SPACE/COSMOS
US grounds SpaceX’s Starship after fiery mid-air explosion
By AFP
January 17, 2025
In this handout image courtesy of Greg Blee, debris from the SpaceX Starship is seen in the sky near Providenciales, Turks and Caicos on January 16, 2025 - Copyright HANDOUT/AFP Greg Blee
Issam AHMED
The United States on Friday grounded SpaceX’s Starship and ordered Elon Musk’s company to investigate why the spaceship spectacularly disintegrated in a fiery cascade over the Caribbean during its latest test mission.
Authorities in the Turks and Caicos Islands confirmed they diverted all flights from their airspace during the incident and urged residents not to touch fallen debris, warning it could be hazardous.
“The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) is requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship vehicle during launch operations on Jan. 16,” the agency said.
“There are no reports of public injury, and the FAA is working with SpaceX and appropriate authorities to confirm reports of public property damage on Turks and Caicos.”
It added that during the event, it briefly activated a “Debris Response Area” protocol to slow aircraft outside the area where the debris was falling or stop aircraft at their departure location.
“Several aircraft requested to divert due to low fuel levels while holding outside impacted areas.”
Under established procedures, SpaceX will now be required to carry out a “mishap investigation” — including the identification of any corrective actions, which the FAA will review before determining the launch vehicle can return to flight.
Alternatively, the company may seek an early return to flight if it can demonstrate sufficient safety measures and confirm the mishap posed no public risk.
The government of the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British-controlled archipelago, confirmed the diversion of all flights during the incident, which lit up social media with dazzling photos and videos of the meteor-like shower of debris.
Officials also met with UK Space Agency experts and reiterated warnings to residents to avoid fallen debris.
“If possible, take a photograph of the object (without touching it) alongside another object for scale,” a public advisory read, emphasizing, “Space debris remains the property of the spacecraft owner.”
– Mars rocket –
Starship’s Super Heavy Booster was grappled mid-air as it returned to the launch pad at Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas, on January 16, 2025
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, and is key to Musk’s ambitions of colonizing Mars.
NASA hopes to use a modified version of the rocket as a human lunar lander for its Artemis missions to return to the Moon.
Thursday’s uncrewed launch was Starship’s seventh orbital test, and the first involving a taller, upgraded version of the rocket.
SpaceX, which dominates the commercial launch market through its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, underscored its technical prowess by catching Starship’s first stage booster in the “chopstick” arms of its launch tower for a second time.
But the triumph was short-lived when teams lost contact with the upper-stage vehicle. SpaceX later confirmed it had undergone “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the company’s euphemism for an explosion.
“Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” Musk quipped on X , sharing one of the many viral clips of the event.
He added the cause of the explosion appeared to be an “oxygen/fuel leak” that caused an excess buildup of pressure.
“Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month,” he ventured.
Stranded astronaut Suni Williams performs spacewalk at ISS
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore (l) and Suni Williams walk out from the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on June 5, 2024. Williams performed a spacewalk at the International Space Station on Thursday. File Photo by Joe Marino/UPI | License Photo
Jan. 16, 2025 / UPI
Jan. 16 (UPI) -- NASA astronaut Sunni Williams, one-half Boeing Starliner crew who have been stuck on the International Space Station for months, took part in a spacewalk on Thursday to do some repairs to the orbiting laboratory.
Williams joined astronaut Nick Hague in the spacewalk to remove and replace a rate gyro assembly that helps provide orientation control for the ISS, install patches to cover damaged ares of light filters for an X-ray telescope and replace a reflector device used for navigational data on one of the international docking adapters.
Williams has been on the ISS with astronaut Butch Wilmore after arriving in Boeing's new Starliner spaceship several months ago. A problem with the spacecraft's thrusters left NASA little choice but to send the Starliner back to Earth unmanned, leaving Williams and Wilmore at the space station.
Both are scheduled to return next month. They will return with Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexandr Gorbunov.
Williams and Wilmore are both space veterans, members of previous trips to the International Space Station. Thursday's spacewalk was the eighth of her career.
U of A astronomers capture unprecedented view of supermassive black hole in action
University of Arizona
image:
An image of the spiral galaxy NGC 1086 obtained by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The galaxy has a distance of 47 million light-years and is one of the nearest galaxies with an active galactic nucleus.
view moreCredit: European Southern Observatory
Active galactic nuclei are supermassive black holes at the center of certain galaxies. As matter falls into these black holes, enormous amounts of energy are released, making active galactic nuclei, or AGN, one of the most energetic phenomena that can be observed in space. University of Arizona astronomers have now produced the highest resolution direct images ever taken of an AGN in the infrared, using the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany were also involved in the study. The findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
"The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer can be considered the first extremely large telescope, so it's very exciting to prove this is possible," said Jacob Isbell, a postdoctoral research associate at the U of A Steward Observatory and lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper.
