Does the existence of life on Earth tell us anything about the probability of abiogenesis—the origin of life from inorganic substances—arising elsewhere? That’s a question that has confounded scientists, and anyone else inclined to ponder it, for some time.

A widely accepted argument from Australian-born astrophysicist Brandon Carter argues that the selection effect of our own existence puts constraints on our observation. Since we had to find ourselves on a planet where abiogenesis occurred, then nothing can be inferred about the probability of life elsewhere based on this knowledge alone.

At best, he argued, the knowledge of life on Earth is of neutral value. Another way of looking at it is that Earth can’t be considered a typical Earth-like planet because it hasn’t been selected at random from the set of all Earth-like planets.

However, a new paper by Daniel Whitmire, a retired astrophysicist who currently teaches mathematics at the U of A, is arguing that Carter used faulty logic. Though Carter’s theory has become widely accepted, Whitmire argues that it suffers from what’s known as “the old evidence problem” in Bayesian confirmation theory, which is used to update a theory or hypothesis in light of new evidence.

After giving a few examples of how this formula is employed to calculate probabilities and what role old evidence plays, Whitmire turns to what he calls the conception analogy.

As he explains, “One could argue, like Carter, that I exist regardless of whether my conception was hard or easy, and so nothing can be inferred about whether my conception was hard or easy from my existence alone.”

In this analogy, “hard” means contraception was used. “Easy” means no contraception was used. In each case, Whitmire assigns values to these propositions.

Whitmire continues, “However, my existence is old evidence and must be treated as such. When this is done the conclusion is that it is much more probable that my conception was easy. In the abiogenesis case of interest, it’s the same thing. The existence of life on Earth is old evidence and just like in the conception analogy the probability that abiogenesis is easy is much more probable.”

In other words, the evidence of life on Earth is not of neutral value in making the case for life on similar planets. As such, our life suggests that life is more likely to emerge on other Earth-like planets—maybe even on the recent “super-Earth” type planet, LP 890-9b, discovered 100 light years away.

Those with a taste for math can read Whitmire’s paper, “Abiogensis: The Carter Argument Reconsidered,” in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

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Explore further

The implications of cosmic silence

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More information: Daniel P. Whitmire, Abiogenesis: the Carter argument reconsidered, International Journal of Astrobiology (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S1473550422000350

Source: New theory concludes that the origin of life on Earth-like planets is likely

Voyager and Lockheed Martin have found a partner to design astronaut facilities for their space station. Hilton will develop suites and sleeping quarters for Starlab, CNBC reports. Under the partnership, Hilton and Voyager will also look at marketing opportunities related to Starlab and trips to what may be one of the first space hotels.

NASA has granted contracts to four private companies who are building private space stations ahead of the agency’s planned decommissioning of the International Space Station at the end of the decade. Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman are also working on space stations. Voyager’s operating company Nanoracks received the largest contract, which was valued at $160 million.

Voyager and Lockheed Martin hope to have the first Starlab up and running by 2027.

Source: Hilton will design suites and sleeping quarters for Voyager’s private Starlab space station | Engadget

Space is getting a little too crowded, increasing the risk of orbital collisions. Slingshot Aerospace, a company specializing in space data analytics, is now offering a solution to regulate some of the traffic up there. The company announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out a free version of its space traffic control system to help satellite operators dodge collisions.

[…]

The company’s Slingshot Beacon software works like an air traffic control system, but for spacecraft in orbit. It pulls in public and private data provided by Slingshot’s customers to create a space catalog. The system then sends out urgent collision alerts to satellite operators worldwide, coordinates satellite maneuvers should there be a risk of collision, and allows operators to communicate with each other, especially during high-risk moments.

Slingshot Aerospace launched Beacon a year ago and is now offering a free basic version to satellite operators in hopes of increasing the number of users on its platform. “We’ve been testing it for the past year with a select few so as not to get overwhelmed by the data,” Stricklan said. “And we have 100% confidence that we are ready to scale to a global scale.” By offering the free version, the company anticipates that some satellite operators will seek the software’s advanced options, which offer more accurate and refined data.

