Category Archives: Astronomy

Japanese scientists found black material from asteroid Ryugu inside one of the Hayabusa 2 missions collection chambers (colour corrected by Astronomy Now). Credit: JAXA/Astronomy Now

Japanese space agency officials said Tuesday they found a large number of pitch black rock and dust particles after opening a capsule returned to Earth earlier this month by the Hayabusa 2 mission, giving eager scientists their first significant specimens ever brought back from an asteroid.

Scientists working inside a super-clean laboratory in Sagamihara, Japan, have opened the first of three sample collection chambers inside Hayabusa 2s return capsule, beginning the process of analysing the material in search of fresh insights into the history of the Solar System.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which manages the Hayabusa 2 mission, released a photo inside the nearly 48-millimetre (2-inch-wide) container, known as chamber A. The photo shows a small pile of black pebbles from Ryugu, a 900-metre (half-mile-wide) asteroid rich in carbon, a crucial building block for life.

This is thought to be the sample from the first touchdown on Ryugu, JAXA tweeted. The sample return is a great success!

Japans Hayabusa 2 spacecraft appears to have returned more asteroid specimens than expected, scientists said, although a precise measurement of how much material the mission collected will have to wait until teams open the capsules other two sample chambers.

Mission planners designed Hayabusa 2 to collect at least 100 milligrams of material from asteroid Ryugu.Engineers had no way of measuring the contents of the sample canister until it returned to Earth, but they were confident the spacecraft gathered the required material.

It appears that confidence was well-founded.

The Hayabusa 2 spacecraft released its sample return capsule for a super-hot re-entry into Earths atmosphere 5 December. Thenearly 40-centimeter (16-inch) sample carrier landed via parachute in Woomera, Australia, where Japanese teams were in position to recover the capsule.

After transporting the sample carrier to a quick-look inspection facility in Australia, the capsule was flown back to Japan on a business jet 7 December. Scientists moved the return capsule into a receiving lab at a JAXA facility in Sagamihara, where they opened chamber A.

Hayabusa 2 used chamber A to collect specimens gathered during the missions first touch-and-go landing on asteroid Ryugu on 21 February 2019.

Scientists will next open chambers B and C, and the sample curation group will take out the asteroid material for analysis, JAXA said.

Chamber B should be empty it was not used while Hayabusa 2 was at the asteroid but scientists expect chamber C should contain specimens collected during the missions second landing on Ryugu on 11 July 2019.

Hayabusa 2s second touch-and-go landing was designed to capturepristine dust and rock excavated by an explosive impactor the spacecraft fired into the asteroid. The subsurface specimens may harbor additional clues about the asteroids origins and evolution because they have been protected from solar radiation and harsh weathering effects from exposure to space.

Before even opening the first of Hayabusa 2s three collection chambers, Japanese scientists were encouraged by the discovery of black dust grains near the canisters lid.

JAXA said the Hayabusa 2 team also analysed gas sealed inside the return capsule. Scientists believe the gas molecules, which differed from the composition of Earths atmosphere, were created by outgassing from the asteroid specimens.

This is the worlds first sample return of a material in the gas state from deep space, JAXA said in a statement.

The Hayabusa 2 missions return to Earth earlier this month completed a six-year round-trip mission to asteroid Ryugu. The craft launched in December 2014 aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket, and arrived near Ryugu in 2018 to begin several months of surveys before attempting the first landing.

The spacecraft dropped a fleet of landers and rovers to the explore the asteroids surface in late 2018, including a hopping robot developed by engineers in Germany and France.

Scientists are eager to analyse the specimens, which they expect may contain organic molecules. Researchers believe asteroids like Ryugu, or a larger body like the one from which Ryugu split off, could have seeded Earth with the ingredients necessary for life.

Hayabusa 2 departed Ryugu in November 2019 to begin the year-long trip back to Earth.

While Hayabusa 2 was in the home stretch of its return journey, NASAs OSIRIS-REx spacecraft performed its own brief landing on asteroid Bennu, a rocky carbon-bearing body similar in composition to Ryugu.

OSIRIS-REx collected significantly more asteroid material than Hayabusa 2 perhaps up to a few pounds of asteroid rocks and is scheduled to depart Bennu early next year. OSIRIS-RExs sample capsule is due to arrive back on Earth in September 2023.

The Japanese and U.S. missions share similar objectives, and JAXA and NASA have agreed to swap a small fraction of their asteroid specimens for joint analysis by scientists from each country.

