Tag: earth

NASA’s Hubble Telescope Captures Collision of DART With Asteroid Dimorphos

National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022, according to their statement.

Hubble‘s time-lapse movie of the aftermath of DART’s collision reveals surprising and remarkable, hour-by-hour changes as dust and chunks of debris were flung into space, NASA said in their statement.

Smashing head on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour, the DART impactor blasted over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off of the asteroid.

The Hubble movie offers invaluable new clues into how the debris was dispersed into a complex pattern in the days following the impact, NASA said.

This was over a volume of space much larger than could be recorded by the LICIACube cubesat, which flew past the binary asteroid minutes after DART’s impact, they said.

The primary objective of DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos, the agency said.

Though neither Didymos nor Dimorphos poses any threat to Earth, data from the mission will help inform researchers how to potentially divert an asteroid’s path away from Earth, if ever necessary, the statement said.

The DART experiment also provided fresh insights into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early solar system.

“The DART impact happened in a binary asteroid system. We’ve never witnessed an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real time, and it’s really surprising.

“I think it’s fantastic. Too much stuff is going on here. It’s going to take some time to figure out,” said Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

The study, led by Li along with 63 other DART team members, was published on March 1 in the journal Nature.

The movie shows three overlapping stages of the impact aftermath: the formation of an ejecta cone, the spiral swirl of debris caught up along the asteroid’s orbit about its companion asteroid, and the tail swept behind the asteroid by the pressure of sunlight, resembling a windsock caught in a breeze, the statement said.

The statement described that the Hubble movie starts at 1.3 hours before impact.

In this view both Didymos and Dimorphos are within the central bright spot; even Hubble can’t resolve the two asteroids separately.

The thin, straight spikes projecting away from the center (and seen in later images) are artifacts of Hubble’s optics.

The first post-impact snapshot is 2 hours after the event.

Debris flies away from the asteroid, moving with a range of speeds faster than four miles per hour, fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull, so it does not fall back onto the asteroid, the statement said.

The ejecta forms a largely hollow cone with long, stringy filaments.

At about 17 hours after the impact the debris pattern entered a second stage.

The dynamic interaction within the binary system starts to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern, the statement described.

The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is tied to the gravitational pull of the companion asteroid, Didymos.

“This is really unique for this particular incident,” said Li. “When I first saw these images, I couldn’t believe these features. I thought maybe the image was smeared or something.” Hubble next captures the debris being swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles, the statement said.

This stretches out into a debris train where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery is compounded later when Hubble records the tail splitting in two for a few days, the statement said.

A multitude of other telescopes on Earth and in space, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Lucy spacecraft, also observed the DART impact and its outcomes.

This Hubble movie is part of a suite of new studies published in the journal Nature about the DART mission.

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Astronomers Discover Milky Way Galaxy’s Most-Distant Stars

Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way’s outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy — almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy.

The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way‘s halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence. The furthest of them is 1.08 million light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

These stars, spotted using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain, are part of a category of stars called RR Lyrae that are relatively low mass and typically have low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The most distant one appears to have a mass about 70 percent that of our sun. No other Milky Way stars have been confidently measured farther away than these.

The stars that populate the outskirts of the galactic halo can be viewed as stellar orphans, probably originating in smaller galaxies that later collided with the larger Milky Way.

“Our interpretation about the origin of these distant stars is that they are most likely born in the halos of dwarf galaxies and star clusters which were later merged – or more straightforwardly, cannibalised — by the Milky Way,” said Yuting Feng, an astronomy doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study, presented this week at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“Their host galaxies have been gravitationally shredded and digested, but these stars are left at that large distance as debris of the merger event,” Feng added.

The Milky Way has grown over time through such calamities.

“The larger galaxy grows by eating smaller galaxies — by eating its own kind,” said study co-author Raja GuhaThakurta, UC Santa Cruz’s chair of astronomy and astrophysics.

Containing an inner and outer layer, the Milky Way’s halo is vastly larger than the galaxy’s main disk and central bulge that are teeming with stars. The galaxy, with a supermassive black hole at its center about 26,000 light years from Earth, contains perhaps 100 billion–400 billion stars including our sun, which resides in one of the four primary spiral arms that make up the Milky Way’s disk. The halo contains about 5 percent of the galaxy’s stars.

