SPACE/COSMOS
Boeing-made satellite breaks up in space
Matt Oliver
Tue, October 22, 2024
An artist’s impression of Boeing’s Intelstat IS-33e satellite, which was kept in geostationary orbit to provide telecoms, broadcasting and other services to customers back on Earth
A Boeing-made satellite has exploded in space, dealing a fresh blow to the crisis-hit aerospace company.
The IS-33e satellite, which is owned and operated by Intelsat, was kept in geostationary orbit to provide telecoms, broadcasting and other services to customers back on Earth.
However, on Saturday an “anomaly” caused it to unexpectedly break apart, a statement from Intelsat said, bringing a halt to communications.
The incident is the latest embarrassment for Boeing, which has been battling a reputational crisis since a major safety failure on one of its 737 Max 9 passenger planes in January.
In its space division, executives at the company were also left red-faced after their Starliner spacecraft was deemed insufficiently safe to return two astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station this summer.
Boeing has been battling a reputational crisis since a panel blew out mid-flight on one of its 737 Max 9 planes in January - NTSB/via REUTERS
After confirming the satellite incident over the weekend, Intelsat has now said it believes IS-33e is a “total loss”.
The US Space Force separately said it was tracking some 20 pieces of debris from the craft in orbit.
It said officials had “observed no immediate threats” but were continuing to monitor the situation.
Intelsat said customers who relied on the satellite’s services were being transferred to other assets or satellites operated by third parties.
In a statement, the company added: “We are coordinating with the satellite manufacturer, Boeing, and government agencies to analyse data and observations.
“A failure review board has been convened to complete a comprehensive analysis of the cause of the anomaly.”
The IS-33e satellite had suffered problems previously, according to the website Space News, with issues concerning its primary thruster delaying it entering service in January 2017.
Further problems with the craft’s thrusters while tests were being conducted in orbit then reduced the satellite’s planned 15-year lifespan by three and a half years.
IS-33e was designed and manufactured by Boeing, based on the company’s 702 communications satellite family.
Boeing has been contacted for comment.
Matt Oliver
Tue, October 22, 2024
An artist’s impression of Boeing’s Intelstat IS-33e satellite, which was kept in geostationary orbit to provide telecoms, broadcasting and other services to customers back on Earth
A Boeing-made satellite has exploded in space, dealing a fresh blow to the crisis-hit aerospace company.
The IS-33e satellite, which is owned and operated by Intelsat, was kept in geostationary orbit to provide telecoms, broadcasting and other services to customers back on Earth.
However, on Saturday an “anomaly” caused it to unexpectedly break apart, a statement from Intelsat said, bringing a halt to communications.
The incident is the latest embarrassment for Boeing, which has been battling a reputational crisis since a major safety failure on one of its 737 Max 9 passenger planes in January.
In its space division, executives at the company were also left red-faced after their Starliner spacecraft was deemed insufficiently safe to return two astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station this summer.
Boeing has been battling a reputational crisis since a panel blew out mid-flight on one of its 737 Max 9 planes in January - NTSB/via REUTERS
After confirming the satellite incident over the weekend, Intelsat has now said it believes IS-33e is a “total loss”.
The US Space Force separately said it was tracking some 20 pieces of debris from the craft in orbit.
It said officials had “observed no immediate threats” but were continuing to monitor the situation.
Intelsat said customers who relied on the satellite’s services were being transferred to other assets or satellites operated by third parties.
In a statement, the company added: “We are coordinating with the satellite manufacturer, Boeing, and government agencies to analyse data and observations.
“A failure review board has been convened to complete a comprehensive analysis of the cause of the anomaly.”
The IS-33e satellite had suffered problems previously, according to the website Space News, with issues concerning its primary thruster delaying it entering service in January 2017.
Further problems with the craft’s thrusters while tests were being conducted in orbit then reduced the satellite’s planned 15-year lifespan by three and a half years.
IS-33e was designed and manufactured by Boeing, based on the company’s 702 communications satellite family.
