©NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Evidence of Ancient Life on Mars Confirmed by NASA Rover
A discovery made by NASA’s Perseverance rover may have just confirmed ancient life on Mars.

Because of the rover’s Mars exploration, scientists have discovered an extremely exciting rock. This rock has evidence suggesting the presence of ancient tiny martians!

©NASA / JPL / MSSS

A Necessary Clarification
The NASA scientists working on the Perseverance rover mission wish to clarify that they are not claiming to have definitely found life on Mars. However, the rover has just found a rock that is very likely to have fossilized remains of microbial martians within it.

Kathryn Stack Morgan, the mission’s deputy project scientist, explains, “What we are saying is that we have a potential biosignature on Mars.”

©NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

What is a Biosignature?
According to Morgan, a biosignature is a structure, composition, or texture in a rock that has the potential of being of biological origin.

The rock that Perseverance has just discovered is being dubbed Cheyava Falls by scientists. Cheyava Falls was likely part of an ancient martian river delta. It has features left behind from microbes—from when the area was wet and warm several billion years ago.

©Getty Images via Canva / buradaki

The Possibility of Finding Life on Mars
Martian rocks could hold important clues about ancient life on Mars. Scientists have long-wondered if there was life on the planet when it had flowing water and a dense atmosphere.

Kenneth Farley, the mission’s project scientist and a professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, said that the Cheyava Falls discovery “is, for me at least, the most compelling rock that we have collected so far.” The scientists hope to bring the rock to Earth for study. According to Dr. Farley, if a sample is successfully brought back home, “it has the potential to really get at the question.”

©Pexels / Rudy Kirchner

Finding Organic Compounds
Organic compounds provide the building blocks for life. Perseverance’s instruments detected organic compounds within Cheyava Falls.

Mineral deposits of calcium sulfate in the rock appear to have been deposited by flowing water. Liquid water is another necessary component for life as we know it.

©NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Leopard Spotted Rocks
Another interesting find on the rock are small leopard-spot-like shapes. These rock spots are small whitish splotches—about a millimeter in size—that have black rings around them.

The spots’ black rings contain iron phosphate. Additionally, the ancient chemical reactions that created the leopard spots could also have provided energy for microbes.

©Pixabay / BlenderTimer

The Importance of Organic Compounds
Molecules that contain carbon and hydrogen are called organic compounds. The detection of organic compounds means that the presence of life is likely.

However, the presence of organic compounds in the Cheyava Falls rock could have many possible explanations. For example, organic compounds can also be created by geological processes like hydrothermal events, which are not connected to the presence of life.

©NASA / Perseverance Mars Rock Samples

Collecting Rock Samples

An important part of Perseverance’s mission is to drill samples of a variety of interesting Mars rocks. Then, a future mission is planned to bring samples back to Earth for scientists to study.

The variety of rocks that have been collected by Perseverance have the potential to answer a wide variety of questions about the Red Planet. Dr. Farley made sure to note that just because they hadn’t found biosignatures until now, it doesn’t mean that the mission had been a disappointment.

©NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center

A Long and Costly Trip Home
Unfortunately, getting the samples back to Earth is turning out to be a herculean task. The Mars sample return mission has hit major developmental and cost difficulties. It is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, explained, “The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive… and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long.” What NASA chooses to do about the sample return mission will affect the future of Mars exploration. “We’re all in the same holding pattern waiting to see what might transpire,” Dr. Farley said.

©NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Eventual Further Research
The Perseverance rover’s movements are limited, so scientists cannot give a more definite answer about the presence of life on Mars… until they are able to get the samples back to Earth. However, Perseverance is continuing to traverse Mars.

This discovery of a potential biosignature is very exciting, and the Perseverance rover’s findings may have just changed what we know about Mars. Alas, until the NASA scientists come up with a plan to get the samples back to Earth, we’ll just have to wait for upcoming updates.

{ https://www.msn.com/en-us/channel/topic/Science/ }

05-08-2024 om 01:19 geschreven door peter  

US Military Recovered UFO That ‘Distorted Space-Time’ & Craft Able To ‘Alter Our Reality’ As Mentioned In Bizarre Navy Docs

Physicist Michio Kaku proposes the existence of other dimensions, also known as parallel universes, coexisting alongside our own reality. Within these dimensions, it is plausible that there are beings or entities living alongside us, despite our inability to perceive them. While the concept of alternate dimensions or universes may seem far-fetched to some, it is intricately connected to the subject of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), commonly referred to as UFO phenomena.

We live in a four-dimensional world (if time is included), but scientists propose there are more dimensions. However, they do not believe there can exist more than 11 dimensions because conditions become unstable and particles naturally collapse back down into 10 or 11 dimensions. The 12th dimension, for example, introduces a second time.

“Our understanding of reality is not complete, by far,” says Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde. “Reality exists independently of us.” If they exist, those universes are separated from ours, unreachable and undetectable by any direct measurement (at least so far). And that makes some experts question whether the search for a multiverse can ever be truly  scientific.

In the realm of  science, our quest for understanding alternate or higher dimensions remains ongoing. However, within the field of UFOlogy, intriguing cases have emerged suggesting the existence of not just other dimensions, but also the presence of entities residing within them. These beings seem to possess the ability to manipulate a bridge connecting their realm to ours, enabling them to embark on regular visits to our world.

Crashed UFO that ‘distorted space and time’

A very strange UFO case has been shared by American attorney Daniel Sheehan with Daily Mail. Sheehan involved in bringing UFO whistleblowers to Congress, claimed that a whistleblower told him a mind-boggling tale about a recovered crashed UFO. He revealed that a crashed UFO recovered by the US military had distorted space-time and was “bigger on the inside.” The whistleblower has reportedly briefed Senate Intelligence Committee staff on the matter.

According to Sheehan, one of the alleged recoveries described by the insider involved a 30-foot saucer partially embedded in the earth. When attempts were made to remove it using a bulldozer, the craft exhibited unusual behavior. As it was being pulled out, it seemingly detached in a pie slice-shaped section, suggesting that it was constructed in a unique way.

The anonymous whistleblower then entered the craft and was astonished to find that the interior was as large as a football stadium, while the exterior was only about 30 feet in diameter. The experience inside caused disorientation and nausea due to the vast size discrepancy. Furthermore, upon exiting the craft in a few minutes, the whistleblower found that four hours had passed outside, indicating time distortion as well.

Sheehan mentions that the craft’s distortion of space and time is consistent with the theories proposed by physicists regarding advanced propulsion systems. These theories suggest that warping space-time could be used to counteract the effects of gravity and achieve advanced forms of propulsion. However, Sheehan does not provide further specific details, such as the location or date of the incident, and admits to being unable to provide concrete evidence to support these claims.

Read also:

• Man Worked In Antarctica Saw Powerful Machines To Contact Alien Crafts In Deep Space
• Las Vegas UFO Crash Is Real, Claims Man Worked For NYPD: 10-Foot Alien Terrified Witness
• Ex-CIA Officer Encountered With Reptilian Alien; Says Reptilian Race Walking Among Us
• Whitley Strieber’s Alien Abduction & Stranger Who Told Him ‘Mankind Is Trapped

Moreover, on Jesse Michels’ show, astronomer and UFO researcher Jacques Vallee discussed another UFO case that includes experiencing another dimension by the witness. Valle said: “There was one case in San Jose. A woman had seen something over her house. It was a big disc, and I say, ‘How big was it?’ And she says, ‘Well, it was about the same size as her house. It was, you know, just like that.’ Then I say, ‘Well, when you went inside, you said, uh, you know, there was this being, and the being took you on a staircase.’ I say, ‘Where did the staircase go?’ Well, the staircase went up the side of this big round room. I say, ‘How would you compare it?’ Well, like a movie house, you know, like an M5 theater. I said, ‘That’s bigger than your house.’”

Luis Elizondo, the man who managed the UFO program inside the Pentagon, explains how space-time distortion works and hints that we can manipulate this physics for technological advancement. In an interview with George Knapp in 2018, Elizondo explains:

“Space-time is something we observe in the natural world all the time, especially in relation to gravity and GPS satellites. The clocks on these satellites need constant calibration. Even though the clocks on the satellites are identical to the ones on the ground station, they still require regular calibration. The reason for this is the effect of Earth’s gravity on space-time. The clocks on Earth run slightly slower compared to the clocks on the platforms above Earth.

