Space/Planets Update 12 March 2015

How strange is space? The answer has to be mighty strange. Let me give you an example of something which astronomers observed. Astronomers actually watched a star explode four times. No, it was not four different explosions, but the same one which was viewed so many times. You might be asking how can this be, it seems like some sort of time travel and if you did ask this question I certainly could not blame you, but this is not what happened. If you are thinking they watched a video of it, you would still be wrong because they actually observed it in a telescope. Let me explain how this was possible. It was due to the speed of light and a phenomena known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when certain areas of space mirror what is happening in other areas. Let me give you a better definition of gravitational lensing, it is from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: the bending and focusing of light and especially the formation of multiple images of a more distant object by a celestial object acting as a gravitational lens. The gravitational lensing allowed astronomers to capture four images of the explosion which was caused by a super nova.

Isn’t it amazing how sometimes it’s hard to get someone to repair your car correctly and yet engineers can fix devices in deep space and on other planets? This was the case in February 2015 when the Curiosity rover suffered a short circuit. It affected the drilling arm on the machine. The rover has been going for quite a while and it is an amazing feat of engineering that it continues to function, or should I say it could be an amazing feat. If you are wondering why I phrased it this way, I did it because a whistleblower who worked for NASA said she saw humans walking on Mars when a camera on the rover picked them up.Β  If this is true it would be much easier to keep the rover repaired. Curiosity was built by the Boeing Corporation and launched in a rocket on November 26, 2011. It was deployed on August 6, 2012. It landed in Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater. The machine has two computers onboard and each has 2 Gigabytes of flash memory, 256 Megabytes of DRAM and 256 kilobytes of EEPROM. In all not that impressive when compared to today’s laptops.

Scientists are now saying Mars had enough water at one time to fill a large ocean. They also said they determined about four billion years ago there was an ocean on Mars that could have covered half of the northern hemisphere. The ocean would have been large, but only about one mile deep. They said the planet would have been very blue in places. So what happened to this water? According to scientists it was lost as it leaked out into space. This may not be the end of the story however. Scientists are saying there could be more water underground. Some scientists now think since there was so much water on Mars at one time, the chances of finding alien organisms is much greater.

A new exoplanet has been discovered. So what some might say, but this one is very different, it has four suns. Another planet was discovered which has 3 suns. NASA in collaboration with India has developed a new device for discovering exoplanets. It is known as the Robo-AO adaptive optics system. The Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in India joined forces with the California Institute of Technology to develop it. The device fits on to a telescope and was attached to the telescopes of the Palomar Observatory.Β  The lead scientists involved with the discovery said, “Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars, triple stars, even quintuple star systems. It's amazing the way nature puts these things together".

Scientists now believe that under some circumstances black holes can slow the growth of galaxies. The Chandra X-ray Observatory has picked up certain signs showing the growth of galaxies which contain super-massive black holes can be slowed by a phenomenon called cosmic precipitation, not to be confused with the type of precipitation we get on earth. Cosmic precipitation is a hot gas event which produces showers of cool gas clouds which load into a galaxy. One scientist said, "We know that precipitation can slow us down on our way to work. Now we have evidence that it can also slow down star formation in galaxies with huge black holes." When astronomers looked at some of the biggest galaxies they found they had a lot of hot gas in them, but something was stopping this gas from forming into stars. It is a complicated scenario, but when there is a super-massive black hole in one of these galaxies it somehow triggers something which takes the energy from the hot gas which then forms cool gas clouds and these clouds mix with the hot gas clouds. Some of the gas then gets sucked in the black hole. This is the gas which normally would be responsible for cloud formation. This in turn slows down galactic growth.

One of the things which fascinate me are rogue bodies. Those are planets, stars and anything else which is blasted out into space and travels on its own. Astronomers used the Keck II and Pan-STARRS1 telescopes in Hawaii to find one of these stars and it is not just an ordinary rogue star, but the holder of a new speed record. So far it holds the record for speediest rogue star ever detected at a speed of 2.7 million miles per hour. It would be interesting to find a complete rogue solar system. I don’t know if this is possible and maybe many scientists would say it isn’t, but I would not eliminate the possibility just yet. I am talking about a star with some of or all of its planets and moons traveling freely in space. It has been said that our solar system is headed out of the galaxy, but scientists think eventually gravity will cause it to stop and slowly return to its position.

It is really strange. When astronomers look further away they are limited in what they see by the speed of light. If a star is a million light years away they see it as it was a million years ago. When galaxies are billions of light years away they see them as they were billions of years ago. Because of this we really don’t know if what we are looking at even exists anymore. There could be something waiting for us at the edge of the universe and we wouldn’t even know it. It could be gobbling up entire galaxies. On the other hand the universe could be far bigger than we suspect and the expansion of it limitless. If we could look far enough back and see things in real time, would we find burned out galaxies? Some think this is our eventual fate, one where all bodies will be on their own with huge distances between them and they will have lost all their energy. On the other hand some scientists think stars and such are being perpetually renewed and are always being created from the ruins of other stars and that this will continue. None of us will be around to find out the answer in this life.

Funding is secured for the giant Magellan Telescope which will boast a light gathering area of 987.5 inches or 25 meters. Texas A&M has reaffirmed its support of the project.