Science

It’s Sunday, and that means photos (of butterflies now) by John Avise. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 10 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Now we’re up to some of the M’s.  Most of this week’s photos happen to have been taken in Florida.

Malachite (Siproeta stelenes), upperwing:

Malachite, underwing:

Mallow Scrub-Hairstreak (Strymon istapa):

Mangrove Buckeye (Junonia genoveva), upperwing:

Mangrove Buckeye, underwing:

Mangrove Skipper (Phocides pigmalion), upperwing:

Mangrove Skipper, underwing:

Marine Blue (Leptotes marina):

Marine Blue, female above:

Marine Blue female below:

Martial Scrub-Hairstreak (Strymon martialis) upperwing:

Martial Scrub-Hairstreak, underwing:

The Habitable Worlds Observatory, NASA’s planned successor to the James Webb Space Telescope, will be a monster of an instrument. Using the same origami-like technique pioneered by the James Webb, the HWO will unfold a mirror spanning 6-8 meters across. Among its many science goals, its primary mission will be to directly image promising nearby exoplanets to hunt for biosignatures, which are signs of life as we know it.

The HWO is expected to take cost $11 billion and launch in the first half of the 2040’s. But if the tortured history of the James Webb is any indication, then those numbers are highly optimistic lower bounds.

After all those resources, all that money and time and talent devoted to one single telescope, designers of the HWO hope to survey a grand total of 25 potentially habitable Earth-like worlds.

Surely there’s a better way.

We need to heavily invest in a program of diversification to have the best – and cheapest – chances of success when it comes to finding life outside the Earth. That means we need to search for life in all the places where we least expect it.

Right now our life-hunting programs focus on Earth-like planets orbiting their parent stars within the so-called Habitable Zone, the band where the star’s radiation is just right to allow for liquid water on the surface. On one hand, these expectations are built on a solid foundation. The only known life to exist in the universe – ours – thrives in exactly that environment. And we know what our kind of life looks like and what it does to planetary atmospheres, increasing the chances of a confirmed detection of a biosignature.

But the other hand, our preconceived notions have been challenged in the past, and assuming that nature is as limited as our current thinking could be a costly mistake, as we spend billions on future programs with little chance of success.

Take the methanogens, a broad group of Archaea that “eat” hydrogen and emit methane as a by-product. Mars might be a suitable home for them. Not on the surface, but kilometers underground.  

Additionally, the last place you might think to look for life is in the outer reaches of the solar system, home to the giant planets and their icy moons. And yet many of those moons host liquid water oceans vaster than the Earth’s – and they are now prime candidates for extraterrestrial life in our own solar system. If we had forged ahead with Habitable Zone searches in our own solar system, we would have spent decades fruitlessly digging in the Martian dirt, ignoring the potential watery goldmines of the outer moons.

We should take the lesson offered by our own backyard and extend that thinking to the wider galaxy. There have already been researchers exploring the edges of what life could be and where it could thrive, pulling their examples from extreme lifeforms on Earth and cutting-edge research into the definition of habitability. Before we invest billions of dollars in a next-generation mega-observatory, we should carefully consider all the options.

The post Is the Habitable Worlds Observatory a Good Idea? appeared first on Universe Today.

The asteroid belt beckons – it contains enough resources for humans to expand into the entire rest of the solar system and has no biosphere to speak of. Essentially, it is a giant mine just waiting to be exploited. So, a student team from the University of Texas at Austin has devised a plan to exploit it as part of the Revolutionary Aerospace System Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL), a competition sponsored by NASA to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to develop innovative ideas to solve some of space exploration’s challenges. UT Austin’s submission to the competition last year, known as the Autonomous Exploration Through Extraterrestrial Regions (AETHER) project, certainly fits that bill.

AETHER was submitted to the AI-Powered Self-Replicating Probes sub-section of RASC-AL 2024, which solicited ideas that would advance John von Neumann’s idea of a self-replicating space probe. AETHER addresses those challenges in two distinct ways.

First, it combines a spring-loaded landing system and a metal-burning rocket engine to hop between different asteroids in the belt. To fuel its rocket, it uses a system to harvest water and metal (specifically aluminum) from the surface of the asteroid it’s currently on, splits it into its components, and then dumps them into a fuel tank that can be used to power its next trip to a different asteroid. All of this is powered by a Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnoloY (KRUSTY) nuclear reactor that has been undergoing NASA and DoE testing for over a decade.

Fraser discusses the concept of von Neumann probes.

The springs in AETHER’s legs have a two-fold purpose. First, they allow for a soft landing on the surface of the gravitationally weak asteroid and can transfer some of the energy created by that landing into stored energy, which can be used to launch the system from its landing place later. It also has a set of wheels to navigate around the asteroid’s surface. When it’s time to jump off again, it replants its legs and springs back into space – with a little help from its rocket engine.

The rocket engine designed as part of AETHER can burn metal, such as aluminum, that the craft harvests from the asteroid to use as fuel. It is the primary system designed to take the craft from asteroid to asteroid, and it is meant to be a high-delta-v option for doing so quickly.

AETHER also tries to mimic a von Neumann probe by using a machine-learning algorithm to improve its resource-harvesting efforts. It would take data from various sensors, including synthetic aperture radar and a spectrometer, and estimate where the best spot would be to land to refuel. While collecting that additional fuel material, it would communicate back with Earth via a high-speed optical communication link, allowing an Earth-based server to update the machine learning parameters and improve the algorithm’s outcome for the next hop.

Fraser’s interest with self-replicating robots goes back a long way – here’s his explanation on HeroX about the concept.
Credit – HeroX YouTuBe Channel

The original mission design for AETHER has it stopping at two specific asteroids before moving on to as-yet-unnamed ones. The first, which is probably no surprise, is Psyche, the big metallic asteroid that is about to be visited by its own dedicated probe. Data from that probe will help inform the first iteration of AETHER’s learning algorithm, and the input the sensors provide from its visit will update it before its next step – Themis. That asteroid, though smaller, is expected to contain a large amount of water ice, which is a necessary component for AETHER’s rocket engines.