Dark matter, which dominates the halo, makes up most of the universe’s mass and is thought to be responsible for its basic structure, with its gravity influencing visible matter to come together and form stars and galaxies.

The halo’s remote outer edge is a poorly understood region of the galaxy. These newly identified stars are almost half the distance to the Milky Way’s neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

“We can see that the suburbs of the Andromeda halo and the Milky Way halo are really extended – and are almost ‘back-to-back,'” Feng said.

The search for life beyond the Earth focuses on rocky planets akin to Earth orbiting in what is called the “habitable zone” around stars. More than 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, already have been discovered.

“We don’t know for sure, but each of these outer halo stars should be about as likely to have planets orbiting them as the sun and other sun-like stars in the Milky Way,” GuhaThakurta said.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

 

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NASA Formally Retires Mars InSight Lander 4 Years After Its Arrival on Red Planet

NASA has formally retired its Mars InSight lander, the first robotic probe specially designed to study the deep interior of a distant world, four years after it arrived on the surface of the red planet, the US space agency announced on Wednesday.

Mission controllers at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles determined the mission was over when two consecutive attempts to re-establish radio contact with the lander failed, a sign that InSight’s solar-powered batteries had run out of energy.

NASA predicted in late October that the spacecraft would reach the end of its operational life in a matter of weeks due to increasingly heavy accumulations of dust on its solar panels, depleting the ability of its batteries to recharge.

JPL engineers will continue to listen for a signal from the lander, just in case, but hearing from InSight again is unlikely, NASA said. The three-legged stationary probe last communicated with Earth on December 15.

InSight landed on Mars in late November 2018 with instruments designed to detect planetary seismic rumblings never before measured anywhere but Earth, and its original two-year mission was later extended to four.

From its perch in a vast and relatively flat plain called Elysium Planitia just north of the planet’s equator, the lander has helped scientists gain new understanding of Mars’ internal structure.

Researchers said InSight’s data revealed the thickness of the planet’s outer crust, the size and density of its inner core and the structure of the mantle that lies in between.

One of InSight’s chief accomplishments was establishing that the red planet is, indeed, seismically active, recording more than 1,300 marsquakes. It also measured seismic waves generated by meteorite impacts.

“The seismic data alone from this discovery program mission offers tremendous insights not just into Mars but other rocky bodies, including Earth,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate.

One such impact a year ago was found to have gouged boulder-sized chunks of water ice surprisingly close to Mars’ equator.

Even as InSight retires, a more recent robotic visitor to the red planet, NASA’s science rover Perseverance, continues to prepare a collection of Martian mineral samples for future analysis on Earth.

This week, Perseverance deposited the first of 10 sample tubes it was directed to leave at a surface collection site on Mars as a backup cache, in case the primary supply stored in the rover’s belly cannot for some reason be transferred as planned to a retrieval spacecraft in the future, NASA said.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

 

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NASA Spacecrafts at Mars Record Biggest Meteor Strikes, Impact Craters Yet

Two NASA spacecraft at Mars — one on the surface and the other in orbit — have recorded the biggest meteor strikes and impact craters yet.

The high-speed barrages last year sent seismic waves rippling thousands of miles across Mars, the first ever detected near the surface of another planet, and carved out craters nearly 500 feet (150 meters) across, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The larger of the two strikes churned out boulder-size slabs of ice, which may help researchers look for ways future astronauts can tap into Mars’ natural resources.

The Insight lander measured the seismic shocks, while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided stunning pictures of the resulting craters.

Imaging the craters “would have been huge already,” but matching it to the seismic ripples was a bonus, said co-author Liliya Posiolova of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. “We were so lucky.”

Mars’ atmosphere is thin unlike on Earth, where the thick atmosphere prevents most space rocks from reaching the ground, instead breaking and incinerating them.

A separate study last month linked a recent series of smaller Martian meteoroid impacts with smaller craters closer to InSight, using data from the same lander and orbiter.

The impact observations come as InSight nears the end of its mission because of dwindling power, its solar panels blanketed by dust storms. InSight landed on the equatorial plains of Mars in 2018 and has since recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes.

