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NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft today began its six-year cruise to the Jupiter system, with the goal of determining whether one of the giant planet’s moons has the right stuff in the right setting for life.

The van-sized probe was sent into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 12:06 p.m. ET (16:06 UTC). A little more than an hour after launch, the spacecraft separated from its launch vehicle to begin a roundabout journey of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) from Earth orbit to Europa.

For decades, scientists have been collecting evidence that Europa harbors a hidden ocean of salty water beneath its icy shell. Or are they hidden lakes? Europa Clipper is built to characterize the moon’s surface, and what’s beneath that surface, to an unprecedented degree.

The spacecraft won’t actually land on Europa. Instead, it will document the moon’s chemical composition, magnetic field, gravity field and subsurface structure over the course of four years, during 49 flybys that will pass as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface.

“Europa Clipper carries the most sophisticated suite of instruments that we’ve ever sent to the outer solar system,” mission project scientist Bob Pappalardo said during today’s webcast.

“It carries a radar that can penetrate through ice like a CAT scan to find liquid water,” he said. “Super-high-resolution imaging will be able to look for warm spots, plumes at Europa — all these wonderful techniques that combine together to tell us, ‘Could Europa be the kind of place that could support life today?'”

Europa Clipper is the most massive interplanetary probe built for NASA, with a fueled-up weight of 13,000 pounds (6,000 kilograms). Putting the spacecraft on its proper trajectory required so much oomph that there wasn’t enough propellant left over for the recovery of SpaceX’s rocket afterward.

Getting the spacecraft off the pad was an odyssey in itself: This summer, mission planners worried that the probe’s radiation shielding wasn’t strong enough to protect its electronics, but those concerns were eased. Last week, Hurricane Milton forced a postponement of the Florida launch, but after the storm passed, NASA and SpaceX gave the all-clear for today’s attempt. During the countdown, the launch team detected — and successfully resolved — a last-minute temperature anomaly on the Falcon Heavy’s second stage.

On its way to the Jupiter system, Europa Clipper will rely on gravity boosts provided during a flyby of Mars next March, and during an Earth flyby at the end of 2026.

Once the spacecraft gets to its destination in 2030, it will fly over Europa repeatedly, following a flight path that’s meant to minimize exposure to the intense emissions from Jupiter’s radiation belts.

Europa Clipper’s science instruments include visible-light, ultraviolet and infrared cameras that will map the ridges and cracks in Europa’s surface — and check for thermal clues that could point to upwellings of liquid water.

Spectrometers will determine the chemical composition of the surface ice and “sniff” Europa’s thin atmosphere. Ice-penetrating radar and a gravity field detector will map Europa’s internal structure. Two instruments will chart the magnetic field, producing data that could confirm the depth and salinity of Europa’s subsurface ocean. A dust analyzer will sample the material that’s thrown up from the surface, to track down its composition and figure out where it’s coming from.

The spacecraft is also carrying a radiation-shielding plate that is decorated with graphical representations of the word “water” in 103 languages — in recognition of Europa’s status as a water world — plus a poem for Europa, celestial equations and other tributes. The names of 2.6 million people around the world have been etched in microscopic letters onto a silicon chip that’s attached to the plate, thanks to a “Message in a Bottle” campaign organized by NASA.

Is there life in Europa’s hidden ocean? Scientists say the $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission shouldn’t be expected to answer that question definitively. “We’re not looking for life itself. We’re just looking for an environment in which life could thrive,” Kate Craft, a staff scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a video about the mission from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Nevertheless, the data could produce some surprises.

NASA has already started looking into the possibility of sending a robotic lander to Europa to follow up on findings from the Europa Clipper mission. Such a lander could sample the ice to a depth of, say, 4 inches (10 centimeters) — and look for signs of life in those samples using a microscope and other lab instruments.

The post Europa Clipper Begins Odyssey to Assess Jovian Moon’s Habitability appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA's Europa Clipper has embarked on its long voyage to Jupiter, where it will investigate Europa, a moon with an enormous subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life. The largest spacecraft NASA ever built for a mission headed to another planet, Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth.

The early Universe continues to offer surprises and the latest observations of infant galaxies are no exception. Astronomers found a surprisingly Milky Way-like galaxy that existed more than 13 billion years ago. That was a time when the Universe was really just an infant and galaxies should still be early in their formation. A well-formed one in such early history is a bit of a surprise.

The newly discovered galaxy is called REBELS-25. It was found as part of the “Reionization Era Bright Emission Line Survey (REBELS) survey using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The idea of the survey is to search out and measure early galaxies.

REBELS-24 is a massive disc-like galaxy with structures that look like spiral arms. That’s pretty similar to our Milky Way Galaxy. It’s more than 13 billion years old and took billions of years to evolve into its present shape. Like REBELS-25, the Milky Way began as a clumpy, disorganized proto-galaxy not long after the Universe began. It merged with other protogalaxies and evolved into a beautiful spiral shape. It appears to be actively forming stars and is incredibly massive for such a young galaxy.

Early Spirals Aren’t New

So, REBELS-25 raises a big question: why is it so massive and well-evolved at a time when the infant Milky Way was still a clump? That’s what astronomers are working to figure out. “According to our understanding of galaxy formation, we expect most early galaxies to be small and messy looking,” said Jacqueline Hodge, an astronomer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. The fact that REBELS-25 looks so “modern” after less than a billion years does—in a sense—rebel against the generally accepted theories about galaxy formation and evolution.

This isn’t the first time that astronomical observations uncovered early spirals. JWST observations suggest that perhaps a third of early galaxies are already spirals in the infant Universe. Its Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) found many of these in the first 700 million years of cosmic history. So, finding this one looking almost “modern” some 13 billion years ago just adds to the mystery of their formation.

REBELS-25 showed up in ALMA observations, which also gave hints that it had a rotating disk. A set of follow-up observations confirmed the rotation of this galaxy and its spiral arm structures. In addition, the ALMA data found hints of a central bar (just like our Milky Way galaxy has). “ALMA is the only telescope in existence with the sensitivity and resolution to achieve this,” said Renske Smit, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and part of the team that worked on this discovery.

The ALMA data produced an image of REBELS-25 (left) and a map of gas motions in this galaxy which lies more than 13 billion light-years away. Blue coloring indicates movement towards Earth. Red indicates movement away from Earth, with a darker shade representing faster movement. In this case, the red-blue divide of the image shows clearly that the object is rotating, making REBELS-25 the most distant and early (13 billion years old) rotating disc galaxy ever discovered. Courtesy ESO.

