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Astronomers map mysterious element in space


Lund University
Wed, 23 Feb 2022 17:38 UTC
The Crab Nebula
© NASA/ESA/J Hester Arizona State UniversityThe Crab Nebula.
A research team led by Lund University in Sweden has provided an important clue to the origin of the element Ytterbium in the Milky Way, by showing that the element largely originates from supernova explosions. The groundbreaking research also provides new opportunities for studying the evolution of our galaxy. The study is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Ytterbium is one of four elements in the periodic table named after the Ytterby mine in the Stockholm archipelago. The element was first discovered in the black mineral gadolinite, which was first identified in the Ytterby mine in 1787.

Ytterbium is interesting because it may have two different cosmic origins. Researchers believe that one half comes from heavy stars with short lives, while the other half comes from more regular stars, much like the sun, and that they create Ytterbium in the final stages of their relatively long lives.

"By studying stars formed at different times in the Milky Way, we have been able to investigate how fast the Ytterbium content increased in the galaxy. What we have succeeded in doing is adding relatively young stars to the study", says Martin Montelius, astronomy researcher at Lund University at the time of the research, and now at the University of Groningen.
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Info

New insights into the formation of brown dwarfs


Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Fri, 18 Feb 2022 19:33 UTC
A team led by LMU astrophysicist Basmah Riaz has detected a special methane compound outside the solar system for the first time.
Nebula in serpens
© ESONebula in serpens - In this region of the sky, the LMU team discovered deuterated methane in a proto-brown dwarf.
Brown dwarfs are strange celestial bodies, occupying a kind of intermediate position between stars and planets. Astrophysicists sometimes call them "failed stars" because they have insufficient mass to burn hydrogen in their cores and shine like stars. It is continually debated if the formation of brown dwarfs is simply a scaled-down version of the formation of Sun-like stars. Astrophysicists are focusing on the youngest brown dwarfs, also called proto-brown dwarfs. They are only a few thousand years old and are still in the early formation stages. They want to know if the gas and dust in these proto-brown dwarfs resemble the composition of the youngest Sun-like proto-stars.

The focus of interest is methane, a simple and very stable gas molecule that, once formed, can only be destroyed by high-energy physical processes. It has been found in several extrasolar planets. In the past, methane has played a fundamental role to identify and study the properties of the oldest brown dwarfs in our Galaxy, which are several hundred million to billions of years old.

Now, for the first time, a team led by LMU astrophysicist Basmah Riaz, has unambiguously detected deuterated methane (CH3D) in three proto-brown dwarfs. It is the first clear detection of CH3D outside the solar system. This is an unexpected result.
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Comet 2

Two comets plunge to their death


SpaceWeather
Fri, 18 Feb 2022 16:57 UTC
It's not unusual for one comet to fall into the sun. On Feb. 16th, two comets did it. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded their death dive:
Two Sungrazers
© SpaceWeather
Travelling in tandem, the two comets disintegrated as they approached the sun. The smaller one vaporized first, and the larger penetrated a bit deeper before it disappeared. Watch the full resolution movie for a better view.
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Galaxy

Astronomers find largest radio galaxy ever


Leiden University
Wed, 16 Feb 2022 15:53 UTC
By a stroke of luck, a team led by Dutch PhD student Martijn Oei has discovered a radio galaxy of at least 16 million lightyears long. The pair of plasma plumes is the largest structure made by a galaxy known thus far. The finding disproves some long-kept hypotheses about the growth of radio galaxies.
New Galaxy
© Martijn Oei et al.
A supermassive black hole lurks in the centre of many galaxies, which slows down the birth of new stars and therefore strongly influences the lifecycle of the galaxy as a whole. Sometimes, this leads to tumultuous scenes: the black hole can create two jet streams, that catapult the building material for baby stars out of the galaxy at almost the speed of light. In this violent process, the stardust heats up so much that it dissolves into plasma and glows in radio light. The international team of researchers from Leiden (The Netherlands), Hertfortshire, Oxford (both UK), and Paris (France) have now collected that light - with the pan-European LOFAR telescope, whose epicentre lies in a marshy Dutch 'radio dark' nature reserve, where your smartphone deliberately loses signal.