Boeing has been contacted for comment.
A Fascinating Theory About a Ring of Asteroids Around Earth Has Some Wild Implications for Evolution
Riley Black
Mon, October 21, 2024
Like many of us, Earth bears old pockmarks. Our planet’s crust has a band of ancient craters that formed around 465 million years ago. The divots were created at a time when animals in the seas were taking on a broad array of new forms, building complex ecosystems from plankton to jawless fish to spaceship-like filter feeders. Back then, those strange invertebrates might have been able to look up through the nighttime shallows and see the glow of Earth’s very own ring, which may have been something like Saturn’s.
Spotting the Milky Way on a clear night is awe-inspiring enough. I can only be envious of the early fish and archaic crabs that might have seen Earth’s temporary band of spinning debris. That band, which Monash University planetary scientist Andrew Tomkins and colleagues are arguing existed in a new paper, may have been the result of an asteroid’s passing just close enough to our prehistoric planet to break up into innumerable pieces. (Unlike Saturn’s ring, it wouldn’t have been composed of so much ice.) The small, iron-rich rocks stayed in orbit for a time, but—as expressed by my favorite new piece of technical jargon—“deorbited” around 465 million years ago, some of them crashing down into Earth. And although the band of ancient craters is the only physical evidence such a ring ever existed, life on Earth likely recorded the geological wonder too.
The new hypothesis that there was such a ring is still in its early stages, and not every proposed ring stays put in our scientific visions of the past. Geologists previously suggested that Earth had a ring during the Eocene, about 35.5 million years ago, but the idea had more to do with searching for a possible cause for ancient climate shifts than with hard evidence from the rock record. It’s possible that the Ordovician craters in Earth’s rock record were created by another astronomical phenomenon, like asteroid debris forming a miniature moon that then broke apart. Whatever transpired, we know that some unusual event showered chunks of rocks across our planet’s surface around 465 million years ago, a little sprinkle of space making its way to Earth.
Let’s assume that the provenance of those rocks was a ring, and follow through the consequences of such a debris field: When Earth wore a ring around its middle, it would have affected how sunlight reached the planet’s surface. The ring probably would have shaded the hemispheres of the planet experiencing winter, while slightly increasing summer heat on the other half, Tomkins and co-authors suggest. Vast quantities of dust from the asteroid and the impacts of the smaller pieces might have affected sunlight and global climate too, perhaps helping to explain why Earth became an icehouse between 444 and 463 million years ago. And as we well know from our present habit of turning an icehouse climate into a greenhouse one, an altered climate dramatically affects life on our planet.
During the time Earth may have gained and lost its ring, life was going through an incredible evolutionary burst. Paleontologists know this as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. Think of it as the sequel to the more famous, earlier Cambrian explosion, which saw the rapid origin of many different kinds of animal bodies and groups of living things in the seas. The GOBE was the following period’s expansion of those previous themes, everything from algae to early clams and fish evolving into new forms and creating ecosystems comparable to what we see in today’s oceans. It was the assembly of what we might think of as modern ocean ecosystems, a rich base of plankton allowing many other forms of life to thrive.
Working out what caused the GOBE is tricky if not impossible, given that this is not Sim Earth and we can’t simply replay different scenarios to see what fits our hypothesis best. Still, perhaps Earth’s ring and its climate consequences had a significant influence on Earth’s life, and was the sudden global shift that nudged life to evolve in different ways. And whether a ring, a miniature moon, or some other scenario, spattering our planet with space rocks may have created conditions that set up what we think of as “modern” oceans.
