Blog#5 Pluto

Posted on April 17, 2022 by Irene

Pluto, formerly considered one of the nine planets, has always been controversial. Nonetheless, since the International Astronomical Union redefined the meaning of planet (A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit) (check IAU Website for further information)

Pluto now falls into the category of a dwarf planet because of its size and the fact that it inhabits a region of other similarly sized bodies known as the Trans-Neptunian region. A dwarf planet is a celestial body that -orbits the sun, has enough mass to assume a nearly round shape, has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit and is not a moon.

Definition of Dwarf Planet and Examples Cr. NASA

NASA’s New Horizons mission is the first mission that conducted a Pluto flyby and provided humans with a high resolute picture of Pluto. 

Pluto has one important moon: Charon. Half the size of Pluto, Cajun is the largest moon of Pluto and the largest known moon relative to its parent body. Pluto and Charon are considered binary systems and experience tidal locking. NASA’s New Horizons mission discovered that the reddish north cap of Charon is atmospheric outgassing from Pluto. 

Charon Cr. NASA
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Magnetar — A Fascinating Neutron Star

Posted on April 17, 2022 by sissichen17

Neutron stars are the collapsed core of the massive stars (our Sun cannot qualify that). Neutron star was the smallest and densest stellar object in the universe. A city-sized neutron star can obtain the mass of the Sun. There are two types of neutron stars — magnetars and pulsars. Pulsars are neutron stars with fast rotational rates, and magnetars — as the name states — are neutron stars with extremely large magnetic fields. Magnetar — my favorite object in the whole universe —  formed from a fascinating process. During the formation when the supernova explosion happened, the magnetic field increases due to the conservation of magnetic flux. Strong magnetic fields originated from magnetar originated from the magnetohydrodynamic dynamo process before neutron stars reached equilibrium configuration. Through the dynamo process, heat and rotational energy will convert into magnetic energy. Strong magnetic fields exist and persist because of the currents in a proton-superconductor phase of matter. Giant flares, the strong eruptions caused by magnetars, burst gamma rays and give enormous information & interesting phenomenon about this mysterious star.

Picture of Magnetar from Space
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Blog Post 5: Comets and their Tails

Posted on April 17, 2022 by isaachuggins
Halley’s Comet, one of the most famous comets that routinely comes back to the terrestrial worlds and can be seen. Credit to Wikipedia.

Comets are large balls of dust, rock, and ice that travel across our solar system and other solar systems. They are large like asteroids, around 10 km in diameter in our solar system. The largest one in our Solar System is Bernardinelli-Bernstein, a massive body about 85 miles in diameter. These objects can approach near Earth and can be seen in the night sky on regular intervals, due to their orbits being predictable and tracked by scientists.

The comet is made of three main parts; the nucleus, the comma, and the tails. The nucleus is the center of the comet, or the actual rock itself. It is made of dust and ice, which remains stagnant and stable in the outer solar system. However, once the comet approaches the center, the ice begins to sublimate away. This area is known as the comma. This atmospheric layer only appears when the object is getting close to the sun, making the object glow bright.

The tails extend thousands of miles behind. There are two tails, a plasma tail and a dust tail. One of them is made of plasma, which is blasted away from the sun by solar wind. The dust tail is made of physical objects, which is blasted away by the sun’s radiation pressure. Both of these tails always face away from the sun, even when moving away from the sun. The tails get larger closer to the sun, since these forces are much greater when closer.

The orbit of a comet, where the tail gets larger as it gets closer to the sun. Credit to the European Space Agency.

One of the reasons why comets are so interesting is because they come from such far distances, yet we can still observe them due to their orbits occasionally coming close to the terrestrial planets. It takes millions of dollars to get photos from an object far away such as the Kuiper Belt. Comets are opportunities for such objects to come to us instead. The comet mentioned before, Bernardinelli-Bernstein, may originate from the Oort Cloud, and will be within Saturn’s orbit by 2032. Even better, some comets come so close that we can see them as pronounced objects in the night sky. Halley’s comet comes every 75 years, and is predicted to come again around 2061.