“It’s going to be heartbreaking when we finally lose communication with InSight,” said Bruce Banerdt of NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lander’s chief scientist who took part in the studies. “But the data it has sent us will certainly keep us busy for years to come.”

The incoming space rocks were between 16 feet and 40 feet (5 meters and 12 meters) in diameter, said Posiolova. The impacts registered about magnitude 4.

The larger of the two struck last December some 2,200 miles (3,500 kms) from InSight, creating a crater roughly 70 feet (21 meters) deep. The orbiter’s cameras showed debris hurled up to 25 miles (40 kms) from the impact, as well as white patches of ice around the crater, the most frozen water observed at such low latitudes, Posiolova said.

Posiolova spotted the crater earlier this year after taking extra pictures of the region from orbit. The crater was missing from earlier photos, and after poring through the archives, she pinpointed the impact to late December. She remembered a large seismic event recorded by InSight around that time and with help from that team, matched the fresh hole to what was undoubtedly a meteoroid strike. The blast wave was clearly visible.

Scientists also learned the lander and orbiter teamed up for an earlier meteoroid strike, more than double the distance of the December one and slightly smaller.

“Everybody was just shocked and amazed. Another one? Yep,” she recalled.

The seismic readings from the two impacts indicate a denser Martian crust beyond InSight’s location.

“We still have a long way to go to understanding the interior structure and dynamics of Mars, which remain largely enigmatic,” said Doyeon Kim of ETH Zurich’s Institute of Geophysics in Switzerland, who was part of the research.

Outside scientists said future landers from Europe and China will carry even more advanced seismometers. Future missions will “paint a clearer picture” of how Mars evolved, Yingjie Yang and Xiaofei Chen from China’s Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen wrote in an accompanying editorial.

 

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ISRO to Conduct First Test Flight of Gaganyaan Mission in February Next Year

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will start a series of test flights for India’s maiden human space flight mission from February next year, a senior official said on Thursday.

The space agency also plans to deploy the heavy lift Chinook helicopter and the C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft for testing the crew module, which will carry astronauts into the orbit for three days as part of the Gaganyaan human space flight mission, R Umamaheshwaran, Director of ISRO‘s Human Space Flight Centre said.

Addressing the India Space Congress, he said scientists at ISRO had completed the design of the Environment Control System, which will ensure ambient living conditions for astronauts in the crew service module when they are orbiting the Earth.

At least 17 different tests are planned by ISRO next year before it carries out the unmanned space flight in December next year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the Gaganyaan Mission in his Independence Day address in 2018 with a tentative target of achieving it in 2022, when the country completed 75 years of freedom from colonial rule.

However, the COVID pandemic led to several delays and the first Indian astronauts are likely to undertake their maiden spaceflight by the end of 2024 or early 2025.

Umamaheshwaran said the task of designing the crew module and environment control system was a challenging one as the astronauts should feel comfortable even during the re-entry phase, when the temperatures outside the space capsule could reach over 2000 degrees celsius.

“The crew module, where the astronauts are supposed to sit and fly, is completed and the fabrication work is on. Within six months, we will get the crew module,” he said on the sidelines of the event organised by the SatCom Industry Association.

Umamaheshwaran said the environment control system was a critical element of the project as it provides ambient living conditions in the crew module.

“We have to provide oxygen, remove carbon dioxide, remove humidity, maintain temperature and also ensure there is no fire hazard. This is a very complex technology which no country would give us,” he said.

The senior scientist said it was decided to develop the environment control system indigenously.

“We have the capability to design, so we are doing that and that only is taking a little bit of time. We have completed all the design and now is the time to prove that whatever has been designed is safe enough. That is the entire effort,” Umamaheshwaran said.

He said four candidates have been shortlisted to undertake the spaceflight and have already completed their initial training in Russia.

The shortlisted astronauts are currently undergoing further training at the Astronaut Training Facility in Bengaluru, he said.

 

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SpaceX Capsule Leaves ISS to Bring 4 Astronauts Back to Earth After 6 Months

The fourth long-duration astronaut team launched by SpaceX to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA departed the orbiting outpost on Friday to begin their flight back to Earth, capping a science mission of nearly six months.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying three US NASA astronauts and an Italian crewmate from the European Space Agency undocked from the ISS at 12:05pm EDT (09:35pm IST) to embark on a return flight expected to last nearly five hours.