Half a century ago, such ideas were received by the scientific community as speculative at best and fanciful at worst. Evolution had usually been thought of in reference to earthbound processes. (It still is, in most cases.) But today, we can consider how a near-miss asteroid and a possible ring around Earth affected life in the distant past because we know that space debris had a deep impact on life at another time. Long after the GOBE, about 66 million years ago, when ecosystems on land were as full of varied living things as the seas, a 6-mile-wide asteroid struck Earth at a place we now call Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. The heat pulse created by falling debris from the strike virtually wiped out every nonbird dinosaur on the planet within a day, soot and dust filled with sunlight-reflecting compounds then creating a global impact winter that lasted at least three years. The world didn’t just lose almost all the dinosaurs; it also lost the flying pterosaurs, the seagoing mosasaurs, and reef-building clams the size of a toilet seat, in addition to mass extinctions of mammals, lizards, birds, and even plankton. Just this year, planetary scientists identified the asteroid as a carbonaceous chondrite, an iron-heavy chunk of rock left over from our solar system’s formation that was pulled onto a collision course with Earth in the most catastrophic million-to-one shot of all time.
For all the destruction that space rock caused, it cleared the way for so much other life. Without that asteroid, we wouldn’t be here or recognize the planet we now call home.
Primates were already around by the time the asteroid struck, in a Northern Hemisphere spring 66 million years ago. When they emerged from their hiding places in the aftermath of the first day and scrounged for food in the following years of darkness, the world was fundamentally changed. Angiosperms, or flowering plants, grew back faster and denser than the previously ubiquitous conifer relatives had been. Iron from the immense asteroid was distributed in the dusty debris and enriched soils across the planet, allowing Earth to host the very first rainforests in the tropics. And without hulking dinosaurs to plow down vegetation and keep forests relatively open, plants grew dense into multitiered habitats that acted as the crucible of mammal evolution. It was here that our ancestors, among many other forms of life, found themselves in a world of thick, novel habitats. Dinosaurs were out of the way, but competition for space and food among these smaller creatures nudged surviving species into new forms. Had the asteroid missed or even struck a different place on the planet, then the world would have continued to be covered in forests of resin-oozing monkey puzzle trees and ginkgoes, and a place where dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes proliferated while mammals thrived only at diminutive size.
The evolution of Earth’s life is often discussed and debated in terms of what’s happening on our planet. Life adjusts according to cooperation and competition, climate change and human impact. But Earth exists as part of a solar system, galaxy, and universe too—and sometimes other parts of our universe come to visit us. Earth isn’t an isolated terrarium, and life upon it has been as influenced by impacts and near misses as by continental drift. We can’t answer why birds are the only dinosaurs still alive, or perhaps even how our oceans built up their complex ecosystems, without speaking of asteroids and their consequences. Speeding rocks have altered life’s unfolding so unpredictably that it’s often easier to write them off as a rare and unusual part of the story. We’re starting to see evidence otherwise. We owe our very existence to an asteroid, after all, our story connected more than 9 billion miles away to the cusp of our solar system. It’s bittersweet, owing even the possibility of my existence to a cold chunk of rock that took away the dinosaurs I wish I could see alive.
Webb telescope spots extremely bright objects. They shouldn't be there.
Mon, October 21, 2024
Like many of us, Earth bears old pockmarks. Our planet’s crust has a band of ancient craters that formed around 465 million years ago. The divots were created at a time when animals in the seas were taking on a broad array of new forms, building complex ecosystems from plankton to jawless fish to spaceship-like filter feeders. Back then, those strange invertebrates might have been able to look up through the nighttime shallows and see the glow of Earth’s very own ring, which may have been something like Saturn’s.
Spotting the Milky Way on a clear night is awe-inspiring enough. I can only be envious of the early fish and archaic crabs that might have seen Earth’s temporary band of spinning debris. That band, which Monash University planetary scientist Andrew Tomkins and colleagues are arguing existed in a new paper, may have been the result of an asteroid’s passing just close enough to our prehistoric planet to break up into innumerable pieces. (Unlike Saturn’s ring, it wouldn’t have been composed of so much ice.) The small, iron-rich rocks stayed in orbit for a time, but—as expressed by my favorite new piece of technical jargon—“deorbited” around 465 million years ago, some of them crashing down into Earth. And although the band of ancient craters is the only physical evidence such a ring ever existed, life on Earth likely recorded the geological wonder too.
