Voyager-2 Lost Contact // Potential Superconductor Breakthrough // Sgr A* Companion

NASA loses contact with voyager 2. Euclid's first images and finally the Ring Nebula from jwst all this and more in this week's space bites even though they were launched in 1977 the Voyager spacecraft are still going and going they are running out of electricity and eventually they will lose so much power that they'll go offline and that'll be that and that's about a decade from now but still just to think that these spacecraft have been flying for close to 50 years now and still we can communicate with them and learn more about the outer solar system unfortunately NASA lost contact with Voyager 2 just a couple of days ago they were doing regular routine check-ins with the spacecraft with the deep space Network these are the gigantic radio antenna that NASA has to be able to communicate with spacecraft across the solar system and they send a series of commands to the spacecraft and one of these was please change the orientation of your antenna two degrees away from Earth and so at that point the spacecraft turned away from Earth and it was no longer able to receive or transmit Communications to and from Earth effectively NASA and Voyager 2 are talking past each other which isn't going to be great but don't worry in mid-october the spacecraft will reset itself and point back at where it believes Earth to be this will allow NASA to re-establish communication and everything will go on as it was before NASA was able to confirm that they were able to detect the carrier wave signal of the spacecraft just not to be able to communicate with it so they know it's doing fine still out there it's not going anywhere and hopefully it will return Communications in mid-october and everything is fine with voyager 1. so you know there's some redundancy out there room temperature superconductor question mark question mark if you've been looking at the internet or the news in any way of course you've caught wind of this new claim of a room temperature superconductor and there was a series of papers that were released onto archive by a team of Korean researchers over a couple of days and the claim is that they had developed a new kind of material called LK 99 and it is a room temperature superconductor and this is the Holy Grail of Materials Science we know that superconductors allows electricity to move through material without any resistance and the repercussions of this are far-reaching that anything that has like electricity or uses magnetism will benefit from this technology it is an enormous claim and if it's true it's Nobel prizes all around but the proper stance when anyone makes a new claim is to be skeptical to wait for evidence and this is one of the most beautiful examples of science happening in real time that I've ever seen according to the papers LK 99 should be relatively possible to recreate with anyone with a proper materials lab and in fact we saw on Twitter on YouTube on Twitch people were attempting to recreate the material in real time they were ordering the ingredients they were configuring their apparatus and they were trying to replicate the results now we're still just a few days into this and we have seen a couple of people claim partial success I know a team of Chinese researchers were able to achieve super conductivity at 100 Kelvin which is not room temperature that's very cold and so we're not yet at this absolute slam dunk yes we did it this is a room temperature superconductor we are in this process where people are verifying whether or not this exists and compare this to the UAP testimony that we had last week where you had eyewitnesses give testimony of unidentified phenomena that they had seen but there was no way to confirm it no way to learn any more about it imagine if the Navy Air Force had delivered all of the radar instrumentation to researchers they were able to run their own calculations imagine if these biological samples were delivered to astrobiologists and other researchers imagine if the materials of the spacecraft were released to researchers around the world and they were able to confirm and double check that's what evidence looks like and the proper approach even with this superconductor is to be skeptical to say that's a big claim prove it and the proof is going to come from other experimenters who try to replicate the results and the more people are able to replicate the results the more we can say yes this is the real thing and I'm really excited like I so want this to be true but I need to manage my expectations and right now I am skeptical but hopeful we did an interview last week with some folks who could really use a superconductor and of course this was a conversation about an electromagnetic launch system that would use superconducting coils to send a spacecraft into orbit with electricity alone a room temperature superconductor would dramatically change the physics involved to do this so listen to the interview that was done before the announcement of this superconductor announcement and so you can sort of hear the potential for a superconductor and actually follow it up with the researchers on this and they said that they are also skeptical about whether or not this is true but hopeful Euclid's first images the European space agency's Euclid Mission has made the journey from the Earth to the Earth Sun L2 LaGrange point and of course this is the spot where jwst and the Gaia Mission are waiting to greet it to begin its work in developing a gigantic map of the cosmos and the Euclid Mission has been in development for over a decade and its purpose is to map out as much of the cosmos as it can in three dimensions and we got the First new images from Euclid this week to showcase the two instruments that it's going to be using to do this job so the first is called the visible instrument and this takes pictures in the visible spectrum and it will allow astronomers to measure the shape of galaxies see their spiral shape be able to see giant elliptical galaxies but also be able to measure the shape of distortions from the gravitationally lensing effect of dark matter and this will allow astronomers to map out which galaxies are being affected by dark matter and by how much the second image shows you the results from the near infrared spectrometer and photometer this instrument will allow astronomers to measure the color the chemical composition the brightness of galaxies and this will let them figure out how far away these galaxies are from Earth and so from these two instruments astronomers will be able to develop this three-dimensional map that