZP_8

The ongoing observations and future missions will continue to shed light on the behavior of asteroid fragments in space, contributing valuable data for planetary defense strategies.

Why don't you remind yourself of that Chelyabinsk asteroid which came running into our atmosphere way back in 2013? All of a sudden, it was a very terrifying reminder that the blue planet which we referred to as Earth is always under the threat of these rogue space rocks.

In a valiant move to protect mankind, NASA in 2022 initiated the Double Asteroid Redirection Test DART mission. The aim? To crash a spacecraft into a near-Earth asteroid and find out whether it would be possible to change its trajectory. The objective? A tiny asteroid that revolves around a larger one, Didymal in a binary system called Dimorphos. Whereafter the next what happened was very amazing.

[caption id="attachment_7916" align="alignnone" width="650"] A gray, rough rock in space. (Image credit NASAJHUAPL)[/caption]

DART Mission Shakes Up the Asteroid World

DART didn’t merely tip over the target, rather, it smashed into it to completely alter its structure. It made a huge dent and indented the asteroid, doing what no one however thought it would do. Prior to the impact, Dimorphos was more rounded within reason stable and slightly discs like.

However, the energy from the impact splayed it in one direction, causing more elongation in one of its axis than the other. This dramatic change not only deformed the shape of Dimorphos, but its spin and revolution tilted the scientist's comfortable posture.

Experts had predicted changes, but what they discovered was far beyond their expectations. Derek Richardson, a lead scientist on the DART mission, revealed that the collision's impact was so powerful that it turned the asteroid's predictable spin into a chaotic tumble. Dimorphos, once calmly aligned with its partner Didymos, is now wobbling unpredictably through space.

With this newfound instability, it is perplexing how such instability has altered the assumed asteroid behavior and even more concerning the unresolved details about their structural composition and the impact over time. If even a small asteroid like Dimorphos can be sent into such disarray, what does that say about bigger and more dangerous objects?

Stakes Are Higher Than Ever

As if that wasn't enough, the success of the DART missions incited insensible urgent issues. Scientists are asking questions, such as whether Dimorphos is in a state that will allow future missions. Is it possible to place experimental equipment on its surface, or is there too much risk in doing so? And what of the debris? How long will it be before it is cleared away, and what new danger might it present?

The DART mission has demonstrated us just how serious a risk we are in. With each novel feature came new urgency to come up with even better strategies for planetary defense.

The European Space Agency is already working on a follow-up mission to the Didymos system to be launched in 2024, but time is not on their side.

However, the aftermath of this mission may have produced an unintended and historic consequence: the potential creation of the first human-made meteor shower. Scientists now believe that debris ejected from the DART impact could eventually intersect with Earth and Mars, possibly resulting in visible meteor showers.

The DART Mission: A Bold Test in Planetary Defense

The DART mission, carried out by NASA in collaboration with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), was designed to test whether a spacecraft could intentionally collide with an asteroid and alter its orbit—an essential capability for future planetary defense against Earth-bound asteroids. The mission targeted Dimorphos, a small asteroid moon orbiting the larger Didymos, approximately 7 million miles from Earth. DART smashed into Dimorphos at a speed of 15,000 miles per hour, shortening its orbit around Didymos by 33 minutes—a remarkable success that demonstrated the feasibility of this technique for deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids.

Yet the DART mission’s impact went far beyond simply altering the orbit of Dimorphos. It blasted away a significant amount of debris, including rocks and dust, creating what researchers have now dubbed "Dimorphids"—a potential source of meteors. These particles, some moving at speeds of 500 meters per second, have been propelled into space, where they are now on trajectories that could eventually intersect with both Mars and Earth.

Dr. Eloy Peña-Asensio, a researcher from the Politecnico di Milano, explained the unexpected findings: “One of the most exciting results from our simulations was the discovery of launch trajectories due to the DART impact of Dimorphos that are compatible with delivery towards Mars. And some of those particles could even head towards Earth.” This opens the possibility that Earth may experience the first human-caused meteor shower—an event that would be unprecedented in the history of space exploration.

The Formation of a Human-Made Meteor Shower

The concept of a human-caused meteor shower is unprecedented. The particles ejected from Dimorphos after the DART impact are small, but over time, some of them could drift toward Earth's orbit and burn up in our atmosphere, creating a meteor shower. While it may take years—possibly decades—for these particles to reach us, scientists are closely monitoring their trajectories. According to Peña-Asensio, "If it does happen, we may witness the first human-made meteor shower." This would mark an extraordinary moment in the history of space exploration, where human intervention in space leads directly to visible changes in the night sky.

The potential meteor shower could be most visible in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in May 2055, when some of the particles may reenter Earth's atmosphere. While many of the particles are likely too small to create significant fireballs, scientists predict that slow-moving meteors could be seen streaking across the sky. However, the exact timing and visibility of this event remain uncertain, and further tracking is needed to refine predictions.

Dimorphos’ Changing Orbit and the Impact on its Structure

In addition to the creation of Dimorphids, the DART mission may have caused more lasting changes to Dimorphos itself. Recent reports suggest that the impact not only changed the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos but may have also deformed its structure and set it on a slightly altered trajectory. Researchers are investigating whether Dimorphos' new shape and orbital path could lead to further changes in its interactions with Didymos over time.

The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch the Hera mission in 2026, which will conduct a detailed survey of Dimorphos and Didymos. Hera will provide scientists with more information on how Dimorphos’ orbit has evolved post-impact and the long-term effects of DART's collision. This follow-up mission will offer critical insights into the consequences of kinetic impactors and help improve the precision of future planetary defense missions.

Long-Term Implications for Space Exploration

The potential meteor shower resulting from NASA’s DART mission is a striking reminder of the far-reaching impacts of humanity’s actions in space. This mission, designed to protect Earth from potential asteroid threats, may also leave a lasting mark in the form of meteors visible from our planet. While this is a novel and unintended consequence, it highlights how closely intertwined humanity’s space activities are becoming with the broader cosmos.

Moreover, the DART mission has shown that kinetic impactors can effectively change the orbits of celestial bodies, providing a powerful tool for future planetary defense efforts. However, it has also revealed the complexities of such missions, including the potential for long-term effects on the impacted bodies and their surrounding environments.

As we continue to push the boundaries of space exploration, missions like DART offer valuable lessons about the unintended consequences of our actions. From altering the orbits of distant moons to potentially creating meteor showers, the DART mission is a powerful example of how human ingenuity and exploration are shaping the future of space and our understanding of the universe.

The study challenges one of the most alarming predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding the rapid collapse of Antarctic ice sheets.

While the research confirms that ice loss from Thwaites Glacier will continue to contribute to rising sea levels, the catastrophic scenarios predicted in the past may be less likely than previously thought.

Challenging the Extreme Predictions

The new research casts doubt on the more dramatic forecasts that have portrayed Thwaites Glacier as a ticking time bomb. According to earlier projections, particularly those put forth in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, the potential for Marine Ice Cliff Instability (MICI)—a process that could cause the glacier’s ice cliffs to break apart rapidly and trigger a sudden collapse—was seen as a worst-case scenario.

This could have led to sea-level rise of up to 50 feet by the year 2100, inundating coastal cities across the globe. However, the Dartmouth-led study, which used high-resolution computer models to simulate the glacier’s behavior, suggests that this type of sudden collapse is "highly unlikely" within this century.

Mathieu Morlighem, the study’s lead author and a professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth, noted that the physics behind the MICI model were not properly represented in previous studies. “The physics underlying the extreme projection included in the IPCC report are inaccurate, and this has real-world effects,” Morlighem stated.

The study found that while Thwaites Glacier is still retreating and will continue to contribute to rising sea levels, the collapse will likely occur more gradually than previously thought. "We’re not seeing the kind of rapid disintegration of ice cliffs that some models have predicted," Morlighem added, offering a more measured perspective on the future of the glacier.

Implications for Climate Policy and Coastal Planning

This revised outlook has significant implications for policymakers and coastal planners who have been preparing for the worst-case scenario of rapid sea-level rise. The original MICI projections have been used to guide infrastructure investments in coastal defenses, such as seawalls, and relocation plans for communities at risk of flooding. According to Morlighem, “Policymakers and planners rely on these models, and they’re frequently looking at the high-end risk. They don’t want to design solutions and then the threat turns out to be even worse than they thought.”

However, the study's findings do not suggest that we are out of danger. The researchers emphasized that while the collapse of Thwaites Glacier is likely to be slower, it is still expected to contribute significantly to sea-level rise over the next few centuries. Morlighem clarified, "We’re not reporting that the Antarctic is safe and that sea-level rise isn’t going to continue—all of our projections show a rapid retreat of the ice sheet." This distinction is critical, as the glacier is still melting at an accelerated pace due to ocean warming, and its retreat is expected to continue contributing to global sea-level rise.

The Need for Continued Research

Despite the more tempered outlook, the study underscores the importance of continued research into the behavior of Antarctica’s ice sheets, particularly in the context of a warming climate. The ice shelves that help stabilize Thwaites Glacier are rapidly disintegrating due to the increasing temperature of ocean waters, which are eroding the glacier from below. The study’s findings highlight the complex dynamics at play, where even a slower collapse could have long-term consequences for coastal regions around the world.

Dan Goldberg, a glaciologist and co-author of the study, noted that more precise climate models are needed to fully understand the glacier’s future behavior. “While we did not observe the rapid collapse predicted by MICI in our simulations, Thwaites is still likely to retreat unstably in the coming centuries,” Goldberg explained. He added that continued observation and modeling will be crucial to accurately forecast how fast the ice will melt and to what extent it will contribute to rising sea levels.

Goldberg emphasized that, although the study provides a more optimistic view compared to previous predictions, it does not suggest that the threat is over. "We must remain vigilant and continue to monitor the situation closely because even a slower retreat can have serious implications for coastal cities around the world," he said.

What This Means for the Future

The study represents a significant development in the understanding of Antarctica’s role in climate change, but it also serves as a reminder that even moderate sea-level rise can have far-reaching consequences.

Coastal communities worldwide will still need to prepare for rising seas, and while the most extreme predictions of the glacier’s collapse may no longer be the most likely scenario, the gradual retreat of the Thwaites Glacier will continue to shape the future of global shorelines.

As scientists work to refine their models and improve the accuracy of their projections, the challenge remains to mitigate the effects of climate change and to protect vulnerable communities from its impacts. The retreat of the Thwaites Glacier, while slower than feared, still poses a long-term threat that will require concerted global efforts to address.

For many years, astronomers wondered about the irregular geometries of minor rocky bodies like Dimorphos and Selam. In a new study, researchers bring to light some reasons for their bizarre appearances and argue that such atypical “moonlets” might be far more common than previously thought.

Understanding Binary Asteroids and Their Moonlets

In our solar system, there are several binary pairs resembling miniature Earth-moon systems. These include Didymos-Dimorphos which is central to NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

According to studies, such binary systems occur when a fast spinning ‘parent’ asteroid made up of loosely aggregated rocks sloughs off matter that coalesces into a smaller satellite or ‘moonlet’.

Normally, these moonlets resemble prolate ellipsoids or upright blunt-end footballs. However, some moonlets had different forms than this, including ones such as Dimorphos before DART’s impact.

In shape, it was an ‘oblate spheroid’ – flattened at the poles but elongated at the equator, similar to that of a watermelon. On the other hand, Selam has two touching rocky globes forming its structure; she is actually an attendant of asteroid Dinkinesh.

These oddities caught the attention of some astronomers, including a graduate student from University of Bern named John Wimarsson, who is the lead author of the study. “Traditional models have no direct solutions to these asteroid satellites,” Wimarsson said.

In order to make clearer in regard to this problem, Wimarsson and his group of scientists from Europe and America came up with two computer models. The first one was aimed at simulating how parent asteroids change shape when they spin off material.

The other one assumed a disk shaped like a doughnut around the debris made by the parent that followed their motion and collision. They also looked into two different kinds of parent asteroids, akin to Ryugu and Didymos.

A moonlet’s shape can be influenced majorly by two things: gravity from its host asteroid, and collisions within its debris disk, all as revealed in a research paper printed in science journal Icarus.

Moreover, additional parameters are important in determining which factor will dominate over the other. For example, faster spinning denser asteroids such as Didymos result in wider debris disks that push moonlets further away from them. At a certain point equal to Roche limit, where gravitational forces equals to internal forces acting on the moonlet, often leads to prolate shapes.

Conversely, moonlets forming beyond the Roche limit tend to be oblate, as they are less influenced by the parent's gravity. Collisions with other debris lead to more uniform growth. If too close, moonlets may be torn apart, losing their prolate forms and more likely becoming oblate spheroids after subsequent collisions.

The collision angle between precursor moonlets also affects the final shape. Side-to-side collisions align along short axes, creating oblate shapes. In contrast, edge-to-edge collisions along longer axes result in bilobate objects, similar to Selam.

The Implications of Unusual Moonlet Shapes

The discovery of these unusually shaped moonlets challenges our previous understanding of asteroid formation. Traditional models have struggled to explain the existence of such shapes, leading to a reevaluation of the processes that govern the evolution of binary asteroid systems.

This research suggests that oblate and bilobate moonlets may be more common than previously believed. However, due to technological limitations, these shapes are often overlooked, leading to a skewed perception of their prevalence in our solar system. As technology advances, we may discover that these peculiar shapes are not the exception but the rule.

The findings from this study open up new avenues for research and exploration. Understanding the formation and evolution of these moonlets could provide valuable insights into the early history of our solar system. As we continue to explore these distant celestial bodies, we may uncover even more complex and intriguing shapes, further deepening our understanding of the cosmos.

This mission, which involved deliberately crashing a spacecraft into Dimorphos, aimed to test our ability to alter an asteroid's trajectory—an essential step in planetary defense.

The data collected from this mission, along with observations from the accompanying Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), have revealed surprising details about the origins and evolution of these celestial bodies.

These discoveries not only deepen our understanding of these specific asteroids but also have broader implications for our knowledge of asteroid formation and the history of our solar system.

Understanding the Binary Asteroid System

NASA's DART mission targeted the binary asteroid system of Didymos and its smaller companion, Dimorphos. The mission's primary goal was to observe the impact's effect on Dimorphos's orbit, thereby testing a potential planetary defense technique.

However, the mission also provided valuable data on the physical characteristics and history of these asteroids. The team, led by Olivier Barnouin from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, found that the surface of Didymos is characterized by a mix of rough, high-elevation areas filled with large boulders and smoother, lower-elevation regions with fewer craters.

In contrast, Dimorphos displayed a more diverse range of boulder sizes and surface features, including several fault lines but relatively few craters. The researchers deduced that Dimorphos likely formed from material ejected from Didymos, following a massive shedding event around 0.3 million years ago.

This conclusion was based on the observation that the rocks on Dimorphos appeared to be inherited from Didymos, suggesting a close genetic relationship between the two bodies.

Key Discoveries and Implications

One of the key discoveries from the DART mission was the identification of thermal fatigue on Dimorphos, a process where repeated cycles of heating and cooling cause rocks to crack and degrade. This phenomenon, observed for the first time on a rocky asteroid like Dimorphos, suggests that the asteroid's surface undergoes significant changes over relatively short geological timescales—estimated to be around 100,000 years.

"These findings give us new insights into the ways that asteroids can change over time," said Thomas Statler, lead scientist for Solar System Small Bodies at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This is important not just for understanding the near-Earth objects that are the focus of planetary defense, but also for our ability to read the history of our Solar System from these remnants of planet formation."

The data also provided insights into the structural composition of the asteroids. The team noted that the low surface strength of both Didymos and Dimorphos likely contributed to the significant change in Dimorphos's orbit following the DART impact.

This characteristic makes such asteroids more susceptible to forces that could alter their trajectories. The analysis of the boulders' shapes and sizes on Dimorphos revealed that they likely formed in stages, supporting the idea that the moonlet originated from material shed by Didymos.

Looking Ahead: The Hera Mission

The DART mission's findings have set the stage for the upcoming European Space Agency's Hera mission, which is scheduled to visit the Didymos system in 2026. The Hera mission aims to provide detailed observations of the impact site and further study the aftermath of DART's collision with Dimorphos. This mission will be crucial for verifying the data collected by DART and for enhancing our understanding of the dynamics of binary asteroid systems.

Olivier Barnouin, commenting on the broader significance of the findings, stated, “The images and data that DART collected at the Didymos system provided a unique opportunity for a close-up geological look of a near-Earth asteroid binary system. From these images alone, we were able to infer a great deal of information on geophysical properties of both Didymos and Dimorphos and expand our understanding on the formation of these two asteroids.”

The DART mission has not only demonstrated a potential method for planetary defense but has also enriched our scientific understanding of asteroid systems. The mission's success highlights the importance of international cooperation and advanced space technology in addressing the challenges posed by near-Earth objects.

As the Hera mission prepares to follow up on DART's groundbreaking work, the scientific community eagerly anticipates more revelations about these ancient cosmic wanderers.

This asteroid, comparable in size to a stadium, measures approximately 880 feet in diameter and will pass by our planet at a distance of about 4 million miles.

This distance is roughly 17 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Despite this seemingly large separation, the close approach qualifies it as a near-Earth object, prompting NASA and other space agencies to closely monitor its trajectory and assess any potential impact risks. The event serves as a reminder of the ongoing need for vigilance in tracking celestial objects that could pose a threat to Earth.

Characteristics and Orbit of Asteroid 2011 AM24

Asteroid 2011 AM24 follows an elliptical orbit around the Sun, intersecting Earth's orbit approximately every 467 days. The asteroid's close approach on July 26 marks one of the closest it will come to Earth in recent times, with its next significant approach not expected until September 21, 2038, when it will be at a distance of about 17 million miles.

The classification of this asteroid as a "potentially hazardous object" is based on its size and proximity to Earth's orbit. Objects of this classification are those that are larger than 492 feet in diameter and come within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbit.

While 2011 AM24 poses no immediate threat of impact, its size and orbital path make it an object of significant interest for astronomers who study near-Earth objects (NEOs). These observations help improve our understanding of asteroid compositions and behaviors, as well as refine our impact prediction capabilities.