Record length

The picture of the two plasma plumes is special, because never before scientists saw a structure this big made by a single galaxy. The discovery shows that the sphere of influence of some galaxies reaches far from their direct environment. How far, exactly? That is hard to determine. Astronomical pictures are taken from a single viewpoint (Earth), and therefore do not contain depth.As a result, scientists can only measure a part of the radio galaxy length: a low estimate of the total length. But even that lower bound, of more than 16 million lightyears, is gargantuan, and comparable to one hundred Milky Ways in a row.
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Sun

Solar tsunami hit Earth 9,200 years ago

Thomas A. Dobbins
Sky & Telescope
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 18:33 UTC
Scientists examining ancient ice cores have found radioactive evidence of an extreme solar storm that took place in 7,176 BCE.
Solar Flare

An international team of researchers announced the discovery of fallout from an extreme solar storm entombed in ancient ice. The fact that the outburst occurred during a time when the Sun ought to have been quiet may be even more alarming than the storm's magnitude.

Ice cores are long cylinders drilled from ice sheets and glaciers, frozen time capsules that allow scientists to reconstruct events in the distant past. The accumulating weight of each year's snowfall compresses previous layers of snow, forming dense glacial ice that contains trapped gases, aerosols, and particles. The thick ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland provide exceptionally well-preserved and detailed records of a variety of events that occurred up to 800,000 years ago — including variations in the level of solar activity.

When energetic charged particles strike atoms in the upper atmosphere, they produce three radioactive isotopes: carbon-14 (half-life 5,700 years), beryllium-10 (half-life 1.4 million years), and chlorine-36 (half-life 300,000 years). The production rate of these cosmogenic isotopes depends on the intensity of cosmic radiation, though the strength of Earth's magnetic field, which can deflect many charged particles, also plays a role.
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Attention

Hong Kong makes some Cathay pilots wear tracking devices

Andrew Curran
Simple Flying
Thu, 10 Feb 2022 04:35 UTC
Hong Kong is furthering tightening quarantine rules for Cathay Pacific flight crews, including making cargo pilots wear electronic tracking devices.

Cathay Pacific
© Boeing
Electronic tagging of Cathay Pacific cargo pilots

Hong Kong authorities continue to squeeze Cathay Pacific with new quarantine rules targeting cargo pilots and crews operating the airline's few remaining passenger flights. In a staff memo, one senior Cathay Pacific executive calls the new rules "some of the most stringent requirements yet."

The new quarantine rules, which Bloomberg first reported, came into effect on Wednesday. The rules apply to all airlines flying into Hong Kong. However, as very few airlines other than Cathay Pacific do, the toughened regime primarily impacts the already besieged airline.

Under the new rules, cargo pilots who've returned home to Hong Kong will need to wear electronic bracelets for three days so authorities can track their movements. Unlike passenger plane crews, cargo crews have been allowed to quarantine at home, leading to all sorts of problems, including a scandal where Cathay Pacific was designating empty passenger planes as cargo planes so the crews could bypass the hotel quarantine process.

Crew returning on passenger flights, empty or otherwise, will now need to undergo 14 days of hotel quarantine where previously seven days sufficed for crews coming off most passenger flights. Adding complexity for the airline is another new rule that bans using a mix of local and overseas-based crew on the same flights. Now passenger aircraft crew can only fly together if they go into quarantine afterward together - for two weeks.
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Jupiter

Electromagnetic 'tug-of-war' lights up Jupiter's upper atmosphere


University of Leicester
Thu, 03 Feb 2022 21:16 UTC
Jupiter Aurorae
© NASA, ESA, and J. Nichols (University of Leicester)Composite image of two different Hubble observations. The aurorae were photographed during a series of Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph far-ultraviolet-light observations taking place as NASA’s Juno spacecraft approaches and enters into orbit around Jupiter. The full-color disk of Jupiter in this image was separately photographed at a different time by Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, a long-term Hubble project that annually captures global maps of the outer planets.
New Leicester space research has revealed, for the first time, a complex 'tug-of-war' lights up aurorae in Jupiter's upper atmosphere, using a combination of data from NASA's Juno probe and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, describes the delicate current cycle driven by Jupiter's rapid rotation and the release of sulphur and oxygen from volcanoes on its moon, Io.

