Fraser Cain: Hi, everyone, I'm Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher
of Universe Today, I've been a space in astronomy news
journalist for over 20 years. This is our space bytes episode
where we collect together a lot of the breaking news this week
in space and astronomy, and video it at you. I also write a
much longer email newsletter that goes in great detail to all
of the big breaking news stories this week. But we understand
some of you want to have a video version. And that's what this
is. All right. Let's get into the news. NASA loses and then
find its Capstone mission. Last week, we talked about NASA's
Capstone mission, this is a CubeSat that is going to be
flying to the Moon, it's going to be following this lunar halo
orbit the same orbit that the lunar gateway mission is going
to be following. This is the space station that's going to be
orbiting near the Moon. And so NASA is sending the Capstone
mission to test out the orbit and make sure that it fulfills
all of the requirements that they have for future exploration
of the Moon. And shortly after launch by the Rocket Lab
Electron rocket, NASA lost contact with the spacecraft on
July 4. And it was a little scary for a while there, but
they regained contact on July 7, and after some debugging, they
were able to figure out what went wrong. Apparently, they
sent some improperly formatted commands to the radio system
that caused it to shut down. And then it realizing that it wasn't
in contact with earth again, reset itself cleared the system
and they were able to re establish contact and figure out
what happened. So at this point, they've got contact with the
spacecraft again, and it's on track to reach the Moon in
November, where it's going to go into this lunar Halo orbit.
James Webb takes the deepest image of the Universe ever. So
just a few more days until we can see these incredible
pictures. But we got another sneak preview this time, an
image was taken by the Canadian Space Agency's Fine Guidance
Sensor. This is an instrument onboard James Webb that's used
to help make sure that it's locked on to its targets. So
they actually did a very long test with the Fine Guidance
Sensor. They did 72 exposures with a total of 32 hours of
exposure with James Webb. And what this produced is the
deepest image ever taken of the Universe. This wasn't planned.
This wasn't like some science they were doing this was just a
test of the instrument. And normally these images aren't
downloaded from James Webb. But in this case, because they're
still in the testing phase, they had some additional bandwidth
available, engineers decided to download this image. And it's
incredible. When you look at this image, you're seeing the
familiar spikes coming from the hexagonal mirrors and the
support structure. And you're also seeing all of these faint
little fuzzy blobs, and those are all galaxies, it is
galaxies, as far as the eye can see. And these galaxies mostly
have never been seen before, because they're outside of the
wavelength that any existing telescope can see. So again,
this is another sneak preview. James Webb releases the furthest
image taken so far. And of course, this record is only
going to stand for about a week until we see the next images,
which will be the next time we see the farthest images ever
seen. We think we know where the first quasars came from. This is
a really big news story. I
would say this is probably one of the most exciting stories
that I've seen this week, because it answers one of the
most long standing questions that astronomers have had. And
that is, how did supermassive black holes get so big so
quickly? When you look back into the early universe, even less
than a billion years after the Big Bang, there are supermassive
black holes, these can have millions, sometimes even
billions of times the mass of the Sun. And the question is,
how do they get so big, so early in the Universe, the traditional
ideas that you would start with large stars, they would detonate
a supernova form black holes, the black holes would merge,
then those black holes would merge with other black holes,
and so on and so forth. And you would build up these bigger and
bigger, more massive black holes. But every calculation
that astronomers did didn't end up with the size of the black
holes that they're seeing across the Universe. We know of 200
quasars which are actively feeding supermassive black holes
that were present in the Universe within a billion years
of the Big Bang. So how did they get so big so quickly? The other
idea is that they somehow formed in place directly in a single
event. But the problem with that idea is that as you start to
pull more and more gas and dust into one single location, the
star starts to turn on it starts to blow out these really
powerful stellar winds that will then stop any future material
from accumulating down onto the star. And so we see stars here
today that are limited to about, say about 100 times the mass of
the Sun, you can't get a bigger star because of those powerful
stellar winds. So how could you get something bigger. And so
astronomers have done supercomputer simulations
looking at the kinds of cold gas streams that were present in the
early Universe. And what they found is that these cold gas
streams can form supermassive stars inside of them. And
they're able to overcome these stellar winds by having
turbulence inside the gas cloud as it's moving along. And so
