Three Stars Mysteriously Disappeared // So Much JWST News // Io's Global Magma Ocean

three stars mysteriously vanished so much jwst news hundreds of volcanoes on iO and Starship is ready to fly again all this and more in this week's space bites all right look at this picture now look at this one we're just going to switch back and forth do you see something disappear three stars right there in the middle of the image are gone that's weird so what you're looking at is two pictures that were taken 50 minutes apart in 1952 by The palar Observatory and so astronomers were doing this all Sky survey and taking image after image after image and then looking for things that had changed sort of like a rudimentary version of the ver ruin Observatory and they found this grouping of three separate stars that were in one picture and then they were gone and they did F on observations and they couldn't find even like faint versions of the those stars and now astronomers have taken one of the most powerful telescopes in modern times and tried to find those stars and no luck they're gone what happened I mean even it was like a supernova or something like that you would see a bright flash there would be an after image like there would be lots of debris it would be obvious that something catastrophically happened a single star maybe there's like some kind of direct collapse into a black hole that could disappear one star but three that's weird so one possibility is that you're looking at a magnetar that is being gravitationally lensed by a foreground object and the magnetar had a some kind of flash on its surface and this was caught in the gravitational lens you saw three different versions of the same Flash and then it disappeared and then the gravitational lens no longer lined up until the star effectively disappeared and they couldn't find it anymore that seems unlikely another possibility is that they're not stars at all but they're actually some kind kind of object in the solar system like maybe two objects in the ort Cloud collided and you got this debris that brightened up briefly and then disappeared but they would have to be very close to us and they would have to be very close to each other and that's a possibility or maybe they're just not an object at all at the time there were nuclear tests going on in the US relatively close to the palamar observatory and so one possibility is that a piece of nuclear fallout fell onto the photographic plate that the astronomers were using and you got this image which then wasn't in the second image so this isn't the first time that astronomers have seen Stars disappear it happens from time to time in old archival data but this is like the first time we've seen three disappear all at the same time so it's a mystery there's no answer uh if you've got ideas put them in the comments all right I feel like I say this every week but buckle up lots of James Webb news so first some follow on observations of the star formal how and this is one of the most interesting Most Fascinating stars that we know of we've got these classic pictures that came from the Hubble Space Telescope it looks like the eye of Sauron and that's because you've got this newly forming star that's surrounded by some kind of planet forming disc and it's relatively close to us and so it's very large and bright and easy to see with lots of different instruments but of course this is the perfect Target for James Webb so astronomers did observations of this several months back and they were able to get better resolution on the disc itself able to see gaps in the disc and they think that maybe they're seeing some kind of asteroid belt that was destroyed and you're getting sort of bright patches in the disc but there was like a previous mystery that astronomers wanted to try and get to the bottom of that and that is that there were 10 infrared objects embedded within the disc and the question is like what are these are these newly forming planets brown dwarf companions around formal how so the astronomers used James web and they were able to look at all those objects and they were able to see that in fact nine of them are background objects they have nothing to do with the star system itself they're just faint infrared sources that are farther away in space they could be galaxies they could be other star systems but one is part of the system and so that could be like a brown dworf companion or a large planet and what's interesting about this is that they ruled out a lot of large planets forming around the Stars say things that are bigger than Jupiter but that leaves things that are smaller than Jupiter and so there could be a bunch of smaller planets terrestrial planets forming in those various gaps in the disc a new weather feature on Jupiter when James web first came online we got all of those first pictures and then we also got an image of Jupiter and this was like a really interesting technical challenge because Jupiter moves very quickly and rotates very quickly from the perspective for James web and so astronomers weren't sure how well web was going to be able to examine Jupiter as an object here in the solar system and it turned out it can do a great job it can track the target it can take quick enough images that it's able to resolve features on the surface of Jupiter without getting Overexposed and we got this really cool first infrared picture of Jupiter but astronomers have been studying this picture and looking for anything that weren't familiar with and one thing that they found was a previously unknown weather feature on Jupiter it's some kind of jet stream in the High Altitude clouds on Jupiter it stretches about 4,800 kilm long and it's got winds going about 515 kilometers per hour and then astronomers did Fallen observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and they were able to sort of see the same area and just like try to understand how do the various atmospheric levels on Jupiter interact with each other how do you get the storm formation how do these jet streams that move in different directions across the cloud tops of Jupiter how do they interact with each other and create this really complex pattern that we see today how do we get the Great Red Spot I mean there's so many questions about Jupiter still a detailed look at ganime now we actually got a picture of ganime several months ago from jwst and I think we reported on it here in space bites but the pictures w't that great it was a very quick observation of the moons of Jupiter astronomers got more time on the telescope and they were able to do much more detailed images of ganim with James Webb and I've said this several times in the past that ganim is one of the most interesting places in the solar system it is the biggest moon in the solar system it's bigger than Mercury it has like a solid