After visiting the first two asteroids, the mission moves on to places unknown, as completing those steps would be considered a success. But given the longevity of the KRUSTY reactor and the craft’s ability to refill its own fuel tank, it is possible, or even likely, that AETHER would consider operating well past its rendezvous with Themis.

The UT Austin team was comprised entirely of undergraduate students, though it’s unclear what year of study they were in. But, given their experience with the 2024 version of RASC-AL, they would seem well-placed to submit a project proposal for the recently announced 2025 version. If they do, hopefully, their idea will be just as innovative as AETHER’s.

Learn More:
Flores et al – AETHER
UT – Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity
UT – NASA Funds the Development of a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon That Would Last for 10 Years
UT – Engineers Design a Robot That Can Stick To, Crawl Along, and Sail Around Rubble Pile Asteroids

Lead Image:
Landing and take-off depiction of AETHER.
Credit – Flores et al.

The post Spring-loaded Robot Could Explore the Asteroid Belt Almost Indefinitely appeared first on Universe Today.

RCW 38 is a molecular cloud of ionized hydrogen (HII) roughly 5,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Vela. Located in this cloud is a massive star-forming cluster populated by young stars, short-lived massive stars, and protostars surrounded by clouds of brightly glowing gas. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) recently released a stunning 80-million-pixel image of the star cluster that features the bright streaks and swirls of RCW 38, the bright pink of its gas clouds, and its many young stars (which appear as multi-colored dots).

The image was captured by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), located at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The telescope is the world’s largest survey telescope and combines a 4.1-meter (~13.5-foot) mirror, the most highly curved mirror of its size. The extremely high curvature reduces the focal length, making the telescope’s structure extremely compact. This design enables VISTA to map large areas of the southern sky quickly, deeply, and systematically.

The telescope also has a wide field of view and a huge camera weighing three metric tons (3.3 U.S. tons) with 16 state-of-the-art infrared-sensitive detectors. VISTA’s surveys in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum have revealed completely new views of the southern sky. Star clusters are often called “stellar nurseries” since they contain all the ingredients for star formation, including dense gas clouds and opaque clumps of cosmic dust.

When clumps of this gas and dust collect to the point that they undergo gravitational collapse, new stars are born. The strong radiation produced by these newborn stars causes the gas shrouding the star cluster to glow brightly, creating the colorful display we see in this image. Despite that, many of the cluster’s stars cannot be observed in visible light because they are obscured by dust. However, these stars are still visible in infrared light, which passes through clouds of dust unimpeded.

This allowed the VISTA telescope and the VISTA InfraRed CAMera (VIRCAM) to capture the interior of the RCW 38 stellar cluster and reveal the true extent of its beauty. Visible in the cluster’s interior are young stars within dusty cocoons and colder “failed” stars known as brown dwarfs. The roughly 2000 stars in RCW 38 are very young, less than a million years old compared to our Sun (4.6 billion years old). Through its six public surveys, the telescope has mapped small patches of sky for long periods to detect extremely faint objects.

These range from distant galaxies, red dwarf stars, and brown dwarfs to small bodies in our Solar System. The newly-released infrared image was taken as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey, which studied the central parts of the Milky Way in five near-infrared bands. This survey took over 200,000 images of our galaxy and captured more than 355 open and 33 globular clusters. The data was used to create the most detailed infrared map of our home galaxy ever made. In fact, this map contains 10 times more objects than a previous one released by the same team back in 2012.

A catalog is also being created from VISTA data that will contain about a billion point sources and will be used to create a three-dimensional map of the central bulge of the Milky Way. Since the image of RCW 38 was taken, the VIRCAM camera has been retired after seventeen years of service. Later this year, it will be replaced by a new instrument, the 4-meter Multi-Object Spectrograph Telescope (4MOST). This second-generation instrument will give new life to the VISTA telescope, allowing it to obtain spectra of 2400 objects at once over a large area of the sky.

Further Reading: ESO

The post Stunning 80 Megapixel Image of a Stellar Nursery appeared first on Universe Today.

When astronomers detected the first known interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, in 2017, it sparked a host of new studies trying to understand the origin and trajectory of the galactic sojourner.

‘Oumuamua’s unique properties – unlike anything orbiting our sun – had scientists pondering how such an object could have formed. Now, a pair of researchers, Xi-Ling Zheng and Ji-Lin Zhou, are using numerical simulations to test out possible solar system configurations that could result in ‘Oumuamua-like objects. Their findings show that solar systems with a single giant planet have the necessary orbital mechanics at work to create such an object – but that other explanations may still be required.

Zheng and Zhou published their findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in February 2025.

They began their study by working backward from the known properties of ‘Oumuamua.

When it was visible to Earth’s telescopes for just a few months in 2017, it showed an intensely variable brightness, changing from bright to dim every four hours. Astronomers interpreted this variability as an elongated, cigar-shaped object tumbling through space.

Two other things made ‘Oumuamua unique. First, it appeared to have a dry, rocky surface, akin to the asteroids known in our solar system. But it also changed its orbit in a way that could not purely be explained by the laws of gravity – something else made it change direction.

Redirections like this are sometimes seen in icy comets. As they approach the Sun, off-gassing released from the heated ice acts like a thruster, changing the comet’s trajectory.

An artist’s depiction of the interstellar comet ‘Oumuamua, as it warmed up in its approach to the sun and outgassed hydrogen (white mist), which slightly altered its orbit. (Image credit: NASA, ESA and Joseph Olmsted and Frank Summers of STScI)

Somehow, ‘Oumuamua displayed a mix of both comet-like and asteroid-like properties.

One plausible explanation, proposed in 2020, is that ‘Oumuamua-like objects are formed by tidal fragmentation. That’s when a ‘volatile-rich’ parent body (like a large comet) passes too close to its star at high speeds, shattering it into long, thin shards. The heating process in these extreme interactions causes the formation of an elongated rocky shell, but preserves an interior of subsurface ice. This unique combination, not seen in our own solar system, would explain ‘Oumuamua’s orbital maneuvers despite its rocky composition.