Remember, comets, just like Tails the fox, have two tails. Credit to Wikipedia.
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Asteroid Mining

Posted on April 17, 2022 by Johann West

Picture of Asteroid

With the current rise of privatized space travel, one industry that may very well likely be popularized within our lifetimes is asteroid mining. However the initial investment cost of getting to a profitable asteroid will be enormous, the payoff of mining and bringing back the metals that these asteroids contain would be more than worth it. We are currently aware of 5 different asteroids that are worth multiple quintillion dollars at the current market rate of the metals that are contained.

However, to play devils advocate, the pure profit from these asteroids would likely be much lower if they were actually brought back to Earth, thanks to the laws of supply and demand. The price for the metals contained in these asteroids would plummet do to the massively increased supply.

Still, that does not mean it would not be fiscally worth it to go after these asteroids. It may be probable that industry would increase with the lowered price of these metals, allowing humanity to advance without resource limitation.

Source : Asteroid Mining

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Possibility of Life on Europa

Posted on April 16, 2022 by Johann West

Picture from European Space Agency

As of now scientists believe there are three requirements for a planet to develop and sustain life. Liquid water, the appropriate chemical elements, and an energy source. Europa has more than enough water, as it is believed that below the roughly 15 miles of solid ice, lies twice as much water as in Earth’s ocean, even though Europa is a fraction of Earth’s size.

As of now the most likely way to get more information about possible life at Europa is to sample water from water vapor fumes shooting through the ice. We would have to send a spacecraft to Europa with capabilities of finding and sampling these fumes.

Europa is currently the best chance of finding life outside of Earth, and it is important to explore this possibility as it would significantly alter how we view the development of life in the universe. If life has developed on two separate bodies in the solar system, life may no longer be viewed as a freak of nature, but as a result of the right combination and not wholly uncommon features in nature.

Source – Europa : Ocean Moon

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Chicxulub Impactor Found?

Posted on April 16, 2022 by Brian
A diagram of the Chicxulub impact and how ejecta could have reached the Upper Midwest, where the impactor samples were found.

In class, we discussed the Chicxulub impact, which is highly likely to have triggered the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. Despite the large size of the impactor, the catastrophic impact and 65 million years of geological processes have hidden the exact nature of the impactor from scientists. While iridium deposits in sedimentary rock layers point towards a more metallic asteroid, there isn’t direct evidence of the composition of the impactor and if it was an asteroid or a comet. Recently, paleontologists discovered what they believe to be shards of the Chicxulub impactor preserved in amber from the moments after the impact. Some fragments in the sample are characteristic of Earth’s crust, but others contain more iron, chromium, and nickel. These elements are signs that these may be tiny pieces of the impactor, and point towards an asteroid as the culprit. While these results have not been thoroughly reviewed yet, this would bring us a step closer to understanding both the Chicxulub impact itself as well as the types of impacts and impactors we see on Earth.

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The Future of Exoplanet Analysis

Posted on April 16, 2022 by Brian
Researchers were able to accurately map oceans, land, and vegetation from a pixelated image of Earth. This technology could be applied to exoplanets in the near future.

The search for extrasolar planets and alien life is a fascinating research focus that sits at the intersection of astronomy, physics, planetary science, and biology. As we have discussed in class, discovering exoplanets is a very difficult task, but we have discovered roughly 5,000 exoplanets to date and are making significant progress in that area. We currently analyze these planets at a surface level and try to make conclusions about their habitability based on their size, mass, the star they orbit, and the distance of that orbit. A potential next step would be to gather visual data about these planets, and a recent study suggests that we could detect the existence of surface features such as land and oceans with only a few pixels of information. Using new machine learning techniques, the researchers were able to correctly map out land and oceans on a blurry image of Earth. Future telescopes, like the next round of planned ground-based telescopes, could be able to produce images of exoplanets, so analysis technology like this could be used soon. 

As I mentioned in class, it seems to me that our rate of discovery of potentially habitable worlds in and outside of our solar system is accelerating significantly. I think it is more likely than not that we discover evidence of alien life within my lifetime— do you agree or disagree?

