Spitzer Space Telescope: Scanning the Skies in Infrared

NASA's Spitzer telescope peers through dust in the universe to see the infrared sky.

Credit: Spitzer Science Center

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in 2003 to study the universe in the infrared. It is the last mission of the NASA Great Observatories program, which saw four specialized telescopes (including the Hubble Space Telescope) launched between 1990 and 2003.

The goal of the Great Observatories is to observe the universe in distinct wavelengths of light. Spitzer focuses on the infrared band, which normally represents heat radiation from objects. The other observatories looked at visible light (Hubble, still operational), gamma-rays (Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, no longer operational) and X-rays (the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, still operational.)

"Spitzer's highly sensitive instruments allow scientists to peer into cosmic regions that are hidden from optical telescopes, including dusty stellar nurseries, the centers of galaxies, and newly forming planetary systems," NASA wrote on the Spitzer website. "Spitzer's infrared eyes also allows astronomers see cooler objects in space, like failed stars (brown dwarfs), extrasolar planets, giant molecular clouds, and organic molecules that may hold the secret to life on other planets."

The telescope is named after Lyman Spitzer Jr., an astrophysicist who made major contributions in the areas of stellar dynamics, plasma physics, thermonuclear fusion and space astronomy, according to a NASA biography. Spitzer was the first person to propose the idea of placing a large telescope in space and was the driving force behind the development of the Hubble Space Telescope.

[Gallery: The Infrared Universe Seen by Spitzer Telescope]

A montage of images taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope over the years.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Development and operations

Infrared light is transmitted by any object that has a temperature above zero Kelvin (roughly minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273 degrees Celsius). But our sky filters out many of the wavelengths, prompting astronomers to seek out opportunities to send up space telescopes to catch the rest.

The first infrared telescopes flew on brief flights that got above most of the atmosphere (including Lear jets and sounding rockets), according to NASA's Spitzer website. In 1979, NASA proposed a Shuttle Infrared Space Facility (SIRTF) that would fly on the space shuttle. At the time, it was assumed shuttle missions would last 30 days and flights would take place every week (optimistic projections far beyond what the program achieved.) Later, it was also discovered that shuttle vapors would interfere with telescope operations.

Meanwhile, NASA, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands collaborated on an infrared telescope called The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), which flew for 10 months in 1983 to great success and sparked calls for a follow-up mission. NASA decided to change its SIRTF to a free-flying concept, and changed the name to Space Infrared Telescope Facility (keeping the acronym the same).

In 1991, a National Research Council report stated that infrared technology had progressed substantially, to the point where it recommended SIRTF, an airplane-based telescope called SOFIA, and an infrared ground telescope for Mauna Kea, Hawaii. NASA's budget was considerably slashed after this report, leading SIRTF to change from a $2.2 billion observatory to one costing about half a billion dollars.

"A significant factor in maintaining the scientific integrity of Spitzer, despite the budget cuts and dramatic redesign, was a series of clever and innovative engineering decisions, including a warm-launch, and a unique choice of orbit," NASA stated.

Upon launch on Aug. 25, 2003, the telescope had three instruments: the infrared array camera (IRAC), an infrared spectrograph, and a multiband imaging photometer. The entire instrument package needed to be cooled to minus 459 F (minus 268 C) to function properly. Spitzer officially received its new name four months after launch, when the telescope was shown to be working properly.

The mission was supposed to last 2.5 years with the "cryogenic" (cold) instruments functioning; the cryogen was depleted after 5.5 years in May 2009. Spitzer still can use two channels of the IRAC even while warm, so operations with that one instrument are ongoing. Spitzer is expected to last until "late in this decade," the website states.

An infographic showing how NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope works with ground-based telescopes to find distant exoplanets, using a technique called microlensing.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Major discoveries

Spitzer was not designed to look at extrasolar planets, but it turns out that the telescope has been quite useful in letting us look at star systems besides our own. 

"The telescope was the first to detect light coming from a planet outside our solar system, a feat not in the mission's original design," NASA wrote in a 2013 press release. "With Spitzer's ongoing studies of these exotic worlds, astronomers have been able to probe their composition, dynamics and more, revolutionizing the study of exoplanet atmospheres." 

This even includes mapping climate patterns on a smaller super-Earth, a discovery the Spitzer team announced in 2016. What's more, Spitzer confirmed a very close rocky planet — only 21 light-years away — in 2015, again showing the range of capabilities the telescope is capable of.

The telescope, NASA said in 2013, also provided some secrets of the universe at large: "A complete census of forming stars in nearby clouds; making a new and improved map of the Milky Way's spiral-arm structure; and, with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, discovering that the most distant galaxies known are more massive and mature than expected."

Besides looking at things far away from us, Spitzer assisted with a mission far closer to home. The telescope observed a comet called Tempel 1, which the NASA Deep Impact mission hit in 2005. After the hit, the comet revealed a surprise ejection of clay, carbonates and crystallized silicates, NASA stated.

"These chemicals are thought have formed in warm environments, possibly near the sun, but away from the chilly outer neighborhood of comets," NASA wrote in a 2005 press release. "How did these compounds get inside comets? One possibility is that materials in our early solar system mixed together before being sorted out into individual bodies."