will go as far back to 10 billion years of light travel time and so it will map out a sphere of the universe where the light has taken 10 billion years to reach us that's almost the entire observable universe and from this map astronomers will be able to measure the effect of dark matter and dark energy over time the observations from Euclid are going to be revolutionary they will hammer down the constraints of dark matter and dark energy better than any telescope has ever done before and when you match up its observations with the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman telescope which will sort of do overlapping jobs as well as the upcoming Vera Reuben Observatory here on Earth the three telescopes working together will give us just a really comprehensive understanding of at least what the effects are we may still not know what is dark matter and dark energy but we will have it measured down to the finest amount is I mean is an Easter egg do we have to mention vir Rubin in every episode in everything that we do I believe the answer is yes I think we do every week we do a vote so you can tell us which of the stories you were most excited about and last week the winning story was that NASA and DARPA are working on a nuclear rocket that are going to be testing in space that's not like a broken record I totally agree it's an amazing story and I think we really need a test of a nuclear rocket in space now we put up this poll after every episode of space bytes so you should see this show up in your feed but if you don't see it in your feed then you should be subscribed to the channel aren't you subscribed to this channel do you watch this every week and you're not subscribed subscribe it's the right thing to do we're also doing another poll between all of the cool images that have come from jwst over the last year we're into the semifinals now and so you can still influence who's going to go into the final round what is the best picture taken by jwst last year and like I know that's an impossible question to ask which is awesome so choose does the Milky Way's supermassive black hole have a companion we know that there is a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way it has 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun and astronomers have found supermassive black holes like this at the hearts of most galaxies out there and some Galaxies have multiple supermassive black holes that are due for a merger and so the question is is there another supermassive black hole orbiting around the Milky Way and one class of black holes that astronomers haven't been able to really pin down yet are the intermediate Mass black holes so you know we have the Stellar Mass black holes the ones where a star many times the mass of our sun explodes and leaves behind a Remnant that is dozens of times the mass of the Sun and then we have the supermassive black holes the ones that are millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun but are there any in between ones that have thousands of times the mass of the Sun they should be out there but where are they so astronomers have been watching the movement of a star that comes extremely close to the Milky Ways black hole called SO2 it comes within 120 astronomical units of the black hole with each orbit and astronomers have been watching the motion of the star for about 20 years and so they've been looking for any kind of variation in the movement of the star that could come from the gravitational influence of a nearby black hole Unfortunately they didn't find one but they were able to put constraint and so if there is an intermediate Mass black hole that is within the orbit of SO2 then it would be at maximum 400 times the mass of the Sun and if there's one that's outside the orbit of SO2 out to about say 4 000 astronomical units then it could be about 10 000 times the mass of the Sun but no concrete discovery of a companion black hole at the heart of the Milky Way so sometimes a non-result is interesting science Plato could be the most successful Planet hunter ever just a quick update on a spacecraft that I'm really excited about and you know I'll pretty soon start just name dropping this spacecraft in every single episode of space bytes that we do whether or not it's warranted or not and that's Plato the planetary oscillations of transits and stars and Plato is kind of like a scaled up version of NASA's Tess spacecraft so Tess is watching thousands of stars that are close to the solar system looking for any of them to dim slightly as a planet passes in front and hopefully Tess will find a lot of the closest planets to the solar system Plato will be scanning 245 000 main sequence stars in our Galactic neighborhood and doing the same thing looking for these transits as planets pass in front and it's estimated that it will find tens of thousands of exoplanets which would put it well up to the number one planet hunting telescope out there it should find 500 earth-sized exoplanets and probably a dozen in the habitable zone around sun-like stars and so one of the big questions that I get all the time is like when will we know of another Earth or at least another earth-sized world in the habitable zone around a sunlight star and right now we don't know of any there's a possibility that Tess could find one of them but if I was to bet on which telescope will give us that result it's going to be the Plato Mission and it launches in 2026. so just a couple of years away and hopefully we'll find that other Earth not this life there just that there could be liquid water on the surface of the planet that's orbiting the Stars if you like the work that we do and you want to support a truly independent space journalism Enterprise why don't you consider joining our patreon and I had another interview with one of the patrons a couple of days ago and they were sort of like doing the math in their mind of like how does Universe today compare to a print magazine and so we released about 100 articles a month about space in astronomy we do probably a dozen if not more videos podcasts all the other information we do across social media we are a news machine about space and astronomy and the news is current up to date and we don't put any of this behind a paywall that if you can support us then you're enabling us to provide this content as widely as possible so people can educate themselves about space and astronomy however no matter where they live no matter what they do so if you want to participate join our patreon go to patreon.com universetoday time for some more images from jwst so first up we've got two images of