James Webb Deep Field // Betelgeuse's Doing It Again // Starliner Fail

Beetlejuice has gotten really bright an update on jwst's Deep Field and more problems with the Boeing Starliner all this and more in this week's space bites remember a couple of years ago when betlejuice started to fade unexpectedly and astronomers and everyone was really excited like is this it is this the moment is this the time when we're gonna see Betelgeuse explode as a supernova and like make no mistake this star is almost ready to die it will explode and when it does it will be one of the brightest supernovae that we have seen in modern history it will shine so brightly you'll be able to see it during the day it'll cast Shadows at night it'll be there for months on end as it slowly Fades away and it'll become a pulsar and then a neutron star and it will just be this fixture it'd be really strange like you will see Orion without one of its Stars one of its shoulder starts it'll be a very bizarre way that the sky has changed but like when is this gonna happen and astronomers haven't been able to give us any confirmed timeline except within a million years or so like maybe a hundred thousand years that's that's what the end of life means astronomically speaking for a start but Betelgeuse has done something really strange in the last couple of months which is that it has brightened up so right now it's about 50 brighter than it normally gets now Betelgeuse is a variable star this is not that strange to see the star getting brighter and getting dimmer and when it got dim it really looks like the results were from the dust accumulation in the area around it blocking it from our view but for it to get brighter unusually outside of its normal brightness cycle is pretty weird and something's got to be going on so maybe there's some kind of massive Flair on the surface so a new paper just came out trying to predict what stage of the life cycle Betelgeuse is in that'll tell us how much longer it's going to take before it explodes and according to this new paper Betelgeuse is nearing the end of the carbon burning Cyclone so when you think about the core of stars you've got hydrogen being turned into helium and then it runs out of hydrogen and this starts to burn the helium into carbon then it runs out of carbon and then it starts to create oxygen and then neon and then silicon and then iron and then you get a supernova and each one of these steps happens faster and faster and faster so if Betelgeuse really is at the end of the carbon burning portion of its life then according to the researchers it only has tens of years left before it explodes as a supernova so this is speculative and it could be hundreds of years not tens of years and it could be years and they could be wrong and it could still be hundreds of thousands of years so here's hoping explodes within our lifetimes I really want to see this this is just wishful thinking I don't you know like this is what I want not what I think is going to happen updates on Webb's Deep Field so people always ask me when jwst is going to do its version of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field where Hubble was pointed at a seemingly empty spot in the sky it just stared and stared and stared and over the time just tens of thousands of galaxies were found in this area many of which were seen just a few billion years after the big bang so jwst has its own version of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and it's called Jades the jwst advanced deep extragalactic survey and they've given jwst 32 days of observation on one part of the sky which partially overlaps the same region that was seen by Hubble as the survey continues more and more research papers are being developed and published because this data is available to astronomers and there are too many to count like if you look in archive just in the last week there are so many papers that reference Jades so I'm just going to pull a couple of interesting stories that came out this week so one is that astronomers were able to see regions of star formation around almost every single Galaxy that they looked at in the survey and so it just means that when you're looking at these galaxies that are just a few hundred million less than a billion years after the big bang they are all a wash in Star formation but another really interesting paper is that in some of these new galaxies in the outskirts of the galaxies you're seeing the results of primordial star formations when you think about the first stars in the universe the population three stars they would have had to have formed only from this primordial hydrogen and helium left over from The Big Bang later generations of stars like our sun are made from the result of stars that have lived and died and blown up a supernova and collided to kill Anova and you get all these heavier elements but those first Stars they had nothing to work with but hydrogen and helium and the problem that in seeing them is that they were also just surrounded by all of the gas from the primordial Universe each star would have started to blow out this Cocoon of gas around it sort of clearing the space with this radiation and then as the various Stars regions met with each other you got larger and larger clearing of space until we got the universe that we see today but those big stars would have just died exploded gone long time ago but according to the Jade survey you've got these galaxies that are the outside edges of these first galaxies where you've got the tail end of this region of star formation they've only got this primordial hydrogen helium and they're seeing the results of the star formation in these regions in the outskirts and so you know it's not exactly seeing the first Stars forming in the universe but it's like it's the kinds of stars that you would see forming in the early Universe which is like almost there so I think we're getting really close to getting some definitive evidence on the first stars in the universe in addition jwstee saw organic molecules at some of the greatest distances that astronomers have ever seen now seeing organic molecules the building blocks of life the astronomers have seen this throughout the