Artificial Solar Eclipses // Mother of All Meteor Storms // Vera Rubin's First Light

A new mission can make solar eclipses on demand. How asteroid 2024 YR4 will make the mother of all meteor showers. New pictures from Vir Rubin around the corner. And Starship 36 explodes during testing. And on Space Bytes Plus, how we could use a space elevator to extract water from Ceres. All this and more in this week's Space Bytes. Did you catch the last total solar eclipse? I did. I was in Texas for it. But it was hard to get to. I had to fly to Texas. The weather was intermittent. We weren't sure we were going to be able to actually see it. And this is the problem with total solar eclipses. Well, the European Space Agency has solved this problem. They can now make total solar eclipses on demand. And that's what the new Proba 3 satellite. And what this is, is two satellites that are flying in formation about 150 meters across. One is the Occulter. It has this circular disk that it can put in front of the Sun and then cast a shadow on the second spacecraft, the Coronagraph. It can view the Sun without seeing the intense glare of the surface of the Sun. And that allows it to see the faint corona around the Sun. The spacecraft take 19.6 hours to complete one orbit around the Earth. And that they can maintain position so that they get to see an eclipse for six hours. And this eclipse is better than the kind of eclipses that we would be able to see, because on Earth, it all depends on how well the Moon is covering the surface of the Sun. With the Proba 3, it can be aligned down to the millimeter so that it's seeing right to the very edge of the Sun and the beginning of the atmosphere. And then you can make observations of regions right around the surface of the Sun. So it's very cool. The European Space Agency can now make solar eclipses every single day. And speaking of the Sun, another mission has been recently launched and is observing the Sun. And that is NASA's Punch spacecraft, essentially the polarimeter to unify the corona and heliosphere. And this is actually four spacecraft that are flying in formation and they're observing the Sun together. They're separated by over 12,000 kilometers across and act like a single instrument watching the Sun. And so this allows them to see the Sun from a slightly three-dimensional angle and watch as various events are unfolding in the atmosphere of the Sun. Like the Proba spacecraft, it has a coronagraph, so it blocks the direct light from the surface of the Sun, allowing you to see details in the area around the Sun. And when they were doing the commissioning phase of the spacecraft, they happened to catch a giant coronal mass ejection. And so you can see just this incredible release of energy from the surface of the Sun. And we know that these coronal mass ejections, if they're directed towards the Earth, they can interrupt our communications, they can cause havoc and problems with our electrical system, cause satellites to go offline. So it's really important for us to better understand how the Sun works. And we've got a story on Universe Today about this from Matt Williams. When we look back through the deep time of the Earth, we can see that there were events that caused havoc on our planet. There are these catastrophic mass extinction events where a lot of the life on Earth died. And what causes these? There's a lot of ideas, volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, comet impacts, but one that has been proposed is a stellar flyby. We know that stars fly close to the Sun on a regular basis, probably closer and more often than you would think. For example, only 70,000 years ago, a star called Scholz's star passed right through the Oort cloud. And it's believed that within about a million years, another star is going to pass within about 10,000 astronomical units of the Sun. And that's just like over tens of thousands of years. You can imagine over millions of years, billions of years, stars get relatively close to each other. So scientists have wondered, could a stellar flyby be a cause of a mass extinction event on Earth? Could you get a change to the climate? Could you get some other impact? And so one that is very interesting was about 56 million years ago, there was a rise in the Earth's temperature. This is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. And over the course of about 10 to 20,000 years, temperatures on Earth rose by several degrees. This lasted for 100,000 to 200,000 years. And this caused a mass extinction event. We saw a die off of both land and ocean animals across planet Earth. And it doesn't seem to be tied to any other obvious event like a giant volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike. And so scientists have wondered, could it have been a stellar flyby? And there was some papers that came out a couple of years ago that proposed that this might be the case. Well, now another team have gone and looked at the possible implications of a stellar flyby. They simulated over a thousand stellar flybys at different angles, different distances, and then looked to see what kinds of gravitational perturbations does this cause to the orbit of the Earth, the orbit of the Moon? You know, could you get some kind of increase in temperature? And what they found was no, that even very close flybys of stars passing through the solar system, you still don't get the kind of gravitational perturbations on the Earth so that it goes into some kind of climate shock, either a raise in temperature or a decrease in temperature that has to be other explanations for mass extinction