It also explains why we don’t tend to see them in our solar system, because “ejected planetesimals experienced tidal fragmentation at more than twice the rate of surviving planetesimals (3.1% versus 1.4%),” the authors write. In other words, if the orbital forces are strong enough for tidal fragmentation to happen, it also means they’re strong enough to kick the object out of the system entirely.

Interstellar space may therefore be full of dagger-shaped shards of rock and ice (an exaggeration, but a fun quote for dinner parties nonetheless).

The white dwarf Sirius B compared to Earth. Credit: ESA and NASA

The simplest star system that could cause this type of tidal fragmentation are those home to white dwarfs. These are the extremely dense, dead cores of old exploded stars. A white dwarf, encircled by a belt of distant comet-like objects, similar to the Sun’s Oort cloud, could spawn ‘Oumuamua clones with regular frequency.

But the process is enhanced in systems that host Jupiter-sized planets.

The exception is ‘Hot Jupiters’ that orbit close to their star. These are less likely to interact with objects subject to tidal fragmentation.

But Jupiter-sized planets distant from their host star are very effective at producing ‘Oumuamua clones, especially if they have eccentric orbits. But even here, it’s not a perfect match for the origin of ‘Oumuamua, because these interactions tend to produce shards that are not as elongated, and at a rate lower than what is expected for ‘Oumuamua-type objects.

The authors conclude that the planetary systems most likely to have spawned ‘Oumuamua are those with many planets, which are more “efficient at producing interstellar objects,” the authors say, though they propose a few other possibilities too.

So while there is now a strong, plausible explanation for the process that birthed ‘Oumuamua, the type of solar system that produced it is still very much an open question.

Xi-Ling Zheng amd Ji-Lin Zhou, “Configuration of single giant planet systems generating ‘oumuamua-like interstellar asteroids.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The post Many Stars Could Have Sent Us ‘Oumuamua appeared first on Universe Today.

Take this for what you will, since my first view came from the New York Post. However, the Post reported a piece by the science editor of the Telegraph, a more respectable paper. Both sites are below; click on the headlines to go to the articles.

NY Post:

Telegraph:

An excerpt from the Telegraph:

The difference between sex and gender has become an increasingly incendiary topic as activists, scientists and politicians all debate the terms and the implications they have for policy.

But a survey of almost 200 scientists at British universities, conducted by The Telegraph and Censuswide, found 58 per cent of respondents think sex is binary, except in rare cases such as intersex individuals.

Less than a third (29 per cent) agreed with the statement “sex is not binary”, while one in eight people (13 per cent) had no views or preferred not to answer.

However, almost two thirds of scientists (64 per cent) said gender was fluid, while 22 per cent said gender is binary, and 14 per cent gave no answer.

The Telegraph figure:

I like the snark of this scientist, but Dr. Goymann is correct (further excerpt from the Telegraph piece):

“To me this just means that at least 29 per cent of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22 per cent of them do not know what gender means,” Dr Wolfgang Goymann, professor for behavioural biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, told The Telegraph.

Yes, I think that a fair number of academics, and that includes biologists and doctors like Steven Novella, don’t understand the nature of biological sex, and why the gamete-based definition that leads to the binary conclusion derives from a long history of observing plants and animals. (Again, for a clear explanation of all this, see Richard Dawkins’s article on his site “The Poetry of Reality.”)

It strikes me that those who say that sex isn’t binary, invoking other factors like hormones, chromosomes, genital configuration, and so on, never really tell us how we should define males and females, implying that the sexes comprise some unspecified multivariate mixture of these traits.  How do you define a male and a female, then? Even the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists, riddled with ideology and the desire to flaunt their virtue, have fallen into this misguided multivariate trap. Further, they imply that sex is a non-binary spectrum in all species, not just humans (see  their original statement here and my post with a group response here). The embarrassing statement of these three societies has been archived here in case they change their minds.

But I digress, so let’s continue with the Telegraph piece:

Dr Goymann recently published an article in the journal BioEssays, where he said some scientists are arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait.

“Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts,” he said.

“While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex.

“On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species.”

. . . .The survey touched on a range of topics that are divisive in the scientific community such as the origin of Covid, the Government’s pandemic modelling and gain-of-function research, as well as the gender/sex debate.

Only UK lecturers were invited to fill in the form and more than half were educated to PhD level or higher. The faculty of social sciences accounted for 18 per cent of the participants, 13 per cent were medicine and 12 per cent were life sciences.

. . . . Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, a human rights organisation that campaigns for clarity on sex in law and everyday life, told The Telegraph: “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary.

“The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.

“Most ordinary people think “gender” is just a polite alternative to “sex”, so are these academics talking about personal style – masculinity or femininity; or assertions about “identity” – that is, states of mind?

“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion.”

Here’s Goymann’s essay (with two coauthors), which you can access for free by clicking on the headline:

Goymann uses the gametic definition of sex with which we’ve become familiar. From that paper:

BIOLOGICAL SEX AS A BINARY VARIABLE

Biological sex is defined as a binary variable in every sexually reproducing plant and animal species. With a few exceptions, all sexually reproducing organisms generate exactly two types of gametes that are distinguished by their difference in size: females, by definition, produce large gametes (eggs) and males, by definition, produce small and usually motile gametes (sperm).[9–12] This distinct dichotomy in the size of female and male gametes is termed “anisogamy” and refers to a fundamental principle in biology (Figure 1).

. . . . A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. (e.g., Ref.[1, 3, 6, 26–28]) or that biological sex is a social construct.[2] These notions very much reflect our own anthropocentric view. In fact, femaleness or maleness is not defined by any of these features that can, but do not need to be associated with the biological or gametic sex.