Surprisingly, the ALMA data also hinted at more developed features similar to those of the Milky Way. It looks like there’s a central elongated bar, and even spiral arms in REBELS0-25. “Seeing a galaxy with such similarities to our own Milky Way, that is strongly rotation-dominated, challenges our understanding of how quickly galaxies in the early Universe evolve into the orderly galaxies of today’s cosmos,” said Lucie Rowland, a doctoral student at Leiden University who led the research into REBELS-25. “Finding further evidence of more evolved structures would be an exciting discovery, as it would be the most distant galaxy with such structures observed to date.”

What Does This Mean for Galaxy Evolution?

As astronomers discover more of these well-evolved galaxies in the early Universe, they’ll have to adjust the working model of galactic birth and evolution. In that model, the baby galaxies are clumps of stars and gas that come together in collisions and cannibalism to form larger galaxies. It’s typically considered a messy and turbulent time in cosmic history. Infant galaxies collided and grew. They combined their stars and gases to make larger structures. Over time they begin to rotate, which also influences the formation of structures inside the galaxy. Further collisions add more mass to the galaxy, and they also spur bursts of star formation. All of this takes billions of years to accomplish. Or so astronomers always thought.

REBELS-25 and other early spirals challenge that general model. For one thing, REBELS-25 looks like a galaxy that’s evolving at an accelerated pace. Compared to the Milky Way’s ponderous billions of years of evolution, REBELS-25 is going at warp speed. That implies something is pushing that acceleration. T he big thing now will be to explain its advanced evolution at a very young age.

The REBELS program should help astronomers understand more about the processes at work only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. That survey will supply large enough amounts of data about high-mass galaxies in the early Universe. Those samples should allow astronomers to do targeted studies of more galaxies using both ALMA and JWST. Both observatories are powerful enough to give detailed looks at individual galaxies in those very early epochs of cosmic history.

For More Information

Space Oddity: Most Distant Rotating Disc Galaxy Found (PR)
Space oddity: Most Distant Rotating Disc Galaxy Found (the paper)
About REBELS

The post It’s Like Looking into a Mirror, 13 Billion Years Ago appeared first on Universe Today.

According to the National Post, Canada has a new med school (Torontoo Metropolitan University, or TMU), slated to open next year, has bought into the full DEI ideology that seems to be waning in the U.S.

This is an op-ed piece, and of course reflects a conservative opinion with statements like the first one below one, but read the facts for yourself. At any rate, I’m not keen on the paragraph below, as we don’t know how admissions will work (the “sob stories” bit is somewhat invidious):

All considered, most of TMU’s prospective med students will be getting in on student personal statements, sob stories and extracurriculars — factors that actually tend to bias admissions in favour of those who are well-off, but perhaps less competent. That’s who many of these diversity doctors will likely be.

The particulars (indented) and remember this is a conservative partisan view, so the language is inflammatory. Look at the links to ensure that their conclusions are supported.

Canada’s newest medical school is slated to be one of the most discriminatory programs of its kind when it opens in 2025. Straight, white, “privileged” men won’t be warmly welcomed as MD candidates at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), as only a quarter of seats will be open to their kind.

It’s the exact kind of over-the-top, explicit, proud racism that diversity advocates assured us would never happen. Well, it’s here, and it’s vile, and in another decade, it might be the reason you switch to a medical AI for general needs and a Mexico-based private specialist for anything more complex.

You see, 75 per cent of spots in the Ryersonian med program will be reserved for “equity-deserving” folk: Indigenous people, admitted through their own stream, Black people, who also get their own stream, and everyone else who can check a diversity box, who get lumped into a final catch-all admissions pathway.

That list of diversity boxes is long, including LGBT people, disabled people, non-white people, children of non-white immigrants, poor-upbringing people, people over the age of 26, and people who have “faced familial and/or socio-cultural barriers such as loss of both parents, long term involvement with the child welfare system, and/or precarious housing.”

The standards for acceptance into the program, you should know, are quite lax. Applicants are required to have a degree and have achieved a GPA of at least 3.3 on a 4.0 scale, or a high B, but even that’s a soft floor — diversity candidates (i.e. most candidates) are eligible for consideration below that 3.3. No MCAT results are required, because the faculty is still under the false impression that standardized testing isn’t inclusive. Not all demographics perform as proficiently on these tests, but the data overwhelmingly show that it is predictive of academic ability across all backgrounds, which is what matters when we’re selecting future doctors.

But here is one thing I really object to (bolding is mine):

The administrators overseeing the place won’t be much better: as we speak, the faculty is searching for a “social accountability” associate dean to lead social justice and decolonization initiatives. They’re also looking for an “other ways of knowing” lead to ensure non-scientific perspectives are represented.

Seriously? What other “way of knowing” is there besides science construed broadly: empirical observation, experiment, doubt, replication, and all the stuff that enables us to understand the universe. Here’s from that page:

This is a bow to indigenous ways of knowing related to medicine but if that knowledge has been supported using modern scientific tests, it becomes “modern medicine”. I hope they won’t teach any indigenous “way of knowing” that haven’t been tested to see if they’re medically efficacious.

More from the article:

Hence, TMU Med aims to “Intentionally recruit diverse faculty and staff and those with a demonstrated commitment to (DEI)“; “include (DEI), intersectionality, health equity, human rights and the social determinants of health in curriculum.” That’s code for more courses about racist, systemic biases in health care more medical academics positioned to churn out bogus scholarly articles about microaggressions and race grievances, and the addition of political capacities, such as the ability to diagnose patients with “climate change”.

. . . Especially concerning for a program that should be rooted in reality is its rejection of absolute truth with regard to health: the school was designed with sensitivity to “ageism,” “fatphobia,” and “anti-madness.” It was also designed clearly to generate activist-doctors: “we work to acknowledge, understand, and challenge systems of power that privilege some groups over others,“ reads one planning document. “We take a race-conscious approach that recognizes the way racism is perpetuated in the healthcare system and that encompasses perspectives like Critical Race Theory.”

The rest of the article is more or less a conservative diatribe against these standards, but of course there is a concern when one prizes diversity over merit in a field like medicine: lives are at stake.  So the $64 question is this: would you be hesitant to go to a doctor who got their degree from this school? Would you vet them more carefully than usual?  Check out the links and weigh in below.

Cosmology has had several ground-breaking discoveries over the last 100+ years since Einstein developed his theory of relativity. Two of the most prominent were the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in 1968 and the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2015. Each utilized different tools, but both lent credence to the Big Bang Theory, which relates to the universe’s formation. However, we still don’t understand a vital part of that formation, and a new review paper by Rishav Roshan and Graham White at the University of Southampton suggests that we might be able to make some headway on our one-second “gap” in knowledge by using our newfound understanding of gravitational waves.

First, let’s look at what problem physicists are trying to solve. The Big Bang theory of cosmology is currently the one most widely accepted by scientists. There are different stages in it, including the earliest stage, known as “inflation,” and a stage where atoms begin to form, known as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). However, there was a one-second gap between the end of inflation and the beginning of BBN that scientists have been unable to see into.