events. We've got a story about that by Evan Goff on Universe Today. So what about supernovae? Now, we know that supernovae can be a problem, especially if they're extremely close. I mean, if they're really close, then just the radiation from the supernova going off causes damage to the Earth. But even if they're a little bit farther away, say less than 25 light years away, then you get this flash of radiation. It breaks apart ozone in the upper atmosphere that lets more radiation into the Earth. And this has all kinds of consequences. And beyond just everybody gets a bad sunburn or maybe increased amounts of skin cancer, you get some weird effects. Like you get degraded atmospheric methane, which can actually decrease temperatures. You get increased cloud cover, which can affect the climate of the planet. And so researchers were looking at historical nearby supernovae and seeing if you could tie those to dramatic climatic events that happened in the past. Now, we know that the sun can cause pretty terrible effects on Earth over long periods of time. They're called Miyake events, and there are about six of them have been recorded over the last, say, 10,000 years in tree rings. Essentially, when a really powerful burst of radiation hits the Earth, it generates a large amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. That carbon-14 is drawn into the trees and you get this very specific event that is measurable. The thing that I always find really scary is that the Carrington event, you know, the most powerful solar storm that we've seen, didn't even qualify for one of these Miyake events. But anyway, so astronomers looked at other tree ring data further back in time and then looked at various supernova events that have happened nearby and then tried to tie that to possible climatic events. And what they found is some interesting correlations. So there are a couple of these carbon-14 events that happened about 14,000 years ago, and then another one that happened about 12,000 years ago. And the one at 12,000 years ago matches this cooling time in the Earth's climate called the Younger Dryas. There is a supernova remnant called the Vela supernova remnant, which happened at around this same time. So you get this supernova that went off about 12,000 years ago and not within that really dangerous distance. And yet you see an increase of carbon-14 in the atmosphere and you see a potential change in the Earth's climate during that period. And so it could be that relatively nearby supernovae are going off and influencing the Earth's climate. And we've got a story about that from Evan Goff. Now you remember asteroid 2024 YR4. This was that asteroid that had a non-zero chance of striking the Earth in 2032. And then people did follow-on observations and brought those chances down. And now they're effectively zero. Is it weird how we were all sort of nervous and talking about this asteroid and like now it's almost largely forgotten? Well, don't completely forget about it because it looks like there is now a 4% chance that it's going to still strike the Moon in 2032. Now, what if it does? It's a 50 meter asteroid that if it hits the Moon, it will gouge out a crater about one kilometer across. It'll throw more than 100 million tons of lunar debris into space. And at least 10% of that is going to make its way down to low Earth orbit. And that's where all the satellites are. It'll only take a couple of days for the debris to get from the impact site on the Moon down to low Earth orbit. And then the satellites orbiting the Earth will start getting pelted by debris from the impact. And it will be like an increased amount of the normal debris that they interact with, but it'll be 10 to 1000 times more than what they normally experience. And so this is going to cause wear and tear on a lot of the satellites in orbit around the Earth. We'll also see one of the greatest meteor showers that humanity has experienced in modern time. So would it be worth it to lose a lot of satellites to see the greatest meteor shower ever? Maybe. And if we do have a serious presence on the Moon by 2032, like maybe there's a the beginnings of a lunar base or something, then they would have to batten down the hatches if there was a strike, because you would get a lot of this debris falling back down onto the surface of the Moon across the entire surface. But remember, there's only a 4% chance of this happening right now, and I'm sure they'll decrease it as we get closer to the flyby event. And we've got a story about that from Evan Goff. Every week we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best story of the week. And the winner this week was a direct image of a planet forming around another star. And I wholeheartedly agree. What an incredible story. So thank you, everybody who voted in our channel. Now we will post this poll into the post tab here on our YouTube channel. So at the time you're watching this video, the poll is there. And if you want, you can go over there and check it out. Or just while you're scrolling YouTube, you should see the poll show up. Give us a quick vote. Now, the best chance to see this is to subscribe to the channel, click on the notifications bell, and then just whenever you see polls, just vote. And that trains the algorithm. All right, now we've got some space flight news. First up, we saw a successful test of the new Chinese capsules escape system. So China is working on their new crew capsule system. This is called the Mojo, and this is a follow on from their existing capsule called the Shenzhou. Shenzhou was the original capsule developed by the Chinese. And