This Week in Space: A ‘blinking’ star and exploring space in world’s deepest pool – Chron

This Week In Space brings you whats new and exciting in space exploration and astronomy once a week, every week. From supernovae to SpaceX or Mars missions to black holesif its out of this world, its covered here.

It's like space! But wet!

The largest indoor swimming pool in the world will be built in 2023, but to splash around in its deep end, you may have to be an astronautor at least a movie star. Called Blue Abyss, the 150 million facility was recently announced as a training ground for astronauts that will also double as a film set and research center.

The aquatic center will be as big as 17 Olympic swimming pools. Future astronauts will work under 150 feet of water to simulate the low gravity and extreme conditions of space, practicing with mock space stations and other setups that will be lowered into the pool via crane through a sliding roof.

As needed, the crane will be able to switch out the astronaut training modules for fake cave systems that would test experimental submersible robots and deep sea divers. Or, if Hollywood so desires, Blue Abyss suggests that its high-tech setups can be replaced by film sets for taping blockbusters.

As of yet, no producer has come forward to take them up on their offer.

If a sun winks at you, do you wink back?

We often think of stars as immutable: unchanging, fixed points of light hanging in the night sky. A group of astronomers have challenged that view with reports that they observed a star blink." Over a few months, the star VVV-WIT-08 slowly darkened to nothingness, then gradually reignited again.

Humankind is no stranger to eclipses, but no one has seen anything like this before. Astronomers know that some stars get momentarily darker when planets pass in front of them (and have used that fact to detect thousands of planets), but typically, such eclipses dim a star by somewhere around a fraction of a percent. Though bigger planets that eclipse smaller stars effectively block more of their light, VVV-WIT-08 is a huge star, almost as big as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. If something blocked its light, it must have been huge, too.

The scientists who reported the discovery dont know what it is, but they have theories. It could be a disk of gas and dust surrounding a newborn planet, or, more exotically, it could be a black hole surrounded by material that it is gradually pulling in. Such a black hole, the authors claim, would have to be at least ten times the mass of the Sun.

Although this is the first star of its kind ever discovered, we may hear of others in the near future, as future telescopes designed to monitor billions of stars come online.

Two planets from the same system with vastly different rates of atmospheric degeneration are perplexing scientists.

At some point in the last four billion years, Mars lost nearly all of its atmosphere. Now, the discovery of a planet that is currently boiling away into spaceand one thats notcould provide a key to understanding why some planets end up like Mars and others like Earth.

In a recently released paper, an international group of astronomers reported that the planet HD 63433 c is losing the equivalent of the entire weight of Earth from its atmosphere every few billion years. At this rate, its atmosphere will be completely stripped away in less than one billion years.

This in itself would be a noteworthy discovery, as only a handful of planets with evaporating atmospheres have ever been found. But the HD 63433 system also hosts another planet, HD 63433 b, which is all the more interesting because its not losing its atmosphere. According to their calculations, the astronomers say it should be boiling off three times as fast as planet c.

Planet b could be something unusual, like the rocky core of a gas giant that never grew to be the size of Jupiter. Or, there could be something missing from our understanding of how planets lose their atmospheres. Until the planet is studied closely with a space telescope like the Hubble or James Webb, we cant know for sure.

More here:

This Week in Space: A 'blinking' star and exploring space in world's deepest pool - Chron