Even observations of well-known solar system bodies brought surprises. In 2009, Spitzer found an enormous ring around Saturn that had remained hidden before then. The material ranges from 3.7 million to 7.4 million miles (6 million to 12 million kilometers) away from the planet, and likely comes from the planet Phoebe, NASA wrote at the time.

Weird Grooves On Mars' Moon Phobos Traced to Asteroids

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this image of the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, from a distance of about 6,800 kilometers (about 4,200 miles).

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Crisscrossed grooves and chains of small craters cover the Martian moon Phobos. Astronomers have disagreed about what caused this strange-looking landscape for decades, but new research may help settle the debate.

Phobos, the largest and closest of Mars' two moons, is more like a gravitationally bound pile of rubble than a solid, spherical satellite like Earth's moon. New simulations show that some of the grooves likely came from impactors like asteroids and comets striking the moon, knocking bits and pieces of its surface into space before they landed back onto the surface.

"All this dirt is kicked up, and it falls nearby very ballistically, creating dimples in the surface," said Michael Nayak, co-author of the new study and graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Imagine a golf ball rolling along the sand and it suddenly bounces, leaving a dimple here and a dimple there until at some point it just peters out." This is how crater chains appeared on Phobos, the study suggests.  [The Grooves of Phobos in Pictures]

First Phobos photos spark debate

NASA's Viking orbiters first photographed the grooves on Phobos in the 1970s. Since then, astronomers have widely believed that the long, parallel lines seen on the satellite's surface are "stretch marks" caused by tidal stress from Mars' gravity,

But later images, from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and the European Space Agency's Mars Express revealed another set of grooves on Phobos that didn't fit the profile for tide-induced marks. The newfound grooves were smaller and superficial, and they didn't line up with the moon's main tidal grooves.

"More detailed imagery started uncovering a second family of grooves, and it turns out that they don't match the tidal patterns at all," said Nayak. Astronomers needed another explanation, he said.

This image shows the sequence of events that create chains of craters on the Martian moon Phobos after an impactor strikes. (Orbital illustrations not drawn to scale)

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin-Neukum; Annotations by M. Nayak & E. Asphaug

Simulating impact craters

Nayak as his colleague Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, used numerical simulations to determine where these so-called "anomalous grooves" came from. To do this, the researchers simulated collisions on the moon that were responsible for existing craters. Then they modeled the ejecta, or dirt and rocks that are catapulted into space after a collision.

The astronomers' research suggests that these unexplained lines on Phobos resulted from things in space, called impactors, hitting the satellite and knocking some of its rubble into short-lived orbits.

"Because the gravity on Phobos is so low, ejecta starts escaping the surface," said Nayak. But this material can't escape Mars' gravity, becoming "almost like a new Martian satellite," Nayak explained. "It doesn't stray far from Phobos, and it falls back down" after a period of weeks, days — even hours, he said.

"If we model that ejecta, it comes back and hits in this very definitive pattern," Nayak said.

The researchers modeled several craters on Phobos and found that the models were accurate for many chains of craters, but not all of them. That was expected, though, because, the researchers said, they already suspected that there could be multiple reasons for the existence of these grooves.

The crater chain pattern on the left matches the predicted sesquinary chain of craters on the right.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin-Neukum; Annotations by M. Nayak & E. Asphaug

Debate settled?

Nayak and Asphaug are not the first to suggest that these crater-chain grooves result from secondary impacts. A 2014 study led by John Murray at the Open University in the United Kingdom first hypothesized that ejecta from impacts on Mars caused the grooves. 

But this model does not explain all the strange patterns on Phobos, just like the tidal idea didn't explain the two families of grooves. "Really, it's a combination of tidal forces … and sesquinary ejecta — the stuff that's kicked off of Phobos, hangs out in orbit for a while, and then comes back." Sesquinary craters differ from secondary craters, which occur when a larger, primary impact kicks rubble up a short distance before it quickly falls back down. The rubble that creates sesquinary craters can linger in Mars' orbit for weeks before plopping back down onto Phobos' surface.

Nayak said he believes the paper will help tie together some of the existing theories about the origins of Phobos' grooves. "We don't really have a good explanation for all the grooves yet," he said, adding that the surface features of Phobos likely have multiple origins, as no single hypothesis has been able to adequately explain all of the satellite's grooves and linear craters.

So Phobos can have more than one reason for being so groovy, even if astronomers haven't figured them all out yet.

XMM-Newton reveals the Milky Way's explosive past

Artistic representation of our Milky Way galaxy during an active phase. Credit: Mark A. Garlick/CfA

A giant bubble surrounding the centre of the Milky Way shows that six million years ago our Galaxy's supermassive black hole was ablaze with furious energy. It also shines a light on the hiding place of the Galaxy's so-called 'missing' matter. 

While the mysterious dark matter grabs most of the headlines, astronomers also know that they have yet to find all of the normal, so-called baryonic, matter in the Galaxy. That has now changed thanks to the work of ESA's X-ray observatory XMM-Newton.

A thorough analysis of archival observations has shown that there is a vast quantity of baryonic matter scattered through the Galaxy. XMM-Newton found it in the form of gas at a temperature of one million degrees that permeates both the disc of the Galaxy, where the majority of the stars are found, and a spherical volume that surrounds the whole Galaxy.

The spherical cloud is vast. Whereas the Sun lies just 26 000 light years from the centre of the Galaxy, the cloud extends out to a distance of at least 200 000 – 650 000 light years.