instead of just stars with 100, times the mass of the Sun, you
can theoretically get stars that have 30,000 times the mass of
the Sun 40,000 times the mass of the Sun, these things live a
very short period of time, collapse directly into very
massive black holes. And then these can go on and merge and
get you those supermassive black holes that we see today. So
obviously, more evidence is necessary. This is the kind of
work that James Webb is going to be able to help to see some of
these early galaxies as they're coming together, which may
already have their supermassive black holes and help pin down
how these first black holes formed. But it's a really
exciting new development in this search and could finally get as
close to the answer of where supermassive black holes came
from. We've seen a helicopter on Mars, how about a plane? Now
we're all very familiar with NASA's ingenuity helicopter,
which has been flying many times on the surface of Mars over 20
times at this point. And so we know that a relatively
lightweight helicopter with a very large rotor that spins very
fast, is able to maintain flight for a minute at a time. But
could you have some other kind of flying vehicle at Mars, and
another possibility is a sail plane. Now, you might know them
as a glider. These are able to fly here in the atmosphere on
Earth, they're able to maintain their altitude using updrafts
that are coming up from warmer areas along mountains and things
like that. And so the question is like, would this work on
Mars, and engineers at the University of Arizona are
working on some sail plane prototypes, and I've done the
calculations that would show that actually, these could fly
on Mars. Now, Mars has 1%, the atmospheric density of Earth.
And so it seems really weird to think that a sail plane could
fly on Mars. But the key is the speed, I helicopter flies,
because it's able to turn its rotor very fast, able to produce
lift, a sail plane can fly at the very high altitude in Mars,
where the wind speeds are incredibly fast. And so they
would provide the lift. So either the sail plane could be
deployed as it's entering the Mars atmosphere, and then it
could fly for hours or days. Or maybe it could land on the
surface, it could deploy some large balloon that would carry
it up to the altitude and then it would release it, and it
would be able to drift around. And it would be great because it
would allow it to cover very large distances across the
surface of Mars be able to explore really interesting
territory like mountain ranges, where there could be some uplift
going on. Right now they're in the process of testing
sailplanes here on Earth, you raise them to a very high
altitude on Earth. And actually, you can get the same kind of
atmospheric density on Earth as you get on Mars. And so it's a
great place to test this idea out. Good news, the Solar System
will be stable for 100 billion years, the Milky Way is a pretty
dynamic place, stars are moving around, they're getting closer
and farther away from each other. And in fact, astronomers
have calculated that one star called Glaiza 710, is going to
get within about 10,000 astronomical units of the Sun in
the next million years or so. Now, it's not gonna cause any
damage to the inner solar system, but it could disrupt the
Oort cloud send a lot more comments into the inner solar
system. Maybe that's how we've gotten mass extinction events in
the past. So watch out in a million years from now. But the
question is, could stars get any closer? And could they get close
enough to actually disrupt the inner solar system and maybe
tear the Solar System apart? And so astronomers have done
calculations where they've examined how close on average
stars get with to each other within the Milky Way. And what
they found is that a star passing so close to another star
that it disrupts any kind of planetary system is about a one
in a 1 billion year event. And so that means is that we would
have to wait on average about a billion years for a star to come
close enough that it would tear the Solar System apart. Now, I'm
sure you're thinking, well, the Sun isn't gonna last 100 billion
years and you're right, the Sun is only gonna last about five
billion years. And you might also be wondering, is there
going to be more flyby events happening when the Milky Way and
Andromeda emerge, but no, actually, the distances between
stars are so vast that when Andromeda and the Milky Way
merge in about 5 billion years, no stars are likely to collide
with each other, it'd be like two swarms of bees flying past
each other. So if you've got any long term plans, you know,
estimate of next 100 billion years or so of safety. A star
has been found moving almost 3% the speed of light. Speaking of
supermassive black holes at the heart of the Milky Way, of
course, we have saj, a star, which is a supermassive black
hole with about 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun. And
this was discovered confirmed by Dr. Andrea Ghez and her team
back in the early 2000s. By using infrared observatories to
be able to peer through the gas and dust surrounding the core of
the Milky Way. And they were able to see the stars that were
moving around in comet like orbits around some hidden center
of mass. And they were able to then calculate the mass of this
object, this completely invisible object to be about 4.1
million times the mass of the Sun. And so that's how they
confirmed that we have this supermassive black hole. And Dr.