core it has a liquid ocean surrounded by Icy shell it has like a thin oxygen atmosphere it has a global magnetosphere there's so much that's interesting at ganim and like I'm not the only one who thinks this uh the European Space Agency is sending its juice mission to the moons of Jupiter it's going to be exploring Europa and Kalisto but mostly ganim ganim is the new Europa ganim is tidy locked to Jupiter so one side is always sort of facing orbit and the other side is trailing orbit and astronomers wanted to know is there any difference between the sides of ganim and they found that indeed around the poles you get this sort of different amount of chemical composition in the ice at ganim a couple of really interesting chemicals that they found at ganim one is carbon dioxide which is not a chemical that you would expect to see above a shell of water ice like how do you get carbon dioxide out of water and so what they think is that there was probably carbon dioxide mixed in various layers through the water ice that is then being exposed to the surface and continually being replenished by microm meteorites wearing down the surface of ganimat they also found hydrogen peroxide which is H2O2 and you know if you get water and you hit it with a lot of radiation solar radiation you should be able to turn some of it into hydrogen peroxide and so you've got this process happening on the surface of of ganim and so like the like the really interesting question about ganim is like what is the interaction between the solid interior the liquid ocean that is being enriched by chemicals volcanism things like that and then is this enriched water making its way to the surface and releasing chemicals out into space and so more observations from web will help us get to the bottom of that a debris disc around a white dwarf so in the far future our sun will run out of fuel in the core expand as a red giant and then blow out its outer layers and then shrink down to become a white dwarf star and in this process it's going to consume the inner planets Mercury Venus they're goners Earth maybe I mean we don't know astronomers argue about whether or not we're doomed or not uh will be heated and so doomed on that front but we may or may not actually go into the star as it expands but then shrinks back down becomes this white dwarf and then will spend the rest of its days slowly cooling down to the background temperature of the universe what happens to planets in this scenario can we get a sneak peek of what's going to happen to us well maybe most white dwarfs are just these visible objects in space they're just shining brightly with the leftover heat from the core CU like a white dwarf is the exposed core of a star that is now just shining off into space and then they will slowly cool down and eventually shift into infrared and eventually they'll be impossible to see compared to the background of the universe but someone white dwarfs have this infrared shell around them and now astronomers know that these infrared sources are crushed up planets debris discs around these white dwarfs and in 2018 astronomers found one which brightened briefly and they realized that this was probably due to asteroids Comet smashing together turning into more debris so an infrared Source this is a classic Target for James web and so astronomers turned the telescope on this region they were ble to detect the presence of silica materials in the disc sand dirt Rock like crunched up planets is which is what you'd expect but they also were able to find carbonates which are the kinds of chemicals that only form in the presence of liquid water in other words crunched up planets with liquid water made this debris disc so I don't know if is this good news for our future or not every week we do a vote on our Channel where you tell us what you thought was the best story and last week it was all about Juno's flyby of IO great pictures uh I totally agree very cool story so thank you everybody who voted when you saw it come through your YouTube video or in the community tab now if you want the best possible chance to find out more about these stories to do the vote make sure you subscribe to our Channel and then you can either just see it show up in your feed while you're scrolling on your phone or you can go to the community Tab and you'll get the new vote so vote tell us what you thought and we will celebrate it next week volcanoes across IO last week we got the new pictures of IO taken by the Juno Mission it came within 12,000 kilometers of this Moon so this week we've got some science updates on this which is that obviously planetary scientists were hard at work studying these images and we've got some initial data astronomers have counted up the number of volcanic hotpots across the surface of IO and the current count is 266 there are 200 166 volcanoes on the surface of IO and scientists think that these volcanoes are connected underneath by just a global magma ocean so you've got like the inner part of IO you've got this magma ocean that is within about 50 kilometers of the surface of IO and then there's just hot spots popping up everywhere you've got volcanic activity that is blasting out onto the surface and there's differences between the amount of volcanoes that are happening around the equator Vio versus the holes of IO it's a very Dynamic World we're just getting these glimpses of you know the most volcanically active place in the solar system thanks to Juno and like we've got some pictures of IO thanks to the voyagers New Horizons took a picture of it Galileo did one flyby of IO but now Juno has done multiple flybys of IO and it's due to do two more close ones including in February it's going to come within 1,500 kilm of a so 10 times closer than this last picture was and so we're going to learn so much more about IO largest ever simulation in the universe one of the ways that astronomers check their theories about the large scale structure of the universe cosmology is they build simulations of the universe they put in all of the factors that they believe were the case in the universe and then they evolve it over time to see whether the simulated Universe matches the one that we have and then from that they can tell whether or not the various theories that they have properly predict the universe that we have and so the largest Universe simulation ever made just wrapped up it's called Flamingo and they used 10,000 CPUs in parallel to compute this simulation so imagine you've got a block of simulated universe that is 9.1 billion light years on a side and within that you've got about three 00 billion objects which are like from dwarf Galaxy to larger spiral galaxies that are interacting with each other throughout the entire evolution of the universe you've got Dark Matter Dark Energy regular matter they're counting for neutrinos