Fabrizio Nicastro, from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy, and his colleagues have been on the trail of the missing baryons for more than 15 years now. Their latest discovery with XMM-Newton shows that there is enough million-degree-hot gas in the Galaxy to account for it all.

It has remained undetected for so long because it does not emit visible light. Instead, the astronomers found it because the oxygen in the cloud absorbed X-rays at very specific wavelengths from light being emitted by more distant celestial objects.

And this was not the only discovery waiting in the data for the team. When it came to model the data with computer simulations to understand the way in which the gas was distributed around the Galaxy, the team did not get the answer they were expecting.

"According to simple gravitational physics you expect the density of the gas to decrease from the centre outwards," says Nicastro. In this picture, the density of gas will be at its peak in the centre of the Galaxy and at its least on the outer edges. But there was a hitch. "I spent three months trying to match the data with that model and I just couldn't," says Nicastro.

Having tried everything else, he moved the peak density away from the centre of the Galaxy. At a distance of about 20 000 light years from the Galaxy's centre the model fitted better. It was puzzling why this should improve things until he remembered that this distance is also the size of two large 'balloons' of gamma rays found in 2010 by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray observatory, which extend tens of thousands of light-years above and below the centre of our Galaxy.

So Nicastro constructed a different density model, in which there was a central bubble of low density gas extending out to 20 000 light years. When he applied this model to his X-ray data, he found that it fitted excellently.

"That was unexpected and very exciting at the same time," says Nicastro. It meant that something had pushed the gas outwards from the centre of the Galaxy, creating a giant bubble.

Astronomers know that there is a supermassive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy. It lies silent and dark these days but the bubble indicates that six million years ago things were very different.

The supermassive black hole was pulling stars and gas clouds to pieces and swallowing the contents. En route to annihilation, the doomed matter was heating up and releasing vast quantities of energy that snow-ploughed through the halo gas, opening up the bubble.

When astronomers look out into the wider Universe, they see that a small percentage of galaxies contain an extremely bright core. These cores are called active galactic nuclei, and as a result of this study astronomers now know that our Milky Way once had one of them.

Six million years later, the shock wave created by this activity has crossed 20 000 light-years of space, creating the bubble that XMM-Newton has seen. Meanwhile, the supermassive black hole has run out of nearby food and gone quiet again.

"I think the evidence for the Milky Way having been more active in the past is now strong," says Nicastro.

"We have taken a big step forwards with this result," says Norbert Schartel, ESA Project Scientist for XMM-Newton. "It means that the next generation of X-ray telescopes, such as ESA's ATHENA mission, will have plenty to study following its launch in 2028."

Notes for editors

A Distant Echo of Milky Way Central Activity closes the Galaxy's Baryon Census by F. Nicastro et al. 2016 is published in ApJL, 828, L12 (doi:10.3847/2041-8205/828/1/L12). A PDF of the accepted paper can be found at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.08210.

The European Space Agency's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, XMM-Newton, was launched in December 1999. The largest scientific satellite to have been built in Europe, it is also one of the most sensitive X-ray observatories ever flown. More than 170 wafer-thin, cylindrical mirrors direct incoming radiation into three high-throughput X-ray telescopes. XMM-Newton's orbit takes it almost a third of the way to the Moon, allowing for long, uninterrupted views of celestial objects.

List of the Biggest Black Holes Ever Spotted by Astronomers

Some of these are INSANE…

Here is a fun look at the largest black holes in the universe, as well as a perspective in size to our own galaxy and solar system:

Our Milky Way may harbor millions of black holes… the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there’s evidence of something far more ominous. A breed of black holes that has reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. Just how large, and violent, and strange can they get?

Yes, a lot of the strangeness observed is from astronomical modeling and some from advancements in telescopes such as the hubble.

It is hard to get one’s mind around the concept of black holes.  One teaspoon can be estimated to have tons and tons of weight.  They are so dense that many times light cannot even escape.  or at least that is what astronomers think.  Are they right?

Let’s see if you know any of these enormous structures.

Here is more information on the advacements in astronomy enabling the observation of such phenomenon:

A new era in astronomy has revealed a universe long hidden to us. High-tech instruments sent into space have been tuned to sense high-energy forms of light — x-rays and gamma rays — that are invisible to our eyes and do not penetrate our atmosphere. On the ground, precision telescopes are equipped with technologies that allow them to cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere. They are peering into the far reaches of the universe, and into distant caldrons of light and energy. In some distant galaxies, astronomers are now finding evidence that space and time are being shattered by eruptions so vast they boggle the mind.
We are just beginning to understand the impact these outbursts have had on the universe: On the shapes of galaxies, the spread of elements that make up stars and planets, and ultimately the very existence of Earth. The discovery of what causes these eruptions has led to a new understanding of cosmic history. Back in 1995, the Hubble space telescope was enlisted to begin filling in the details of that history. Astronomers selected tiny regions in the sky, between the stars. For days at a time, they focused Hubble’s gaze on remote regions of the universe.
These hubble Deep Field images offered incredibly clear views of the cosmos in its infancy. What drew astronomers’ attention were the tiniest galaxies, covering only a few pixels on Hubble’s detector. Most of them do not have the grand spiral or elliptical shapes of large galaxies we see close to us today.

