JWST Galaxies Take Another Turn // Ice Giants Collide // Psyche Launch

astronomers see ice giants colliding we Peak into the Osiris Rex sample collector even more evidence that the Big Bang hasn't been overturned and a huge Gaia data release all this and more in this week's space bites imagine what would happen if Neptune and Uranus collided in the solar system just think of the Mayhem well this is what astronomers think they might have seen a couple years ago astronomers had this weird mystery on their hands they saw this star that brightened in the infrared for about a thousand days before it dimmed and then they watched as the star itself dimmed in the visible spectrum for about 500 days before it recovered its brightness and this was a mystery and so the astronomers who made this discovery published all these light curves on to the various Research Forum and other astronomers were looking through and studying the data and a new hypothesis has emerged which is that we are looking at the results of two planets with about 25 times the mass of Earth colliding in a star system and so what they think is happening is you've got these two giant planets that collided with each other and it created this giant dust cloud and then this dust cloud moved around and was bright and then started to slowly dissipate into this kind of smear around the star and then at one point this dust cloud moved in between us and the star and caused the brightness of the star to dim and it's believed that through this Collision you're getting another planet forming and when you look at these kinds of events you think about what the early solar system must have been like that there must have been collisions between planets over and over again until we finally got the structure of the solar system as we see today our first pictures inside the Osiris Rex sample capsule we've all been watching with beta breath as NASA has been retrieving and processing the samples from the Osiris Rex Mission the spacecraft briefly touched down on asteroid benu puffed out gas slurped in a bunch of rock and dust and other volatile minerals and material and then it jumped off away from the asteroid and then came home delivered the sample capsule to Earth and is now proceeding on to its future meeting with asteroid apus and so scientists at Nasa have been carefully unpackaging this sample capsule and they're trying to get a sense of what they've got their hands on and we got a really cool picture this week inside the sample capsule and you can kind of see what they're dealing with there's like this dark very dark coal black kind of Rocky material in there and some of it are in larger chunks but a lot of is just this powder that is everywhere and so NASA thinks they've got about 250 g of asteroid material but they don't know exactly and that's because what they have to do now is dismantle the sample capsule piece by piece and clean it off very carefully and extract all of the material to make sure that they've got every single microgram of asteroid material that arrived what they found is that there is carbon Rich organic material as well as water mixed in with the rocky samples from the asteroid and this is huge because one of the big questions is like how do we get life on Earth you know we needed water and we needed organic material carbon atoms and it looks like an asteroid like benu is filled with that kind of material and you can imagine early on in the solar system asteroids were raining down on Earth and delivering the carbon and the water that we needed to be able to have life on Earth We're still just in the initial stages of this whole thing NASA has a lot of work to even even get to the point where they can start to distribute the samples to researchers so they can start to work on it the other cool thing they're going to do is they're going to hold back about 70% of the samples and put them into a cold storage for future researchers to be able to work with it as more Advanced Techniques and Technology gets developed and we saw this with the Apollo missions so some of the lunar rocks were delivered to researchers so they could answer some of their questions but some of them are still under storage today and every few years they pop out a few more and they're able to use the most advanced new technology that's available with pristine samples and so we could see people working on these samples for decades to come the psyche mission is off to psyche it's very peculiar to me that both the mission and the target are called psyche this this isn't confusing so NASA's psyche mission is a spacecraft designed to go and explore the asteroid psyche and psyche is really fascinating because it is an incredibly dense probably metallic asteroid it's the leftover chunk of core from some planetesimal that crashed into each other the lighter elements were Stripped Away and you're left with this core that is very metal rich and you know at one point there could have been like metal volcanoes on this asteroid so it's one of the most most exciting and interesting places to visit here in the solar system and there is a spacecraft now on its way the spacecraft launched on a falcon heavy rocket and it's got a bit of a long journey ahead before it finally reaches asteroid psyche so first in 2026 it's going to do a flyby of Mars and get a tweak to its trajectory and then it's going to arrive at asteroid psyche in 2029 it has a solar electric ion engine on board which is going to allow it to make very large changes in velocity over a long period of time and so really there's not much more to say I mean we've got about another 6 years to wait for it to finally reach psyche but then we're going to get some really cool pictures I think more evidence against massive galaxies in the early Universe once again remember all of the buzz about a year ago when astronomers said they were finding massive galaxies in the early universe and people were taking this as like an opportunity to overturn the big bang and here we are a few months later and we've got more research being done and a few more arguments against the possibility that jwst has been seeing massive galaxies in the early Universe like galaxies that were too big too early galaxies that would overturn our understanding of the Big Bang so the first piece of research is based on the kinds of galaxies that the astronomers were seeing that were too big too early and so when astronomers are looking at galaxies in the early Universe you want to confirm that you are measuring it at the right distance and the way they do that is they use this technique called spectroscopy where they take the light from a Galaxy they expand it blow it up into this giant rainbow and then they're looking for specific lines in this rainbow that tell you what elements are present in the Galaxy now of course James Webb is an infrared Observatory and so you're seeing these shifted over into the infrared and then you can say okay we know that this galaxy is at this distance astronomers are looking for two kinds of gaps in this spectroscopy one is called the Lyman break and the