Dangers of A Super Solar Storm // Jupiter Twice The Size // Crazy Moon Landing System

Jupiter could have been twice as big in the past. The challenges of landing on the moon, the record for the farthest galaxy has been broken again. And in our Patreon edition, how the location of gas plays a role in star formation. All this and more in this week's Space Bites. Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system. Really, you could say the solar system is mostly the sun and a little bit of Jupiter, and that would be very accurate, but astronomers think that Jupiter was once larger in the past. And the way gas giants work is a little strange because you can actually add more mass to Jupiter and it would get smaller. And so there are planets with many times the mass of Jupiter that are actually like the same size as Jupiter or even smaller. And then there are planets with dramatically less mass than Jupiter and yet are larger. So planetary scientists wanted to know is there some hint of the size that Jupiter was in the past maybe early on in the solar system. So what they did was they looked at the orbits of two of the innermost moons going around Jupiter and then used that to map out what the planet would have been like over various epochs in its evolution. And what they found was that Jupiter was probably two to two and a half times bigger than it is today in the past, shortly after formation. Not only that, but if it was larger, it probably would have had a magnetic field that was 50 times stronger than Jupiter has today. And so, right now, Jupiter can hold 1,321 Earths and early on in its history could have held about 2,000 Earths. And then who knows what the future will hold for Jupiter as it continues to cool down or maybe it gathers more material. It's just really impressive to me that just through orbital motion, astronomers can figure out what the historical size of Jupiter was into the past. And if you want more information about this, we've got a story on Universe Today by Matt Williams. So next up, we've got a couple of stories talking about landing on the moon. We are seeing an increased traffic to the moon with all of these robotic landers. And if everything goes well, we should see humans from both the US and China, maybe SpaceX, other nations landing on the moon in the next couple of decades. And the problem is that every time a spacecraft lands on the moon, the plume of its rocket kicks up debris that can then go into orbit around the moon. And then this causes a hazard for spacecraft that are in orbit around the moon, as well as a hazard for any spacecraft that are going to be attempting a landing. So if you want a sustainable lunar presence, you have to build a solid landing pad. The problem is that the exhaust plume coming out of a rocket is superheated gas. And so whatever you make this landing pad out of, it's going to ablate as this plume is hitting it. And so researchers looked at different kinds of landing pads that you could make. You could make them out of compressed regalith. You could figure out some kind of adhesive that holds the regalith together. You could use a process calledining. They simulated different exhaust plumes and then worked out what are the kinds of temperature maximums that you would have to see before you started to get an ablation, a wearing off of the surface of the landing pad, which would then start to erode it away and eventually it would start to tear apart and then that would be new debris that would be thrown up into orbit. And so now we've got a better sense of how thick, how strong lunar landing pads will have to be. And we've got a story about that on Universe Today by Mark Thompson. All right. And this is a bonkers idea. And I would love to see if it could actually work. When you land on any planet with an atmosphere, you get to take advantage of this gas as a way to decelerate your spacecraft. When spacecraft reenter the Earth's atmosphere, they can be slowed down by the atmosphere, deploy a parachute, and then land gently on the surface. You could do the same thing on Venus. You could do the same thing on Titan. It's harder on Mars, but you still can use the atmosphere of Mars to slow your spacecraft down. But on airless worlds like the moon, you have to do a propulsive landing. And so you don't get a free lunch, a free landing. But now, a company called Lunar Cargo has developed an idea for how you could have a propellantless landing on the moon. Their system is called the momentum absorption capture for express deliveries on non-atmospheric Somata or Macedonus. All right, so how does it work? Well, you've got to look at the animation, but the gist is that there's a mother ship that is in orbit around the moon. It has all of the cargo that it's trying to deliver down to the surface of the moon. Once per orbit, every two hours, it releases a piece of cargo that then flies on a ballistic trajectory and perfectly goes into this catcher on the moon. Then it uses this elastic spring to get rid of all of the momentum of this object and eventually just dropping it into a net at the end. And so by doing so, you don't have to pay that 2 kilometers plus per second delta V to be able to go from lunar orbit to safely down on the surface of the moon. You just have