Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna and
I'm so glad you could join us. For today's
episode, we've got a jam packed show for you
covering some really fascinating developments
from across the universe and right here on
Earth too. First up, we'll dive into
the latest on space missions, including an
update on the Axiom mission 4 and that
unexpected anomaly that's caused a bit of a
setback for SpaceX's Starship program.
Then we'll turn our attention back in time to
uncover how ancient life on Earth might have
survived some truly brutal snowball Earth
periods. After that, we're zooming out to the
cosmos to talk about galaxy evolution and
how scientists are getting closer to
understanding the very birth of galaxies
similar to our Milky Way. And speaking of
searching, we'll explore how the hunt for
alien life and advanced civilizations is now
going real time, which is super exciting.
Finally, we'll tackle one of those enduring
planetary mysteries. Why giant planets
often end up in the far reaches of their
solar systems. It's a bit like a cosmic game
of pinball, apparently. So stick around, it's
going to be a really interesting ride.
Alright, let's kick things off with some news
from the International Space Station, or ISS.
The launch of Axiom Mission 4, which was
originally set for Sunday, June 22, has
actually been put on hold again. NASA, Axiom
Space and SpaceX are still reviewing new
launch opportunities, so we'll have to wait
and see when it's rescheduled. Now, why the
delay? Well, NASA needs a little more time,
it seems, to evaluate the ISS operations
after some recent repair work on the Zvezda
service modules aft segment. You see, the
space station's systems are all really
interconnected, so they want to make
absolutely sure everything is totally ready
for additional crew members. They're taking
all the necessary time to review the data and
make sure it's safe. The crew is currently in
quarantine in Florida, but they're ready to
go as soon as the station gives the green
light. Meanwhile, SpaceX's Falcon
9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft are reportedly
in great shape, just waiting on the launch
pad at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's
Kennedy Space Center. Stay tuned for updates
on that. It's on.
Okay, shifting gears a bit to some not so
great news after. As I reported yesterday,
SpaceX experienced a pretty significant
setback at their Massey's test site near
Starbase Texas on the evening of June 18th.
They were doing a routine six engine static
fire test of ship 36 for their starship
program and unfortunately There was a sudden
energetic anomaly just after
11pm Central Daylight Time. While propellant
was being loaded onto the vehicle, a pair of
explosions ripped ship 36 apart,
producing a large fireball and causing
significant damage to the test facility. This
ship was actually slated for the 10th Test
flight of Starship and super heavy, expected
very soon, which obviously won't be happening
now. So what happened? Well, according to
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, initial
data points to a failure of a composite
overwrapped pressure vessel, or COPV,
in Ship 36's nose cone. These are
lightweight tanks that hold high pressure
gases. A rupture acted like a shaped charge,
tearing the payload wall and header tank
transfer tubes. This caused the liquid
methane and oxygen to mix and instantly
ignite, leading to the first explosion. The
nose cone collapse. Seconds later, the rest
of the propellant ignited, causing the
second. Fires kept burning for several
hours, indicating damage to the liquid
methane farm. The good news is fire.
Thankfully, SpaceX confirmed no personnel
were injured and everyone was accounted for.
All media and public members were safe too,
thanks to preset exclusion zones. This is a
crucial point, obviously for the Starship
program, though this is a notable setback.
It's the first time SpaceX has lost a ship in
ground testing since May 2020. And
what's more, they've lost the ability to
perform testing at Massey's for now, due to
all that significant damage to their static
fire test stand and the surrounding
infrastructure. It means that even ships like
ship 37, which just started getting engines,
can't be static fired without repairs. It's
worth noting that the COPVs on Starship don't
share commonality with those used on SpaceX's
Falcon rockets. So this issue is isolated to
the Starship program. The FAA won't be
involved in the investigation since it
happened during ground testing. SpaceX will
conduct their own. This means we're likely
looking at some significant changes and
delays for the Starship program in the coming
months as they assess repairs and
potentially inspect other ships in their
fleet. It's a tough break for sure, but as
SpaceX has demonstrated in the past, they
will bounce straight back from looking
at challenges in space.
Let's turn our attention back to Earth and a
fascinating mystery from its deep past. New
research out of MIT is shedding light on how
early complex life forms, what we call
eukaryotes, might have survived those extreme
periods known as Snowball Earth between
720 and 635 million years
ago. Now, imagine our planet completely iced
over. We're talking average global
temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius.
Geologists call this the cryogenian period.
And whether Earth was a hardened snowball or
more of a softer slushball. And is still
debated. But one thing's for most of
it was plunged into a deep freeze. So the big
question has always been, how and where did
life actually survive? Previously, ideas
included patches of open ocean, deep sea,
hydrothermal vents, or perhaps even under ice
sheets. But this new study suggests another
intriguing meltwater ponds on
the surface of the ice. Fatima Hussain,
a graduate student at mit, explained their
interest, saying, we see evidence for
eukaryotes before and after the cryogenian in
the fossil record, but we largely lack direct
evidence of where they may have lived during.