Live video showing the capsule drifting away from the station as the two vehicles soared high over the North Atlantic was shown on a NASA webcast of the undocking.

Wearing helmeted white-and-black spacesuits, the four astronauts were seen strapped into the crew cabin shortly before the spacecraft separated from the station, orbiting some 250 miles (400kms) above Earth.

A series of several brief rocket thrusts then autonomously pushed the capsule safely clear of the ISS and lowered its orbit to line up the capsule for later atmospheric re-entry and splashdown.

If all goes smoothly, the Crew Dragon, dubbed Freedom, will parachute into the sea off the Atlantic coast of Florida at 4:55pm local time (02:25am IST on Saturday).

The Freedom crew, Americans Kjell Lindgren, 49, Jessica Watkins, 34, and Bob Hines, 47, as well as Italy’s Samantha Cristoferetti, 45, arrived at the station on April 27 following a SpaceX launch that day. Watkins became the first African-American woman to serve on a long-duration mission aboard the ISS.

That crew had been designated as “Crew-4,” the fourth full-fledged long-duration group of astronauts launched to ISS by SpaceX since the private rocket company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk began flying NASA personnel in May 2020.

Their departure came a week after their replacement team, Crew-5, arrived aboard the station — a Russian cosmonaut, a Japanese astronaut and two NASA crewmates, including the first Native American woman sent to orbit.

Crew-5 is remaining on ISS for now with two other Russians and a third American who shared a Soyuz flight to the ISS in September. One of those cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev, assumed ISS command from Cristoferetti of the European Space Agency before Crew-4’s departure.

ISS, spanning the length of a football field, has been continuously occupied since 2000, operated by a US-Russian-led partnership that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

 

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NASA-Funded Technology for Future Missions May Charge EVs in 5 Minutes on Earth

A new NASA-funded technology for future space missions may charge an electric car in just five minutes on Earth, paving the way for increased adoption of such vehicles, the US space agency said.

Researchers at Purdue University, US developed the Flow Boiling and Condensation Experiment (FBCE) to enable two-phase fluid flow and heat transfer experiments to be conducted in the long-duration microgravity environment on the International Space Station (ISS).

The new “subcooled flow boiling” technique results in greatly improved heat transfer effectiveness compared to other approaches and could be used to control the temperatures of future systems in space.

This technology can also have applications on Earth: It could make owning an electric car more appealing, the researchers said.

Currently, charging times vary widely, from 20 minutes at a station alongside a roadway to hours using an at-home charging station.

Lengthy charging times and charger location are both cited as major concerns of people who are considering electric vehicle ownership.

Reducing the charging time for electric vehicles to five minutes — an industry goal — will require charging systems to provide current at 1,400A.

Currently, advanced chargers only deliver currents up to 520A, and most chargers available to consumers support currents of less than 150A.

However, charging systems providing 1,400A will generate significantly more heat than current systems, and will require improved methods to control temperature.

Recently, the team applied the technique learned from the NASA FBCE experiments to the electric vehicle charging process.

Using this new technology, dielectric — non-electrically conducting — liquid coolant is pumped through the charging cable, where it captures the heat generated by the current-carrying conductor.

Subcooled flow boiling allows the team to deliver 4.6 times the current of the fastest available electric vehicle chargers on the market today by removing up to 24.22kWs of heat, the researchers said.

The charging cable can provide 2,400A, which is far beyond the 1,400A required to reduce time required to charge an electric car to five minutes, they said.

“Application of this new technology resulted in unprecedented reduction of the time required to charge a vehicle and may remove one of the key barriers to worldwide adoption of electric vehicles,” the researchers added.

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Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Has “Almost All” Ingredients for Life to Survive: Study

The search for alien life just got more interesting as a team of scientists recently discovered new evidence suggesting that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has oceans that have all the basic requirements and materials needed for life to survive. According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers believe that the ocean of Enceladus is filled with dissolved phosphorus, which is an essential ingredient for life. 

“Enceladus is one of the prime targets in humanity’s search for life in our solar system,” said Southwest Research Institute’s Dr Christopher Glein, the co-author of the paper. 

“What we have learned is that the plume contains almost all the basic requirements of life as we know it. While the bioessential element phosphorus has yet to be identified directly, our team discovered evidence for its availability in the ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust,” he added. 