How is this possible if the clocks are the same? Well, it’s because the closer you are to a massive object, like Earth, the more space-time warps. This phenomenon is explained by the theory of general relativity, which boils down to using the equation E=mc². Essentially, it means that a significant amount of mass or energy warps space-time. When you approach a supermassive object like the sun, the distortion becomes even greater. In fact, near a black hole, time becomes so distorted that it virtually stops.

We have observed this phenomenon through gravitational lensing when studying distant galaxies. We can actually see the effects of gravity on space-time with our own eyes, so it’s a  scientific fact, not fiction. The question now is how we can manipulate this physics for technological advancement. Potentially, we could warp space-time in a way that allows us to travel from point A to point B more quickly.”

Is it possible that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has already accomplished this kind of technology and has been using it to visit our world? Or perhaps we already have such technology?

In 2021, leaked documents revealed that the US Navy had conducted experiments on various far-fetched technologies, including a “space modification weapon.” These documents, disclosed by The War Zone, detailed the research carried out by the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) between 2017 and 2019. The most interesting thing is that the technology written in those documents discusses propulsion system that defies gravity, or to devastating weapons that bends the laws of physics and craft that alters the fabric of time and space.

The man behind all the patents is Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, who is an aerospace engineer at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD). He has four patents registered in his name that contain the source of technology that would change the world. In these patents, a “Spacetime Modification Weapon” (SMW, a weapon that can make the Hydrogen bomb seem more like a firecracker, in comparison) is mentioned.

Are these patents a cover for the reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology? The Navy’s objective in testing this conceptual system was to keep pace with similar programs being developed in China. The researchers believed that the space modification weapon could revolutionize power and propulsion systems. The technology was based on the “Pais effect” aimed to push the boundaries of  science.

Pais made ambitious claims about the potential of this technology, suggesting that it could lead to a propulsion system defying gravity or devastating weapons that bend the laws of physics. He even outlined plans for a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft” capable of altering the fabric of time and space.

The Navy’s aerospace research enterprise supported Pais’s patents, stating that they filed them to keep up with similar technological advancements being pursued by the Chinese military. The “space modification weapon” described in the documents was envisioned to release extremely high energy levels, surpassing the destructive power of a Hydrogen bomb.

However, the experiments conducted between 2017 and 2019 were inconclusive. The elusive Pais effect was neither observed nor disproven during this period. The Pais effect refers to a theoretical physics concept that involves the controlled movement of highly electrically charged matter. If proven possible, it could enable the creation of powerful energy fields capable of fundamentally engineering the fabric of reality.

It is unclear whether the US Navy is continuing its experiments on the Pais effect or if the project has been discontinued entirely. None of the futuristic technologies described in the leaked UFO patents were developed, leaving the ultimate fate of the space modification weapon and related concepts uncertain.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

04-08-2024 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

Researcher Jean Ward, while analyzing a Mars image acquired by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on March 2, 2010, discovered an unusual anomaly in Noachis Terra, a region of Mars north of Asimov, also known as the "Land of Noah." 

Using Topaz Labs' Gigapixel to upscale the image for better detail, Ward observed the anomaly, measuring approximately 250 to 300 meters in length, resembles what looks like an artificially created structure with multiple right angles. Ward suggests it could outline a 'tanker-shaped' anomaly. 

Some suggest that the anomaly could be part of an ancient road with a wall and might be part of a longer route that has been partially covered by landslides or other natural occurrences but others say that it is only the wall that stands out supporting the theory that it could be the upper part of an underground base built at/inside the rim of a crater. 

Just imagine if it is an underground Mars base, the location would be suitable for UFOs to take off or land on landing pads inside the crater, which are connected to the base. This would not be the first time UFOs have been observed descending into or taking off from craters. 

Whatever its origin, this anomaly does not appear to be a natural formation. 

• Topaz Labs' Gigapixel image. 
• Original MRO image (CTX: B19_016868_1344_XN_45S355W). 
• Jean Ward's video analyze of the anomaly.

{ https://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

04-08-2024 om 22:26 geschreven door peter  

Study: Dinosaur-Killing Mass Extinction Triggered Rapid Evolution of Bird Genomes

About 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, a 10-km-wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The impact eradicated roughly 75% of the animal and plant species on Earth, including whole groups like non-avian dinosaurs and ammonites. New research has identified important changes in birds’ genomes sparked by this end-Cretaceous mass extinction, ultimately contributing to the incredible diversity of living birds.

This painting depicts an asteroid slamming into tropical, shallow seas of the sulfur-rich Yucatan Peninsula in what is today southeast Mexico. The aftermath of this immense asteroid collision, which occurred approximately 65 million years ago, is believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species on Earth. Shown in this painting are pterodactyls, flying reptiles with wingspans of up to 50 feet, gliding above low tropical clouds.

Image credit: Donald E. Davis / NASA.

“By studying the DNA of living birds, we can try to detect patterns of genetic sequences that changed just after one of the most important events in Earth’s history,” said University of Michigan’s Dr. Jake Berv.

“The signature of those events seems to have imprinted into the genomes of the survivors in a way that we can detect tens of millions of years later.”

A living organism’s genome comprises four nucleotide molecules, referred to by the letters A, T, G and C. The order of these nucleotides in a genome defines the blueprint of life.

The DNA code can sometimes evolve in a way that shifts the overall composition of DNA nucleotides across the whole genome.

These compositional changes are crucial in determining what kind of genetic variation is possible, contributing to an organism’s evolutionary potential, or its ability to evolve.

Dr. Berv and colleagues found that the mass extinction event sparked shifts in nucleotide composition.

They also found that these shifts seem to be connected to the way birds develop as babies, their adult size and their metabolism.

For example, within approximately 3 million to 5 million years of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, surviving bird lineages tended to develop smaller body sizes.

They also changed how they developed as hatchlings, with more species becoming ‘altricial.’

“This means they are still very embryonic when they hatch, need their parents to feed them, and can take weeks to fledge,” Dr. Berv said.

“Birds that hatch ready to fend for themselves, like chickens and turkeys, are called ‘precocial’.”

“We found that adult body size and patterns of pre-hatching development are two important features of bird biology we can link to the genetic changes we’re detecting.”

“One of the most significant challenges in evolutionary biology and ornithology is teasing out the relationships between major bird groups — it’s difficult to determine the structure of the tree of life for living birds.”

Over the past 15 years, researchers have been applying increasingly large genomic data sets to try to solve the problem.

Previously, they used genomic data to study the evolution of birds’ genomes using statistical models that make strong assumptions.

These traditional models allow researchers to reconstruct the history of genetic changes, but they typically assume that the composition of DNA, its proportion of A, T, G and C nucleotides, does not change across evolutionary history.

The study authors developed a software tool to more closely track DNA composition over time and across different branches of the tree of life.

With this tool, they were able to relax the assumption that the composition of DNA remains constant.

“This allowed the model of DNA evolution to vary across the evolutionary tree and identify places where there was likely a shift in DNA composition,” said University of Michigan’s Professor Stephen Smith.

“For this new research, these shifts were concentrated in time, within about 5 million years of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction,” Dr. Berv added.

This approach also allowed the team to estimate which bird traits were most closely associated with these shifts in DNA composition.

“This is an important type of genetic change that we think we can link to the mass extinction event,” Dr. Berv said.

“As far as we know, changes in DNA composition have not been previously associated with the end-Cretaceous mass extinction in such a clear way.”

“We know that mass extinction events can dramatically affect biodiversity, ecology and organismal form,” said University of Cambridge’s Professor Daniel Field.

“Our study emphasizes that these extinction events can actually influence organismal biology even more profoundly — by altering important aspects of how genomes evolve.”

“This work furthers our understanding of the dramatic biological impacts of mass extinction events and highlights that the mass extinction that wiped out the giant dinosaurs was one of the most biologically impactful events in the entire history of our planet.”

By relaxing the typical assumptions used in evolutionary biology, the researchers are building more nuanced insight into the sequence of events that occurred in the early history of birds.

“We have typically not looked at the change in DNA composition and model across the tree of life as a change that something interesting has happened at a particular point of time and place,” Professor Smith said.