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Asteroid, meteor, meteoroid, meteorite

Posted on April 16, 2022 by joubertklopper

These four terms are often misunderstood and the objects/occurrences they represent are thought of to be similar when in reality that is not the case. I am here to put these false assumptions about these misunderstood terms to rest.

Looking at the definitions. An asteroid is a rock in space orbiting the sun, a meteoroid is similar to an asteroid where it is also a space rock, but it is smaller in size. A Meteor is a flash of light across the sky, it does not represent the rock itself while a meteorite is a meteor which travels through earth’s atmosphere and hits the ground. The differences between these terms are often classified according to their size, position and relativity to earth.

Meteor and Meteorites.

With the inclusion of a comet as well, one can use this blog post to correctly identify an outer world occurrence and maybe use this knowledge to impress your crush 😉

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Nuclear Weapons, Asteroids, and PHOs

Posted on April 16, 2022 by parallaxHubble
The Chichxulub Asteroid, the impactor which likely killed the dinosaurs. Source: National Geographic

Both nuclear weapons and asteroids are incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous objects with capabilities for mass destruction. The impact of the Chicxulub Asteriod about 65 million years ago had an explosive force about two million times greater than the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful man-made nuclear weapon ever deployed, which had an explosive power of 50 megatons of TNT. Doing some simple calculations, we can determine that the Chicxulub asteroid had an explosive force of about a hundred million megatons of TNT (50 x 2,000,000 = 100,000,000). For perspective, attached below is the explosion of the Tsar Bomba, which created a mushroom cloud 37 miles tall and could be seen from over 600 miles away (Britannica).

Tsar Bomba (BBC)

Fortunately, there is a potentially productive and responsible relationship between these two destructive forces. Using basic statistics and probability based off historical data, we know that it is significantly likely that within the next 10,000 years there will be a moderately size asteroid set to collide with Earth. This asteroid will be much, much smaller than the Chichxulub impactor, which spanned several km across. However, even a considerably smaller asteroid, with a radius of several dozen meters, still has enough destructive potential to seriously damage or destroy a small city. Thankfully, NASA is currently monitoring the 2,122 potential hazardous objects (PHOs) in our solar system, which are asteroids with radii over 140 meters that could someday impact Earth (source).

Due to their energy-dense properties, nuclear weapons are actually particularly effective at potentially deflecting an incoming asteroid. NASA claims that nuclear options are 10 to 100 times more effective at diverting incoming asteroids than non-nuclear options.

Source: MIT

I think that considering the potential positive benefits of nuclear power is something equally as important as treating them with due respect and carefulness for their destructive potential. Ultimately, we may someday have to use a nuclear weapon to deflect an incoming asteroid, as long as we don’t destroy ourselves beforehand.

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Pluto – A Planetary Anomoly

Posted on April 16, 2022 by parallaxHubble
Source: University of Arizona

When the spacecraft New Horizons first flew past Pluto in 2015, astronomers didn’t really have too much of an idea of what to expect.

Pluto had only been discovered about 85 years earlier (source) on February 18th, 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Due to Pluto’s immense distance, small size, and laughable luminosity, the small planet was not only extremely hard to detect but also to properly photograph. The image below is taken by the Hubble Telescope, the most powerful telescope that we humans have access to. The Hubble Telescope is powerful enough to literally look billions of years into the past, producing images like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, but the best image it could create of Pluto is the blurry mess below.

Source: Hubble Observatory

What the New Horizon mission revealed seven years ago continues to have implications today. Besides discovering that the planet actually has an incredibly interesting geographical domain, consisting of icy mountains, newly formed glaciers, an extensive hazy atmosphere, and an oceanic core, the exploration also revealed that Pluto is not alone. Pluto is in fact just one of several dozen, potentially several hundred similar dwarf planets in our solar system, which are similarly unexplored. This begs the question: is it time to send more spacecraft to the outer limits of our solar system? We obviously do not know as much as we thought we did about this systems.

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