Eyes for PLATO // Water Ice in Another Star System // Venus Tectonics

issa's Plato mission gets its eyes installed. Web finds water ice in another star system. Could it be dark matter and not dark energy that's evolving over time? And in Space Bites Plus, bacteria are evolving to thrive in spacecraft clean rooms. All this and more in this week's Space Bites. The European Space Agency is continuing to build its Plato mission. This is a next generation planet hunting observatory and Plato is very cool. It's got an array of 26 cameras on board. Now 24 of them are identical. They're collected into four groups of six cameras that are all pointed at the same part of the sky and then all of the different groups are offset a little bit. And what this allows it to do is watch 5% of the sky continuously for long periods of time. and then we'll switch to another part of the sky and watch that for a long period of time. And over the course of its mission, it's going to be studying 200,000 stars and it's looking for evidence of Earth-sized worlds orbiting around sunlike stars. Like this was the goal of the Kepler mission and Plato is the closest now that we've got to being able to fulfill on that dream. And just in the last week, the European Space Agency showed us cool video and images of them installing the 24 main cameras onto the Plato mission. Now, it also has two additional faster cameras that sit just above the big array of cameras, and they're used for guidance, and those are still coming. So, now with all of the cameras installed, there's a lot of other work to be done. Of course, it's got to be tested in the vacuum chamber temperature. It's got to go through its shake test, get its solar panels installed, and by 2026, it's going to be ready to fly to space, and the mission will begin. Now, I've done a very long interview with one of the people behind the Plato. So, if you want to know more about this mission, you should definitely check out that interview, and if you want to read the article about the camera installation, we've got it on Universe Today. It's written by Mark Thompson. A cubat to watch type 1A supernova. When spacecraft are designed, the scientists have scientific objectives. And some are relatively easy to do using off-the-shelf components that have been to space. But other cases, what they want to do is going to require entirely new technologies to be developed. This is called the technological readiness level. And level one is I've got an idea. And level nine is this is a piece of hardware that's flown to space and we know that it works. And so for example, when James Web was first developed, there were a bunch of technologies that had varying levels of technological readiness level. And it's thought that because of these new technologies that had to be developed to even make this mission work, that introduced a lot of risk, pushed back the deadlines, caused the budgets to go higher. So it makes sense to derisk your project, to improve the technological readiness of the various components by testing them in space. So now a team of researchers from the University of Florida are working on a cubat version of an ultraviolet space telescope. Now it's going to be very small. It's called ultraviolet type 1A supernova mission. They're calling it UV1A. And this will use an entirely new type of ultraviolet sensor array as well as a new mirror coding. And these are two pieces of technology that have yet to actually fly on a space mission. And so they're hoping they can fly this mission, demonstrate the technology, and then also be able to do some science, study type 1A supernova in the ultraviolet range. And that if this works, then you're going to see this technology be enabled for then future missions to take advantage of it without having to take all of those big risks. And I really like this idea. That's why I included this story because, you know, there are a lot of great ideas. You know, I report on the NYAK grants and how a lot of this technology is over the horizon in terms of what we can do. And yet, there needs to be ways to put this stuff into the pipeline so that it actually gets tested and developed and proven and ready for space flight. And then people who are designing missions can include this into their plans. So definitely check out the article by Andy Thomasick on Universe Today. Water ice in another star system. Here in the solar system, the inner planets where the Earth is located is bone dry. And I know that sounds strange. The Earth has a lot of water. Sure, it does. But the asteroids, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the moon, there's very little water. But once you cross the asteroid belt, you cross this region called the frost line. And this is where the radiation from the sun is no longer so intense that it will evaporate any of the water that you have on the surface of any object. And now you have icy objects. Think about the moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn, the Kyper belt objects. There's a lot of ice out there in the outer solar system. And now James Webb has detected a very similar situation in an exoplanetary system. It's called HD181327. And it's located about 155 light-years away. This is a very young system. It's only about 23 million years old. Consider the solar system is 4.5 billion years old. This is very young. And yet James Webb has detected the presence of water ice in this system. Not water vapor in the in an exoplanet, which has been done, but actually water ice. And not only water