“This study illustrates that we have probably been missing something.”

• The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
• Jacob S. Berv et al. 2024. Genome and life-history evolution link bird diversification to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Science Advances 10 (31); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adp0114
• This article is a version of a press-release provided by the University of Michigan.

LINK VIDEOS

• https://youtu.be/sBCwKeXnA0A

• https://youtu.be/yqINf3buJNo

• https://youtu.be/7TQqLUUmt7A

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

03-08-2024 om 22:46 geschreven door peter  

New 'quasi-moon' discovered near Earth has been traveling alongside our planet since 100 BC

Scientists recently discovered an asteroid that tags along with Earth during its yearly journey around the sun. 

Dubbed 2023 FW13, the space rock is considered a "quasi-moon" or "quasi-satellite," meaning it orbits the sun in a similar time frame as Earth does, but is only slightly influenced by our planet’s gravitational pull. It is estimated to be 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter — roughly equivalent to three large SUVs parked bumper to bumper. During its orbit of the sun, 2023 FW13 also circles Earth, coming within 9 million miles (14 million kilometers) of our planet. For comparison, the moon has a diameter of 2,159 miles (3,474 km) and comes within 226,000 miles (364,000 km) of Earth at the closest point of its orbit, according to NASA. 

2023 FW13 was first observed in March by the Pan-STARRS observatory, which is located atop the volcanic mountain Haleakalā in Hawaii. The asteroid's existence was then confirmed by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and two observatories in Arizona before being officially listed on April 1 by the Minor Planet Center at the International Astronomical Union, a network of scientists responsible for designating new planets, moons and other objects in the solar system.

Some estimates suggest that 2023 FW13 has been Earth's cosmic neighbor since at least 100 B.C. and that the space rock will continue to follow this orbital path until around A.D. 3700, Adrien Coffinet, an astronomer and journalist who first categorized the asteroid as a quasi-moon after modeling its orbit, told Sky & Telescope.

"It seems to be the longest quasi-satellite of Earth known to date," Coffinet said.

Astronomers have discovered a quasi-moon that has orbited around the Sun alongside Earth since 100 BC. 

Naeblys/Getty Images/iStockphoto

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Following 2023 FW13's initial discovery in March, space observers dug into the data and found observations of the asteroid dating all the way back to 2012, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. 

Despite hovering relatively close to Earth, this quasi-satellite likely isn't on a collision course with our planet. 

"The good news is, such an orbit doesn't result in an impacting trajectory 'out of the blue,'" Alan Harris, an astronomer at the Space Science Institute, told Sky & Telescope. 

This is not Earth's only quasi-companion; a different quasi-satellite known as Kamo'oalewa was discovered in 2016. The rock sticks similarly close to our planet during its orbit around the sun, and a 2021 study suggested that this asteroid could actually be a fragment of Earth's moon. 

• https://youtu.be/WcyD59fheb4

{ https://www.livescience.com/ }

02-08-2024 om 23:49 geschreven door peter  

Following tests at Vandenberg, the LOFTID is scheduled to be included as a secondary payload aboard NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) satellite. The space agency hopes that current testing of the device will help gauge its capabilities for future missions, which may include the delivery of everything from future robotic explorers that will follow in the tread marks left by Perseverance to spacecraft carrying human crews.

“LOFTID is dedicated to the memory of Bernard Kutter, manager of advanced programs at ULA, who passed away in August 2020 and was an advocate for technologies like LOFTID that can lower the cost of space access,” the space agency said in a statement.

Over the last several weeks, the LOFTID underwent a complete systems test, along with several environmental tests, electromagnetic compatibility tests, and other checkups, along with match-mate testing between NASA and ULA components to help ensure that the systems can be successfully integrated prior to launch.

Following testing, the heat shield (also called an aeroshell) was fully inflated under conditions that replicated its orbital deployment environment, after which it underwent laser-assisted measurements before being repackaged for launch.

The LOFTID will be carried to space on board a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket, after which its inflation mechanism will be deployed. Then, traveling at speeds nearing 5 miles per second, the inflatable heat shield will be tested on whether it can withstand the tremendous pressures of re-entry.

The LOFTID, a project of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, falls under its Technology Demonstration Missions program. In partnership with United Launch Alliance (ULA), the current LOFTID launch is being overseen out of Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

• Micah Hanks is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on Twitter: @MicahHanks. 

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/uap/ }

02-08-2024 om 23:35 geschreven door peter  

The discovery raises several intriguing questions about Mars and its history, as well as what environmental factors could have led to the formation of the crystals.

A Chance Discovery

Since October 2023, Curiosity has been scouring the Gediz Vallis channel on Mount Sharp, an area where scientists believe ancient lava flows occurred in the planet’s early history. The Martian rover has concentrated its explorations in the area, given the region’s promising potential for having once been home to microbial life or even the possibility that it may still be a present-day refuge for such simple organisms.

The discovery of the colorful mineral was made by chance, as Curiosity cracked open a rock while driving over it. To the Curiosity team’s surprise, the yellow interior of the stone revealed what is likely to be pure sulfur, whereas the sulfates that are normally encountered in the area are salts comprised of combinations of sulfur and other minerals.

Unveiling Mount Sharp’s Mysteries

Since 2014, NASA’s Curiosity rover has made its ascent of Mount Sharp, where its explorations of the Gediz Vallis channel have revealed a portion of the landscape once shaped by ancient water flows on the planet. Curiosity’s present mission is to investigate whether this ancient channel and its surrounding terrain could have supported microbial life, particularly at a time when water was more abundant on Mars.

“This was not a quiet period on Mars,” according to Becky Williams, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and deputy principal investigator of Curiosity’s Mast Camera. “There was an exciting amount of activity here.

“We’re looking at multiple flows down the channel, including energetic floods and boulder-rich flows,” Williams said.

Going forward, the Curiosity team hopes to conduct drilling on larger rocks in the area to determine if they may also contain sulfur crystals. Presently, the relationship between elemental sulfur and other sulfur-based minerals in the area remains unclear to scientists studying the Martian environment.

“Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it,” Vasavada said in a statement.

“Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/space/ }

02-08-2024 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

Flakes of Natural Graphene Found in Lunar Soil Samples

 by Natali Anderson

In lunar regolith samples collected by China’s Chang’e-5 probe, planetary scientists have identified few-layer graphene formed together with complex minerals. The finding provides new insights into the origin of the Moon, supporting the hypothesis of a carbon-containing Moon.

Structural and compositional characterization of few-layer graphene in the Chang’e-5 lunar soil sample.

Image credit: Zhang et al., doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwae211.

“Graphene has revolutionized the research of condensed matter physics and materials science with its novel physical phenomena and extraordinary properties,” said Jilin University Professor Wei Zhang and colleagues.

“It plays an increasingly important role in extensive areas including planetary and space science.”

“It is estimated that around 1.9% of total interstellar carbon is in the form of graphene and protosolar graphene has been identified in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.”

The researchers analyzed an olive-shaped sample of lunar soil, about 2.9 mm by 1.6 mm, collected by the Chang’e 5 mission in 2020.

Using a special spectrometer, they found an iron compound that is closely related to the formation of graphene in a carbon-rich section of the sample.

They then used advanced microscopic and mapping technologies to confirm that the carbon content in the sample comprised ‘flakes’ that have two to seven layers of graphene.

The scientists proposed that the few-layer graphene may have formed in volcanic activity in the early stages of the Moon’s existence, and been catalyzed by solar winds that can stir up lunar soil and iron-containing minerals that helped transform the carbon atoms’ structure.

Meteorite impacts, which create high-temperature and high-pressure environments, may also have led to the formation of graphene.

Scientists have discovered graphene on the Moon, in a lunar sample returned to Earth

Depositphotos

“This is the first study to verify the presence of natural few-layer graphene in lunar soil samples by examining its microstructure and composition,” the authors said.

“Our finding provides new insights into the origin of the Moon, supporting the hypothesis of a carbon-containing Moon.”

“Moreover, the exotic properties of graphene are highly structurally and environmentally dependent.”

“Further in-depth property investigation of natural graphene would provide more information on the geologic evolution of the Moon.”

“In turn, the mineral-catalysed formation of natural graphene sheds light on the development of low-cost scalable synthesis techniques for high-quality graphene.”