There are more than 9,800 satellites in orbit today, with more than 115,000 planned to launch by 2030, according to Slingshot’s space object database. And that’s in addition to the thousands of pieces of space junk currently in orbit around our planet. Some satellite operators are currently working with outdated technology that wasn’t designed for the volume of spacecraft in orbit today, making then unreliable when it comes to issuing warnings of potential in-space collisions. “There’s a lot of noise out there,” Stricklan said. “They’re getting thousands of [collision warnings] a day, so it just turns into noise.”

[…]

Source: This Startup’s Free Software Could Prevent Satellite Collisions

Astronomers have found a baby planet hidden in clouds of gas and dust swirling within a young solar system, by studying the accumulation of material around Lagrange points.

That’s according to research published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Studying these protoplanets is difficult. Their stellar nurseries are shrouded in thick, hot clumps of mostly hydrogen gas, preventing astronomers from clearly observing the birth of stars and planets.

“Directly detecting young planets is very challenging and has so far only been successful in one or two cases,” Feng Long, first author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard, said. “The planets are always too faint for us to see because they’re embedded in thick layers of gas and dust.”

To overcome this hurdle, Long and her colleagues developed a method to detect baby worlds, and used it to discover what appears to be a young planet forming around LkCa 15, a juvenile star located 518 light-years from Earth.

Here’s how the team said they did it. They used observational data gathered from the ALMA telescope, which revealed a clump of mass and an arc-shaped feature, both telltale signs that something else is forming within the dense protoplanetary disk of matter surrounding the young star.

These images did not, however, provide hard evidence of a planet forming around that sun. But another measurement connecting the pair of features convinced the team they had found an alien world in the making. “This arc and clump are separated by about 120 degrees,” Long said. “That degree of separation doesn’t just happen — it’s important mathematically.”

The separation showed these two features lie at Lagrange points, points in space around which objects can orbit stably thanks to the gravitational pull of two nearby large objects – for example, a star and a planet

[…]

The data from LkCa 15 showed the arc is located at the L4 point and the clump is at L5. These are so placed because another object – a hidden planet – is orbiting between them; the Lagrange points are the result of the gravitational pull by the young star and its forming world, just as the Sun and Earth form Lagrange points

[…]

Long and her colleagues used the data to simulate the growth of a planet with similar properties to the one they thought they had found, and compared their model’s results with the telescope’s images.

Strong similarities between the simulations and observational data showed a planet is likely forming around LkCa 15. The mystery object is estimated to be about the size of Neptune or Saturn, and orbits around the star at quite a distance – 42 times the distance between the Sun and Earth

[…]

“[We] put a planet into a disk full of gas parcels and dust particles, and see how they interact and evolve under known physics,” […] This model image will show what the millimeter wavelength emission would look like, [so we can] make a direct comparison with our observations.”

[…]

Source: Astronomers describe how they found a baby planet forming • The Register

Where are we in the Milky Way? And where is the Milky Way in the Universe? How many galaxies are in the observable Universe? Find answers in this infographic.

Source: How Big Is The Universe | Observable Universe: Map, Size | Laniakea Supercluster | Star Walk

Analyzing data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories, astronomers have concluded that the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse quite literally blew its top in 2019, losing a substantial part of its visible surface and producing a gigantic Surface Mass Ejection (SME). This is something never before seen in a normal star’s behavior.

The sun routinely blows off parts of its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, in an event known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). But the Betelgeuse SME blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME.

The monster star is still slowly recovering from this catastrophic upheaval. “Betelgeuse continues doing some very unusual things right now; the interior is sort of bouncing,” says Andrea Dupree of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.

These new observations yield clues as to how red stars lose mass late in their lives as their nuclear fusion furnaces burn out, before exploding as supernovae. The amount of mass loss significantly affects their fate. However, Betelgeuse’s surprisingly petulant behavior is not evidence the star is about to blow up anytime soon. So the mass loss event is not necessarily the signal of an imminent explosion

[…]

The titanic outburst in 2019 was possibly caused by a convective plume, more than a million miles across, bubbling up from deep inside the star. It produced shocks and pulsations that blasted off the chunk of the photosphere leaving the star with a large cool surface area under the dust cloud that was produced by the cooling piece of photosphere. Betelgeuse is now struggling to recover from this injury.

Weighing roughly several times as much as our moon, the fractured piece of photosphere sped off into space and cooled to form a dust cloud that blocked light from the star as seen by Earth observers. The dimming, which began in late 2019 and lasted for a few months, was easily noticeable even by backyard observers watching the star change brightness. One of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse is easily found in the right shoulder of the constellation Orion.