Observing the Asteroid's Flyby

The asteroid's closest approach to Earth will occur at approximately 10:56 AM EDT on July 26. Although the asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye due to its distance, there are several ways to observe the event. NASA offers a virtual asteroid tracker that provides real-time data on the asteroid's trajectory, allowing the public to follow its path across the sky.

Additionally, the Virtual Telescope Project will be hosting a livestream of the event, providing clear visuals and expert commentary. These broadcasts offer a unique opportunity for the public to engage with astronomy and understand the dynamics of NEOs.

The Significance of Monitoring Near-Earth Objects

The flyby of 2011 AM24 underscores the critical importance of monitoring asteroids and other near-Earth objects. These celestial bodies, remnants from the early solar system, carry valuable information about its formation and evolution. Monitoring NEOs like 2011 AM24 allows scientists to gather data on their physical properties, such as size, shape, and composition, which are crucial for understanding the potential hazards they may pose.

NASA's recent efforts, including missions like the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and the OSIRIS-REx mission, reflect a growing focus on planetary defense. These missions aim to test our ability to alter the course of an asteroid and to collect samples from asteroids to study their makeup.

Such measures are part of a broader strategy to protect Earth from potential asteroid impacts, ensuring that we can respond effectively should a hazardous object be detected. The study of NEOs also contributes to broader scientific knowledge, aiding in the development of strategies for future exploration and resource utilization in space.

Sightings and Reports

Several people reported seeing what looked like a meteor streaking through the sky, accompanied by a loud boom and noticeable shaking. NASA's initial reports suggest that this daylight fireball may have passed over the Statue of Liberty before moving west into New Jersey. The American Meteor Society received dozens of reports about the fireball around 11:15 a.m. from the Tri-State Area and parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Videos posted on the American Meteor Society's website show a flash of light streaking through the sky in Northford, Connecticut, and Wayne, New Jersey.

New York City Councilman Justin Brannan commented on the event, stating, "Folks from the Jersey Shore to the West Side of Manhattan reported hearing a sonic boom." Despite the widespread reports, NYC Emergency Management noted, "There is nothing on their radar. USGS says no earthquake. Some say maybe a meteor?"

NASA's Analysis

NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office provided more details, estimating that the fireball was first seen over New York City, then traveled east at 38,000 miles per hour, passing over the Statue of Liberty before heading west into New Jersey. According to Bill Cooke, lead for NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office, the meteor was "a small meteor, about a foot across, traveling at 34,000 miles an hour." Cooke explained, "Something when it's moving that fast it heats up. You expect to see meteors at night not during the day, so this was a rare daylight fireball."

Cooke also addressed the confusion about the source of the loud booms, stating, "It's not entirely clear if the loud booms people heard at the time they saw the fireball was from the fireball itself or from military activities happening simultaneously in New Jersey. So, if the fireball produced a boom it's kind of lost in all the stuff generated by military activity to your south."

Public Reactions

The event sparked numerous reactions from the public. Judah Bergman, who was working at his desk in Lakewood, described his sighting: "It was long and really, really fast. It looked like a flaming, long rod or something on fire and flying through the sky."

Steven Bradley, from Park Ridge, recalled hearing the boom, "Then, less than a second after that, there was a tremble of the house as if something had hit my roof." He noted that the sound and rumbling were enough to scare his pets, saying, "The golden retriever jumped out of his skin and the cat just darted under the sofa."

Investigations and Conclusions

Despite the dramatic nature of the event, NASA noted that no meteorites were found, and the initial trajectory is based on eyewitness accounts that have not been verified by camera or satellite data. The American Meteor Society listed up to 20 possible sightings between 11:16 and 11:20 a.m., further indicating the widespread visibility of the meteor.

The event has highlighted the dynamic and often unpredictable nature of meteoric activity, as well as the significant impact such events can have on the public. The ongoing investigations aim to provide a clearer understanding of what exactly transpired and whether military activities played a role in the perceived impact of the fireball.

As investigations continue, the event serves as a reminder of the fascinating and sometimes startling phenomena that occur in our skies, offering both scientists and the public a glimpse into the dynamic environment beyond our planet.

This mission aims to demonstrate the country's planetary defense capabilities and contribute to global efforts to protect Earth from potential asteroid impacts.

China's Asteroid Mission Overview and Target Selection

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has announced ambitious plans to develop and launch a spacecraft designed to impact the asteroid 2015 XF261, a near-Earth object approximately 30 meters in diameter. The choice of this particular asteroid is strategic, given its proximity to Earth and manageable size for an initial test mission.

The target asteroid, 2015 XF261, made a close approach to Earth on July 9, 2024, coming within 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) of our planet. This asteroid, traveling at a speed of about 26,000 mph (42,000 kph), presents a significant challenge and an ideal candidate for testing kinetic impactor techniques.

A recent paper published in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration outlines the mission's objectives and methodology. "For China's first near-Earth asteroid defense on-orbit verification mission, a defensive disposal demonstration will be carried out on the potential risk of near-Earth asteroids impacting the Earth," the paper states. This mission aims to not only validate China's technological capabilities but also contribute valuable data to the global understanding of asteroid deflection strategies.

Mission Components and Objectives

The CNSA's asteroid deflection mission will feature a dual-spacecraft system: an observer and an impactor. The observer spacecraft will be the first to reach the asteroid, spending three to six months conducting detailed analyses and gathering data on its composition, structure, and orbit. This period of close observation is crucial for understanding the asteroid's physical properties and preparing for the subsequent impact.

Following the observer's analysis, the impactor spacecraft will be launched towards the asteroid with the goal of altering its trajectory through a high-speed collision. The observer will remain in proximity to the asteroid to capture and transmit data back to Earth regarding the immediate and long-term effects of the impact. This information will be vital for assessing the effectiveness of kinetic impactors as a planetary defense mechanism.

Drawing parallels to NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which impacted the smaller body in the Didymos binary asteroid system in September 2022, China's mission aims to build on these findings. NASA's DART mission demonstrated that a spacecraft could successfully alter an asteroid's orbit through kinetic impact, paving the way for further experiments and refinements in planetary defense techniques.

Enhancing Planetary Defense through International Collaboration

China's planned asteroid deflection mission is part of a broader international effort to develop and refine planetary defense strategies. The CNSA's initiative complements ongoing projects by other space agencies, such as NASA's NEO Surveyor space telescope, scheduled for launch in June 2028. This telescope is designed to detect and track potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, providing early warnings and critical data for future deflection missions.

The joint efforts of various space agencies, including CNSA, NASA, and the European Space Agency (ESA), highlight the importance of international collaboration in addressing the global threat posed by asteroids. By pooling resources, expertise, and technological innovations, these agencies aim to enhance the effectiveness and reliability of planetary defense measures. "The joint work of various space agencies, including China, increases confidence in the safety of our planet, despite international tensions between countries," the article noted.

This collaborative approach is essential, as no single nation can effectively mitigate the risks associated with asteroid impacts on its own. Continued research, development, and testing of planetary defense technologies are crucial for safeguarding Earth from potential future threats.

Traveling at a speed of over 40,000 miles per hour (65,215 km/h), the asteroid will pass approximately 936,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, which is about four times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

While the approach is relatively close in astronomical terms, NASA has confirmed that it poses no risk to life on Earth.

Asteroid Characteristics and Discovery

Asteroid 2024 MT-1, measuring roughly 260 feet (79 meters) in diameter, was first detected by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program. This program is responsible for tracking and characterizing asteroids and comets that come close to Earth using a network of ground-based telescopes and radar systems. Despite its significant size and speed, NASA has assured that there is no immediate threat of collision with Earth.

The asteroid’s trajectory has been closely monitored by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. JPL’s Asteroid Watch dashboard provides real-time data on the asteroid’s position, speed, and distance from Earth.

According to JPL, 2024 MT-1’s closest approach will be a safe distance away from our planet, passing by on July 8, 2024, ensuring that it poses no immediate threat.

Asteroid 2024 MT1 is a near-Earth object approximately 260 feet (about 79 meters) in size. It is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid due to its significant size and the relatively close distance at which it will pass by Earth. The closest approach of 2024 MT1 is… pic.twitter.com/B5ilYyMNnY

— Astro_Insights 🔭🪐 (@AstroInsights_) July 2, 2024

Potential Hazards and Planetary Defense

Asteroids of this size are considered potentially hazardous due to the significant damage they could cause if they were to collide with Earth. The impact of an asteroid like 2024 MT-1 could result in widespread devastation, including massive explosions, fires, and tsunamis. Such an impact would have severe consequences for any populated area, causing loss of life and extensive property damage.

However, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) is actively working on strategies to mitigate such threats. The PDCO collaborates with international space agencies and research institutions to develop technologies for asteroid deflection and impact prevention.

One of the key technologies being explored is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which aims to test the feasibility of deflecting an asteroid by crashing a spacecraft into it. The DART mission, launched in November 2021, successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, demonstrating the potential of this technique. While DART is not directly related to 2024 MT-1, it represents a significant step forward in planetary defense efforts and showcases the capability to alter the trajectory of potentially hazardous asteroids.

Observational Opportunities

The close approach of 2024 MT-1 has sparked significant interest among astronomers and space enthusiasts. Observatories around the world are preparing to capture images and data of the asteroid as it makes its close approach. The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico are among the facilities that will be used to study the asteroid’s characteristics and behavior. These observatories will utilize radar and optical telescopes to gather detailed information about the asteroid's size, shape, rotation, and surface properties.

Researchers are particularly interested in understanding the composition and structure of 2024 MT-1, as this information can offer insights into the early solar system and the formation of planets. Studying such asteroids helps scientists learn more about the building blocks of our solar system and the processes that led to the formation of Earth and other planetary bodies. Additionally, the data collected during this close approach will enhance our ability to predict the behavior and trajectories of other near-Earth objects in the future.

Implications for Planetary Defense

NASA’s ongoing efforts to track and study near-Earth objects are vital for our safety and for advancing our knowledge of the universe. The agency’s work ensures that we are better prepared to respond to potential threats from space while also contributing to our understanding of the cosmos.

By monitoring and characterizing asteroids like 2024 MT-1, NASA and other space agencies can develop and refine strategies to mitigate the risks posed by these objects. This proactive approach to planetary defense is essential for protecting Earth from future impacts.

The approach of asteroid 2024 MT-1 is a significant event for both scientists and the general public. It provides a unique opportunity to study an asteroid of this size and speed up close. NASA's continuous monitoring and research efforts play a crucial role in ensuring planetary safety and enhancing our comprehension of space phenomena. As we observe this near-Earth object, we gain valuable knowledge that helps us prepare for and mitigate potential future threats.

The close approach of 2024 MT-1 highlights the importance of international collaboration in space exploration and planetary defense, as well as the need for continued investment in space research and technology.

A Close Encounter with Two Asteroids

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), two asteroids, 2024 MK and (415029) 2011 UL21, will make their close approaches to Earth within a short time frame, offering a unique opportunity for observation and study.

Two interesting asteroids will safely pass Earth this week, a rare double flyby that is perfectly timed to coincide with this year's @AsteroidDay!https://t.co/AOznSVdxNX

— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) June 24, 2024

Asteroid 2024 MK

Asteroid 2024 MK, discovered on June 16, 2024, measures between 120 and 260 meters. It is set to make a close approach to Earth on June 29, passing within 290,000 kilometers—roughly 75% of the distance to the Moon. Despite its proximity, there is no risk of impact. If an asteroid of this size were to strike Earth, it would cause considerable damage, potentially impacting large urban areas and causing widespread destruction.

The rapid discovery and subsequent tracking of 2024 MK highlight both the advancements and the current limitations in our asteroid detection capabilities. Discovering an asteroid of this size just two weeks before its closest approach underscores the necessity for improved surveillance and early-warning systems.

Due to its size and proximity, 2024 MK will be observable in clear, dark skies using small telescopes or binoculars for amateur astronomers in some parts of the world. This close encounter offers a valuable opportunity for scientists and astronomers to study the asteroid's characteristics and behavior up close.

Asteroid (415029) 2011 UL21

The larger of the two asteroids, (415029) 2011 UL21, measures 2310 meters across, making it larger than 99% of all known NEOs. On June 27, it will pass Earth at a distance more than 17 times that of the Moon. Despite its considerable size, there is no risk of collision with Earth.

This asteroid's immense size means that if it were on a collision course with Earth, the consequences would be catastrophic, causing global climate changes and mass extinctions similar to the events that likely led to the demise of the dinosaurs.

Asteroid 2011 UL21 has an orbit around the Sun that is steeply inclined compared to most large objects in the Solar System. This unusual orbit could be the result of gravitational interactions with Jupiter, which can deflect asteroids inward toward Earth.

Understanding these gravitational influences is crucial for predicting and mitigating potential asteroid threats. Scientists study these orbital patterns to better understand the dynamics of asteroid movements and to develop more accurate models for future predictions.

The Significance of Asteroid Day

Asteroid Day, observed on June 30 each year, commemorates the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska event, the largest observed asteroid impact in recorded history. This event, which flattened approximately 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers in Siberia, serves as a stark reminder of the potential devastation an asteroid impact could cause. The Tunguska event's timing was a fortunate near-miss for humanity, as it occurred in a sparsely populated area rather than over a major city.

Asteroid Day was co-founded by astrophysicist and famed musician Dr. Brian May, among others, and is endorsed by the United Nations. The day aims to raise public awareness about the risks of asteroid impacts and to promote the importance of monitoring and studying NEOs. Activities on Asteroid Day include educational programs, public talks, and special observatory sessions designed to engage the public and inspire interest in planetary defense.

Enhancing Detection and Defense

The European Space Agency (ESA) has been at the forefront of planetary defense, coordinating data, information, and expertise to address asteroid hazards. Over the past two decades, ESA has focused on the detection and analysis of potentially hazardous NEOs. There are an estimated 5 million NEOs larger than 20 meters, which is the threshold above which an impact could cause significant damage.

ESA's Hera mission, set to launch later this year, is part of the world’s first test of asteroid deflection. Hera will perform a detailed survey of the asteroid Dimorphos following NASA’s DART mission impact in September 2022. This mission aims to develop a well-understood and repeatable planetary defense technique.

Back on Earth, ESA is developing a network of Flyeye telescopes inspired by insect vision. These telescopes will use their wide field of view to scan the entire sky each night, searching for new potentially hazardous asteroids. Additionally, the future NEOMIR satellite will be positioned between Earth and the Sun to use infrared light to detect asteroids approaching from regions of the sky currently obscured by the Sun’s glare.

ESA’s Planetary Defense Office continues to monitor the sky for potential threats. In May 2024, ESA's fireball camera in Cáceres, Spain, captured a meteor believed to be a small comet fragment. In June 2024, the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona discovered a small asteroid that passed very close to Earth, demonstrating the importance of continuous monitoring.

These advancements in detection and defense are critical for safeguarding our planet from potential asteroid impacts, ensuring a more secure future for Earth. As technology and international cooperation improve, so too does our ability to prevent and mitigate the dangers posed by these celestial objects.

Jupiter: Earth's celestial shield

The AI tool developed by the research group was meticulously trained with vast amounts of sky imagery, allowing it to classify over a billion points of light and pinpoint thousands of asteroids. Many of these are located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but others are in orbit around Jupiter itself. This highlights Jupiter's role not just as a massive planet, but as a protective barrier that helps prevent more errant space rocks from threatening Earth.

Recounting the past: The dinosaur extinction

The mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, is a stark reminder of the devastation that can be wrought by asteroid impacts. About 75% of Earth's species vanished after a massive asteroid struck the Gulf of Mexico, creating the Chicxulub crater. This historical event underscores the importance of vigilant monitoring and research in planetary defense.

The DART mission: Testing asteroid deflection

In an unprecedented test of human ingenuity and proactive defense, the DART mission in September 2022 successfully altered the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorphos. By colliding a spacecraft into Dimorphos at high speed, scientists were able to shorten its orbit by 33 minutes, proving that it's possible to change the course of an asteroid. This mission represents a critical step toward developing the capabilities necessary to protect Earth from potential asteroid threats.

Enhancing future asteroid detection

The advancement in AI and the anticipated operational start of the Vera Rubin Telescope next year promise to revolutionize our ability to detect and monitor asteroids. The more asteroids we can identify and track, the better prepared we will be to enact measures like the DART mission if and when necessary. This ongoing commitment to planetary defense signifies a crucial strategy in safeguarding our planet from the unseen dangers of space.

https://b612foundation.org/asteroid-institute-and-google-cloud-identify-27500-new-asteroids/

The 120m (394ft) asteroid, technically titled 2024 JZ, will travel by the planet at a breathtaking 56,000 mph (90,123), 65 times quicker than a bullet.

However, there is no need panic just yet, as this asteroid will pass Earth at a safe distance of 2.6 million miles (4.2 million km).

NASA Warns of Near-Earth Asteroid Flyby

NASA classifies the asteroid as a 'near-Earth object' (NEO). Dr. Edward Bloomer, senior astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, told MailOnline: "Today's passing is not a concern at all, this is not the kind of thing we should be worrying about."

According to NASA: 'NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighbourhood.

'Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.'

A NEO is defined as any object that is within 1.3 astronomical units (AU) (120.8 million miles) of the sun, and thus within 0.3 AU (27.8 million miles) of Earth's orbit.

Asteroids are considered 'possibly hazardous' if they pass within 0.05 astronomical units (4.65 million miles) of Earth and have a diameter of more than 140 metres (459 feet).

Even though 2024 JZ will be a completely safe distance of only 0.028 AU from Earth, this is regarded quite close in astronomical terms.

This tonight, a minor asteroid known as 2024 JT3 will pass within 12,000 miles (19,300 km) of Earth.

However, Juan Luis Cano from the ESA's Planetary Defence Office assured MailOnline that Earth is 'absolutely' safe.

Mr Cano claims that there is 'no possibility of striking the Earth.'

He continues: "In any case, a 5-10 m object would typically disintegrate in the atmosphere, releasing some small meteorites to the ground."