solar system out in space and start forming nebula everywhere we look we see what are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and you get these when you burn wood and you've got this sort of material that's left over it's the kind of Gunk that you would pull out of your chimney there are a lot of amino acids and other basic chemicals in that material that life is essentially derived from now astronomers are seeing these organic molecules farther and farther in space but now we're seeing them further back in time and so in a recent study astronomers saw some of these just a few billion years after the big bang the farthest these organic molecules has ever been seen now it's a pretty tricky observation because the signal was very faint so they used gravitational lensing where they had this foreground Galaxy cluster that was magnifying this more distant fainter Galaxy and they were able to magnify it enough that they were able to see the signal of the organic molecules in this galaxy and confirm that yes indeed there were organic molecules as soon as they could form in the universe which of course makes it really weird like like where is everybody if the building blocks for life are everywhere Across the Universe and we're there just a few billion years after the big bang where is everybody after every episode of space bites we do a vote where you get to tell us which one of the stories you thought was the best and last week's winner was a landslide everyone really loved this image from jwstee of the plumes around Enceladus so once this episode of space bites is complete we'll put up the vote and go ahead and tell us which one of the stories this week you thought was the best and if you want to make sure that you see it subscribe to the channel and then it will show up in your feed and then you can vote and tell us what you thought was best why Jupiter's Stripes change color if you've ever looked at Jupiter in a small telescope you are able to see the atmospheric bands across the planet and these are storms that are moving around the planet and the amazing thing is that when you look at these bands across the planet they're going in opposite directions so whatever Direction one of the Bands is going in the next band down is going in the opposite direction around the planet and over long periods of time astronomers have found that these bands change in their color and they were wondering why and when you make observations with an infrared telescope you can see not only are the colors changing but actually the temperatures of these regions are changing so once again why so we know that Jupiter has a planetary magnetosphere like the Earth does like the sun does and this magnetosphere changes over time and when they map out the magnetic field around Jupiter astronomers have found this region that they call the great blue spot we know about the Great Red Spot which is this giant cyclonic storm that is permanently there on the surface of Jupiter but it also has this spot where the magnetic field lines are coming out of Jupiter and this region sort of shifts and moves around and they found that as the position of this magnetic field changes on Jupiter you get these interactions with the various planetary bands now they're not exactly sure what the mechanism is but somehow the magnetism from Jupiter is interacting and raising the temperature of these planetary bands that have been causing them to change their colors so we're getting closer to an answer for why this is happening bad news for Boeing for the longest time NASA was completely reliant on the Russian space agency to get astronauts to the International Space Station and that's not a great idea like you want to have your own way to get your astronauts to and from the space station and so NASA contracted two companies to provide commercial launch services for their astronauts SpaceX and Boeing now with SpaceX you've got the crew dragon and at this point now we've seen crew dragon has done 10 successful launches including three private commercial launches but also seven launches with NASA but the other offering is the Boeing cst-100 Starliner and it has been plagued with a bunch of problems NASA and Boeing thought that they had worked out all of the issues and they were getting ready to launch in the end of July but then NASA did a very detailed overview to see how things were going and they found a few remaining issues so they found problems with the electrical lines and the parachute these are both show stopping problems that need to be fixed before humans can climb on board this spacecraft and fly to the International Space Station and so now according to the program manager they're not even sure they're going to be able to launch the Starliner before the end of 2023 which obviously sucks for bullying but it sucks for just space flight in general I mean I keep making this point over and over again that having redundancy having competition is a good thing you want multiple ways for astronauts to get from Earth to the International Space Station and so if there's any kind of problem then the other provider can pick up a slack and continue carrying astronauts into space the more competitors the more options the better so hopefully Boeing and NASA will work through these issues get them solved and the first astronauts will fly to the International Space Station on a Boeing Starliner in early 2023 I'm absolutely fascinated by what are the new cool out-of-the-box ideas for space exploration how can we use new techniques new technologies to solve existing problems in space flight go faster survive longer be able to acquire your resources in situ I'm obsessed and there is of course NASA's Innovative advanced concepts Group which releases awards every year to people who provide ideas that are out of the box the kinds of stuff that is Way Beyond the safe stuff that NASA tends to invest in and I love these ideas and I have been interviewing as many of the awardees as I can get my hands on and we just wrapped up one whole season of NASA natak award interviews so we've got a playlist that you can go through all of them if you want and the funny thing is is that I just got the email from Nyack on the call