“Therefore, a new lunar exploration program may be promoted and some forthcoming breakthroughs can be expected.”

Chinese researchers have discovered a form of carbon in lunar soil samples collected in 2020 which could overturn the theory that the moon was formed by a cosmic collision between Earth and a smaller planet.

Photo: Reuters

• The findings were published in the journal National Science Review.
• Wei Zhang et al. Discovery of natural few-layer graphene on the Moon. National Science Review, published online June 17, 2024; doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwae211

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

02-08-2024 om 21:39 geschreven door peter  

Study: Lunar soil has the right stuff for “extraterrestrial photosynthesis”

It could pave a way for plants, fuel, and so much more.

by Doris Elín Urrutia

 

Rainer Fuhrmann / EyeEm/EyeEm/Getty Images

What’s new — The new study proposes “extraterrestrial photosynthesis,” a process by which humans in space can draw on just two simple, out-of-this-world ingredients — lunar soil and sunlight — to produce fuel and recycle carbon dioxide back into breathable oxygen on long-duration crewed missions to the Moon and Mars.

One major talking point for space agencies with their eyes to the skies: How do you power a trip far from Earth? The longest crewed lunar mission to date — NASA’s Apollo 15 flight in 1971 — lasted 12 days. They maintained themselves on the supplies they brought along, which had the heaviest payload in a lunar orbit at about 107,000 pounds.

Digging into the details — The study looks at ways to replenish water, oxygen, and fuel by using human byproducts, solar radiation, and local lunar soil called regolith. If this is successfully achievable, space agencies can save on cargo weight and vehicle space for crewed missions lasting weeks or even months.

Their preliminary findings inspired them to propose a model for how a self-sustaining Moon outpost could work.

The team analyzed the Chang’e-5, or “CE-5,” regolith samples to see what chemicals they contained and then investigated how well these components could catalyze carbon dioxide into oxygen. Exhaled breath might be used for potable water, or turned into hydrogen or methane for fuel.

Their experiments yielded some positive results. They saw bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen gas, for example. The paper reports that compounds in lunar regolith catalyzed a reaction during a photovoltaic-driven water electrolytic (PV-EC) test, which takes light and water and turns the liquid into those two gases. On the Moon, the water used here would come from lunar ice and human breath that would have previously gone through a dehydrating process. The astronauts would use the water for drinking.

What’s next — A lot more needs to be done before the research is Moon-ready. The researchers wrote that “the current catalytic performance from the CE-5 lunar sample cannot fully satisfy the requirement of extraterrestrial survival,” adding that their findings weren’t on par with the efficiency of existing catalyst systems on Earth.

They wrote that researching the compounds on the Moon more thoroughly could lead to more success.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

02-08-2024 om 21:36 geschreven door peter  

20 Years Later, MESSENGER Is Still Giving Us Strange Hidden Gems

A recent study looking decades-old data suggests Mercury may have a 10-mile-thick layer of diamond deep in its interior.

by Kiona Smith

 

NASA

Yongjiang Xu, of the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing, and his colleagues published their work in the journal Nature Communications.

Diamonds In The Rough

Like most rocky planets, Mercury was once a seething, churning ball of magma. Over time, that magma cooled and solidified, and in the process, it settled into layers — giving the planet a dense inner core, a slightly lighter and mostly fluid mantle, and a light, rocky outer crust. To simulate that process, Xu and his colleagues made digital models using data from MESSENGER that offered clues about Mercury's inner structure. They also squashed a lot of carbon samples in the lab to see how the material behaved under tremendous heat and pressure.

According to Xu and his colleagues’ simulations, there should be a layer of diamond lying atop Mercury's core and just beneath its mantle — and it could be between 9 and 11 miles thick. The diamond would have crystallized out of an ocean of carbon-rich magma that once covered Mercury billions of years ago.

Meanwhile, on the surface, carbon crystallized into a different (and much less sparkly) form called graphite. Graphite and diamond are both pure carbon, but the atoms are arranged in different crystal structures, which gives the two materials very different properties. At the surface, where pressures and temperatures were much lower, the carbon formed dark, soft graphite. Deep below, the intense pressure beneath Mercury's mantle pressed carbon into diamond — if Xu and his colleagues are right.

Don’t Shoot The Messenger

The finding is just the latest scientific gem MESSENGER has laid at our feet since its launch 20 years ago. It took four years just to reach Mercury in 2008, and then the spacecraft had to make a carefully-planned series of flybys to slow down enough to enter Mercury's orbit without also accidentally getting pulled into the Sun. (Trying to maneuver a spacecraft that close to the Sun's gravitational influence is a challenge.) MESSENGER settled into Mercury's orbit in 2011.

During its four years in orbit around Mercury, MESSENGER revealed some surprising things about our Solar System's innermost planet. One of those is the graphite that dusts its surface, which gives the planet's surface its dark, patchy appearance — and gave Xu and his colleagues the idea for their recent simulations.

MESSENGER also revealed that Mercury has tectonic quakes, similar to the quakes that happen on Earth and Mars, and that the already-small planet is actually shrinking a little bit every year. The mission found evidence of frozen water deep in the permanent shadows of some of Mercury’s polar craters. And there's even a hint that some organic chemistry, and maybe even very simple cells, once could have eked out an existence beneath the planet's surface.

Xu and his colleagues’ simulations may help explain another of MESSENGER's most important discoveries: Mercury's surprisingly strong magnetic field.

For such a small planet, Mercury boasts a disproportionately powerful magnetic field. If Xu and his colleagues are right, the layer of diamond lying beneath the mantle could be changing how heat flows from the core to the mantle (because diamond transfers heat very efficiently). That, in turn, could be changing how convection, currents driven by hot liquid rising and cool liquid sinking, happens in the molten outer layers of Mercury's core. And since all that flowing molten metal is part of what generates the magnetic field, the diamond layer could be a big part of the explanation.

The MESSENGER mission came to a dramatic end on April 30, 2015, when the spacecraft smashed into Mercury's surface at more than 8,000 miles per hour. Because MESSENGER was on the far side of the planet at the time, its human team back on Earth didn't witness its final moments; they heard only the silence of the dead spacecraft failing to resume radio contact a few moments later.

MESSENGER set the foundation for the European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission, and it may also shed light on the interiors of other rocky planets.

"The processes that led to the formation of a diamond layer on Mercury might also have occurred on other planets, potentially leaving similar signatures," says Yanhao Lin, also of the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing and a coauthor of the recent study, in a recent statement. The riches of the Universe seem to only grow with time.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

02-08-2024 om 18:44 geschreven door peter  

Oorlog in de ruimte: VS voelen hete adem van Rusland en China

Volgens de New York Times zet het Pentagon spoed achter de voorbereidingen om oorlog in de ruimte te kunnen voeren.  

Washington is ervan overtuigd dat de snelle vooruitgang van China en Rusland op het gebied van ruimteoperaties een groeiende bedreiging vormt voor de Amerikaanse troepen en andere militaire middelen op de grond en satellieten in een baan om de aarde.

De details van de inspanningen van het Pentagon blijven zeer vertrouwelijk. Bepaalde documenten zijn echter onlangs vrijgegeven en gepubliceerd door de New York Times.

Daarin erkennen functionarissen van het Ministerie van Defensie in toenemende mate dat het initiatief een grote verschuiving in militaire operaties weerspiegelt, waarbij de ruimte een echt slagveld zal worden.

De VS zal niet langer alleen vertrouwen op militaire satellieten om te communiceren, navigeren, traceren en te richten op terrestrische bedreigingen, instrumenten die het Pentagon decennialang een aanzienlijk voordeel hebben gegeven in conflicten.

Het ministerie van Defensie wil een nieuwe generatie instrumenten op de grond en in de ruimte verwerven waarmee het zijn satellietnetwerk kan verdedigen tegen aanvallen en, indien nodig, vijandelijke ruimtevaartuigen in een baan om de aarde kan verstoren of uitschakelen, aldus functionarissen van het Pentagon in een reeks interviews, toespraken en verklaringen

De strategie verschilt fundamenteel van eerdere militaire ruimteprogramma's door de uitbreiding van het scala aan offensieve capaciteiten, wat heel anders is dan het voorstel voor het Strategisch Defensie-initiatief uit de jaren tachtig, dat nooit het daglicht zag en dat tot doel had satellieten te gebruiken om de Verenigde Staten te beschermen tegen aanvallen met nucleaire raketten.