We hope you like the video as these are truly fascinating phenomenon and likely hold a lot of the answers to our universe.  Check back for updates as new data comes in within the next year.

Cassini Finds Flooded Canyons on Titan

NASA's Cassini spacecraft pinged the surface of Titan with microwaves, finding that some channels are deep, steep-sided canyons filled with liquid hydrocarbons. One such feature is Vid Flumina, the branching network of narrow lines in the upper-left quadrant of the image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found deep, steep-sided canyons on Saturn's moon Titan that are flooded with liquid hydrocarbons. The finding represents the first direct evidence of the presence of liquid-filled channels on Titan, as well as the first observation of canyons hundreds of meters deep.

A new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters describes how scientists analyzed Cassini data from a close pass the spacecraft made over Titan in May 2013. During the flyby, Cassini's radar instrument focused on channels that branch out from the large, northern sea Ligeia Mare.

The Cassini observations reveal that the channels -- in particular, a network of them named Vid Flumina -- are narrow canyons, generally less than half a mile (a bit less than a kilometer) wide, with slopes steeper than 40 degrees. The canyons also are quite deep -- those measured are 790 to 1,870 feet (240 to 570 meters) from top to bottom.

The branching channels appear dark in radar images, much like Titan's methane-rich seas. This suggested to scientists that the channels might also be filled with liquid, but a direct detection had not been made until now. Previously it wasn't clear if the dark material was liquid or merely saturated sediment -- which at Titan's frigid temperatures would be made of ice, not rock.

Cassini's radar is often used as an imager, providing a window to peer through the dense haze that surrounds Titan to reveal the surface below. But during this pass, the radar was used as an altimeter, sending pings of radio waves to the moon's surface to measure the height of features there. The researchers combined the altimetry data with previous radar images of the region to make their discovery.

Key to understanding the nature of the channels was the way Cassini's radar signal reflected off the bottoms of the features. The radar instrument observed a glint, indicating an extremely smooth surface like that observed from Titan's hydrocarbon seas. The timing of the radar echoes, as they bounced off the canyons' edges and floors, provided a direct measure of their depths.

The presence of such deep cuts in the landscape indicates that whatever process created them was active for a long time or eroded down much faster than other areas on Titan's surface. The researchers' proposed scenarios include uplift of the terrain and changes in sea level, or perhaps both.

"It's likely that a combination of these forces contributed to the formation of the deep canyons, but at present it's not clear to what degree each was involved. What is clear is that any description of Titan's geological evolution needs to be able to explain how the canyons got there," said Valerio Poggiali of the University of Rome, a Cassini radar team associate and lead author of the study.

Earthly examples of both of these types of canyon-carving processes are found along the Colorado River in Arizona. An example of uplift powering erosion is the Grand Canyon, where the terrain's rising altitude caused the river to cut deeply downward into the landscape over the course of several million years. For canyon formation driven by variations in water level, look to Lake Powell. When the water level in the reservoir drops, it increases the river's rate of erosion.

"Earth is warm and rocky, with rivers of water, while Titan is cold and icy, with rivers of methane. And yet it's remarkable that we find such similar features on both worlds," said Alex Hayes, a Cassini radar team associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and a co-author of the study.

While the altimeter data also showed that the liquid in some of the canyons around Ligeia Mare is at sea level -- the same altitude as the liquid in the sea itself -- in others it sits tens to hundreds of feet (tens of meters) higher in elevation. The researchers interpret the latter to be tributaries that drain into the main channels below.

Future work will extend the methods used in this study to all other channels Cassini's radar altimeter has observed on Titan. The researchers expect their continued work to produce a more comprehensive understanding of forces that have shaped the Saturnian moon's landscape.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the US and several European countries.

The Case of the Missing Ceres Craters

Ceres is covered in countless small, young craters, but none are larger than 175 miles (280 kilometers) in diameter. To scientists, this is a huge mystery, given that the dwarf planet must have been hit by numerous large asteroids during its 4.5 billion-year lifetime. Where did all the large craters go?

A new study in the journal Nature Communications explores this puzzle of Ceres' missing large craters, using data from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres since March 2015.
 

"We concluded that a significant population of large craters on Ceres has been obliterated beyond recognition over geological time scales, which is likely the result of Ceres' peculiar composition and internal evolution," said lead investigator Simone Marchi, a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. 

Marchi and colleagues modeled collisions of other bodies with Ceres since the dwarf planet formed, and predicted the number of large craters that should have been present on its surface. These models predicted Ceres should have up to 10 to 15 craters larger than 250 miles (400 kilometers) in diameter, and at least 40 craters larger than 60 miles (100 kilometers) wide. However, Dawn has shown that Ceres has only 16 craters larger than 60 miles, and none larger than 175 miles (280 kilometers) across.

One idea about Ceres' origins holds that it formed farther out in the solar system, perhaps in the vicinity of Neptune, but migrated in to its present location. However, scientists determined that even if Ceres migrated into the main asteroid belt relatively late in solar system history, it should still have a significant number of large craters.

"Whatever the process or processes were, this obliteration of large craters must have occurred over several hundred millions of years," Marchi said.

Dawn's images of Ceres reveal that the dwarf planet has at least three large-scale depressions called "planitiae" that are up to 500 miles (800 kilometers) wide. These planitiae have craters in them that formed in more recent times, but the larger depressions could be left over from bigger impacts. One of them, called Vendimia Planitia, is a sprawling area just north of Kerwan crater, Ceres' largest well-defined impact basin. Vendimia Planitia must have formed much earlier than Kerwan.