After releasing its sample return capsule 5 December, the Hayabusa 2 missions parent spacecraft still loaded with plenty of propellant completed three divert manoeuvres to steer away from a collision course with Earth. The spacecraft is heading back into the Solar System on an extended mission that will include a high-speed flyby of an asteroid in 2026 and a rendezvous with a small fast-rotating space rock in 2031.

Hayabusa 2 is Japans second asteroid sample return mission.

A previous mission, named Hayabusa, successfully returned its sample capsule to Earth in June 2010. But a string of technical problems, including a fuel leak and a failure in its sample collection mechanism, prevented Hayabusa from gathering any significant material from a stony asteroid name Itokawa.

Despite the setbacks, Japanese scientists found microscopic particles from Itokawa inside Hayabusas sample return carrier.

Hayabusa 2 performed its mission without any major issues, bringing home much more material from Ryugu, an asteroid covered in more primitive organic molecules than Itokawa, raising hopes scientists will learn more about the formation of the planets more than 4.5 billion years ago.

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Scientists thrilled with asteroid treasure returned by Japanese spacecraft - Astronomy Now Online

Following the collapse of the historic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, China has opened the biggest radio telescope in the world up to international scientists.

In Pingtang, Guizhou province stands the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the largest radio telescope in the world, surpassing the Arecibo Observatory, which stood as the largest in the world for 53 years before the construction of FAST was completed in 2016. Following two cable failures earlier this year, Arecibo's radio telescope collapsed in November, shutting down the observatory for good. Now, FAST is opening its doors to astronomers from around the world.

"Our scientific committee aims to make FAST increasingly open to the international community," Wang Qiming, the chief inspector of FAST's operations and development center told the news agency AFP during a visit to the telescope, according to the French news site AFP.

Related: Losing Arecibo's giant dish leaves humans more vulnerable to space rocks

China will accept requests this upcoming year (2021) from foreign scientists looking to use the instrument for their research, according to the report.

With its massive 1,600-foot (500 meters) diameter dish, FAST is not only larger than the now-destroyed Arecibo telescope, but it's also three times more sensitive. FAST, which began full operations in January of this year, is also surrounded by a 3-mile (5 kilometers) "radio silence" zone in which cellphones and computers are not allowed.

"We drew a lot of inspiration from its [Arecibo's] structure, which we gradually improved to build our telescope," Qiming said.

Radio telescopes like FAST use antennas and radio receivers to detect radio waves from radio sources in the cosmos, like stars, galaxies and black holes. These instruments can also be used to send out radio signals and even reflect radio light from objects in the solar system (like planets) to see what information might bounce back.

Researchers may use FAST to not just explore the universe but also to study alien worlds, determining whether or not they rest in the "goldilocks zone" near their host star, and also search for alien life.

Famously, in 1974 at Arecibo, scientists working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, sent out an interstellar radio message to the globular cluster M13 in the hopes of receiving confirmation of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The message was co-authored by astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, helping to popularize Arecibo and radio astronomy in general.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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China is opening the world's largest radio telescope up to international scientists - Space.com

Using the Keck I telescope, a team of astronomers has measured the distance to the ancient and farthest galaxy called GN-z11. The galaxy is so distant that it defines the very boundary of the observable universe itself.

According to astronomers, this discovery could shed light on a period of cosmological history when the universe was only a few hundred million years old.

Professor Nobunari Kashikawa from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo is driven by his curiosity about galaxies. In particular, he sought the most distant one to observe to find out how and when it came to be.

Kashikawa said,From previous studies, the galaxy GN-z11 seems to be the farthest detectable galaxy from us, at 13.4 billion light-years, or 134 nonillion kilometers (thats 134 followed by 30 zeros). But measuring and verifying such a distance is not an easy task.

Astronomers measured the redshift of GN-z11. This refers to the way light stretches out, becomes redder the farther it travels. By measuring how stretched these telltale signatures are, astronomers can deduce how far the light must have traveled, thus giving away the target galaxys distance.

Kashikawa said,We looked at ultraviolet light specifically, as that is the area of the electromagnetic spectrum we expected to find the redshifted chemical signatures. The Hubble Space Telescope detected the signature multiple times in the spectrum of GN-z11. However, even the Hubble cannot resolve ultraviolet emission lines to the degree we needed. So we turned to a more up-to-date ground-based spectrograph, an instrument to measure emission lines, called MOSFIRE, which is mounted to the Keck I telescope in Hawaii.

