Vera Rubin Delivers Even More BIG Discoveries

Rubin finds Neptune's Trojans and two new companions to the Milky Way. China reveals more of its plans to send humans to the Moon. Finding the seeds of supermassive black holes, and on SpaceBytes Plus, how Mars has microclimates near its North Pole. All this and more, in this week's SpaceBytes. Well last week we talked about how Vera Rubin has found a new dwarf planet here in the Solar System. And the Rubin discoveries just keep on coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Subtitles by the Amara.org community And so now we've got a couple of more discoveries that I want to talk with you about. So the first one, and this, I think this is maybe bigger than another, just like another dwarf planet. And that is that astronomers have used Rubin to find Neptune's Trojan asteroids. So the Trojan asteroids, you know, we're going to talk about Lagrange points here. I know you're all really excited about that. So there are the five Lagrange points. Three are relevant to this conversation, but two, the L4 and the L5. Proceed and trail a planet in its orbit around the Sun. And so, Earth has Trojans, Jupiter has a lot of Trojans, and of course this is where NASA's Lucy mission is going, Saturn has found to have Trojans, Uranus has Trojans, but Neptune, the problem is that the Trojans are currently in a region that is very obscured by the Milky Way. It's a very bright region of the sky, and so it's really difficult. To pick out some faint objects moving at just the right speed to indicate that they're Trojan asteroids in line with Neptune. Vera Rubin could find them. The researchers were looking through Vera Rubin data, and this is sort of the great thing about having this giant survey of the entire sky, is you can look at the part of it that you're interested in. So they knew where the Trojan asteroids had to be, or they have to be, 60 degrees ahead and behind Neptune in its orbit. And so that's two very distinct regions that they could then search. And they were able to find two Trojan asteroids and then another candidate object that they haven't been able to verify yet. Now, there's another image that was released as part of the press package that we got on this story. And that's this really cool image showing the asteroids that have been found by Vera Rubin so far. And you can see what looks like these cones. Extending out from planet Earth and that's because these are regions that Rubin has scanned so far and so you can see the region where all of the new asteroids are and then you can see all of the known asteroids in sort of a much larger band around the solar system and then I promised you some more discoveries from Vera Rubin and this time we've got the discovery of a new globular cluster and a new dwarf galaxy orbiting around the Milky Way and The Milky Way is surrounded by dozens of these smaller dwarf galaxies. They're very dim. They're actually pretty hard to find, but we know of about 65 of them so far. And the Milky Way is also surrounded by about 40 globular clusters. These are these ancient clusters of stars containing... Millions of stars, and these are thought to be maybe the cores of old dwarf galaxies or, you know, some kind of primordial object. These are as old as the universe itself. And now Vera Rubin has found one of each of these. So the dwarf galaxy is now called Aquarius IV. And then the globular cluster is called Rubin GC1. And it's not enough to just find one of these objects with the telescope, you need to verify it. And so astronomers then did follow-on observations with the Dark Energy Camera and found them. And so now these are just the first of the dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. And it's assumed that there are dozens, maybe double The number that we know of surrounding the Milky Way. And so Vera Rubin is just going to keep on looking for more of these things. Just imagine where this will get over the next 10 years. And that story was done by Evan Goff. This next story comes from Matt Williams. And this is about China's plans for sending humans to the moon. And we've been talking about this a lot, that the Chinese are planning to send a team of human beings to the surface of the moon by 2030. And the plan, the architecture of their missions, is that they have this sort of new technology that they've been building. So the Lunar Lander is called Lan Yue and the crew capsule is called Meng Zhou. And so the plan is that they're going to put Lanyue on one of these Long March 10 rockets and they're going to put Mengzhou on the other one and then they're going to fly to the moon and then the two are going to dock. Lander is going to go down to the surface and then come back up and then the crew will come back home in the crew capsule. But the new information that we got is sort of China's plans to prepare for going to the moon. They've got to do a lot of their tests in low-earth orbit first. So they're going to be planning to launch a variation of the Long March 10 rocket, one with only two stages and no boosters, and they're going to launch a orbital version of the Mengzhou capsule. And they're going to go to their Chinese space station and test out this hardware and test out the docking and so on. And then when they finally do go to the moon, the Long March 10 is going to have three stages and side boosters. And that's where it gets into that full... 27 metric ton capacity. And the long-term plans is that the Chinese want to build their International Lunar Research Station. And, you know, probably by 2031, they will begin the development