Space News thread

[harrybarracuda]

The Universe could be on the brink of collapse, much sooner than expected
Don’t lose sleep over it though - we’re gonna be okay.
BEC CREW
25 MAR 2015


Physicists have come up a new calculation for when the Universe will stop expanding and collapse in on itself - which, as you can imagine, is very bad news for all matter inside - and predict that it will happen in the next tens of billions of years or so.

By human standards, that’s a pretty long way away, to put it lightly. But on a cosmological timescale, the researchers are calling it ‘imminent’, and say the collapse is coming much too soon. "The fact that we are seeing dark energy now could be taken as an indication of impending doom, and we are trying to look at the data to put some figures on the end date,” one of the team, Antonio Padilla from the University of Nottingham in the UK, told Lisa Zyga at Phys.org.

In proposing their new 'cosmological collapse mechanism’, the team set out to answer one of the most difficult questions in physics - why is the expansion rate of the Universe currently accelerating?

Back in 1917, when it hadn’t occurred to scientists that the Universe could be expanding, Einstein came up with his 'cosmological constant’, which quantified the energy density of the vacuum of space and balanced out the attraction of matter. A little over a decade later, when astronomer Edwin P. Hubble realised that the Universe was actually expanding, Einstein rejected the idea of a cosmological constant, but more recently, physicists have proposed that dark energy could be filling that role.

Dark energy is a low-mass form of energy that physicists now think makes up roughly 68 percent of the Universe. Dark matter makes up about 27 percent of it, and ‘normal’ matter contributes less than 5 percent. The problem with this? Theoretically, that super-high percentage of dark matter should only allow the growth of a tiny universe, not the huge one we know and love, because it’d be expanding too rapidly for galaxies to have a chance to form.



Perhaps, say Padilla and his colleague Nemanja Kaloper from the University of California, Davis in the US, the Universe will continue to be dominated by dark energy, up until the point of a complete turn-around towards destruction.

Zyga explains at Phys.org:

"According to the new mechanism, the Universe originated under a set of specific initial conditions so that it naturally evolved to its present state of acceleration and will continue on a path toward collapse. In this scenario, once the collapse trigger begins to dominate, it does so in a period of 'slow roll' that brings about the accelerated expansion we see today. Eventually the Universe will stop expanding and reach a turnaround point at which it begins to shrink, culminating in a 'big crunch'."

The team has published their calculations in the journal Physical Review Letters. Kudos to the duo for publishing a paper about the demise of the Universe and calling it, simply, 'The End'.

"I think we have opened up a brand new approach to what some have described as 'the mother of all physics problems', namely the cosmological constant problem," Padilla told Phys.org. "It's way too early to say if it will stand the test of time, but so far it has stood up to scrutiny, and it does seem to address the issue of vacuum energy contributions from the standard model, and how they gravitate."

It’s a lot to wrap your head around, and Padilla does a great job at discussing it in the video below. Just know that if Padilla and Kaloper are right, you've got at least tens of billions of years to get your things in order and move universes, so that's good.

[Topper]

Global warming, imminent galaxy collapse....just what I needed was another worry.

[BaitongBoy]

Throw a dollar in a savings account for all your children's children's children...

[kingwilly]

Global warming, imminent galaxy collapse....just what I needed was another worry.

Galaxy? Heck, we're talking about the entire freakin universe, not just some middling galaxy located in one of millions of Superclusters in the universe!



/pedant mode off.

[Luigi]

According to a report, a 1,000 m wide huge asteroid could pass past earth on Friday. Currently, the asteroid has been travelling at a speed more than 23,000 mph in space. Reports stated that if the mammoth asteroid, 2014-YB35, hit earth it could destroy a country and pose threat to the planet.
It is not unusual for small meteorites to pass close by, however one of this size is a very rare occurrence and poses a very real threat, an expert said. Any impact would trigger devastating changes in the climate, earthquakes and tsunamis.

Bill Napier, professor of astronomy at the University of Buckinghamshire, told the Express there is a “very real risk” of a comet or damaging asteroid hitting Earth.