Exploring the Differences Between NEOs and Meteors

A network of professional and volunteer astronomers monitors NEOs as they move through the solar system.

Every month, they discover dozens of NEOs and accurately anticipate their courses.

In fact, huge objects like 2024 JZ going through Earth's orbit are so common that the ESA classifies it as a'very regular event'.

The vast majority of these items burn up in the planet's atmosphere and appear to us as shooting stars rather than landing on the ground.

Each year, the Earth passes through many intense clouds of debris left by comets, resulting in meteor showers like this month's Eta Aquariids.

NEOs vary from meteors in that they are large enough to transit through the atmosphere without being destroyed.

While today's close encounter is not cause for fear, Dr. Bloomer believes there is a risk of an impact in the future.'We're kind of gambling every day,' he admitted.

If 2024 JZ were on a threat intercept course, that would be a big problem because it's a big old chunk of rock moving pretty quickly.'

During the 1908 Tunguska Event, an asteroid less than half the size of 2024 JZ erupted over an area of Siberian woodland, destroying 830 square miles of trees.

Similarly, Dr. Bloomer points out that the Chelyabinsk meteor, which damaged 7,200 structures and injured 1,491 people in Russia, had a diameter of only 20 metres (65 feet).

Most concerning was the fact that the Chelyabinsk meteor had previously gone undetected when it struck with Earth.

As Mr Cano clarifies, while there is currently no relevant threat, 'the actual problem resides on the fact that there are still many NEOs to be found.'

How Does NASA Safeguard Earth from NEOs?

Fortunately, NASA has already invested in ways for protecting the planet from incoming asteroids.

In November 2021, the space agency conducted the DART mission, which sent a satellite into the side of Dimorphos, an asteroid approximately 6.8 million miles (10.9 million km) from Earth.

This experiment demonstrated that by hitting an asteroid with a small satellite early enough, the little impact could propel it into a safe orbit by the time it reaches Earth.

Dr Bloomer states: 'If you can get to it faster and further in advance then you actually need to make a smaller impact to make a bigger deflection over time.

'Whereas if you've got something that you don't detect until particularly late, then you've got to make more efforts to deflect it in time.'

While this operation was simply a rehearsal, it demonstrated that the planet could be rescued with enough advance notice.

This weekend’s stories include A quantum computer has simulated a wormhole for the first time to James Webb Space Telescope view of Saturn’s weirdest moon Titan to Southern hemisphere’s largest radio telescope joins search for extraterrestrial technology to Magnetic Milky Way filaments dwarfed by mysterious structures in distant galaxy cluster, and much more.

Plasma sail spacecraft could soar like an albatross to Alpha Centauri–-A spacecraft equipped with a “sail” made from plasma could build up speed by repeatedly crossing the boundary at the edge of the solar system, just as an albatross soars by taking advantage of regions of different wind speeds, reports New Scientist.

Is Our Universe a Hologram? Physicists Debate Famous Idea on Its 25th Anniversary–The Ads/CFT duality conjecture suggests our universe is a hologram, enabling significant discoveries in the 25 years since it was first proposed, reports Anil Ananthaswamy for Scientific American. 

Why This Universe? A New Calculation Suggests Our Cosmos Is Typical, writes Charlie Wood for Quanta. Two physicists have calculated that the universe has a higher entropy — and is therefore more likely — than alternative possible universes.

How Niels Bohr’s idea changed the world, reports Big Think. “Niels Bohr’s atom was a truly revolutionary idea, mixing old and new physics concepts. In some ways, an atom resembles the solar system; in other ways, it behaves rather bizarrely. Bohr realized that the world of the very small demanded a new way of thinking.”

A quantum computer has simulated a wormhole for the first time--“Researchers have used Google’s Sycamore quantum computer to simulate a simplified wormhole for the first time, and sent a piece of quantum information through it,” reports New Scientist

How NASA Launched Its Asteroid Killer–“Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as seen by the DART spacecraft 11 seconds before impact. DART’s onboard DRACO imager captured this image from a distance of 42 miles. The DART mission, in which a spacecraft knocked an asteroid off course, is a rehearsal for saving the world,” reports David W. Brown for The New Yorker.

Milky Way Census Shows Stars Take Varied Paths--The Gaia satellite is making the most detailed and complete map of the stars in our galaxy, reports Clara Moskowitz and Nadieh Bremer for Scientific American.

Ancient killer asteroid created a megatsunami on Mars, reports New Scientist. “New evidence suggests that 3.4 billion years ago, an asteroid impact created a ~110-km wide crater and a megastunami that extended for ~1500 kilometers.”

James Webb Space Telescope view of Saturn’s weirdest moon Titan thrills scientists, reports Meghan Bartels for Space.com. “Titan is a strange world — a little bit Earthlike, if land were made of water ice, rivers and seas were filled with liquid methane and other hydrocarbons, and the atmosphere were thick and hazy, dotted with methane clouds”

Southern hemisphere’s largest radio telescope joins search for extraterrestrial technology–MeerKAT will increase the number of targets that Breakthrough Listen can observe by a thousand fold. The largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere has joined the search for technosignatures, signals that indicate the presence of technology developed by extraterrestrial intelligence, reports Engadget.

Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer, reports Quanta. “The unprecedented experiment explores the possibility that space-time somehow emerges from quantum information, even as the work’s interpretation remains disputed.”

Google’s quantum computer suggests that wormholes are real–Perhaps wormholes will no longer be relegated to the realm of science fiction, reports Big Think. 

A new supercomputer simulation animates the evolution of the universe–It’s the most accurate, detailed glimpse of the early cosmos yet, researchers report, writes James R. Riordon for Science News. “This virtual glimpse into the cosmos’s past is the result of CoDaIII, the third iteration of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which traces the history of the universe, beginning with the “cosmic dark ages” about 10 million years after the Big Bang.

Magnetic Milky Way filaments dwarfed by mysterious structures in distant galaxy cluster, reports Robert Lea for Space.com–“These filaments dangle around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astrophysicist Farhad Zadeh, now at Northwestern University in Illinois, first discovered the structures in the 1980s, when they left him puzzled and fascinated.”

The Most Overhyped Space Movie–2001: A Space Odyssey is prescient, beautiful, and entirely unsatisfactory, reports Marina Koren for The Atlantic. “What follows is my real-time reaction to watching 2001 on a recent evening, edited for length and clarity. Even though the movie has been out for 54 years, I feel a duty to warn you that there are major spoilers ahead.”

2022 Space Telescope Advent Calendar--It’s time once more for one of my favorite holiday traditions: the 15th annual Space Telescope Advent Calendar—this year featuring images from both NASA’s Hubble telescope and its brand-new James Webb Space Telescope, reports The Atlantic.

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Your free daily fix of  stories of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene epoch.

Yes, Sign Me Up for “The Galaxy Report” Newsletter

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Today’s stories include How One Barren Exoplanet Could ‘Dramatically Narrow’ the Search for Alien Life to The Webb Spots Structures From The Early Universe Never Seen Before to New NASA UFO Team Hopes They’re Not an Adversary, and much more.

Ancient bacteria might lurk beneath Mars’ surface--A New study finds the chances of uncovering life on Mars are better than previously expected, reports Northwestern University. ““If microbes evolved on Mars, they could be capable of surviving until the present day.280 million years that ‘Conan the Bacterium’ could survive buried on Mars. That means returning Mars samples could contaminate Earth. 

Puzzling astronomical observations support an alternative theory of gravity, reports New Atlas. “Astrophysicists have observed some puzzling behavior in star clusters that seem to defy our current understanding of gravity at cosmic scales. Intriguingly, the observations fit with an alternative theory of gravity that could negate the need for dark matter.”

How NASA Launched Its Asteroid Killer. The DART mission, in which a spacecraft knocked an asteroid off course, is a rehearsal for saving the world, reports The New Yorker.

NASA captures the whole universe in illuminating decade-long time lapse, reports SyFy. 

Will Alien technology signal extraterrestrial life, asks Earth Sky. “If aliens looked at Earth, our human technology – from cell towers to fluorescent light bulbs – could signal the presence of life. Can we find life in the universe from alien technologies?”

How One Barren Planet Could ‘Dramatically Narrow’ the Search for Alien Life –We still don’t know where aliens are, but we’re learning where they probably aren’t, reports CNET. “The team explains how an Earth-like planet orbiting the most common type of star in the universe, an M dwarf, seems to have no atmosphere. What this means is perhaps we can conclude that most other Earth-like planets orbiting all those other M dwarfs don’t have atmospheres either.”

Newly found organic molecules on Mars raise the question: Did life make them?–Organic molecules can be produced by living or non-living systems. But the recent findings are very intriguing, reports Dirk Schulze-Makuch for Big Think. “The large diversity of organic molecules detected on Mars is a hint that life once existed there.”

JWST Spots Structures From The Early Universe Never Seen Before, reports IFL Science. “The space observatory has revealed that a far distant known galaxy is not a single object but two. The object is known as MACS0647-JD, and the light we can see today has been travelling since 400 million years after the Big Bang.”

Brightest-Ever Space Explosion Reveals Possible Hints of Dark Matter–A recent gamma-ray burst known as the BOAT — “brightest of all time” — appears to have produced a high-energy particle that shouldn’t exist. For some, dark matter provides the explanation, reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for Quanta.

Why Mars has captured our hopes and fears for millennia. From being the celestial embodiment of warrior gods to housing canal-digging aliens, Mars has uniquely endured in the public consciousness. Even today, the Red Planet still spells adventure, reports Stuart Clark for New Scientist.

NASA Opens Investigation Into Recent UFO Sightings, Hopes They’re ‘Not an Adversary, reports Extreme Tech. “The team is impressively diverse: Two astrophysicists, two policy specialists, two aviation specialists, an oceanographer, an AI startup founder, a science journalist, a planetary scientist, a former NASA astronaut, a telescope scientist, a space infrastructure consultant, an electrical and computer engineer, and a physicist each made the cut.”

Space Force moves to consolidate its intelligence community, reports Federal News Network. “As the Space Force expands and defines the roles of its different commands, one of its top priorities will be intelligence gathering in space. In a service so new no one has had time to wear the shine off their buttons, Space Operations Command (SpOC) will take a major role in the business of spying, satellites and satellite image.”

Are parallel Universes physically real, or just an unsupported idea?–Are you unhappy with how various events in your life turned out? Perhaps, in a parallel Universe, things worked out very differently, reports Big Think. “There are two ways to think about it that are physically well-motivated: in the contexts of inflationary cosmology and quantum physics.”

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Your free daily fix of  stories of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene epoch.

Yes, Sign Me Up for “The Galaxy Report” Newsletter

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories include William Shatner’s Blue Origin Trip Filled Him with ‘Dread’ for Earth to The Hard Problem of Consciousness, and much more.

Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe, writes Dennis Overbye for the New York Times. “Take gravity, add quantum mechanics, stir. What do you get? Just maybe, a holographic cosmos. “It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing,” Leonard Susskind of Stanford University wrote in a paper in 2017. ‘But those of us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other.'”

William Shatner’s Blue Origin trip filled him with ‘dread’ for Earth amid the ‘vicious coldness of space, reports Fortune on his new book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder. “When I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold…all I saw was death,” he writes. “I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. also felt sadness, he writes, because of the damage being done to the planet.”

NASA finds Earth’s moon didn’t need hundreds of years to form. Try hours–Watch a violent collision simulation that could have spawned the moon. ‘A study published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests a bold new idea: The moon could have formed in one swift exchange, with a large chunk of baby Earth and its impactor’s material blown into a wide orbit — in a matter of hours.”

The real problem of consciousness–It looks like scientists and philosophers might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be, reports Anil K Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science for Aeon.

Finding Aliens Could Trigger Global Conflict With Dire Consequences: Study, reports Newsweek. “However, according to a paper published in the journal Space Policy, which is a critique of a previous study discussing the geopolitical dangers of detecting extra-terrestrial life, these fears are unfounded.”

Should We Be Searching for Smart Aliens or Dumb Aliens? asks astrophysicist Adam Frank. There are two ways to look for extraterrestrial life. We’ve been focusing on only one, reports The Atlantic. “Dumb life consists of things such as microbes and plants that can proliferate across a planet but are unlike humans as self-conscious, technological thinkers. Smart life consists of creatures like us that build planet-spanning technologies.”

Could an asteroid destroy Earth?, asks Brandon Specktor for Space.com–“Our planet is tougher than you’d think — but humans aren’t. ‘An object bigger than Mars hit Earth early in its history and made the moon, without destroying the Earth,’Brian Toon, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied asteroid impacts.”

Ian Sinks Florida ‘Dome Home’ Built to Survive Hurricanes–A house built from geodesic domes off the coast of Florida was designed to withstand gale-force winds and powerful storm surges but not sea-level rise, reports Scientific American.

California Quakes Mysteriously Preceded by Shifts in Earth’s Magnetic Field, reports Mike McCrae for Nature. “One possible advance sign could involve flickers in the magnetic field that ebbs and flows around our planet. For decades, researchers have debated the merits of hunting for magnetic signatures to imminent tremors, for want of convincing evidence.”

A Martian menu that could transform how we eat on Earth, reports Evan Fraser and Lenore Newman for CNN. “Prepping a Martian meal would be one of the most technically challenging problems our species has ever confronted. A community on Mars would be exposed to punishing radiation and temperatures that could range from minus 220 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Tasty and nutritious meals would be crucial to the psychological as well as the physical health of space pioneers.”

New JWST view showcases our cosmic isolation–With its first view of a protoplanetary disk around a newly forming star, the JWST reveals how alone individual stellar systems truly are, reports Big Think.

This podcast brings Steve Jobs back to life, thanks to AI–In a free-wheeling conversation with Joe Rogan, Jobs talks about Microsoft, Adobe, and much more, reports Interesting Engineering.

The DNA that works like a computer disk –Keeping data safely locked up for millennia could soon be on the table, reports BBC Future. “Radio telescopes and particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) alone produces 90 petabytes (90 million gigabytes) per year.”

As Omicron mutates wildly the virus shows first signs of convergent evolution, reports Rich Haridy for New Atlas. “Over the last couple of months researchers tracking emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants have started noticing something strange These mutations all seemed to be converging in a way to evade our pre-existing immunity, and a striking study recently appeared speculating the virus has the potential to completely escape our current immune responses.”

This Indigenous Scientist Helped Save Lives as Covid Devastated the Navajo Nation–Crystal Lee grew up the granddaughter of Navajo medicine men. As Covid wreaked havoc on her community, she decided to act reports Tulika Bose for Scientific American.

The life-changing effects of hallucinations –“Illusions brought on by drugs, lights and disease are giving us new insights into the inner workings of our brains. William Park ventured into his own induced hallucination to find out more” for BBC Future.

A new method helped find million-year-old marine DNA in Antarctica — here’s what’s next–The data shows that diatoms were consistently abundant during warm climatic periods, reports Interesting Engineering. “According to the University of Bonn, it shows that DNA can open the pathway to studying long-term responses of ocean ecosystems to climate change.”

Fossils Solve Mystery of an Ancient ‘Alien Goldfish’ –Closer examination of Typhloesus fossils suggests that the organism, which swam 330 million years ago, was similar to modern sea slugs, reports New York Times Science.

Fossils Reveal Pterosaur Relatives Before They Evolved Wings–By reanalyzing earlier specimens, scientists linked small, leggy creatures that roamed 237 million years ago to the reptiles that flew through the dinosaur era, reports New York Times Science. “At a quick glance, they look nothing like a pterosaur,” Dr. Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, said. “But a close look at their skeletons and the similarities with pterosaurs became apparent, like invisible ink being held to the light.”

Can solar power from space help solve our energy needs? asks The Guardian. “The latest developments in solar tech offer potential solutions to the energy security crisis – including satellites that would convert sunlight into power for Earth”

How philosophy turned into physics and reality turned into information, reports Peter Evans for The Conversation.

The Physics of Smashing a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid--NASA will soon release the results of its DART mission to find out whether crashing a probe into a space rock can deflect it. Here’s how they’ll do the math, reports Wired.

Curated by the Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

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Recent Galaxy Reports:

Unmistakable Signal of Alien Life to What Happens if China Makes First Contact?

Clues to Alien Life to A Galaxy 100 x Size of Milky Way 

Cracks in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity to Colossal Shock Wave Bigger than the Milky Way 

Monster Comet Arriving from the Oort Cloud to Black Hole Apocalypse 

Enigmas of Stephen Hawking’s Blackboard to Why the Universe and Life Exist 

Einstein’s Critics to NASA Theologians Prepare for Alien Contact

Mind-Bending New Multiverse Theory to Dark-Matter Asteroids of the Milky Way 

Mysterious Expanding Regions of Dark Matter to Are Black Holes Holograms

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories include Black Holes Wobbling Three Times a Second have Proved Einstein Right to Astronomers Have Unveiled the World’s Largest Digital Camera, and much more.

One of Jupiter’s moons may be hiding magnificent underwater lakes — and perhaps even life–Europa, a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life, has an icy surface that hides a bustling, watery interior, reports Salon. “This is significant because, just as life on Earth originated from the vast array of water-based structures on our planet, life on Europa may very well be flourishing within any system of lakes that exists on that planet.”

If aliens have visited the solar system, here’s how to find clues they left, reports Paul Sutter for Space.com–“So far, all searches for extraterrestrial life have come up empty. But there is another avenue that is relatively unexplored: the search for extraterrestrial artifacts (SETA). The idea behind this approach is that if aliens become advanced enough, they might want to explore the galaxy, either by themselves or through robotic spacecraft during the 4.5 billion-year history of the solar system–plenty of time to swing by our neighborhood and maybe leave a mark.

Telescopes on the Moon–Our future in space relies on settling the Moon and using it as a base to probe the deepest questions in the cosmos, reports Joseph Silk, Homewood Research Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University for Aeon. “Only from the lunar surface can we mount the ultimate search for our origins. We’ll achieve this by constructing novel telescopes of unprecedented scope in dark lunar craters and on the far side of the Moon.”