of this longer-term plans for the moon. And they've got an entirely new, much heavier rocket in the works called the Long March 9. So China is continuing on with its plans. And, you know, I'm pretty sure they'll hit their targets. So 2030, we should see Chinese astronauts go to the moon for the first time. This next story comes from Carolyn Collins Peterson, and it's a wild one. You know that nothing, not even light, can escape the surface of a black hole. The, essentially, the gravity is so strong that you would have to exceed the speed of light to be able to escape a black hole. And so, is there any way that a black hole could split into multiple pieces? A bunch of astronomers were evaluating every possible way that you could get this kind of an outcome. What they found is that under certain conditions, if the black hole is spinning pretty much close to the speed of light, then it could get into a situation where it actually starts to kind of tear itself apart. into two pieces and in fact the way the event horizon kind of stretches out the researchers called it a trouser-like shape and so their name is a pair of pants topology the researchers have investigated and found that the math holds for primordial black holes black holes with less mass than a stellar mass black hole that once you reach the stellar mass black hole range then these are probably impossible if these things do exist then as these black holes are spinning up close to the speed of light tearing themselves apart Then they could release a burst of gamma radiation. This is the kind of thing that could be detected by our various gamma ray observatories. And so this could be another line of evidence for the existence of primordial black holes. Now, there's one big problem with this, and that is entropy, that a black hole sort of has the maximum amount of entropy possible. And that if you were to somehow split a black hole into two pieces, then it would actually decrease in entropy, and that is something that is sort of forbidden by the laws of physics. But still, interesting sort of hypothetical. This next story comes from Evan Goff, and this is about the seeds of what eventually became the supermassive black holes that we see at the heart of every galaxy. So we know now that there are giant supermassive black holes in the middle of Pretty much every single galaxy in the universe, they're inextricably linked to these host galaxies, and they're going to have millions, even billions of times the mass of the sun. And yet, the only mechanisms that we know to actually create black holes are supernovae. Like if a supernova can go off and then you end up with a black hole of three times the mass of the sun, how can you end up with a black hole that has... Hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun within the first billion years of the age of the universe. Black holes are finding one another, merging, and then more black holes are merging, and then more black holes are merging. And so researchers have looked at a class of black holes known as an intermediate mass black hole. And these have actually, there have not been a lot of these that have been discovered so far. There have been some found. At the hearts of globular clusters, in fact, the largest cluster in the Milky Way, the Omega Cluster, you know, researchers are fairly certain there's about an 8,500 solar mass black hole wandering around in this globular cluster. But researchers have been able to find other clusters in other galaxies that are giving Giving off the kind of radiation that tells you that there might be one of these. Intermediate mass black holes roaming around inside and so if you find these intermediate mass black holes And that shows you this sort of growth of these black holes over time. Researchers used James Webb to image a Gravitational lens and there's this galaxy that's sort of smeared out around this gravitational lens called the Firefly Sparkle galaxy, which I think is the best name For a galaxy and in that galaxy there appear to be sources of radiation that are related to these intermediate mass black holes and so you actually could be seeing these regions inside one of these galaxies where the potential seeds for future supermassive black holes are forming and the sort of interesting part about this is how the math nicely lines up with the predicted math. for the kinds of black holes that you would get from the first stars in the universe, the Population 3 stars. These are the ones that only have the primordial hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang. And so these things go off. Maybe you end up with a black hole that is in the tens of solar masses, and then you could build up to these intermediate mass black holes, and it looks like the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together. This next story comes from Matt Williams, and it's about a probably one of the most famous Paintings in the world, and definitely the most astronomical painting in the world. And this is Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night. And, you know, for the longest time, people looked at this and just assumed that this was just van Gogh's interpretation of the night sky. And, you know, he's an artist. You know, you don't want to put too much stock in what he's showing. What is his astronomical accuracy? But researchers have wondered, was he actually painting a very specific scene in the night sky? And so they were able to go to the exact spot where he painted this painting in Saint-Rémy in 1889. And then they were able to sort of look at the positions of the stars in the painting and then match that. two known configurations of stars in the sky and I realized that this matches a very well-known cluster called the Hyades Cluster. You can see it sort of close to the constellation of Taurus. Looks like this V in the sky and you know once you know what it looks like you can find it. And so they were able to then pinpoint what is the point where you had the Hyades Cluster close to the horizon. You had Venus in the view and you also had this Crescent Moon. From what I could tell it was July 22nd in 1889. Turns out Van Gogh was painting an actual scene. And there's actually another ink drawing that he did as sort of preparation for doing this where he mapped out the stars and had that same level of precision. So he was actually painting the sky as he saw it. 