ice, but crystalline water ice. And this is important. This is the kind of water ice that we see in Saturn's rings, that we see in Kyper Belt objects, the surface of Europa, where water has formed into larger chunks and crystals. The water is found in this giant debris disc around the star, similar to our own Kyper belt. And what they found was that the water ice is mostly in the outer parts of the debris disc and then in the middle parts it's medium to low and then in the inner part of the system there's no water at all. And this is very similar to what we have here in the solar system. And so astronomers are looking at a very young version of what the solar system probably looked at 4 and a half billion years old shortly after the formation of the sun. But these Kyper belt I guess these exo Kyper belt objects are smashing into each other creating more particles and evolving over time into something that will look more like the solar system that we have today. If you want to learn more about the discovery of ice in another exoplanetary system, check out this article by Mark Thompson on Universe Today. Maybe it's dark matter that's evolving over time. At this point, you are probably familiar with the Hubble tension. This is this idea that when you measure the expansion rate of the universe using nearby methods, when you compare that to the farthest distances, you get a different measurement and those measurements don't overlap. And this is the Hubble tension, also known as the crisis in cosmology. And then another result has come out in the last couple of years from the dark energy spectroscopic instrument, the DESI survey. And it's found that you could be seeing an evolution of dark energy in the universe over time. Instead of dark energy just being this constant outward force that appears with more space, it might actually be evolving. Maybe it's decreasing over time. Maybe it's increasing, but it could be changing. And nobody ordered dark energy. It was a surprise to the people who discovered it and got their Nobel prizes for it. And nobody ordered evolving dark energy. That is also pretty weird and yet could help explain the Hubble tension. But there's lots of other ideas like maybe the universe is slowly rotating and that explains the Hubble tension. Or the timecapes model that time dilation accounts for the observations of type 1A supernova in the densest parts of galaxy clusters. And so in a new paper, researchers say, well, what if it's dark matter that is actually evolving over time and not dark energy? And what they propose is that to match the observations, you just need the mass of dark matter to change over time. And that would help explain the changes that we see in the expansion rate of the universe since most of the matter in the universe is dominated by dark matter. And they propose that even if just 15% of the dark matter in the universe can evolve over time, that would explain the discrepancy. That sounds weird, of course, but to get this kind of mass oscillation is not an completely unknown thing. Nutrinos can have a mass oscillation. And so they propose that it could be a mechanism that is kind of similar to what nutrinos do. Now, this is a toy model. uh this is not bound by observational evidence just another way to think about the universe and of course would require a tremendous amount of follow-on observations but it's interesting to just think like okay you can see that all of these bits and pieces all play together into this larger cosmos that we see and that we could be focusing on one element but it might be something completely else in the recipe that creates the ratios of matter and energy in the universe. So, we've got an article about that from Dr. Brian Cobberline on Universe Today. Every week, we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news story of the week. And this week's winner was probably the worst story of the week. And this is, of course, the coming budget cuts to NASA. So, thank everybody who voted. We will put our new poll into the post tab within about 24 hours of releasing this video. And so if you see it while you're scrolling through YouTube, go ahead and give us a vote and we will celebrate the winner next week. The best chance to see the vote is to subscribe to the channel, click on the notifications bell, and then of course just obey the algorithm to get it to put our polls into your feed. How long would it take everything to decay in the universe? Hawking radiation is an idea that was proposed by Stephven Hawking that said that over vast periods of time black holes evaporate that they will not last forever. They will give up their mass. They will radiate heat and by radiating that heat they will lose mass. But it's now believed that this process of Hawking radiation doesn't just apply to black holes, but it applies to any kind of compact object that not only black holes will evaporate, but maybe even neutron stars will evaporate. white dwarfs will evaporate and maybe everything evaporates. And so researchers did the math to find out how long things are going to take to evaporate. And they found that say neutron stars and stellar mass black holes will take about 10 to the power of 67 years to evaporate. A one followed by 67 zeros. That's a lot of years. Um and the most massive black holes will take even longer to evaporate. But they calculated that it will take objects like the moon or a person about 10 to the power of 90 years to evaporate. And so nothing is going to last forever in the universe. We've got a story