We finally get those images from Webb. A SpaceX booster has a
surprising explosion, a mission to Neptune from China, a black
hole fails to consume a star and going under the ice to search
for European space whales. All this and more. Hi everyone. I'm
Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today, I've been a
space and astronomy news journalist for over 20 years.
This is our space bytes segment. Or maybe it's called news bytes.
And we haven't really decided on the name vote in the comments
below on which one it should be. And then I will try to remember,
anyway, we've got a lot of really interesting news coming
at you this week. Let's get into it. This has been a pretty busy
week. And that's of course, because we finally got those
first images from James Webb, what we've been waiting like 20
years, we got the first Sneak Peek image on Monday night from
President Biden and vice president Harris and other
people from NASA. And then we got the rest of the images and a
more detailed explanation on Tuesday. And of course, we
jumped to work very quickly and produced a full length video on
just those images. So if you want more information about
those images, you should definitely go and and check that
out. But there's a few other little interesting tidbits that
we wanted to add that have come out. In the video, I mentioned
that we would maybe get a chance to see Jupiter and other objects
in the Solar System, thanks to web, and we got those images,
actually, we were able to include those images in the
video, because they come out after I'd recorded. And we got
some more versions of these images of Jupiter in the last
couple of days. So we're gonna include that here. And they look
great. I mean, it's an infrared image of Jupiter and not a
visible light. And so you can really get a sense of the
difference, the kinds of features that you see in
infrared, versus what you might see in visible light. Of course,
the quality of the images that you can get from a big space
telescope at Earth just isn't going to be anywhere near as
good as all of the spacecraft that have actually flown
directly to Jupiter, we've got Juno at Jupiter right now taking
the most incredible images from close up. But still, it's great
to have another eye on Jupiter and other objects in the Solar
System. So thanks, Webb. And of course, even though Juno is
right there up close, it doesn't have the same imaging capability
as webb two will the see into those same infrared wavelengths.
So this gives just another perspective on the objects
inside the Solar System. And when you think about some of the
discoveries that even the Hubble Space Telescope made about, say
plumes on Europa, this is a chance to make other interesting
discoveries across the Solar System from a powerful infrared
observatory operating here in the Solar System. It was
interesting to see the reactions from people across both our
comments and other news stories about it. There's a lot of
confusion and misunderstanding, I feel pretty glad about the way
we tackled it. Hopefully, we were able to keep fairly good
with the science. But there was some other really amazing
analysis done by other youtubers that you should definitely
watch, because I know there's a lot of poor quality videos out
there. But you should definitely check out the videos done by Dr.
Becky, Anton Petrov, and Joe Scott, they all did really
terrific jobs of explaining the images. And maybe between the
four of them, you do some kind of mash up between all of us,
you'll get just like a really good explanation of everything
that Webb was able to produce. Here's a cool image that is
overlaid on top of Gaia data that shows you the locations of
the different objects that Webb was able to image. This came
from Reddit user RT foci. And so we'll put a link to that in the
show notes. There's been some interesting comparisons done
between Hubble images and webb images. And it's it's not
exactly apples to apples, because of course, Hubble is a
near infrared visible ultraviolet telescope. Well,
James Webb is entirely in the infrared. And so you get
differences in the sharpness and really just the wavelengths of
what these images are showing. But still, you can see how much
more powerful Webb is compared to Hubble, but other really
useful comparisons or say, Spitzer, or wise, and then you
can see really dramatic differences between those
infrared telescopes and the capabilities of Webb. It's, it's
such a dramatic improvement. And at this point, people are always
asking me like, when are we going to see more images? And
the answer is, we
don't know. There's gonna be more images coming out every few
days. My guess is that we're going to have a flurry of
additional images just sort of go with the excitement of this
initial release. And then the scientists have to do their
work. And so we're probably going to have a bit of a empty
stretch, and then more really interesting science results
coming out over the next couple of months. So stay tuned, and
we'll of course, update you on everything as it is released.
There was an explosion during a super heavy test. So a few of
the folks that set up down at Boca Chica are constantly
videoing all of the work that's being done at the Starbase. And
we got an video clip from the folks at NASA spaceflight,
showing this test that was being done on booster seven, which is
one of the super heavy boosters for starship. And there was this
pretty big explosion that detonated underneath the
booster. And you can see like the camera shook there was like
this shockwave that came out, and a lot of the ground
equipment that was around the underneath of the booster was
blown out of the way. And shortly after that the folks at
NASA spaceflight tweeted out and said, this was a bit of a
surprise. And there was a tweet back from Elon Musk saying, Oh,
it's we were doing a test. And this is fairly normal. And then
that tweet was deleted and replaced with another tweet that
said, okay, yeah, this is actually a little more
significant than we thought. And there's a fix for this, the
space shuttle, whenever you see the launch of the spaceship,
where you see these kind of sparklers, that are firing out
sparks underneath where the fuel is coming out from the Space
Shuttle. And this is designed, you don't get an explosion like
this. So maybe we'll see something like this used with
the superheavy, we don't really know what happened. There was
clearly some kind of fuel leak that caused this detonation
underneath the engines. And the problem is that you've got these
33 newly installed Raptor, two engines underneath the super
heavy, and this explosion could have caused some damage to them.