The emissions from GN-z11 were captured in detail using MOSFIRE. This allowed them to make a much better estimation of its distance than was possible from previous data. When working with distances at these scales, it is not sensible to use our familiar units of kilometers or even multiples of them; instead, astronomers use a value known as the redshift number denoted by z.

Astronomers improved the accuracy of the galaxys z value by a factor of 100. If subsequent observations can confirm this, then the astronomers can confidently say GN-z11 is the farthest galaxy ever detected in the universe.

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Astronomers measured the distance to an ancient galaxy - Tech Explorist

Astronomy and photography fans have an opportunity to win a tour of one of Europes most famous observatories.

The Reach for the Stars competition is seeking the best astrophotographs taken in Ireland between January 1st, 2020 and March 31st, 2021, with the first prize winner awarded a VIP tour of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (Dias) Dunsink Observatory.

Prof Peter Gallagher, Head of Astrophysics at Dias, which is organising the contest in partnership with The Irish Times, said recent advances in cameras and phones had led to a growth in astrophotography.

We all love looking up at the night sky and admiring how spectacular it can be . . . With the Reach for the Stars competition we are asking for people to submit their images, he said.

While 2020 is not a year many will remember fondly, it has been a great year for astronomy fans, Prof Gallagher said. The night sky has featured supermoons, sunspots, and the coming together of Jupiter and Saturn on the winter solstice, he said.

People across the country are taking breath-taking images of such events, he added.

Entrants do not need to be professionals, but they must be over the age of 18 and photographs must have been taken from the island of Ireland.

Entries will be judged by Prof Gallagher, along with Irish Times Picture Editor Brenda Fitzsimons; John Flannery, of the Irish Astronomical Society; and Martina Quinn, managing director of Alice PR & Events.

As well as an observatory tour, the winning photographer will see their images published on the Irish Times and Dias websites, and will receive 500 worth of photographic or telescopic equipment and a 12-month Premium Digital subscription to The Irish Times. Winning and highly-commended images will also feature in an exhibition during 2021, so long as circumstances allow.

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Photographers and astronomy lovers invited to reach for the stars - The Irish Times

Scientists looking for proof of extraterrestrial life are investigating a radio wave emission coming from the nearest star to our solar system.

The beam was found from the direction of the star Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.2 light years from Earth. It was noticed during a 30-hour telescope observation in Australia last year, according to a report by the Guardian.

Astronomers with the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project have spotted strange blasts of radio waves before, most of which have been attributed to human-made interference or natural sources.

The latest signal is also likely to have a natural explanation, but scientists are preparing a paper on the beam to support Breakthrough Listen, which is searching for evidence of life in space.

The beam from Proxima hasn't been detected since the first observation, but one individual in the astronomy community said the findings are very promising.

"It is the first serious candidate since the Wow! signal' the person, who spoke under anonymity, said, referring to the unusual 1977 discovery of a signal that some claimed was made by aliens.

In 40 years, there's been no consensus on what might have caused the signal, according to EarthSky.

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Astronomers investigating whether radio beam from neighboring star is proof of alien life - Washington Examiner

Astronomers using data from NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have discovered two exoplanets transiting inactive red dwarf stars TOI-122 and TOI-237.

An artists impression of the super-Earth planet TOI-237b. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

M dwarfs (red dwarfs) are interesting targets for transiting exoplanet studies as they provide the best opportunity for finding temperate terrestrial planets, said University of Colorado, Boulder astronomer William Waalkes and his colleagues.

All main sequence stars less massive than 0.6 solar masses fall into the M-dwarf category, and they are the most numerous stellar type in the Universe.

These stars are very cool and very small, so cool planets have shorter periods, higher transit probabilities and deeper transits than they would around larger stars.

M dwarfs tend to host terrestrial exoplanets more often than gas giants, and these terrestrial planets can more readily be found at lower insolations given the low luminosities of M dwarfs, they added.

Finally, M dwarfs have such long lifetimes that not a single M dwarf ever formed has yet evolved off the main sequence, making these stellar systems interesting laboratories for very long timescale planetary evolution.

One of the newfound planets, TOI-122b, is a sub-Neptune planet about 2.7 times the size of Earth.

It orbits TOI-122 (also known as TIC 231702397), an M dwarf that is 33% the radius of our Sun.

The planetary system is located approximately 203 light-years away in the constellation of Tucana.