Even more fantastic, the supergiant’s 400-day pulsation rate is now gone, perhaps at least temporarily. For almost 200 years astronomers have measured this rhythm as evident in changes in Betelgeuse’s brightness variations and surface motions. Its disruption attests to the ferocity of the blowout.

[…]

Betelgeuse is now so huge now that if it replaced the sun at the center of our solar system, its outer surface would extend past the orbit of Jupiter. Dupree used Hubble to resolve hot spots on the star’s surface in 1996. This was the first direct image of a star other than the sun.

[…]

Source: Hubble sees supergiant Betelgeuse slowly recovering after blowing its top

A new analysis of seismic data from NASA’s Mars InSight mission has revealed a couple of surprises.

The first surprise: the top 300 meters of the subsurface beneath the landing site near the Martian equator contains little or no ice.

“We find that Mars’ crust is weak and porous. The sediments are not well-cemented. And there’s no ice or not much ice filling the pore spaces,” said geophysicist Vashan Wright of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Wright and three co-authors published their analysis in Geophysical Research Letters.

“These findings don’t preclude that there could be grains of ice or small balls of ice that are not cementing other minerals together,” said Wright. “The question is how likely is ice to be present in that form?”

The second surprise contradicts a leading idea about what happened to the water on Mars. The red planet may have harbored oceans of water early in its history. Many experts suspected that much of the water became part of the minerals that make up underground cement.

“If you put water in contact with rocks, you produce a brand-new set of minerals, like clay, so the water’s not a liquid. It’s part of the mineral structure,” said study co-author Michael Manga of the University of California Berkeley. “There is some cement, but the rocks are not full of cement.”

“Water may also go into minerals that do not act as cement. But the uncemented subsurface removes one way to preserve a record of life or biological activity,” Wright said. Cements by their very nature hold rocks and sediments together, protecting them from destructive erosion.

The lack of cemented sediments suggests a water scarcity in the 300 meters below InSight’s landing site near the equator. The below-freezing average temperature at the Mars equator means that conditions would be cold enough to freeze water if it were there.

Many planetary scientists, including Manga, have long suspected that the Martian subsurface would be full of ice. Their suspicions have melted away. Still, big ice sheets and frozen ground ice remain at the Martian poles.

[…]

Source: Subsurface water on Mars defy expectations: Physics connects seismic data to properties of rocks and sediments

Australian media has reported that space debris found in New South Wales was indeed junk from a SpaceX mission, including one piece measuring nearly three meters in length.

The black shard, found sticking out of the ground, is presumed to be Elon Musk’s take on 2001’s Monolith. The Register asked SpaceX to clarify, but we have yet to receive a response.

The debris fell to Earth earlier in July, and the three-meter long component was found on July 25. Australian authorities had been awaiting confirmation that the pieces were indeed from a SpaceX mission and, according to ABC South East NSW, that confirmation has now been received.

G’day @elonmusk, I’m a reporter at @abcnews that’s been covering the discovery of @SpaceX debris in Australia. Just wondering, is anyone from your team coming to collect it?
Here’s a pic of one of the pieces👇 pic.twitter.com/NcJeuigQzx

— Adriane Reardon (@adrianereardon) August 3, 2022

Astronomer Jonathan McDowell noted that the July 8 reentry path for the leftover SpaceX Crew-1 trunk was close to the Dalgety area (slightly inland, halfway between Melbourne and Sydney) where the debris was found. The lengthy shard also bears a distinct resemblance to the attach point of one of the trunk’s four fins. Additional debris was also found.

As well as a reusable capsule, the SpaceX Crew Dragon has an unpressurized trunk, which features solar panels and fins. The trunk is jettisoned prior to reentry for disposal. However, it appears that some components survived to land in Australia.

SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission was the first operational flight of the Crew Dragon, ferrying four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS.) It launched on November 16, 2020 and returned to Earth on May 2, 2021. The trunk, it appears, made its own return somewhat later.

[…]

Source: SpaceX shows that it too can shower the Earth with debris • The Register

As more private astronauts venture out into space, NASA is seeking to better regulate their journeys to Earth orbit. The space agency recently announced some updates to the set of rules required for upcoming private astronaut missions, including the stipulation that all future missions be led by a former NASA astronaut.