Ghez won a Nobel Prize just a couple years ago for this
discovery in black holes. And so astronomers have now been
tracking the stars over decades, with incredible sensitivity. And
they found one star that seems to be the one that on the
closest orbit around the supermassive black hole it
orbits every four years. And at its closest point, it gets to
about 100 astronomical units from the Sun, which is a little
farther than the distance of the Sun to Pluto. And when it does,
when at the closest point of this orbit, it's going about
8000 kilometers per second, which translates to about three
almost 3% the speed of light, which is kind of incredible. If
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work we do. Join our Patreon. Speaking of exclusive
information, I did interviews with two team members on
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science fiction writer and focuses on a lot of our
spaceflight stories. And then I called to talk to Alan Boyle,
who is a legend in the space journalism community. He has
been a space journalist for over 20 years a journalist for 40
years, one of my heroes and mentors, and I think you'll find
it really fascinating to hear his career in space journalism,
the rocket launches he's had a chance to see and his advice for
how to become a writer and a journalist. Those interviews are
available on our Patreon feed, they're publicly available, but
you're gonna want to click the links in the feed below. Psyche
mission is getting delayed, we got bad news that NASA's psyche
mission, which is going to be traveling to asteroid psyche, I
know kind of confusing, has been delayed. The reason is because
the mission has a very short launch window, they got to be
able to fly between August and October, because they're going
to be using a flyby of Mars to be able to reach asteroid Psyche
by 2026. And so that October 11 date is is a hard timeline
they've got to hit. And the problem is, is that they're
working on software testing, and they realize that they're not
going to have it ready in time for that October 11th launch. So
that means you're gonna have to use another launch window either
in 2023 or 2024. And the downside is that means that the
mission won't reach psyche by 2029 or 2030. Still using that
Mars flyby. SuperHeavy and Starship with 39 Raptor v2
engines. SpaceX shared a picture this week showing the SuperHeavy
booster with 33 Raptor v2 engines and the starship with
six v2 raptor engines, bringing you a total of 39 raptors. All
of the Raptors on the super heavy are optimized for sea
level and three on starship are optimized for sea level and
three are for vacuum. So the plan is that SuperHeavy and
starship will launch as a stack about 170 seconds after launch,
SuperHeavy will return to Earth and it's going to do a soft
landing in the ocean about 30 kilometers away from the launch
facility at Boca Chica. Starship will fly to orbit, it's going to
spend about 90 minutes flight, and then it's going to return
off the coast of Hawaii and try to do a soft landing as well.
And so the hope is that both parts will be able to do a soft
enough landing to prove that this is truly a fully reusable
two stage rocket. The next test is going to be a hot fire test
for the super heavy booster. And so when we see that we'll know
we're getting closer. Now we don't know when it's going to
launch. But it sounds soon, sometime in July sometime in
August. So we could be just around the corner now. And
again, this is just a shorter version of the much longer
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means the Universe to us. All right, those were all the
stories that we had this week. Next week is going to be big.
We're gonna get those first pictures from James Webb. We'll
see you then