HUGE Discovery From Lucy // Most Powerful Ion Engine // Slime Mold Universe

Lucy made an incredible Discovery one of the strangest exoplanetary systems ever seen understanding the universe with slime mold and the most powerful ion engine passes the test all this and more in this week's space bites all right last week we gave you like one last minute picture that had been taken by NASA's Lucy Mission as it made its flyby of dinkes the asteroid and the asteroid belt and we saw that it had discovered a moon but it wasn't the whole picture more data came back from Lucy and astronomers were able to continue to watch this little moonlet as it was orbiting around the larger asteroid and they realized that this Moon isn't just like one rock orbiting the larger Rock but actually there's two asteroids side by side sort of gently touching this is a common thing in the solar system it's known as a contact binary so you can imagine you've got two asteroids coming towards each other and at high velocity and they smash into each other and you get all this debris and that's how you get some of these like debris Rubble piles like benu or ryugu but you can also get a situation where the two asteroids come together so calmly so slowly that they just Bonk into each other and they remain there and this is like the best picture we've ever had of a contact binary asteroid and the first time a contact binary has ever been found orbiting around another asteroid so this is big and I'm going to talk a little bit more about like finding something like this and what this means for asteroid research at the end of the show so stay tuned for that one of the strangest planetary systems we've ever seen all right so think about the solar system you've got the Sun and then you've got a bunch of planets terrestrial planets and gas giants orbiting around it and then ice giants and like a collection of Kyper built objects and other stuff in the solar system that's what we consider to be normal but it isn't necessarily what you know what's normal is Red Door stars and so larger stars like a sun are actually a little more unusual but most of the larger brighter stars are in multiple star systems binary star systems trary star systems all the way up to like seven you can get various scenarios where planets are interacting with these multiple star systems You' got a situation where the two stars are far apart and the planets are orbiting each one of the stars and you can have a situation where the stars are very close together and the planets are orbiting around both of the stars together this is called a circumbinary system and this is still fairly normal you know you've heard just people say we found an example of a Tatooine and this is sort of what you're looking at now let's go back to orbits of planets around their stars in the solar system right you've got the plane of the ecliptic where all of the planets are orbiting around roughly the equator of the Sun but a few examples have been found where planets are on Polar orbits around the star so the star is rotating and the planets are going above and below the star which is pretty weird so this new this is a big long setup but this new system that was discovered is a circumbinary planetary disc in a polar orbit in other words you've got these two stars that are orbiting around each other and then there is a planetary disc that is on a binary orbit around these two stars and we've never seen anything like this and like how did this happen how do you get a Planet forming disc that is in a polar orbit around binary Stars I don't know it's weird more information is needed carbon dioxide seen in a centaur for the first time thanks to James Webb we've been finding plenty of carbon dioxide across the solar system and Across the Universe it's been seen in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets it found carbon dioxide on the surface of ganim we reported on this last week and now astronomers report that they found carbon dioxide on on the surface of a centaur now centaurs are a class of objects they're kind of like comets kind of like asteroids and they orbit between Jupiter and Neptune and of course that includes Saturn and and Uranus so they're in that range and so they sometimes behave a bit like comets where they can produce like a coma and they can produce a tail and then other times they're very much more like asteroids just like a chunk of rock just hanging out there astronomers looked at the Centaur 39p otma and they were able to detect the presence of carbon dioxide on the surface of the Centaur and this is exciting because you know one of the big mysteries about the solar system is like where did all of the water and all of the organic molecules that we have here on Earth where did they come from a lot of that stuff should have been blasted out by the sun early on in its history and the inner solar system should have been parched and yet you're finding obviously water in these comets and centaurs and then you're finding the elements that lead into these organic molecules like carbon and oxygen and so it could be that centaurs comets containing some of these elements needed for life were able to deliver this material into the inner solar system after the planets formed and that stopped the Sun from being able to Blast Away these chemicals early on in the solar system it's exciting to just understand the composition of centaurs throughout the solar system and this will lead into what I'm going to talk about later on in the show as well so just hang on for that slime mold in the universe all right this is going to sound like a very strange question but what can slime mold teach us