3000 Years Old Star Map // Lunar Starship Elevator Test // Io Close Flyby

Juno's closest flyby of IO Hubble studies an exoplanet atmosphere for 3 years astronauts test out starship's elevator and more evidence for cork stars all this and more in this week's space bites so NASA's Juno spacecraft has been exploring the jovian planet and its moons and just completed its 57th flyby of Jupiter now the way Juno works is that it does these big long elliptical orbits around Jupiter it gets close takes a bunch of pictures gathers some data and then it flies back out safe from all of the radiation in the inner region and then it makes another fly by gathers a bunch of data and this like approach is now being considered it's going to be used for the Europa Clipper you can see it's a great way to be able to have a spacecraft be in a fairly dangerous environment and still to be able to do a bunch of Science and so now that Juno has completed kind of its main science objectives in studying Jupiter NASA's just sending it out in other places in the system and so it's been making a bunch of flybys of IO which is the closest Moon into Jupiter it's also the most dangerous one it's the one that is closest into Jupiter's extensive magnetosphere and so more damage is probably going to happen to Juno as it makes these flybys now it's already done a bunch of flybys but on December 30th 2023 last year it did a flyby that brought it within 1,500 kilometers of the surface of IO and that sounds close and it is for Juno but in fact NASA's Galileo spacecraft made an even closer flyby about 20 years ago and so Juno is still catching up to the work that Galileo did and every time we get close-up flybys from Juno then all of the citizen scientists take those pictures produce much cooler versions of it and so here's a bunch to look at one from Kevin Gil who is one of my favorite image processors now Juno has another flyby planned on February 3rd it's going to come to about the same distance of course planetary scientists have a lot of questions about IO and if you want to learn what some of those questions are I did a really amazing interview with Dr Ashley Davis from NASA JPL he has been studying these images coming back from Juno and has a lot of really interesting theories about what's going on what's driving all of this volcanism on I Hubble studies an exoplanet atmosphere for 3 years we're in the Golden Age of studying exoplanet atmospheres thanks to James Webb we've got just this Exquisite data on many different exoplanets we're seeing the presence of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide and methane and water vapor and all this kind of stuff but that's not the first instrument that was able to analyze exoplanetary atmospheres the first like tentative work was done with other INF red observatories like Spitzer and Hubble Is equipped with the instruments that will allow it to study exoplanetary atmospheres and so back in 2016 astronomers tasked Hubble to observe the atmosphere of a very famous hot Jupiter planet called wasp 121b it's located about 800 light years from Earth and it completes an orbit around its star every 30 hours so that's very close it is a very hot planet and so Astron used Hubble to observe various phases of this orbit of the planet going around the star they were able to see as a pass directly in front of the star and they're also able to observe when it passed behind the star and you also get when it returns from behind the star and so you get these multiple observations astronomers were able to observe back in 2016 and detect the presence of the atmosphere and then they came back and did some more observations in 2018 and then they came back and did more observations in in 2019 what they've done is then put together all of these data from those three separate years of observation and they found that the atmosphere is changing and when they made sophisticated models of the atmosphere of wasp 121b what it seems to be is that there is some kind of giant cyclonic storm on the surface of this planet that is Shifting its position and causing the different readings that they were detecting with each one of their observations and so this is like the next phase I mean we've gone from finding exoplanets to detecting the atmospheres of exoplanets and now we're moving into detecting the weather in the atmosphere on exoplanets now once again I've done an amazing interview kind of all about this concept of what it takes to observe the atmospheres of exoplanets so check that out an ancient stone with an accurate Sky Map so so archaeologists were studying an ancient Fort that had been found in Italy and they were unearthing various artifacts in this region and they found these two Stone discs that were like clearly man-made and on the discs there were 29 spots that had been chiseled in and astronomers looked at those spots and they were able to match them up to the stars in the sky they were able to see a lot of very famous very bright stars they able to find the stars in the belt of Orion So based on the positions of the Stars they were able to then calculate when these Stone discs were made because of course all of the stars in the sky are moving slowly and so if you chart the positions of the sky at any point in history you know when you were looking at those stars and so they dated these star positions to between 1800 BCE and 400 BCE but one really interesting mystery about this is that in fact there were 29 spots chiseled on the discs while they were only able to match up 28 stars and so what they're thinking is that additional Mark could be connected to maybe a supernova that appeared in the sky and so maybe that was the reason why they made these discs was to chart the appearance of a supernova in the sky so it's a really cool mystery and it shows you how ancient texts can be used for astronomy to understand more about what happened in the past in