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 that Vera Rubin found a new dwarf planet. So thank you everybody who voted. Of course we're going to put the vote into the post tab. If you want to see these polls more regularly, subscribe to the channel, click on the notifications bell and then just obey the algorithm. This next story comes from Andy Thomaswick and it is about when the Earth's protective Now, you know that back in 2024, the sun was giving off some pretty powerful flares. And one of these struck the earth, a solar storm that created auroras that were visible as far down south as Florida, Mexico. It was kind of an amazing time. I was traveling clouds. I wasn't able to see it. But my wife was back home and she was just like, you got it. Are you seeing this? So yeah, the auroras that year were absolutely incredible. And so researchers know that when this solar storm was striking the Earth, it was interacting with Earth's magnetosphere. And the magnetosphere has a region that is filled with electrons that are moving at relativistic speeds. These are known as the Van Allen belts. And that we know that the Van Allen belts can change in their size and shape. As there are various solar storm events that are going on. But during this event, the Japanese had a satellite called Arase. And it was measuring the ultra-relativistic electrons. And they were about 5,000 times higher than the normal background that this satellite was measuring. Turns out what was happening was that as the solar storm was impacting the Earth's magnetosphere, it was actually changing the shape of the Van Allen belt. And you had this region that normally none of these electrons were able to make it through. It was actually becoming more filled with these energetic electrons. And then as the storm subsided in this region, Came back down again. But you can think about, you know, if we're going to be sending astronauts through the Van Allen Belts out to the moon and we know that there's a powerful solar storm, then maybe the amount of time that you have to spend in the Van Allen Belts, you want to sort of change the trajectory or maybe even wait for the solar storm to end before you send your astronauts off to the moon. And finally, I'd like to give you some very cool images, and these are both coming from James Webb and a partner telescope. So the first image is the Cat's Head Nebula, and this is in the Carina Nebula, which is one of the largest star-forming regions in the Milky Way. It contains the most massive star that we know of in the Milky Way, Eta Carinae. And people say it's the cat's head nebula because it looks like this cat that's sitting and looking away from us with this glowing red eye. But I don't see that. I see this sort of strange snake monster with a skull head and this glowing red eye. But, you know, I guess, you know. Beauty's in the eye of the beholder? I don't see a beholder, though. Anyway, but this structure is the kind of things that you see in these star-forming regions as the powerful stellar winds from all of the stars in the region are blasting with their radiation and kind of wearing away these giant columns of gas and dust. And because you get this collaboration, you've got James Webb that is doing the infrared view, and then you've got the Hubble Space Telescope, which is giving you... The visible light and a little bit into the ultraviolet. And so between the two of them, you're able to get more spectrum across all the different features that are in this nebula. And then this second image is also in the Carina Nebula. And this was released just before Halloween. And so the European Space Agency was calling this Carina's Ghost. But again, you've got this region of gas and dust seen by James Webb. And it's able to peer through the gas and dust To be able to see the... This is where all the new star formation is happening. But then the partner on this image was the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is able to see all of the hot stars. Those are the purple dots throughout this entire picture. And of course, new stars are releasing a tremendous amount of radiation, a lot in the X-rays. And so this radiation then blasts out, pushes away this gas and dust, and in the end, clears out the nebula so that there's sort of nothing else left. You just have the stars, since you have this star cluster, and then the stars separate into space, and now you just have stars. I hope you're watching this week's episode of Space Bytes, but if you're watching it here on YouTube, you had to watch an ad, and we don't want you to have to watch an ad. We want you to be able to watch this show ad-free, and so we've got another version of this exact show, except it is completely ad-free. 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