Huge Discoveries by James Webb // Fire In Space // Quantum Squeezing

lots of new discoveries from jwst why hakuto R crashed and Kepler's last exoplanets all this and more in this week's space bites I've heard that people would like to hear some more information from jwst well here you go we've got a ton of new interesting discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope so first up we got some amazing images of the plumes around Enceladus and like normally jwst is spending its time looking out to the very edges of the observable universe but it can still look here inside the solar system and so they directed its gaze at Saturn's moon Enceladus and of course famously this moon has plumes of water ice that are blasting out into space it's one of the most interesting world in the solar system to explore because wherever you find water on Earth you find life so we know there's liquid water on Enceladus we can see it being sprayed out into space and so it's the perfect place to go and look for life jwst was able to observe one of the largest plumes that's ever been seen so when you consider the world itself is 505 kilometers cross but the plume extended about 10 000 kilometers away they estimated that it's throwing out about 300 liters of water a second into space which is enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every couple of hours they did see water but unfortunately they didn't see any other chemical constituents in the plumes and this is important because we know from the flybys that Cassini did it was able to detect dissolved hydrogen gas in the plumes essentially food for bacteria and the Hope was that maybe jvst would also be able to see this hydrogen gas in the plumes as well as maybe other organic molecules that could be more indicative that there's life there so great analysis of the plumes didn't get all of the data that they were hoping for we still are going to need that spacecraft to go and fly through the plumes of Enceladus to give us those answers or to sneak butt crawl around the surface or descend down into one of the plumes to sample the ocean below the other observation is of a fairly famous exoplanet known as wasp 18b and astronomers have known about this planet since 2009 it's in the hot Jupiter class but it orbits around a star that's a little hotter and brighter than our own sun the planet has many times the mass of Jupiter so it is nothing like the Earth nothing even really like Jupiter we don't have any analogs here in our own solar system but the question that astronomers wanted to answer was like what happens to the atmosphere of a world that is this close to its star what they did was they observed how the planet was passing in front of the star and then would pass behind the star and they could measure the temperature of the planet where we were seeing The Far Side the night side of the planet but they could also observe as it was just starting to peek out from the other side of the star and see it was quite hot and bright and they were able determined that yes indeed the planet is tidally locked to the star and it ranges in temperature from the day side to the night Side by about a thousand degrees difference they're able to measure the atmosphere of the planet they found water vapor in the planet now that doesn't make it habitable just because you've got water vapor you know steam is not very habitable but it's still they were able to see the temperature changes and one of the big Mysteries is like when you have this planet that is tidally locked where one side is locked to the star and the other side is an internal Darkness how do the atmospheric systems move this heat around the planet and what they found was not well that they weren't finding the kinds of changes in temperature flows from the day side to the night side like man I'm like having trouble like wrapping my my mind I was like like it's so amazing that we've got these not only just like we understand that this planet exists that we understand that it goes around the star this this closely that it's probably tidally locked no now we measure the atmosphere we can see the day side the night side and we can see how the heat is Flowing around the planet so cool not cool yeah the opposite of cool so hot that's hot yeah now we know why hakuduar crashed all right last week I mentioned that hakuto are crashed and we got some new images of the crash site thanks to NASA's lunar reconnaissance Orbiter and you're able to Blink back and forth between images to see the potential crash site and just like a couple of hours after we released the episode we got an explanation of why it probably crashed and in fact if you want to see another video on this definitely check out Scott Manley's video he goes into great detail and explains what happened but the short version is that originally hakuto was supposed to land on this open plane a very flat landscape and they changed the landing site to go inside a crater and that required writing some new software for it to be able to analyze its surroundings as it got closer and closer to the landing site as it passed the rim of the crater its rangefinder got confused about where it was and so it fought that it had actually landed when it was still about five kilometers altitude above the surface of the Moon it then continued to fire its thrusters thinking that it was still sort of setting down gently on the surface of the Moon and then it ran out of propellant and then it just free falled for the rest of the way and crashed onto the surface but apart from that it was actually a very successful Mission like we got a private company was able to deliver a lunar lander very close to the lunar surface all of the parts worked except for this this last I guess the most important part but hopefully this will set up ispace for future missions to the moon and we could see more and more commercial flights to the Moon delivering supplies instruments experiments I I like their chances for next time and the next company that's going to try to land on the surface of the Moon is going to be astrobotics they're going to be flying on the first test flight of United launch alliances Vulcan rocket so once again we'll go through this whole process of waiting to see if a private lunar lander can sit down safely on the surface of the Moon good luck astrobotics a record number of people in space isn't it amazing to think that there have been human beings in space flying overhead continuously since the launch of the International Space Station over 20 years ago there has never not been people in space but the number of people in space has increased and decreased depending on which missions how many crews whether the swapping over Crews you had more people when there was the Space Shuttle flying and then delivering astronauts to the International Space Station now we have the Chinese space station which has astronauts on board last week we had this perfect moment where you had three crew members on the Chinese space station being swapped out with three other crew members on the Chinese space station you also had seven crew members of expedition 69 on