We finally get a launch date for the Space Launch System, the
strongest magnet in the Universe, more amazing images
from James Webb. And we've got a launch provider for the Nancy
Grace Roman telescope. Hi, everyone. I'm Fraser Cain. I'm
the publisher of Universe Today. And this is our space bites
segment. Now, this is just a shorter version of my much
longer, weekly email newsletter that you can sign up for, and I
write it but we understand not everybody wants to read the
news, some of you like to have the news videoed at you. So
let's get into the news. More pictures from James Webb. A lot
of you've been asking me when we're going to see the next
pictures from James Webb. And the answer is all the time
nonstop. There will be more and more pictures we got for the
next 20 years, there's going to be pictures. And the reality is
that we're not going to be seeing these giant big releases
from NASA celebrating the space telescope that often unless
something really exciting happens. Instead, what you've
got is researchers getting time with James Webb pulling down
their images, a lot of these images aren't being immediately
available on the internet, so you can look through them. And
various image experts can take those images and try to produce
some very beautiful pictures from them. And so the first
example that came out was a galaxy called M 74. This is a
fairly famous galaxy, it's one of the messier objects, you can
see it with the telescope. And here's what it looks like from
the Hubble Space Telescope.
And here's what it looks like in James Webb. Now, this is a
scientific image. This was gathered by scientists because
they want to do research on star formation in this galaxy, they
used four separate filters, and gathered all this data and put
it on the James Webb Data Archive. And one of my favorite
Astro image processors woman named Judy Schmidt took these
images and made this incredible image and it looks, it's hard to
describe It's like some kind of spiral, some kind of eldritch
portal to another dimension. But it really just shows a different
face of M 74. But at a much higher level of detail than even
Hubble was capable of doing. And this isn't the only picture that
we've seen come out, we've got an image of a galaxy, and it
just looks like a red blob. But it happens to be the most
distant galaxy that we have ever seen. So the galaxy is called
Glass Z 13. Now the glass is the survey that's being done, and
the Z 13. That is the redshift number of this galaxy. And if
you don't calculate redshift numbers in your head, that's no
problem. Z 13, roughly equates to seeing this galaxy as it
looked about 300 million years after the Big Bang. And this is
just one of the first Galaxy pictures that were taken by
Webb, you know, we're still in the first few months of science
operations. And yet we're seeing this galaxy, it probably has
about a billion stars in it. And when you compare that to the
Milky Way, with about 100 billion stars, it's still much
smaller than the Milky Way. And yet, it's a surprisingly large
object that has come together. Only 300 million years after the
Big Bang, think about it, right? We've had all of these clouds of
gas leftover from the Universe. And then these had to come
together to form the first stars and the first stars had to come
together to form the first galaxies. And yet, only 300
million years after the Big Bang, we are seeing this galaxy.
And this is definitely not the best that Webb can do. This is
just one scientific observation. One interesting red galaxy in
this giant observation, we're going to see much longer
observations done ones which are going to rival the kinds of
timeframes that we saw with the Hubble Deep Field and get done
with James Webb, which is many times more powerful. We're also
going to see gravitational lensing, where we see some
foreground object that is lensing more distant galaxies,
and magnifying them by factors of 10,000 plus, so this record
of the most distant galaxy that's ever been seen, is going
to be broken anytime now. But don't forget about Hubble, it's
still taking some amazing pictures. And here's a really
cool picture taken of the Tarantula Nebula, you've got two
separate star forming regions in the Tarantula Nebula. And this
is a recent image by Hubble that can show just how the two
nebulae are so different and yet they're side by side in the sky.
We've got a lot of updates coming from NASA. The first
update is that we finally get a launch date for the Space Launch
System. NASA held a press conference this week, and they
gave us a firm ish date for when they think the Space Launch
System is going to launch, August 29. The plan is that
Space Launch System will launch on August 29. Carrying the Orion
capsule into a lunar orbit, it's going to go into orbit around
the Moon for several weeks, and then it's going to return, we
should see it back on Earth around October the 10th. So
we'll spend about 42 days in orbit. That's just the first
date that they proposed. They suggested another couple of
launch Windows could open up if weather causes delays, one for
September, the second and another for September the fifth.
