Vera Rubin Finally Delivers Its First Big Discovery

Vera Rubin finds a new dwarf planet, while Webb sees dwarf planets colliding in another system. Valles Marineris might still be volcanically active, and Hera gets its first picture of Didymos and Dimorphos. And on SpaceBytes Plus, a planet that shouldn't have an atmosphere, but does. All this and more, in this week's SpaceBytes. Alright, so we have been talking about Vera Rubin excitedly for...ever? And I have been talking about all the amazing things that it's going to discover. It's going to discover all of the supernovae and active galactic nuclei and dwarf planets. And maybe it'll find planet nine. Well, it hasn't found planet nine, but it has found a new potential dwarf planet candidate. So the astronomers notice this pattern of this object moving night by night through a region of the sky, the kind of the speed for something that is out in the Kuiper Belt object. And they were able to rack up about 10 observations of this object. And then they went and looked back through historical information taken by Vera Rubin, and they found an additional 20 observations. They have 30 data points of this object moving in the outer solar system. Astronomers wanted to be absolutely sure that this object was there. And so they went back and looked through another survey that had imaged the same area. And that was the Dark Energy Camera that had looked at the area in 2016. And they found it. And so they've got... Observations of it back from 2016 and then in 2026, and that allowed them to compute an orbit of this object as it goes around the sun. And so its name is 2026 ED 138, and it is out beyond the orbit of Pluto. So when you think about astronomical units, it is 46 astronomical units away, while Pluto is, say, 40 astronomical units away. And one of the reasons why it went undiscovered for so long is that it's on a highly inclined orbit from the rest of the objects in the solar system. So it orbits at an inclination of 25 degrees, and that is where it's not in the plane of the ecliptic, which is where most astronomers are looking for objects in the Kuiper Belt. But Vera Rubin is looking everywhere. And so it's estimated that its size is between 600 and 1,500 kilometers across. And so that's big, one of the biggest objects ever found in the Kuiper Belt, in the same kind of class as Pluto, if it's on the high end. And it will have enough mass to pull it into some kind of hydrostatic equilibrium, a kind of spherical object, and so that would qualify it. As a dwarf planet, and you know, we're still just into the early stages of Vera Rubin, and this was obviously one of the brighter objects that popped out of the observations, but buckle up, I think we're going to see a lot more of these. So we've got some reporting on this from Evan Goff on Universe Today. And speaking of dwarf planets, we've got an interesting story about a very cool Exoplanetary system, it's one of the best, and this is known as Beta Pictoris. And this is a relatively young star, it's located about 63 light years away, and it has been very well observed. And it was one of the first ever exoplanetary systems that was found with a debris disk. So it's got this ring of material in this planetary system. And so a lot of people have pointed large telescopes at this system and more recently, astronomers found three exoplanets orbiting inside of this debris disk. This is a really interesting analogy of the kind of environment that we saw in the early solar system when all of the planets were still forming. That, you know, there was this giant disk around the sun, planets, planetesimals started to form, they crashed into each other, you got these debris disks, things gathered together, Another fair crack. Crashed into the earth, created the moon, and after hundreds of millions of years of mayhem, things finally settled down to the point that you've got more of the solar system that we see today. And so we're like watching this process happen in real time. And one of the planets, Beta Pictoris C, is the closest. exoplanet that has ever been imaged to its star. So there's like a lot of records broken with this system. The first disk, closest planet, it's pretty great. But now researchers have found a second structure in Beta Pictoris. And it appears to be this long stream of material that is going away from the star. And the astronomers liken this to a cat's tail. And thanks to Webb, they were able to detect the presence of a lot of organic material in this long stream of material. And when they estimated the mass of it, it was about the mass of two objects that are kind of the mass of Ceres or Pluto. Crashing into each other. In fact, the organic material that they see in this trail of debris is very similar to the kinds of surface material that we see on Kuiper Belt objects like Pluto or Eris. What they think is that there were these two dwarf planets in the Beta Pictoris system that crashed into each other and created this long trail of... Debris containing a bunch of organic material in it. And so you can see how much mayhem there was in this star system early on in its history. And you would assume that something very similar happened in the solar system. Think about all of the planets that are long gone because they crashed into each other. The dwarf planets that could be out there, but were gobbled up by giant planets or smashed into each other and turned into comets and other debris. The solar system has a much more kind of violent history. Than we probably had assumed. And speaking of debris disks, we've got another system that astronomers are looking at. But