Black holes wobbling three times a second have proved Einstein right–A pair of merging black holes show extreme signs of gravity-induced orbital precession, or wobbling, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, reports New Scientist.

NASA Spacecraft Accomplishes Mission and Smashes Asteroid Into New Orbit–The DART mission proved more successful than expected in adjusting the trajectory of Dimorphos, suggesting that a deadly space rock could be deflected in the future, reports The New York Times.

Jet from neutron stars seems to travel seven times the speed of light–An optical illusion created by the relative positions of Earth and a pair of colliding neutron stars makes it seem like a jet of radiation is traveling at seven times the speed of light – but thankfully no laws of physics have been broken, reports New Scientist.

James Webb telescope captures ‘cosmic fingerprint’ formed by two giant stars–Series of 17 concentric dust rings was spawned by Wolf-Rayet 140 binary system thousands of light years away, reports The Guardian. “Like clockwork, WR140 puffs out a sculpted smoke ring every eight years, which is then inflated in the stellar wind like a balloon,” said Prof Peter Tuthill of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney, a study co-author. 

‘We’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before:’ Black Hole Spews Out Material Years After Shredding Star, reports the Harvard CfA. The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years.

Astronomers have unveiled the world’s largest digital camera--The world’s largest digital camera for astronomy is taller than a car, has as many pixels as 266 iPhones and will, over the course of the next 10 years, help researchers study billions of galaxies, reports New Scientist.

Black hole discovered firing jet at neighboring galaxy, reports the Royal Astronomical Society. The black hole is hosted by a galaxy around one billion light years away from Earth named RAD12.

Two exoplanets have a strangely heavy element floating in their skies–Astronomers have found barium floating high in the atmospheres of two sweltering exoplanets, and they don’t know how such a heavy element ended up where it is, reports New Scientist.

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories include What does Earth look like from across the Universe to Carlo Rovelli: “Science is More Than Equations,” and much more.

Artemis: Nasa ready to launch new era of Moon exploration, reports BBC –SLS is the most powerful vehicle ever developed by Nasa, and will be the foundation of its Artemis project which aims to put people back on the lunar surface after a 50-year absence. The moon mission will lay groundwork for flights to Mars in the 2040s. The rocket is timed to go up from the Kennedy Space Centre at 08:33 local time (12:33 GMT; 13:33 BST) on Monday.

The Drake equation for alien intelligence is more important than ever, reports David Rothery for Space.com–“Whatever reasonable values you feed into the equation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we shouldn’t be alone in the galaxy.”

What does Earth look like from across the Universe?–From here on Earth, looking farther away in space means looking farther back in time. So what are distant Earth-watchers seeing right now? asks Big Think.

Artificial intelligence reduces a 100,000-equation quantum physics problem to only four equations, reports Phys.org –“”We start with this huge object of all these coupled-together differential equations; then we’re using machine learning to turn it into something so small you can count it on your fingers,” says study lead author Domenico Di Sante, a visiting research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) in New York City and an assistant professor at the University of Bologna.”

Science is More Than Equations: The big idea: why relationships are the key to existence –From subatomic particles to human beings, interaction is what shapes reality, writes Carlo Rovelli for The Guardian. “A century after its birth, something remains deeply puzzling about quantum theory. Unlike its illustrious predecessor, Newton’s classical mechanics, it does not tell us how physical systems behave.”

NASA Is About to Crash Into an Asteroid to Save Future Earth. Here’s How to Watch.–The DART mission has been flying to its target since launching last year. On Monday night, it will connect, reports the New York Times.  “DART is set to collide with Dimorphos, a small asteroid that is the moon of a larger space rock, Didymos. While these two near-Earth objects pose no immediate threat to our world, NASA launched DART last year to test a technique that could one day be used for planetary defense.

Jupiter will be its brightest in 59 years Monday. Here’s how to see it for yourself--The giant planet can be seen from anywhere, including in light-polluted cities, reports The CBC.

The Ghosts of Antarctica Will Haunt the End of the World--As climate change threatens to upend the icy kingdom, we’re writing ghost stories in real time, reports CNET.

Target Venus not Mars for first crewed mission to another planet, experts say–Despite its ‘hellish’ environment, scientists argue there are good reasons to focus on ‘Earth’s sister’, reports The Guardian. “a group of experts are advocating that our other nearest neighbor should be the initial target for a crewed mission to another planet. There are notable downsides. Walking on the surface would be an unsurvivable experience, so astronauts would have to gaze down at the planet from the safety of their spacecraft in a flyby mission.

Climate Change Forces French Vineyards to Alter the Way They Make Wine –Growers change grape varieties and reshape the landscape to protect some of the world’s most valuable vineyards from warmer temperatures, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The ‘super-deep’ royal diamonds revealing Earth’s secrets, reports BBC Future. “The largest diamonds in the British Crown Jewels may be pieces of the ancient ocean floor, which have drifted down into the interior of our planet – then come back up again.”

How Stars and Plants Helped Create Earth’s Unique Continents–You might not expect that the arms of our galaxy and the emergence of plants could help form the continents, but new research suggest it might be possible, reports Discover magazine. “A new study published in Geology tried to get at what really helped get the continents started in the first place. Instead of looking at processes happening within the planet, they looked at how the solar system’s position in the galaxy might have influenced geologic processes on Earth.

Has a US intelligence office really just put a UFO on its logo? reports Creative Bloq–“UFO watchers are having a field day. The US National Intelligence Manager for Aviation (NIM-A) has – apparently – just revealed a new logo that appears to recognize what believers have been saying all along. 

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories include Astronomers discover traces of ‘super-supernovas’ that destroyed earliest stars to Where is the center of the Universe? and much more.

Where is the center of the Universe? Here, there, and everywhere –The Big Bang is commonly misunderstood, warping our understanding about the Universe’s size and shape, reports Big Think. “The Universe may be infinite, but even if it is not, the observable part of it is just an incomprehensibly tiny part of the whole. Any spot in the Universe can be considered the center, with equal validity. Indeed, you may be the center of the Universe.”

Physics World reports Earth is ‘well-hidden’ from extraterrestrial civilizations hunting for habitable planets.

Hubble Detects Protective Shield Defending a Pair of Dwarf Galaxies, reports NASA. For billions of years, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – have followed a perilous journey. “A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”

Astronomers discover traces of ‘super-supernovas’ that destroyed earliest stars, reports Robert Lea for Space.com. The team examined chemical traces of Population III stars using a 13.1-billion-year-old quasar.

This Astrophysicist Holds Star Data In The Palm Of Her Hand: “What if you could hold part of the galaxy in your hands? Or peer into an orb and see the birthplace of stars? By combining astrophysics and art, that’s exactly what Dr. Nia Imara does reports NPR Science Friday. She’s a visual artist and assistant professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, based in Santa Cruz, California.”

Contact with ET: How would humanity react? reports Leonard David for Space.com –“That knowledge would likely have far-reaching effects on our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. Researchers are looking into the potential psychological impacts of such an announcement, which some people might have a hard time accepting.”

Physicists Rewrite a Quantum Rule That Clashes With Our Universe, reports Charlie Wood Quanta.com. “The past and the future are tightly linked in conventional quantum mechanics. Perhaps too tightly. A tweak to the theory could let quantum possibilities increase as space expands. For 90 years, physicists have sought a reconciliation, a more fundamental description of reality that encompasses both quantum mechanics and gravity. But the quest has run up against thorny paradoxes.”

The Milky Way is ‘rippling’ like a pond, and scientists may finally know why, reports Brandon Specktor for Live Science. “Picture someone dropping a stone the size of 400 million suns into that water. The tranquility is shattered. Wave after wave of energy ripples across the galaxy’s surface, jostling and bouncing its stars in a chaotic dance that takes eons to calm. Astronomers suspect that something like this may have really happened — not just once, but several times over the past several billion years.”

China’s Mars rover finds hints of catastrophic floods–Radar images reveal clues to the history of a largely unexplored region, reports Nature. “China’s Zhurong rover has peered deep under the surface of Mars, finding evidence of two major floods that probably shaped the region the robot has been exploring since it landed in May 2021.”

Ground Telescopes Capture Jaw-Dropping Views of DART Asteroid Impact--Telescopes around the world honed in on the historic collision, revealing a surprisingly large and bright impact plume, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo. “NASA’s DART mission to ram a kinetic impactor into a harmless asteroid went perfectly yesterday, resulting in the desired destruction of the spacecraft. And as views from Earth showed, the effects of the impact weren’t subtle.”

Contact with ET: How would humanity react? reports Leonard David for Space.com –“That knowledge would likely have far-reaching effects on our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. Researchers are looking into the potential psychological impacts of such an announcement, which some people might have a hard time accepting.”

Is Our Universe a Fake? Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of “Closer to Truth,” a public television and multimedia program that features the world’s leading thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions, reports Space.com

Black Hole Discovery Helps to Explain Quantum Nature of the Cosmos–New insights from black hole research may elucidate the cosmological event horizon, reports Edgar Shaghoulian for Scientific American.

Image credit top of page: ESO Observatories, Chile

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Recent Galaxy Reports:

Unmistakable Signal of Alien Life to What Happens if China Makes First Contact?

Clues to Alien Life to A Galaxy 100 x Size of Milky Way 

Cracks in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity to Colossal Shock Wave Bigger than the Milky Way 

Monster Comet Arriving from the Oort Cloud to Black Hole Apocalypse 

Enigmas of Stephen Hawking’s Blackboard to Why the Universe and Life Exist 

Einstein’s Critics to NASA Theologians Prepare for Alien Contact

Mind-Bending New Multiverse Theory to Dark-Matter Asteroids of the Milky Way 

Mysterious Expanding Regions of Dark Matter to Are Black Holes Holograms

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

This weekend’s stories include JWST’s Data Is So Incredible That Even Those Who Built It Are Questioning Previous Science to to Do fundamental laws of nature apply to all objects, at all times and in all locations, all across the Universe? and much more.

JWST’s Data Is So Incredible That Even Those Who Built It Are Questioning Previous Science. “Over its few operational months, Webb has already offered an illuminating breadth of information — findings that have confirmed, confounded, and even contradicted existing theories about the cosmos.”

NASA Is About to Crash Into an Asteroid. Here’s How to Watch, reports Kenneth Change for The New York Times. The DART mission has been flying to its target since launching last year. On Monday night, it will connect.

A Universe Created from Nothing? A team of physicists says they have proven a 70-year-old quantum theory where something can be created out of nothing, reports The Debrief.

Astronomers detect hot gas bubble swirling around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, reports the ESO. “We think we’re looking at a hot bubble of gas zipping around Sagittarius A* on an orbit similar in size to that of the planet Mercury, but making a full loop in just around 70 minutes. This requires a mind blowing velocity of about 30% of the speed of light!” says Maciek Wielgus of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, who led the study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.”

SETI Researchers Have Begun Scanning the Backgrounds of Images for Alien Signals, reports Extreme Tech. ” Michael Garrett of the University of Manchester and Andrew Siemion from the Berkeley SETI Research Center are more interested in the “astronomical exotica” in the deep background of Breakthrough Listen observations.”

Hubble Unveils an Astronomical Explosion, reports NASA. “A shroud of thick gas and dust surrounds a bright young star in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 inspected a young stellar object, over 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, to help astronomers understand the earliest stages in the lives of massive stars. This object – which is known to astronomers as IRAS 05506+2414 – may be an example of an explosive event caused by the disruption of a massive young star system.”

Maarten Schmidt dies; Caltech astronomer changed our understanding of the cosmos, reports The Los Angeles Times. “Schmidt had only recently arrived at Caltech when he ascended in the observing cage of the great Palomar Mountain telescope to try to understand measurements radio astronomers were getting from a bizarre object that should have been a star but couldn’t possibly be.”

Diving Into The Biggest Ideas In The Universe, reports NPR Science Friday. Sean Carroll talks about  exploring where physics equations leave off and philosophical concepts begin, and the nebulous world in between.

Immortal Mystery Object–Every Brown Dwarf Ever Created Still Exists, reports Jackie Faherty, astrophysicist, Senior Scientist with the American Museum of Natural History for The Daily Galaxy. 

Neptune and rings shine in photos from new space telescope, reports Phys.org The pictures taken in July show not only Neptune’s thin rings, but its faint dust bands, never before observed in the infrared, as well as seven of its 14 known moons.

Why does nature obey laws at all?–asks Ethan Siegal for Big Think. “As far as we can tell, the same fundamental laws of nature apply to all objects, at all times and in all locations, all across the Universe. It’s easy to imagine a Universe where this isn’t the case: where laws or constants vary in time and space or where things are simply inconstant and inconsistent from moment to moment. Yet our Universe doesn’t appear to be this way, reflecting a relatively recent shift in our thoughts as human beings. Why is this so; why does nature obey laws at all?”

Dead stars in Milky Way’s companion galaxy cause mysterious gamma-ray cocoon, reports Robert Lea for Space.com. The Fermi bubbles are massive structures extending from the Milky Way, reaching 50,000 light-years in length.

How infinity threatens cosmology –The mind-boggling mystery of infinity, reports Peter Cameron for iAi. “Infinity is back. Or rather, it never (ever, ever…) went away. While mathematicians have a good sense of the infinite as a concept, cosmologists and physicists are finding it much more difficult to make sense of the infinite in nature, writes Peter Cameron.”

What is the largest known star in the universe? (What about the smallest?) asks Isobel Whitcomb for Live Science. “The big stars make our sun look puny.”

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Recent Galaxy Reports:

Unmistakable Signal of Alien Life to What Happens if China Makes First Contact?

Clues to Alien Life to A Galaxy 100 x Size of Milky Way 

Cracks in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity to Colossal Shock Wave Bigger than the Milky Way 

Monster Comet Arriving from the Oort Cloud to Black Hole Apocalypse 

Enigmas of Stephen Hawking’s Blackboard to Why the Universe and Life Exist 

Einstein’s Critics to NASA Theologians Prepare for Alien Contact

Mind-Bending New Multiverse Theory to Dark-Matter Asteroids of the Milky Way 

Mysterious Expanding Regions of Dark Matter to Are Black Holes Holograms

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories range from  to is the Metaverse Science Fiction or Reality to Seven Spectacular Lessons from Webb’s First Image to the Quantum Theory of Consciousness Put in Doubt, and much more.

Seven spectacular lessons from James Webb’s first deep-field image –Even with only 12.5 hours of exposure time, James Webb’s first deep-field image taught us lessons we’ve never realized before, reports Big Think. “Despite devoting just 1/50th of the time that went into Hubble’s deepest image of the Universe, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, JWST has revealed details we’ve never seen before.”

Webb Telescope Reveals a New Vision of an Ancient Universe, reports The New York Times, “The universe was born in darkness 13.8 billion years ago, and even after the first stars and galaxies blazed into existence a few hundred million years later, these too stayed dark. Their brilliant light, stretched by time and the expanding cosmos, dimmed into the infrared, rendering them — and other clues to our beginnings — inaccessible to every eye and instrument. Until now.

Organic molecules found in a Mars rock were probably not from Martian life, reports Phil Plait for SyFy Wire. “In the last days of 1984, a team of meteorite hunters spotted a dark rock in the ice of Antarctica. Fifteen centimeters long and tipping the scale at nearly 2 kilos, it’s a big space rock, and analysis of gases trapped in bubbles in the rock showed beyond doubt that it came from Mars. “

Why we shouldn’t fear the search for alien life–But rather than hope that the extraterrestrials have launched signals our way, let’s knock on their door — and get their attention, reports Seth Shostak for NBC “Think.” 

The Metaverse: Science Fiction or Reality? –We tend to overestimate a technology’s abilities in the near term, and massively underestimate what it can do in the long term., reports Quillette.com. “In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, he envisaged the metaverse (meta + universe) as a 3D virtual world that existed parallel to the real world, similar to a simulation where people can use avatars or virtual humans to interact with each other.”

Imaginary numbers are real –These odd values were long dismissed as bookkeeping. Now physicists are proving that they describe the hidden shape of nature, reports Aeon.com. “Though imaginary numbers have been integral to quantum theory since its very beginnings in the 1920s, scientists have only recently been able to find their physical signatures in experiments and empirically prove their necessity.”

Are cryptocurrencies a Ponzi scheme? Here’s the view from two sides, reports Interesting Engineering. One side predicts the crypto cycle will ‘collapse instantaneously and the value will be zero.’ Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have faced a $2 trillion crash over the last six months, and some experts fear worse is to come. As Forbes points out, China’s Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) has had its say on the current situation, calling bitcoin and cryptocurrency “the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history.”

Physicists Find The ‘Missing Link’ That Could Provide Quantum Internet Technology, reports Science Alert–“new research shows is that certain defects in the silicon – known as T centers – can act as photonic (or light-based) links between qubits.”

Quantum theory of consciousness put in doubt by underground experiment, reports Physics World. “Based on results from an experiment done under Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, the new work concludes that Roger Penrose’s and Stuart Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR) is “highly implausible” when based on the simplest type of gravity-related wavefunction collapse – although they point out that more complex collapse models leave some wiggle room.

If Octopuses are Really Smart, Should We Eat Them, asks Mind Matters–“Extraordinary recent science discoveries re octopus intelligence have created an ethical dilemma: Octopus arms (tentacles) are gourmet delicacies in Korea, Japan, and the Mediterranean countries and many poor people make a living providing them. Factory farming is of octopuses is slowly becoming practical. But should we do to them what we wouldn’t do to dogs?

Mysterious artifacts hint at ‘another realm’ of ancient China–Bronze Age artifacts found in China were burned to commune with ‘another realm,’ reports Live Science.

40 facts about Earth to deepen your knowledge of the planet. Want to know more about planet Earth? Here are some surprising facts about it, reports Interesting Engineering. For example, “The Earth is made mostly of just four elements to The vast majority of fresh water on Earth is frozen.”

Protecting planet Earth from asteroids–“The threat of asteroids is real,” NASA scientist Elena Adams said during a panel discussion June 28 on international cooperation for planetary defense. Adams is the systems engineer for the first planetary defense mission, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The DART mission is a collaboration among NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency.