NASA released the list of updated rules on Monday, which will be documented as part of the Private Astronaut Mission Authorization, Coordination, and Execution (PACE) Annex 1. The updates are “lessons learned” from the first private astronaut mission to the ISS, in which Axiom space sent four astronauts to the ISS in April. Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) was led by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, but the new requirements now call for all future missions to be led by a former NASA astronaut. For these missions, the NASA astronaut will serve as the mission commander and provide guidance “during pre-flight preparation through mission execution.”

Axiom Space was planning on sending future missions without a NASA astronaut and have four paying customers instead of three, according to SpaceNews. It’s not yet clear how the new rules will affect the private space company’s original plan to launch private missions without a NASA astronaut in command.

[…]

Source: NASA Is Changing Its Rules for Private Astronauts

Scientists believe we’ve only discovered about 5% of the universe. Here’s a map of what we’ve found so far, visualized using a log scale.

logarithmic map of observable universe

Source: A Logarithmic Map of the Entire Observable Universe

China is claiming that as of Wednesday, its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter has officially photographed the entire Red Planet. And it’s shown off new photos of the southern polar cap and a volcano to prove it.

“It has acquired the medium-resolution image data covering the whole globe of Mars, with all of its scientific payloads realizing a global survey,” state-sponsored media quoted the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announcing.

Among the images are one of Ascraeus Mons with its crater, shots of the South Pole whose ice sheet is believed to consist of solid carbon dioxide and ice, the seven-kilometer deep Valles Marineris canyon, and the geomorphological characteristics of the rim of the Mund crater.

Ascraeus Mons, above … Source: CNSA. Click to enlarge any image

Mars South Pole

Valles Marineris

Mund crater

Tianwen-1 had been in orbit around Mars for 706 days. The orbiter circled Mars 1,344 times, as of an announcement from CNSA. The space org said Tianwen-1 has completed its scheduled missions.

In conjunction with its rover Zhurong, Tianwen-1 amassed 1,040 gigabytes of raw scientific data through 13 onboard scientific payloads.

The mission has allowed CNSA to observe solar occultation and solar wind together with international observatories – including those in Russia, Germany, Italy, Australia and South Africa – to improve the accuracy of space weather forecasts.

[…]

Source: China says it has photographed all of Mars from orbit • The Register

I really don’t understand why the doubtful reporting.

South Korea conducted its first successful satellite launch using a domestically developed rocket on Tuesday, officials said, boosting its growing aerospace ambitions and demonstrating it has key technologies needed to launch spy satellites and build larger missiles amid tensions with rival North Korea.

The three-stage Nuri rocket placed a functioning “performance verification” satellite at a target altitude of 700 kilometers (435 miles) after its 4 p.m. liftoff from South Korea’s space launch center on a southern island, the Science Ministry said.

The satellite transmitted signals about its status to an unmanned South Korean station in Antarctica. It is carrying four smaller satellites that will be released in coming days for Earth observation and other missions, ministry officials said.

[…]

Source: South Korea Launches First Satellite With Homegrown Rocket – The Diplomat

This evening, Boeing’s new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, successfully docked itself to the International Space Station — demonstrating that the vehicle can potentially bring humans to the ISS in the future. It’s a crucial capability that Starliner has finally validated in space after years of delays and failures.

Starliner is in the midst of a key test flight for NASA called OFT-2, for Orbital Flight Test-2. The capsule, developed by Boeing for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, was made to transport NASA’s astronauts to and from the space station. But before anyone climbs on board, NASA tasked Boeing with conducting an uncrewed flight demonstration of Starliner to show that the capsule can hit all of the major milestones it’ll need to hit when it is carrying passengers.

Boeing has struggled to showcase Starliner’s ability until now. This mission is called OFT-2 since it’s technically a do-over of a mission that Boeing attempted back in 2019, called OFT. During that flight, Starliner launched to space as planned, but a software glitch prevented the capsule from getting in the right orbit it needed to reach to rendezvous with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the vehicle home early, and the company never demonstrated Starliner’s ability to dock with the ISS.

[…]

At 6:54PM ET, Starliner successfully launched to space on top of an Atlas V rocket, built and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Once Starliner separated from the Atlas V, it had to fire its own thrusters to insert itself into the proper orbit for reaching the space station. However, after that maneuver took place, Boeing and NASA revealed that two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses for the procedure failed and cut off too early. The capsule’s flight control system was able to kick in and rerouted to a working thruster, which helped get Starliner into a stable orbit.