the International Space Station three Russians three Americans and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates and then you had the four members of the Axiom 2 mission which is this private mission on a crew Dragon up to the International Space Station so if you add all that up you get to 17 people in space but there's a bit of a hack uh just before the launch of the replacement astronauts for the Chinese space station you got the launch of unity 25 from Virgin Galactic which had six people on board so 14 plus six you got to 20 people who were in space and then they landed and then you got the launch of the Chinese which brought the number back up to 17. so any way you count it there are a lot of people in space both through these handovers but also just all the time now like if there's at least 10 people in space all the time now Ingenuity went silent but now it's back now we've been raving about the successes of NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter for quite a while now they just completed flight 51 but a few weeks ago things got a little scary we got a recent blog post from the engineer of Ingenuity Travis Brown and he talked about how they lost contact with Ingenuity for about six days so what happened was overnight Ingenuity ran out of power and this happens a lot its solar panels covered in dust it has a hard time keeping itself completely warm during the long Martian night and it runs completely out of power and then it has to reset itself during one of these resets its clock became unsynced with the perseverance Rover clock and so they weren't trying to communicate with each other at the same time this has happened before and and so normally you just wait until they're able to restore communication but there was a bit of an extra problem which was that the landscape was not good for radio communication between Ingenuity and perseverance so there was some landforms in the way the antenna that perseverance uses to communicate with Ingenuity was on the wrong side of the Rover it was like Wi-Fi in your house not communicating correctly so they're able to work through all these problems over the course of several days and finally after six days of blackout Communications with Ingenuity they were able to finally restore communication and learned a bunch of valuable life lessons about where you park your Rover and your helicopter when you know you're going to run out of power on one of these Martian nights and I I feel saying this but like prepare yourself emotionally that that eventually there will be the the final report from Ingenuity like it's supposed to only fly for five times now we're more than 50. this can't last forever make your peace Kepler's last planets NASA's Kepler space telescope was the most productive Planet hunting Mission that's ever been sent to space it found 2711 confirmed exoplanets and then another 2056 candidates but near the end of its Mission it was running out of fuel and it was becoming more and more erratic it wasn't able to maintain a solid lock on its Target for long enough time for the astronomers to get really good data and so in the final observing Run mission number 19 astronomers were able to get partial data out of the telescope and from that partial data they were able to reconstruct and identify three final exoplanets they had a bunch of amateurs look through the Kepler data and identify even by I the dip where the planet was passing in front of the star now the planets themselves are not that interesting like a bunch of super Earth listen to me oh you know boring exoplanets I know there are no boring exoplanets they're all awesome but still I I didn't even learn them but these will be the final planets that are in Kepler's data now there might be other planets found with more weak signals earlier on in the data but sort of chronologically the last time Kepler was able to take pictures of the sky and discover planets these those if you want to learn more about Tess which is hunting planets right now and hopefully we'll give Kepler a run for its money in the long term you should listen to this interview I did with Dr Nicole colon from NASA after space fights each week we give you a chance to vote on the story that you found the best and the one that was well ahead of all of the other ones was this idea that those impossible galaxies might be even more impossible than previously believed I think we're working on a story that maybe they're not as impossible right now so you know as we flip out back and forth week after week after week but still but that was the one everybody likes so once again right after we released this episode we'll put up the vote you can decide which of the stories you thought was the best and we will tabulate that for next week so make sure you're subscribed to the channel and that way you won't miss these cool votes and see which of the stories did the best a new way to search for habitable planets now I'm sure you're familiar with the habitable zone this is a region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet not that it does exist just that it can exist like before closer into the habitable zone water is boiling beyond the habitable zone water is freezing but in between you can have liquid water on the surface of a planet but Life as We Know It requires water but it also requires carbon and it turns out when you look at the Earth and you think about all of the life that's on the surface of our planet Earth is considered water poor and carbon poor and that's because Earth didn't form with its water in place it would have all boiled away instead the water was delivered later on maybe I'd ask maybe my comets asteroids some way to get the water when you compare that to places like Europa Enceladus these ice worlds out there they're almost entirely water and Earth is carbon pore which means that we also didn't have a lot of this carbon formed locally with Earth maybe we had that delivered later on and so astronomers are starting to wonder is there a carbon Zone that's part of the habitable zone is there a soot Zone you sort of think about like what would be on the inside of your chimney this sort of Gunk this carbon molecules that are inside your chimney and in fact the levels of carbon would have an influence on the formation of life and interact with the amount of water that you could get and in fact you could get a region that is outside the habitable zone for water but if it was a world that had a lot of carbon on it maybe that would increase its habitability farther away maybe all the way out to the frost line of a star system and so astronomers are identifying planets that might be high in carbon there's actually one they know of called 55 cancri e that appears to be one-third carbon so we have this just thin veneer of carbon on the surface of Earth but there could be worlds out there that are largely carbon what would that do for life now if you notice we don't have any ads in the middle of this video we don't have any sponsorship messages in this video at all and we like that I know they can be very long they can be very disruptive and they just decrease