One reason for the lack of large craters could be related the interior structure of Ceres. There is evidence from Dawn that the upper layers of Ceres contain ice. Because ice is less dense than rock, the topography could "relax," or smooth out, more quickly if ice or another lower-density material, such as salt, dominates the subsurface composition. Recent analysis of the center of Ceres' Occator Crater suggests that the salts found there could be remnants of a frozen ocean under the surface, and that liquid water could have been present in Ceres' interior.

Past hydrothermal activity, which may have influenced the salts rising to the surface at Occator, could also have something to do with the erasure of craters. If Ceres had widespread cryovolcanic activity in the past -- the eruption of volatiles such as water -- these cryogenic materials also could have flowed across the surface, possibly burying pre-existing large craters. Smaller impacts would have then created new craters on the resurfaced area.

"Somehow Ceres has healed its largest impact scars and renewed old, cratered surfaces," Marchi said. 

Ceres differs from Dawn's previous destination, protoplanet Vesta, in terms of cratering. Although Vesta is only half the size of Ceres, it has a well-preserved 300-mile- (500-kilometer) -wide crater called Rheasilvia, where an impacting asteroid knocked out a huge chunk of the body. This and other large craters suggest that Vesta has not had processes at work to smooth its surface, perhaps because it is thought to have much less ice. Dawn visited Vesta for 14 months from 2011 to 2012.

"The ability to compare these two very different worlds in the asteroid belt -- Vesta and Ceres -- is one of the great strengths of the Dawn mission," Marchi said. 

Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:

Planet Kepler-186F May Be Inhabitable For Extraterrestrials

Does this planet have life that we can communicate with?

The search for extraterrestrials has fascinated us and been a hotly debated topic.  From the S.E.T.I. program to other methods, lately the focus on exoplanets has gained a lot of attention.  There is one in particular that has caught the attention of many astronomers:

Scientists say a world that’s 490 light-years away qualifies as the first confirmed Earth-sized exoplanet that could sustain life as we know it — but in an environment like nothing we’ve ever seen.
The planet, known as Kepler-186f, is “more of an Earth cousin than an Earth twin,” Elisa Quintana, an astronomer at the SETI Institute at NASA Ames Research Center, told the journal Science. Quintana is the lead author of a report on the planet published by Science this week.

And for the update there are 10 facts that you may not know about this planet.  A home science fan compiled them from NASA’s data.  Have any guess how long a year is there?

And even SETI might try to communicate with it.  Is that a good idea?

They are very excited about this discovery at NASA because of its implications for other similar planets:

“This discovery does confirm that Earth-sized planets do exist in the habitable zones of other stars,” Quintana said during a Thursday news briefing at NASA Headquarters.
Kepler-186f goes around an M-type dwarf star that’s smaller and cooler than our sun. But it orbits much closer to its parent star than Earth does, within what would be Mercury’s orbit in our own solar system. Those two factors combine to produce an environment that could allow for liquid water on the surface, assuming that the planet had a heat-trapping atmosphere.

What do you think could this planet harbor extraterrestrial intelligence?  Or perhaps kepler 452-b?

How would you suggest searching for evidence?

What It’ll Be Like When We Harness the Power of an Entire World

To measure the level of a civilization’s advancement, the Kardashev scale focuses on the amount of energy that a civilization is able to harness. Obviously, the amount of power available to a civilization is linked to how widespread the civilization is (you can’t harness the power of a star if you are confined to your home planet, and you certainly can’t harness the power of a galaxy if you can’t even get out of your solar system).

In short, according to the Kardashev scale, Interstellar Travelers = Advanced society

In a previous article, we offered an overview of the various civilization types: Subglobal Cultures, Galactic Cultures, Multiverse Cultures etc.  We’ve already discussed a Subglobal Culture. Today, I want to talk about what it would be like to live in a Type I Civilization—A Planetary Culture.

I know that this type of culture doesn’t sound too terribly interesting. A Planetary Culture…a culture that lives on a planet. Wow. Fascinating. But don’t be so quick to judge, as such civilizations are generally far more advanced than we are.

EARTH: ABOVE AND BEYOND

While it’s true that such cultures are limited to the energy that can be obtained from a single world, that they are stuck on a single rock, Type I Civilizations have harnessed the power of the entire planet itself (estimated at about ~4 x 10^19 erg/sec.).

This means that their technological advancement isn’t limited by the availability of fossil fuels.

So in essence, if you lived in a Type I Civilization, you wouldn’t need to worry about earthquakes, tornadoes, or other catastrophic phenomena. Horrifying natural disasters like Pompeii, the 2004 South Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina…all of these cataclysms would be things of the past.

Ultimately, harnessing the power of the planet means controlling weather patterns, plate tectonics, oceanic currents, controlling volcanoes…the list goes on and on. As such, Type I Civilizations are able to manipulate (and, in many ways, manufacture) their own world.

You want rain? You can program it, so no more droughts. And no droughts means little to no starvation. This is a very good thing.

SO, WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE?