• (SR and MaSi for Tagtik/Source: New York Times/Photo: Pixabay)

{ https://www.msn.com/nl-be/ }

02-08-2024 om 18:31 geschreven door peter  

It’s an ancient idea, which only increases its resonance for some. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was the first to propose it. He coined the term ‘panspermia’ and said that the Universe was full of life and that some of it fell to Earth. It remains on the fringe of science because it can’t explain how life started, and it’s not testable. But it is enduring.

Oumuamua’s appearance sparked renewed interest in Panspermia. After the object came and went rapidly in 2017, scientists attempted to determine what it actually was. Maybe it was a comet, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe it was a chunk of frozen hydrogen. Many hypotheses were presented. Now, we simply call it an interstellar object, or ISO.

From the perspective of panspermia, Oumuamua’s classification isn’t the most pressing concern. It was a visitor to our Solar System from elsewhere, and that’s the most salient point.

In a new paper, a trio of researchers examine how many of these types of objects might exist and what properties they’d need to protect and transport life throughout the galaxy. The paper is titled “The Implications of ‘Oumuamua on Panspermia.” The lead author is David Cao, a high school student who also served as an intern at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“Panspermia is the hypothesis that life originated on Earth from the bombardment of foreign interstellar ejecta harbouring polyextremophile microorganisms,” the authors write. “By utilizing ‘Oumuamua’s properties as an anchor, we estimate the mass and number density of ejecta in the ISM.”

Throughout their work, they acknowledge that “panspermia is an extraordinarily difficult theory to quantitatively model and assess.” But it’s still worth an attempt because of Oumuamua. “The recently discovered ‘Oumuamua merits a reexamination for the possibility of panspermia, the hypothesis that life seeded on Earth from the bombardment of life-bearing interstellar ejecta and that life can be transferred from one celestial body to another.”

The trio determined the minimum size of ejecta needed to protect extremophiles from radiation, especially from supernovae. Intense gamma rays can sterilize ejecta if they’re not large enough for extremophiles to survive in their interiors, shielded by rock or water ice. Ejecta also needs to be large enough to protect any lifeforms from impact with another body. But the size depends on the nature of the ejecta.

“We consider the four most common elemental compositions of asteroids (chondritic, stony and metallic) and comets (water-ice) in our own Solar System: silicate, nickel, iron, and water-ice,” they write. Nickel has the highest attenuation and the smallest minimum size needed to shelter life. Water-ice requires the maximum size.

The authors explain, “We make an assumption that the number density abundances and varying compositions of interstellar ejecta mirror the content of minor bodies in our own Solar System.” Based on that, they settled on a minimum size of 6.6 meters.

They also tried to determine the likelihood that extremophiles could have seeded Earth, though they acknowledge that many of the factors involved are poorly understood and poorly constrained. In order to seed life, an ejecta carrying extremophiles had to have arrived at Earth early, before the earliest evidence of fossilized life. “Second, we estimate the total number of impact events on Earth after its formation and prior to the emergence of life (? 0.8 Gyr).”

They calculate impact rates for objects of different sizes. For objects at least 10 meters in diameter, they calculate that about 40,000 of them could’ve impacted Earth in its first 800,000 years.

Existing estimates of the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way are available. Based on those, here’s what it all adds up to, keeping in mind all of the poorly constrained factors involved. “However, we find that panspermia is a plausible potential life-seeding mechanism for (optimistically) potentially up to ~ 10⁵ (100,000) of the ~ 10⁹ (one billion) Earth-sized habitable zone worlds in our Galaxy,” the authors write.

But the prospects that Earth itself was seeded by panspermia are very weak. “For the Earth in particular, we conclude that, independent of other hypotheses for the origins of life on Earth, panspermia remains improbable (< 0.001%).” In a way, it’s more of a thought experiment. The authors say that “the true relative probability for panspermia remains unknown.”

The panspermia idea will not disappear. It’s simply too compelling to discard, even though it cannot be tested.

Another way of looking at it is that Earth could be a source of panspermia rather than a receiver.

“The fraction of these rocky planets that possess magnetic fields, atmospheres, and liquid surface water capable of supporting life is currently unconstrained and unknown, but our work implies as many as 10⁴ of these worlds in our Galaxy could be populated with life today via panspermia under the most optimistic assumptions that all of these worlds are capable of supporting ejecta-transported life, with Earth as one of the potential source planets.” The number could rise to 10⁴ under the most optimistic conditions.

There are other factors to consider. We’re only beginning to determine the number of rogue planets or free-floating planets (FFPs). As we learn more about them and their abundance, the panspermia hypothesis will change. “The discovery of rogue-free floating planets (FFPs) suggests a significantly higher ISM ejecta number density than expected for large objects,” the authors explain.

Also, the number of ejecta and their mass haven’t been constant. For example, during the hypothesized Late Heavy Bombardment, a much larger number of objects were crashing into the Earth and the other Solar System bodies. How would that have affected panspermia?

“~4 Gyr ago, the Earth is thought to have experienced an unprecedented number of impact events
that consequently ejected matter into the ISM, the era of Late Heavy Bombardment,” the authors write. The rate of bombardment was between 100 to 500 times greater than the present rate. If other solar systems experienced similar events, there would be substantially more potential for panspermia.

The star formation rate also plays a role. “As more stars are formed, more mass will be ejected into the ISM in star formation regions, increasing the production of ISM ejecta number density,” the authors explain.

There are so many unknowns and so much conjecture that many scientists avoid the panspermia theory completely. But more and more data will keep coming our way, and as it does, the idea will be revised and reconsidered.

The Rubin Observatory Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will hopefully see its long-anticipated first light in early 2025. That telescope will undoubtedly detect many more ISOs and FFPs, filling in important gaps in our knowledge.

As that data comes in, expect more attention to be focused on the panspermia theory

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

02-08-2024 om 01:45 geschreven door peter  

Being trapped in space sounds like the stuff of nightmares. Astronauts on board the International Space Station have on occasion, had their return delayed by weather or equipment malfunction. We find ourselves again, watching and waiting as two astronauts; Juni Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stuck for months instead of their week long mission. The delays came as the Starliner system required fixes to be implemented. NASA successfully fired up 27 of its 28 thrusters in a hot-firing test and now, ground teams are preparing finally, to bring them home.

The Boeing Starliner spacecraft is officially known as the CST-100 Starliner. It was developed by Boeing as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Its purpose is to transport astronauts to the International Space Station and other low orbit craft. Starliner hit the headlines with its reusable design aimed at reducing costs and increasing launch frequency. It was first launched on 20 December 2019 as an uncrewed test flight to demonstrate docking capability with ISS. 

Since 2019 Starliner has had issues along the way but has largely seen a successful progression to becoming a key part of NASA’s launch capability. Just recently however there have been issues with the manoeuvring jets used to adjust the attitude. Engineering teams at NASA and Boeing have been working on and running tests with Mexico a new configuration. Part of the thruster system controls the flow of helium, these are the helium manifolds and they were opened to allow engineers to monitor any helium supply issues and leaks. 

The team ran a hot fire test of the reaction control system jets on 27 July to see if there were any problems with the propulsion system. They test fired 27 out of 28 jets while astronauts Wilmore and Williams sat inside the docked Starliner. The tests involved firing the jets for short bursts, one at a time. They revealed that all thrusters were back to performing well and the helium manifolds were within operational margins that were needed for a return trip from ISS. The engineering teams closed the manifolds ahead of undocking and returning the astronauts home. 

The work is not over for the engineering teams however as they are now reviewing data from the tests and from ground based testing at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. Once the review of data is complete, NASA and Boeing will identify a date to return the astronauts. 

Meanwhile back on board the ISS Wilmore and Williams wait. They have been checking other Starliner systems in preparation for return, working with other Boeing teams to prepare and have been undertaking pressure tests of their space suits. They have been working alongside Expedition 71 members and have recently helped setup the BioServe centrifuge in the Harmony Module. The centrifuge supports a wide range of biological, physical and materials science projects. Facilitating the separation of substances with different densities it can work with cell cultures, DNA, protein, blood and sedimentary samples.

