Hi, Vasiliy.
I'm sure you've heard the big news this week: astronomers have detected water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet that's located in the habitable zone of its star. This is huge news, but it doesn't mean that we're looking at a habitable world.
The planet, K2-18b, is about twice the size of Earth with 8 times the mass, and orbits a red dwarf star every 33 days. Astronomers were able to use Hubble to detect the presence of water vapor in the presence of the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it actually has liquid oceans. It might be a superearth with an extended atmosphere, or it might be a mini-neptune. More research will be needed.
You might hear stories that this is the most habitable planet found so far, and that's definitely not accurate. It has significantly more gravity that Earth, it orbits a red dwarf star that can release devastating solar flares. It's probably tidally locked to its star; one side is blasted by sunlight, the other side is in darkness.
But is the very first time astronomers have detected water on a planet in the habitable zone of another star. Over time, they're going to find more and more of them, and eventually it'll be a true Earth-sized world that must have oceans.
As always, stay tuned as the science evolves.
Thanks!
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
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Lagrange Points. Stable spots in space that you just can't stop thinking about. What spacecraft work best in which places? What are some amazing ideas that could utilize these regions across the Solar System? In the last episode, I gave an overview of the Lagrange points, and then went into the details of spacecraft missions sent to L1, the perfect place to constantly observe the Sun, the Earth, or to block radiation coming from the Sun. The best place for a lunar elevator, or a spot to put a space station at the Moon. This week, we're going to talk about L2 and L3, the other meta-unstable spots that you can park a spacecraft at.
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Well, this is heartbreaking. In last week's newsletter, I let you know that India's Vikram lander was about to set down on the surface of the Moon and begin two weeks of exploration. Unfortunately, the landing failed, and India lost contact with the spacecraft in the final moments, when it should have been sitting safely on the surface of the Moon. India is still trying to make contact with the lander, and we still don't know any of the details.
Since Cassini's discovery of lakes on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, astronomers have been trying to puzzle out what they could be, and how they formed. A new theory proposes that they're actually the craters left over from massive explosions beneath the surface of Titan, where huge pockets of nitrogen suddenly exploded, opening a crater on the surface that later filled with liquid methane.
Astronomers have known about a hyper-velocity star for a few years now, and astronomers thought it was hurled out of the galaxy by the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. But new observations show that it originated somewhere else, which means there's something else capable of accelerating a star this quickly. An intermediate-mass black hole? A supernova? What threw the star is still a mystery.
Witness the power of a fully operational 500-meter single dish radio telescope. China announced this week that their Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (or FAST) is now operational and ready to do science at a massive scale. The Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico is 305 meter across, so this is a nice upgrade for radio astronomers scanning the sky for pulsars, fast radio bursts and other radio-emitting astronomical objects.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell announced the company's ambitious plans to launch 24 Starlink missions in 2020. I'm not talking about 24 satellites, I'm talking about 24 launches, each of which contains 60 satellites, so they'll be putting well over 1,000 satellites into orbit next year, doing more launches than any rocket company has ever done in a year. They're accelerating their plans to offer internet service to North America.
Now that Cassini's gone, we'll need to rely on Hubble to give us regular pictures of Saturn. And here's the 2019 edition, taken when Saturn was at its closest point in June. It was taken when the planet was "only" 1.36 billion kilometers away, using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. So pretty. Also... we need to go back.
There are active black holes (quasars), constantly blasting out radiation into space as they feed on material, and there are the quiet black holes, which have run out of food. But astronomers have discovered a black hole that seems to be eating on a regular basis, every 9 hours or so, throwing out a burp of X-rays and then quieting down.This kind of regularity has never been seen before, but what could be causing it?
When humans finally try to make a permanent outpost at Mars, it might actually not be down on the surface, but on one of its smaller, potato-like moons: Deimos. According to a new proposal from NASA flight surgeon Jim Logan, you could drill a hole into Deimos, mine all the minerals and water you could ever want, all within the safety of a protective rocky tunnel.
If we're going to live in space permanently, we're going to need to build large structures in space out of materials harvested from asteroids and the Moon. As a tiny step towards this future, astronauts tried mixing up a few batches of concrete in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station. Without gravity to separate the layers, and for bubbles to be able to rise to the top, the resulting concrete is surprisingly different.
The Outerspace Treaty clearly defines that you can't own the Moon, and you can't use it for military purposes. So what would a peaceful community on the Moon look like? Last week a group of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs came together to hash out some of the issues that a lunar station might face if it actually comes together.
As we learned this week, it's incredibly difficult to land on the Moon. In order to stick the landing, NASA is testing out techniques that would allow future landers to autonomously detect the surface around them, and put down in a spot that's safe, away from big rocks, steep slopes and craters. Let's hope the next generation of landers have better luck getting down to the Moon.
How long is a day on Saturn? That's actually a very tricky question to answer with precision. That's because it doesn't have any surface features you can track as they go around the planet. Instead, astronomers have watched how its magnetic field turns around the planet, but even that has been unreliable. In fact, in the last few decades, the length of day had seemed to change by about 6 minutes. How is that possible?
Other Interesting Space Stuff
Have you ever watched a meteor shower? Take pictures of the sky every few minutes all night long, and you'll realize just how many chunks of dust are really hitting the Earth's atmosphere during one of these events. This amazing picture by @brinscoe shows you the beauty of the 2018 Perseids over Colorado.
We have featured over 1,000 astrophotographers on our Instagram page, which has more than 186,000 followers. Want to do a takeover? Use the hashtag #universetoday and I'll check out your photos.
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