Monday, January 13, 2025

SPACE/COSMOS

Bezos' Blue Origin delays debut launch of New Glenn space rocket

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin on Monday delayed the launch of its New Glenn rocket due to "anomalies". The company hopes the New Glenn will lead its first orbital mission, making it a competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Issued on: 13/01/2025
By: FRANCE 24

The New Glenn rocket on the launch pad at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. © Blue Origin Handout via AFP

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin called off the launch of its long-anticipated New Glenn rocket after "a few anomalies" during the mission countdown on Monday, postponing by at least a day an inaugural attempt to reach orbit and compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch market.

"We are standing down today's launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window," Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin executive, said during a live feed watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers.

The delay could be at least 24 hours but will likely last longer as the company examines the snag for the high-risk, high-stakes mission.

A quarter century after its founding, Blue Origin hopes the launch of its maiden orbital voyage with a brand new rocket will shake up the commercial space race.

Named New Glenn after legendary astronaut John Glenn, it stands 320 feet (98 meters) tall, roughly equivalent to a 32-story building.

The culmination of a decade-long, multi-billion-dollar development journey, the flight, whenever it takes off, will include an attempt to land New Glenn's first stage booster on a sea-fairing barge in the Atlantic Ocean 10 minutes after liftoff, while the rocket's second stage continues toward orbit.

With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, vital for the commercial sector, the Pentagon and NASA.

"SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor... this is great," G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship – its gargantuan new-generation rocket – this week, upping the high-stakes rivalry.

Landing attempt

Space rockets compared. © Gal Roma, Stéphane Koguc, Emmanuelle Michel, AFP

Though SpaceX has long made such landings a near-routine spectacle, this is Blue Origin's first shot at a touchdown on the high seas.

Meanwhile, the rocket's upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of roughly 12,000 miles above the surface.

A Defence Department-funded prototype spaceship called Blue Ring will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight.

Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets – used for suborbital tourism – but they are much smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea.

Physically, New Glenn dwarfs the 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads.

It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks.

Cautious pace

Jeff Bezos walks near Blue Origin's New Shepard after flying into space on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. © Joe Raedle, Getty Images via AFP

Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink.

For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals – United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab – trail far behind.

Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space. But whereas Musk dreams of colonising Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, "humanity's blue origin."

He founded Blue Origin in 2000 – two years before Musk created SpaceX – but has adopted a more cautious pace, in contrast to his rival's "fail fast, learn fast" philosophy.

The Blue Origin New Glenn rocket stands ready on Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on January 11, 2025, in Florida. © John Raoux, AP

If New Glenn succeeds, it will give the US government "dissimilar redundancy" – valuable backup if one system fails, said Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University.

Musk's closeness to President-elect Donald Trump has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, especially with private astronaut Jared Isaacman – a business associate of Musk – slated to become the next NASA chief.

Bezos, however, has been making his own overtures, paying respect to his former foe during a visit to Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence, while Amazon has said it would donate $1 million to the inauguration committee.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)

New study unveils breakthrough in understanding cosmic particle accelerators

Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how collisionless shock waves – found throughout the universe – are able to accelerate particles to extreme speeds.

Northumbria University

Image 1: Composite image of the Tycho Supernova remnant. Shock waves from such explosive events are believed to be the main drivers behind cosmic rays. — image:
*Composite image of the Tycho Supernova remnant. Shock waves from such explosive events are believed to be the main drivers behind cosmic rays.*
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Credit: Credit: MPIA/NASA/Calar Alto Observatory

Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how collisionless shock waves – found throughout the universe – are able to accelerate particles to extreme speeds.

These shock waves are one of nature's most powerful particle accelerators and have long intrigued scientists for the role they play in producing cosmic rays – high-energy particles that travel across vast distances in space.

The research, published today in Nature Communications, combines satellite observations from NASA’s MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale) and THEMIS/ARTEMIS missions with recent theoretical advancements, offering a comprehensive new model to explain the acceleration of electrons in collisionless shock environments.