Of course, exploiting the power of a planet takes work. And you certainly can’t do it if your civilization is comprised of a few measly individuals who are confined to one tiny continent. Consequently, if you lived in a Type I civilization, you would be part of a vast population. Cities would stretch across the globe. Literally. Your world would no longer have countries or nations; it would be a single City-Empire. All peoples would act as one. They would be one…a truly global culture.

This is an inspiring and a harrowing thought.

The optimist will assert that Type I Civilizations will have ended war and genocide through peaceful processes. The pessimist will assert that Type I Civilizations will have ended war and genocide through war and genocide—by killing all those who dissented and opposed the majority.

Regardless of the path taken, the main point remains: A Type I Civilization will be a single, global culture that uses a network of highly advanced planetary-wide technologies to harness the total energy output of the Earth. For any world plagued by war and infighting, the large-scale projects required to attain Type I status will simply be out of reach.

WHEN WILL WE GET THERE?

Obviously, Planetary Civilizations are more advanced than we are. But, with any luck (if we don’t blow ourselves to oblivion, or turn the Earth into an uninhabitable wasteland), we will reach this stage in 100 to 200 years. So maybe your grand-kids will be around to see it; there’s some hope in that (assuming you have kids).

But there are problems that we will need to overcome if we are to attain the vast amount of energy generation needed to advance to a Type I Civilization. In order to reach Type I status using current modes of technology, we would need to essentially coat the entire surface of the planet with man-made structures. Such an enterprise would be astronomically expensive…and insanely detrimental to the environment. Moreover, we lack the material needed to create such large-scale structures.

On top of all this, nearly all forms of energy — electrical, thermal, mechanical, nuclear — they all return to the biosphere in a single degraded form: Heat. And heat is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Without it, we would all be very, very dead. But too much of a good thing is, well, not a good thing. Thermal pollution can rapidly reach catastrophic proportions. As more and more energy (heat) is liberated, the global temperature begins to rise, and the precarious energy balance of the biosphere begins to suffer irreversible damage.

At what point will this ultimate catastrophe occur?

On Earth, it is estimated that our pale blue dot will turn into a dry dead inferno long before we reach the energy levels needed to reach a Type I Civilization. The main point: The coming days will test us. There is a limit to every kind of energy production. At least, there is a limit if we don’t want to kill ourselves. So if we want to really advance, if we hope to boldly go where no one has gone before, then we are going to need to invest in new technologies and new means of production. We are going to need educated individuals to conduct research (I’m looking at you).

NASA’s Chandra Detects Record-Breaking Outburst from Milky Way’s Black Hole

Astronomers have observed the largest X-ray flare ever detected from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This event, detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, raises questions about the behavior of this giant black hole and its surrounding environment.
The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is estimated to contain about 4.5 million times the mass of our sun.
Astronomers made the unexpected discovery while using Chandra to observe how Sgr A* would react to a nearby cloud of gas known as G2.
“Unfortunately, the G2 gas cloud didn’t produce the fireworks we were hoping for when it got close to Sgr A*,” said lead researcher Daryl Haggard of Amherst College in Massachusetts. “However, nature often surprises us and we saw something else that was really exciting.”
On Sept. 14, 2013, Haggard and her team detected an X-ray flare from Sgr A* 400 times brighter than its usual, quiet state. This “megaflare” was nearly three times brighter than the previous brightest X-ray flare from Sgr A* in early 2012. After Sgr A* settled down, Chandra observed another enormous X-ray flare 200 times brighter than usual on Oct. 20, 2014.
Astronomers estimate that G2 was closest to the black hole in the spring of 2014, 15 billion miles away. The Chandra flare observed in September 2013 was about a hundred times closer to the black hole, making the event unlikely related to G2.
The researchers have two main theories about what caused Sgr A* to erupt in this extreme way. The first is that an asteroid came too close to the supermassive black hole and was torn apart by gravity. The debris from such a tidal disruption became very hot and produced X-rays before disappearing forever across the black hole's point of no return, or event horizon.
“If an asteroid was torn apart, it would go around the black hole for a couple of hours – like water circling an open drain – before falling in,” said co-author Fred Baganoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “That’s just how long we saw the brightest X-ray flare last, so that is an intriguing clue for us to consider.”
If this theory holds up, it means astronomers may have found evidence for the largest asteroid to produce an observed X-ray flare after being torn apart by Sgr A*.
A second theory is that the magnetic field lines within the gas flowing towards Sgr A* could be tightly packed and become tangled. These field lines may occasionally reconfigure themselves and produce a bright outburst of X-rays. These types of magnetic flares are seen on the sun, and the Sgr A* flares have similar patterns of intensity.
“The bottom line is the jury is still out on what’s causing these giant flares from Sgr A*,” said co-author Gabriele Ponti of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. “Such rare and extreme events give us a unique chance to use a mere trickle of infalling matter to understand the physics of one of the most bizarre objects in our galaxy.”
In addition to the giant flares, the G2 observing campaign with Chandra also collected more data on a magnetar: a neutron star with a strong magnetic field, located close to Sgr A*. This magnetar is undergoing a long X-ray outburst, and the Chandra data are allowing astronomers to better understand this unusual object.
These results were presented at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society being held in Seattle.  NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
NASA is exploring our solar system and beyond to understand the universe and our place in it. The agency seeks to unravel the secrets of our universe, its origins and evolution, and search for life among the stars.

Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster Confirms Dark Matter Universe

This image contains the most distant galaxy cluster, a discovery made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes. The galaxy cluster, known as CL J1001+0220, is located about 11.1 billion light years from Earth in the constellation of Sextans and may have been caught right after birth — a brief, but important stage of cluster evolution never seen before. This is a composite image where X-rays are purple, infrared is red, green and blue and radio green. Image credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/Université Paris/T.Wang et al; Infrared: ESO/UltraVISTA; Radio: ESO/NAOJ/NRAO/ALMA.

The remote galaxy cluster was found in data from the COSMOS survey, a project that observes the same patch of sky in many different kinds of light ranging from radio waves to X-rays. This composite shows CL J1001+0220 (CL J1001, for short) in X-rays from Chandra (purple), infrared data from ESO's UltraVISTA survey (red, green, and blue), and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (green). The diffuse X-ray emission comes from a large amount of hot gas, one of the defining elements of a galaxy cluster, as described in the press release.
In addition to its extraordinary distance, CL J1001 is remarkable because of its high levels of star formation in galaxies near the center of the cluster. Within about 250,000 light years of the center of the cluster (its core), eleven massive galaxies are found and nine of those display high rates of formation. Specifically, stars are forming in the cluster core at a rate equivalent to about 3,400 Suns per year.
The large amount of growth through star formation in the galaxies in CL J1001 distinguishes it from other galaxy clusters found at distances of about 10 billion light years and closer, where little growth is occurring. These results suggest that elliptical galaxies in clusters may form their stars through more violent and shorter bursts of star formation than elliptical galaxies outside clusters.
The latest study shows that CL 1001 galaxy cluster may be undergoing a transformation from a galaxy cluster that is still forming, known as a "protocluster," to a mature one. Astronomers have never found a galaxy cluster at this precise stage. These results may also imply that star formation slows down in large galaxies within clusters after the galaxies have already come together during the development of a galaxy cluster.


There was a time in the Universe’s distant past where it was too young to contain the structures we see in it today. If we look back early enough, we should find no galaxy clusters, no galaxies, and even no stars. It takes millions or even billions of years for gravitation to pull matter together in order to form these giant, dense clumps of material, and without the right ingredients in the Universe, we wouldn’t get them early enough, or at all. Thanks to a combination of observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope, the ESO’s UltraVISTA infrared telescope and the ALMA radio telescope, scientists have just announced the discovery of the most distant galaxy cluster ever: CL J1001+0220. Its light is only now arriving after an 11.2 billion year journey, making it the earliest structure this large ever discovered.

This cluster isn’t only remarkable for becoming the newest cosmic record-holder for an object so large at such early times, however. There are other galaxy clusters — some of which are much, much larger — discovered at a lookback time of up to ten billion years ago. But in all of those cases, the centers of these clusters already contain giant elliptical galaxies at their cores.

The light from the “El Gordo” galaxy cluster, ACT-CL J0102-4915, comes to use from over 7 billion years in the past. It’s incredibly massive at over 3 quadrillion suns, but the giant ellipticals are already formed and are much quieter and full of older stars than a “new” cluster would indicate. Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (University of California, Davis), J. Hughes (Rutgers University), F. Menanteau (Rutgers University and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), C. Sifon (Leiden Observatory), R. Mandelbum (Carnegie Mellon University), L. Barrientos (Universidad Catolica de Chile), and K. Ng (University of California, Davis).

Thought to occur from the mergers of multiple large spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies are:

• larger,
• with ultra-massive black holes,
• devoid of gas that forms new stars,
• and, comparatively, inundated with older stellar populations.

But when we look at this newest, youngest and most distant cluster, we find that there are 11 massive galaxies close to its core, and an incredible nine of them are forming new stars at an incredible rate.

EmDrive: Nasa Eagleworks' paper has finally passed peer review, says scientist in the know

EmDrive research from Nasa Eagleworks scientists has apparently passed peer review and will soon be published in the AIAA's Journal of Propulsion and Power

Is the mystery of the 'impossible' fuel free EmDrive thruster about to be solved? Claims secretive Nasa lab to publish paper on 'warp drive' that could take humans to Mars in 10 weeks

• EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves in chamber 
• Scientists aren't sure how this happens as it defies the laws of physics
• Nasa has been investigating the drive along with other labs 
• Claims paper has now been accepted for publication by a major journal

It has been dubbed the  'impossible engine', that could take humans to Mars in just 10 weeks - but nobody knows how. 

The so-called EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around in an enclosed chamber, and uses only solar power.

Roger Shawyer, a British scientist who invented the EmDrive, says that the industry has moved past far past Nasa's tests of the space propulsion technology, a space technology race is ongoing amongst private companiesRoger Shawyer, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd

Many argue the concept is simply hype, suggesting the design goes against the laws of physics , and now a Nasa lab that has been studying the concept is set to publish its findings for the first time it has been claimed.

A prototype of the 'impossible' fuel-free engine that some say power a spacecraft to Mars in just 10 weeks. The design is now set to undergo peer-review. Many maintain the system goes against the laws of physics

WHAT IS AN EM DRIVE? 

 

The concept of an EmDrive engine is relatively simple.

It provides thrust to a spacecraft by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container.

Solar energy provides the electricity to power the microwaves, which means that no propellant is needed.

The implications for this could be huge. For instance, current satellites could be half the size they are today without the need to carry fuel.