TOI-122b likely has a thick atmosphere but on a 5.1-day orbit, it is far interior to the habitable zone of its star and irradiated at over 8x the flux of the Earth, the astronomers said.

With a relatively low equilibrium temperature, there could be very interesting atmospheric chemistry in this planets atmosphere that might be observable with sufficiently ambitious observing programs.

The second new planet, TOI-237b, is a super-Earth with a radius about 1.44 times the Earths radius.

It circles TOI-237 (TIC 305048087), an M dwarf that is 21% the radius of our Sun and only 3200 K.

The system lies approximately 124 light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor.

With its 5.4-day orbit, TOI-237b receives nearly 4x Earth insolation from its host star, the researchers said.

Given the size of this planet and dimness of the star, mass measurements are likely very difficult to achieve, and we may not know its mass for some time.

Even cooler than TOI-122b, this planet cannot be studied with emission spectroscopy, but transmission spectroscopy is possible and we may be able to learn about this planets atmosphere, if it has retained one.

According to the scientists, TOI-122b and TOI-237b are among the cooler exoplanets yet discovered by TESS.

TOI-122b and TOI-237b are two worlds that span planetary radii not seen in our own Solar System and are interesting laboratories to study planet formation, dynamics, and composition, they concluded.

A paper on the discovery will be published in the Astronomical Journal.

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William C. Waalkes et al. 2020. TOI 122b and TOI 237b, two small warm planets orbiting inactive M dwarfs, found by TESS. AJ, in press; arXiv: 2010.15905

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TESS Discovers Two Small and Warm Exoplanets | Astronomy - Sci-News.com

Astronomers have discovered the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen, with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible.

Its half-second flash of light, detected in May, came from a violent explosion of gamma rays billions of light-years away that unleashed more energy in a blink of an eye than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime.

The study has been accepted in The Astrophysical Journal and will be published online later this year. A pre-print is available on arXiv.org.

Its amazing to me that after 10 years of studying the same type of phenomenon, we can discover unprecedented behavior like this, said Wen-fai Fong, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University and lead author of the study. It just reveals the diversity of explosions that the universe is capable of producing, which is very exciting.

NASAs Hubble Space Telescope quickly captured the glow within just three days after the burst and determined its near-infrared emission was 10 times brighter than predicted, defying conventional models.

These observations do not fit traditional explanations for short gamma-ray bursts, said Fong. Given what we know about the radio and X-rays from this blast, it just doesnt match up. The near-infrared emission that were finding with Hubble is way too bright.

To zero in on this new phenomenons exact brightness, the team used W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii to pinpoint the precise distance of its host galaxy.

Distances are important in calculating the bursts true brightness as opposed to its apparent brightness as seen from Earth, said Fong. Just as the brightness of a light bulb when it reaches your eye depends on both its luminosity and its distance from you, a burst could be really bright because either it is intrinsically luminous and distant, or not as luminous but much closer to us. With Keck, we were able to determine the true brightness of the burst and thus the energy scale. We found it was to be much more energetic than we originally thought.

Using Keck Observatorys Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS) and DEep Imaging and Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS), the team determined the burst came from a galaxy located at a redshift of z = 0.55 quite a bit farther than the initial calculated distance.

Lasting less than two seconds, short gamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic, explosive events known; they live fast and die hard. Scientists think theyre caused by the merger of two neutron stars, extremely dense objects about the mass of the Sun compressed into the volume of a small city. A neutron star is so dense that on Earth, one teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons!

Neutron star mergers are very rare and extremely important because scientists think they are one of the main sources of heavy elements in the universe, such as gold and uranium.

Along with a short gamma-ray burst, scientists expect to see a kilonova whose peak brightness typically reaches 1,000 times that of a classical nova. Kilonovae are an optical and infrared glow from the radioactive decay of heavy elements and are unique to the merger of two neutron stars, or the merger of a neutron star and a black hole.

What Fong and her team saw was too bright to be explained even by a traditional kilonova. They provide one possible explanation for the unusually bright blast. While most short gamma-ray bursts probably result in a black hole, the neutron star merger in this case may have instead formed a magnetar, a supermassive neutron star with a very powerful magnetic field. The magnetar deposited a large amount of energy into the ejected material of the kilonova, causing it to glow even brighter.

What we detected even outshines the one confirmed kilonova discovered in 2017, said co-author Jillian Rastinejad, a graduate student with Fongs team at Northwestern University. As a first-year graduate student working with real-time data for the first time when this burst happened, its remarkable to see our discovery motivate a new and exciting magnetar-boosted model.