. . . . CONCLUSION: DENYING BIOLOGICAL SEX ERODES SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND TRUST IN SCIENCE

It is clear that the biological definition of the sexes cannot be the basis for defining social genders of people, as forcefully pointed out by the philosopher Paul Griffiths.[8] Likewise, the socio-cultural, and thus anthropocentric, construct of gender cannot be applied to non-human organisms.[7] There is a red line that separates humans with their unique combination of biological sex and gender from non-human animals and plants, which only have two distinct sexes – both of which are either expressed in the same or in different individuals. As much as the concept of biological sex remains central to recognize the diversity of life, it is also crucial for those interested in a profound understanding of the nature of gender in humans. Denying the biological sex, for whatever noble cause, erodes scientific progress. In addition, and probably even worse, by rejecting simple biological facts influential science journals may open the flood gates for “alternative truths.”

Here’s a good headline from the NYT (click to read, or find it archived here). You may remember Palmerston, the the resident Chief Mouser of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) at Whitehall in London, who lived on Downing Street and often got into tiffs with Larry, the Chief Mouser of the Cabinet Office. Well, Palmerston, once rumored to have died, is very much alive, and has been transferred to Bermuda.  Click to read, or find it archived here.

We interrupt this program for a special bulletin.

In a major government shake-up, Palmerston, the cat who left the British Foreign Office in 2020, will come out of retirement and take up a new posting working with the governor of Bermuda.

Palmerston stepped down from the Foreign Office in 2020. At the time of his retirement, he was said to have been looking forward to a more low-key lifestyle. Although there was talk of him writing his memoirs, he instead spent his time climbing trees. But the lure of service to crown and country seems to have been too strong.

“I’ve just started work as feline relations consultant (semi-retired) to the new Governor of Bermuda,” Palmerston wrote on X on Tuesday. “I’ve been busy meeting very welcoming Bermudians.”

Andrew Murdoch, who had served with Palmerston in the Foreign Office and had maintained a residence with him in retirement, was appointed to the governor’s role in September.

A black-and-white cat, Palmerston is named after Lord Palmerston, a two-time prime minister in the 1850s and ’60s. Lord Palmerston was known for promoting British nationalism and intervention. Palmerston is known for mousing.

As a rescue cat, Palmerston is of uncertain age, although he was reported to be roughly 2 years old when appointed in 2016. His relatively low profile in recent years had led to rumors of his demise.

Lord Simon McDonald, formerly the most senior civil servant at the foreign office, said the most frequent question he had received since leaving office was what had happened to Palmerston. “The answer — retirement to countryside — usually treated as euphemism for ‘He died.’” he wrote. “Now we have proof of life in Bermuda! Enjoy your latest assignment.”

Much as Palmerston’s eponymous prime minister could never get along with another prime minister, William Gladstone, Palmerston has had a longtime rivalry with Larry, the chief mouser at 10 Downing Street. Although many details remain murky, reports say that in 2016, Larry tried to enter the Foreign Office in London, leading Palmerston to claw him. Larry was injured enough to need veterinary treatment. Bitterness lingered.

Larry is currently serving under his sixth prime minister. With Palmerston now more than 3,000 miles away, their feud is likely to diminish, political analysts say.

This video shows Larry confronting Palmerston, but also chasing a fox and rejecting Liz Truss’s attempt to pet him:

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Here’s Jenn, who posts only good news, talking about Browser the Library Cat for Life (what a good name!), who kept his job after a curmudgeon tried to oust him.

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And The Kiffness with a great riff on a cat’s vocals: “Sometimes I’m Alone”.  The cat is named George, as you’ll see at the end, and The Kiffness is on tour!

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Lagniappe:  Two today!  First, a cat misuses a store display.

pic.twitter.com/wkcmkCkkWF

— Meonk! (@majeliskucing) February 12, 2025

And wait! There’s more!  The cat movie “Flow,” which I’ve mentioned before, has now been nominated for two Oscars. It’s for everyone, not just cat lovers, for it features adventures and many animals. You can read about it in the NYT below by clicking the headline, or find it archived here, and I’ve put the trailer below. SEE IT!

An excerpt:

“We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.

Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.

“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.

A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.

. . . . The “Flow” craze has reached far beyond Latvia. Here in the United States, the animated adventure, which opened in theaters in late November, has become the all-time highest-grossing release for the distributors Janus Films and Sideshow, bringing in $4 million so far.

“Flow” has received terrific ratings on Rotten Tomatoes: 97% from the critics and 98% from the public. You don’t see ratings like that for most movies, especially animated ones with no words!

The American Trailer:

h/t Michael, Laura

Although many doctors who spread COVID misinformation act as if its in poor taste to bring it up today, we don't need their permission to remember.

The post “Don’t Worry About the NIH” From the Same Doctors Who Brought You “Don’t Worry About COVID.” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth.

The process of separating useful molecules from mixtures of other substances accounts for 15% of the nation's energy, emits 100 million tons of carbon dioxide and costs $4 billion annually. In a new study, researchers have found these manufactured separation materials don't function as intended because the pores are so packed with polymer they become blocked. That means the separations are inefficient and unnecessarily expensive.

Researchers have explored a 'quantum-inspired' technique to make the 'ones' and 'zeroes' for classical computer memory applications out of crystal defects, each the size of an individual atom. This turns milimeter-sized crystals into computer memory devices capable of storing terabytes of data. This interdisciplinary revolution in computer memory took its inspiration from the radiation dosimeters worn by hospital employees working with X-ray machines.

Researchers have explored a 'quantum-inspired' technique to make the 'ones' and 'zeroes' for classical computer memory applications out of crystal defects, each the size of an individual atom. This turns milimeter-sized crystals into computer memory devices capable of storing terabytes of data. This interdisciplinary revolution in computer memory took its inspiration from the radiation dosimeters worn by hospital employees working with X-ray machines.

Three innovative design techniques substantially enhance wireless transmitter performance and can boost power efficiency and elevate data rates concurrently. This effectively aligns with the growing demand for speed and efficiency, accelerating the widespread deployment of wireless devices. This enables synergistic operation of wireless electronic devices and better quality of modern life.

Three innovative design techniques substantially enhance wireless transmitter performance and can boost power efficiency and elevate data rates concurrently. This effectively aligns with the growing demand for speed and efficiency, accelerating the widespread deployment of wireless devices. This enables synergistic operation of wireless electronic devices and better quality of modern life.