other one is called the Balmer break and when they find a galaxy with both of them they call them a double break Galaxy and these were the kinds of galaxies that astronomers were looking for but there are lots of other galaxies in this area it's just the Balmer break are a very specific type that they can see that they can then calculate the distance and the brightness of the Galaxy and so another team of astronomers took this same technique and then they looked in a completely different survey from jwst but what they were doing is they were looking at Galaxy clusters where you were getting gravitational lensing of background galaxies and you got a sort of a better representative sample of the kinds of galaxies that are there they found a bunch of these double break galaxies but they also found galaxies that didn't have this double break but were also present in the data and they found that in fact if you're just looking for those double break galaxies they're going to be brighter and they're going to skew the data that you're seeing so it looks like you've got more massive galaxies than you actually do so they found in fact things look kind of what was expected and there's a second paper that came out this week and this is where astronomers were thinking about how galaxies in the early Universe should behave and so they ran these very complex simulations that looked at What stages big galaxies should go through from the beginning of the universe until sort of more modern era and you can imagine like at the very beginning of the universe you've got all of these new galaxies forming and it's just raw gas left over from The Big Bang and so you get this sort of wash of star formation that all happens at once and then the Galaxy uses up a lot of its ready-made gas sort of dials back the star formation and then the reservoirs pull up and then it has another flash of star formation and then it settles back down and so in theory in the early Universe within the first say billion years you should get these pulses of star formation that happen on a regular basis and when you look at a Galaxy it's really hard to know are you looking at a very bright Galaxy that is extremely far away or are you looking at a dimmer Galaxy that is closer and so if you happen to see these galaxies that are going through these pulses it will make them seem brighter than they normally would be and so it could very well be that astronomers thought they were seeing very massive galaxies but actually they're seeing very bright galaxies because they happen to be going through this this blast of star formation and they're about to dial it back down again over the next tens of millions of years so you know like I think as always be patient wait for the science to be done wait for astronomers to make bold claims and then wait for other astronomers to overturn those bold claims and then those astronomers to come back and respond and then they have agreements and arguments and eventually you get the scientific consensus and so we are too early for the scientific consensus but we will get there and it's exciting to be part of it as it's happening every week we do a vote on our Channel where you tell us what you thought was the most interesting news that we presented this week now we sort of internally think about this and we use this to God our choices of stories and how we present them and get a better sense of what you like and this week there was no question that everybody was excited about the discovery of rogue planets in the Orion Nebula so thank you everybody who voted on this I've had a few people ask me like how do you find this and we post this into the community tab on our YouTube channel and so as you're scrolling on your phone or as you're looking at your YouTube homepage there will be little blocks sometimes polls other pieces of text photographs things like that that show up and that's where they are like I know that's not very satisfying you know talk to YouTube about how to make these more available but the best way to make sure that you see these polls is to subscribe to the channel and then you're more likely to see this poll as it pops up after we post the new one and I guess the other way is like just use YouTube all the time all day long just keep scrolling refreshing and just yeah that's not super helpful it even more Gaia data now normally I sneak in a comment about Gaia into pretty much every single story that I can but this week I get to talk about actual Gaia data so I'm going to now we're in between major releases of guia we had the Gaia data release 3 and now we're waiting for the Gaia data release 4 but Gaia threw us a bone this week when they gave us sort of an intermediate data release relas and there's like three big things that they included in this data release one is they released information on 500,000 stars in The Omega centuri cluster now the Omega cluster is the biggest brightest globular cluster in the night sky and I'm in the Northern Hemisphere and so I can't see it but folks in the southern hemisphere can and and I've been to Australia once and looked at it and it's just it's a monster it's stunning it's an amazing thing to think about and up until this point astronomers had only identified about 50,000 stars in the cluster and Gia had not looked at the cluster because there was too much going on and they wanted to save their time and be more efficient now they've done their big data release now they were able to come back and study this cluster in more detail and so they found 500,000 stars and they charted the positions and the locations and the characteristics of these stars and this is really important because because globular clusters are used as these sort of natural Laboratories to test out ideas in astronomy this is where you're going to find intermediate Mass black holes this is how you figure out how old galaxies are or regions of galaxies as you look at the globular clusters and so with really detailed information on this one cluster I know a lot of astronomers out there are going to be really excited the other thing they released was hundreds of new gravitational lenses and then they also released the position positions and velocities of 150,000 asteroids in the solar system again like just because they could so anyway tons of new data from guia and this isn't even the next big data release uclid lost its gu stars but it's found them again a couple of months ago we shared images from the European space agency's uclid mission its first light and the uclid mission it's in L2 with James web and and its job is to help astronomers understand the amount of dark matter and dark energy in the universe it's got two instruments on board one is visible light one is infrared and it's looking at the size and shape of galaxies and also measuring their chemical characteristics they can look at the images and see the shapes of the galaxies as are being distorted by dark matter and then start to map out how much dark matter is around Galaxy clusters and such and then at the same time be able to understand what role dark energy is