to reset this catcher every time a new piece of cargo has dropped into your catcher's mitt. And so you can imagine some future where we've got so much material that we're sending to the moon that it's able to just capture them one after the other and deploy them safely on the surface and then maybe even use the stored energy to then go the other way and actually start hurling stuff off the surface of the moon. So it's a really cool idea and I can imagine some future where this uh gets developed much more seriously and we've got a really cool story about this from Andy Thomasick on Universe Today. Now, I've said many times that the spacebased existential threat that I am most worried about is solar storms. This is where you get a very powerful coronal mass ejection, super flares off the surface of the sun. And this interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. It can take out satellites. It can blow transformers on the surface of the Earth. It can render various electronics dead. And we've seen a mini version of this with the Carrington event that happened in the 1800s. And this was before our modern interconnected electrical grid. And yet telegraph poles caught on fire. People at the middle latitudes were able to see auroras. It was a pretty crazy time. And what's even scarier is that there are even more extreme events that have been marked into the tree rings on Earth. And the Carrington event didn't even register. So it's not a question of if. It's really just a matter of when a catastrophic solar storm is going to hit the earth. And so the question is, are we ready? Can we prepare for this? And so a little over a year ago, a group of US state and federal agencies and institutions and universities came together to do a tabletop exercise where they simulated a powerful solar storm hitting the earth and then looked at did we have enough time to make the changes that were required? are we able to communicate out the information to everyone? And although they found that the level of preparedness that the US has today is better than it was in the past, it's still not enough that we need more lead time to predict when these big solar storms are about to happen. The severity of them, let the various people know that they can then say disconnect parts of the electrical grid before the damage is caused. Maybe satellites can also go into some kind of safe mode as the solar storm is washing over the earth. And then you need to be able to quickly explain to everybody what happened and then be able to make repairs in the critical places to get the electrical grid back online. So, we're not there yet. If a big powerful solar storm does hit us, we are going to suffer a catastrophic recovery that could take parts of the power grid offline for months at a time. Hopefully, all the lessons learned from this exercise could then be used to make our response better. What was very prophetic about this event when they ran their tabletop exercise, this was when a giant solar storm was hitting the Earth, the most powerful one that had been seen in 20 years. And so just shows we are still vulnerable to the sun throwing out its flares. Now we've got a story about this by Carolyn Collins Peterson on Universe Today. And now a couple of stories from James Webb about some of the most distant objects in the universe. Now when James Webb launched, it was assumed that it would find a lot of the most distant galaxies ever seen. And what do you know? It did. Uh and we were seeing like a whole bunch of records that people were saying had been broken. It took a little while, but astronomers did the gold standard for what helps you know for sure the distance to the galaxy that you're looking at. And this is using spectroscopy. And the record holder for the longest time was a galaxy called Jade's GS Z14-0. And this has a red shift of 14.32. And this is less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. But astronomers assumed there have got to be farther galaxies out there. It's just a matter of time before they find them. And now a new survey has turned up the most distant galaxy ever seen. This one is called M Z14. And it has a red shift of 14.44. Now what does that mean? Well, a red shift of 14.44 corresponds to 280 million years after the Big Bang. And so we are seeing this galaxy as it looked just less than 300 million years after the big bang. So what's interesting about mom Z14, which I I think that's what I'm going to call it now, um is that it's actually very similar to a globular cluster. It has a very similar nitrogen to carbon ratio of the stars in it. And that they are really large, very bright stars. And I kind of like the idea that this is what a globular cluster might have started out as and then maybe it could have had some of it the rest of its galaxy stripped away through some kind of galactic merger. When we see the globular clusters that are surrounding the Milky Way, they really are relics of an early universe. Very old stars, very low in metalicity, and we're starting to get a sense of where these things came from. So anyway, new record for the most distant galaxy and we've got a great story about this by Evan Gooff. And then another story from James Webb about little red dots, which we've been talking quite a bit