And so people are going to have to go and look through all of
these boosters may be replace, swap out parts. And we've
actually seen some problems in the past for booster seven,
there was a story reported on a few weeks back about some
internal plumbing that imploded and had to be replaced. So we
don't really know exactly what the implications of this are
like we're expecting the launch of superheavy in the next few
weeks. But now they're going to have to go and do some detailed
analysis on booster seven, maybe we're going to swap out to
booster eight, we still don't know. Now this is just a really
short version of it. I highly recommend you watch Scott
Manley's coverage. He went through this in great detail,
measured the size of the explosion frame by frame, and
was able to give a lot better conclusions about what might
have happened and what the implications are. For SpaceX.
There could be a mission to Neptune, but not by who you
think. In most recent planetary science Decadal Survey
scientists gave the government their wish list of the kinds of
missions that they wanted to do. At the top of their wish list
was the Mars sample return mission. But if there's any more
funding, it would really love a flagship mission to Uranus,
please, it's a very interesting target. No one's ever been back
to Uranus since the Voyager two flew by in 1986. And this week,
we heard from the Chinese space agency that they're thinking of
sending a mission to Neptune we still don't have a lot of
details on the mission and the paper was written in Chinese we
had to translate it, but their plans are to send a flagship
mission using a fission reactor a 10 kilowatt electric fission
reactor, and this would then use heat thermocouples to extract
electricity from this fission reactor to power the spaceship.
10 kilowatts is an enormous amount of power. When you
consider say curiosity and perseverance are using
plutonium, but they're using it at through the decay of the
plutonium the heat that's given off from that plutonium, they
get about 110 watts of electricity out of the plutonium
the mission would it be equipped with a main orbiter but they
would also come with probably four sub probe satellites to
would be sent into Neptune to study its upper atmosphere
internal structure, and two would probably go to Triton,
which is one of the most interesting moons in the entire
solar system.
It was one of the first places that geysers were discovered in
that initial flyby in 1986. We have to go back to Triton.
Ideally, the mission would launch in 2030 and arrive at
Neptune around 2036. But there's other launch windows that would
work it would use a gravitational flyby of Jupiter
to gain an increase in velocity. And so the final goal is to send
a flagship mission to Neptune to go into orbit around Neptune and
its moons to understand the magnetosphere of Neptune its
atmosphere composition, the ring system, its moons, it would be
an incredible amount of science that you get from Neptune. If
you like the work we're doing, why don't you consider joining
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we'll give you behind the scenes information and I will remove
all the ads from Universe Today website for life. A blackhole
tried to eat a star, but failed. A couple of weeks ago, we talked
about how one of the stars that's orbiting the supermassive
black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, takes just four years
to go around the Milky Way black hole, and at its closest point,
it's going almost 3% the speed of light, and yet it still holds
together as a star. Now, what if you get closer? Well, then you
don't survive the journey. Astronomers watched as a star
passed too close to a supermassive black hole, about
250 million light years away, and the tidal forces tore apart
the star into this stream of material that went into the
accretion disk around the black hole. And you would expect that
this material is now going to just make its way down swirling
into the black hole. But what astronomers saw was actually
this cloud of material moving away from the black hole at
10,000 kilometers per second. And when they did some math and
measured the amount of material, they found that actually the
majority of the stellar material was escaping the grasp of the
black hole. So it sounds like black holes are actually sloppy
eaters. In search of European Space whales, one of the most
popular topics here on our channel is the exploration of
Europa and specifically, some way to explore under the ice on
Europa. I've done many videos about this. I've interviewed
experts about missions that could explore under the ice on
Europa. But a big question is like once you melt down through
10s of kilometers of ice, and you make your way to a
subsurface ocean on Europa, how do you explore it? This week, we
got the announcement of a new NASA advanced innovative
concepts Award, which awarded $125,000 for the study of a
swarm of cryo bots that would explore the ocean underneath
Europa. So as this probe is melting down through the ice,
it's carrying about 50 cell phone sized little swimming,
cryo bots, they kind of look like superstar destroyers from
Star Wars. And so when the probe reaches the ice, it'll deploy
these tiny swimming robots. And they would then be able to move
away from the base station and explore underneath the ice, they
would then be able to communicate whatever they find
back up to the base station, it will be able to communicate with
the surface. And we could learn about what's happening under the
ice on Europa. The various probes could go off on their
own, but they could also collect together like a school of fish
to study the European Space will when they find it. So it's a
cool idea. And just shows like, we're just getting closer and
closer and closer to more interesting missions are gonna
go to Europa. All right, those are all the top stories that we
had this week. And we've got links to everything we talked
about in the description down below. Now, this is just a small
tidbit of the enormous amount of news that I published in my
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to all the interplanetary researchers, the interstellar
adventures and the Galaxy wanderers. Your support means
the Universe to us. All right. Those were all the stories this
week. What a week. It's been busy. All right, we'll see you
next week.