the Sky more solar flares are coming so as you probably know we are moving towards the peak of the solar activity it's called solar maximum and we're still probably about 18 months away and already this is shaping up to be one of the most active solar cycles that we've ever seen like if you compare this year's solar activity to last year's solar activity it's already much more active and a couple of days ago the sun released its most powerful solar flare in 6 years it was an x-class flare X5 which is very powerful and the last most powerful flare happened back in 2017 when it released an X 8.2 flare the results of the flare hit the earth just a couple of days ago and so if you happen to have clear skies and you live in the Northern latitudes Southern latitudes you'd be able to see the Northern Lights now this is an amazing time to see an aurora if you've never seen an aurora this is your chance and so I want to talk a bit more about how you can maximize your chance of seeing Aurora during this solar cycle we'll talk about that at the end of the show nyak 2024 is out now of course this is a big moment for us here on the channel and that is that NASA has released the 2024 awardees for their Advanced Innovative Concepts this is where they give tens of thousands of dollars to about a dozen groups who are coming up with out of the box ideas for space exploration and it just came out today so I'm still kind of digesting it but of course we're going to do a full court press we're going to cover all of the interesting ideas I'm going to try to interview as many people as possible we're going to release a video where we give you more information about it so stay tuned for that every week we do a vote on our Channel where we ask you to tell us what you thought was the best space news story of the week and two weeks ago the top vote was the the possibility of black holes inside Stars which just slightly beat out the Cat video typ beam from space and like I get it it's cool I disagree um but thank you everybody for voting now we will post the vote shortly after we release this video and so if you want you can go to the community tab give your Vote or just as you're scrolling on YouTube you should see the vote show up give us a quick vote help us know what you thought was the the best story of course the best chance to see that vote is to subscribe to the channel click on the notification Bell that should give you a much greater chance of seeing the vote ouch canid arm 2 hit by a meteor every now and then astronauts are reminded that when they're out in space it is not a completely calm place that in fact there are Untold millions of tiny pieces of space debris moving at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour buzzing around them at all times and we got a really great example of this with a new photograph that was taken by Issa astronaut Andreas mogenson he took a picture of the canid arm 2 and showed this chunk that was taken out of it by a microm meteoroid or a piece of space debris according to mson the impact happened back in 2021 and it was from a one mm object traveling a 25,000 km/ hour that struck the canid arm it went through the insulation covering the arm and actually struck the arm itself it didn't cause any problems to the operation of the Canada arm itself it's just this reminder now we've seen examples where it actually has caused damage and it was a problem like with a hit on the kna science module caused a coolant leak uh there have been hits on the solar panels so just like this reminder that when you go to space it's still pretty dangerous starship's Moon elevator tested NASA chose space X's Starship as the Lander for the upcoming emis 3 mission and the choice seems kind of strange because Starship is gigantic it is 50 m tall it is 9 M across and so when the astronauts arrive at the moon in their relatively tiny Orion module they're going to transfer over into a Starship that's designed to land on the moon and then they're going to go down to the surface of the Moon and then they're going to be over 40 MERS away from the surface of the Moon and even in the low gravity of the Moon it is not safe to jump out of Starship they're going to need some way to get down to the surface of the Moon and the plan is an elevator and so we got some cool images of NASA astronauts in their space suits testing out this elevator to find out how it's going to work to be able to get them from the crew compartment on Starship down to the surface of the Moon and then back up again well we did it we completed 2023 and we produced an enormous amount of space content for you so here's some interesting stats we did 51 episodes of space bites we missed one episode because of the Christmas to New Year's holiday and there just isn't a lot of space news we released 37 episodes of the QA we answered 442 questions plus a whole bunch of overtime questions and patreon exclusive questions we published 1,36 71 stories on Universe today I wrote 52 newsletters didn't miss a week for the entire year we did 71 interviews with a total of 57 hours 1 minute and 34 seconds and all of that content is available on the website in our podcast as well as additional interviews with me on the podcast feed and everything we do is done with a minimum amount of advertising and the only way we can do that is thanks to the support of the patrons and so with more patrons more content less ads we are producing an enormous amount of space content we've got a very large team and if you want to help support what we do have an independent space News Group go to patreon.com universetoday and support the work we do more evidence for cork stars nron stars are what you get when a star that is much more massive than the Sun explodes as a supernova and then you get this collapsing infalling material that and I believe the technical term is smushes the protons and the electrons together to form neutrons