about. And these are these strange red galaxies seen really at the very beginning of the universe. And now James Webb has found about 300 of them. And they're very strange because you've got this very bright central object at the middle of the galaxy. And astronomers generally assume that that kind of a thing is caused by a super massive black hole. And so they think that the the red dot is an actively feeding super massive black hole. But one of the things you would expect to see from an actively feeding super massive black hole is an outpouring of X-ray radiation. These are extreme objects and so they send out some of the highest energy photons out there. So astronomers wanted to confirm if yes indeed these little red dots are actively feeding super massive black holes. So they used the Chandra X-ray Observatory. They got 55 hours of observation time and they were able to look at a bunch of these galaxies and they didn't find an excess of X-ray radiation. And what that tells them is that it can't be actively feeding super massive black holes. Now, another theory is that there's another kind of way that super massive black holes can feed. It's called super Edington accretion. And this would also give off a certain amount of X-ray radiation. And they didn't see that either. And so in the paper, the astronomers say that, you know, if they aren't actively feeding super massive black holes, then these things aren't as massive or as luminous as astronomers first thought when they saw them. So, we don't really know what they are. The mystery deepens. I love that the answer to this mystery hasn't shown up very quickly that it's going to take us a little while to figure it out. And if you want to learn more about that, we've got a story from Evang. Every week, we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news story. And the winner this week is that maybe it's dark matter and not dark energy that has been evolving over time. So, thank you everybody who voted for last week's poll. And so, if you want to vote for this week's stories, we have put the new vote into the post tab and we'll put a direct link into the show notes so you can go over there and give us a vote. The best chance, of course, is to subscribe to the channel, click on the notifications bell, go into the post tab, vote on a bunch of our past votes, and then YouTube's algorithm will know that you want to see more of these into the future. The habitable zone of the solar system contains three planets, Venus, Earth, and Mars. But the location of the habitable zone really is due to the energy output of the sun. And in billions of years from now, the sun will begin to die. And when it does, it will become a red giant star. And when that happens, it will probably consume the inner planets, Mercury, Venus for sure, maybe even Earth, but also the habitable zone of the sun will expand outward. And what's really cool is that it will then incorporate Jupiter. And when you think about all of the icy moons that are surrounding Jupiter, they will melt. And so Europa, Ganymede, Kalisto will be within the habitable zone of the sun. And so you're wondering like, could we just move to these cool new water worlds? Well, maybe not. So yes, the surfaces of those moons will melt, but the problem is that the intense radiation as well as the reflected radiation coming from Jupiter will then sublimate that water into water vapor, which will then be blasted off and will start to dry out these worlds. But for a little while, they will end up with an atmosphere of water vapor that'll help keep them warmer. And so there will be this like tiny little window when they will be more habitable and eventually they will be completely dried out and desiccated and then I don't know maybe the sun will move on to Saturn. But yeah, there will be this time when the moons of Jupiter will be within the habitable zone of the sun. And speaking of changing worlds, let's talk about Mars. Now Mars is cold, dry, blasted by radiation. It has almost no atmospheric pressure. as a fraction of the gravity that we have here on Earth. Mars sucks. But people have been wondering for decades, can we fix it? Can we make Mars better? Can we make it more Earthlike? And of course, there's lots of science fiction stories about this process. If you've read the Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson, you've got a sense of what we could do to change Mars. And scientists have written actual scientific papers about what would be involved. But a lot of the thinking into terraforming happened decades ago when we had different scientific techniques at our disposal. Well, a new paper just came out where researchers went and looked at and did a review of all of the more modern techniques that have been developed and thought about what would it take to actually terraform Mars. So, they considered that it will probably come in a couple of phases. Initially, you're looking to just warm up the planet to the point that you can have water exist in liquid form on the surface of Mars and thicken the atmosphere. And so, they suggest that in fact now we can do this with orbital mirrors that can reflect and heat up the planet. But then also there are these new aerogels that have been developed that would be very effective