Ultimately, NASA and Boeing claimed that the issue should not impact the rest of Starliner’s mission. “There’s really no need to resolve them,” Steve Stich, NASA’s program manager for the Commercial Crew Program, said in a press conference after the flight. “But I know what the teams will do, and what we always do is we’ll go look at the data, try to understand what happened.” Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue “does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test,” according to Boeing.

Boeing also noted today that the Starliner team is investigating some weird behavior of a “thermal cooling loop” but said that temperatures are stable on the spacecraft.

[…]

Source: Boeing’s Starliner successfully docks to the International Space Station for the first time

Wait, with the record on their 777 aircraft they are saying things like they don’t need to resolve issues?!

[…]

an international team of astronomers, including a team that I led from the University of Central Lancashire, has unveiled the first image of the object lurking at the centre of the Milky Way – and it is a supermassive black hole.

This means there is now overwhelming evidence for the black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A*. While it might seem a little scary to be so close to such a beast, it is in fact some 26,000 light-years away, which is reassuringly far. In fact, because the black hole is so far away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as a donut would have on the Moon. Sagittarius A* also seems rather inactive – it is not devouring a lot of matter from its surroundings.

Our team was part of the global Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which has used observations from a worldwide network of eight radio telescopes on our planet – collectively forming a single, Earth-sized virtual telescope – to take the stunning image. The breakthrough follows the collaboration’s 2019 release of the first ever image of a black hole, called M87*, at the centre of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy.

Looking into darkness

The team observed Sagittarius A* on multiple nights, collecting data for many hours in a row, similar to using a long exposure time on a camera. Although we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a tell-tale signature: a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun.

[…]

Source: How we captured first image of the supermassive black hole at centre of the Milky Way

The researchers observed unexpected, rapid “electron precipitation” from low-Earth orbit using the ELFIN mission, a pair of tiny satellites built and operated on the UCLA campus by undergraduate and graduate students guided by a small team of staff mentors.

By combining the ELFIN data with more distant observations from NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft, the scientists determined that the sudden downpour was caused by whistler waves, a type of electromagnetic wave that ripples through plasma in space and affects electrons in the Earth’s magnetosphere, causing them to “spill over” into the atmosphere

[..]

Central to that chain of events is the near-Earth space environment, which is filled with charged particles orbiting in giant rings around the planet, called Van Allen radiation belts. Electrons in these belts travel in Slinky-like spirals that literally bounce between the Earth’s north and south poles. Under certain conditions, whistler waves are generated within the radiation belts, energizing and speeding up the electrons. This effectively stretches out the electrons’ travel path so much that they fall out of the belts and precipitate into the atmosphere, creating the electron rain.

One can imagine the Van Allen belts as a large reservoir filled with water—or, in this case, electrons, said Vassilis Angelopolous, a UCLA professor of space physics and ELFIN’s principal investigator. As the reservoir fills, water periodically spirals down into a relief drain to keep the basin from overflowing. But when large waves occur in the reservoir, the sloshing water spills over the edge, faster and in greater volume than the relief drainage. ELFIN, which is downstream of both flows, is able to properly measure the contributions from each.

[…]

The researchers further showed that this type of radiation-belt electron loss to the atmosphere can increase significantly during geomagnetic storms, disturbances caused by enhanced solar activity that can affect near-Earth space and Earth’s magnetic environment.

[…]

Source: Researchers discover source of super-fast electron rain

On Feb. 3, SpaceX launched 49 small satellites into low earth orbit as a part of its Starlink program, an advanced satellite internet service that, as with many other products and services pioneered by American billionaire Elon Musk, is at least a little controversial. The satellites were carried into the atmosphere without a problem and were deployed into their intended orbit, however, once they were orbiting, there was an anomaly in the earth’s atmosphere that caused the loss of all but nine of the quarter-ton satellites.