Robot that can perceive its body has self-awareness, claim researchers –The team claims to have given a robot self-awareness of its location in physical space, but others are skeptical, reports New Scientist.

The Case for Popularizing Ocean Science –Why Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Carlie Wiener thinks octopuses and science fiction matter to ocean conservation, reports Nautilus.

A company aims to power the world for millions of years by digging the deepest holes ever. And it utilizes a nuclear fusion technology, reports Interesting Engineering. “An MIT spinout aims to use X-rays to melt rock and repurpose coal and gas plants into deep geothermal wells – effectively transforming dirty fossil-fuel plants into clean ones.”

Why spending time near water gives us a powerful mental health boost–We have long known that connecting with nature in green spaces is great for our mental health. Now fresh research is showing that time near water – by the coast, rivers and even fountains in the park – is even more restorative, reports New Scientist.

The unseen whale killer–Ocean noise pollution is terrible for sealife. Reducing it could be an easy win. “Over the past 50 years, increased shipping has contributed to a 30-fold increase in the low-frequency noise present along major shipping routes – Lucille Chapuis.”

Astrophysicist Paul Sutter explains the world’s seeming lack of trust in science, reports astrophysicist Paul Sutter for Ars Technica. “The public has a very strange relationship with science. Perennial issues of public mistrust like evolution and climate change have recently been joined by a range of conspiracy theories about the COVID pandemic—even the shape of the Earth has become an issue.”

James Webb’s first science images: before-and-after –Now that it’s fully commissioned, the James Webb Space Telescope begins its exploration of the Universe, reports Big Think.

Webb’s Record-Breaking First Image Shows Why We Build Telescopes –A new galaxy-packed picture from the James Webb Space Telescope offers a chance to rekindle our wonder about the universe, reports  Grant Tremblay for Scientific American.

The Explosive Ambitions of Kate the Chemist –At the lecture halls of the University of Texas or on TV, Kate Biberdorf is working to catalyze more people into careers in science, reports The New York Times. “The dream is Vegas.That is not a typical aspiration of someone who teaches chemistry to undergraduates. For Dr. Biberdorf — better known as Kate the Chemist — that dream is part of her goal to capture the fun of scientific exploration and to entice children, especially girls, to consider science as their life’s calling.”

Eight Superfoods That Could Future-Proof Our Diet –These climate-resilient crops could find more prominent placement on our plates in the next few decades, reports The Smithsonian.

When does the fetus become a “person”? The philosophy of gradualism provides a moral guide. Gradualism rejects the idea of a “bright line” in the abortion debate, reports Big Think.

Here’s what we know sex with Neanderthals was like, reports BBC Future. “Scientists know a surprising amount about the titillating episode in human history when our species got together, including whether we kissed and the nature of their sexual organs.”

Microparticles could be used to deliver “self-boosting” vaccines –With particles that release their payloads at different times, one injection could provide multiple vaccine doses, reports MIT News.

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Recent Planet Earth Reports:

NASA Zooms in on UFOs to Is Life the Result of Entropy?

James Webb Space Telescope’s Super-Secret Targets to Is Geometry a Language Only Humans Know?

Critics Horrified by World’s First Octopus Farm to Quest for Immortality

China’s One-of-a-Kind Cyber-Espionage to Multiverse of Universes All with Randomly Dialed Higgs Masses Virus from

Age of Dinosaurs Found in Human Genome to Is Earth’s Core a Weird State of Matter?

Why are NASA Spaceships Exploring Earth’s Deepest Oceans to Is Reality a Wavefunction? 

The Terrifying Message Lurking in Earth’s Ancient Record to Robots Evolving Autonomously

The Quantum Century to Events That Could Have Ended Humanity

The ‘Douglas Adams Epoch’ to Earth’s Earliest Life May Owe Existence to Viruses

The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

This week’s “Heard in the Milky Way” offers audio and video talks and interviews with leading astronomers and astrophysicists that range from Would Data from an Alien Intelligence be Lethal for Us to Neal Stephenson on  Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI and the Future of Humanity to Is Alien Life Weirder than We Think, and much more. This new weekly feature, curated by The Daily Galaxy editorial staff, takes you on a journey with stories that change our knowledge of Planet Earth, our Galaxy, and the vast Cosmos beyond.  Highly recommended for insomniacs.

“We are the Mind of the Cosmos”–Dartmouth Physicist Marcelo Gleiser Contemplates Humanity’s Central Role in the Cosmos

Alien life: What would constitute “smoking gun” evidence? –Multiple lines of evidence — physical, chemical, and biological — must converge for scientists to conclude that alien life has been found, reports this Big Think podcast.

The Unnerving Origin of Technosignatures with Astrophysicist Caleb Scharf.Would data from an Alien intelligence be lethal for us? Caleb Scharf joins John Michael Godier to discuss how our data, and data from other intelligent civilizations is alive, known as the dataome. 

Dark Energy May Not Be the Cosmological Constant as Theorized by Einstein

Is Alien ‘Life’ Weirder Than We Imagine: Who Is Out There?

Did all life begin from a single, ancient cell? asks Ethan Siegel for Big Think. Probably not. Even though we’re still investigating the origin of life, the evidence suggests that cells came much later.

Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity –“Neal Stephenson is a sci-fi writer (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and new book Termination Shock), former Chief Futurist at Magic Leap and first employee of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin”|

Image credit top of page: ESO Observatories, Chile.

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

“If the Perseverance rover finds evidence for microbes on Mars, our self-esteem will not be affected since it is obvious that we are more intelligent than they are,” wrote Harvard’s Avi Loeb in an email to The Daily Galaxy asking him for his thoughts about the impact of evidence of the existence of an advanced alien civilization. “But if the rover will bump into the wreckage of a spacecraft far more advanced than we ever produced, our ego will be challenged.”

“The illusion of superiority and unjustified hubris is deeply rooted in human nature. It led the Nazi regime during World War II to trigger the death of more than 70 million people or 3% of the world population in 1940, an order of magnitude more than the death toll caused so far by the COVID-19 virus. The miniscule genetic differences that motivated Nazism would appear laughable in the presence of a far more advanced civilization,” Loeb noted in his email.

The Extraterrestrial Signal -We May Not Want to Receive

Guided by Biological or Artificial Intelligence?

“It is often argued,” Loeb observed, “that the general public already believes that we are not alone in the universe and therefore the societal implications of finding technological signatures of another civilization will be mild. However, this argument is misguided. The response of humanity to such a discovery will greatly depend on the details of the findings: whether the equipment is autonomous or robotic, whether it is guided by biological or artificial intelligence, whether it represents a form of life that we had never witnessed, and finally — what is its intent?”.

Humans are currently in an AI revolution, which suggests something similar may be going on at other points in the universe, says Susan Schneider,  Director of the Center for the Future Mind, and William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professor of Philosophy of Mind, Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute, Florida Atlantic University, who has written about the intersection of SETI and AI. Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, she notes, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI.”

The Staggering Implications of Infinite Space (YouTube Episode)

Types of Contact

In his email, Loeb explained: Our historic migration out of Africa started about a hundred thousand years ago, but a future migration out of Earth may be triggered by a dialogue with a messenger from afar that does not resemble anything we had seen before. Protocols for contact with extraterrestrial intelligence have been mostly inspired in the past by the possibility of detecting radio signals from planets around distant stars. Given that the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is 4.4 light-years away, such signals would require a decade or more for a round-trip conversation. As a result, they do not bear consequences to our immediate future.

“But a different type of contact could deliver prompt implications,” Loeb notes. “It concerns physical objects from another civilization that are already here, waiting to be noticed like a package in our mailbox. The arriving hardware need not be brainless but could possess artificial intelligence (AI), seeking information about the habitable planets around the sun.

“An encounter of this type implies instant contact without a significant delay in communication time. The potential for an immediate engagement changes the response protocol relative to a delayed radio signal.”

The Extraterrestrial-Contact Paradox (YouTube Episode)

Early in 2021, the political news site, The Hill, reported that a video of an unidentified flying object was leaked by the Department of Defense, raising questions that are still unanswered. The video obtained by documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell was recorded by the Navy and shows a spherical object flying and darting above the water off the coast of San Diego for several minutes before descending into the ocean.   

“Why does science have to be boring?” Loeb asks, referring to the Navy video . “Here we are talking about a discovery that would change the history of humanity, so how dare we push it aside.

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research via Avi Loeb and The Hill

Image credit top of page: Shutterstock License

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

A big step in solving the mystery of how the very biggest black holes grow has been taken by researchers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. They identified a black hole containing about 200,000 times the mass of the Sun, buried in gas and dust in the dwarf galaxy Mrk 462. ”Future sensitive observations, using x-ray and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for example, will be able to find signatures of direct collapse black holes over a wider range of masses and growth rates, and help determine whether they form the seeds of the supermassive black holes we see today,” wrote Dartmouth University astrophysicist Ryan Hickox in an email to The Daily Galaxy,

“This is important because it could help address a major question in astrophysics: How did black holes get so big so early in the universe?” these supermassive black holes could have formed during the formation of its host galaxy, and we wanted to turn these theoretical predictions into observational predictions that could be seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.”

James Webb Space Telescope Detection of the First Galaxies

“The big breakthrough with JWST is that it will begin detecting the early galaxies that would host these direct collapse black holes. If the black holes are massive enough, and accreting material rapidly enough, we may even be able to use JWST to see signatures of these direct collapse black hole growing,” Hickox explained in his email, referring to primordial black holes of the early universe that formed before the first stars.

JWST will be sensitive to infrared light, and such light is much less affected by dust and gas than is the optical light typically used by ground-based telescopes. 

Mrk 462 contains only several hundred million stars. By contrast, our Milky Way is home to a few hundred billion stars. This is one of the first times that a heavily buried, or “obscured,” supermassive black hole has been found in a dwarf galaxy.

“We are Missing Something” -Dwarf Galaxies Contradict Cosmological Models

Notoriously Hard to Find

“This black hole in Mrk 462 is among the smallest of the supermassive, or monster, black holes,” said Jack Parker of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who led the study with colleague Ryan Hickox, also from Dartmouth. “Black holes like this are notoriously hard to find.”

In larger galaxies, astronomers often find black holes by looking for the rapid motions of stars in the centers of galaxies. However, dwarf galaxies are too small and dim for most current instruments to detect this. Another technique is to search for the signatures of growing black holes, such as gas being heated up to millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays as it falls towards a black hole.

The researchers in this study used Chandra to look at eight dwarf galaxies that had previously shown hints of black hole growth from optical data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Of those eight, only Mrk 462 showed the X-ray signature of a growing black hole.

The unusually large intensity of high energy X-rays compared to low energy X-rays, along with comparisons to data at other wavelengths, indicates that the Mrk 462 black hole is heavily obscured by gas.

“Deeply Compelling” –Weird Existence of Primordial Black Holes in the Early Universe

Problem of Buried Black Holes

“Because buried black holes are even harder to detect than exposed ones, finding this example might mean there are a lot more dwarf galaxies out there with similar black holes,” said Hickox. “This is important because it could help address a major question in astrophysics: How did black holes get so big so early in the universe?”

Previous research has shown that black holes can grow to a billion solar masses by the time the universe is less than a billion years old, a small fraction of its current age. One idea is that these huge objects were created when massive stars collapse to form black holes that weighed only about 100 times the mass of the Sun. Theoretical work, however, struggles to explain how they could pack on weight quickly enough to reach the sizes seen in the early universe.

An alternative explanation is that the early universe was seeded with black holes containing tens of thousands of solar masses when they were created — perhaps from the collapse of gigantic clouds of gas and dust.

Origin of Supermassive Black Holes? –Dark-Matter Centers of the Early Galaxies

Astonishing Growth of Black Hole Seeds 

A large fraction of dwarf galaxies with supermassive black holes favors the idea that small black hole seeds from the earliest generation of stars grew astonishingly quickly to form the billion solar mass objects in the early universe. A smaller fraction would tip the scales to favor the idea that black holes began life weighing tens of thousands of Suns.

These expectations apply because the conditions necessary for the direct collapse from a giant cloud to a medium-sized black hole should be rare, so it is not expected that a large fraction of dwarf galaxies would contain supermassive black holes. Stellar-mass black holes, on the other hand, are expected in every galaxy.

“We can’t make strong conclusions from one example, but this result should encourage much more extensive searches for buried black holes in dwarf galaxies,” said Parker. “We’re excited about what we might learn.”

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Ryan Hickox and Chandra X-Ray Observatory

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

With stories ranging from the quest for the origin of the universe to the strange cloud in the Outer Solar System to the 60-year extraterrestrial SETI silence of our Milky Way Galaxy, this week’s “Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

Quest for the Origin of the Universe — The astrophysicist Brian Keating in a podcast talk with host Steven Strogatz about chasing the universe’s greatest mysteries — and what it’s like to have a major discovery slip through his fingers.

Evolution Tells Us We Might Be the Only Intelligent Life in the Universe, reports Nicholas R. Longrich for Singularity Hub. “Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations—not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself—were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery…only far less likely.”

Scientists Plan Private Mission to Hunt for Earths around Alpha Centauri –A privately funded telescope called Toliman will seek habitable worlds in our nearest neighboring star system, potentially sparking a new wave of exoplanetary exploration, reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for Scientific American

Decolonizing the cosmos –-Instead of treating Mars and the Moon as sites of conquest and settlement, we need a radical new ethics of space exploration, reports Aeon.

Odd Martian meteorites traced back to largest volcanic structure in the solar system –The rocks were most likely ejected from Tooting crater more than a million years ago and are now helping scientists piece together the red planet’s turbulent past, reports Robin George Andrews.

The mysteries of the icy cloud around our Solar System, reports BBC Future –“In the coldest, darkest reaches of our Solar System – a region still to be visited by human spacecraft – is a strange, frigid cloud that contains material from other stars.”

“The Biological Cosmos”–Complex Carbon Molecules Form Spontaneously in Space, reports The Daily Galaxy. “A new discovery shows complex carbon molecules can form and survive in the harsh environment of interstellar space. “In some ways, life can be thought of as the ultimate in chemical complexity,” said Martin Cordiner of the Catholic University of America.

We’re Gonna Need Another Space Telescope –And this one is going to search for other Earths, around other suns.” The decadal survey, organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, recommends that NASA establish a program to produce several more major space-based observatories in the coming decades, and that the next one should look for exoplanets—planets beyond our solar system—resembling this little chunk of rock that we call home.”

“Milky Way’s Sweet Spot” –Earth at Center of Galactic Habitable Zone –““The GHZ yields an age distribution for the complex life that may inhabit our Galaxy. We found that 75% of the stars in the GHZ are older than the Sun,” reports The Daily Galaxy.

Why haven’t we heard from aliens? There is a reason for the silence –The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been going on for 60 years without success. Given the hurdles to interstellar communication, that’s just a blink of an eye, reports New Scientist.

Creatures of the dawn: How radioactivity unlocked deep time–“When scientists discovered the energy embedded within atoms, it transformed how we think about the long-term future of humanity, writes the historian Thomas Moynihan.”

Why does time only move forwards? Possibly just because we’re ignorant –The one-way flow of time is one of the great mysteries of physics. It might be that we see causes and effects just because our information about reality is incomplete, reports New Scientist.

Distant rocky planets may have exotic chemical makeups that don’t resemble Earth’s, reports ScienceNews –“A smattering of heavy elements sprinkled on 23 white dwarf stars suggests that most of the rocky planets that once orbited the stars had unusual chemical makeups, researchers report. The elements, presumably debris from busted-up worlds, provide a possible peek at the planets’ mantles, the region between their crust and core. ‘These planets could be just utterly alien to what we’re used to thinking of.”

Why is quantum theory so strange? The weirdness could be in our heads –Quantum theory is peerless at explaining reality, but assaults our intuitions of how reality should be. It seems likely the fault lies with our intuitions, reports New Scientist.

How Scientists Could Tell the World if They Find Alien Life –Sparked by major advances in their field, astrobiologists are grappling with how best to discuss possible breakthrough discoveries with the public, reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for Scientific American.

Laws of Logic Lead to New Restrictions on the Big Bang, reports Charlie Wood for Quanta. –Physicists are translating commonsense principles into strict mathematical constraints on how our universe must have behaved at the beginning of time.

NASA’s DART Mission Could Help Cancel an Asteroid Apocalypse –Our planet is vulnerable to thousands of “city-killer” space rocks. If—when—one is found on a collision course with Earth, will we be ready to deflect it? reports Robin George Andrews for Scientific American.

Not Science Fiction: Electric Propulsion Comes of Age With Psyche Mission to an Asteroid, reports SciTechDaily–An operating electric Hall thruster will propel NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is set to launch in August 2022 and travel to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

‘Wind Rider’ Could Reach Saturn in Six Weeks reports Alex Tolley for Centauri Dreams “Can you imagine the science we could do if we had the capability of sending a probe to Jupiter with travel time of less than a month? How about Neptune in 18 weeks?”

Why is the universe just right for life? Blame the multiverse –Physicists have long speculated why our universe seems “just right” for life. The most complex answer might be the simplest – that every other universe also exists, reports New Scientist. 

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“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

Abigail Allwood’s Hunt for Alien Fossils on Mars Has Begun, reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo –When the NASA Mars rover Perseverance was dramatically airlifted through the Red Planet’s atmosphere and touched down on the iron-rich soil, geologist and astrobiologist Abigail Allwood was at home on Earth, watching the events unfold via livestream like the rest of us. Speaking over the phone the next day, her thought process was probably similar to yours: “Amazing—talk about incredible,” she said. “Excitement yesterday about landing and today about the landing site.” But in the months to come, Allwood will have a unique charge, one that years of terrestrial study have prepared her for: seeking out life on Mars.

The Secret Life of a Coronavirus –An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don’t quite know what to make of it, reports Carl Zimmer for the New York Times. ”
Nature was expanding as billions of people were retreating from the Covid-19 pandemic. The change was so swift, so striking that scientists needed a new name for it: the anthropause.”