Running models with data on the ocean-seafloor system on Enceladus, the research team predicted that there should be as much or more phosphorus than in seawater on Earth. “What this means for astrobiology is that we can be more confident than before that the ocean of Enceladus is habitable,” Mr Glein added.  

The researchers noted that it was previously Enceladus might not have adequate levels of phosphorus to support life. However, with their new study, Mr Glein suggested that a new probe be sent to Enceladus in a bid to investigate the habitable ocean. 

“We need to get back to Enceladus to see if a habitable ocean is actually inhabited,” he said as per the study. 

Meanwhile, as per The Independent, Saturn is not the only planet that might have life in its vicinity. The presence of ammonia on Venus has also led some researchers to suggest that the planet could have alien life in its sulfuric atmosphere. They have said that while the planet itself is too hot to have life, there could be microscopic organisms in the clouds, producing ammonia to neutralise the acidity in the same way that animals on Earth do. 

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Can We Really Deflect an Asteroid by Crashing Into It? Nobody Knows, but We Are Excited to Try

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft is designed to be a one hit wonder. It will end its days by crashing into an asteroid at 24,000 kilometres per hour on September 26. Launched from Earth in November 2021, DART is about the size of a bus and was created to test and prove our ability to defend Earth from a dangerous asteroid.

Landing a direct hit on a target from 11 million kilometres away isn’t easy. But while this sounds far, the asteroid was actually selected by NASA because it is relatively close to Earth. This will give engineers the opportunity to test the spacecraft’s ability to operate itself in the final stages before the impact, as it crashes autonomously.

The target asteroid is called Dimorphos, a body 163 metres in diameter that’s orbiting a 780 metre-wide asteroid called Didymos. This “binary asteroid system” was chosen because Dimorphos is in orbit around Didymos, which makes it easier to measure the result of the impact due to the resulting change in its orbit. However, the Dimorphos system does not currently pose any risk to the Earth.

Regardless, NASA is attempting nothing less than a full scale planetary defence experiment to change an asteroid’s path. The technique being used is called “kinetic impact”, which alters the orbit of the asteroid by crashing into it. That’s essentially what is known as a safety shot in snooker, but played on a planetary level between the spacecraft (as the cue ball) and the asteroid.

A tiny deflection could be sufficient to prove that this technique can actually change the path of an asteroid on a collision path with the Earth.

But the DART spacecraft is going to be completely blown apart by the collision because it will have an impact equivalent to about three tonnes of TNT. In comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was equal to 15,000 tonnes of TNT.

So, with this level destruction and the distance involved, how will we be able to see the crash? Luckily, the DART spacecraft is not travelling alone on its quest, it is carrying LICIACube, a shoebox-size mini spacecraft, known as a cubesat, developed by the Italian Space Agency and aerospace engineering company Argotec. This little companion has recently separated from the DART spacecraft and is now travelling on its own to witness the impact at a safe distance of 55km.

Never before has a cubesat operated around asteroids so this provides new potential ways of exploring space in the future. The impact will also be observed from Earth using telescopes. Combined, these methods will enable scientists to confirm whether the operation has been successful.

It might, however, take weeks for LICIACube to send all images back to Earth. This period will be utterly nerve wracking – waiting for good news from a spacecraft is always an emotional time for an engineer.

What happens next? An investigation team will look at the aftermath of the crash. These scientists will aim to measure the changes in Dimorphos’ motion around Didymos by observing its orbital period. This is the time during which Dimorphos passes in front and behind Didymos, which will happen every 12 hours.

Ground telescopes will aim to capture images of the Dimorphos’ eclipse as this happens. To cause a significant enough deflection, DART must create at least a 73-second orbital period change after impact – visible as changes in the frequencies of the eclipses.

These measurements will ultimately determine how effective “kinetic impact” technology is in deflecting a potentially hazardous asteroid – we simply don’t know yet.

This is because we actually know very little of the asteroids’ composition. The great uncertainty around how strong Dimorphosis is has made designing a bullet spacecraft a truly enormous engineering challenge. Based on ground observation, the Didymos system is suspected to be a rubble-pile made up of lots of different rocks, but its internal structure is unknown.