It’s difficult to see what happened in that second because that specific period was opaque to electromagnetic waves, such as the CMB that helped prove the Big Bang theory in the first place. While one second may not seem like a whole lot of time, the universe might have dropped something like twenty-two orders of magnitude in temperature in that one second. How that temperature change played out is critical to understanding what happened in BBN and, therefore, in creating the universe as we know it today.

Fraser discusses using existing missions as gravitational wave detectors.

Luckily, gravitational waves are here to save the day. They could permeate even that one-second gap, allowing cosmologists for the first time to peer into the previously mysterious time and try to glean any information they could about the imbalance between matter and antimatter or the expansion rate of the universe itself at that point. But to do so, they need a new set of tools.

Now that gravitational waves have officially been found, after a search that lasted more than 100 years, scientists have plenty of new ideas for novel ways to detect them. The paper breaks down three methods, each of which could find waves of different frequencies.

First are more advanced systems similar to LIGO that detected the first wave. Known as interferometers, these precise tools use synced lasers to detect any minute differences between two locations that gravitational waves might have caused. Scientists have drawn up plans for the future, including more enormous interferometers based on the ground and some based in space, which wouldn’t be subject to disturbances like earthquakes. These solutions promise to look into gravitational waves in the microhertz to kilohertz range of frequencies.

Fraser describes gravitational waves in detail.

Astrometry and pulsar timing array are the two other techniques. Both are useful in other parts of cosmology but can also detect lower-frequency gravitational waves if the instruments monitoring them are sensitive enough. Astrometry is more commonly used for exoplanet detection, whereas pulsar timing arrays are a typical measure of distance in cosmology. However, both could be affected by slow gravitational waves that could be detectable by the same instruments already used to monitor them.

These different techniques will search for the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background (SGWB). This operates similarly to the CMB in that it’s a leftover remnant of the beginning phase of the universe. Still, in this case, the SGWB comprises gravitational waves that would allow astronomers to see back to the very beginning of the universe.

If these new instruments do detect it, they could potentially detect some massively energetic events that happened during that one-second temperature de-escalation. One of the most commonly considered creation theories for gravitational waves is an “acoustic” source. This isn’t sound as we would traditionally consider it, but it describes massive shockwaves that would happen from two “sound shells” surrounding early, hot matter running into each other. Creation theories like this are commonly grouped in the paper as “cosmic phase transitions.”

Gravitational wave astronomy has the potential to change our understanding of the universe, as Fraser discusses.

Another grouping in the paper surrounds events known as “topological defects.” Topology is a common theme in physics, and a “defect,” in this case, represents an actual break in space-time as we know it. Those events could have obvious gravitational implications, some of which should be detectable in the frequencies tracked by the new detectors.

A final set of events that could induce gravitational waves is called “scalars.” Instead of representing a “break,” like the defects mentioned above, these events are just giant-scale versions of known physics. Gravitational waves can be caused by large masses moving together, though equations better describe such a”scalar” event than words.

Other, even more exotic events could form gravitational waves during this time period, but detecting them would require higher-frequency detectors than are currently available. Designs for some that could detect high-frequency gravitational waves are currently on the drawing board, but no solid commitment or experimental proof of their efficacy is forthcoming at the time of writing.

Fraser discusses LISA, one of the proposed space-based interferometers that might one day detect gravitational waves from space.

Cosmologists will undoubtedly have enough to chew on even without detecting higher-frequency GWs. We’ve talked before about the coming age of gravitational wave astronomy – and every day, it’s getting closer to reality—papers like those from Drs. Roshan and White are what help light the way.

Learn More:
Roshan & White – Using gravitational waves to see the first second of the Universe
UT – Future Gravitational Wave Observatories Could See the Earliest Black Hole Mergers in the Universe
UT – Gravitational Waves Could Show us the First Minute of the Universe
UT – Gravitational Wave Observatories Could Detect Primordial Black Holes Speeding Through the Solar System

Lead Image:
Representation of gravitational waves in the CMB.
Credit – Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

The post How Gravitational Waves Could Let Us See the First Moments After the Big Bang appeared first on Universe Today.

Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse peddles the idea that we have overlooked an extraordinary ancient civilisation. Flint Dibble explains why that is wrong, and why real archaeology is more exciting

There are four fundamental forces in the Universe. These forces govern all the ways matter can interact, from the sound of an infant’s laugh to the clustering of galaxies a billion light-years away. At least that’s what we’ve thought until recently. Things such as dark matter and dark energy, as well as a few odd interactions in particle physics, have led some researchers to propose a fifth fundamental force. Depending on the model you consider, this new force could explain dark matter and cosmic expansion, or it could interact with elemental particles we haven’t yet detected. There are lots of theories about this hypothetical force. What there isn’t a lot of is evidence. So a new study is looking for evidence in the orbits of asteroids.

Many of the fifth-force models focus on what are known as Yukawa-type interactions. Back in the early days of nuclear physics, Hideki Yukawa proposed a potential interaction to describe how protons and neutrons could bind together in the nuclei of atoms. The resulting force was similar to the inverse-square forces of gravity and electromagnetism but had an exponential decay aspect, so it only affected nucleons. Over time, as we began to better understand nuclear interactions, the Yukawa potential model was replaced by the strong nuclear force, though it remains a good approximation for low-energy nucleons. Similar to the way Newtonian gravity is a good approximation for general relativity.

As scientists started to develop fifth-force models, the Yukawa interaction gained attention once again. For example, the Higgs boson generates mass in particles through a Yukawa interaction. Dark energy is often described as a part of the fundamental aspects of spacetime, but it can also be described as a Yukawa-type fundamental force. If there is such a fifth force, then it would have an effect on things such as planetary motion. But the effect would be so tiny that we haven’t had a chance of detecting it until recently, which is where this new study comes in.

The potential impact on the orbit of Bennu from other forces. Credit: Tsai, et al

The team considered the effects of a Yukawa-type fundamental force mediated by a massive scalar field. In other words, just as the electromagnetic field is mediated by the massless bosons known as photons, the fifth force is mediated by a similar boson, but one with mass. The mass of these new bosons would determine how strongly the force would affect orbital motions. Given how well orbital motions agree with Newtonian gravity, any Yukawa boson would need to have an extremely tiny mass. With standard optical observations and radar observations of planets, we know that the mass of these bosons couldn’t be more than about 10-16 eV. That’s really tiny, but still large enough to measure with an asteroid-visiting spacecraft.

In this work, the team looked at data from the OSIRIS-REx mission, which gathered sample material from the asteroid 101955 Bennu. Since we get radio signals directly from OSIRIS-REx, we know its motion with extreme precision. And since it orbited and landed on Bennu, we know the orbital motion of the asteroid extremely well. Based on this data, the team found no evidence of a fifth force, but they did put even further constraints on the mass of any fifth-force particle. We now know these hypothetical dark bosons can’t have a mass greater than 10-18 eV, roughly a factor of 100 stronger than previous limits.