The six numbers that define the entire Universe, reports BBC Science Focus –In this edited extract from The Little Book of Cosmology, physicist Prof Lyman Page explains how our model of the Universe relies on just six parameters.”The first three parameters tell us about the contents of the Universe. We describe them as fractions of a total matter and energy budget, like the components of a pie chart. The first parameter describes the amount of normal matter, or atoms, in the Universe, and it says that atoms account for just 5 per cent of the Universe. The second parameter describes dark matter, some type of new fundamental particle that we do not yet understand, which accounts for 25 per cent of the Universe.”

‘Space hurricane’ observed above the North Pole –The space hurricane was detected in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and ‘rained electrons’ over the North Pole for nearly eight hours, reports Science Focus.

Earth’s Hidden ‘Innermost-Inner’ Core –“May Reveal an Unknown, Dramatic Event in the Planet’s History”, reports The Daily Galaxy. “We found evidence that may indicate a change in the structure of iron, which suggests perhaps two separate cooling events in Earth’s history,” said Joanne Stephenson, a researcher from The Australian National University (ANU), about the confirmation of the existence of the Earth’s “innermost inner core” that may point to an unknown, dramatic event in the Earth’s history.

“The Methuselah Dilemma” — Atacama Cosmology Telescope Resolves True Age of Our Universe, reports The Daily Galaxy. In 2013, the Hubble Space Telescope found the birth certificate of oldest known star in the universe, cataloged as HD 140283, aptly named “methuselah”. The star, located in the constellation Libra, which is at the very first stages of expanding into a red giant, could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe’s calculated age of about 13.8 billion years, creating what we commonly call a dilemma.

The Moon Has a Comet-Like Tail. Every Month It Shoots a Beam Around Earth, reports Robin George Andrews for The New York Times –“It almost seems like a magical thing,” said one of the astronomers involved in studying the lunar phenomenon.

Surface Bubbles Could Have Evolved into Earth’s First Cells –Artificial “protocells” suggest the complex biochemical mechanisms used by living cells could have originated in simple bubbles, reports Inside Science.

How our abuse of nature makes pandemics like covid-19 more likely –From habitat degradation to squalid animal treatment, our part in allowing “zoonotic” diseases like covid-19 to leap into humans is becoming ever clearer, reports New Scientist.

Neanderthals Listened to the World Much Like Us –A reconstructed Neanderthal ear adds a new piece to the puzzle of whether the early humans could speak, reports The New York Times.

One of the largest ecosystems on Earth lives beneath the seafloor and eats radiation byproducts, reports ZME Science.

Butterflies are vanishing out West. Scientists say climate change is to blame. –The rate of decline is “calamitous,” one scientist said, and has implications for crops and the environment, reports The Washington Post.

India’s revolutionary sustainable roads –From lower carbon emissions to fewer potholes, there are a number of benefits to building a layer of plastic into roads, reports Chermaine Lee for BBC Future

Did Woolly Mammoths Overlap With First Humans in New England? asks Amy Olson for Dartmouth News/
Researchers trace the age of a Mount Holly mammoth rib fragment from Mount Holly, Vt. –“It has long been thought that megafauna and humans in New England did not overlap in time and space and that it was probably ultimately environmental change that led to the extinction of these animals in the region, but our research provides some of the first evidence that they may have actually co-existed,” says co-author Nathaniel Kitchel.

Strange Earthquakes in Utah Reveal Volcanic Activity Hidden Below The Desert, reports ScienceAlert –It might not look like it, but the arid expanses of Utah conceal an ancient volcanic complex, and this hidden underground system is still active far below the desert’s surface, scientists say.

Largest Glowing Shark Species Discovered Near New Zealand –It’s the biggest bioluminescent vertebrate found on land or sea, so far, reports The New York Times.

The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

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Cosmologists speculate based on hints of twisted light that offer clues to an exotic substance called “quintessence”that could be the  unknown force accelerating the expansion of the universe, with implications not only for cosmology, but also for fundamental physics — the standard model of particle physics does not predict its existence.  This hypothetical form of dark energy –a relative of the Higgs Field that permeates the cosmos– could be an exotic unknown form of dark energy distinct  from any form of or normal matter, radiation, or even dark matter. 

“A Fifth Force–Quintessence Field?”

“They suggest,” reports Davide Castelvecchi in Nature, “that the twisting of light, which they identified in data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) the glow of “relic radiation” collected by the Planck space telescope, and the acceleration of the Universe could be produced by a cosmic ‘quintessence’, an exotic substance that pervades the cosmos — “a quintessence field, after the fifth element, or ether — the name that ancient Greek philosophers gave to an invisible material thought to fill all the empty space in the universe– a ‘fifth’ force beyond the four already known – gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. However, researchers think this fifth force may be ‘screened’ or ‘hidden’ for large objects like planets or weights on Earth, making it difficult to detect.”

“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten,  one of the world’s leading theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. who has been compared to Newton and Einstein, about the unknown force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate– a ‘fifth’ force that acts on matter. 

Persistence of Dark Energy

“The relevant fact about dark energy isn’t its pressure,” says Caltech physicist Sean Carroll in his Preposterous Universe blog, “is it’s that it’s persistent. It doesn’t dilute away as the universe expands. And this is even a fact that can be explained, by saying that dark energy isn’t a collection of particles growing less dense as space expands, but instead is (according to our simplest and best models) a feature of space itself. The amount of dark energy is constant throughout both space and time: about one hundred-millionth of an erg per cubic centimeter. It doesn’t dilute away, even as space expands.”

Enter Dynamic Quintessence

This new, controversial quintessence theory suggests that this dark energy might be getting stronger and denser, leading to a future in which atoms are torn asunder and time ends. In stark contrast, the accepted theory described above by Sean Carroll, is that dark energy is an intrinsic property of space, which would mean that the amount of dark energy per unit volume of space is fixed as a ‘cosmological constant’.  In other words, the density of dark energy is constant, which means the curvature of spacetime is constant, which means that the universe expands at a fixed rate.

“Unknown Physics” –Darkest Mystery of the Cosmos Deepens

Quintessence, which posits that the vast majority of the energy in the universe is in the form of a hitherto undiscovered substance, reports Physics World, has the striking physical characteristic that it causes the expansion of the universe to speed up. Most forms of energy, such as matter or radiation, cause the expansion to slow down due to the attractive force of gravity. For quintessence, however, the gravitational force is repulsive, and this causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

Strange New Energy Field Switches On

“Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation — a strange new energy field switched on,” writes Dennis Overbye for New York Times Science. “That energy suffused space with a kind of cosmic antigravity, delivering a not-so-gentle boost to the expansion of the universe.”

Then, after another 100,000 years or so, observes Overbye, the new field simply switched off, leaving no trace other than a speeded-up universe, according to a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University led by Adam Riess, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Nobel laureate who is an expert in the Hubble constant. In a bold and speculative leap into the past, the team has posited the existence of this field to explain a baffling astronomical puzzle: the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should be.

Hubble Tension

“A growing mystery about the universe, known as the ‘Hubble Tension,’ is that it appears to be expanding much faster now than predicted even with our latest understanding of its initial conditions and contents,” says Riess. Their research is the first to provide a possible explanation—”that the early universe received an infusion of dark energy soon after the Big Bang giving it a boost—which better matches all observations. This theory shows how this ‘tension’ may actually be revealing a new feature of the universe. It also makes predictions which can be tested so that more measurements should tell us if it is correct.”

“We now know that the accelerated expansion of the universe did not start until sometime in the last 10 billion years,” says Robert Caldwell, a cosmologist at Dartmouth College, one of the first researchers to propose the existence of quintessence as dark energy.

“Unknown Dark Energy”– A Fifth Force or New Form of Matter?

“Such a discovery would require a major revision of current theories,” writes Castelvecchi. “But physicists warn that the evidence is tentative, failing to  meet the ‘5 sigma’ threshold used to determine whether a signal is a discovery.” 

“We Have Zero Idea about How the Universe is Going to End”

“If dark energy is a quintessence, its push on the expansion could slowly wither or disappear, or could even reverse to become an attractive force, causing the Universe to collapse into a ‘big crunch’, says Sean Carrol. “We’re back to a situation where we have zero idea about how the universe is going to end.”

The first direct evidence that an unknown force was pushing cosmic expansion to accelerate emerged in 1998, from two separate surveys of supernovae. A host of other studies have since confirmed the presence of this force, dubbed dark energy, but have provided precious little information about its nature.

“Dark energy  is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed,” said Noble Prize winning physicist Adam Riess, who was not part of the current study, in an interview with The Atlantic. “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”

“Quintessence is Dynamic, Time-Evolving, and Spatially Dependent”

Unlike the cosmological constant, quintessence “is a tangible medium and it has fluctuations of its own”, says Robert Caldwell, a cosmologist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who was one of the first researchers to propose the material’s existence in a 1998 paper by Robert R. Caldwell, Rahul Dave and Noble Prize laureate Paul Steinhardt. “It differs from the cosmological constant explanation of dark energy,” says Caldwell, “in that it is dynamic, and changes over time. Quintessence can be either attractive or repulsive depending on the ratio of its kinetic and potential energy, becoming  repulsive about ten billion years ago, about 3.5 billion years after the Big Bang.”

“Quintessence,” says Caldwell, “is a dynamic, time-evolving, and spatially dependent form of energy with negative pressure sufficient to drive the accelerating expansion. Whereas the cosmological constant is a very specific form of energy vacuum energy quintessence encompasses a wide class of possibilities.”

Quintessence could have properties that are intermediate between those of matter and of a cosmological constant, Caldwell adds. “As the universe expands, a cosmological constant would maintain a constant density, whereas the density of quintessence would decrease — although not as fast as the density of matter, which drops as galaxies spread out.”

In 1998, reports Castelvecchi, “Carroll proposed an experimental test for quintessence, based on the prediction that it alters how light propagates in space. A group led by the theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski, now at Johns Hopkins University, then calculated how this effect could be measured in the CMB, the primordial radiation often described as the afterglow of the Big Bang. The researchers suggested that it would be possible to detect signs of quintessence by looking at maps of polarized light across the CMB. Light is polarized when its electric field ‘wiggles’ in a particular direction, rather than in a random one. The theory says that quintessence twists the direction in which the polarization points, in a way that could be detected by looking at polarization across the whole sky.”

Fast forward  to today, two cosmologists — Yuto Minami at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)  and Eiichiro Komatsu at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics  — have identified that CMB signature in data from the European Space Agency’s Planck mission to map tiny variations in the CMB’s temperature across the sky, and measure the radiation’s polarization, which concluded in 2013.

Minami and Komatsu were able to detect signs of quintessence using a new technique that they reported in 2019. Their results, reports Nature,  “differ from those of other groups, which have looked at CMB polarization maps — including Planck’s — and found no twist,” says physicist Suzanne Staggs at Princeton University in New Jersey, whose team measures CMB radiation using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. Staggs’s team plans to try out Minami and Komatsu’s technique on ACT data. “We are interested in exploring it,” she says.

“If it’s Real, it’s Big”

The paper is “quite a nice analysis”, but noise in the Planck signals could be a complicating factor, says George Efstathiou, a leading Planck cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. “If it were real, it’s big,” says Carroll. But he notes that the statistical significance — only 2.5 sigma — of the result is weak, and says that such results often fade away on further scrutiny.

“The rock that they’re standing on is the cosmological constant. If you change that rock, that could have an effect on everything else,” says Caldwell.

 “I think we’ll probably want to be going through all that very carefully before getting too worked up,” says Kamionkowski. He adds that “the existence of quintessence would have implications not only for cosmology but also for fundamental physics: the standard model of particle physics does not predict any kind of quintessence.”

Other efforts, reports Nature, are in the works to map the CMB polarization with greater accuracy than ever before, and will put a stringent test on quintessence. These projects include the Simons Observatory, another CMB experiment now being set up in the Atacama Desert, and a future Japanese-led space probe called LiteBIRD. 

To end on more speculative, fun note, Caleb Scharf at Columbia University takes a hint from Albert Einstein who was fond of saying that “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” Perhaps some hyper-advanced extraterrestrial life  five billion years ago figured out how to switch on the Higgs field. Scharf, who works in the fields of exoplanetary science and astrobiology, proposes in Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? that part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence or is perhaps even life itself. Perhaps, Scharf concludes, “hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence. In other words, life might not just be in the equations. It might be the equations.”

“Coming Attractions” –Alien Intelligence as Physics

Impossible? Far fetched? Perhaps not, said Princeton’s  great quantum physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, who, near the end of his life, suggested that when we finally unravel the secret of the universe, of human existence, we will be astounded by its simplicity.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via The New York Times, Nautil.us, Preposterous Blog and Nature

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Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

The grim fate that could be ‘worse than extinction’ –What would it take for a global totalitarian government to rise to power indefinitely? This nightmare scenario may be closer than first appears, reports BBC Future.

Game Theory Focuses the Hunt for Alien Civilizations Onto Just One Star –Our galaxy contains billions of exoplanets. Now game theory has narrowed the search for ones that might host intelligent life and be worth contacting to a single star in the constellation of Taurus, reports Discover.

“Ten One-Billionths of Cosmic History” –Past Homo Species Could Not Survive Intense Climate Change

“Who Knows What Else is Out There” –Glow Shields Earth’s ‘Last Creature’ from Deadly Radiation

Are aliens hiding in plain sight? Several missions this year are seeking out life on the red planet. But would we recognize extraterrestrials if we found them? asks The Guardian.

‘Super antigens’ tied to mysterious COVID-19 syndrome in children –A serious pediatric illness has been linked to a similar condition in adults. Coronavirus inhabiting the gut could be the cause—and it may explain long-lasting symptoms, too., reports National Geographic.

We’ve built a fourth dimension of space and we’re about to look inside –We only ever experience three spatial dimensions, but quantum lab experiments suggest a whole new side to reality – weird particle apparitions included, reports New Scientist.

The Milky Way is Eating One of Its Own–The globular cluster M92 is a gorgeous example of its kind. A roughly spherical ball of hundreds of thousands of stars held together by their mutual gravity, it’s one of about 160 such that orbit the Milky Way. Well, for now. It turns out our galaxy is eating it, reports Phil Plait for SyFy.

The strange story of 2020 SO: How an asteroid turned into rocket junk and the NASA scientist who figured it out, reports Space.com

The African lake with explosive power –In central Africa is a deep lake that has a dangerous propensity to explode – but tapping it as a source of energy could help avert disaster. Lake Kivu is one of Africa’s strangest bodies of water. An unusual set of properties make it an intriguing subject for scientists, as well as a potential source of both peril and prosperity for the millions of people living nearby., reports BBC Future.

The Pandemic’s Holy Grail: The Race for a Super-Antibody Against the Coronavirus –A network of scientists is chasing the pandemic’s holy grail: an antibody that protects against not just the virus, but also related pathogens that may threaten humans, reports The New York Times.

The Third Coronavirus Surge Has Arrived--This week’s COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations make clear that the U.S. is once again sinking deeper into the pandemic, reports The Atlantic.

With Covid-19 Under Control, China’s Economy Surges Ahead –Exports jumped and local governments engaged in a binge of debt-fueled construction projects. Even consumer spending is finally recovering, reports The New York Times.

Strange sounds, followed by mysterious illnesses, have affected U.S. diplomats in Cuba, China and now Russia, raising speculation of a foreign attack, reports The New York Times.

It’s the End of the World … Somewhere –Aliens Facing Apocalypse Would be Easier to Find, reports Caleb Scharf for Scientific American.

Alaska’s new climate threat: tsunamis linked to melting permafrost –-Scientists are warning of a link between rapid warming and landslides that could threaten towns and tourist attractions, reports The Guardian.

When Did We Become Fully Human? What Fossils and DNA Tell Us About the Evolution of Modern Intelligence, reports Singularity Hub,

The Moon’s farside unveiled –When Luna 3 ventured around the Moon in 1959, it sent back images that shattered our view of the hidden hemisphere, reports Astronomy.com

‘I Could Show You Stuff You Wouldn’t Believe:’ Gravediggers Speak Out About Horrifying Conditions –Gravediggers employed by one of the country’s largest cemetery and funeral home corporations, StoneMor, are battling for their first union contract—amid a COVID-related increase in burials, reports Motherboard Science.

The Unsuccessful WWII Plot to Fight the Japanese With Radioactive Foxes –An outlandish idea codenamed ‘Operation Fantasia’ aimed to demoralize the Axis power by mimicking legendary spirits, reports The Smithsonian.

How to Build a Spacecraft to Save the World –“The goal of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is to slam the [spacecraft] into a small asteroid orbiting a larger asteroid 7 million miles from Earth. …It should be able to change the asteroid’s orbit just enough to be detectable from Earth, demonstrating that this kind of strike could nudge an oncoming threat out of Earth’s way. Beyond that, everything is just an educated guess, which is exactly why NASA needs to punch an asteroid with a robot.” reports Wired.

This is what “war in space” probably would look like in the near future –“Any conflict in space will be much slower and more deliberate.” reports Ars Technica.

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Planet Earth Report –“Herod’s Flu to What Life Will Look Like in 2022”

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“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

Meet Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, SpaceX’s First NASA Astronauts –They’re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut, reports The New York Times. “I wanted to make sure everyone at SpaceX understood and knew Bob and Doug as astronauts, as test pilots — badass — but also as dads and husbands,” said Gwynne Shotwell, president of the company that built the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will carry the men to orbit, at a news conference this month. “I wanted to bring some humanity to this very deeply technical effort as well.”

Twitter fact-checks a misleading Trump tweet for the first time, reports MIT Technology Review,The news: Twitter added a fact-checking label to two tweets from US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Tuesday. The tweets from @realDonaldTrump (the president’s popular personal account that also serves as his main social -media presence) claimed that mail-in voting would be “substantially fraudulent” and lead to a “Rigged Election.” It is the first time that Twitter has labeled tweets from his account in this way.

Asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit just right for maximum damage, reports New Scientist. When an asteroid hits a planet, the resulting crater is highly dependent on the angle of the impact. Gareth Collins at Imperial College London in the UK and his colleagues compared a set of simulations with geological data gathered at Chicxulub crater to reconstruct that impact.