in helping to warm up the planet. Once you had warmed up the planet, new research into extreophiles would then take over where there would be genetically engineered plants and animals that would be able to live in the hostile environment of Mars, thicken the atmosphere. And they proposed that after a few generations, maybe a few hundred years, you could thicken the atmosphere of Mars to the point that a human could walk around on the surface without a space suit and just breathe the atmosphere. And then the last piece that is coming soon is that we're going to have this revolution in reusable rocketry. Both the things that SpaceX is starting to work on, but other nations and other companies are working on reusable rockets that should decrease the prices and allow us to get more of this material to Mars. Now, we've got a story on Universe Today by Mark Thompson about this. But also, I'm going to be interviewing one of the researchers behind this story, and you should expect to see that on our channel within a couple of weeks. So, wait for that. And if you want to learn more about the search for water on Mars, places where there could be liquid water on Mars today, I've got a really cool interview that I did with Dr. Adicha Cooler about how water could be just under the surface of Mars, heated by the sun, and there could be life in it. I know you like your space news and we only have time to cover a certain number of stories here on space bites, but we are working on dozens of stories over on Universe Today and I write them up for my weekly email newsletter. For example, we've got a story about how an exoplanet can cause chemical discrepancies in paired stars and we've got a story about this by Andy Thomas Wick. How astronauts could see auroras on Mars with their own eyes. We got a story about that from Matt Williams and how an exoplanet's companion was found just through orbital mechanic variations. We got a story about that by Andy Thomasick. I write my newsletter every Friday. It goes out to 70,000 of my closest friends. There's no ads. It's completely free. Go to univertoday.com/newsletter to sign up. Did you know that there's a longer version of this video with one more story and you can watch it without ads, completely free. We call it Space Bites Plus and it's over on Patreon and I'll put a link in the show notes. I'll talk some more about existential threats from space. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingson, Andrew Gross, Barely Griffing, Brian Bod, Keredwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Block, Sin Nelson, David Guilton, David Mass, Dustin Cable, Evan Pro, Greg, Phy, Henshults, Hudson Ward, Jay Graves, James Clark, Jerry Madden, Jim B, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smith, Michael Purcell, Modzel, Paul Robuck, Ring Kaidu, Rob, Sean Sergeant, Steven Fowler, Muny, Vlad Shiplin, and Wolf Gang Clots who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So, I mentioned early on in this episode that the only existential threat that I'm truly worried about is solar storms. And this this is because, you know, when you think about the potential existential threats that we might face, like what have we got? We got asteroids. Well, yes, we know that asteroids can cause mass extinctions on Earth, they are a very bad day. And yet astronomers have already mapped out all of the very dangerous asteroids that are in the solar system and know that none of them are going to be able to strike the Earth. You know, the ones that are 10 kilometers across. Um, and now with the upcoming Ver Rubin telescope and with other observatories coming online, we're going to be able to map all of the even potentially hazardous ones like the ones down to 140 m across. And even if we do find an asteroid that's on a dangerous trajectory, we have proven that we can reach out and smash an asteroid and move it out of the way. And so I feel like the chances of an asteroid hitting us are very low and our ability to impact them is high. When you think about a rogue black hole, that would be a terrible event to the solar system if a rogue black hole passed through that it would jumble up all of the planets, would crash other planets into each other. But when we look at the fact that our solar system has been around for 4.6 billion years and it does not show signs that a rogue black hole passed in our vicinity any time in the last few uh billion years, the chances of it happening are incredibly low. We know that there are no stars capable of going supernova within about 25 lightyears of us. And that's the danger zone where you don't want to be that close to a supernova going off. There is the possibility of gammaray bursts, but all of the stars that could potentially become gamay bursts are not pointed at us within the Milky Way. So, it looks like we're safe from that. But solar storms happen and they happen on a regular basis and we've seen what happened with the Carrington event and when we look at the tree rings, we see how bad solar storms have been in the past and just in the past 10,000 years, which is fairly recent. So, if there's one thing that I think humanity should come together and solve, it is our response and protection and resilience to solar storms. All right, we'll see you next