He said: “With something like YB35, we are looking at a scale of global destruction, something that would pose a risk to the continuation of the planet.

This rock is forecast to pass within 2.8 million miles – a tiny distance in astronomical terms – of Earth on Friday, according to NASA’s Near Earth Object Programme.

It is estimated to be from between 500 metres and 1km wide, with 990 metres the most likely. The object was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey at the end of last year with astronomers expected to be closely watching its progress this week.




NASA On Alert: Huge Asteroid On Near-Collision Course With Earth | CosmosUp

[Neo]

Check Out Three Amazing Rocket Launches That All Happened on One Day

By Attila Nagy on 30 Mar 2015 at 10:30PM

What a busy weekend for space exploration. There were three successful lift offs around the world, including two Soyuz launches from opposite sides of the Earth:

Friday, 19:42 GMT: Liftoff of the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (pictured above and below), with Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly on board, headed to the International Space Station for a year-long mission.

Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA
Friday, 21:46 GMT: Liftoff of another Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guyana, loaded with two satellites for the European Space Agency's Galileo navigation program.

Photo: ESA/CNES/ARIANESPACE-Service Optique CSG, S. Martin
Saturday 11:49 GMT: Launch of the Indian Space Research Organisation's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV-C27/IRNSS-1D, with the fourth satellite of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System in its payload, from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India's east coast.

Photo: ISRO
Top photo: Media photograph the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft as it launches to the International Space Station with Expedition 43 NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko, and Gennady Padalka of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) onboard (Bill Ingalls/NASA)

[Neo]

Astronomers detect the building blocks of life in a distant star system

By Chris Wood
April 10, 2015

2 Pictures


An artist impression of the protoplanetary disk surrounding MWC 480 (Image: B. Saxton/NRAO/AUI/NSF))
Image Gallery (2 images)


Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star, revealing the presence of complex organic molecules that represent the building blocks of life. The findings mark the first time that such a discovery has been made.

The new observations focused on the star system MWC 480, located some 455 light-years from Earth. Just one million years old, the star is around twice the mass of the Sun, and is in the very early stages of development, having only recently emerged from a stellar womb of gas dust, and with no signs of planet formation yet detected.

The ALMA observations revealed large volumes of the complex, carbon-based molecule methyl cyanide, as well as hydrogen cyanide. They were found in the outer reaches of the star's disk – a region thought to be similar to the Kuiper Belt, which resides beyond the planets in our own Solar System.

The detected molecules contain carbon-nitrogen bonds essential in the formation of amino acids that are, in turn, the foundation of proteins. Through the study of comets, we know that similar molecules were present during the same stage of development in our own Solar System, and in similar concentrations observed in MWC 480's protoplanetary disk.

ALMA was able to make the discovery by scouring the system for telltale millimeter wavelength radiation that's naturally emitted by the molecules. The findings have significant implications regarding the existence of life in the wider Universe.

"From the study of exoplanets, we know the Solar System isn't unique in its number of planets or abundance of water," said Karin Öbery of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Now we know we're not unique in organic chemistry. Once more, we have learned that we're not special. From a life in the Universe point of view, this is great news."

The observations were carried out before the telescope had reached its full operational capacity, meaning that only a portion of the array's 66 telescopes were used to carry out the observations. It's believed that further study using all available arrays will lead to a more detailed understanding of the composition of the MWC 480 and similar protoplanetary disks, increasing our knowledge of both star and planet formation.

The findings of the study have been published in the journal Nature.

Source: ESO

[Takeovers]

The Dawn probe is in orbit around Ceres for a while now. Closing in on the intended low orbit.

Ceres is in the category of Dwarf Planets. It is the biggest object in the asteroid belt. Ceres has a large amount of water in form of ice. It may even contain liquid water deep down.
For that reason the Planetary Protection rules require that Dawn will not impact Ceres for at least another 20 years to avoid contamination of potential indigenous live with terrestrial microbes. If you think this is ridiculous I am with you. It does not matter much for the moment as there is no intent of landing. However it means that at the end of Dawns useful lifespan they cannot get it down into a very low suicide orbit for better resolution photos. They did something like this with other probes.