So as far as we can tell, when it comes to fundamental forces, five is right out.

Reference: Tsai, Yu-Dai, et al. “Constraints on fifth forces and ultralight dark matter from OSIRIS-REx target asteroid Bennu.” Communications Physics 7.1 (2024): 311.

The post Can an Asteroid's Movements Reveal a New Force in the Universe? appeared first on Universe Today.

A new way to store numbers in computers can dynamically prioritise accuracy or range, depending on need, allowing software to quickly switch between very large and small numbers

It’s been quite a week… Spectacular northern lights for hours on Thursday night. A great comet in the evening skies (though so far I’ve have only caught glimpses, thanks to atrocious viewing conditions.) And now, I’m at CERN (the pan-European particle physics laboratory) for the first time since the pandemic began. I’ll be giving a talk at a conference of CMS experimenters. (CMS and ATLAS are the two general purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC].)

The topic of the workshop is a novel technique called “Level-1 Scouting” — though it isn’t really about “scouting” for anything. It has to do with evading the strait-jacket of the trigger, an essential feature of data gathering at each of the LHC experiments. With tens of millions of collisions per second, the data flood at CMS is too great, and only a tiny fraction of these collisions can be stored. The trigger decides real-time which ones to keep and which ones to discard forever. That’s been the basic rule since the LHC began running.

But this rule no longer applies, thanks to new technology and human ingenuity. CMS now uses level-1 scouting to record sketchy information about every single collision that happens in their detector. LHCb, with a smaller detector, was the first to try something along these lines. ATLAS is on a parallel track. These developments have the potential, looking ahead, to substantially enhance the capability of these detectors. More about this after I’ve given my talk.

Auroras after sunset. (These were as bright to the naked eye) Comet A3 after sunset. (Brighter than to the naked eye.)

Post-sunset light over CERN. (As to the naked eye.)

SpaceX has conducted their most successful test launch of a Starship system to date. The system they tested has three basic components – the Super Heavy first stage rocket booster, the Starship second stage (which is the actual space ship that will go places), and the “chopsticks”, which is a mechanical tower designed to catch the Super Heavy as it returns. All three components apparently functioned as hoped.

The Super Heavy lifted Starship into space (suborbital), then returned to the launch pad in Southern Texas where it maneuvered into the grasping mechanical arms of the chopsticks. The tower’s arms closed around the Super Heavy, successfully grabbing it. The engines then turned off and the rocket remained held in place. The idea here is to replicate the reusable function of the Falcon rockets, which can return to a landing pad after lifting their cargo into orbit. The Falcons land on a platform one the water. SpaceX, however, envisions many Starship launches and wants to be able to return the rockets directly to the launch pad, for quicker turnaround.

The Starship, for its part, also performed as expected. It came back down over the designated target in the Indian Ocean. Once it got to the surface it rolled on its side and exploded. They were never planning on recovering any of the Starship so this was an acceptable outcome. Of course, eventually they will need to land Starship safely on the ground.

The system that SpaceX came up with reflects some of the realities and challenges of space travel. The Earth is a massive gravity well, and it is difficult to get out of and back into that gravity well. Getting into orbit requires massive rockets with lots of fuel, and falls prey to the rocket equation – you need fuel to carry the fuel, etc. This is also why, if we want to use Starship to go to Mars, SpaceX will have to develop a system to refuel in orbit.

Getting back down to the ground is also a challenge. Orbital velocity is fast, and you have to lose all that speed. Using the atmosphere for breaking works, but the air compression (not friction as most people falsely believe) causing significant heat, so reentering through the atmosphere requires heat shielding. You then have to slow down enough for a soft landing. You can use parachutes. You can splash down in the water. You can use bouncy cushions on a hard landing. Or you can use rockets. Or you can land like a plane, which was the Shuttle option. All of these methods are challenging.

If you want to reuse your rockets and upper stages, then a splashdown is problematic as salt water is bad. No one has gotten the cushion approach to work on Earth, although we have used it on Mars. The retro-rocket approach is what SpaceX is going with, and it works well. They have now added a new method, by combining rockets with a tower and mechanical arms to grab the first stage. I think this is also the planned method for Starship itself.

On the Moon and Mars the plan is to land on legs. These worlds have a lower gravity than Earth, so this method can work. In fact, NASA is planning on using the Starship as their lunar lander for the Artemis program. We apparently can’t do this on Earth because the legs would have to be super strong to handle the weight of the Super Heavy or Starship, and therefore difficult to engineer. It does seem amazing that a tower with mechanical arms grabbing the rocket out of the air was considered to be an easier engineering feat than designing strong-enough landing legs, but there it is. Needing a tower does limit the location where you can land – you have to return to the landing pad exactly.

SpaceX, however, is already good at this. They perfected the technology the the Falcon rocket boosters, which can land precisely on a floating landing pad in the ocean. So they are going with technology they already have. But it does seem to me that it would be worth it to have an engineering team work on the whole strong-landing-legs problem. That would seem like a useful technology to have.

All of this is a reminder that the space program, as mature as it is, is still operating at the very limits of our technology. It makes it all the more amazing that the Apollo program was able to send successful missions to the Moon. Apollo solved these various issues also by going with a complex system. As a reminder, the Saturn V used three stages to get into space for the Apollo program (although only two stages for Skylab). You then had the spaceship that would go to the moon, which consisted of a service module, a command module, and a lander. On approach to the Moon, it would have to undergo, “transposition, docking, and extraction”. The command module would detach from the service module, turn around, then dock with the lunar lander and extract it from the service module. The pair would then go into lunar orbit. The lander would detach and land on the lunar surface, and eventually blast off back into orbit around the Moon. There it would dock again with the command module for return to Earth.

This was considered a crazy idea at first within NASA, and many of the engineers were worried they couldn’t pull it off. Docking in orbit was considered the most risk aspect, and if that failed it would have resulted in astronauts being stranded in lunar orbit. This is why they perfected the procedure in Earth orbit before going to the Moon.

All of this complexity is a response to the the physical realities of getting a lot of mass out of Earth’s gravity well, and having enough fuel to get to the Moon, land, take off again, return to Earth, and then get back down to the ground. The margins were super thin. It is amazing it all worked as well as it did. Here we are more than 50 years later and it is still a real challenge.

Spaceflight technology has not fundamentally changed in the last 50 years – rockets, fuel, capsules are essentially the same in overall design, with some tweaks and refinements. Except for one thing – computer technology. This has been transformative, make no mistake. SpaceX’s reusable rockets would not be possible without advanced computer controls. Modern astronauts have the benefits of computer control of their craft, and are travelling with the Apollo-era equivalent of supercomputers. Computer advances have been the real game-changing technology for space travel.