Humans could also travel further into space, generating their own propulsion on the way.

But when the concept was first proposed it was considered implausible because it went against the laws of physics.

Its allegedly fuel-free nature also means that the drive may directly contradict the law of conservation of momentum.

It suggests it would produce a forward-facing force without an equal
and opposite force acting in the other direction.

'It is my understanding that Eaglework's new paper has been today accepted for publication in a peer-review journal, where it will be published,' claims one user on the Nasa Spaceflight forum. 

Earlier this year, an employee confirmed the team was working on the paper.

'The Eagleworks Lab is NOT dead and we continue down the path set by our NASA management. 

'Past that I can't say more other than to listen to Dr Rodal on this topic, and please have patience about when our next EW paper is going to be published. Peer reviews are glacially slow,' Eagleworks engineer Paul March wrote on the same forum. 

Earlier this year, a paper published in AIP Advances  suggests the EmDrive produces an exhaust like every other rocket.

Simulated transverse magnetic modes TM20, (red high, blue low) at the wide and narrow ends of the EmDrive tapered cavity differ from each other. This implies interference of microwaves, and hence also anisotropic efflux of paired photons. The loss of momentum results in an equal and opposite reaction, i.e., thrust.

EmDrive works just like any other engine,' Dr Arto Annila, physics professor at

the University of Helsinki and lead author of the paper, told MailOnline.

'Its fuel is the input photons at microwave lengths.'

The researchers suggest the photons coming out of the machine interfere with each

other, so that the overall effect seems as if nothing is there. 

'In the cavity the input photons will bounce back and forth, and invariably some of 

them will interfere completely destructively.'

The technology has been dubbed the 'warp drive' for its similarity to the power plant from the fictional Star trek series.

Then the two photons will be exactly 180 degrees out phase. 

'At the complete interference electromagnetic fields for the two photons will cancel exactly, but the 
photons themselves continue to propagate.'

The idea is the same as water waves travelling together, at the exact right time so that the crest of one 
wave is exactly at the trough of the other and cancelling each other out. 

The water does not go away, it's still there. In the same way the pairs of photons are still there and carrying momentum even though they cannot be seen as light.

The Nasa Eagleworks team is tasked with investigating radical propulsion methods

'The paired photons without net electromagnetic field will escape from the cavity,' Dr Annila said. 'This
 efflux of paired photons is the exhaust of EmDrive.'

'When the cavity is asymmetric, like the tapered cone, the efflux of paired photons is also 
asymmetric. Therefore the loss of momentum carried by the paired photons is uneven. In other words,
 thrust is non-zero.'

Dr Annila came up with the idea along with Dr Erkki Kolehmainen, an organic chemistry professor at
 the University of Jyväskylä and Patrick Grahn, a multiphysicist at engineering software firm Comsol. 

'Thrust without exhaust is of course impossible,' the authors wrote in their. 'Yet, certain resonant 
cavities, when fueled with microwaves, deliver thrust without apparent exhaust.' 

Their theory suggest the exhaust produced by the EmDrive is there, but just cannot be seen. 

Dr Annila said the photons could theoretically be detected by an interferometer, the same instrument 
used to detect gravitational waves.

'My gut feeling is that it will be very difficult to detect such a small excess in energy density, especially 
when operating EmDrive steadily,' he said.

'Namely changes are more amenable to detection in any case. But still our idea about the exhaust can 
be useful to design the cavity for pairing photons better for an exit in a preferred direction, and hence to generate more thrust.' 

The idea is the same as water waves travelling together, at the exact right time so that the crest of one wave is exactly at the trough of the other

HOW THE EMDRIVE PRODUCES THRUST WITHOUT AN EXTERNAL FORCE

Dr Mike McCulloch of Plymouth University has a new explanation about how the EmDrive works

The EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around in an enclosed chamber, and uses only solar power.

According to classical physics, the EM Drive should be impossible because it seems to violate the law of conservation of momentum.

The law states that the momentum of a system is constant if there are no external forces acting on the system – which is why propellant is required in traditional rockets.

But Mike McCulloch of Plymouth University came up with a possible explanation based on a new theory of inertia.

McCulloch's suggests inertia arises from an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity called 'Unruh radiation'.

The Unruh radiation effect states that if you're accelerating in a vacuum, empty space will contain a gas of particles at a temperature proportional to the acceleration.

According to McCulloch, inertia is the pressure that the Unruh radiation exerts on an accelerating body.

When the accelerations involved are smaller, such as is the case with the EmDrive, the wavelength of Unruh radiation gets larger.

At extremely small accelerations, the wavelengths become too large to fit in the observable universe.

As a result, inertia may only take on whole-wavelength units over time, causing it to become 'quantized.' This means it can only in some multiple of a unit of measure, causing sudden jumps in acceleration. 

But because of the EmDrive's truncated cone, the Unruh radiation in tiny.

The cone allows Unruh radiation of a certain size at the large end but only a smaller wavelength at the other end, according to an in-depth report by MIT.

This means the inertia of photons inside the cavity change as they bounce back and forth. To conserve momentum, they are forced to generate thrust.

The concept of an EM Drive engine is relatively simple. It provides thrust to a spacecraft by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. Dr Mike McCulloch, a scientist at Plymouth University, says something known as 'Unruh radiation' may be behind the bizarre performance of drive