about this from Mark Thompson on Universe Today. It's all Mark Thompson. Um um Mark just knows how to grab the coolest stories because I put all these stories into the into the hopper and Mark grabs the the zingers that we want to talk about here on Space Bites. Venus might have tectonic activity after all. We always talk about Venus as being our evil twin planet. And that is the evil part comes from the fact that it has crushing pressure on its surface. The temperature is incredibly hot. And yet, this planet is roughly the same size as Earth. It is made of roughly the same stuff as Earth. It has roughly the same surface gravity of Earth. It could be another Earth. And yet, one of the big differences between Venus and the Earth are plate tectonics. Here on Earth, the continental plates float on top of the mantle. And you get this subduction between the various plates which causes this resurfacing on the surface of the Earth. And it also takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and puts it into the mantle and it regulates the surface of planet Earth. Venus doesn't seem to have any evidence of plate tectonics or any tectonic activity after all. It's believed that instead Venus is this thick shell where underneath the mantle is wearing away underneath this shell of crust. But maybe every few hundred million years or so all the pressure builds and the planet just inverts itself. It's a very bizarre place, but planetary scientists think they might have found evidence of tectonic activity on Venus. Not full-on plate tectonics, but there are some images taken by NASA's Mellin spacecraft back 30 years ago when it took its data that has these strange concentric rings. And it's believed that you've got these places where pressure is building up underneath the crust of Venus causing these giant cracking concentric circles. So Venus is more active than we thought. Now there are missions that are in the works to go back to Venus. And so we could get new scans of the surface of Venus and over the course of say 30 years we might be able to detect changes in these cracks and start to get a better sense of how the surface of Venus is actually evolving over time. And we've got a story by Mark Thompson on Universe Today. Web watches Auroras on Jupiter. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and it has an incredibly powerful magnetic field. It is dozens of times more powerful than the earth. If you could see it in the sky, it would be much bigger than the moon. Even though Jupiter would be this tiny dot, its huge magnetic field would be surrounding it. And just like the Earth, that magnetic field channels particles from the solar wind down towards its poles and it gets auroras. And the auroras on Jupiter are monsters, incredibly large. And on Christmas in 2023, scientists pointed James Webb at Jupiter. At the same time that they were taking images with the Hubble Space Telescope. Now James Webb is seeing it in the infrared. Hubble is looking in the visible near infrared and in the ultraviolet. And it's the ultraviolet that the astronomers really interested in because you get a lot of activity in the aurora in the ultraviolet. But there's a chemical that gets formed in auroras called trihydrogen ions. And they're an indication of auroral activity on a planet. And in fact, this was recently done with Uranus. Astronomers looked at the atmosphere of Uranus and they were able to detect the presence of these trihydrogen ions and use that to map out the auroras. And so they did the same thing on Jupiter. And what really amazed the astronomers was how quickly the auroras on Jupiter were changing over time. They were expecting to see something that would pulse over the course of hours, but in fact, it was changing in minutes or even seconds. And if you've ever watched an aurora, like I'm like for those of you who've seen pictures of an aurora, it looks like this very static painting in the sky, but it is nothing like that when you watch it. They are alive dancing around in the sky almost instantaneously. It's a it's an amazing experience. And so they saw something very similar on Jupiter, but at a much larger scale. And we've got a story by Mark Thompson again on Universe Today about this one. And if that's not enough space news for you, of course, I'm working on my weekly email newsletter, which contains dozens of stories about space and astronomy. We only have time to capture just a small fraction of them here on Space Bites. It's my weekly guide to space newsletter. And for example, we've got a story from Brian Cobberline about how there's no simple origin story for long gammaray bursts. a story from Mark Thompson about how astronomers have been studying that most powerful solar storm in decades that happened almost exactly one year ago. And Evan Gooff has a story about glass beads on the moon. They might contain material dug up from deep below the surface. Now, my newsletter, it comes out every Friday. Goes out to about 70,000 people. I write every single word. There's no ads. It's completely free. You can go to univertoday.com/newsletter to sign up. We've got a longer version of this video over on Patreon. It's completely free. You don't need to sign up. And it's got one additional story we call the Space Bites Plus. And this week's extra story is all about how bacteria are evolving to survive in NASA clean rooms dealing with all the decontamination efforts. If that's interesting to you, I'll put a link in the show notes. 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