Every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at the center. Some of them are considered active while others are inactive, depending on how quickly material is falling onto them, Isbell said. There's a disk around the black hole that glows more brightly the more material there is. If this accretion disk glows brightly enough, it's called an active supermassive black hole. The AGN that exists in galaxy NGC 1068, which neighbors the Milky Way, is one of the nearest ones that is considered active.
The Large Binocular Telescope is located on Mount Graham northeast of Tucson. It operates its two 8.4-meter mirrors independently, essentially functioning as two separate telescopes mounted side by side. The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer combines the light from both mirrors, allowing for much higher resolution observations than would be possible with each mirror on its own. This imaging technique has been successfully used in the past to study volcanoes on the surface of Jupiter's moon Io. The Jupiter results encouraged the researchers to use the interferometer to look at an AGN.
"The AGN within the galaxy NGC 1068 is especially bright, so it was the perfect opportunity to test this method," Isbell said. "These are the highest resolution direct images of an AGN taken so far."
The Large Binocular Interferometer Team is led by Steve Ertel, associate astronomer of Steward Observatory. Through the interferometer, the team was able to observe several cosmic phenomena going on simultaneously in the AGN.
The bright disk around the supermassive black hole releases a lot of light, which pushes dust away like many tiny sails, a phenomenon known as radiation pressure. The images revealed a dusty, outflowing wind caused by radiation pressure. Simultaneously, farther out, there was a lot of material that was way brighter than it should have been, considering it was illuminated only by the bright accretion disk. By comparing the new images to past observations, the researchers were able to tie this finding to a radio jet that's blasting through the galaxy, hitting and heating up clouds of molecular gas and dust. Radio jet feedback is the interaction between powerful jets of radiation and particles emitted from supermassive black holes and their surrounding environment.
Direct imaging with extremely large telescopes such as the Larger Binocular Telescope Interferometer and the upcoming 83.5 feet Giant Magellan Telescope located in Chile makes it possible to distinguish feedback from the radio jet and dusty wind simultaneously. Previously, the various processes were blended due to low resolution, but now it is possible to view their individual impact, Isbell said.
The study shows that the environments of AGN can be complex, and the new findings help better understand AGN's interaction with their host galaxies.
"This type of imaging can be used on any astronomical object," Isbell said. "We've already started looking at disks around stars or very large, evolved stars, which have dusty envelopes around them."
Journal
Nature Astronomy
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Direct imaging of active galactic nucleus outflows and their origin with the 23 m Large Binocular Telescope
Article Publication Date
17-Jan-2025
Astrophysicists reveal structure of 74 exocomet belts orbiting nearby stars in landmark survey
Trinity College Dublin
image:
30 of the exocomet belts, as imaged in this study, showing the extreme variation in such belts.
view moreCredit: Prof Luca Matra, Trinity College Dublin.
Astrophysicists led by a team from Trinity College Dublin have – for the first time – imaged a large number of exocomet belts around nearby stars, and the tiny pebbles within them. The crystal-clear images show light being emitted from these millimetre-sized pebbles within the belts that orbit 74 nearby stars of a wide variety of ages – from those that are just emerging from birth to those in more mature systems like our own Solar System.
The REASONS (REsolved ALMA and SMA Observations of Nearby Stars) study marks such a significant milestone in the study of exocometary belts because its images and analyses reveal where the pebbles, and hence the exocomets, are located. They are typically tens to hundreds of au (the distance from Earth to the Sun) from their central star.
In these regions, it is so cold (-250 to -150 degrees Celsius) that most compounds including water are frozen as ice on these exocomets. What the astrophysicists are therefore observing is where the ice reservoirs of planetary systems are located. REASONS is the first program to unveil the structure of these belts for a large sample of 74 exoplanetary systems.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is an array of 66 radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, while the Submillimeter Array (SMA) is a similar eight-element array in Hawaii. Both observe electromagnetic radiation at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths. This study used both to produce the images that have provided more information on populations of exocomets than ever before.
“Exocomets are boulders of rock and ice, at least 1 km in size, which smash together within these belts to produce the pebbles that we observe here with the ALMA and SMA arrays of telescopes. Exocometary belts are found in at least 20% of planetary systems, including our own Solar System,” said Luca Matrà, Associate Professor in Trinity’s School of Physics, and senior author of the research article that has just been published in leading international journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Dr Sebastián Marino, Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, and coauthor in this study, added: “The images reveal a remarkable diversity in the structure of belts. Some are narrow rings, as in the canonical picture of a ‘belt’ like our Solar System’s Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. But a larger number of them are wide, and probably better described as ‘disks’ rather than rings.”