The paper, ‘Revealing an Unexpectedly Low Electron Injection Threshold via Reinforced Shock Acceleration’, was written by a team of international academics, led by Dr Savvas Raptis of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in the USA, and in collaboration with Northumbria University’s Dr Ahmad Lalti.

This research addresses a long-standing puzzle in astrophysics – how electrons reach extremely high, or relativistic, energy levels.

For decades, scientists have been trying to answer a crucial question in space physics: What processes allow electrons to be accelerated to relativistic speeds?

The main mechanism to explain acceleration of electrons to relativistic energies is called Fermi acceleration or Diffusive Shock Acceleration (DSA). However, this mechanism requires electrons to be initially energized to a specific threshold energy before getting efficiently accelerated by DSA. Trying to address how electrons achieve this initial energy is known as ‘the injection problem’.

This new study provides key insights into the electron injection problem, showing that electrons can be accelerated to high energies through the interaction of various processes across multiple scales.

Using real-time data from the MMS mission, which measures the interaction of Earth’s magnetosphere with the solar wind, and the THEMIS/ARTEMIS mission, which studies the upstream plasma environment near the Moon, the research team observed a large scale, time dependent (i.e. transient) phenomenon, upstream of Earth's bow shock, on December 17, 2017.

During this event, electrons in Earth’s foreshock region – an area where the solar wind is predisturbed by its interaction with the bow shock – reached unprecedented energy levels, surpassing 500 keV.

This is a striking result given that electrons observed in the foreshock region are typically found at energies ~1 keV.

This research suggests that these high-energy electrons were generated by the complex interplay of multiple acceleration mechanisms, including the interaction of electrons with various plasma waves, transient structures in the foreshock, and Earth's bow shock.

All of those mechanisms act together to accelerate electrons from low energies ~ 1keV up to relativistic energies reaching the observed 500 keV, resulting in a particularly efficient electron acceleration process.

By refining the shock acceleration model, this study provides new insight into the workings of space plasmas and the fundamental processes that govern energy transfer in the universe.

As a result, the research opens new pathways for understanding cosmic ray generation and offers a glimpse into how phenomena within our solar system can guide us to understand astrophysical processes throughout the Universe.

Dr. Raptis believes that studying phenomena across different scales is crucial for understanding nature. “Most of our research focuses on either small-scale effects, like wave-particle interactions, or large-scale properties, like the influence of solar wind,” he says.

“However, as we demonstrated in this work, by combining phenomena across different scales, we were able to observe their interplay that ultimately energize particles in space.”

Dr Ahmad Lalti added: “One of the most effective ways to deepen our understanding of the universe we live in is by using our near-Earth plasma environment as a natural laboratory.

“In this work, we use in-situ observation from MMS and THEMIS/ARTEMIS to show how different fundamental plasma processes at different scales work in concert to energize electrons from low energies up to high relativistic energies.

“Those fundamental processes are not restricted to our solar system and are expected to occur across the universe.

“This makes our proposed framework relevant for better understanding electron acceleration up to cosmic-ray energies at astrophysical structures light-years away from our solar system, such as at other stellar systems, supernovae remnants, and active galactic nuclei.”

The paper ‘Revealing an Unexpectedly Low Electron Injection Threshold via Reinforced Shock Acceleration’ has been published today (Monday 13 January 2025) in Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-55641-9).

For more information please contact Dr Savvas Raptis at savvas.raptis@jhuapl.edu or Dr Ahmad Lalti atahmad.lalti@northumbria.ac.uk

Photo captions:

Image 1: Composite image of the Tycho Supernova remnant. Shock waves from such explosive events are believed to be the main drivers behind cosmic rays. Credit: MPIA/NASA/Calar Alto Observatory

Image 2: Illustration of Earth’s bow shock and magnetic field environment. Particles coming from the Sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field forming a shock wave (called bow shock – shown in red). Credits Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Image 3: MMS measurements showing the absence of 100-500 keV (high-energy) electrons. (B): MMS measurements during an event with energetic electrons. The X-axis (horizontal) shows the time while the Y-axis(vertical) represents the ratio between the background flux (number of electrons passing through a specific area in a given amount of time) and the actual observation. A value of 1, as shown on the left plot, indicates no energetic particles, whereas the right panel demonstrates a tenfold increase in energetic electrons.