really, it's based on the Soviet Soyuz. The new Mojo is a capsule designed all by the Chinese, and it's designed to carry seven astronauts or taikonauts, as they're called, both to the Chinese space station, but also it will eventually be the spacecraft that carries the Chinese astronauts to the upcoming lunar landing. And so this week they performed an escape flight test. And this is where they had the capsule with the escape tower on top of it. And then they fired the solid rocket boosters on the escape tower, lifted both the tower and the capsule up. About 20 seconds later, they detached the escape tower from the capsule. Capsule deployed its parachutes and then returned safely to Earth. And so this demonstrated that their crew escape system is working. And this provides like another layer of safety when you actually have people on top of a giant rocket. And speaking of the giant rocket, that is the Long March 10, and that is still under development as well as the lunar lander system that they're going to be sending to the moon as well. So they have got development for the crew capsule, the lunar lander, and then the new Long March 10 rocket. All that's got to come together for their upcoming human lunar landings, probably in 2030. And we've got a story about that by Mark Thompson. Next up, we saw a reusable rocket test from Honda. I'm just going to let that sink in. Honda, you know, the car company. Well, they've got a engine company and that engine company has a research and development company. And that company launched a reusable rocket. Now, the rocket is only about six and a half meters tall, just weighs a few thousand kilograms, not heavy. And yet they were able to perform a fully reusable test. The rocket took off, flew to an altitude of 271 meters and then landed again within 37 centimeters of its intended target. The whole flight lasted about 57 seconds. This came out of nowhere. I mean, it's not entirely true. We've been reporting a couple of years ago that Honda was working on a reusable rocket and had done some static fire tests on the ground. They didn't give us any announcement that they were going to do this. And yet we got a successful test from them. So it's great to see another player in this field. And hopefully they'll be able to contribute to the larger field of reusable rocketry. So go Honda. Now, we've been reporting on Starship and we had the last three Starship launches ended in failure where the Starship didn't make it back through the atmosphere. This time we had a Starship that didn't even make it off the ground. So SpaceX was testing Starship 36. They were tanking it up, getting prepared to do a static fire test. They'd already done a static fire test with a single engine. They're about to do a static fire test with all six engines on Starship and the thing exploded. Normally, I would show you a video of this event, but the only video that I know of that was taken was by NASA Space Flight, and they have incredible coverage of this. And so instead of that, we're going to just direct you over to the NASA Space Flight channel so you can go and watch their incredible coverage of it. But clearly, this is a problem to lose another Starship on the ground. So this is the fourth failure in a row of the block to Starships. The first two blew up on their way up to orbit. The third one was tumbling when it got into orbit. And this is the fourth one. So that's probably going to be a setback. And when you think about all the things that are riding on Starship, both SpaceX's plans to build out their Starlink network, as well as, of course, the need for a SpaceX Starship to be the lunar lander. This is going to be a setback, I'm sure. They were intending to send their next mission to Mars in the next launch window. That sounds like it's going to get set back. So we will continue to watch and see what happens and see how they recover. Hopefully, we'll get a lot more information from SpaceX about what happened. We'll get more pictures, better understanding and what they plan to do going forward. But right now, it's all just fresh. The thing just exploded and we'll find out more. I also really enjoyed Scott Manley's analysis of this explosion. If you want more understanding of what actually happened, definitely check out his video. And I'll put links to both NASA Space Flight and Scott Manley here in the channel. All right, this is it. It's about to happen. And that is that we're about to see the first light, the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The plan is that they are going to release these images on June 23rd at 1500 universal time. Now, that corresponds to 8 a.m. for me here on the west coast of Canada. So that's 11 a.m. Eastern time. So you can sort of do the math on when you're going to be able to see that. And, you know, we don't really know what images we're going to see, but it's going to be first light from this incredible observatory. But this is different because, you know, this is the largest astronomical camera that's ever been built. It's a 3.2 gigapixel camera, so not 3.2 megapixel, gigapixel. And it weighs as much as a car. It's going to be taking images nonstop every night of the southern sky. And over the course of about three nights, it will have captured the entire field of view. And then it's going to start again and then it's going to do it again. And over the course of its 10 year operation, it's going to take 800 images of every single part of the sky that it can see. And so if you imagine that the night sky is doing all of this stuff, there's supernova going off, there's asteroids moving through