Here a first high definition photo of Ceres taken by Dawn.

[harrybarracuda]

The largest known structure in the Universe is a hole 1.8 billion light-years across
Literally a whole lot of nothing.
FIONA MACDONALD21 APR 2015



Astronomers have stumbled across the biggest object ever detected in the Universe… and it’s a void that stretches for 1.8 billion light years.

Distinguishable by its emptiness, the ‘supervoid’, as it's being called, isn't the only hole in the Universe, but it's the biggest patch we've found, and is abnormal in the typically evenly distributed Universe.

The supervoid was spotted by scientists trying to explain an unusually cool patch in the radiation left over from the Big Bang, known as the Universe’s cosmic microwave background. You can see this patch, which researchers named the 'Cold Spot', circled in the image above, taken by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Planck telescope.

For the past decade, researchers have been extremely interested in the Cold Spot, because it doesn't fit with our current understanding of how the Universe evolved. While a few small warm and cold patches are expected, we shouldn't see such big cold patches, according to the current model.

So an international team of astronomers decided to investigate further, and stumbled across the hole. Although the void isn’t entirely empty, there are an estimated 10,000 galaxies missing from the patch of sky.

Previous studies had missed the supervoid as they were looking too far back - the researchers used the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii, and NASA's Wide Field Survey Explorer to count the number of galaxies in a patch of sky just 3 billion light years away.

"This is the greatest supervoid ever discovered," one of the researchers András Kovács, from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, told Hannah Devlin over at The Guardian. "In combination of size and emptiness, our supervoid is still a very rare event. We can only expect a few supervoids this big in the observable universe."

The supervoid isn't actually a vacuum, but because it's so sparse - it contains around 20 percent less matter than the rest of the Universe - it sucks energy from light travelling through it, partially contributing to the Cold Spot's unusually low temperature.

But, frustratingly, it still doesn't fully explain why that region of the sky is so cold.

"The void itself I’m not so unhappy about. It’s like the Everest of voids – there has to be one that’s bigger than the rest," Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist from the University of Durham in the UK, who wasn't involved in the research, told Devlin. "But it doesn’t explain the whole Cold Spot, which we’re still in the dark about."

The one thing the slow-down of light as it passes through the supervoid does support, however, is the fact that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. As Devlin explains:

"This is because the photons convert kinetic energy to gravitational potential as they travel to the heart of the void and get further from denser surrounding patches of universe - think of it as climbing a hill. In a stationary universe, the situation would be symmetrical and so the photons would regain the lost energy on the way out of the void (down the hill) and exit at the same speed.

In an accelerated expansion of the universe, however, everything is effectively becoming less dense as space is stretched out, so voids become relatively shallower over time. This means by the time the light descends the virtual hill, the hill has become flatter and the light cannot pick up all the speed it lost on the way in."

So if you weren't already feeling like the Universe was a cold, lonely place, don't worry, there are now holes out there thousands of times bigger than our entire galaxy.

[Sumocakewalk]

The Hubble Space Telescope drifts away from NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1993 after its optics, gyros and solar panels were repaired.

Euronews.com

It was launched into space exactly 25 years ago, on 24 April 1990, amid much skepticism.

The Hubble Space Telescope did little to silence its critics when a camera was discovered to be out of focus, and had to be repaired in 1993.

But today its discoveries about the universe are legendary.

“The telescope has exceeded all of our expectations, scientifically, the way it has impacted the culture, the way the people have adopted it as its own telescope. It has been a huge success story, probably NASA’s biggest success story over the years, at least outside of the manned space programme,” said Dr Kenneth G. Carpenter, project scientist for Hubble Operations.

Above all, the telescope has become renowned for its breathtaking images of the universe.