Source : 

• NASA, Boeing Complete Second Docked Starliner Hot Fire Test

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

02-08-2024 om 01:36 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers have recently spotted signs of an extended disk of dust and gas, whirling in orbit around a distant star.

While this phenomenon is a normal stage in the development of a star and its planetary system, what makes this find so spectacular is that it's the first one we've seen around a star in a whole other galaxy, outside of our own.

The feature was spotted in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy some 179,000 light-years away from the Milky Way. And, although it might seem like common sense to suppose that star formation processes are universal, we've not been able to observe their vagaries outside of our home galaxy before.

"When I first saw evidence for a rotating structure in the ALMA data I could not believe that we had detected the first extragalactic accretion disc, it was a special moment," said astronomer Anna McLeod of Durham University in the UK, when the findings were published in November.

"We know discs are vital to forming stars and planets in our galaxy, and here, for the first time, we're seeing direct evidence for this in another galaxy."

Stars are born from dense clumps in clouds of molecular gas and dust that hang out in interstellar space. When a clump grows dense enough, it collapses under gravity; spinning, it starts to draw in more material from the cloud around it. This material doesn't just fall onto the protostar any old how, though; it arranges into a disk around the star's equator, and falls down onto it in a more controlled, steady stream, like water down a drain.

Once the star is done forming, what remains of the disk stays there, clumping together to form all the other elements of a planetary system: the planets, the asteroids and meteors, the comets, the dust. That's why the Solar System's planets are more or less orbiting the Sun in a flat plane. We ourselves are like the sentient mold that grew on the leftovers of the Sun's breakfast.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a powerful radio telescope, has imaged quite a few such disks throughout the Milky Way, in various stages of development; some have clear gaps that are thought to be cleared by planets clumping together as they orbit. But the farther away something is, the harder it is to resolve, even with a powerful telescope.

McLeod and her colleagues embarked on their campaign to find an extragalactic stellar disk when data obtained by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the Very Large Telescope revealed signs of a jet, in a system named HH 1177.

These, too, are a signature of star formation: some of the material swirling around the forming star gets whisked away along its magnetic field lines to the poles, where it is launched into space in the form of a powerful jet.

The researchers wanted to see if they could spot the disk in the dusty heart of star formation, so they used ALMA to look for signs of rotation. This can be seen in the way wavelengths of light are shortened as the source is pushed towards us, and lengthened as they are pulled away.

"The frequency of light changes depending on how fast the gas emitting the light is moving towards or away from us," explained astronomer Jonathan Henshaw of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. "This is precisely the same phenomenon that occurs when the pitch of an ambulance siren changes as it passes you and the frequency of the sound goes from higher to lower."

Interestingly, the ALMA data showed clear signs of this rotation. The star, the team's analysis revealed, is very young and massive, still feeding from the disk around it. This is pretty normal. But there was a difference between it and the protostellar disks found in the Milky Way: the HH 1177 disk can be seen in optical wavelengths.

This, the researchers explain, has to do with the interstellar environment in the Large Magellanic Cloud. There is much less dust there; so the HH 1177 star is not as shrouded in a curtain of material as young, massive Milky Way stars usually are.

This makes the discovery an important one for studying, not just how stars form in different environments, but the limits those environments can place on star formation in general.

"We are in an era of rapid technological advancement when it comes to astronomical facilities," McLeod said. "Being able to study how stars form at such incredible distances and in a different galaxy is very exciting."

• The research has been published in Nature.
• A version of this article was first published in December 2023.

{ https://www.msn.com/en-us/channel/topic/Science/ }

01-08-2024 om 22:46 geschreven door peter  

01-08-2024 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

Milky Way’s Thin Disk Formed Less Than One Billion Years from Big Bang, New Study Suggests

Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have found a large number of metal-poor stars older than 13 billion years on orbits similar to that of our Sun.

Rotational motion of young (blue) and old (red) stars similar to the Sun (orange).

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt / SSC / Caltech.

“The Milky Way Galaxy has a large halo, a central bulge and bar, a thick disk and a thin disk,” said Dr. Samir Nepal from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam and colleagues.

“Most stars are located in the so-called thin disk of our Milky Way and follow an organised rotation around the Galactic center.”

“Middle-aged stars such as our 4.6-billion-year-old Sun belong to the thin disk, which was generally thought to have started forming around 8 to 10 billion years ago.”

Using the new Gaia dataset, the astronomers studied stars within around 3,200 light-years from the Sun.

They discovered a surprising number of very old stars in thin disk orbits; the majority of these are older than 10 billion years, some of them even older than 13 billion years.

These ancient stars show a wide range of metal compositions: some are very metal-poor (as expected), while others have twice the metal content of our much younger Sun, indicating that a rapid metal enrichment took place in the early phase of the Milky Way’s evolution.

“These ancient stars in the disk suggest that the formation of the Milky Way’s thin disk began much earlier than previously believed, by about 4-5 billion years,” Dr. Nepal said.

“This study also highlights that our Galaxy had an intense star formation at early epochs leading to very fast metal enrichment in the inner regions and the formation of the disk.”

“This discovery aligns the Milky Way’s disk formation timeline with those of high-redshift galaxies observed by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA).”

“It indicates that cold disks can form and stabilize very early in the Universe’s history, providing new insights into the evolution of galaxies.”

“Our study suggests that the thin disk of the Milky Way may have formed much earlier than we had thought, and that its formation is strongly related to the early chemical enrichment of the innermost regions of our Galaxy,” said Dr. Cristina Chiappini, an astronomer at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam.

“The combination of data from different sources and the application of advanced machine learning techniques have enabled us to increase the number of stars with high quality stellar parameters, a key step to lead our team to these new insights.”

• The paper will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
• Samir Nepal et al. 2024. Discovery of the local counterpart of disc galaxies at z > 4: The oldest thin disc of the Milky Way using Gaia-RVS. A&A, in press; arXiv: 2402.00561

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

01-08-2024 om 21:04 geschreven door peter  

Warp Drive Collapse Should Generate Gravitational Waves, Theoretical Astrophysicists Claim

The principle idea behind a warp drive is that instead of exceeding the speed of light directly in a local reference frame, a ‘warp bubble’ could traverse distances faster than the speed of light — as measured by some distant observer — by contracting spacetime in front of it and expanding spacetime behind it.

Clough et al. proposed a formalism for studying warp drive spacetimes dynamically and produced the first fully consistent numerical-relativity waveforms for the collapse of a warp drive bubble.

Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with University of Wales astrophysicist Miguel Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel.

Whilst there are numerous practical barriers to their implementation in real life, such as the requirement for an exotic type of matter with negative energy, computationally, one can simulate their evolution in time given an equation of state describing the matter.

In a new work, theoretical astrophysicists studied the signatures arising from a warp drive ‘containment failure.’

“Even though warp drives are purely theoretical, they have a well-defined description in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and so numerical simulations allow us to explore the impact they might have on spacetime in the form of gravitational waves,” said Dr. Katy Clough, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

“The results are fascinating. The collapsing warp drive generates a distinct burst of gravitational waves, a ripple in spacetime that could be detectable by gravitational wave detectors that normally target black hole and neutron star mergers.”

“Unlike the chirps from merging astrophysical objects, this signal would be a short, high-frequency burst, and so current detectors wouldn’t pick it up.”

“However, future higher-frequency instruments might, and although no such instruments have yet been funded, the technology to build them exists.”

“This raises the possibility of using these signals to search for evidence of warp drive technology, even if we can’t build one ourselves.”

“In our study, the initial shape of the spacetime is the warp bubble described by Alcubierre,” said Dr. Sebastian Khan, a researcher at Cardiff University.

“While we were able to demonstrate that an observable signal could in principle be found by future detectors, given the speculative nature of the work this isn’t sufficient to drive instrument development.”

The authors also delve into the energy dynamics of the collapsing warp drive.

The process emits a wave of negative energy matter, followed by alternating positive and negative waves.

This complex dance results in a net increase in the overall energy of the system, and in principle could provide another signature of the collapse if the outgoing waves interacted with normal matter.

“It’s a reminder that theoretical ideas can push us to explore the Universe in new ways,” Dr. Clough said.

“Even though we are sceptical about the likelihood of seeing anything, I do think it is sufficiently interesting to be worth looking.”