Otherwise we are still using the same kinds of rocket fuel. We are still using stages and boosters to get into orbit. Modern capsule design would be recognizable to an Apollo-era astronaut, although the interior design is greatly improved, again due to the availability of computer technology. There are some advanced materials in certain components, but Starship is literally built out of steel.

Again, I am not downplaying the very real advances in the aerospace industry, especially in getting down costs and in reusability. My point is more that there haven’t been any game-changing technological advances not dependent on computer technology. There is no super fuel, or game-changing material. And we are still operating at the limits of physics, and have to make very real tradeoffs to make it work. If I’m missing something, feel free to let me know in the comments.

In any case, I’m glad to see progress being made, and I look forward the the upcoming Artemis missions. I do hope that this time we are successful in building a permanent cis-lunar infrastructure. That, in turn, would be a stepping stone to Mars.

The post Latest Starship Launch first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A 6000-kilogram spacecraft will embark on a six-year journey to Jupiter to explore whether its icy moon Europa has the conditions to support life

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been antivax for two decades. His fellow travelers are not happy about his leaving out vaccines in his "Make America Healthy Again." To them it's an obvious misdirection, and they are turning on him.

The post Antivaxxers easily see through the misdirection of RFK Jr.’s MAHA first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the popular Netflix show and the science fiction novel on which it is based, The Three-Body Problem, by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin. The story’s premise is a star system where three stars orbit each other, which leads to periodic destruction on a planet orbiting one of them. As Isaac Newton described in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the interaction of two massive bodies is easy to predict and calculate. However, the interaction of three bodies leads is where things become unpredictable (even chaotic) over time.

This problem has fascinated scientists ever since and remains one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in mathematics and theoretical physics. The theory states that the interaction of three gravitationally bound objects will evolve chaotically and in a way that is completely detached from their initial positions and velocities. However, in a recent study, an international team led by a researcher from the Niels Bohr Institute ran millions of simulations that showed “isles of regularity in a sea of chaos.” These results indicate that there could be a solution, or at least some predictability, to the Three-Body Problem.

The study was led by Alessandro Alberto Trani, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), the Research Center for the Early Universe at The University of Tokyo, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). He was joined by researchers from the Universidad de Concepción in Chile, the American Museum of Natural History, the Leiden Observatory, and NASA’s Ames Research Center. The paper that details their findings was recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Millions of simulations form a rough map of all conceivable outcomes when three objects meet, which is where the isles of regularity appear. Credit: Alessandro Alberto Trani

To investigate this problem, Trani and his colleagues used a software program he developed himself named Tsunami. This program calculates the movements of astronomical objects based on known physical laws, such as Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. They then set it to run millions of simulations of three-body encounters with specified parameters, including the positions of two co-orbiting objects (i.e., their phase along a 360-degree axis) and the angle of approach of the third object – varying by 90°. As Trani explained in a recent NBI Research News story:

“The Three-Body Problem is one of the most famous unsolvable problems in mathematics and theoretical physics. The theory states that when three objects meet, their interaction evolves chaotically, without regularity, and completely detached from the starting point. But our millions of simulations demonstrate that there are gaps in this chaos – ‘isles of regularity’ – which directly depend on how the three objects are positioned relative to each other when they meet, as well as their speed and angle of approach.”

The millions of simulations they conducted covered all possible combinations of this framework. The results formed a rough map of all conceivable outcomes from the threads of initial configurations, which is when the isles of regularity appeared. This discovery could lead to a deeper understanding of an otherwise impossible problem and represents a new challenge for researchers. Whereas it is possible to calculate our chaos using statistical methods, they become more complex when the chaos is interrupted by regularities. Said Trani:

“When some regions in this map of possible outcomes suddenly become regular, it throws off statistical probability calculations, leading to inaccurate predictions. Our challenge now is to learn how to blend statistical methods with the so-called numerical calculations, which offer high precision when the system behaves regularly. In that sense, my results have set us back to square one, but at the same time, they offer hope for an entirely new level of understanding in the long run.”

This illustration shows the merger of two supermassive black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Since the encounter of three objects in the Universe is a common occurrence, the Three-Body Problem is more than just a theoretical challenge. Trani hopes that this discovery will lead to a deeper understanding that will pave the way for improved astrophysics models:

“If we are to understand gravitational waves, which are emitted from black holes and other massive objects in motion, the interactions of black holes as they meet and merge are essential. Immense forces are at play, particularly when three of them meet. Therefore, our understanding of such encounters could be a key to comprehending phenomena such as gravitational waves, gravity itself and many other fundamental mysteries of the Universe.”

Further Reading: Neils Bohr Institute

The post New Research Could Help Resolve the “Three-Body Problem” appeared first on Universe Today.

The “Epoch of Reionization” was a critical period for cosmic evolution and has always fascinated and mystified astronomers. During this epoch, the first stars and galaxies formed and reionized the clouds of neutral hydrogen that permeated the Universe. This ended the Cosmic Dark Ages and led to the Universe becoming “transparent,” what astronomers refer to as “Cosmic Dawn.” According to our current cosmological models, reionization lasted from 380,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. This is based on indirect evidence since astronomers have been unable to view the Epoch of Reionization directly.

Investigating this period was one of the main reasons for developing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which can pierce the veil of the “dark ages” using its powerful infrared optics. However, observations provided by Webb revealed that far more galaxies existed in the early Universe than previously expected. According to a recent study, this suggests that reionization may have happened more rapidly and ended at least 350 million years earlier than our models predict. Once again, the ability to peer into the early Universe has produced tensions with prevailing cosmological theories.

The study was led by Julian B Muñoz, an assistant professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. He was joined by John Chisholm, also an assistant professor of astronomy at UT Austin; Jordan Mirocha, a NASA postdoctoral student at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology; Steven R Furlanetto, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California-Los Angeles, and Charlotte Mason, an associate professor with the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute. The paper that describes their findings was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The history of the Universe is outlined in this infographic. Credit: NASA

According to current cosmological models, the Universe was filled with a hot, dense plasma of protons and electrons for the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Eventually, the Universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to come together and form neutral hydrogen. By ca. 100 million years after the Big Bang, the first stars (Population III) began to form, which were extremely massive and hot. These stars came together to create the first galaxies, and their ultraviolet light caused neutral hydrogen to once again split into protons and electrons (aka. became ionized).

Once most of the hydrogen in the Universe became ionized (ca. 1 billion years after the Big Bang), the Epoch of Reionization ended. At this point, the Universe was transparent, and light from this period is visible to optical telescopes today. As Chisholm indicated in a UT Austin news release, reionization also played a major role in how the Universe evolved. “The process heated and ionized gas in the Universe, which regulated how fast galaxies grew and evolved,” “These early stars established the overall structure of galaxies in the Universe.”