In a press release, SpaceX claims that a “geomagnetic storm” is the culprit. According to the company, this storm warmed and increased the density of the atmosphere at the 210-kilometer height the satellites were deployed at, increasing the drag on the orbiting hardware to an unsustainable degree. Measures were taken in an attempt to remedy this increase in drag, but these were mostly unsuccessful. Of the 49 satellites launched, 40 have allegedly either already fallen out of orbit or are in the process of doing so

[…]

SpaceX insists that they will not end up as space junk or indeed even impact the ground. It says that the lost hardware poses “zero collision risk with other satellites,” and that by design they will “demise upon atmospheric reentry.” So far, there have been no reported instances of Starlink units causing any damage to life or infrastructure on the ground. However, with plans to eventually launch over ten thousand of the small satellites into low earth orbit, the risk of a collision with an object in space will increase.

[…]

 

Source: Solar Storm Destroys 40 New SpaceX Starlink Satellites | The Drive

Chinese satellite was observed grabbing another satellite and pulling it out of its normal geosynchronous orbit and into a “super-graveyard drift orbit.” The maneuver raises questions about the potential applications of these types of satellites designed to maneuver close to other satellites for inspection or manipulation and adds to growing concerns about China’s space program overall.

On January 22, China’s Shijian-21 satellite, or SJ-21, disappeared from its regular position in orbit during daylight hours when observations were difficult to make with optical telescopes. SJ-21 was then observed executing a “large maneuver” to bring it closely alongside another satellite, a dead BeiDou Navigation System satellite. SJ-21 then pulled the dead satellite out of its normal geosynchronous orbit and placed it a few hundred miles away in what is known as a graveyard orbit. These distant orbits are designated for defunct satellites at the end of their lives and are intended to reduce the risk of collision with operational assets.

The unusual maneuver was observed by telescopes belonging to commercial space awareness firm Exoanalytic Solutions. During a webinar hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) this week, Exoanalytic Solutions’ Brien Flewelling said the SJ-21 satellite “appears to be functioning as a space tug.” Space Command did not respond to a request for comment, Breaking Defense reports.

Space Force has been increasingly turning to commercial space companies to provide a variety of data and services to boost its situational awareness, and to that end, Joint Task Force-Space Defense awarded Exoanalytic Solutions a contract in 2021 to provide space domain data. “Comms, data relay, remote sensing, and even ISR and some other things — [these] capabilities are increasingly available in the commercial market,” Space Force deputy Lt. Gen. David Thompson said last year.

SJ-21, or Shijian-21, was launched in October 2021 atop a Long March-3B rocket. The satellite is officially designated as an On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing, or OSAM satellite, a broad class of satellites designed with capabilities to get close to and interact with other satellites. Such systems could enable a wide range of applications including extending the life of existing satellites, assembling satellites in orbit, or performing other maintenance and repairs. According to Chinese state news outlets, SJ-21 was designed to “test and verify space debris mitigation technologies.”

[…]

Source: A Chinese Satellite Just Grappled Another And Pulled It Out Of Orbit

Just over 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules there’s a rugby ball-shaped exoplanet orbiting a star. It’s the first time astronomers have been able to detect such an unusual shape of an alien world.

Most planets are more or less spherical due to gravitational forces that pull matter equally in from all sides, yet WASP-103b appears to be elongated. The planet is in an orbit close to its host star, and experiences strong tidal forces that appear to have deformed its surface.

[…]

The findings were published in a paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics on Tuesday.

[…]

Tidal interactions between a star and its companions can suck exoplanets in, making the time it takes for a complete orbit to shorten over time. But the orbital period for WASP-103b appears to be increasing, meaning its getting further away from its star.

The team isn’t quite sure why the planet seems to be getting more distant, and are trying to confirm the data in future observations.

Source: Massive rugby ball-shaped exoplanet spotted 1,500 ly away • The Register

In a study published today in Nature, they describe an amorphous, 1,000-light-year-wide bubble ensconcing Earth that is responsible for those stars.

Called the Local Bubble, the researchers believe it formed from a series of large explosions that blasted energy into space over the last 14 million years. Those explosions were supernovae—spectacular collapses of stars that sometimes leave behind beautiful nebulae. In this case, the supernovae also shaped our galactic neighborhood, 500 light-years in any direction from Earth.

“We find that all nearby, young stars formed as powerful supernova explosions triggered an expanding shockwave, sweeping up interstellar clouds of gas and dust into a cold dense shell that now forms the surface of the Local Bubble,” said study co-author Catherine Zucker in an email to Gizmodo.

“Astronomers have theorized for many decades that supernovae can ‘sweep up’ gas into dense clouds that ultimately form new stars, but our work provides the strongest observational evidence to date in support of this theory,” added Zucker, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.