this is on the other end of the age of a star system. So while Beta Pictoris is at the very beginning of the life of it as a star system and the planets that are forming around it, astronomers have been looking at a white dwarf star. called WDJ1328+1450. And this is the kind of object that you would get when a star like the sun reaches the end of its life. Of course, it uses up all the fuel in its core, puffs out as a red giant, blows out its outer layers, and you're left with the core of the star where the fusion had happened. And as these stars like the sun turn into this red giant, They consume their inner planets, but some of the terrestrial planets like, say, the Earth or Mars might not be consumed a little too far away. And then the star collapses down and then all that remains is this. bright glowing ember left over from the star and you can have the debris of the planets that were once there are now continuing to orbit around it. And in other stories that we've reported on, it's thought that maybe you can have this debris come back together and you get this second generation planet around a white dwarf star. So in the case of this white dwarf, astronomers have found two large debris disks around the white dwarf. And these debris disks seem to contain kind of the gas and dust that you would get if there were planetesimals roaming around inside this disk, colliding with smaller things and vaporizing them. That you need something that's sort of constantly replenishing this material very close to the white dwarf. And so the researchers did some simulations and believe that there are two objects still orbiting this white dwarf. One is Not much more than the size of an asteroid, very close in to the white dwarf. And then the other one is much larger, probably more like the size of Pluto. But another possibility is that this was once a planet, like maybe Mercury. that got destroyed as the star bloated out and got torn apart and so you got these two separate rings one is more like the crust of the planet and the other is more like the core of the planet and in fact the presence of magnesium is different in the two rings and so that indicates that maybe these are two different planets or two different parts of the same planet But it's assumed that anything orbiting this close to a white dwarf should be torn apart by all the tidal forces in the area unless it has enough significant kind of internal strength to hold itself together, like a planetesimal or something that's made of rock or metal. So maybe that's the future of the Earth. We will be smeared out into this debris disk with chunks of remnant planet plowing through, vaporizing the leftover asteroids. If we're lucky, this next story comes from Matt Williams, and it's about Valles Marineris, which is one of the most impressive just things in the solar system. It's this giant valley on Mars. It's about 4,000 kilometers long. It can be like up to 120 kilometers across. It's up to 10 kilometers deep. And it's believed that Valles Marineris was formed probably about 4 billion years ago when there was a lot of active volcanism on Mars. And you had some version of plate tectonics. And essentially, all of this volcanic activity just pulled apart a chunk of the crust of Mars and has remained to this day. But Mars is a lot smaller than the Earth, has less mass. And so it cooled down a lot more quickly than the Earth did. And so Mars does not have plate tectonics today, but obviously you can see evidence of volcanism on Mars in the past. Like it has some of the largest volcanoes in the solar system. They're not active today, but were active in the past. And so it was assumed that Mars was geologically dead, but NASA sent a lander called InSight to Mars. Years ago, what, like a decade ago, and it was doing some incredible science detecting the presence of earthquakes on Mars, Marsquakes, and researchers were looking through all of the Marsquakes, and one of them really jumped out to them, and that was because it appeared to look like there was some kind of slip fault on Mars, and we have these here on Earth where you have fault lines that are sliding against each other. And this was located deep under the Valles Marineris on Mars. And in fact, when they detected this Mars quake on Mars, they had a couple of theories for what it might be causing it, that it could just be some random tremor, could be a landslide, could be a meteorite striking the ground, which they've seen all of these already. But when they carefully examined the data and compared it to the kinds of quakes they've The thing that best fit the data was this slip fault deep underneath Valles Marineris. And so this place, which was clearly a feature created by massive amounts of volcanism, but then sort of froze in place into this valley, could still have active volcanism deep underneath. The sixth story comes from Dr. Brian Koberlein, and this is about Betelgeuse and its companion star. Now, we call it Betelbuddy, but astronomers have given it the nickname Siwara. While Betelgeuse is Arabic for hand, Siwara is Arabic for a bracelet. And this makes sense, that you've essentially got this star that is orbiting around Betelgeuse, very close to the surface of this star. For a long time, there was this mystery with Betelgeuse. We know that it's a variable star, and the pulsations of the star were well explained by its stage of life. Essentially, the star is pulsing because it is in the process of dying. But there was this second variation that lasted almost six years, and astronomers are having a hard time explaining it. But they realized that this could be caused by a