With such an event, the team expects the ejecta from the burst to produce light at radio wavelengths in the next few years. Follow-up radio observations may ultimately prove the origin of the burst was indeed a magnetar. The birth of a magnetar from a neutron star merger has never definitively been seen before, as they are expected to be rare outcomes.

The short gamma-ray burst was first detected with NASAs Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Once the alert went out, the team quickly enlisted other telescopes to conduct multi-wavelength observations. They analyzed the afterglow in X-ray with Swift Observatory, optical and near-infrared with Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, Hubble, and Keck Observatory, and in radio wavelengths with the Very Large Array. This particular gamma-ray burst was one of the rare instances in which scientists were able to detect light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

NASAs upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is particularly well-suited for this type of observation.

We cant wait to combine the power of Keck and JWST along with other facilities as a team to go after even more enigmatic events like these, said Keck Observatory Chief Scientist John OMeara. This study shows that we have much left to learn.

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Astronomers discover unexplained brightness from colossal explosion - West Hawaii Today

Only 12 light years from Earth, Tau Ceti is the closest single star similar to the Sun and an all-time favourite in sci-fi stories. Habitable worlds orbiting Tau Ceti were destinations of fictional starships like The Expanses Nauvoo and Barbarellas vessel. Star Treks Captain Picard also frequented an exotic bar in the system.

Now, thanks to a new approach to analyzing nearby planetary systems, we have a deeper understanding of the actual worlds that orbit Tau Ceti and many other nearby stars.

Exoplanets worlds around other stars have long been staples of science fiction but remained mostly inaccessible to scientific investigations. This all changed over the past decade, when NASAs Kepler and TESS exoplanet hunter space telescopes added thousands of new planets to the previously short tally of alien worlds.

READ MORE: Hell planet found with lava oceans, rocky rain and supersonic winds

We, astrophysicists and exoplanet researchers at the University of Arizonas Steward Observatory and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and members of NASAs NExSS exoplanet research coordination network, have long been fascinated by the secrets nearby unexplored planetary systems may hold.

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We have now developed a novel way to figure out whether there are yet-undiscovered planets in these systems.

We realized that by combining what is known about a given planetary system with simple statistical rules, we can predict where yet-undetected planets may reside and how large they may be just like guessing what pieces are missing from a partially completed puzzle. The new analysis can guide discoveries of new planets, help complete maps of planetary systems in the solar neighbourhood and inform future searches for life.

Our model, nicknamed Dynamite, combines four ingredients to predict hidden worlds.

First, Dynamite considers the locations and sizes of all currently known planets in a given system. In general, the more planets that are known in the system, the easier it is to predict whether any are missing. The second consideration is knowing that planets are more likely to be closer to the star than farther out. Dynamite uses a mathematical description built up through statistical studies of thousands of known exoplanets of how far from their host star planets are likely to be.

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Although planets are likely to be closer to their host stars, they cannot all be jammed together. Planets all attract each other via gravity, which is much stronger when the planets are closer. Thus, planets that are too close will distort each others orbits, often leading to chaotic interactions and even the ejection of one of the planets from their birth systems. This criterion for stability is the third important element that Dynamite uses to predict the architecture of the planetary system.

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The fourth component is a mathematical pattern in the lengths of the orbits of adjacent planets (some configurations are more likely than others). Put together, Dynamite tries to build model planetary systems that are similar to actual planetary systems, with a compact and stable collection of planets orbiting their host stars.

We were not sure whether such a relatively simple recipe could be used to successfully predict missing planets. To test Dynamite, we gave it some known multi-planet systems with a twist: In each system, we hid one or two of the known planets from the algorithm. In the cases tested, Dynamite successfully predicted whether one or two planets are missing and where those planets could be, and could even guess their sizes correctly.

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Today, Dynamite can be tested only on systems with planetary orbits similar to that of Earths or smaller. Thats because we lack data on outer planetary systems, so we cannot yet detect far-flung planets the equivalent of Neptune. More data will allow Dynamites four rules of building a planetary system to be refined and its predictions improved. Still, our predictions for over 50 partially explored planetary systems, discovered by NASAs TESS space telescope, are already guiding the search for hidden worlds.

The most exciting planets to predict and hunt for will be the closest ones to us the worlds we will likely target in future searches for signatures of extraterrestrial life.