NASA continues to progress with the development of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST), the next-generation observatory with a target launch date of 2027. As the direct successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will build on the successes of Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, the “mother of the Hubble,” the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a panoramic field of view 200 times greater than Hubble’s infrared view, enabling the first wide-field maps of the Universe.

Combined with observations by the ESA’s Euclid mission, these maps will help astronomers resolve the mystery of Dark Matter and cosmic expansion. The development process reached another milestone as the mission team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center successfully integrated the mission’s sunshade—a visor-like aperture cover—into the outer barrel assembly. This deployable structure will shield the telescope from sunlight and keep it at a stable temperature, allowing it to take high-resolution optical and infrared images of the cosmos.

Similar in function to Webb‘s sunshield, Roman’s is designed to make its instruments more sensitive to faint light sources, allowing the telescope to resolve distant galaxies, dimmer stars, brown dwarfs, and the gas and dust that permeate the interstellar medium (ISM). The shield consists of two layers of reinforced thermal blankets that will remain folded during launch, allowing the telescope to fit inside its payload fairing. It will deploy once the telescope has reached space using a system of three booms that are triggered electronically.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy.
Credits: NASA

The integration took a few hours, during which the technicians joined the sunshield and outer barrel assembly in the largest clean room at NASA Goddard. In addition to protecting the telescope from micrometeoroid impacts, the outer barrel assembly will also prevent light contamination and keep the telescope at a stable temperature. This will be accomplished by a series of heaters that prevent the telescope’s mirrors from experiencing temperature swings that would cause them to expand and contract. Said Brian Simpson, Roman’s deployable aperture cover lead at NASA Goddard, in a NASA press release:

“We’re prepared for micrometeoroid impacts that could occur in space, so the blanket is heavily fortified. One layer is even reinforced with Kevlar, the same thing that lines bulletproof vests. By placing some space in between the layers we reduce the risk that light would leak in, because it’s unlikely that the light would pass through both layers at the exact same points where the holes were.”

With this integration complete, the mission has now passed the Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D) milestone, the transition from fabrication to the assembly phase. This will be followed by the integration and testing phases, which Roman is on track for completion by fall 2026, followed by the launch phase no later than May 2027. The sunshade and outer barrel assembly were built by Goddard engineers and have been individually tested many times. Following the integration, the engineers conducted a deployment test that verified that they function together.

Since the sunshade was designed to deploy in space, the system isn’t powerful enough to deploy in Earth’s gravity, so the test involved a gravity negation system to offset its weight. Next, the team will conduct a thermal vacuum test to ensure the components function in the temperature and pressure environment of space. After that, they will put the assembled components through a shake test to simulate the intense vibrations they will experience during launch.

The view from below the Roman Space telescopes Outer Barrell Assembly’s baffles towards the deployed Deployable Aperture Cover. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

In the coming months, technicians will attach the telescope’s solar panels (which completed testing this past summer) to the outer barrel assembly and sunshade. The team expects to have these components integrated with the rest of the observatory by the end of the year. Said Laurence Madison, a mechanical engineer at NASA Goddard:

“Roman is made up of a lot of separate components that come together after years of design and fabrication. The deployable aperture cover and outer barrel assembly were built at the same time, and up until the integration the two teams mainly used reference drawings to make sure everything would fit together as they should. So the successful integration was both a proud moment and a relief!”

In addition to surveying billions of galaxies and investigating the mystery of Dark Energy, Roman will use its wide-field imagers and advanced suite of spectrometers to directly image exoplanets and planet-forming disks, supermassive black holes (SMBHs), stellar nurseries, and small bodies in our Solar System. Said Sheri Thorn, an aerospace engineer working on Roman’s sunshade at NASA Goddard:

“It’s been incredible to see these major components go from computer models to building and now integrating them. Since it’s all coming together at Goddard, we get a front row seat to the process. We’ve seen it mature, kind of like watching a child grow up, and it’s a really gratifying experience.”

Further Reading: NASA

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Our neighbour, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), is rich in gas and dust and hosts regions of extremely robust star formation. It contains about 700 open clusters, groups of gravitationally bound stars that all formed from the same giant molecular cloud. The clusters can contain thousands of stars, all emitting vibrant energy that lights up their surroundings.

One of these clusters is NGC 2040 in the constellation of Dorado, and the Gemini South Telescope captured its portrait.

NGC 2040 is noteworthy because it contains so many O-type and B-type stars. They’re hot, massive stars that tend to live fast and die young as explosive supernovae. The cluster contains more than a dozen of these stars.

There are two things at play in this image. Supernova explosions buffet the gas and dust and help shape the nebula while the young stars light it up. The explosions also create shock waves that compress the surrounding gas, leading to the formation of the next generation of stars.

A press release describes the nebula as a “Valentine’s Day rose.” What we’re really seeing is oxygen and hydrogen atoms energized by UV light from young stars and emitting light at different wavelengths. However, since it’s Valentine’s Day, we’ll concede to their more poetic description.

Human eyes can never see something like this naturally. The light spans wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the optical to the infrared. Instead, the Gemini South telescope captures the light at wavelengths beyond our range. The telescope employs filters to manage the light, showing us the deep red and orange colours from hydrogen and the light blue of oxygen. Bright white regions are abundant in both. It’s a nice partnership between telescope technology and human vision.

NGC 2024 is part of a larger structure called LH 88, one of the LMC’s largest star formation regions. The stars in the cluster are moving together, though they’re widely separated. They’re ensconced in gas and dust, some left behind by stars that have already exploded as supernovae. The gas and dust are further shaped by the strong stellar winds from so many young stars.

Our Sun likely formed in a cluster similar to NGC 2024. However, since that happened about five billion years ago, the stars have dispersed, and so have the gas and dust. There’s no more nebula.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of NGC 2040 back in 2012 with its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA and D. A Gouliermis. Acknowledgement: Flickr user Eedresha Sturdivant

It might not seem like it in our busy lives here on Earth’s surface, but this image tells a story we’re all wrapped up in: The cyclical nature of birth, death, and rebirth. When stars die and explode as supernovae, their material is expelled into space and taken up in the next round of star formation. And who knows, some of that material may be taken up in planet formation, maybe even rocky planets in the habitable zones of some of the new stars. Perhaps life will take root on one of those planets.