The new hypothesis that there was such a ring is still in its early stages, and not every proposed ring stays put in our scientific visions of the past. Geologists previously suggested that Earth had a ring during the Eocene, about 35.5 million years ago, but the idea had more to do with searching for a possible cause for ancient climate shifts than with hard evidence from the rock record. It’s possible that the Ordovician craters in Earth’s rock record were created by another astronomical phenomenon, like asteroid debris forming a miniature moon that then broke apart. Whatever transpired, we know that some unusual event showered chunks of rocks across our planet’s surface around 465 million years ago, a little sprinkle of space making its way to Earth.
Let’s assume that the provenance of those rocks was a ring, and follow through the consequences of such a debris field: When Earth wore a ring around its middle, it would have affected how sunlight reached the planet’s surface. The ring probably would have shaded the hemispheres of the planet experiencing winter, while slightly increasing summer heat on the other half, Tomkins and co-authors suggest. Vast quantities of dust from the asteroid and the impacts of the smaller pieces might have affected sunlight and global climate too, perhaps helping to explain why Earth became an icehouse between 444 and 463 million years ago. And as we well know from our present habit of turning an icehouse climate into a greenhouse one, an altered climate dramatically affects life on our planet.
During the time Earth may have gained and lost its ring, life was going through an incredible evolutionary burst. Paleontologists know this as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. Think of it as the sequel to the more famous, earlier Cambrian explosion, which saw the rapid origin of many different kinds of animal bodies and groups of living things in the seas. The GOBE was the following period’s expansion of those previous themes, everything from algae to early clams and fish evolving into new forms and creating ecosystems comparable to what we see in today’s oceans. It was the assembly of what we might think of as modern ocean ecosystems, a rich base of plankton allowing many other forms of life to thrive.
Working out what caused the GOBE is tricky if not impossible, given that this is not Sim Earth and we can’t simply replay different scenarios to see what fits our hypothesis best. Still, perhaps Earth’s ring and its climate consequences had a significant influence on Earth’s life, and was the sudden global shift that nudged life to evolve in different ways. And whether a ring, a miniature moon, or some other scenario, spattering our planet with space rocks may have created conditions that set up what we think of as “modern” oceans.
Half a century ago, such ideas were received by the scientific community as speculative at best and fanciful at worst. Evolution had usually been thought of in reference to earthbound processes. (It still is, in most cases.) But today, we can consider how a near-miss asteroid and a possible ring around Earth affected life in the distant past because we know that space debris had a deep impact on life at another time. Long after the GOBE, about 66 million years ago, when ecosystems on land were as full of varied living things as the seas, a 6-mile-wide asteroid struck Earth at a place we now call Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. The heat pulse created by falling debris from the strike virtually wiped out every nonbird dinosaur on the planet within a day, soot and dust filled with sunlight-reflecting compounds then creating a global impact winter that lasted at least three years. The world didn’t just lose almost all the dinosaurs; it also lost the flying pterosaurs, the seagoing mosasaurs, and reef-building clams the size of a toilet seat, in addition to mass extinctions of mammals, lizards, birds, and even plankton. Just this year, planetary scientists identified the asteroid as a carbonaceous chondrite, an iron-heavy chunk of rock left over from our solar system’s formation that was pulled onto a collision course with Earth in the most catastrophic million-to-one shot of all time.
For all the destruction that space rock caused, it cleared the way for so much other life. Without that asteroid, we wouldn’t be here or recognize the planet we now call home.