Before the deployment of the JWST, scientists relied on measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and the Lyman-alpha Forest – the wavelength of light associated with hydrogen reionization. From this, astronomers have gained a sense of how much energy was available for reionization to occur (a “photon budget”) and how long it lasted. As Muñoz explained:

“[Reionization] is the last major change to happen. You went from neutral and cold and boring to ionized and hot. And this isn’t something that only happened to one or two galaxies. It happened to the whole Universe. It’s an accounting game. We know that all hydrogen was neutral before reionization. From there, you need enough extreme ultraviolet to split each atom. So, at the end of the day, you can do the math to figure out when reionization ended.”

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Credit: NASA

However, observations made with the JWST have revealed things that challenge accepted models. This includes a greater abundance of galaxies, which produce more UV radiation than previously anticipated. These findings suggest that reionization should have ended 550 to 650 million years after the Big Bang rather than 1 billion years. But if this were true, the CMB and Lyman-alpha Forest would look different. In short, there is a tension between these measurements and Webb‘s observations – as the team describes in their study, a “photon budget crisis.”

Much like the Hubble Tension, these findings suggest something could be missing from our current cosmological models. One possibility that the team explored is recombination, where ionized protons and electrons come together again to form neutral hydrogen. This is precisely what happened 380,000 years after the Big Bang, known as the “Era of Recombination.” If this process happened more often than our models suggest, it could increase the amount of extreme-UV light needed to reionize the Universe. As Muñoz explained, follow-up observations are needed to confirm this theory:

“We need more detailed and deeper observations of galaxies, and a better understanding of the recombination process. Resolving this tension on reionization is a key step to finally understanding this pivotal period. I am excited to see what the coming years hold.”

Further Reading: Phys.org, MNRAS

The post Webb Observations Shed New Light on Cosmic Reionization appeared first on Universe Today.

Sam Kahn, an editor at Persuasion, has written a piece taking issue with the claim that wokeness is on the way out—that we’ve passed “peak woke”.  I though we had, given the increasing frequency of stories in the MSM that questioned the “received wisdom” of progressive authoritarianism, like this 2022 piece from the NYT (it did, by the way, encounter strong pushback from the paper’s staff).

And we all know that DEI programs are being dismantled in both the academic and corporate world.  So I was hopeful that “wokeness”—by which I mean “progressive and performative authoritarianism that does little to improve society but inflates the reputation of the promoter”—was on its way out. This was buttressed by an article in The Economist which used graphs (see below) to show a decline in wokeness.

Click below to read Kahn’s piece (Michelle Goldberg of the NYT also made this claim about “peak wokeness” going away):

Kahn takes issue with the “wokeness-is-declining” conclusion on two grounds. First, he argues that wokeness is so deeply entrenched in mainstream institutions that we barely notice it any more. Second, he argues that the statistics presented in The Economist article are misleading: they may show a small decline in indices of wokeness in the past couple of years, but no long-term trend.  I find his argument pretty convincing, especially the main example he uses to demonstrate his thesis. Click below to read:

Kahn’s example of his thesis is the infamous interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil. Coates has just published a book containing three essays, one of which is a 100-page anti-Israel screed based on a mere ten days that Coates spent in “Palestine,” by which he means both Israel and the West Bank.  I will be reading that, but the book hasn’t arrived at the library yet. However, Dokoupil’s questions, the scathing review of the book by Coleman Hughes, along with other reports, are indicate a one-sided accusation of Israel. The fact that Coates doesn’t even mention Hamas or the terrorism inflicted on Israel is a telling sign that his essay is misleading, as is the praise for it.

The sign for Kahn that we haven’t reached peak woke is the fact that Dokoupil was called on the carpet by CBS officials simply for asking civil but hard questions of Coates (see the video here). The problem, as everyone knows but only a few will admit, is that Dokoupil challenged some dubious conclusions and observations of a black American icon. That is simply beyond today’s journalistic pale, and that’s why Kahn sees wokeness as deeply embedded in the media. Had Coates been white rather than black, the pushback on Dokoupil would have been far less intense. Race mattered.

Kahn:

My point here is that a clash like Coates v. Dokoupil v. CBS News is Exhibit A for how the “woke wars” never went away, how if “peak woke” seems quieter than it did circa 2020, woke censoriousness is, contra Goldberg and contra The Economist, part of American institutional life, now maybe more than ever.

. . . What’s going on is a bit subtle. The woke revolution already said its piece. The University of California endocrinology professor long ago apologized for saying “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” in class and “imply[ing]” that only biological women can give birth. The University of Michigan music professor long ago stepped back from teaching after showing Lawrence Olivier’s 1965 blackface film of Othello in class. The fear of being “canceled” remains pervasive. Wokeism, now, has been so internalized by the institutions that they barely need to articulate it—and employees have an acute danger sense of what not to talk about. Meanwhile, “peak woke” finds itself memory-holed. An article like The Economist’s depicts it as a temporary blip—a reaction to Trump’s election. Michelle Goldberg, in her New York Times op-ed, finds herself longing for the “progressive urgency” of the “peak woke” moment. A representative NPR piece, from 2023, frames the whole discourse as a Republican talking-point—something that has “been co-opted as a political slogan on the right … [and] could lead to violence.”

All of those dynamics emerged in the Dokoupil fracas. The admonishment by the CBS executives was a delectable bit of muddled corporate speak. “We are journalists and as hard as it is, this means we set our personal feelings and beliefs aside,” CBS executive Adrienne Roark said on the staff call. “Our job is to serve our audiences without bias or perceived bias, to provide objective news that we know and they know they can trust.”

The phrase “perceived bias” (what a wide-ranging idea!) gives the game away. It tips off that the issue with Dokupil had very little to do with journalistic standards and was instead that he strayed outside of the bounds of acceptable expression. By challenging a much-beloved author and his ferocious critique of Israel, he was violating unspoken tenets of the new woke corporate regime. The fact that it’s literally his job to argue with on-air guests seemed to matter not at all to the corporate brass.

Regardless of what Coates said in his book, and I will be checking it, you don’t treat a journalist like this for asking hard questions.  That is what we expect journalists to do when they interrogate someone having strong opinions on contentious issues. The fact that CBS would give Dokoupil a verbal spanking (and later refuse to admit that Jerusalem is in Israel), shows that they have “structural wokeism.”

As for the Economist‘s statistics, it is true that they shows rise in indices of wokeness until 2020, but then a tiny decline in the subsequent three years. It may mean something, but it may not. Here are three graphs given by Persuasion and taken from The Economist:

As The Economist notes:

. . ., . we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since.