star that is orbiting around close to the surface of Betelgeuse. And so new observations have shown that as this star is passing very close to the surface of Betelgeuse, it is distorting the atmosphere, causing the star to be a little bit more egg-shaped as the star is passing above it. And then while the star is behind it from our perspective, then the star looks more circular. And then the Companion star comes out the other side, causes it to be a little bit more egg-shaped in the direction of the gravity of this star that is pulling on it. What I really love about this is that, you know, you have this potential theory for what could be explaining this strange variation in the brightness of Betelgeuse. And then... Like, the lines of evidence are starting to come together. We've seen images of it taken directly. And now you're getting these measurements of the shape of the star. We see the changes in brightness. And they all come together to tell us the story about Betelgeuse and this binary companion. 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 the winner last week was... The Japanese MMX mission is off to Phobos. So thank you everyone who voted last week. Of course, we're going to put this week's vote into the post tab here on our YouTube channel. So if you take a second, vote, and of course, subscribe to the channel, like this video, just obey the algorithm. This next story comes from Evan Goff and looks at an upcoming space telescope that NASA is working on. We have lamented here on the channel that the age of the flagship telescopes has mostly ended for NASA. With the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, we're not going to see another giant flagship telescope until probably... The Habitable Worlds Observatory, which could be in the late 2030s or even into the 2040s. But there are going to be some telescopes launched between now and then. And so I'd like to talk to you about one that is in the works right now called the Ultraviolet Explorer. And so this is a next generation ultraviolet space telescope that NASA is going to be launching probably in 2031. And ultraviolet is one of these wavelengths that is very difficult to observe. It's well blocked by the Earth's atmosphere. So to be able to observe ultraviolet, you've got to get up outside the Earth's atmosphere. You need a space telescope. And a lot of the energy has been put into infrared, visible light. But ultraviolet is a fascinating part of the spectrum. This is where you've got hot. Gases. This is where you've got stars that are putting out a lot of energy. Newly forming stars are releasing a lot of ultraviolet radiation. And we currently have a big gap in our ability to observe ultraviolet radiation. And so NASA is hoping to close this gap with a new survey telescope. And you know, I love a survey telescope, something that just observes the entire sky, puts it all together so that astronomers can then plumb through it and find And so the. Ultraviolet Explorer, or UVEX, will do this large-scale survey of the entire sky in ultraviolet. And specifically, what it's going to be helping astronomers look for are low-mass galaxies. These are smaller than the giant galaxies like the Milky Way or Andromeda. And yet when you add them all up, they account for roughly half the mass of the galaxies in the universe. So really, these are a huge part of the structure of the universe. And these low mass galaxies seen around us today, they can still have large amounts of star formation. And so you can detect them in ultraviolet. But as you look back in time, then the light coming from these galaxies has been red shifted. into the visible or even into the infrared. And these are the kinds of galaxies that say James Webb has been seeing early on in the history of the cosmos, but they're very far away. And so James Webb just sees this tiny little dot a billion years after the big bang, but these low mass galaxies shining in the ultraviolet will be visible nearby. And so we'll be able to see them larger and more resolution and get a better sense of what their behavior is like. And then use that to be able to think about what the universe was like. early on in its history. So that's like the main thing astronomers are looking for. But it will also be able to look at the aftermath of various energetic events. So think about the collisions between neutron stars. We think about the kilonova event that was discovered in part. By an X-ray telescope that saw this flash of very energetic photons. These are the kinds of things that you want to examine in ultraviolet. Watch the afterglow after the two neutron stars have collided with each other. And then you just get this large survey across the entire sky that then astronomers who have questions about ultraviolet can go into it and use that as part of their science paper. And so one of the previous surveys done by NASA is this telescope called GALEX. And the UVEX mission should be able to do a 50 to 100 times more sensitive observation of the entire sky. One interesting space telescope that we have been following for a couple of months now is called the Lazuli Telescope. I guess the name of it is Lapis Lazuli. And it's going to be funded entirely by Eric Schmidt, who is the ex-CEO of Google. And if all goes well, this space telescope will have a three-meter primary mirror. It'll be bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope. It'll have three instruments on board, a wide-field optical imager, an integral field spectrograph, and an extrasolar coronagraph. Up until this point, the... Planets that astronomers are mostly able to image are seen in