“For me, the most important aspect of the study is the novelty of accurately modeling the dynamics of negative energy spacetimes, and the possibility of extending the techniques to physical situations that can help us better understand the evolution and origin of our Universe, or the processes at the centre of black holes,” said University of Potsdam’s Professor Tim Dietrich.

“Warp speed may be a long way off, but this research already pushes the boundaries of our understanding of exotic spacetimes and gravitational waves.”

“We plan to investigate how the signal changes with different warp drive models.”

• The team’s paper was published online in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
• Katy Clough et al. 2024. What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse. Open Journal of Astrophysics 7; doi: 10.33232/001c.121868

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

01-08-2024 om 20:58 geschreven door peter  

Twee nieuw ontdekte gassen in de atmosfeer van Venus zouden kunnen wijzen op sporen van leven: de ontdekking

Door Janine

NASA/JPL

Venus, de tweede planeet van het zonnestelsel, lijkt qua omvang en massa sterk op de aarde, maar verder is het een van de meest onherbergzame plaatsen die we tot nu toe kennen. De atmosfeer, die bestaat uit gassen die giftig voor ons zijn, is het onderwerp geweest van recente ontdekkingen die de aanwezigheid lijken te suggereren van twee gassen die door levende organismen worden geproduceerd. Kunnen we daarom spreken van sporen van leven op Venus? Laten we het samen ontdekken!

Zoeken naar leven op andere planeten: het belang van biomarkers

Zoals we in de inleiding zeiden, is Venus een plek die net zo fascinerend is om te bestuderen als onherbergzaam, voor welke vorm van leven dan ook die ons bekend is. Het oppervlak bereikt temperaturen van 450°C, terwijl de atmosfeer ongeveer 90 keer dichter is dan die van de aarde. Een onherbergzame plek, waar echter leven zou kunnen voorkomen op hoogten van minstens 50 kilometer boven het oppervlak, waar de omstandigheden minder extreem zijn. Maar hoe kom je erachter of er organismen op Venus leven?

Een van de methoden die wetenschappers gebruiken, bestaat uit het analyseren van de chemische samenstelling van de planeten. Meestal is het inderdaad mogelijk om verbindingen te identificeren die geen verband houden met het leven, maar soms is het mogelijk om zogenaamde biomarkers te vinden, dat wil zeggen chemische verbindingen die op aarde door bepaalde organismen worden geproduceerd. En die zouden kunnen duiden op een soortgelijk proces op andere planeten of andere hemellichamen. Op Venus beweren sommige wetenschappers bijvoorbeeld sporen van fosfine en ammoniak te hebben gevonden. Maar wat betekent dat?

Fosfine en ammoniak in de atmosfeer van Venus: wat betekent het?

Unsplash - Not the actual photo

Er zijn twee specifieke biomarkers gedetecteerd in de atmosfeer van Venus, tijdens observaties die al een paar jaar duren en die, zo lijkt het, zijn bevestigd. De eerste biomarker is fosfine, een verbinding die op aarde door sommige microben wordt geproduceerd in zuurstofvrije omgevingen en in kleine hoeveelheden door vulkanen. Sommige wetenschappers beweren al jaren dat fosfine een teken van buitenaards leven op Venus zou kunnen vertegenwoordigen. In het bijzonder vestigde Dave Clements van Imperial College London in een onderzoek uit 2023 opnieuw de aandacht op de kwestie en ontdekte dat fosfine wordt vernietigd door de werking van de zon. Maar over zijn vorming is nog niets bekend: zou het leven kunnen zijn?

De tweede biomarker is ammoniak, onlangs geïdentificeerd door Jane Greaves van Cardiff University, die samen met Dave Clements een conferentie gaf op de National Astronomy Meeting 2024. Beiden betogen hoe de aanwezigheid van fosfine en ammoniak ons ​​kan helpen de atmosfeer van Venus beter te begrijpen en, waarom niet, ook de mogelijke aanwezigheid van leven.

Sporen van leven op Venus?

Veel geleerden zijn het erover eens dat Venus in het verleden mogelijk omstandigheden heeft gehad die meer leken op die op aarde, inclusief de mogelijkheid om leven te huisvesten. Het is echter moeilijker om de aanwezigheid van fosfine en ammoniak in de atmosfeer van de planeet te verklaren met bekende chemische processen. Hier op aarde worden de twee stoffen geproduceerd door biologische of hoogstens industriële processen, maar op Venus?

Het is duidelijk dat het te vroeg is om conclusies te trekken, maar het onderzoek van Clements en Greaves heeft tenminste de verdienste dat het met de vinger in de juiste richting wijst. Er zullen veel preciezere detecties nodig zijn door de James Clerk Maxwell-telescoop, gericht op Venus, en veel meer tijd. Tegelijkertijd is het normaal om verbaasd te zijn over de mogelijkheid om iets te ontdekken dat nog nooit eerder is gezien, ook al is het een klein organisme dat op 50 kilometer hoogte zweeft, op een verder onherbergzame planeet.

{ https://www.curioctopus.nl/ }

01-08-2024 om 18:37 geschreven door peter  

Runaway Star Might Explain Mysterious Black Hole Disappearing Act

By JET PROPULSION LABORATORY

The telltale sign that the black hole was feeding vanished, perhaps when a star interrupted the feast. The event could lend new insight into these mysterious objects.

At the center of a far-off galaxy, a black hole is slowly consuming a disk of gas that swirls around it like water circling a drain. As a steady trickle of gas is pulled into the gaping maw, ultrahot particles gather close to the black hole, above and below the disk, generating a brilliant X-ray glow that can be seen 300 million light-years away on Earth. These collections of ultrahot gas, called black hole coronas, have been known to exhibit noticeable changes in their luminosity, brightening or dimming by up to 100 times as a black hole feeds.

But two years ago, astronomers watched in awe as X-rays from the black hole corona in a galaxy known as 1ES 1927+654 disappeared completely, fading by a factor of 10,000 in about 40 days. Almost immediately it began to rebound, and about 100 days later had become almost 20 times brighter than before the event.

The X-ray light from a black hole corona is a direct byproduct of the black hole’s feeding, so the disappearance of that light from 1ES 1927+654 likely means that its food supply had been cut off. In a new study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists hypothesize that a runaway star might have come too close to the black hole and been torn apart. If this was the case, fast-moving debris from the star could have crashed through part of the disk, briefly dispersing the gas.

This illustration shows the black hole after the debris from the star has dispersed some of the gas in the disk, causing the corona to disappear.

Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech

“We just don’t normally see variations like this in accreting black holes,” said Claudio Ricci, an assistant professor at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile, and lead author of the study. “It was so strange that at first we thought maybe there was something wrong with the data. When we saw it was real, it was very exciting. But we also had no idea what we were dealing with; no one we talked to had seen anything like this.”

Nearly every galaxy in the universe may host a supermassive black hole at its center, like the one in 1ES 1927+654, with masses millions or billions of times greater than our Sun. They grow by consuming the gas encircling them, otherwise known as an accretion disk. Because black holes don’t emit or reflect light, they can’t be seen directly, but the light from their coronas and accretion disks offers a way to learn about these dark objects.

The authors’ star hypothesis is also supported by the fact that a few months before the X-ray signal disappeared, observatories on Earth saw the disk brighten considerably in visible-light wavelengths (those that can be seen by the human eye). This might have resulted from the initial collision of the stellar debris with the disk.

Digging Deeper

The disappearing event in 1ES 1927+654 is unique not only because of the dramatic change in brightness, but also because of how thoroughly astronomers were able to study it. The visible-light flare prompted Ricci and his colleagues to request follow-up monitoring of the black hole using NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. In total, NICER observed the system 265 times over 15 months. Additional X-ray monitoring was obtained with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — which also observed the system in ultraviolet light — as well as NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the ESA (the European Space Agency) XMM-Newton observatory (which has NASA involvement).

When the X-ray light from the corona disappeared, NICER and Swift observed lower-energy X-rays from the system so that, collectively, these observatories provided a continuous stream of information throughout the event.

Although a wayward star seems the most likely culprit, the authors note that there could be other explanations for the unprecedented event. One remarkable feature of the observations is that the overall drop in brightness wasn’t a smooth transition: Day to day, the low-energy X-rays NICER detected showed dramatic variation, sometimes changing in brightness by a factor of 100 in as little as eight hours. In extreme cases, black hole coronas have been known to become 100 times brighter or dimmer, but on much longer timescales. Such rapid changes occurring continuously for months was extraordinary.