In our newest study, we applied Dynamite to the partially explored Tau Ceti system, where four planets are already known. Weak signals indicating the potential presence of several other planet candidates have also been reported, but their presence hasnt been verified.

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Based on our model, we predict that three of the planet candidates are real planets. Whats more, we predict that another, yet unseen world exists. This new planet, which we call Tau Ceti PxP-4, is particularly exciting as it is within the temperate zone of Tau Ceti the region around the star where a planet similar to Earth would be habitable. Our analysis shows that PxP-4 may be a gaseous planet, akin to our Neptune, but smaller and warmer. We find, however, that PxP-4 is more likely to be a rocky planet, although larger than Earth.

Such a world may be detectable in the coming years with the newest planet-hunting instruments and, if confirmed, would be a prime target for future searches for life. And, perhaps one day in the distant future Tau Cetis PxP-4 may even be home to an exotic bar popular among Starfleet officers.

Daniel Apai, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona and Jeremy Dietrich, Graduate Student in Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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COMMENTARY: These astronomers have a new way to find distant planets including some like Earth - Global News

An artists impression of a very dusty galaxy in the early universe that already exhibits signs of a rotating disc. Reds represent gast while blues and browns represent dust as seen by the ALMA radio telescope array. Image: B. Saxton NRAO/AUI/NSF, ESO, NASA/STScI; NAOJ/Subaru

One might expect galaxies forming in the very early universe to be relatively free of dust and the heavy elements cooked up when successive generations of massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and explode in supernova blasts. That process takes time, and most infant galaxies could be expected to experience rapid growth spurts in the eventual transition between the primordial and mature stages in their development.

But in a survey of 118 young galaxies dating back to within 1 billion to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, astronomers were surprised to find many more mature galaxies than expected.

We didnt expect to see so much dust and heavy elements in these distant galaxies, said Andreas Faisst of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology.

In fact, about 20 percent of the galaxies sampled in the survey are already very dusty and a significant fraction of the ultraviolet light from newborn stars is already hidden by this dust, said Daniel Schaerer of the University of Geneva.

The ALMA Large Program to Investigate C+ at Early Times, or ALPINE, survey is the largest multi-wavelength study of galaxies in the early universe, utilising optical observations by ground- and space-based telescopes, including Keck, Subaru, the Very Large Telescope and the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and radio observations using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, or ALMA.

The ALMA observations allowed researchers to detect star formation hidden by thick dust that blocks optical and infrared wavelengths and to follow the motion of gas associated with star-forming regions, finding Hubble-dark galaxies that even the space telescope cannot see.

We want to see exactly where the dust is and how the gas moves around, said Paolo Cassata of the University of Padua in Italy. We also want to compare the dusty galaxies to others at the same distance and figure out if there might be something special about their environments.

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Growing up fast in the very early universe Astronomy Now - Astronomy Now Online

Water molecules have been detected in the Moons surface by NASAs flying Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Researchers found traces of the life-sustaining substance in one of the largest lunar craters visible from Earth, the Clavius Crater. This ancient impact site receives a significant portion of sunlight compared to other areas of the Moon, which suggests that lunar water might not be limited to shadowy sites at the Moons poles.

Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space, Casey Honniball, the studys lead author, said in a NASA press release. Yet somehow were seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there.

The findings were published October 26 in Nature Astronomy.

Water, humanity, and the Moon

The key to how water could survive such a harsh lunar environment might be related to another harsh reality on the Moon: micrometeorites. These small pieces of space rock only a few hundredths of an inch or so wide rain down on the lunar surface, potentially forming beadlike glass structures upon impact.

Its these structures that the researchers think could trap and protect water molecules from sunlight. Alternatively, the researchers say, the water molecules could be caught between grains of lunar soil that shields them from sunlight. And depending on what exactly is protecting the newfound water from the Sun, scientists think astronauts may eventually be able to mine it.

However, its important to note that the amount of surface uncovered is still rather small. NASA compares the amount to 100 times less than is found in the Sahara Desert. So, researchers arent quite sure what these findings mean for supporting a sustainable human presence on the Moon.

The new find marks the first time SOFIA a modified Boeing 747 mounted with a 100-inch reflecting telescope has looked at the Moon. Follow-up flights by the aircraft will search for additional water signatures within sunlit portions of the Moon. The results will then be used to inform future NASA lunar missions, including NASAs Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER).

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NASA's flying SOFIA telescope confirms water in the Moon's soil - Astronomy Magazine