So if all goes well, in just a few weeks time, we should see
the Space Launch System where the most powerful rocket ever
built, blast off. And of course, this is the first step of NASA's
returned to the Moon. If Artemis one is successful, we could see
the first crewed launch happen in 2025. So stay tuned. We also
learned that the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman telescope is going
to be launching on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. This is really the
first time that we've seen a science mission for NASA do for
launch on a Falcon Heavy. There's been a couple of other
missions that have been proposed, but we're gonna get
into that in a second. So if all goes well, and then screws
rolling will launch on this Falcon Heavy in 2026. Now,
what's interesting is that on the SpaceX website, and for the
longest time, the price of launching on a Falcon Heavy
rocket was $90 million, while say a falcon nine was $60
million. So it's a big cost savings compared to other
traditional launch systems. But NASA announced that they're
paying 225 million for this launch on the Falcon Heavy so I
guess the Falcon heavies are not as inexpensive as we were
originally led to believe. Now, what's great about Nancy Grace
Roman, this is a Hubble Space Telescope class observatory. It
is roughly the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope, but a
much wider field of view. And its primary job is to help map
out the amounts of dark energy and dark matter in the Universe.
Right now we have very rough estimates for how much of the
Universe are taken up by dark matter and dark energy. When the
Nancy Grace Roman launches, we should get much more precise
information and really get an answer that final question, will
the Universe tear itself apart in the future with The Big Rip?
wait for Nancy Grace Roman to give us that answer. NASA's
Viper rover is getting delayed to 2024. So the Viper mission,
this is a rover lander that's going to be going to the moon's
south pole that was originally scheduled to be going in 2023.
And NASA decided to push that launch back to 2024. They wanted
to spend more time with testing the hardware, the software, the
landing system. And so they decided to shift that launch
window back. And that's a really good idea because recently, we
saw a couple of landing failures from two nations attempting to
land on the Moon. Israel had a problem with their lander on the
Moon and India's Chandrayaan two had a problem with its landing.
So the Moon is a actually a very difficult place to land on. And
so to spend a little more time testing probably makes sense. Of
course, the Chinese had no problem with their various
landings on the Moon. So sometimes it can be simple,
sometimes it can be difficult. We've been talking a lot about
the psyche mission. And now we've learned that it's needing
to go through a very extensive review, Psyche was a NASA
mission that was going to be going to this really cool metal
asteroid. And to be honest, this is one of the missions this year
that I'm most excited about. And we've learned that the launch
had gotten delayed because of some issues with the software
that have been developed. And what we're learning now is that
the software is needing a lot more testing. To get it prepared
for launch. It sounds like the situation wasn't really well
understood by the managers involved. And so NASA decided to
do a very detailed review, to really understand what is the
state of the mission? Where did the problems creep in? Who
didn't know what when. And hopefully, they'll be able to
get a sense of whether or not the mission can launch but one
of the things they said is that this launch may never happen,
the mission may be canceled if it's gone so off the rails. So
hopefully it's not that bad and we'll see admission sometime in
the next couple of years. Perseverance found some string
on Mars. So look at this picture, you're looking at a
weird little stringy object. And this is something that NASA's
perseverance rover found on the surface of Mars. What is it? I
mean, it does not look like the kind of thing you would find on
Mars. The answer is we don't know. But most likely, it is a
piece of the Perseverance rover either from its parachute from
its back shell from its descent equipment. And at some point it
fell onto the surface of Mars and blew by the wind in front of
perseverance, which I know kind of sounds like quite a big
coincidence. And we know that the wind blew there. And then in
another picture, it's gone. So the wind had blown it away
again. So yeah, I mean, you know, maybe it's a really
bizarre Martian life form, I would not guess that's the case,
I would mostly suspect it is a piece of debris leftover from
the spacecraft. How to capture near earth asteroids. We saw a
really cool study, you actually reported on this on Universe
Today this week. It's an idea to essentially minimize the risk of
near earth asteroids and create a lot of resources that future
space exploration can use. And so we know that we are in this
cosmic shooting galleries about 30,000 asteroids near earth
asteroids that come relatively close to the Earth, some which
will have a potential to crash into the Earth into the future.