Image 4: A series of astrophysical bow shocks to the southeast (lower-left) and northwest (upper-right). Image is taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Image shows Herbig-Haro 211 showing the details of the outflow of a young star. Herbig-Haro objects are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from newborn stars form shock waves. Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, Tom Ray (Dublin)

Image 5: Dr Savvas Raptis of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA.

Image 6: Dr Ahmad Lalti of Northumbria University’s Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering, UK.

- Ends -

Image 4: A series of astrophysical bow shocks to the southeast (lower-left) and northwest (upper-right). Image is taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Image shows Herbig-Haro 211 showing the details of the outflow of a young star. Herbig-Haro objects are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from newborn stars form shock waves.
Credit
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, Tom Ray (Dublin)

Credit

Dr Savvas Raptis and Dr Ahmad Lalti

Illustration of Earth’s bow shock and magnetic field environment. Particles coming from the Sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field forming a shock wave (called bow shock – shown in red).
Credit
Credits Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-55641-9

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Revealing an Unexpectedly Low Electron Injection Threshold via Reinforced Shock Acceleration

Article Publication Date

13-Jan-2025

X-ray flashes from a nearby supermassive black hole accelerate mysteriously

Their source could be the core of a dead star that’s teetering at the black hole’s edge, MIT astronomers report

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Edge Flares — image:
In this artist’s rendering, a stream of matter trails a white dwarf orbiting within the innermost accretion disk surrounding 1ES 1927’s supermassive black hole.
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Credit: Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University

One supermassive black hole has kept astronomers glued to their scopes for the last several years. First came a surprise disappearance, and now, a precarious spinning act.

The black hole in question is 1ES 1927+654, which is about as massive as a million suns and sits in a galaxy that is 100 million light-years away. In 2018, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere observed that the black hole’s corona — a cloud of whirling, white-hot plasma — suddenly disappeared, before reassembling months later. The brief though dramatic shut-off was a first in black hole astronomy.

Members of the MIT team have now caught the same black hole exhibiting more unprecedented behavior.

The astronomers have detected flashes of X-rays coming from the black hole at a steadily increasing clip. Over a period of two years, the flashes, at millihertz oscillations, increased in frequency from every 18 minutes to every seven minutes. This dramatic speed-up in X-rays has not been seen from a black hole until now.

The researchers explored a number of scenarios for what might explain the flashes. They believe the most likely culprit is a spinning white dwarf — an extremely compact core of a dead star that is orbiting around the black hole and getting precariously closer to its event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull. If this is the case, the white dwarf must be pulling off an impressive balancing act, as it could be coming right up to the black hole’s edge without actually falling in.

“This would be the closest thing that we know of around any black hole,” says Megan Masterson, a graduate student in physics at MIT, who co-led the discovery. “This tells us that objects like white dwarfs may be able to live very close to an event horizon for a relatively extended period of time.”

The researchers present their findings today at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland.

If a white dwarf is at the root of the black hole’s mysterious flashing, it would also give off gravitational waves, in a range that would be detectable by next-generation observatories such as NASA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA).

“These new detectors are designed to detect oscillations on the scale of minutes, so this black hole system is in that sweet spot,” says co-author Erin Kara, associate professor of physics at MIT.

The study’s other co-authors include MIT Kavli members Christos Panagiotou, Joheen Chakraborty, Kevin Burdge, Riccardo Arcodia, Ronald Remillard, and Jingyi Wang, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

Nothing normal

Kara and Masterson were part of the team that observed 1ES 1927+654 in 2018, as the black hole’s corona went dark, then slowly rebuilt itself over time. For a while, the newly reformed corona — a cloud of highly energetic plasma and X-rays — was the brightest X-ray-emitting object in the sky.