moons here in the solar system thanks to jdbst first let's look at ganymy which is of course the largest moon in the solar system it is the largest moon orbiting Jupiter and it is so big and so massive that it has its own internal Dynamo it has a magnetosphere astronomers looked at Ganymede with jwst and they were able to see the presence of hydrogen peroxide which is this sort of orangish yellow glow around the poles of the Moon the hydrogen peroxide is created as charged particles from Jupiter from the Sun or hitting the surface of Ganymede they are breaking apart molecules and creating hydrogen peroxide but then these molecules are being Guided by the magnetosphere to the polar regions and so they're able to track the presence and location of the magnetosphere at Ganymede using jwc and then the other image is of IO which is the closest large moon to Jupiter because of how close iOS to Jupiter is under enormous tidal flexing and this causes volcanoes to erupt across the surface of this Moon and in this image of IO you can see sort of the hot spots where there are active volcanoes on iO but you can also see the presence of sulfuric oxide which is one of the byproducts of volcanism and so for the first time astronomers were able to directly connect the presence of the volcanic gases with actual eruptions on the surface of IO and now an image of the Ring Nebula from gwst The Ring Nebula is really special to me because when I first bought a telescope when I was like 14 years old it was during the summer and there were a bunch of objects in the sky that I was able to point my little telescope at and one of these was the Ring Nebula and it was very easy to find in the sky once you know where the constellation of lira is it's it's between two stars it's very easy to find and yet it looks like this Dusty little ring like nothing else that you see in the sky and so I always love to see pictures of the Ring Nebula and this is an image of the Ring Nebula taken by jwst which is the one of the most powerful telescopes ever built and it's a little better than what I could see with my own eyes and the Ring Nebula is an example of a planetary nebula this is when a star kind of like the Sun dies Puffs out its outer layers and then collapses down into a white dwarf you can see the outer layers that were puffed out by the star as it died and they've bunched up and create all of these folds and ripples of nebulosity around the central star and then you can see the central region which has this green color which if you take a picture you can see this green color you don't see it with your eyes unless it's like a really powerful telescope I've seen it once with my eyes and you can see these striations of color and as different densities of nebula material are around the central star and this is actually just with one of the instruments the researchers said they've got another version of the Ring Nebula coming out shortly where they're going to use Miri so we'll see another version of the Ring Nebula shortly and finally a test of the Mars sample return missions Rockets so Ness released a video this week showing two tests that they're doing for the Mars sample return Mission this is the system that's going to land on the surface of Mars and wait for perseverance to deliver all of the samples that it's been collecting they're going to hand over all the samples are going to be put into a return rocket then the rocket is going to be catapulted into the air and it's going to fire its first stage solid rocket motor it's going to fly up into high altitude it's going to fire its second solid rocket motor and it's going to meet with a return spacecraft and it's going to send these samples back home to Earth so NASA showed us some tests of the two solid rocket Motors the first one for the first stage they tested it in a vacuum chamber and so you can't hear anything this rocket is completely silent and in the second one you're seeing the upper stage and in this they didn't test it in a vacuum chamber and so you do hear it naoto spun the rocket up to 200 revolutions per minute which is the kind of forces that a rocket might experience as it's flying through the atmosphere of Mars now both were tested at -20 Celsius which is the kind of temperatures you would experience on Mars and so it's just another concrete example that NASA is continuing to develop the Mars sample return Mission even though the budgets are getting larger and we're not entirely sure what the future holds for this mission I'm going to talk about the Mars sample return Mission some more like does it really make sense to send a robotic Mission when humans are going to be going to Mars but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Joel Yancey Antonio lofi Lara Dustin cable just Paul Davis Vlad shiplin Jay Dennis David Gilton modzo George Jeremy Mattern Jordan young Tim Whalen Dave veriboff Andrew Gross and Josh Schultz who support us at the master of the universe level after we posted the story to Universe today I got someone commenting to me what is the point of sending a Mars sample return mission that could cost eight plus billion dollars when humans are going to be going to Mars relatively soon and first we don't know if and when humans are going to be going to Mars like I know SpaceX is working on the Starship and it should make Landings on Mars piece of cake and NASA also has its own plans for going to Mars at some point in the 2030s or maybe 2040s but things take longer than we expect and we might be waiting until the 2050s or maybe the 2060s before humans actually go to March like I know you don't want to hear that but prepare yourself emotionally for it to be a long time for humans actually go to Mars it's expensive it's complicated it's dangerous there's a lot of stuff to be developed but when they go they're going to need to return they're going to need a sample return Mission except instead of samples it's people a people return Mission and so all of the technology that's being developed for the sample return mission to bring these precious samples of Mars back home will also be extremely useful for developing the methods to bring humans back home from Mars so this won't be wasted technology researchers will get their hands on chunks of Mars that they can study in the most powerful Laboratories ever devised and we will get some really solid answers about what happened on Mars over the billions of years of its history

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 60,864

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

Id: Tf7WuEuw3ys

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023