the field of view, there's comets, there's all kinds of interesting things to find. You will have this video of every single spot in the sky, 800 frames that take you through all of the stuff, all of the stars that are blinking and changing in brightness and things that are disappearing. It's going to be an entirely new way of studying the universe. And we get to see that first picture on June 23rd. Now I'm going to be doing a live stream event with Dr. Pamela Gay and the rest of the team from CosmoQuest. Also, we're going to be doing an episode of Astronomy Cast talking about it. Now I've interviewed the director of Vera Rubin, Dr. Edward Ajar, so you can definitely check out that conversation. And then I'm then I'll be in full reporting mode as we start to get all of the new news and discoveries that are coming out of Vera Rubin. So stay tuned. It's about to get very exciting around here. Are you hungry for space news? Of course you are. You're watching Space Bytes. But this is just a fraction of the interesting space news stories that we're covering on Universe Today. And that's my job. I'm the publisher of the Universe Today website. So for example, in addition, we're covering how fast radio bursts have helped to find the universe's missing mass. We've got a story from Matt Williams. Do ocean worlds have smaller habitable zones than terrestrial worlds? We've got a story from Evan Goff. Now, this is an interesting story that I found that lunar dust is bad. We know that. But researchers have compared the effects of lunar dust on human lung tissue and found that it's bad, but it's not as bad as the pollution you might experience living in a city. So let that sink in. We've got a story from Mark Thompson. So I am working on my weekly email newsletter, which covers all these and more stories goes out by email every Friday to 70,000 of my closest friends. It's completely free. There's no ads. I write every word. Check it out. Go to Universe Today dot com slash newsletter to sign up. Now, did you know that we have a longer version of this video with one extra story? We call that Space Bytes Plus, and it's available over on Patreon completely free. No ads. You don't have to sign up or anything. And this week's extra story is about how we could build a space elevator to get water off Ceres. And I'll put a link in the show notes. Now, I'm going to answer a question about what there is to do on Vancouver Island, which is where I live. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Bear Lake Roofing, Brian Bode, Caridwyn, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bailock, Cy Nielsen, David Giltonen, David Matz, Dustin Cable, Evan Pro, Greg Feely, Hudson Moore, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, James Burke, Jordan Young, Marcel Sinitz, Michael Purcell, Montel, Paul Roebuck, Frank Kaidu, Robeck, Sean Sargent, Stephen Fowler Munley, Vlad Shipplin, and Wolfgang Klotz who support us at the Master of the Universe level. And all our patrons, all your support means the universe to us. So we often get a lot of comments and questions on Patreon. And Anna Polly Rush asked, Fraser, can you recommend any cool places in Vancouver or Vancouver Island to visit? That's a great question. And, you know, I think that I live in one of the coolest places on Earth. This is the west coast of Canada. And specifically, I live on Vancouver Island, which many people don't even know exists. And yet it is a 500 kilometer long island on the west coast of Canada. And it has this temperate rainforest. So our temperatures during the summer don't get too hot, sort of maximum about 27 degrees Celsius. Sometimes it can go into the 30s, but mostly it's reasonably cool. And it rains a lot during the winter. It's a lot drier in the summer. And so we have just incredible forests. We have lots of mountains. We've got incredible sea life. And there's a lot of really neat places you can go. Now, where I grew up is one of the coolest beaches in all of Canada. It's called Hornby Island, and it has this beach called Tribune Bay. And so if you can make it to Vancouver Island and then catch another ferry and go to Hornby Island, then you can check out this place. But there's a lot of great beaches just on Vancouver Island. On the west coast, we have Tofino, which is part of the Pacific Rim National Park. And it is just kilometre after kilometre of sand beach. It's really quite amazing. At the north part of the island is a place called San Joseph Bay, which is widely considered one of the best beaches in the entire world. And I have been there many times. You can camp out on the beach and it's just beautiful. We have some gigantic old growth forests here on Vancouver Island, a place called Cathedral Grove that you can check out. And then there's a lot of activities that you can do around the island. There's a lot of fishing. You can do whale watching trips where you can actually go and see orcas as well as humpback whales. Tons of hiking and mountains to explore. We have some of the best mountain biking trails in the world. And people here like spend more on their mountain bikes than they do on their cars. So, yeah, if you're ever considering an adventure, come on over to Vancouver Island and check out where I live now. Only come during like the good weather. So from around May through October, the weather is great. And then from October to May, the weather is wet and miserable. And I do not recommend it. So for half the year, this place is paradise for half the year. This place is pretty wet and cold. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll see you next week.