Yes, but it’s not much of a fall: a small drop in one year and a tiny rise in 2023:

A plot of those who think that inequities are due to discrimination, again showing just a slight drop after 2021.  No statistics are given so we don’t know if the figures are significantly different, but at any rate the drop is tiny.

And woke terms in social-science papers. Again, a smallish dip between 2022 and 2023.

None of this is convinces me that wokeness is decreasing. You’d need a longer-term analysis to show that. The Economist article also gives data on the censuring of academics, mentioning DEI on earnings calls, and DEI jobs in big companies, all showing declines between 2021 or 2022 and 2023.  And the first two declines look significant, but again we’d like long-term data. It may be that DEI as an institution is on the way out, but is still embedded in academia in non-obvious ways (I think this is the case for my university). I have no idea what to make of the “earnings calls” mentions.

Perhaps Kahn is right: wokeness has so thoroughly imbued America that we no longer notice it. Teachers are inhibited from saying certain things in the classroom; the NYT and Washington Post are still biased in their news coverage towards progressive issues, and identiarianism—a sure sign of wokeness—is still with us.  Perhaps wokeness has just become hidden so much that we no longer see it as wokeness.  But I’ll give Kahn the last word (feel free to tendewr your opinion below):

A situation like what happened at CBS has become something very close to a new normal in institutional America. Some perspective, even a very radical one, gets favored. Any opposition to that favored perspective goes beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and is suggestive of “perceived bias.” Corporate management, in its attempt to smooth things over, placates whatever the loudest voices are at the moment and punishes whomever espouses the less-favored perspective. At CBS News—which is a company full of journalists dedicated, at least in theory, to independence of thought—there’s some pushback, but in most companies, employees would simply know where the guardrails are and steer well clear of causing any offense.

It’s not placards or encampments or Twitter mobs but it’s no less insidious. “Peak woke” has profoundly changed the way that American institutions operate. If it’s impossible to have honest, challenging conversations at CBS News—a place whose whole reason for existence is to pursue journalistic truth—then it’s likely impossible to do so anywhere else in the American institutional structure. “Wokeism” may have peaked around 2020, but that doesn’t mean that it just disappeared afterwards. What happened was that there was a culture war and “wokeism” won.

I can’t help adding that the wokeness evinced by asserting that Israel is a demonic, apartheid-ridden, and settler-colonialist state—a “progressive” view evinced by Ta-Nehisi Coates—has certainly not declined over the last year. It began on October 7 and has ramped up ever since.

h/t: Ginger K.

 

For the first time ever, SpaceX has followed through on a Starship test launch by bringing back the Super Heavy booster for an on-target catch in the arms of its “Mechazilla” launch-tower cradle in Texas.

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice said.

Today’s successful catch marks a giant step toward using — and reusing — Starship for missions ranging from satellite deployments to NASA’s moon missions to migrations to Mars.

The amazing catch took place minutes after Super Heavy lofted Starship’s second stage, known as Ship, into space for the launch system’s fifth test flight. Liftoff occurred at 7:25 a.m. CT (1225 UTC) at SpaceX’s Starbase on the South Texas coast.

Although the primary objective of the test was to have Ship survive atmospheric re-entry and splash down intact in the Indian Ocean, the Super Heavy booster was the star of the show.

Super Heavy is too massive to set down on landing legs, as is the case for SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Perfecting the Mechazilla catch is an essential part of SpaceX’s strategy for Starship rocket reusability.

The feat required pinpoint accuracy during the booster’s autonomous descent back through the atmosphere. It had to position itself precisely between Mechazilla’s adjustable arms, also known as “chopsticks,” and hover while the mechanism was engaged to secure the rocket.

“Even in this day and age, what we just saw, that looks like magic,” launch commentator Dan Huot said after the booster shut down its engines and came to rest, hanging on its launch tower.

Today’s test of Starship, which is the world’s most powerful rocket, proceeded according to plan from launch to splashdown. All 33 of the booster’s methane-fueled Raptor engines fired up for launch, and 13 of the Raptors powered the Super Heavy’s return to the pad.

The second stage continued at orbital speeds, on a suborbital test trajectory that rose as high as 200 kilometers (124 miles). An hour after launch, Ship restarted three of its own Raptor engines and made an autonomous descent to its target splashdown point in the Indian Ocean.

During SpaceX’s fourth Starship test flight in June, the Ship sustained damage on the way down but survived for a splashdown. Ship’s thermal protection system was beefed up for today’s test.

Video views of the rocket’s flaps, sent down to Earth via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, showed heat building up on the control surfaces. Sparks flew off during the descent, but eventually the flaps cooled off — bringing rounds of applause from SpaceX employees who were watching the feed.

Minutes later, the rocket’s video stream showed Ship making a vertical dive into the water, and then a different stream from a nearby buoy showed Ship blazing as it floated on the surface.

“What an incredible end to Starship’s journey,” Tice said.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk hailed the results in a posting to his X social-media platform: “Ship landed precisely on target!” he wrote. “Second of the two objectives achieved.”

Data from the test flight will be used to fine-tune the launch system for future tests, using Starship hardware that has been stacked up at Starbase. Eventually, SpaceX aims to make the entire system fully reusable.

“We just caught a booster,” Huot said. “We’re going to start real soon looking at when we can catch a Ship.”

Starship could be used to accelerate the deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and perhaps to provide point-to-point travel between terrestrial destinations as well.

NASA is depending on SpaceX to provide a modified version of Starship that would serve as the lander for crewed Artemis missions, beginning as soon as 2026. “As we prepare to go back to the moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead — including to the South Pole region of the moon and then on to Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a congratulatory message posted to X.

SpaceX plans to use Starship for missions to Mars — starting with uncrewed trips that could get off the ground by as early as 2026, and continuing with crewed flights that could bring permanent residents to the Red Planet. Musk reportedly envisions building a city on Mars by the 2040s — and Starship is the key to his quest.

“Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” Musk wrote on X.

The post SpaceX’s Mechazilla Catches a Starship Booster on First Try appeared first on Universe Today.

Thanks to the readers who answered my appeal for photos, I now have at least a week’s worth. But please keep them coming in!

Today is Sunday, ergo we have a batch of photos by biologist John Avise; this is the second part of a four-part series on the birds of Hawaii (part 1 is here). John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Birds in Hawaii, Part 2 

Today we continue our photographic montage of native and introduced birds that might be seen on a natural-history tour of the Hawaiian Islands.