Some systems have multiple rings/disks, some of which are eccentric, which provides evidence that yet undetectable planets are present and their gravity affects the distribution of pebbles in these systems.
“The power of a large study like REASONS is in revealing population-wide properties and trends,” explained Prof. Matrà.
“For example, it confirmed that the number of pebbles decreases for older planetary systems as belts run out of larger exocomets smashing together, but showed for the first time that this decrease in pebbles is faster if the belt is closer to the central star. It also indirectly showed – through the belts' vertical thickness – that unobservable objects as large as 140 km to Moon-size are likely present in these belts.
Dr David Wilner, Senior Astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, underlined:“Arrays like the ALMA and SMA used in this work are extraordinary tools that are continuing to give us incredible new insights into the universe and its workings. The REASONS survey required a large community effort and has an incredible legacy value, with multiple potential pathways for future investigation.
“For example, the REASONS dataset of belt and planetary system properties will enable studies of the birth and evolution of these belts, as well as follow-up observations across the wavelength range, from JWST to the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes and ALMA’s upcoming ARKS Large Program to zoom even further onto the details of these belts.”
Journal
Astronomy and Astrophysics
All 74 exocomet belts as imaged in this study.
Credit
Prof Luca Matra, Trinity College Dublin
Panorama of our nearest galactic neighbor unveils hundreds of millions of stars
University of Washington
image:
This is the largest photomosaic yet assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light years away from Earth. This mosaic took over 10 years to create, captures 200 million stars, still a fraction of Andromeda’s population, and contains about 2.5 billion pixels. This detailed look will help astronomers piece together the Andromeda galaxy’s past history, including mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.
view moreCredit: Science: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams and Zhuo Chen (University of Washington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern). Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
In the decades following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way — the Andromeda Galaxy. It can be seen with the naked eye on clear autumn nights as a faint oval object roughly the size of the moon.
A century ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble first established that this so-called "spiral nebula" was approximately 2.5 million light years away from our own Milky Way galaxy.
Now, the space telescope named after Hubble has accomplished the most comprehensive survey of this galaxy. The work yields new clues to the evolutionary history of Andromeda — and it looks markedly different from the Milky Way's history.
University of Washington astronomers presented the findings Jan. 16 in Maryland at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and in an accompanying paper published the same date in The Astrophysical Journal.
Without Andromeda as an example of a spiral galaxy, astronomers would know much less about the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way. That's because Earth is embedded inside the Milky Way. This is like trying to understand the layout of New York City by standing in the middle of Central Park.
"With Hubble we can get into enormous detail about what's happening on a holistic scale across the entire disk of the galaxy. You can't do that with any other large galaxy," said principal investigator Benjamin Williams, a UW research associate professor of astronomy.
Hubble's sharp imaging capabilities can resolve more than 200 million stars in the Andromeda galaxy, detecting only stars brighter than our Sun. They look like grains of sand across the beach. But the telescope can’t capture everything. Andromeda's total population is estimated to be 1 trillion stars, with many less massive stars falling below Hubble's sensitivity limit.
Photographing Andromeda was a Herculean task because the galaxy is a much bigger target in the sky than the galaxies Hubble routinely observes, which are often billions of light years away. The full mosaic was carried out under two Hubble programs. In total it required over 1,000 Hubble orbits, spanning more than a decade.
This panorama started about a decade ago with the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury program. Images were obtained at near-ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths using instruments aboard Hubble to photograph the northern half of Andromeda.
This has now been followed by the newly published Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury. This phase added images of approximately 100 million stars in the southern half of Andromeda. This region is structurally unique and more sensitive to the galaxy's merger history than the northern disk mapped earlier.
Combined, the two programs collectively cover the entire disk of Andromeda, which is seen almost edge on — tilted by 77 degrees relative to the view we see from Earth. The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate fields of view. The mosaic image is made up of at least 2.5 billion pixels.
“The asymmetry between the two halves — now visually evident in this image — is incredibly intriguing,” said Zhuo Chen, a UW postdoctoral researcher in astronomy and lead author of the accompanying paper. “It’s fascinating to see the detailed structures of an external spiral galaxy mapped over such a large, contiguous area.”
The complementary Hubble survey programs provide information about the age, heavy-element abundance and stellar masses inside Andromeda. This will allow astronomers to distinguish between competing scenarios where Andromeda merged with one or more galaxies. Hubble's detailed measurements constrain models of Andromeda's merger history and disk evolution.