Researchers from the University of Leicester's School of Physics and Astronomy used data from Juno's Magnetic Field Investigation (MAG), which measures Jupiter's magnetic field from orbit around the gas giant, and observations from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph carried by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Their research provides the strongest evidence yet that Jupiter's powerful aurorae are associated with an electric current system that acts as part of a tug-of-war with material in the magnetosphere, the region dominated by the planet's enormous magnetic field.

Dr Jonathan Nichols is a Reader in Planetary Auroras at the University of Leicester and corresponding author for the study. He said: "We've had theories linking these electric currents and Jupiter's powerful auroras for over two decades now, and it was so exciting to be able to finally test them by looking for this relationship in the data. And when we plotted one against the other I nearly fell off my chair when I saw just how clear the connection is.
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UFO

Investigator believes 2022 'going to be seismic year for UFOs'

Oleg Burunov
Sputnik News
Sun, 06 Feb 2022 17:08 UTC
UFO at Night
© CCO
Last year, the issue became the bottom line of a Pentagon report which concluded that there was no "single explanation" for over 140 UFO-like occurrences recorded by military personnel since 2004, but that they posed a threat to flight safety and national security.

Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating the possible sightings of unidentified flying objects for the British Ministry of Defence, has said he is "confident" that 2022 "is going to be a seismic year for UFOs".

Such objects are also referred to as "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP) or "anomalous aerial vehicles" (AAVs).

Referring to the US, where a Pentagon report on the matter was released in 2021, Pope told The Guardian that he senses "a genuine desire" from the country's Department of Defence (DoD) and Intelligence Community "to "grip the issue".
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Radar

Best of the Web: More moons! Earth acquires SECOND 'Trojan asteroid', space rock orbiting our planet


University of Barcelona
Wed, 02 Feb 2022 17:22 UTC
An International team of astronomers led by researcher Toni Santana-Ros, from the University of Alicante, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), has confirmed the existence of the second Earth Trojan asteroid known to date, the 2020 XL5, after a decade of search. The results of the study have been published today, February 1, in the journal Nature Communications.
Earth Trojan Asteroid
© University of Barcelona
All celestial objects that roam around our solar system feel the gravitational influence of all the other massive bodies that build it, including the Sun and the planets. If we consider only the Earth-Sun system, Newton's laws of gravity state that there are five points where all the forces that act upon an object located at that point cancel each other out. These regions are called Lagrangian points, and they are areas of great stability. Earth Trojan asteroids are small bodies that orbit around the L4 o L5 Lagrangian points of the Sun-Earth system.

These results confirm that 2020 XL5 is the second transient Earth Trojan asteroid known to date, and everything indicates it will remain Trojan — that is, it will be located at the Lagrangian point — for four thousand years, thus it is qualified as transient. The researchers have provided an estimation of the object bulk size (around one kilometer in diameter, larger than the Earth Trojan asteroid known to date, the 2010 TK7, which was 0.3 kilometres in diameter), and have made a study of the impulse a rocket needs to reach the asteroid from Earth.
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Sun

Scientists explain mysterious finger-like features in solar flares


Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Thu, 27 Jan 2022 19:20 UTC
Astronomers have presented a new explanation for the mysterious downward-moving dark voids seen in some solar flares.

Solar Flares
© NASA SDO
Cambridge, MA -- In January 1999, scientists observed mysterious motions within a solar flare.

Unlike typical flares that showed bright energy erupting outwards from the Sun, this solar flare also displayed a downward flow of motion, as if material was falling back towards the Sun. Described as "downward-moving dark voids," astronomers wondered what exactly they were seeing.

Now, in a study published today in Nature Astronomy, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) offer a new explanation for the poorly understood downflows, now referred to as supra-arcade downflows (SADs) by the scientific community.

"We wanted to know how these structures occur," says lead author and CfA astronomer Chengcai Shen, who describes the structures as "dark finger-like features." "What's driving them and are they truly tied to magnetic reconnection?"
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