and so you have this ball of neutrons it is a neutron star now normally individual neutrons if you just have like a neutron hanging out it's going to Decay within a few minutes but because of this intense gravity that's holding the neutron star together they don't Decay the quirks are bound too tightly to be able to escape but one theory is that for the most massive neutron stars the corks do escape and they sort of percolate down to the center of the neutron star and they form this ball of quirks and this is like the last stage right on the edge where if it had any more mass it would turn into a black hole so researchers have done a bunch of observations of neutron stars and have done fairly detailed simulations and they're predicting that the heaviest neutron stars are like 80 to 90% likely to have an inner core that is made of this cork material and so with more observations we should find more evidence and it might very well be that there are stars that are right at the edge between neutron star and black hole that are made with an enormous amount of cork it's like a super exotic form of matter before you get a black hole finally we've got a couple of really cool images from look at the first is called the running chicken nebula I don't see it but maybe you do now this image was taken by the European Southern observatory's very large telescope which is one of the largest telescopes in the world the region is gigantic it's about 25 times the size of the full moon and so in order to be able to image the full complex they had to take a ton of separate images and then stitch them all together into this gigantic Mosaic and so the underlying image is monstrous it is 1.5 billion pixels and the final image if you want to download the full resolution it's a 1.5 GB image like who has a monitor that is that big I don't know now in this image you're seeing all kinds of things that you would see in a star forming region you're seeing clouds of nebulosity you're seeing emission nebula you're seeing reflection nebula and you're seeing Bok globules which are regions of like dark gas and dust that resist the radiation that's coming from all these newly forming Stars so it's a beautiful image and that full resolution you could just be looking around from area to area for hours but again warning it's gigantic and finally an image of a star forming region called 30 duratus B which is located in the large magalen Cloud so it's about 160,000 lter away but it is part of this larger comp complex it is like the largest star forming region in our vicinity and some of the most massive stars that have ever been found are in this star forming region it's believed to be about 8 to 10 million years old which means that it's still fairly young and a lot of the most massive stars the ones that died within just a couple of million years they've already died detonated a supernova polluted the region with heavier elements that will then go on to form the next Generations of stars and so in this image there's actually multiple super Supernova remnants that were detected through a combination of the Chandra x-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope and so it's really cool to see like a star forming region that is also filled with Supernova remnants very cool now I'm going to talk some more about how to maximize your chances of seeing an aurora but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Hay Twilight douge Stewart Steven Kaki David Richards Mark antis Joel yansy Antonio Luffy Lara Dustin cable Vlad shipin moo George David Gilton Andrew Gross Jeremy M Josh schul Jordan Young Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon so for some of you you have seen a bright Aurora and you know exactly what I'm talking about and for the rest of you you've never seen this and you should so when you get this heightened solar activity you get these chronal Mass ejections these flares that are coming off the sun they're interacting with the Earth's magnetosphere and you get these auroras in the sky and during the heightened solar activity they can happen every couple of days sometimes and the strength of the storms create much stronger Aurora activity and now astronomers have gotten very good at predicting when and where the flare activity on the Sun is going to turn into auroras here on Earth and so normally you want to be really close to the poles you want to be living in Iceland or Alaska or Antarctica to be able to see the auroras but under these larger storms you can get a activity that is Shifting really far away from the polls so for example you could see auroras in the middle of Europe you could see it in the middle of the US you could see it in Southern Australia much higher chance but you have to be organized and so you have to get some kind of Aurora alert app on your phone or follow the noaa's Aurora alerts I don't have an aurora alert recommendation so but there's plenty on various app stores and then when you get an alert of a really intense geomagnetic storm you got to see if there's going to be some R activity in your area and then you have to go to a place that is dark away from city lights that gives you a view towards your closest pole and then bring a camera do some long exposure photography but if you're lucky you won't need any of that that the sky will erupt with Green Glows and flares and flickering Cur curtains of it's amazing it's amazing and when you see it uh you just can't get out of your head and you want to see it some more I'm going to share some Aurora time lapses that I took that I saw and like it just doesn't compare to what I actually saw but this should give you an idea of just like what I saw here at my home in southern Canada and of course if you really want to get a chance to see it book a trip to a place like Alaska or Iceland or Antarctica and you should get a shot at being able to see an aurora all right we'll see you next week