It's not a matter of, if it's a question of when. And so one of
the best ideas that we have is to try and take all of these
asteroids and make them safe push them into much more usable
orbits. So the idea in this paper is that you set up two
spacecraft, one, which is the pitcher, and one that is the
catcher. And so the pitcher spacecraft flies from asteroid
to asteroid and bounces jumps off of the surface of the
asteroid, imparting a kick that changes its orbit slightly. It
then is moving through space into its new orbit, and then the
catching spacecraft does its jump off the surface of the
asteroid and puts it into a final orbit that is a lot safer
and more useful for us to extract the resources off. And
what's cool is that the two spacecraft can just go jumping
from asteroid asteroid, and change a whole bunch of
asteroids all at the same time without having to burn a lot of
fuel. And it's a very efficient way they've calculated that you
can use your fuel to be able to shift the the orbits of many
asteroids. For a fraction of the price of what it would cost to
just do one asteroid at a time. It's a really clever idea.
Astronomers find the strongest magnet in the Universe,
astronomers were using the Chinese insight HX M T x ray
telescope, and they were observing a pulsar that seemed
to have a binary companion. And it turns out this binary
companion was a magnetar, that shifted through this accretion
disk of material surrounding the pulsar. And when it did, it
blasted out this burst of X ray radiation. And based on that
burst of extra radiation, the astronomers were able to
calculate the magnetic field of the magnetar and what they found
was that it is 1.6 billion Tesla. And if you don't know
what that number is, and I had to look it up as well, it's a
million billion times the magnetic field of the Earth, and
it is the strongest magnetic field that's ever been seen in
the Universe. So far. Astronomers find a dormant black
hole in a nearby galaxy. Astronomers know about lots of
black holes, but they tend to have the same kinds of
characteristics either they are a supermassive black hole that
is located at the heart of a galaxy like the Milky Way like
Andromeda, like M 87. And they are obvious based on the
gravitational interactions that they have with their
surroundings. If they're actively feeding quasars, then
we can see these bursts of radiation coming out of them.
The other way that astronomers find black holes is if they're
in some kind of gravitational dance with a binary object, this
is a stellar mass black hole, but definitely close enough that
the black hole is like actively feeding or somehow interacting
with this other star. And so it is releasing radiation that can
be detected. But astronomers have found a black hole that is
dormant so it's not giving off actively any radiation, they're
able to detect it purely through its interactions of gravity with
the star that it's orbiting around with. So the black hole
has probably nine times the mass of the Sun, and it's orbiting
around a star that is 25 times the mass of the Sun. And they're
located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. And this was found
through a survey of about 1000 separate stars, and it's one big
image astrnomers are carefully studying it. And they were able
to pick out the gravitational interactions between this black
hole and the star. Even though the black hole isn't feeding
right now. It's dormant. If you want any more information, all
of the news stories that we talked about today, we're going
to have links in the show notes down below. And I cover most of
these stories in my weekly email newsletter that comes out every
Friday. So if you want to get that go to
universetoday.com/newsletter to sign up, I write the whole
thing. It's completely free. There's no ads ads, join the
50,000 other people who read this newsletter every week. And
if you want to listen to our audio, once you sign up to our
podcast, just go to universetoday.com/podcast Or
just search for Universe Today on iTunes, Spotify or wherever
you get your podcasts. Thank you to everyone who supports us on
Patreon and helps us stay independent.
Thanks to all the interplanetary researchers, the interstellar
adventures, the Galaxy wonders, and a special thanks to Andrew
M. Gross, who supports us at the Master of the Universe level.
Your support means the Universe to us. Alright, those were all
the stories that we had this week. Thanks, everyone, and
we'll see you next week.