about the universe now if you've never heard of slime mold like it's all around you it's in the forest might even be in your fridge and it contains a bunch of different organisms working together and what it does is it sends out tendrils into its environment searching for sources of nutrition and when it finds those sources it then thickens the tendril to sort of feed material back to the main organism and it is the absolute master of an algorithm called exploration versus exploitation which is like how much time should you spend how much energy should you spend exploring your environment versus extracting the resources from the environment how much time should you spend trying new video games versus playing the video games that you know you love and scientists have used slime molds to do some really amazing things like it can navigate through mazes it can remember where food sources were it can replicate the subway map of Tokyo purely through its ability to explore and be efficient and it doesn't have a brain it just like can do this and so astronomers took this tendency of slime molds and wondered what that would have as an impact on the large scale structure of the universe and so they took one of the largest simulations ever made and then they took a slime mold simulator and ran that on the universe to identify the tendrils of gas and dust that would be drawn into Galaxy clusters by gravity and they were able to then get a much better sense of how the density of the universe should be around these Galaxy clusters based on how slime mold would behave if it was in the same environment slime mold what can't it do every week we do a vote on a channel where you tell us what you thought was the most interesting story this week and the winner just barely was the discovery of seven planets orbiting around a sunlike star so thank you everybody who voted now now you can go into the community tab on our YouTube channel or if you're just like scrolling on your phone the vote should probably show up but the best chance is subscribe to our Channel click on the notifications and then you should have a higher chance of seeing that when you're on your phone or in your computer could Gaia detect gravitational waves all right this story is going to be absolutely mashed with topics that I love and this is why we picked it so it's got Gaia it's got the ver Rubin Observatory it's got gravitational waves it's got the puls or timing array there's so much going on here as you probably recall astronomers recently announced the background gravitational wave signal of the universe that's coming from merging super massive black holes this is something that they can't detect with gravitational wave experiments like ligo and Virgo but they were able to find this by watching how pulsars change over long periods of time kind of like like buoys floating on an ocean I forget does the way I say buoy do people think that's hilarious man I don't even know what my accent is anymore so a new paper came out that said that Gaia could do a similar technique by analyzing the positions of asteroids in the solar system of course Gaia is this incredibly accurate astrometry satellite that knows the position and movements of various objects it's doing that with stars but it's also finding asteroids and maybe if it does really precise measurements of asteroids moving in the solar system it could detect the presence of these gravitational waves and this would be like a second method of knowing that these gravitational waves are present in the universe and ver ruin when it comes online next year will find tons and tons more of these asterids that then they can task Gaia to analyze their positions and we could get to a point where we're able to pin down more information about the gravitational wave background of the universe thanks to Gaia ver Rubin pulser timing array all the things the most powerful ion engine passes the test ion engines are a really established technology at this point there are ion engines on board several NASA spacecraft all of the starlings are using ion engines and this is the technology that NASA has chosen for station keeping for the lunar Gateway but it's a very big spacecraft space space station and so it's going to need a very powerful Thruster to keep it in place So the plan is to equip the lunar Gateway with four 12.5 kilowatt ion engines so it'll be using a total of 40 to 50 Kow of power and it'll be taking that electricity and it'll be ionizing xenon gas and Blasting those particles out of the spacecraft and like that sounds very powerful and yet it will only be producing about 1.77 Newtons of thrust and just for comparison that is about the same amount of force as you pressing keys on your keyboard and yet this thing will fire continuously and so it'll be able to build up large amounts of thrust over time and keep the space station in exactly the orbit that NASA wants it to be at so as part of this process NASA and its supplier AET rocket tested one of the four thrusters so this is only a 12.5 kilowatt Thruster and according to NASA it met all of their criteria for this test was able to run as long as they wanted produce the right amount of thrust and use the right amount of electricity and so this showed that this Thruster is going to be able to fulfill the job for the lunar Gateway and I like I love this idea that the lunar Gateway is going to have this giant array of ion engines on board like it's it's not Tie fighters yet but we're getting there now when you watch space bites every week we only talk about a handful of stories that are we think are really interesting but at Universe today we cover dozens of stories