infrared. Essentially, the planet is giving off heat. You're able to determine the characteristics of the atmosphere because of the just intrinsic heat coming off of the planet. But with the Lazuli telescope, astronomers are hoping to see reflected light. from the star off the planet and use that as a way to examine the characteristics of the atmosphere of the planet. The hope is that this telescope will launch in 2029, which is just like three years away. And by observing these exoplanets in reflected light, one of the hopes is that you could get a hint of biosignatures as well. And so in partnership with the telescope as it's under construction, astronomers put together a list of their top 27 objects that they would like to observe with the Lazuli telescope. Lazuli? Now these are all giant exoplanets like we do not know of earth-sized worlds orbiting around sun-like stars and many of these are very famous. We've talked about them quite a bit but they're the perfect targets to observe with this new larger space telescope. I am I'm excited for the potential of a completely private space telescope. In fact, this is the kind of thing that a lot of you have commented in our videos before, which is like, why doesn't some rich billionaire just spend their money building a giant space telescope? And that's a great question, billionaires. Why don't you do that? Well, Eric Schmidt has stepped up and said that he's going to do that. But we have also seen billionaires say that they're going to fund megaprojects in the past. Think about Breakthrough Starshot, and yet when the actual invoice comes due and the bill just keeps growing and growing, will a billionaire, even like Eric Schmidt, have the patience to write checks all the way up to $10 billion? We'll find out. The European Space Agency's HERA mission is on its way to the binary asteroid pair Didymus and Dimorphos. And of course, Dimorphos is the impact site. for NASA's DART mission which crashed into it and demonstrated that we can move an asteroid if we really want to and avenge the dinosaurs. And now HERA is on its final approach for this asteroid pair and so we got this image that it took on October 18th when it was 1,280 kilometers away from the two asteroids and that is close enough that you can actually see the larger Didymus and then the smaller Dimorphos that's orbiting around it. Didymus is 780 meters across, while Dimorphos is 151 meters across. And they're only a little over one kilometer apart, so it's pretty impressive that it's starting to be able to pick out the two objects from one another. It's actually approaching very slowly, just 20 meters per second in comparison to the asteroids, and that is because it's going into orbit. So you don't wanna come screaming past or crashing into. One of these asteroids, you want to come in very slowly. And Hera is carrying two CubeSats with it. And these are going to assist in the observations in the Dimorphos Didymus system. And at the very end of their mission, they're going to try to land on the surface of Dimorphos. Now, I just wanted to direct your attention to a really cool set of stories that we're doing on Universe Today. Matt Williams, who is... Kind of obsessed with extraterrestrial civilizations. He covers a lot of our kind of techno signatures, SETI work. He did this long running series on the history of SETI, covered the Drake equation, Fermi paradox, all of that. And now he's doing a new series. It's probably going to be a five part series, but if I know Matt, it'll be more like a 10 part series on METI, which is messaging. extraterrestrial intelligence. So there have been attempts to send a message out into space to communicate with other civilizations, both inside the solar system, outside the solar system. And so in this series, Matt is talking about all the past attempts to do this, the future attempts that are maybe being planned, the ethics of broadcasting our location. to aliens and what are some of the risks that we might face. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes. We've got two episodes that he's written up so far. The first one is early ideas and the second episode is going from interplanetary to interstellar. And of course, this is just a fraction of all of the stories that we're covering on Universe Today this week. Dozens and dozens of stories. And if that's too many stories for you to sort of keep in your mind and keep refreshing the Universe Today website, I write a weekly email newsletter every Friday. It goes out to 70,000 of my closest friends. It's completely free. 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All your support means the universe to us. So you are watching episode 237 of Space Bites, and so we have been doing this show continuously pretty much for five years. We've missed one episode for Christmas one year, and Anton, who's the editor, was really grumpy about it because he does not like to miss an episode ever, and he will never let me live it down. We have a routine. Every Thursday, Anton and I get together in a video chat and we record the live episode of Space Bites and then Anton edits the thing and puts it out on Friday afternoons. That's our perspective of this. But what is your perspective? You know, Do you know that this comes out every Friday? And if so, are you sort of looking forward and anticipating for the new episode to be released? What is your sort of schedule? Do you like watch it for breakfast? Do you watch it at the dinner table? Do you inflict it upon the people in your family? Or do you wait and watch it over the next couple of days? 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