What Having Neaderthal DNA Mean for Modern People, reports Inverse.com. “I think they were a lot like us.” While anthropologists long speculated that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals mated, this interbreeding wasn’t confirmed until May 2010, after the Neanderthal genome was sequenced and compared to modern humans.

The Mysterious Anomaly Weakening Earth’s Magnetic Field Seems to Be Splitting, reports Science Alerts. New satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA) reveal that the mysterious anomaly weakening Earth’s magnetic field continues to evolve, with the most recent observations showing we could soon be dealing with more than one of these strange phenomena.

Unexplained Phenomena Keep Suggesting the Universe Isn’t What We Thought –Two unrelated studies recently raised the same possibility: the laws of physics might not apply everywhere, which, if true, would upend an idea underpinning centuries of science, reports Becky Ferreira for Motherboard/Vice.“The cosmological principle is, in more tangible terms: Is the universe playing fair with us?” explained Robert Caldwell, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, in a call. “Are the laws of physics the same everywhere? Or is there a preferred location in the universe?”

Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes, reports Charlie Wood for Quanta. Collider physicists report that several measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive.

Space X Prepares to Launch Two NASA Astronauts –-First Crewed Launch Since 2011, reports The New York Times.. On Wednesday at 4:33 p.m. Eastern time, SpaceX plans to launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. If successful, it would be the first crewed spacecraft launch in the United States since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.

Spreading the Word on a Possible Alzheimer’s Treatment –Neuroscientists could use brain waves to spur immune cells into action against the disease — but the process is almost too fantastic to believe reports Quanta.com.

Feds Arrest Member of Fin7, Group Tied to a Billion Dollars Worth of Hacks –Victims of the group included Chipotle, Whole Foods, and Trump Hotels reports Vice.

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“The double asteroid was hurtling by the Earth at more than 70 000 km/h, making observing it with the Very Large Telescope (VLT ) challenging,” said Diego Parraguez, who was piloting the European Southern Observatory telescope. He had to use all his expertise to lock on to the fast asteroid and capture it with SPHERE, one of the very few instruments in the world capable of obtaining images sharp enough to distinguish the two components of the asteroid, which are separated by around 2.6 km.

Stephen Hawking believed that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter, which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot “bubbles” of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark “scars” on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks.

Through Earth’s history such collisions occur, on the average every one million year. If this figure is correct, it would mean that intelligent life on Earth has developed only because of the lucky chance that there have been no major collisions in the last 70 million years. Other planets in the galaxy, Hawking believes, on which life has developed, may not have had a long enough collision free period to evolve intelligent beings.

Dark-Matter Asteroids  – “Trillions of Trillions May Exist in the Milky Way”

“The threat of the Earth being hit by an asteroid is increasingly being accepted as the single greatest natural disaster hazard faced by humanity,” according to Nick Bailey of the University of Southampton’s School of Engineering Sciences team, who has developed a threat identifying program.

Back to the present: The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) coordinated a cross-organizational observing campaign of the asteroid 1999 KW4 as it flew by Earth, reaching a minimum distance of 5.2 million km on 25 May 2019. 1999 KW4 is about 1.3 km wide, and does not pose any risk to Earth. Since its orbit is well known, scientists were able to predict this fly-by and prepare the observing campaign.

SPHERE was designed to observe exoplanets; its state-of-the-art adaptive optics (AO) system corrects for the turbulence of the atmosphere, delivering images as sharp as if the telescope were in space. It is also equipped with coronagraphs to dim the glare of bright stars, exposing faint orbiting exoplanets.

“Undetected” –NASA Discovers Hiroshima-Size 2018 Asteroid Explosion Above the Bering Sea

Taking a break from its usual night job hunting exoplanets, SPHERE data helped astronomers characterize the double asteroid. In particular, it is now possible to measure whether the smaller satellite has the same composition as the larger object.

“These data, combined with all those that are obtained on other telescopes through the IAWN campaign, will be essential for evaluating effective deflection strategies in the event that an asteroid was found to be on a collision course with Earth,” explained ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut. “In the worst possible case, this knowledge is also essential to predict how an asteroid could interact with the atmosphere and Earth’s surface, allowing us to mitigate damage in the event of a collision.”

“Incoming NEO” –Will a Massive Asteroid Prove Indestructible?

Bin Yang, VLT astronomer, declared “When we saw the satellite in the AO-corrected images, we were extremely thrilled. At that moment, we felt that all the pain, all the efforts were worth it.” Mathias Jones, another VLT astronomer involved in these observations, elaborated on the difficulties. “During the observations the atmospheric conditions were a bit unstable. In addition, the asteroid was relatively faint and moving very fast in the sky, making these observations particularly challenging, and causing the AO system to crash several times. It was great to see our hard work pay off despite the difficulties!”

While 1999 KW4 is not an impact threat, it bears a striking resemblance to another binary asteroid system called Didymos which could pose a threat to Earth sometime in the distant future.

“Impact” -The Asteroid That Towered a Mile Above the Cruising Altitude of a 747

Didymos and its companion called “Didymoon” are the target of a future pioneering planetary defence experiment. NASA’s DART spacecraft will impact Didymoon in an attempt to change its orbit around its larger twin, in a test of the feasibility of deflecting asteroids. After the impact, ESA’s Hera mission will survey the Didymos asteroids in 2026 to gather key information, including Didymoon’s mass, its surface properties and the shape of the DART crater.

The success of such missions depends on collaborations between organizations, and tracking Near-Earth Objects is a major focus for the collaboration between ESO and ESA. This cooperative effort has been ongoing since their first successful tracking of a potentially hazardous NEO in early 2014.

“We are delighted to be playing a role in keeping Earth safe from asteroids,” said Xavier Barcons, ESO’s Director General. “As well as employing the sophisticated capabilities of the VLT, we are working with ESA to create prototypes for a large network to take asteroid detection, tracking and characterization to the next level.”

This recent close encounter with 1999 KW4 comes just a month before Asteroid Day, an official United Nations day of education and awareness about asteroids, to be celebrated on 30 June. Events will be held on five continents, and ESO will be among the major astronomical organizations taking part. The ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre will host a range of activities on the theme of asteroids on the day, and members of the public are invited to join in the celebrations.

The Daily Galaxy, Jake Burba via ESO

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Sixty-five years and 35 films later, Godzilla is back and bigger than ever in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Godzilla first made his debut in 1954. At inception, he was a 50-meter tall metaphor for wanton destruction, particularly U.S. hydrogen-bomb testing in the Marshall Islands, which, in the film, destroyed Godzilla’s deep-sea ecosystem.

If one accepts that Godzilla is a ceratosaurid dinosaur from the Jurassic period, as argued in the film series, then he represents a sensational example of evolutionary stability over a span of at least 145 million years. Yet Godzilla has doubled in size since 1954, far surpassing the rate of evolution observed in 2,500 natural organisms today.

Today, at 119.8 meters tall, Godzilla battles it out for supremacy against three god-sized monsters, all with the future of humanity at stake. Film critics and fans have long observed that Godzilla has been getting larger over time, as buildings become taller. In fact, Godzilla has evolved 30 times faster than other organisms on Earth, according to a team of Dartmouth scientists whose findings were published in Science.

Godzilla size chart, 1954 – 2019. Credit: Artwork created by Noger Chen.

The researchers propose that Godzilla has been “evolving in response to a spike in humanity’s collective anxiety.” They used U.S. military spending as a proxy for our collective anxiety and found a strong correlation between it and Godzilla’s body size between 1954 and 2019. If Godzilla is the embodiment of our anxiety, they argued, then our collective anxiety appears to be spiking as it did during the nuclear age of the 1950s.

“Godzilla’s body was consistent for some 150 million years until 1954, suggesting a sudden and strong selective pressure on body size during the past 65 years,” says co-author Nathaniel J. Dominy, the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology and a professor of the ecology, evolution, ecosystems and society graduate program at Dartmouth. Dominy co-authored the study with Ryan Calsbeek, an associate professor of biological sciences and of the ecology, evolution, ecosystems and society graduate program at Dartmouth.

“Anthropocene Nuclear Legacy” –Melting Glaciers Could Unleash Radioactive Fallout

The co-authors add that Godzilla endures as a cultural icon because it is a “fable with a lesson for our times.”

Bivariate plot of the 9 size categories of Godzilla in relation to U.S. military spending. and Why Godzilla is the perfect monster for our age of environmental destruction. (Nathaniel J. Dominy)

The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot via Dartmouth College

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There’s a crisis brewing in the cosmos. Measurements over the past few years of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with the increasingly controversial “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. Astronomers think that a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble Constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding, might be revealing something new and astounding about the universe.

The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and its present rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, gives the time elapsed since the Big Bang. However, the two best methods used to measure the Hubble constant do not agree, suggesting our understanding of the structure and history of the universe – called the ‘standard cosmological model’ – may be wrong.

There was, writes Dennis Overbye in New York Times Science, a disturbance in the Force: “Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation — a strange new energy field switched on. That energy suffused space with a kind of cosmic antigravity, delivering a not-so-gentle boost to the expansion of the universe.

“Then, after another 100,000 years or so, the new field simply winked off, leaving no trace other than a speeded-up universe.”

This reports Overbye, is the strange-sounding story being promulgated by a handful of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In a bold and speculative leap into the past, the team has posited the existence of this field to explain an astronomical puzzle: the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should be.”

Adding to the current scrum, there already is a force field — called dark energy — making the universe expand faster. A new, controversial report suggests that this dark energy might be getting stronger and denser, leading to a future in which atoms are ripped apart and time ends. Amen.

Dark Energy –“New Exotic Matter or ET Force Field?”

The concept of dark energy emerging in phases hints at a link to, or between, two mysterious episodes in the history of the universe, with the first episode occurring when the universe was less than at Planck scale a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. At that moment, a fraction of a trillionth of a second of the Big Bang, this event — named “inflation” by the cosmologist Alan Guth, of M.I.T. — smoothed and flattened the initial chaos into the universe observed today.

But, Overbye observes: “Nobody knows what drove inflation.”

The second episode is unfolding today: cosmic expansion is speeding up. But, as Dr. Adam Riess, Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the Johns Hopkins University and a Senior member of the Science Staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said, “This is not the first time the universe has been expanding too fast.” But why? The issue came to light in 1998, when Riess led a study for the High-z Team which provided the first direct and published evidence that the expansion of the universe was accelerating and filled with dark energy.

In Search of Dark Energy –Probing 11-Billion Years of Cosmic History

“Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed,” said the Noble Prize winning Riess in an interview. “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”

The two competing 1998 teams asked whether the collective gravity of the galaxies might be slowing the expansion enough to one day drag everything together into a Big Crunch. What they discovered, however, was the opposite: the expansion was accelerating under the influence of an anti-gravitational force later called dark energy. The two teams won a Nobel Prize.

“Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.”

Before his and his colleagues’ discovery, many scientists had posited the rate at which the universe was expanding was decreasing. Riess was awarded the Nobel Prize in conjunction with Brian Schmidt, who like Riess was a member of the High-Z Supernova Search Team, and Saul Perlmutter, head scientist of the Supernova Cosmology Project, a competitor to Riess’ team which published a paper in 1999 corroborating the results of Riess’ 1998 paper.

It so happens, adds Overbye, that this increase in dark energy also would be just enough to resolve the discrepancy in measurements of the Hubble constant.

“The bad news,” says Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth theoretical physicist, is that, “if this model is right, dark energy may be in a particularly virulent and — most physicists say — implausible form called phantom energy. Its existence would imply that things can lose energy by speeding up, for instance.” Caldwell’s research addresses questions about the basic properties of the universe, dark energy, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, gravitational waves, and the fate of the Universe.

As the universe expands, Overbye adds, the push from phantom energy would grow without bounds, eventually overcoming gravity and tearing apart first Earth, then atoms.

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

“If it is real, we will learn new physics,” said Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who has spent most of her career studying the expansion rate of the universe and the nature of dark energy A decade ago she led a team of 30 astronomers who carried out the Hubble Key Project to measure the current expansion rate of the universe. The project’s final results determined the age of the universe as approximately 13.7 billion years, resolving a longstanding debate regarding previously wide-ranging estimates.

Elsewhere, an international team including University College London (UCL) and CL and Flatiron Institute cosmologists say that measurements of gravitational waves from ~50 binary neutron stars over the next decade will definitively resolve this increasingly intense debate.

The study, published today in Physical Review Letters, shows how new independent data from gravitational waves emitted by binary neutron stars called ‘standard sirens’ will break the deadlock between the measurements once and for all.

“The Hubble Constant is one of the most important numbers in cosmology because it is essential for estimating the curvature of space and the age of the universe, as well as exploring its fate,” said Professor Hiranya Peiris (UCL Physics & Astronomy).

“We can measure the Hubble Constant by using two methods – one observing Cepheid stars and supernovae in the local universe, and a second using measurements of cosmic background radiation from the early universe – but these methods don’t give the same values, which means our standard cosmological model might be flawed.”

The team developed a universally applicable technique which calculates how gravitational wave data will resolve the issue.

Gravitational waves are emitted when binary neutron stars spiral towards each other before colliding in a bright flash of light that can be detected by telescopes. Indeed, UCL researchers were involved in detecting the first light from a gravitational wave event in August 2017.

Binary neutron star events are rare but invaluable in providing another route to track how the universe is expanding.

This is because the gravitational waves they emit cause ripples in space-time which can be detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo experiments, giving a precise measurement of the system’s distance from Earth.

By additionally detecting the light from the accompanying explosion, astronomers can determine the system’s velocity, and hence calculate the Hubble constant using Hubble’s Law.

For this study, the researchers modeled how many such observations would be needed to resolve the issue in measuring the Hubble constant accurately.

“We’ve calculated that by observing 50 binary neutron stars over the next decade, we will have sufficient gravitational wave data to independently determine the best measurement of the Hubble constant. We should be able to detect enough mergers to answer this question within 5-10 years,” said lead author Dr Stephen Feeney of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City.

“This in turn will lead to the most accurate picture of how the universe is expanding and help us improve the standard cosmological model,” concluded Professor Peiris.

The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via ULC and New York Times

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Image Credit: NASA Dark Energy

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Astronomers observed a ghostly pulsar, a superdense, rapidly spinning neutron star exploded from a supernova 10,000 years ago, racing through space at nearly 2.5 million miles an hour—so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes. The discovery was made using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

The pulsar lies about 53 light-years from the center of a supernova remnant called CTB 1. Its rapid motion through interstellar gas results in shock waves that produce the tail of magnetic energy and accelerated particles detected at radio wavelengths using the VLA. The tail extends 13 light-years and clearly points back to the center of CTB 1.

“Mapping Ghosts” — Ancient Pulsars, Objects So Dense They Warp Spacetime

This one, dubbed PSR J0002+6216 (J0002 for short), sports a radio-emitting tail pointing directly toward the expanding debris of a recent supernova explosion. “Thanks to its narrow dart-like tail and a fortuitous viewing angle, we can trace this pulsar straight back to its birthplace,” said Frank Schinzel, a scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico. “Further study of this object will help us better understand how these explosions are able to ‘kick’ neutron stars to such high speed.”

Schinzel, together with his colleagues Matthew Kerr at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, and NRAO scientists Dale Frail, Urvashi Rau and Sanjay Bhatnagar presented the discovery at the High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Monterey, California. A paper describing the team’s results has been submitted for publication in a future edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Pulsar J0002 was discovered in 2017 by a citizen-science project called Einstein@Home, which uses time on the computers of volunteers to process Fermi gamma-ray data. Thanks to computer processing time collectively exceeding 10,000 years, the project has identified 23 gamma-ray pulsars to date.

Located about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, J0002 spins 8.7 times a second, producing a pulse of gamma rays with each rotation.

New radio observations combined with 10 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have revealed a runaway pulsar that escaped the blast wave of the supernova that formed it. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Using Fermi data and a technique called pulsar timing, the team was able to measure how quickly and in what direction the pulsar is moving across our line of sight.

“Extremely Extreme Life” –Neutron Star, Pulsar and Black-Hole Planets

“The longer the data set, the more powerful the pulsar timing technique is,” said Kerr. “Fermi’s lovely 10-year data set is essentially what made this measurement possible.” The result supports the idea that the pulsar was kicked into high speed by the supernova responsible for CTB 1, which occurred about 10,000 years ago.

J0002 is speeding through space five times faster than the average pulsar, and faster than 99 percent of those with measured speeds. It will eventually escape our galaxy.

At first, the supernova’s expanding debris would have moved outward faster than J0002, but over thousands of years the shell’s interaction with interstellar gas produced a drag that gradually slowed this motion. Meanwhile, the pulsar, behaving more like a cannonball, steadily raced through the remnant, escaping it about 5,000 years after the explosion.

Exactly how the pulsar was accelerated to such high speed during the supernova explosion remains unclear, and further study of J0002 will help shed light on the process. One possible mechanism involves instabilities in the collapsing star forming a region of dense, slow-moving matter that survives long enough to serve as a “gravitational tugboat,” accelerating the nascent neutron star toward it.

The image at the top of the page shows that CTB 1 supernova remnant resembles a ghostly bubble, which combines new 1.5 gigahertz observations from the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope (orange, near center) with older observations from the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory’s Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (1.42 gigahertz, magenta and yellow; 408 megahertz, green) and infrared data (blue).

The VLA data clearly reveal the straight, glowing trail from pulsar J0002+6216 and the curved rim of the remnant’s shell. CTB 1 is about half a degree across, the apparent size of a full Moon. (Composite by Jayanne English, University of Manitoba, using data from NRAO/F. Schinzel et al., DRAO/Canadian Galactic Plane Survey and NASA/IRAS)

The team plans additional observations using the VLA, the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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Stephen Hawking observed that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of advanced intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets.

With Hawking’s observation in mind, a team of scientists, astronomers and engineers are meeting weekly at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory research campus to discuss plans to save the world with DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, their plan to avert catastrophe from an asteroid impact similar to the one that sealed the fate of the dinosaurs.