upwards of 40 stories every week and I will gather all of these stories up and I put them into a weekly email newsletter I write the whole thing myself every word and then we send this out every Friday and it's a giant magazine you're going to need several hours to go through the whole thing and a lot of people tell me they like they get the newsletter on Saturday morning and then they spend their morning coffee and breakfast just going through the newsletter and just keeping themselves up to date on all of the interesting things that are happening in space and astronomy so go to universetom newsletter to sign up ukids first images now we got the first light images from uclid a couple of months ago and they were you know they were cool black and white images showing that yes the telescope actually is out in space and then we learned that the European space agency was having problems with the tracking on the uclid spacecraft and there's this hilarious kind of terrifying image that shows the star Trails where uclid wasn't able to maintain its tracking for its various stillar targets Engineers solved that problem and this week we got the first color pictures from uid and it's just like a collection of really cool pictures we got the Perseus cluster of galaxies spiral galaxy IC 348 the irregular galaxy NGC 6822 globular cluster NGC 63 97 and the famous Horsehead nebula and these are great pictures but this isn't ucl's job uclid has two instruments on board one is a visible camera system that's going to allow it to measure the size and shape of various galaxies Across the Universe and then an infrared instrument that will help astronomers do spectroscopy to understand the chemical composition of those galaxies and then from that astronomers are going to be able to build a three-dimensional map of the universe charting the amount of dark matter and dark energy that was in the universe at various epochs of time it's a very powerful instrument and when you match it with all of the other instruments that are coming online we should have a much better understanding of the nature of Dark Matter dark energy in the coming decade finally check out this really cool map that was produced by NASA's surface water and ocean topography Mission this satellite launched fairly recently and it's designed to measure the height of the water across the entire planet and so this First Data release was made with a little less than a month of data with the satellite just analyzing the surface height of every ocean on earth and so you've got these areas that are blue which means that they're a bit lower than the planetary average by about 25 cm and you have the areas that are red which means that those areas are higher by up to 25 cm and then everything in between and you can just look at this animation of the entire planet and see all these places where surface levels are a little lower a little higher Rivers putting water out into the ocean you've got places where currents are pushing water around wind waves it's a really interesting way to look at the planet and this is just the beginning of this Mission they're going to gather a lot more information over time and eventually we'll get this really good sense of how water moves around the planet and also keep track of how water levels are increasing over time thanks to global warming I'm going to talk about the need for studying asteroids across the solar system but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to David Richards Mark Anis Joel yansy Antonio lilara Dustin cable Vlad shiin moo George David guilet andream Gross Jeremy mat Josh Schultz and Jordan Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon when you look at this picture of asteroid dinkin and its Conta binary moon like this is different this isn't something that we've seen and when you think about say asteroid ryugu or asteroid benu or iros or all of the asteroids that we have visited closely so far each one is weird and different and like I'm really excited by Lucy because it's going to eventually turn up like 11 objects the asteroid that we've already seen as well as a bunch of objects in Jupiter's Trojan belt and these Trojans are probably very different me they were selected because they are different from each other but when you sort of map out the extent of what's here in the solar system there are tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of interesting asteroids comets centaurs Kyper built objects or Cloud objects Interstellar objects they are all different and each one has new lessons to teach us both about how asteroids move and interact as well as how they might have delivered material into the inner soul solar system how they shift around over the long scales of the solar system and especially the interstellar objects that come in from other solar systems like there's so much to learn and it's overwhelming and I think that we're going to see proposals for New Missions that will do things that are quite similar to what Lucy is doing where you are trying to grab information on a whole bunch of different objects and deliver this into the hands of asteroid researchers they would love to have analysis of every single object that they can get their hands on to compare and contrast with each other so Lucy is a good first step uh let's see more missions that are going to be visiting many more asteroids in the solar system all right we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 93,438

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, superconductor, Euclid, esa, James Webb, just, room temperature, lk99, LK-99

Id: c6z1octUAak

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023