“It was still extremely bright, though it wasn’t doing anything new for a couple years and was kind of gurgling along. But we felt we had to keep monitoring it because it was so beautiful,” Kara says. “Then we noticed something that has never really been seen before.”

In 2022, the team looked through observations of the black hole taken by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, a space-based observatory that detects and measures X-ray emissions from black holes, neutron stars, galactic clusters, and other extreme cosmic sources. They noticed that X-rays from the black hole appeared to pulse with increasing frequency. Such “quasi-periodic oscillations” have only been observed in a handful of other supermassive black holes, where X-ray flashes appear with regular frequency.

In the case of 1ES 1927+654, the flickering seemed to steadily ramp up, from every 18 minutes to every seven minutes over the span of two years.

“We’ve never seen this dramatic variability in the rate at which it’s flashing,” Masterson says. “This looked absolutely nothing like a normal black hole.”

The fact that the flashing was detected in the X-ray band points to the strong possibility that the source is somewhere very close to the black hole. The innermost regions of a black hole are extremely high-energy environments, where X-rays are produced by fast-moving, hot plasma. X-rays are less likely to be seen at farther distances, where gas can circle more slowly in an accretion disk. The cooler environment of the disk can emit optical and ultraviolet light, but rarely gives off X-rays.

“Seeing something in the X-rays is already telling you you’re pretty close to the black hole,” Kara says. “When you see variability on the timescale of minutes, that’s close to the event horizon, and the first thing your mind goes to is circular motion, and whether something could be orbiting around the black hole.”

X-ray kick-up

Whatever was producing the X-ray flashes was doing so at an extremely close distance from the black hole, which the researchers estimate to be within a few million miles of the event horizon.

Masterson and Kara explored models for various astrophysical phenomena that could explain the X-ray patterns that they observed, including a possibility relating to the black hole’s corona.

“One idea is that this corona is oscillating, maybe blobbing back and forth, and if it starts to shrink, those oscillations get faster as the scales get smaller,” Masterson says. “But we’re in the very early stages of understanding coronal oscillations.”

A more likely scenario, and one that scientists have a better grasp on in terms of the physics involved, has to do with a daredevil of a white dwarf.

“These things are really small and quite compact, and we hypothesize that it’s a white dwarf that is getting so close to the black hole,” Masterson says.

According to their modeling, the researchers estimate the white dwarf could have been about one-tenth the mass of the sun. In contrast, the supermassive black hole itself is on the order of 1 million solar masses.

When any object gets this close to a supermassive black hole, gravitational waves are expected to be emitted, dragging the object closer to the black hole. As it circles closer, the white dwarf moves at a faster rate, which can explain the increasing frequency of X-ray oscillations that the team observed.

The white dwarf is practically at the precipice of no return and is estimated to be just a few million miles from the event horizon. However, the researchers predict that the star will not fall in. While the black hole’s gravity may pull the white dwarf inward, the star is also shedding part of its outer layer into the black hole. This shedding acts as a small kick-back, such that the white dwarf — an incredibly compact object itself — can resist crossing the black hole’s boundary.

“Because white dwarfs are small and compact, they’re very difficult to shred apart, so they can be very close to a black hole,” Kara says. “If this scenario is correct, this white dwarf is right at the turn around point, and we may see it get further away.”

The team plans to continue observing the system, with existing and future telescopes, to better understand the extreme physics at work in a black hole’s innermost environments. They are particularly excited to study the system once the space-based gravitational-wave detector LISA launches — currently planned for the mid 2030s — as the gravitational waves that the system should give off will be in a sweet spot that LISA can clearly detect.

“The one thing I’ve learned with this source is to never stop looking at it because it will probably teach us something new,” Masterson says. “The next step is just to keep our eyes open.”

###

Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News

Edge Flares 2

Astronomers developed this scenario to explain the evolution of rapid X-ray oscillations detected by ESA’s (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton satellite. ESA’s LISA mission, due to launch in the next decade, should be able to confirm the presence of an orbiting white dwarf by detecting the gravitational waves it produced.