A zoom-in of the main image. Are planets forming in here somewhere? Rocky ones in habitable zones? Image Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)

Nothing lasts forever. Everything has a beginning and an end. One day, our Sun will become a red giant, Earth will be destroyed, and humanity may be destroyed with it. Though it’s a bleak proposition, it seems likely. But so is a kind of rebirth in a Universe that constantly recycles matter.

“Death is certain for one who has been born, and rebirth is inevitable for one who has died,” the Bhagavad Gita tells us. “Therefore, you should not lament over the inevitable.”

The post A Flaming Flower in the Large Magellanic Cloud appeared first on Universe Today.

New research on locomotion techniques that could be used in space exploration is constantly coming out. A lab from UCLA known as the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) is presenting a paper at the upcoming IEEE Aerospace Conference in March that details a unique system. The Space and Planetary Limbed Intelligent Tether Technology Exploration Robot (SPLITTER) consists of two miniaturized jumping robots tethered together.

Such a system might sound like a recipe for chaos and bring back memories of ladder ball games where no amount of control seems to make the tether go where you want it to. But, according to the paper, that system is actually quite stable, even in airless environments.

Mechanically, their system consists of two four-legged robots designed for jumping and tied together at their tops by a tether. Jumping is much more effective than “roving” on the surface of an asteroid because of all the jagged obstacles that need to be avoided. It is also more effective than flying since there is no atmosphere to push against in many space environments. Jumping robots, however, have been around for a while, but the real secret sauce is in the controls the RoMeLa team has developed.

Video describing some of the underlying tech of the SPLITTER robot.
Credit – Alvin Zhu YouTube Channel

The concept they used is called inertial morphing. In the case of SPLITTER, the robots “adjust inertia with changes in limb configurations and tether length,” according to lead author Yusuke Tanaka in an interview with TechXplore. The researchers turned to a technique called Model Predictive Control (MPC) to determine how each variable needs to be adjusted.

MPC is used in various industries and comes as advertised, with a model (i.e., a mathematical representation of the robots) and a prediction, which reflects what the software estimates will happen to the model next. With the model’s current state and expected next state, a controller can change the variables that affect the model’s state. Those changes will result in a stable flying path, allowing SPLITTER to soar through the skies, even without air. It also uses a physical phenomenon known as the Tennis Racket Theorem, which describes how an object can flip rotation around its intermediate axis while rotating around it. Most famously, this was demonstrated on the ISS with a t-handle. It looks chaotic, but the mathematics behind the motion are well-understood.

Implementing it in a tethered robotic system is another matter altogether, though. While SPLITTER is flying, it looks a lot like a bola used in ladder ball, except instead of round spheres on each end, it’s a robot body with four legs splayed out in different directions. The orientation of how those legs are spread out and the length of the tether connecting the two ends are the variables the MPC controls to stabilize its flight. SPLITTER can operate without heavy attitude control hardware, like reaction wheels or thrusters.

Famous video of the Tennis Racket Effect on the ISS.
Credit – Plasma Ben YouTube Channel

It also allows the system to perform other actions, like spelunking, where one robot is anchored firmly to the top of a cave system while the other rappels using the tether. Both robots only weigh about 10kg each on Earth, as well, which would make them even more agile on a world with smaller gravity like the Moon or an asteroid.

This isn’t the first robot system the RoMeLa lab designed for this purpose. They initially worked on a robot called the Spine-enhanced Climbing Autonomous Legged Exploration Robot) (SCALER), which had its limitations as they found the limbed climbing robot was too slow.

With SPLITTER, the research team thinks they have a better concept that can both traverse terrain faster and collect data that a robot tied to the ground would be unable to do. Unfortunately, for now, at least, SPLITTER is best described as a computer model, though some preliminary work has been done on the physics of MPC controlling a reaction wheel. Researchers at the lab intend to continue working on the concept, so maybe soon we’ll see a bola robot test jumping near Los Angeles.

Learn More:
TechXplore – Modular robot design uses tethered jumping for planetary exploration
Tanaka, Zhu, & Hong – Tethered Variable Inertial Attitude Control Mechanisms through a Modular Jumping Limbed Robot
UT – Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity
UT – A Jumping Robot Could Leap Over Enceladus’ Geysers

Lead Image:
Depiction of one SPLITTER robot descending into a crater while the other anchors on the rim.
Credit – Yusuke Tanaka, Alvin Zhu, & Dennis Hong

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White dwarfs are the remnants of once brilliant main sequence stars like our Sun. They’re extremely dense and no longer perform any fusion. The light they radiate is from remnant heat only.

Astronomers have doubted that white dwarfs could host habitable planets, partly because of the tumultuous path they follow to become white dwarfs, but new research suggests otherwise.

White dwarfs are so small that their habitable zones would be equally as small. Their habitable zones could range from only 0.0005 to 0.02 AU from the star. At that range, any planets would be tidally locked. One side of the planet could suffer from the runaway greenhouse effect, while the other could be frigid. Another problem concerns the existence of any white dwarf planets themselves. There are indications that they exist, but their population is undefined.

There are about 10 billion white dwarfs (WDs) in the Milky Way, and new research in The Astrophysical Journal suggests that some of them could harbour life-supporting planets. The research is titled “Increased Surface Temperatures of Habitable White Dwarf Worlds Relative to Main-sequence Exoplanets.” The lead author is Aomawa Shields, associate professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine.

“These results suggest that the white dwarf stellar environment, once thought of as inhospitable to life, may present new avenues for exoplanet and astrobiology researchers to pursue.”

Aomawa Shields, lead author, UC Irvine

“Discoveries of giant planet candidates orbiting white dwarf (WD) stars and the demonstrated capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope bring the possibility of detecting rocky planets in the habitable zones (HZs) of WDs into pertinent focus,” the authors write. If we do find more WD planets with the JWST or other telescopes, how likely is it that they’re habitable?