“This ambitious photography of the Andromeda galaxy sets a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies,” Chen said.
Though the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies formed presumably around the same time many billions of years ago, observational evidence shows that they have very different evolutionary histories, despite growing up in the same cosmological neighborhood. Andromeda seems to be more highly populated with younger stars and unusual features like coherent streams of stars, researchers say. This implies it has a more active recent star formation and interaction history than the Milky Way.
"This detailed look at the resolved stars will help us to piece together the galaxy's past merger and interaction history," Williams said.
This research was funded by NASA and the Simons Foundation. A full list of co-authors is listed with the paper.
For more information, contact Williams at benw1@uw.edu or Chen at zczhuo@uw.edu.
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
PHAST: The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury. I. Ultraviolet and Optical Photometry of over 90 Million Stars in M31
Article Publication Date
16-Jan-2025
MSU researcher’s breakthrough model sheds light on solar storms and space weather
Michigan State University
EAST LANSING, Mich. – Our sun is essentially a searing hot sphere of gas. Its mix of primarily hydrogen and helium can reach temperatures between 10,000 and 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit on its surface and its atmosphere’s outermost layer. Because of that heat, the blazing orb constantly oozes a stream of plasma, made up of charged subatomic particles — mainly protons and electrons. The sun’s gravity can’t contain them because they hold so much energy as heat, so they drift away into space as solar wind. Understanding how charged particles as solar wind interact with other transient eruptions of energy from the sun can help scientists study cosmic rays emitted in supernova explosions.
Thomas Do, an astronomy graduate student at Michigan State University, published a paper predicting how particles accelerate under a wider net of circumstances than previous models. His model could be applied to solar storms that impact technology in space.
Do started working on charged particles three years ago during an undergraduate research project at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. His research aimed to illuminate how charged particles accelerate when they’re swept along by powerful ejections of mass from the sun. Those explosions are called coronal mass ejections, and when they’re fast enough, they can create shock waves.
“As they fly out from the sun, they interact with charged particles along the way. During those interactions, particles gain energy from the shock wave,” Do said.
As the particles gain energy, they hurtle faster and faster into space and toward Earth. Sometimes, particles gain so much speed that they catapult past the crest of the shock wave, escaping from behind it and into the cosmos.
To understand how charged particles escape, Do expanded on a model developed in 2021 by Federico Fraschetti, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics. Fraschetti and Do’s updated model predicts how particles accelerate and escape under a wider range of energies than previous models. In particular, their model accounts for the escape from the accelerating region of particles over a range of higher and lower energies. That’s important, Fraschetti said, because previously only high-energy particles were thought to break free from riding a shock wave.
The previous model scientists used to make predictions about charged particles — developed around 50 years ago — didn’t include low-energy particles. Using multiple energy levels in their updated model, the team created a set of equations that predict how particles accelerate over time and how many particles escape at each energy level.
“We’re trying to allow for more particles to escape because we believe that’s more physically realistic,” Do said.
After expanding the model, he and Fraschetti wanted to compare it to an actual solar event.
They knew it was only a matter of time before they would have a chance, Fraschetti said. That’s because the sun reaches its solar maximum when solar activity is at its highest in its 11-year cycle. During a solar maximum, the massive explosions needed to generate shock waves are more frequent and more intense.
The team didn’t have to wait long for such an event. On Sept. 5, 2022, the sun spat a huge wad of energy into space just as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took one of its closest dives toward the star. The probe recorded data such as particle speed and temperature as the explosion’s shock wave smashed into it.
“We were so lucky in September 2022 to see the very beginning of this process,” Fraschetti said. “This is one of the events that Parker Solar Probe was designed to measure.”
They found that their model’s prediction matched what the Parker Solar Probe reported: particle acceleration and escape across a range of energy levels. The probe was very close to the sun — for scale, if the Earth and sun were a meter apart, the probe would only have been about 7 centimeters away. That proximity meant that the particles it passed had recently crossed paths with the shock wave, so the team could see data on particles that hadn’t gained much speed yet.
“The model showed an excellent agreement with the data and confirmed that our physical expectation of what happens to young shock waves close to the sun is correct,” Fraschetti said. “We had never tested this expectation, and it did not have to be this way.”
"This model can be used in other areas of space research that involve charged particles," Do said.
###
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Journal
The Astrophysical Journal
Article Title
Time-dependent Acceleration and Escape of Charged Particles at Traveling Shocks in the Near-Sun Environment
Article Publication Date
17-Jan-2025
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