It’s also, reports the Washington Post, NASA’s first mission not to explore space, but to defend against it. The plan is simple: The research team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel plans to launch a spacecraft, speed it up really fast and smash it into an asteroid.

“Kind of like a big missile,” said Elena Adams, the mission’s lead engineer. “It’s very exciting. You are actually doing something for the fate of humanity.”

An estimated 100 tons of space debris -mostly dust and sand-at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory falls to Earth every day say scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Occasionally according to our planet’s geological record, “space sends something bigger.”

In August of 2018 NASA confirmed it will provide US$3.8 million over the next 4 years to support the construction and operation of two asteroid-hunting observatories south of the Equator. Researchers, reports Nature, plan to build one facility in South Africa, but are still deciding on a location for the second outpost. The observatories will join two existing telescopes on the islands of Maui and Hawaii as part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which is run by the University of Hawaii.

Three Northern Hemisphere observatories, including ATLAS, spotted more than 95% of the 2,057 near-Earth asteroids discovered in 2017. But these northern surveys are blind to roughly 30% of the southern sky — and to any asteroids in that region that could hit Earth.

A southern presence for ATLAS is also alluring to astronomers because the southern sky is rich in interesting objects. “If you want to look at the Galactic Center, that’s where you want to be,” says Matthew Holman, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The forthcoming telescopes could yield data across the whole range of astrophysics, he says.

The southern ATLAS units’ primary purpose, however, will be to spot relatively small asteroids that bigger telescopes miss. The asteroid that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs was 9 kilometers in diameter, but much smaller space rocks can also inflict serious damage. The mid-air explosion of a 20-meter asteroid in 2013 resulted in burns, cuts and broken bones for people in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. And researchers think that a 50-meter asteroid devastated thousands of square kilometers of Russian forest in the 1908 Tunguska event.

Large telescopes such as those that are part of the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona, excel at finding asteroids in the far reaches of the Solar System like our recent first interstellar visitor, the asteroid Oumuamua. But the current ATLAS telescopes shine at picking out small objects that are much closer to Earth — within 7.5 million kilometers of the planet. They do so by conducting relatively rapid scans of the entire sky, which gives researchers more opportunities to detect diminutive asteroids as soon as the objects are visible from the ground.

ATLAS also has software optimized to detect fast-moving objects. As a result, the network can spot asteroids roughly the size of the Chelyabinsk and Tunguska rocks a few days to a week before impact, says John Tonry, the founder and principal investigator of ATLAS, who is based at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. in Honolulu.

In early June, 2018 the system proved its mettle by providing data on the trajectory of a 1.8-meter asteroid called 2018 LA that swept over Africa. Researchers were subsequently able to find fragments of this space rock in Botswana. Since it started making observations in 2015, ATLAS has discovered 171 asteroids whose path brings them close to Earth’s orbit.

Establishing relatively inexpensive ATLAS systems in the south will enable astronomers “to cover the entire night sky every day or two to provide as much warning as we can”, says Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer for NASA in Washington DC.

After the southern ATLAS observatories come online, “we’ll have close to round-the-clock coverage of the night sky”, says Larry Denneau, an ATLAS co-principal investigator at the University of Hawaii. “The more eyes you have looking, the better.”

NASA has considered nuking an asteroid with warheads, reports the Washington Post, but that risks turning a single incoming rock into a shower of debris as happened in “Deep Impact.” Another plan calls for flying a spacecraft beside the asteroid and gradually drawing it off course like a gravity tractor. DART offers a third strategy, and will be the first to be given a live test. “It’s the simplest and most effective,” NASA’s Paul Chodas said.

The team at the Hopkins laboratory has begun the final design and construction of the DART spacecraft. It will be about the size of a Honda Civic, scheduled for launch in summer 2021 for a journey will take more than one year.

The deflection test target is the tiny moon of an asteroid, collectively named Didymos, or Greek for “twin” that orbit the sun between Earth and the Asteroid Belt. The moon is not much bigger than the Washington Monument — minuscule in the scale of space. “This is by far the smallest object anyone has ever flown a spacecraft into,” said Andy Cheng, the mission’s co-lead and chief scientist in APL’s space department. DART will reach speeds as fast as 15,000 miles per hour. The crash in October 2022 will fling debris from the asteroid moon. A small satellite will accompany the DART spacecraft to measure the effect.

“We don’t see the moon of the asteroid until we’re just an hour away,” said Adams, the engineer. “That last hour is going to be really thrilling.”

“We’re just going to give it a love tap,” said Andy Rivkin, the mission’s other co-lead and planetary astronomer at APL.

The Daily Galaxy, Jake Burba, via Nature and The Washington Post 

Based on findings by Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft, to think of the atmosphere of Venus, start with an image of hell and work back from there. The planet’s sky is covered by thick clouds of sulfuric acid that are located at a height of 45-70 kilometers, making it hard to observe the surface from Earth-based telescopes and circling orbiters. Surface temperatures reach a scorching 460 degrees Celsius, a crushing environment for any observations by entry probes. Due to these conditions, there are still many unknowns regarding Venus’ atmospheric phenomena.A Japanese research group led by Hiroki Kashimura at Kobe University has identified a giant streak structure among the clouds covering planet Venus based on observation from the spacecraft Akatsuki. The team also revealed the origins of this structure using large-scale climate simulations.

Venus is often called Earth’s twin because of their similar size and gravity, but the climate on Venus is very different. Venus rotates in the opposite direction to Earth, and a lot more slowly (about one rotation for 243 Earth days). Meanwhile, about 60 km above Venus’ surface a speedy east wind circles the planet in about 4 Earth days (at 360 km/h), a phenomenon known as atmospheric superrotation.

“Could It Harbor Life?” –The Upper Atmosphere of Venus is the Most Earth-Like Location in the Solar System

To solve the puzzle of Venus’ atmosphere, the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki began its orbit of Venus in December 2015. One of the observational instruments of Akatsuki is an infrared camera “IR2” that measures wavelengths of 2 μm (0.002 mm). This camera can capture detailed cloud morphology of the lower cloud levels, about 50 km from the surface. Optical and ultraviolet rays are blocked by the upper cloud layers, but thanks to infrared technology, dynamic structures of the lower clouds are gradually being revealed.

Before the Akatsuki mission began, the research team developed a program called AFES-Venus for calculating simulations of Venus’ atmosphere. On Earth, atmospheric phenomena on every scale are researched and predicted using numerical simulations, from the daily weather forecast and typhoon reports to anticipated climate change arising from global warming. For Venus, the difficulty of observation makes numerical simulations even more important, but this same issue also makes it hard to confirm the accuracy of the simulations.

NASA Explores an Extreme Rover for Extreme Venus –“No Spacecraft has Survived Its Surface Heat and Sulfuric Acid for more than Two Hours”  

AFES-Venus had already succeeded in reproducing superrotational winds and polar temperature structures of the Venus atmosphere. Using the Earth Simulator, a supercomputer system provided by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the research team created numerical simulations at a high spatial resolution. However, because of the low quality of observational data before Akatsuki, it was hard to prove whether these simulations were accurate reconstructions.

This study compared detailed observational data of the lower cloud levels of Venus taken by Akatsuki’s IR2 camera with the high-resolution simulations from the AFES-Venus program.

The left part of Figure 1 shows the lower cloud levels of Venus captured by the IR2 camera. Note the almost symmetrical giant streaks across the northern and southern hemispheres. Each streak is hundreds of kilometers wide and stretches diagonally almost 10,000 kilometers across. This pattern was revealed for the first time by the IR2 camera, and the team have named it a planetary-scale streak structure. This scale of streak structure has never been observed on Earth, and could be a phenomenon unique to Venus. Using the AFES-Venus high-resolution simulations, the team reconstructed the pattern (Figure 1 right-hand side). The similarity between this structure and the camera observations prove the accuracy of the AFES-Venus simulations.

Next, through detailed analyses of the AFES-Venus simulation results, the team revealed the origin of this giant streak structure. The key to this structure is a phenomenon closely connected to Earth’s everyday weather: polar jet streams. In mid and high latitudes of Earth, a large-scale dynamics of winds (baroclinic instability) forms extratropical cyclones, migratory high-pressure systems, and polar jet streams.

NASA: “The Death of a Planet” –Venus Had an Ocean and Habitable Surface Temperatures for Two Billion Years (VIDEO)

The results of the simulations showed the same mechanism at work in the cloud layers, suggesting that jet streams may be formed at high latitudes. At lower latitudes, an atmospheric wave due to the distribution of large-scale flows and the planetary rotation effect (Rossby wave) generates large vortexes across the equator to latitudes of 60 degrees in both directions (figure 2, left).

When jet streams are added to this phenomenon, the vortexes tilt and stretch, and the convergence zone between the north and south winds forms as a streak. The north-south wind that is pushed out by the convergence zone becomes a strong downward flow, resulting in the planetary-scale streak structure (figure 2, right). The Rossby wave also combines with a large atmospheric fluctuation located over the equator (equatorial Kelvin wave) in the lower cloud levels, preserving the symmetry between hemispheres.

This study revealed the giant streak structure on the planetary scale in the lower cloud levels of Venus, replicated this structure with simulations, and suggested that this streak structure is formed from two types of atmospheric fluctuations (waves), baroclinic instability and jet streams. The successful simulation of the planetary-scale streak structure formed from multiple atmospheric phenomena is evidence for the accuracy of the simulations for individual phenomena calculated in this process.

Until now, studies of Venus’ climate have mainly focused on average calculations from east to west. This finding has raised the study of Venus’ climate to a new level in which discussion of the detailed three-dimensional structure of Venus is possible. The next step, through collaboration with Akatsuki and AFES-Venus, is to solve the puzzle of the climate of Earth’s twin Venus, veiled in the thick cloud of sulfuric acid.

Image credit top of page: DAMIA BOUIC, DARTS, ISAS, JAXA

The Daily Galaxy via Kobe University

“Many of the animals we are familiar with today are objectively bizarre compared with the Cambrian weird wonders. Frankly, butterflies and birds are stranger than anything swimming in the ancient sea.”

A new study by an international team of researchers, led by scientists from the University of Bristol, has revealed the origins and evolution of animal body plans. Animals evolved from unicellular ancestors, diversifying into thirty or forty distinct anatomical designs. When and how these designs emerged has been the focus of debate, both on the speed of evolutionary change, and the mechanisms by which fundamental evolutionary change occurs.

Did animal body plans emerge over eons of gradual evolutionary change, as Darwin suggested, or did these designs emerge in an explosive diversification episode during the Cambrian Period, about half a billion years ago?

A fossil trilobite from the Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil Lagerstätte of North Greenland. Trilobites are one of the earliest groups of animals to appear in the fossil record. Jakob Vinther, University of Bristol.

The research team tackled this question by exhaustively compiling the presence and absence of thousands of features from all living animal groups.

Professor Philip Donoghue, from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said: “This allowed us to create a ‘shape space’ for animal body plans, quantifying their similarities and differences.

“Our results show that fundamental evolutionary change was not limited to an early burst of evolutionary experimentation. Animal designs have continued to evolve to the present day – not gradually as Darwin predicted – but in fits and starts, episodically through their evolutionary history.”

Co-author Bradley Deline, from the University of West Georgia (USA), added: “Our results are important in that they highlight the patterns and pathways in which animal body plans evolved.

“Moreover, major expansions in animal form following the Cambrian aligns with other major ecological transitions, such as the exploration of land.

Co-authors James Clark from Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences and Dr Mark Puttick from the University of Bath’s Department of Biology, worked on trying to fit fossil species into the study.

Dr Puttick said: “One of the problems we had is that our study is mostly based on living species and we needed to include fossils. We solved the problem through a combination of analyzing the fossils and using computer models of evolution.”

James Clark added: “The fossils plot intermediate of their living relatives in shape space. This means that the distinctiveness of living groups is a consequence of the extinction of their evolutionary intermediates. Therefore, animals appear different because of their history rather than unpreserved jumps in anatomy.”

Co-author Jenny Greenwood, also from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, wanted to dig deeper. She wanted to work out which of the many proposed genetic mechanisms drove the evolution of animal body plans.

Jenny said: “We did this by collecting data on the different genomes, proteins, and regulatory genes, that living animal groups possess. The differences in anatomical designs correlate with regulatory gene sets, but not the type or diversity of proteins. This indicates that it is the evolution of genetic regulation of embryology that precipitated the evolution of animal biodiversity.”

Co-author Kevin Peterson from Dartmouth College (USA), added: “Our study confirms the view that continued gene regulatory construction was a key to animal evolution.”

The Daily Galaxy via University of Bristol

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From an evolutionary standpoint, “there’s no reason to think grief would be restricted to humans,” says Richard Connor, a cetacean biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.

When an adult striped dolphin emerged from the Mediterranean Sea in 2016 pushing, nudging, and circling the carcass of its dead female companion for more than an hour, a nearby boat of scientists fell silent. Afterward, the students aboard said they were certain the dolphin was grieving. But was this grief or some other response? In a new study, researchers are attempting to get to the bottom of a mystery that has plagued behavioral biologists for 50 years.

Grief, in humans at least, continues Virginia MorellJun in Science, is a reaction to the permanent severing of a strong social or family bond. Although chimpanzees, baboons, and elephants are thought to experience the complex emotion, scientists don’t yet know enough about it in other animals. There are dozens of photos and YouTube videos of grieflike behavior in dolphins: Some mothers have been seen carrying their dead infants in their mouths or on their backs for a week or longer, even as the body decomposes; a couple adult males have also been seen holding dead calves in their mouths.

In the new study, cetacean biologist Giovanni Bearzi of Dolphin Biology and Conservation in Pordenone, Italy, and his colleagues at other institutions analyzed 78 scientific reports from 1970 to 2016 of these kinds of displays—which they labeled “postmortem-attentive behavior.” They found that just 20 of 88 cetacean (dolphin and whale) species engage in them. Of those, most were dolphins from the Sousa and Tursiops genera. Just one was a baleen whale—a humpback.

The scientists also found a correlation between grieflike displays and the cetaceans’ brain size and complexity; dolphins, which live in more structured social groups, generally have larger, more complex brains than baleen whales do. Though the correlation might simply reflect the fact that most studies focused on dolphins, it still suggests grieflike behavior may evolve only in animals with large, complex brains and societies, the researchers report this month in Zoology.

But is it possible for researchers to prove that any of the dolphins or whales are actually grieving? Jane Goodall and others have largely proved that chimpanzees grieve by collecting detailed accounts of death events. For instance, one young chimpanzee unable to cope with the death of his mother in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park grew lethargic, refused food left by researchers, fell sick, and died 1 month later. Other scientists have identified grief in female baboons by analyzing their stress hormone levels before and after losing a close companion or infant.

But no such detailed records exist for cetaceans. So Bearzi and his colleagues say that, no matter what we may think these animals are feeling, the question of grief—and of their understanding of death—remains open.

“They are being appropriately cautious,” says Lori Marino, a marine mammal biologist at The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy in Kanab, Utah, who has studied cetacean neurology and self-awareness.

The next steps may prove challenging. Bearzi and his colleagues say that when other scientists find dolphins and whales with their dead, they should put hydrophones in the water to record their calls and use drones to collect blowhole spray to analyze their hormones later.

But that might not help in all cases. One male oceanic dolphin, for example, was seen carrying a dead calf, accompanied by two female dolphins off the coast of Hawaii. No one knows whether the male killed the calf, which was thought to be the infant of the younger female. But by holding the body, he ensured the females stayed with him—a smart tactic, says Bearzi, should one of the females become ready to mate. In other cases, an animal might not be grieving but trying to determine why their companion isn’t reacting. That may have been the case with the event witnessed by Bearzi and his students.

At times, the living dolphin placed its chin on the carcass and pressed down on it. At the same time, it looked down at the body—as if watching for a response. But the adult was alone with the carcass for more than an hour, a dangerous move for a species that relies on its large pods for safety.

“Besides filming and observing, I didn’t know what to do as a scientist,” Bearzi says. “Maybe [additional] data will give us a better understanding about what is in their minds and if they feel grief. The bottom line now is: We do not know.”

The Daily Galaxy via Science 

Image credit top of page: With thanks to Mark Van Coller/Solent

A team of astronomers have identified two 11- to 12-billion-year-old white dwarf stars only 100 light years away from Earth. These stars are the closest known examples of the oldest stars in the Universe forming soon after the Big Bang. Known as WD 0346+246 and SDSS J110217, 48+411315.4 (J1102), these stars are located in the constellations Taurus and Ursa Major.

"A white dwarf is like a hot stove," said Mukremin Kilic, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the University of Oklahoma. "once the stove is off, it cools slowly over time. By measuring how cool the stove is, we can tell how long it has been off. The two stars we identified have been cooling for billions of years."

Kilic explained that white dwarf stars are the burned out cores of stars similar to the Sun. In about five billion years, the Sun also will burn out and turn into a white dwarf star. It will lose its outer layers as it dies and turn into an incredibly dense star the size of Earth.

Kilic and colleagues obtained infrared images using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to measure the temperature of the stars. Over a three-year period, they measured J1102's distance by tracking its motion using the MDM Observatory's 2.4m telescope near Tucson, Arizona.

"Most stars stay almost perfectly fixed in the sky, but J1102 is moving at a speed of 600,000 miles per hour and is a little more than 100 light years from Earth," remarks co-author John Thorstensen of Dartmouth College. "We found its distance by measuring a tiny wiggle in its path caused by the Earth's motion — it's the size of a dime viewed from 80 miles away."

"Based on the optical and infrared observations of these stars and our analysis, these stars are about 3700 and 3800 degrees on the surface," said co-author Piotr Kowalski of Helmholtz Centre Potsdam in Germany. Kowalski modeled the atmospheric parameters of these stars.

Based on these temperature measurements, Kilic and his colleagues were able to estimate the ages of the stars. "It is like a crime scene investigation," added Kilic. "We measure the temperature of the dead body — in our case a dead star, then determine the time of the crime. These two white dwarf stars have been dead and cooling off almost for the entire history of the Universe."

The Daily Galaxy via University of Oklahoma

Image credit: http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/illustrations/whitedwarfs.html

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