for proposals for the next round so just when we finished up this round of interviews we're about to find out what the next group of interviews are going to be and we'll start the whole process over again so hopefully I'll be able to keep doing the season after season so enjoy these interviews satellite beams power to Earth and vice versa one idea that I've been keeping my eye on is space Power and the traditional idea for this right is that you take a satellite you fly into space you collect power from the Sun you then beam this power to Earth with something like microwaves and boom you've got a Non-Stop source of power but the reality is that there's a lot of challenges you've got inefficiencies at every step of the game and honestly like solar power is just falling here on Earth and we could take advantage of it all the time like plants are doing it around your house right now but people are still wondering can this be successful are you able to generate power in space and transmit it down to earth and the answer appears to be yes so a new cubesat called the space solar power demonstrator or sspd was launched a few months ago and researchers confirmed that they were able to both send a power signal from Earth to space and light up an LED on the satellite and also be able to collect Power in space with the satellite and beam that power back down to earth now I don't know the amount and I'm assuming the amount is incredibly low but the fact that it was done from Earth to space from space to Earth demonstrates that it is theoretically possible and look I'll admit I'm pretty skeptical that we will ever find a use for space-based solar power down here on Earth because of all the inefficiencies involved that solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper every year but there is a lot of value in beaming power from space to space so imagine you've got a spacecraft that doesn't have solar panels on board and instead you just beam power at it from down here on Earth or you you've got a spacecraft that is in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon and you need to get power to it and you have a base station that is beaming power so there's a lot of other applications and in fact I did a really interesting interview with Dr Steven Sweeney where we went through what are some of the surprisingly useful ways that you could be in power in space to space or from Earth to space or from space to Earth so there are a lot of good ideas don't write it off completely check out the interview time for some more cool videos this is sort of turned into a new way for us to wrap up each episode of space bytes and so this week we've got a couple of cool videos for you the first is to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the European space agency's Mars Express spacecraft 20 years this spacecraft has been taking pictures of Mars and sending them home and it's actually imaged almost all of Mars at a ridiculously good resolution and researchers have been studying it like we feature these images all the time here on Space bytes and on Universe today and we got this full planetary Mosaic from the European Space Agency now this was not done at their highest resolution they did this between resolutions of around 4 000 and 10 000 kilometers of altitude and so each pixel is very large but you get a really beautiful picture of Mars when they Stitch it all together and the other part that's really cool about this image is that the different kinds of surfaces are seen in different colors and so you've got different regions of the Martian Highlands and the lowlands and regions which are ancient lava flows and other kinds of minerals on the surface of Mars so definitely check out this image and also to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mars Express they did a lot live stream of Mars where they turned Mars Express on the planet Mars and then they just sent the images as quickly as the spacecraft could gather them and then they just released them live and it was turned out to be about one every 50 seconds and they did this for about an hour the problem is that about the halfway point they lost data because it was raining in Spain where they're receiving the data and like Spain has had a drought and so they really needed this rain but it was also hard on the radio telescope and so they lost a bunch of the data during that point but Isa released an animation showing the results of the entire live stream and so you can see it here you could see the jump where they lose the data in the middle and of course it's not live because it takes several minutes thanks to the speed of light for the signals to get from Mars to Earth but still live stream of Mars but like on that like nothing is live you know it takes nanoseconds even for light to go from your computer screen to your eyeballs so is that live nothing's life everything's delayed and finally we've got a cool image of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster returned to Earth at the end of the ax2 launch and what's really amazing about this video is just how well the camera is locked in on the booster as it's returning to earth like the position is perfect the focus is perfect and you watch as it lands next to the launch facility at Cape Canaveral so what a cool video to see again Rockets they take off and then they land again what a time to be alive alright so those were all the news stories that we had today now we've got more information on each one of them references you can check out in the show notes down below and just follow the rabbit hole as long as you want 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 universeto.com podcast or search for universetoday on Apple podcast 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 and modso George Jeremy Mattern Jordan young Tim Whalen Dave veribioff Andrew Gross and Josh Schultz who support us at the master of the universe level all your support means the universe to us all right that was all the news that we had today we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 180,068

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: 5Qxo3MhhInA

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023