as well as all of the energy that is going on from all of these objects and how they all interact and they found that it wasn't until they accounted for all of this stuff that we see in the universe and properly simulate in the simulation did they actually get a very accurate thorough measurement of the universe and I wonder like are we getting to the point now where people inside this Flamingo simulation are wondering if they're living in a simulated Universe s to break the news but yes you are living in a simulation space bites is one of the kinds of content that we do we do a lot of our question shows but some of the work that I'm the most proud of are the interviews we do now probably two interviews a week deep Dives with space scientists astronauts astronomers Engineers about the work that they're doing to push us forward into our understanding of the cosmos and what's great is you as my audience you're very technically knowledgeable and so I don't have to pull any punches I can ask really complicated questions listen to very complicated answers and ask follow-on questions we can skip the basics and get right into the more advanced stuff and I'm really glad that we're able to do this kind of content this is the one that I'm learning from the most and I hope you are too so you know when you see the interviews come up trust me they're great you'll enjoy them stick around or like sign up for the podcast and then you can listen to them at 50% higher speed and consume them because I think you'll learn a lot of new things with every one of the interviews and of course we've got a playlist of all of the interviews so you can just go through them one at a time for hundreds and hundreds of episodes if you want astronomers want hundreds of hours to study the Milky Way the center of the Milky Way is one of the most interesting places relatively nearby it's only a few tens of thousands of light years away from us this is the place where we've got the super massive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way place where stars are thousands of times clustered more densely than what we've got in our neighborhood there is the gas and dust left over from all of the stars and some really weird things have been found at the center of the Milky Way that there is regions of star formation that really shouldn't happen in such a radiation pulverized part of the cosmos and yet there are new stars forming just within a few light years of the super massive black hole that's weird so astronomers have put together a gigantic proposal for hundreds of hours of time on the James Webb Space Telescope to try and reveal the center of the Milky Way in a way that we've never seen before because it's all shrouded in dust this is the perfect place that you would search with James Webb it's an infrared instrument it looks through the dust it can see through all this stuff and start to map out the region so a gigantic proposal was sent out with 80 different scientific institutions participating hundreds of astronomers making the case that they need hundreds of hours on James web to study this region and answer a lot of these outstanding questions about the center of the milk QA Starship is ready to fly we got a really cool video from SpaceX showing off the SpaceX Starship super heavy stack doing a wet dress rehearsal and this is where they completely tank up the cryogenic propellant into the spacecraft and so according to SpaceX starship's ready to fly but according to the government Starship is still not ready to fly and that was because back when they did their last test launch there was a bunch of environmental issues there's a giant checklist that the FAA gave to SpaceX to work through solve all these problems s and get themselves ready and compliant to be able to fly again SpaceX says they've gone through the list they've completed all of the tasks that were required by the FAA and now they're ready to fly and so now we're waiting for final approval from the FAA when they get that then they're cleared for launch and we should see another test of Starship and hopefully this time it'll actually make it to orbit finally another picture of Jupiter this one came from Juno and it was taken during the 54th flyby of Juno going past Jupiter and it looks like this spooky scary face on the surface of the planet and NASA always gets into the Halloween spirit every year they they'll post a bunch of pictures that they think are Halloween related I mean like I don't find like I find Space the concept of an overwhelming infinite Cosmos filled with an unknown amount of friendly or malevolent alien entities terrifying enough to sort of think about how we are tiny specks in this infinite Cosmos we are insignificant and there could be an infinite amount of time ahead of us and yet we're here for this brief moment it's hard not to feel just this Cosmic horror and uh on WE but here's a scary face in Jupiter I going to talk about IO some more but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to David Richards Mark antis Antonio lilara Dustin cable Vlad shiin George andram gross Jeremy M Josh Schultz Jordan Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our supporters on patreon a couple years ago NASA put out a short list of the missions that they wanted to consider for the coming decade they proposed two missions to Venus One mission to IO and one mission to Neptune's moon Triton they had to short list that down to two missions and they ended up going with the two Venus missions which is fine like that's great U I would love to know more about Venus but that means we don't get to learn more about Triton and we don't get to learn more about IO and when you look at these pictures of IO you look at the and you understand the volcanism that's going on like imagine if you could be down on the surface of IO and just see volcanoes exploding in all directions out to the Horizon with Jupiter super close that would be amazing and so it would be just fantastic to have a mission that's dedicated to IO that just keeps making flybys passing through this punishing radiation field taking a bunch of pictures focusing in on individual volcanoes seeing how the ejector from the volcanoes is spreading around the entire world and falling back down in these curtains creating volcanic craters trying to understand the amount of heat that's being generated inside the world because of its tital interactions with jupit I have questions and I would love to have some answers and so even though we don't get the io Mission we got the two Venus missions please put the io Mission back on the table we need to learn more about IO all right we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 462,991

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

Id: nQXPuYTMAoM

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023