the quality of the video itself and so we try to make this as useful and science focused as we can and instead we fund the work that we do through our patrons and this allows us not only to release this material out as publicly as possible we're going to put anything behind pay walls we release everything as a Creative Commons 4.0 license so people can reuse It remix it do whatever they want and that's all funded thanks to our patrons most of the other channels in this space they have to do sponsorships and we could make more money if we did sponsorships but I I just don't want to and it makes a better quality video and I hope you appreciate that as well so if you want to be a part of this amazing Community go to patreon.com universetoday help us stay independent and as ad free as humanly possible ligo is fully operational again have you noticed that we haven't talked a lot of about gravitational wave discoveries recently that's because the world's giant gravitational wave Observatory telescopes are offline they are being upgraded and improved and in fact just last week ligo came back online with a ton of new improvements there's a laundry list of changes and fixes they made in improving the various instruments on board but one of the big changes that they made is called Quantum squeezing and there's like a longer version of this explanation and I'm going to give you the short version but essentially they take advantage of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle like there is a limit to the amount of information you can gather about photons or particles but if you're willing to sacrifice one part of the observations you can greatly increase the sensitivity on the other side of it and that's what they're able to do they call it quantum squeezing but essentially they're saying we don't need this part of the uncertainty which will give us more certainty in this area and that allows them to make much higher resolution scans of the gravitational waves that pass by so these upgrades double the sensitivity of ligo which means that it can sense gravitational wave events in a much wider sphere as well as new kinds of events that have never been seen before like merging white dwarfs together or a white dwarf or neutron star or stars at vastly different masses coming together and just more gravitational wave events overall and so I I wouldn't be surprised if if upcoming episodes of space fights just started to like here's all the jwst stuff and then here's all the Lego stuff every week and then of course we're gonna get two more gravitational wave observatories coming back online as well Virgo got a series of upgrades and then the Japanese kagra Observatory is going to come online as well so you've got three different observatories located around the world working together to observe gravitational waves so we are just really in the era of gravitational wave astronomy now to wrap this up we've got some cool new pictures of space well hot really the first image is fire in space but this isn't regular fire this is iron on fire so there European Space Agency recently tested on a suborbital rocket how Iron particles catch on fire in space now you've probably seen experiments where you can light say steel wool on fire and so metal burns and there's like an optimal way to make metal burn depending on how far away the particles are from each other how the heat from one particle is able to LEAP to the next one and ignite it and keep going and when you're in weightlessness you can sort of have the particles hit the exact right distance and shape to each other to be able to find out what is the optimal way to burn iron and I'm sure you're wondering like why do you want to light iron on fire what's that about well if you light iron on fire you generate a lot of Heat and the byproduct of that is iron oxide it's rust and you can then use hydrogen to restore the iron and then use it for fire again and this whole process generates no carbon dioxide there's no carbon involved in the process at all and so we could see future furnaces power plants that run on iron and not fossil fuels and you still are able to generate the same amount of electricity there's a prototype that they built that fits within a warehousing can produce a megawatt of power purely by burning iron and so we could see this technology find its way into a lot of prototype and new startups that focus on iron fire power plants as opposed to Coal or oil or gas the other image also hot comes from both the Chandra x-ray Observatory and jwst and in this you're seeing the combined light of these two observatories merge together and the two observatories are on the opposite sides of the electromagnetic spectrum on the one hand you've got jwst which is doing infrared cooler objects star-forming regions clouds of gas and dust and then on the other side you've got Chandra which is looking at x-ray radiation coming from Stars the regions around supermassive black holes quasars whatever is at the extreme hot side of the cosmos and so when you blend these two images together you can see the star forming regions the cooler gas and dust but also the Young new stars that are blazing inside of it you can see the centers of galaxies which are surrounded by all this gas and dust but also the hot Quasar at the middle which is blasting out x-ray radiation I love it when they merge the data from different telescopes together to get these kinds of combined images this has been done a lot in the past you can see images coming from Spitzer and Hubble and Chandra all mashed together into one image all right those were all the news stories that we had today of course we're gonna have links in the show notes down below to everything that we talked about so you can just keep researching you can get even more space news in my weekly email newsletter I send it out every Friday to more than 60 000 people I write every word there are no ads and it's absolutely free subscribe at university.com newsletter you can also subscribe to the universe Today podcast there you can find an audio version of all of our news interviews and Q and A's as well as exclusive content subscribe at universetoday.com podcast or search for Universe today on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts a huge thanks to everyone who supports us on patreon and helps us stay independent and keeps ads at a bare minimum thanks to all the interplanetary researchers the interstellar adventurers and the Galaxy wanders and a special thanks to just Paul Davis Vlad shiplin Jay Dennis David Gilton in modso George Jeremy Mattern Jordan young Tim Whelan Dave veriboff Andrew Gross and Josh Schultz who support us at the master of the universe level all your support means the universe to us alright that was all the news for today we'll see you next week big week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 331,657

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, astronomy news, juice, esa, nasa, starship, space starship, starship oft, starship test, starship explosion, spacex explosion, gaia

Id: OEFciqSNmOk

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023