The team modeled how the explosions likely took place over millions of years, pushing gas outward like a broom sweeping up dust. At its genesis, the bubble was probably moving outward at about 60 miles per second, Zucker said. It’s still expanding today, but at a more leisurely 4 miles per second. Interactive figures of the bubble can be seen here.

Our Solar System is at the center of the bubble, rather than at its edge. That’s because, unlike the stars on the Local Bubble’s periphery, our solar system was born much longer ago than the last 14 million years.

“When the Local Bubble first started forming, the Earth was over 1,000 light-years away,” Zucker said. “We think the Earth entered the bubble about 5 million years ago, which is consistent with estimates of radioactive iron isotope deposits from supernova in the Earth’s crust from other studies.”

Source: Earth Is in a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Bubble That Cooks Up Stars

Heads up, future space travelers: No more commercial astronaut wings will be awarded from the Federal Aviation Administration after this year.

The FAA said Friday it’s clipping its astronaut wings because too many people are now launching into space and it’s getting out of the astronaut designation business entirely.

The news comes one day ahead of Blue Origin’s planned liftoff from West Texas with former NFL player and TV celebrity Michael Strahan. He and his five fellow passengers will still be eligible for wings since the FAA isn’t ending its long-standing program until Jan. 1.

NASA’s astronauts also have nothing to worry about going forward—they’ll still get their pins from the space agency.

All 15 people who rocketed into space for the first time this year on private U.S. flights will be awarded their wings, according to the FAA. That includes Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, as well as the other space newbies who accompanied them on their brief up-and-down trips. The companies handed out their own version of astronaut wings after the flights.

All four passengers on SpaceX’s first private flight to orbit last September also qualified for FAA wings.

Adding Blue Origin’s next crew of six will bring the list to 30. The FAA’ s first commercial wings recipient was in 2004.

Earlier this year, the FAA tightened up its qualifications, specifying that awardees must be trained crew members, versus paying customers along for the ride. But with the program ending, the decision was made to be all-inclusive, a spokesman said.

Future space tourists will get their names put on a FAA commercial spaceflight list. To qualify, they must soar at least 50 miles (80 kilometers) on an FAA-sanctioned launch.

Source: FAA: No more commercial astronaut wings, too many launching

Astrophysicists believe the heliosphere protects the planets within our solar system from powerful radiation emanating from supernovas, the final explosions of dying stars throughout the universe. They believe the heliosphere extends far beyond our solar system, but despite the massive buffer against cosmic radiation that the heliosphere provides Earth’s life-forms, no one really knows the shape of the heliosphere—or, for that matter, the size of it.

[…]

Opher’s team has constructed some of the most compelling computer simulations of the heliosphere, based on models built on observable data and theoretical astrophysics.

[…]

a paper published by Opher and collaborators in Astrophysical Journal reveals that neutral hydrogen particles streaming from outside our solar system most likely play a crucial role in the way our heliosphere takes shape.

[…]

models predict that the heliosphere, traveling in tandem with our sun and encompassing our solar system, doesn’t appear to be stable. Other models of the heliosphere developed by other astrophysicists tend to depict the heliosphere as having a comet-like shape, with a jet—or a “tail”—streaming behind in its wake. In contrast, Opher’s model suggests the heliosphere is shaped more like a croissant or even a donut.

The reason for that? Neutral hydrogen particles, so-called because they have equal amounts of positive and negative charge that net no charge at all.

“They come streaming through the solar system,” Opher says. Using a computational model like a recipe to test the effect of ‘neutrals’ on the shape of the heliosphere, she “took one ingredient out of the cake—the neutrals—and noticed that the jets coming from the sun, shaping the heliosphere, become super stable. When I put them back in, things start bending, the center axis starts wiggling, and that means that something inside the heliospheric jets is becoming very unstable.”

Instability like that would theoretically cause disturbance in the solar winds and jets emanating from our sun, causing the heliosphere to split its shape—into a croissant-like form. Although astrophysicists haven’t yet developed ways to observe the actual shape of the heliosphere, Opher’s model suggests the presence of neutrals slamming into our solar system would make it impossible for the heliosphere to flow uniformly like a shooting comet. And one thing is for sure—neutrals are definitely pelting their way through space.

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Source: Studying our solar system’s protective bubble