O’ahu ‘Elepaio (Chasiempis ibidis) in the hand of a bird-bander (this species is endemic to the Hawaiian Islands):

Erckels spurfowl (Pternistis erckelii) (native to Africa):

Great Frigatebird female (Fregata minor) (native to Hawaii and many other locales in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans):

Hawaiian Coot (Fulica alai) (endemic to the Hawaiian Islands), dark morph:

Hawaiian Coot, light morph (the color morph refers to the color of the frontal shield):

Hawaiian Duck (Anas wyvilliana) (a non-migratory endemic to the large island of Hawaii):

Hawaiian Goose, or Nene (Branta sandvicensis) (an endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, and the official state bird):

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus)(native to North America), male:

House Sparrow (Passer domesticus), male (native to Europe and Asia but introduced to many other parts of the world):

Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonicus) (native to East Asia):

Java Sparrow (Lonchura oryzivora) (native to Indonesia):

Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) (native to the Hawaiian islands):

Laysan Albatross flying:

Laysan Albatross chick:

JAC:  Note that the Laysan albatross, in the form of one female bird named Wisdom, is the oldest confirmed living wild bird in the world. She was first tagged in 1950s and is still alive, now about 72 or 73 years old. She has gone through a couple of mates and produced at least 30-36 chick, including at least one grandchick. I love her.

In 2012, astronomers detected a gas giant transiting in front of WASP-49A, a G-type star located about 635 light-years from Earth. The data obtained by the WASP survey indicated that this exoplanet (WASP-49 b) is a gas giant roughly the same size as Jupiter and 37% as massive. In 2017, WASP-49 b was found to have an extensive cloud of sodium, which was confounding to scientists. Further observations in 2019 using the Hubble Space Telescope detected the presence of other minerals, including magnesium and iron, which appeared to be magnetically bound to the gas giant.

WASP-49 b and its star are predominantly composed of hydrogen and helium, with only trace amounts of sodium – not enough to account for this cloud. In addition, there was no indication of how this sodium cloud was ejected into space. In our Solar System, gas emissions from Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io create a similar phenomenon. In a recent study, an international team led by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found potential evidence of a rocky, volcanic moon orbiting WASP-49 b. While not yet confirmed, the presence of a volcanic exomoon around this gas giant could explain the presence of this sodium cloud.

The study was led by Apurva Oza, a former postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and now a staff scientist at Caltech. He was joined by colleagues from NASA JPL and researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, the Caltech/IPAC-NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, and multiple universities. The paper that details their findings was recently published in The Astrophysical Letters.

Io is the most volcanic body in our Solar System, with hundreds of active volcanoes and extensive lava formations. This activity is the result of tidal interaction with Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, which causes the interior of Io to flex and contract, creating dense lava flows that break through the surface. These volcanoes spew lava up to 300 km (186 mi) into space, along with sulfur dioxide, sodium, potassium, and other gases, creating a massive cloud around Jupiter up to 1,000 times the planet’s radius.

While the team’s observations did not detect any exomoons directly around WASP-49 b, a massive sodium cloud could constitute indirect evidence of a volcanic moon that is simply too small and dim to detect. For years, Oza has investigated how exomoons might be detected via their volcanic activity. To determine if this was the case around WASP-49 b, he and the team observed WASP-49 b over time using the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

This proved quite challenging because of the distance involved and the way the star, planet, and cloud often overlap, making it very difficult to distinguish between them. Nevertheless, their observations revealed several pieces of evidence that suggest that a separate body is responsible for the sodium cloud. For example, their observations indicated that the cloud suddenly increased in size during two observations, suggesting it was being replenished. In fact, they estimate that the cloud is replenished at a rate of 100,000 kg (220,000 lbs) per second.

They also observed the cloud moving faster than the planet, suggesting it was generated by another body orbiting faster than the planet. “We think this is a really critical piece of evidence,” said Oza. “The cloud is moving in the opposite direction that physics tells us it should be going if it were part of the planet’s atmosphere.” Their observations also noted something interesting as WASP-49 b orbited its parent star every 2.8 days. During this time, the cloud appeared and disappeared behind the star or the planet irregularly.

This artist’s concept depicts a potential volcanic moon between the exoplanet WASP-49 b, left, and its parent star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To address this, the team also used a computer model to simulate the presence of an exomoon and compare it to their observations. Their results showed that an exomoon with an orbital period of eight hours could explain the cloud’s motion and activity, including how it appeared to pass in front of the planet and will disappear and reappear at intervals. Another takeaway from this study was what it suggests about this possible exomoon’s future.

If WASP-49 b is similar in size to Earth’s Moon, Oza and his colleagues estimate that the tidal interaction with the planet’s gravity and its rapid mass loss will eventually cause it to disintegrate. “If there really is a moon there, it will have a very destructive ending,” said Oza. While these observations are intriguing, the team emphasizes that follow-up observations are needed to learn more about the cloud’s orbit and structure.

Further Reading: NASA, The Astrophysical Letters

The post A Possible Exomoon Could be Volcanic, like Jupiter’s Moon Io appeared first on Universe Today.

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Situating her analyses within the broader intellectual landscape, First Amendment scholar and philosopher Tara Smith takes up the views of such historical figures as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, while also addressing contemporary clashes over issues ranging from speech on social media, “cancel culture,” and the implications of “religious exemptions” to the crucial difference between speech and action and the very vocabulary in which we discuss these issues, dissecting the exact meanings of “censorship” and “freedom.”

Tara Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught since 1989. A specialist in moral, legal, and political philosophy, she is author of the books Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, 2006), Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and Moral Rights and Political Freedom (Rowman and Littlefield 1995). Smith’s scholarly articles span such subjects as rights conflicts, the morality of money, everyday justice, forgiveness, friendship, pride, moral perfection, and the value of spectator sports.

Shermer and Smith discuss:

• What is freedom?
• What are rights?
• How are rights and freedoms won or lost?
• Private vs. government restrictions on speech
• Social media, tech companies, and censorship
• speech and expression
• Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission
• Speech – Action distinction and where the lines between speech and conduct are blurry
• Hate speech = violence?
• Is Twitter a platform or a publisher?
• Is Facebook an information service or a telecommunications company?
• Incitement to violence and the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection
• Libel and slander
• Self-censorship
• Free expression as speech (flag burning, Madonna’s videos, etc.)
• Corporate controls on speech
• Compelled speech
• How Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the clear and present danger test, which would become an important test under First Amendment law over the coming decades.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

If you don’t know who Chappell Roan is, she’s a singer/songwriter who recently became famous; you can read about here.  She identifies as queer and as a drag queen, even though she’s apparently a biological woman.

In this video, Bill Maher addresses an open letter to her. Roan has touted the virtues of open-mindedness, which Maher admires, but according to him she seems to get all her history from Tik Tok and is apparently sympathetic to Palestine and Hamas and sees Israel as a “colonizer”. Maher proceeds to give her a history lecture couched in Generation Z jargon. As he tells her, “you have it completely ass-backwards as to who is doing the oppressing” (of Palestinians).

This is more serious than most of Maher’s “comedy” videos, but he’s passionate about the subject.