playing in the overall size and shape and expansion of the universe but after they got first light from uclid they realized there was a problem and that was that it couldn't lock on to its guid stars and so the way ukl works is that every 75 minutes it shifts its view to another location and then stares at this point in the sky and then shifts to a new location but it was losing track of those gu stars and shifting around and there's like an amazing picture that you can see these sort of star trails in the sky as uclid was wandering around and not being able to lock onto its Target this is a huge problem and so engineers at the European Space Agency were able to code up the fix and then they upload it to the spacecraft and now it is locked on target again so disaster reverted so we produce all of this educational content here on the channel as well as on Universe today as well of our podcast and all that and I think it's really important that educational content is as freely available as possible and at the same time you want to be able to show an educational video in the classroom and so I think it should be as free of advertising and sponsorships as humanly possible and that's why mostly we rely on patreon the support of people like you to help us continue being a completely independent space journalism thanks to your support we're able to do as much as we can with the absolute minimum amount of advertising whether people support us on patreon or not so if you want to be able to support the work that we do go to patreon.com univers toay and help contribute if you can and if you can't that's totally fine too another coolant leak on the International Space Station so on Monday astronauts on board the ISS were looking at the window and they noticed that it was snowing and of course you can't have snow in space and so snow is not a good thing to see in space that means that part of your spacecraft is venting they traced the problem down and realized that one of the radiators on the Russian NAA module was leaking coolant into space and this is like I said the third time that coolant has been leaking from the station previously there was coolant on an attached soyou spacecraft and then later on there was coolant leaking from an attached progress spacecraft and each time the Russian space agency said well this is due to some kind of external damage a microm meteorite or a piece of space debris this is three coolant leaks in 10 months so who knows what's going on here uh hopefully they're going to be able to resolve the issue now the astronauts are not in any kind of risk this is actually a backup unit on the naela module but it did force them to cancel a spacewalk and they had to close their Windows because this coolant is actually very corrosive and you really don't want it to to get on various parts of your spacecraft so it's like it needs to be fixed but nobody's at long-term risk from this finally I'd like to share this really cool video of a flight on Mars This is what it would be like to be flying in an airplane above the surface of Mars flying from the vals marinaras which is of course like the deepest valley in the solar system to the tharsus region this is where all of the big volcanoes on Mars are and this is the region that's in between it's called noctis labyrinthus or the Labyrinth of night and what this is is this is a region of volcanic uplift in between those parts of Mars that all of that volcanic activity bulged up this part of the planet and then it settled back down again but in sort of bits and pieces and in cracks and so you've got these plateaus which are the parts that are the highest and then you've got all of the slumped material these valleys in between and The Valleys can be 30 km across cross and 6 km deep so they're very deep the video was made up from a mosaic of images taken by the European space agency's Mars Express Mission which has been at Mars since 2003 and they took those images and then turned them into video they made an exaggeration on the vertical scale and so they're not as deep as they look in the image and also they added some haze just to give it a little bit more of a realistic view but it's sort of a really cool sequence to imagine what it would be like to fly over the surface of Mars now I want to talk about a very famous quote from Arthur C Clark about whether or not we're alone in the universe but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to David Richards Mark Anis Joel yansy Antonio lyara Dustin cable just Paul Davis Vlad chiplin Jay Dennis David guilted Modo George Jeremy M Jordan young Tim whan Dave verbo Andrew Gross and Josh schu support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon one of of my favorite quotes from Arthur C Clark is two possibilities exist either We're alone in the universe or we're not and both are equally terrifying and I wanted to test how people feel about that idea by doing a poll on my channel and so I asked people this very simple question which would you choose if you could know with 100% certainty no alien have ever visited Earth or aliens are regularly visiting Earth and I said I'm not asking what you believe I'm asking what you would prefer to believe and at the heart of this I was really asking people of those two possibilities either We're alone in the universe or we're not both being equally terrifying which would you prefer and the results of this poll were surprising they are perfectly 5050 and at this point we're at over 6,400 votes hundreds of comments and yet it is exactly 50/50 and I you know obviously I could have asked a much more nuanced question like said like the regularly visiting Earth and we know that they're friendly or we know that aliens are in the universe but they're not here but I wanted to get a sense and when you think about the people who believe or disbelieve in the presence of aliens visiting Earth I think it's really important to be able to separate what we believe based on evidence or lack of evidence and what we would prefer to believe and I'm a person who I don't believe that there's aliens in the universe but I really wish there were and I'm sure there are people who are the opposite for me who are certain that aliens are visiting us but they really wish they weren't and so think about this in general when you think about scientific questions and you think about what is the thing that you feel you have evidence for and what is the thing what is the outcome that you would prefer and if the two line up then you might have a cognitive bias and you might want to sort of sit down and really think about what is the evidence that supports the belief that you have anyway it was a lot of fun uh to answer this question and hopefully you enjoy the conversation and more stuff like this I think I'll ask more of these sort of deeper philosophical questions I have a bunch more that I want to ask all right thanks everyone and we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 95,968

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

Id: Zc8W77btzA8

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023