Primates were already around by the time the asteroid struck, in a Northern Hemisphere spring 66 million years ago. When they emerged from their hiding places in the aftermath of the first day and scrounged for food in the following years of darkness, the world was fundamentally changed. Angiosperms, or flowering plants, grew back faster and denser than the previously ubiquitous conifer relatives had been. Iron from the immense asteroid was distributed in the dusty debris and enriched soils across the planet, allowing Earth to host the very first rainforests in the tropics. And without hulking dinosaurs to plow down vegetation and keep forests relatively open, plants grew dense into multitiered habitats that acted as the crucible of mammal evolution. It was here that our ancestors, among many other forms of life, found themselves in a world of thick, novel habitats. Dinosaurs were out of the way, but competition for space and food among these smaller creatures nudged surviving species into new forms. Had the asteroid missed or even struck a different place on the planet, then the world would have continued to be covered in forests of resin-oozing monkey puzzle trees and ginkgoes, and a place where dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes proliferated while mammals thrived only at diminutive size.
The evolution of Earth’s life is often discussed and debated in terms of what’s happening on our planet. Life adjusts according to cooperation and competition, climate change and human impact. But Earth exists as part of a solar system, galaxy, and universe too—and sometimes other parts of our universe come to visit us. Earth isn’t an isolated terrarium, and life upon it has been as influenced by impacts and near misses as by continental drift. We can’t answer why birds are the only dinosaurs still alive, or perhaps even how our oceans built up their complex ecosystems, without speaking of asteroids and their consequences. Speeding rocks have altered life’s unfolding so unpredictably that it’s often easier to write them off as a rare and unusual part of the story. We’re starting to see evidence otherwise. We owe our very existence to an asteroid, after all, our story connected more than 9 billion miles away to the cusp of our solar system. It’s bittersweet, owing even the possibility of my existence to a cold chunk of rock that took away the dinosaurs I wish I could see alive.
Webb telescope spots extremely bright objects. They shouldn't be there.
Mashable
Tue, October 22, 2024
An artist's depiction shows how a quasar, which is the extremely bright core of a galaxy, unleashes torrents of energy from its central black hole.
Scientists didn't build the James Webb Space Telescope simply to find answers. They've sought new questions and mysteries.
And they've just found another.
Using the Webb telescope to peer back into the earliest periods of the universe, researchers spotted a handful of some of the brightest objects in the cosmos — quasars — adrift in the empty voids of space, isolated from other galaxies. This is strange. Quasars are black holes at galactic centers, millions to billions times more massive than the sun, that shoot potent bursts of energy into space (from material falling toward or rapidly spinning around black holes). The prevailing, and logical, theory was that such massive, hungry objects could only form in regions of dense matter.
But that's not always the case.
"Contrary to previous belief, we find on average, these quasars are not necessarily in those highest-density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to be sitting in the middle of nowhere," Anna-Christina Eilers, a physicist at MIT who led the research, said in a statement. "It’s difficult to explain how these quasars could have grown so big if they appear to have nothing to feed from."
SEE ALSO: NASA scientist viewed first Voyager images. What he saw gave him chills.
The research was recently published in a science journal called the Astrophysical Journal.
In the image below, you can see one of these isolated quasars, circled in red. Astronomers expect to find quasars amid regions flush with other galaxies. There, bounties of cosmic matter could support the creation of such giant and luminous objects. (In fact, "a quasar’s light outshines that of all the stars in its host galaxy combined," NASA explains.)
An isolated quasar in deep space, circled in red.
An isolated quasar in deep space, circled in red. Credit: Christina Eilers / EIGER team
In this research, astronomers endeavored to view some of the oldest objects in the universe, created some 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. For perspective, our solar system wouldn't form for another 8.5 billion years or so.
The Webb telescope, which orbits 1 million miles from Earth, captures profoundly faint, stretched-out light as it existed eons ago. This light is just reaching us now.
"It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail," Eilers said. "For the first time, JWST enabled us to look at the environment of these quasars, where they grew up, and what their neighborhood was like."
"It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail."
This latest cosmic quandary is not just about how these quasars formed in isolation, but how they formed so rapidly. "The main question we’re trying to answer is, how do these billion-solar-mass black holes form at a time when the universe is still really, really young? It’s still in its infancy," Eilers said.