One of Hubble’s most famous images is the Hubble Deep Field that was made when the telescope focused on a seemingly black and empty sliver of space in the constellation Ursa Major and found it bursting with young galaxies and bright objects. According to NASA, astronomers called it a baby picture of space.

“That has allowed us to really peer back in time to the beginning of the universe about as far out in space as we can imagine within a couple of hundred years of the origin of the universe and see what galaxies were like,” Carpenter explains.

The telescope has enabled scientists to learn more about its origin and expansion, being credited with providing evidence for the existence of “dark energy”.

It has also led to breakthroughs in everyday technology. It is said that the Hubble’s need for tiny electronic components provided the impetus for developments leading to the know-how behind today’s selfies and other advances.

Since 1990, Hubble has made more than 1.2 million observations. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is expected to be launched in 2018. That telescope will peer further into space than any other instrument, building on Hubble’s success to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Until then: Happy Birthday, Hubble.


Sometimes called the butterfly nebula, planetary nebula NGC 6302's hourglass shape is created by roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles per hour, and has been traveling outward for about 2,200 years and stretches about 2 light-years. It comes from the explosion of a star five times the mass of the Sun. The dense ring-like cloud of dust hiding the star in the center from view is constricting the flow of matter and creating the hourglass shape. NGC 6302 lies within the Milky Way, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. This Hubble image was taken on July 27, 2009.

Happy Birthday, Hubble: legendary telescope turns 25 | euronews, world news

[Takeovers]

Until then: Happy Birthday, Hubble.

I second that, Hubble has been a huge success, largely thanks to the servicing missions.

Two nitpicks though.

The Hubble Space Telescope did little to silence its critics when a camera was discovered to be out of focus, and had to be repaired in 1993.

This is the sanitized version. Nothing was out of focus. They have simply miscalculated the shape of the main mirror and the whole telescope was near worthless as a result. At least compared to its expected capabilities. An absurd and embarassing mistake. They were able to fix that problem in the first servicing mission with correction optics fortunately.

Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is expected to be launched in 2018.

A very common misconception. James Webb is not a successor. It is a completely different device with completely different capabilities. James Webb is a far infrared telescope with its receptors extremely cryocooled for low infrared noise. They are complementary and ideally they should be used in parallel on the same objects.

Hubble is nearing the end of its life without another service misison. The telescope and the cameras are in great shape and could work for a long time. Thy gyros keeping it pointed are failing though and without them it cannot work. The gyros have a limited lifespan but they are designed to be replacable. They have been replaced once already. Some would like to have another service mission and propose doing it with the upcoming new manned Dragon spacecraft. It would be a much cheaper mission than the SpaceShuttle missions were. Let's hope it becomes reality.

[harrybarracuda]

This is the sanitized version. Nothing was out of focus. They have simply miscalculated the shape of the main mirror and the whole telescope was near worthless as a result.

Not quite, there was a defect on a measuring device used during polishing which essentially meant the edges of the mirror were polished too flat.

[beazalbob69]

This is the sanitized version. Nothing was out of focus. They have simply miscalculated the shape of the main mirror and the whole telescope was near worthless as a result.

Not quite, there was a defect on a measuring device used during polishing which essentially meant the edges of the mirror were polished too flat.

I worked with a guy in Florida that was part of the team that made the faulty mirror. He didn't like to talk about it! Seeing how he was just an inspector in a small machine shop it would seem that gaff ended a promising career.

[Takeovers]

I made a mistake polishing my first telescope mirror too and that also ended my carreer in telescope mirror making.

Fortunately it was not a professional carreer. It was only for my own self made mirror telescope when I was a high school student. Like Hubble it worked quite decently despite that mistake.

[Markus]

Check Out Three Amazing Rocket Launches That All Happened on One Day

By Attila Nagy on 30 Mar 2015 at 10:30PM

What a busy weekend for space exploration. There were three successful lift offs around the world, including two Soyuz launches from opposite sides of the Earth:

Friday, 19:42 GMT: Liftoff of the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (pictured above and below), with Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly on board, headed to the International Space Station for a year-long mission.

Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA
Friday, 21:46 GMT: Liftoff of another Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guyana, loaded with two satellites for the European Space Agency's Galileo navigation program.

Photo: ESA/CNES/ARIANESPACE-Service Optique CSG, S. Martin
Saturday 11:49 GMT: Launch of the Indian Space Research Organisation's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV-C27/IRNSS-1D, with the fourth satellite of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System in its payload, from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India's east coast.

Photo: ISRO
Top photo: Media photograph the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft as it launches to the International Space Station with Expedition 43 NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko, and Gennady Padalka of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) onboard (Bill Ingalls/NASA)

Just another Russian dock to the ISS. What do the SpaceX fanboys have to say about that ?

[harrybarracuda]

I made a mistake polishing my first telescope mirror too and that also ended my carreer in telescope mirror making.

Fortunately it was not a professional carreer. It was only for my own self made mirror telescope when I was a high school student. Like Hubble it worked quite decently despite that mistake.

But Hubble didn't work decently, it was an absolute disaster.

The fix, however, was brilliant.

[Takeovers]

But Hubble didn't work decently, it was an absolute disaster.

I don't disagree. However even the term disaster is relative. Even with disastrous performance - relative to the expected - it was still a very much sought after device. But only the fix made it what it was designed for.

[harrybarracuda]

No, it was a disaster.

An extract from a WF/PC image shows the light from a star spread over a wide area instead of being concentrated on a few pixels.

[Takeovers]

No, it was a disaster.

But still better than most ground based telescopes were. Even at that quality there were many more research requests by scientists than could be granted.

[Takeovers]

Progress M-27M on the way to resupply the ISS is lost. Reasons are not yet clear. This is a major hit for the ISS. It is the second loss of a payload mission in 6 months after the explosion of the Antares rocket carrying the Cygnus spacecraft of Orbital Sciences.

The next supply mission of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is now of critical importance to bolster supplies like food and other essentials. A failure of CRS-7 would get the ISS into critical territory.

Fortunately unlike the Orbital Sciences Cygnus failure this will very likely not lead to a lengthy stand down. Russia will probably launch again in 2 months time. Orbital however cancelled any flights of their unreliable launch vehicle Antares and switch to different vehicles with major delays.

Here an article. But it is now outdated. At that time they still had hope they could regain control. No doubt the failure will hit the media soon. Right now it is only in space related forums.

http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/28...ommunications/

[harrybarracuda]

^ That is a bit of an oops

[Takeovers]

^ That is a bit of an oops

Orbitals failure was much worse. Progress is an old and known reliable vehicle. Though if I would have to speculate the reason is in attempts to modernize it. Orbital played russian roulette and lost with a vehicle they knew exactly was unreliable.

BTW SpaceX CRS-2 very narrowly avoided a similar fate like this Progress.

Berth of a Dragon after Thruster Failure Recovery Establishes American Lifeline to ISS

Dragon was tumbling after a thruster failure and contact was already lost like with Progess now. They were only able to reestablish contact and save Dragon because the US Airforce provided their advanced communications network capabilities. One hour later Dragon would be doomed because its batteries would deplete without the solar panels.

Russia is lacking similar capabilities. They can contact Progress only while it is flying over groundstations located in Russia. I don't know if the US Airforce could have helped with Progress but Russia certainly did not ask.

[harrybarracuda]

An unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft ferrying supplies to the International Space Station is plunging back to Earth and apparently out of control.

“It has started descending. It has nowhere else to go,” an official familiar with the situation said on condition of anonymity on Wednesday. The official was speaking ahead of an official Russian space agency statement expected later in the day. “It is clear that absolutely uncontrollable reactions have begun.”

Unmanned Russian spacecraft plunging to Earth, says official | Science | The Guardian

[Horatio Hornblower]

There going to let it crash in the Middle east

[harrybarracuda]

There going to let it crash in the Middle east

You do understand the concept of "absolutely uncontrollable", dont you?