This research sought to find out by simulating two Earth-like aqua planets (ocean worlds) orbiting two different stars. They’re both tidally locked, follow circular orbits, and have Earth’s mass, atmospheric composition, and surface pressure. One is in the HZ of a main sequence star named Kepler-62, and the other is in the HZ of a hypothetical WD. Astronomers have already discovered large planets around WDs, so this simulation is based on real situations.

The researchers created synthetic spectra for both Kepler-62 and the white dwarf based on what is known about both. This image shows the spectral energy distribution of the modelled WD with an effective temperature of 5000 K (red) and a synthetic spectrum of Kepler-62 (4859 K, purple). Image Credit: Shields et al. 2025.

“While white dwarf stars may still give off some heat from residual nuclear activity in their outer layers, they no longer exhibit nuclear fusion at their cores. For this reason, not much consideration has been given to these stars’ ability to host habitable exoplanets,” lead author Shields said in a press release. “Our computer simulations suggest that if rocky planets exist in their orbits, these planets could have more habitable real estate on their surfaces than previously thought.”

Shields and her co-researchers used a 3D climate model to simulate planets around the stars. Both planets are tidally locked to their stars. Although both stars have similar effective temperatures, the results show that the planets’ climates differ considerably. The HZ around the white dwarf is much closer, meaning its planet is closer. That proximity means the planet had a higher surface temperature and a much faster rotation period, which is critical to the results.

“The synchronously rotating WD planet’s global mean surface temperature is 25 K higher than that of the synchronously rotating planet orbiting K62 due to its much faster (10 hr) rotation and orbital period,” the authors explain in their paper.

The simulated planet orbiting K62 had a much longer orbital period, which allowed a large mass of water vapour clouds to accumulate on the dayside. These clouds cooled more of the planet’s surface, subtracting habitable surface area. “The planet orbiting Kepler-62 has so much cloud cover that it cools off too much, sacrificing precious habitable surface area in the process,” Shields said.

“On the other hand, the planet orbiting the white dwarf is rotating so fast that it never has time to build up nearly as much cloud cover on its dayside, so it retains more heat, and that works in its favor,” Shields said.

The WD planet’s faster rotation circulated the atmosphere more effectively, avoiding the runaway greenhouse effect. “This ultrafast rotation generates strong zonal winds and meridional flux of zonal momentum, stretching out and homogenizing the scale of atmospheric circulation and preventing an equivalent buildup of thick, liquid water clouds on the dayside of the planet compared to the synchronous planet orbiting K62,” the paper states. The authors also explain that this transports heat from higher latitudes toward the equator and that this pattern is seen in other simulations of short-period planets.

The simulations show that zonal winds are weaker on the K62 planet (left) than on the WD planet (right.) The WD planet’s more powerful winds create a more habitable planet. Image Credit: Shields et al. 2025

“We expect synchronous rotation of an exoplanet in the habitable zone of a normal star like Kepler-62 to create more cloud cover on the planet’s dayside, reflecting incoming radiation away from the planet’s surface,” Shields said. “That’s usually a good thing for planets orbiting close to the inner edge of their stars’ habitable zones, where they could stand to cool off a bit rather than lose their oceans to space in a runaway greenhouse. But for a planet orbiting squarely in the middle of the habitable zone, it’s not such a good idea.”

This figure shows surface temperatures on the K62 planet (left), which has a 155-day orbit, and the WD planet (right), which has a 0.44-day orbit. The planet orbiting K62 “shows a characteristic, oval-shaped temperature pattern,” the authors write. The hottest point is at the substellar point on the planet’s dayside, and a cold nightside. The WD planet has stretched-out scales of circulation across the planet. and midlatitude jets. The hottest surface temperatures are located in the midlatitude jets, which is similar to simulations of other short-period planets. Image Credit: Shields et al. 2025.

Fewer clouds on the dayside of WD planets, combined with a stronger greenhouse effect on the night side, would create warmer, more habitable conditions than on the Kepler-62 planet, despite the fact that WD energy outputs slowly decline over time. If these results hold up, they could be game-changing in our search for exoplanets in habitable zones.

“White dwarfs may, therefore, present amenable environments for life on planets formed within or migrated to their HZs, generating warmer surface environments than those of planets with main-sequence hosts to compensate for an ever-shrinking incident stellar flux,” the authors explain.

“These results suggest that the white dwarf stellar environment, once thought of as inhospitable to life, may present new avenues for exoplanet and astrobiology researchers to pursue,” Shields said.

What’s not clear is how many planets there are around WDs. The transition from a red giant to WD isn’t a peaceful process. When red giants expand, they engulf and destroy nearby planets. Our Sun will one day become a red giant, and it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth. Maybe even Mars.

Artist’s impression of a red giant star. When red giants expand, they engulf and destroy nearby planets. Planets further away could migrate inwards and orbit the star when it’s a white dwarf. Image Credit: NASA/ Walt Feimer

These destroyed planets can form a debris disk around the white dwarf, from which a new generation of planets could emerge. Or planets further away from the red giant could survive and move closer to the star as it undergoes its changes. More research is needed to understand these possibilities.

“As it is likely that many of the planets orbiting WD progenitors will have been engulfed during the red giant phase, WD planets may be few within their systems and possibly orbiting alone in single-planet systems,” the authors write.

Our knowledge of exoplanet habitability is incomplete. Yet, it’s a critical issue in understanding the Universe and one of our biggest questions: Is there other life? We can’t answer the big one without a much better understanding of habitability and what conditions it exists in. The only way to gain that knowledge is with more powerful observations.

“As powerful observational capabilities to assess exoplanet atmospheres and astrobiology have come on line, such as those associated with the James Webb Space Telescope, we could be entering a new phase in which we’re studying an entirely new class of worlds around previously unconsidered stars.”