Although the Webb telescope is designed to peer through the thick clouds of dust and gas in the universe, the researchers do say it's possible that these enigmatic quasars are in fact surrounded by galaxies — but the galaxies are shrouded. To find out, more observation with Webb is necessary.
An artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope observing the cosmos 1 million miles from Earth.
An artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope observing the cosmos 1 million miles from Earth. Credit: NASA-GSFC / Adriana M. Gutierrez (CI Lab)
The Webb telescope's powerful abilities
The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades to come:
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.
NASA captures star duo spraying plasma a quarter-trillion miles
Mashable
Mon, October 21, 2024
The Hubble Space Telescope has been monitoring the binary star system R Aquarii.
New images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope demonstrate how a withered star remnant is only mostly dead — that is until a bloated nearby star reanimates it, a la Frankenstein.
The legendary observatory has monitored a double star system about 700 light-years away from Earth for more than 30 years, capturing how it dims and brightens over time as a result of strong pulses from the primary star. The binary, composed of a white dwarf star and a red giant star, has a caustic relationship, releasing tangled streams of glowing gas into the cosmos like an erratic lawn sprinkler.
Astronomers have dubbed this toxic pair in the constellation Aquarius a "stellar volcano" for how it sprays streams of glowing gas some 248 billion miles in space. For comparison, that's 24 times farther than the diameter of our solar system.
NASA is watching the stars to study how they recycle elements into the universe through nuclear energy.
"The plasma is shooting into space over 1 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes!" NASA said in a statement. "The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo."
SEE ALSO: This nova is on the verge of exploding. You could see it any day now.
White dwarf star swinging close to red giant star
When a white dwarf star swings close to a red giant star, it draws away hydrogen. Credit: NASA Goddard illustration
The binary star system, known collectively as R Aquarii, is a special type of double star, called symbiotic, and it's the closest such pair to Earth. In this system, an elderly red giant, bloated and dying, and a white dwarf, the shriveled core of a dead medium-sized star, are orbiting each other.
The big star is over 400 times larger than the sun and varies dramatically in brightness over a 400-day period. At its peak, the red giant is 5,000 times brighter than the sun. Like the big star in R Aquarii, the sun is expected to bloat into a red giant in about 5 billion years.
When the white dwarf in R Aquarii gets close to its hulking companion along its 44-year orbit, the dead star steals stellar material away with gravity, causing hydrogen gas to heap onto its cool surface. That process makes the corpse rise from the dead, so to speak, warming up and eventually igniting like a bomb.
NASA and the European Space Agency created the above timelapse video of R Aquarii using Hubble images that spanned 2014 to 2023.
This thermonuclear explosion is called a "nova" — not to be confused with a supernova, the obliteration of an enormous star before it collapses into a black hole or neutron star. The nova doesn't destroy the white dwarf — rather, the explosion merely causes it to spew more elements, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron, back into space.
This year scientists have been on the edge of their seats, waiting for a nova to emerge from T Coronae Borealis, or T CrB, a binary star system about 3,000 light-years away in the Milky Way. This particular nova, which should be visible to the naked eye, is intriguing because it experiences periodic outbursts. Experts have determined it detonates about every 80 years.
A few months ago, experts believed the white dwarf would go nova sometime before September. Curiously, that sudden brightening hasn't happened yet.
"Recurrent novae are unpredictable and contrarian," said Koji Mukai, a NASA astrophysicist, in a June statement. "When you think there can’t possibly be a reason they follow a certain set pattern, they do — and as soon as you start to rely on them repeating the same pattern, they deviate from it completely."
These events are critical to understand because of how important they are for generating and distributing the ingredients for new stars, planets, and life. And this is what astronomer Carl Sagan meant when he said humans are made of "star stuff." The same substances that make our bodies were literally forged within the cores of stars, then flung through the cosmos when the stars burst.
R Aquarii blasts glowing jets that twist up and out following strong magnetic fields. The plasma seems to loop back onto itself, weaving an enormous spiral.
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