There are also great uncertainties about the outcome of the impact. Material ejected afterwards will contribute to the effects of the crash, providing an additional force. We don’t know whether a crater will be formed by the impact or if the asteroid itself will suffer major deformation, meaning we can’t be sure how much force the collision will unleash.

Future missions Our exploration of the asteroid system does not end with DART. The European Space Agency is set to launch the Hera mission in 2024, arriving at Didymos in early 2027 to take a close look at the remaining impact effects.

By observing the deformations caused by the DART impact on Dimorphos, the Hera spacecraft will gain a better understanding of its composition and formation. Knowledge of the internal properties of objects such as Didymos and Dimorphos will also help us better understand the danger they might pose to Earth in the event of an impact.

Ultimately, the lessons from this mission will help verify the mechanics of a high-velocity impact. While laboratory experiments and computer models can already help validate scientists’ impact predictions, full-scale experiments in space such as DART are the closest we will get to the whole picture. Finding out as much as we can about asteroids will help us understand what force we need to hit them with to deflect them.

The DART mission has led to worldwide cooperation among scientists hoping to address the global issue of planetary defence and, together with my colleagues on the DART investigation team, we aim to analyse the impact effects. My own focus will be on studying the motion of the material that is ejected from the impact.

The spacecraft impact is scheduled for September 26 at 19:14 Eastern Daylight Time (00:14 British Summer Time on September 27). You can follow the impact on NASA TV.

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Astronomers Spot Hot Gas Bubble Spinning Clockwise Around Milky Way Black Hole

Astronomers said Thursday they have spotted a hot bubble of gas spinning clockwise around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy at “mind blowing” speeds.

The detection of the bubble, which only survived for a few hours, is hoped to provide insight into how these invisible, insatiable, galactic monsters work.

The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* lurks in the middle of the Milky Way some 27,000 light years from Earth, and its immense pull gives our home galaxy its characteristic swirl.

The first-ever image of Sagittarius A* was revealed in May by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which links radio dishes around the world aiming to detect light as it disappears into the maw of black holes.

One of those dishes, the ALMA radio telescope in Chile’s Andes mountains, picked up something “really puzzling” in the Sagittarius A* data, said Maciek Wielgus, an astrophysicist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

Just minutes before ALMA’s radio data collection began, the Chandra Space Telescope observed a “huge spike” in X-rays, Wielgus told AFP.

This burst of energy, thought to be similar to solar flares on the Sun, sent a hot bubble of gas swirling around the black hole, according to a new study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The gas bubble, also known as a hot spot, had an orbit similar to Mercury‘s trip around the Sun, the study’s lead author Wielgus said.

But while it takes Mercury 88 days to make that trip, the bubble did it in just 70 minutes. That means it travelled at around 30 percent of the speed of light.

“So it’s an absolutely, ridiculously fast-spinning bubble,” Wielgus said, calling it “mind blowing”.

A MAD theory

The scientists were able to track the bubble through their data for around one and half hours – it was unlikely to have survived more than a couple of orbits before being destroyed.

Wielgus said the observation supported a theory known as MAD. “MAD like crazy, but also MAD like magnetically arrested discs,” he said.

The phenomenon is thought to happen when there is such a strong magnetic field at the mouth of a black hole that it stops material from being sucked inside.

But the matter keeps piling up, building up to a “flux eruption”, Wielgus said, which snaps the magnetic fields and causes a burst of energy.

By learning how these magnetic fields work, scientists hope to build a model of the forces that control black holes, which remain shrouded in mystery.

Magnetic fields could also help indicate how fast black holes spin – which could be particularly interesting for Sagittarius A*.

While Sagittarius A* is four million times the mass of our Sun, it only shines with the power of about 100 suns, “which is extremely unimpressive for a supermassive black hole, Wielgus said.

“It’s the weakest supermassive black hole that we’ve seen in the universe – we’ve only seen it because it is very close to us.”

But it is probably a good thing that our galaxy has a “starving black hole” at its centre, Wielgus said.

“Living next to a quasar,” which can shine with the power of billions of suns, “would be a terrible thing,” he added.

Buying an affordable 5G smartphone today usually means you will end up paying a “5G tax”. What does that mean for those looking to get access to 5G networks as soon as they launch? Find out on this week’s episode. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

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