Press Release: UC Irvine astronomers gauge livability of exoplanets orbiting white dwarf stars

Research: Increased Surface Temperatures of Habitable White Dwarf Worlds Relative to Main-sequence Exoplanets

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Throughout Earth's history, ice caps have been very rare, but a model of the past 420 million years suggests an explanation for why they sometimes form

We all know that asteroids are out there, that some of them come dangerously close to Earth, and that they’ve struck Earth before with catastrophic consequences. The recent discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4 reminds us of the persistent threat that asteroids present. There’s an organized effort to find dangerous space rocks and determine how far away they are and where their orbits will take them.

A team of scientists has developed a method that will help us more quickly determine an asteroid’s distance, a critical part of determining its orbit.

Our asteroid concern is centred on NEOs or Near-Earth Objects. These are asteroids whose closest approach to the Sun is less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU). (A small number of NEOs are comets.) There are more than 37,000 NEOs, and while potential impacts are rare, the results can be catastrophic. Considering what happened to the dinosaurs, there’s not much room for complacency or hubris.

Large asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt (MAB) are easier to study. Their large sizes mean they produce a bigger signal when observed, and astronomers can more easily determine their orbits. However, the MAB holds many smaller asteroids around 100-200 meters. There could be hundreds of millions of them. They’re big enough to devastate entire cities if they strike Earth, and they’re more difficult to track. The first step in determining their orbits is determining their distances, which is challenging and takes time.

Recent research submitted to The Astronomical Journal presents a new method of determining asteroid distances in much less time. It’s titled “Measuring the Distances to Asteroids from One Observatory in One Night with Upcoming All-Sky Telescopes” and is available at arxiv.org. The lead author is Maryann Fernandes from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University.

The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) should see its first light in July 2025. One of its scientific objectives is to find more small objects in the Solar System, including asteroids, by scanning the entire visible southern sky every few nights. If it moves and reflects light, the VRO has a good chance of spotting it. However, it won’t automatically determine the distance to asteroids.

The Vera Rubin Observatory is poised to begin observations in 2025. It could detect 130 Near Earth Objects each night. Image Credit: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA/B. Quint

“When asteroids are measured with short observation time windows, the dominant uncertainty in orbit construction is due to distance uncertainty to the NEO,” the authors of the new paper write. They claim their method can shorten the time it takes to determine an asteroid’s distance to one night of observations. It’s based on a technique called topocentric parallax.

Topocentric parallax is based on the rotation of the Earth. In a 2022 paper by some of the same researchers, the authors wrote that “Topocentric parallax comes from the diversity of the observatory positions with respect to the center of the Earth in an inertial reference frame. Observations from multiple observatories or a single observatory can measure parallax because the Earth rotates.”

In the two years since that paper, the researchers have refined their method. The research expands on previous algorithms and tests the technique using both synthetic data and real-world observations.

“In this paper, we further develop and evaluate this technique to recover distances in as quickly as a single night,” the authors write in the new paper. “We first test the technique on synthetic data of 19 different asteroids ranging from ~ 0.05 AU to ~ 2.4 AU.”

The figure below shows the results of the test with synthetic data. Each asteroid was observed six times in one night, and two different equations were employed to process the data.

This figure shows the measured and true distances to 19 asteroids as part of the method’s test. In this test, each asteroid was observed six times in one night. The top shows Measured distance (AU) versus True distance (AU) for all 19 asteroids considered in this analysis. Each panel is based on a separate equation that can be employed in the method. “We see the fit from Eq. 1 for the group of asteroids yielding precise distances with relatively good agreement with true distances,” the authors write. Image Credit: Fernandes et al. 2025.

The researchers also tested their method by taking 15 observations of each asteroid over five nights (3 per night). In this test, Equation 1 performed poorly, while Equation 2 performed well.

This scenario featured 15 observations taken over 5 nights, with three observations per night. Equation 1 produces poor distance agreement, while with Equation 2, the distance recovery improves. Image Credit: Fernandes et al. 2025.

Of course, the distance to the asteroid affected the accuracy of the measurements. The closer the object was, the more precise the measurement was. The paper notes that the method was able to recover distances “with uncertainties as low as the ~ 1.3% level for more nearby objects (about 0.3 AU or less) assuming typical astrometric uncertainties.”

After these tests with synthetic data, the team acquired their own single-night observations of two asteroids using a different algorithm. The real observations produced a less precise result, but it was still a meaningful improvement. The authors explain that they were able to recover distances “to the 3% level.”

So, what do all these tests, equations, and algorithms boil down to?

When we hear of an asteroid that could potentially strike Earth in a few years, people can wonder why the situation is so uncertain. Shouldn’t we know if an asteroid is heading straight for us? Trying to determine the orbit of these small rocks from tens of millions of km away is extremely difficult. An AU is almost 150 million km (93 million miles). 2024 YR, the latest asteroid of concern, is only 40 to 90 metres (130 to 300 ft) in diameter. Those numbers illustrate the problem.

If this method can improve the accuracy of our distance measurements and do it based on a single night of observations, that’s a big improvement.

The technique can be applied to data generated by the Vera Rubin Observatory and the Argus Array. According to the authors, “distances to NEOs on the scale of ~ 0.5 AU can be constrained to below the percent level within a single night.” As the study shows, the accuracy of those measurements from a single-site observatory depends heavily on the spacing between individual observations. If multiple observatories at different sites are used on the same night, the accuracy increases.

The Argus Array is a planned astronomical survey instrument that will be unique in its ability to observe the entire visible sky simultaneously. It will consist of 900 small telescopes, each with its own camera. It’s currently under construction, but its location isn’t being publicized. The researchers say their method can work with Argus’ data. Image Credit: Argus Array

Though larger asteroids, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, tend to remain stable in the main asteroid belt, smaller asteroids are more easily perturbed and can become part of the NEO population. An impact from a smaller asteroid might not spell the end of civilization, but it can still be extremely destructive.

Anything humanity can do to understand the asteroid threat is wise. Many asteroids have struck Earth in the past, and it’s only a matter of time before another one comes our way. If we can see it coming in advance, we can try to do something about it.

Research: Measuring the Distances to Asteroids from One Observatory in One Night with Upcoming All-Sky
Telescopes

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