“This dataset has a lot of puzzles in it,” said Erin Kara, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the new study. “But that’s exciting because it means we’re learning something new about the universe. We think the star hypothesis is a good one, but I also think we’re going to be analyzing this event for a long time.”

It’s possible that this kind of extreme variability is more common in black hole accretion disks than astronomers realized. Many operating and upcoming observatories are designed to search for short-term changes in cosmic phenomena, a practice known as “time domain astronomy,” which could reveal more events like this one.

“This new study is a great example of how flexibility in observation scheduling allows NASA and ESA missions to study objects that evolve relatively quickly and look for longer-term changes in their average behavior,” said Michael Loewenstein, a coauthor of the study and an astrophysicist for the NICER mission at the University of Maryland College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Will this feeding black hole return to the state it was in before the disruption event? Or has the system been fundamentally changed? We’re continuing our observations to find out.”

More About the Missions

NICER is an Astrophysics Mission of Opportunity within NASA’s Explorer program, which provides frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations from space utilizing innovative, streamlined, and efficient management approaches within the heliophysics and astrophysics science areas.

NuSTAR recently celebrated eight years in space, having launched on June 13, 2012. A Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR’s mission operations center is at the University of California, Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center at GSFC. ASI provides the mission’s ground station and a mirror data archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory was launched in December 1999 from Kourou, French Guiana. NASA funded elements of the XMM-Newton instrument package and provides the NASA Guest Observer Facility at GSFC, which supports the use of the observatory by U.S. astronomers.

GSFC manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory of the University College London in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.

• Read Astronomers Watch a Black Hole’s Corona Mysteriously Disappear, Then Reappear for more on this research.
• Reference: “The Destruction and Recreation of the X-Ray Corona in a Changing-look Active Galactic Nucleus” by C. Ricci, E. Kara, M. Loewenstein, B. Trakhtenbrot, I. Arcavi, R. Remillard, A. C. Fabian, K. C. Gendreau, Z. Arzoumanian, R. Li, L. C. Ho, C. L. MacLeod, E. Cackett, D. Altamirano, P. Gandhi, P. Kosec, D. Pasham, J. Steiner and C.-H. Chan, 16 July 2020, Astrophysical Journal Letters.
  DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab91a1

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01-08-2024 om 01:47 geschreven door peter  

Runaway 'failed star' races through the cosmos at 1.2 million mph

CWISE J1249+3621,was originally discovered by citizen scientists working with the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, which uses data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to detect faint, moving objects relatively close to the sun.

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• Hubble Space Telescope discovers 'failed stars' are bad at relationships too

After several citizen scientists flagged the object, a team of astronomers followed up using the Keck I Telescope, one of two 10-meter twin telescopes located on the dormant volcano Maunakea, in Hawai'i.

"We discovered a very low-mass object, right on the star/brown dwarf mass boundary, that has an extreme velocity, moving fast enough that it may actually be unbound to the Milky Way galaxy," study team leader Adam Burgasser, of the University of California San Diego, told Space.com. "It joins a collection of 'hypervelocity' stars that have been found over the past few decades, most of which are thousands of light-years from the sun, whereas this source is a 'mere' 400 light-years away."

Burgasser added that the team's observations included an analysis of CWISE J1249+3621's atmosphere. This indicated that the potential brown dwarf also has an unusual chemical composition. The team aimed to use the information they gathered about the motion and composition of CWISE J1249+3621 to speculate on its possible origins.

"This discovery mainly opens up a new pathway to studying brown dwarfs that are in remote regions of the Milky Way, including its center, its halo and its various globular clusters and satellites," Burgasser said. "All of these systems are too far away to study brown dwarfs in detail directly, but if they get thrown at us, it's much easier!"

A young star, similar to the renegade star PG 1610+062, gets ejected from the Milky Way by a hungry black hole. So long! 

(Image credit: A. IRRGANG, FAU)

What is this rogue star running from?

Brown dwarfs form just like stars do — from giant clouds of gas and dust, called molecular clouds, that develop overly dense patches that collapse under the influence of their own gravity. However, unlike a regular star such as the sun, brown dwarfs fail to gather enough material from the remains of the cloud that birthed them to reach the mass needed to generate the pressures and temperatures in their cores that kickstart the fusion of hydrogen to helium. This is the process that defines a "main sequence" star. Hence, the "failed star" moniker foisted on brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs have masses ranging from around four times that of Jupiter to around 80 times that of the gas giant. (For comparison, the sun is 1,000 times more massive than Jupiter.) The mass of CWISE J1249+3621 is exciting because it puts it right at the hypothetical boundary between a star and a brown dwarf.

"The low mass is significant because it's by far the lowest-mass, high-velocity 'star' found to date. The original hypervelocity stars found about 20 years ago were massive O stars [around 50 times as massive as the sun] and B stars [up to 16 times as massive as the sun], a likely selection bias because these stars are rare and would need to be found at large distances," Burgasser said. "Our discovery indicates that whatever process (or processes) causes these stars to run away must operate at both high and low masses."

The UC San Diego researcher explained that the team is really excited to try to answer what sent this stellar body careening through the Milky Way.

"The star could have been kicked out of the center of Milky Way by our supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, a process commonly used to explain the origins of other hypervelocity stars," Burgasser said. "Notably, our star is moving into the center, not away, but it might be on a return trip after being ejected previously."

He added that it is also possible that the brown dwarf is on the run from a "cosmic vampire." The rogue stellar body may have been part of a binary system with a white dwarf stellar corpse that was ripping material away from it. This gruesome feeding eventually causes the white dwarf to erupt in a cosmic explosion called a Type Ia supernova. This would destroy the white dwarf and provide the "kick" that sent this runaway racing through the Milky Way at incredible speeds.

"Another possibility is that the star was launched out of a globular cluster through dynamical interactions with black holes in the center of the cluster; recent simulations show that this should happen several times over the age of the Milky Way," Burgasser said. "Any of these processes above, given a fast enough kick, could have launched it out, or in the case of an 'extragalactic' star, it just happens to be passing through."

He added that, currently, the team can't rule out the possibility that this potential brown dwarf is an intruder in our galaxy that came from outside the Milky Way. But the fact that it's passing through the plane of our Milky Way makes that a less likely case.

"The orbit is certainly the most surprising aspect of this object; it is moving radially in and out of the center of the Milky Way and almost perfectly in the plane," Burgasser said. "Most of the high-velocity stars we see are on much more chaotic or inclined orbits. I think this is a real clue to its real origin."

Related: 

• Brown dwarfs: The coolest stars or the hottest planets?

Runaway brown dwarfs, if that is indeed what CWISE J1249+3621 is, appear to be rare, but this could be because of their cool and faint nature, which makes them difficult to detect. This means that the population of rogue brown dwarfs could be much larger than current detection rates indicate.

"These types of stars are exceedingly rare; only a few dozen have been found out of billions of stars examined, and, as noted, this is the first low-mass one. And this object in particular is difficult to see because it's a very cool and dim star, nearly 10,000 times fainter than the sun and emitting most of its light at infrared wavelengths," Burgasser said. "It's hard to say how common these bodies are, with only one found so far, but since this is so close, we speculate that there may be many more.

"That speculation is informed partly by the fact that the majority of stars in the Milky Way are low mass, and about one in five are brown dwarfs, and that these objects are the easiest to 'throw around' since they are so low mass."

The team now intends to follow up on the investigation of CWISE J1249+3621's atmosphere in greater detail to see if its chemical abundances reveal something about its origin. They will also attempt to discover more of these low-mass stellar runaways, a hunt in which citizen scientists will play an integral role.

"We definitely want to find more of these objects, and our citizen scientists have identified several more high-velocity candidates to follow up," Burgasser concluded. "Citizen scientists were absolutely essential to this study! They were the ones who identified this source as an interesting target worth investigating. Without them, we'd still have hundreds of thousands of faint little dots to sort through."

The team's research is discussed in a pre-peer-reviewed paper featured on the repository site arXiv.

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01-08-2024 om 01:38 geschreven door peter