She added, the great part of this mystery is
we know life survived. We're just trying to
understand how and where. To test this
meltwater pond hypothesis, the researchers
analyzed samples from modern meltwater ponds
in Antarctica, specifically on the McMurdo
Ice Shelf. These ponds, just a few feet deep
and meters wide, form when trapped sediments
rise to the surface, absorb sunlight, and
melt the ice. The bottom of these ponds
are lined with microbial mats, kind of like
sticky, layered communities of cells.
While we know simpler life like cyanobacteria
can survive in these harsh environments, the
researchers wanted to know if eukaryotes,
those more complex organisms with a cell
nucleus, could also weather such challenging
circumstances. Using a combination of lipid
analysis, specifically looking for sterols
and genetic components called ribosomal rna,
they found something pretty remarkable. They
discovered a surprising diversity of
eukaryotic life, including various types of
algae, protists, and even microscopic animals
thriving within these microbial mats.
Houssain noted that no two ponds were alike,
but they all hosted diverse eukaryotic
assemblages from all the major groups. This
really suggests that meltwater ponds during
the snowball Earth episodes could have served
as crucial above ice oases,
nurturing the eukaryotic life that eventually
led to the incredible diversification of
complex life we see today, including us.
The study was published in the journal Nature
Communications.
Okay, from understanding ancient life here on
Earth, let's turn our gaze even further back
in time, to the very early universe and the
birth of galaxies. There's some really
groundbreaking new research that's helping us
understand how galaxies, including our own
Milky Way, first came to be.
We're talking about a period known as the
cosmic noon, which spanned from 10 to 12
billion years ago. During this incredibly
active time, star formation was happening at
a rate 10 to 100 times greater than it is
today. And New research has been looking
deeply into a particular type of ancient
galaxy called Lyman Alpha emitters or
laes. Now, without getting too technical,
Lyman Alpha or Leia, is a hydrogen line
emission in the UV spectrum. Basically, when
young energetic stars form, they emit intense
UV light that ionizes hydrogen gas around
them. And when that hydrogen recombines, it
emits this specific Lya line. So
detecting it is like a really strong
indicator of active star formation. LAEs are
thought to be the direct progenitors of
galaxies like our Milky Way. They're
typically low mass and very young, only about
200 to 600 million years old, and they have
the highest star formation rates among all
galaxies. But there's been a bit of, a
puzzle surrounding them. Were they undergoing
their very first intense burst of star
formation or were they older galaxies just
restarting their star forming engines after a
quiet period? A new study titled
Star Formation Histories Reveal Formative
Starbursts Experienced by lea emitting
Galaxies at Cosmic Noon. Led by Nicole
Firestone from Rutgers University, set out to
answer this. Firestone calls laes the most
profound beacons of the high redshift
universe, adding that they're fantastic
probes of distant galaxy populations because
they shine so brightly. M the team used
machine learning to examine the light from 74
LAEs detected by the 100 DCAM Imaging in
Narrowband Survey, or ODIN.
This allowed them to trace the star formation
history of each galaxy. They identified three
main those undergoing their first burst,
those with a dominant burst happening now,
but some past activity, and those where the
dominant burst occurred in the past.
The exciting finding a strong majority,
67% of the LAEs they studied were indeed
experiencing their very first major star
formation burst, with at most only modest
activity in their past. In fact,
95% were experiencing what the researchers
called dominant bursts of star
formation at the time of observation.
Firestone emphasized, for the very first
time, we have been able to definitively show
that most LAEs are experiencing their first
major starburst at the time of observation
and only have very young stars. This
is a big deal, because if LAEs are truly the
precursors to galaxies like ours, then this
research has essentially unlocked a part of
our own galaxy's origin story. As Eric
Gowiser, also from Rutgers, put it, now we
know the answer to that question is yes. When
asked if we'd looked far enough back to find
the starting points for galaxies like the
Milky Way. It really builds on those
fascinating JWST findings that showed
surprisingly massive, well, structured
spiral galaxies in the early universe. I
mean, it's all part of this incredible story
of galaxy evolution.
Alright, let's shift gears a little bit from
the cosmic past to the future of searching
for alien civilizations. Imagine
scanning the night sky for signs of alien
technology using the very same systems that
hunt for exploding stars. That's exactly
what researchers are starting to do now.
Transforming astronomical alert systems
originally designed to catch things like
supernovae into powerful tools for
detecting potential technosignatures.
That's the evidence of advanced civilizations
beyond Earth. Every single night, the
Zwicky Transient Facility, or ztf,
generates up to a million alerts as it
monitors the sky for changing objects.
These alerts flow through what are called
alert brokers, which are basically
sophisticated software systems that process
and distribute information about anything
that brightens, dims or suddenly appears
in the sky. And the upcoming Legacy Survey
of Space and Time, or lsst,
is going to increase this volume by an order
of magnitude, creating just an unprecedented
flood of astronomical data. While these
systems were initially built to catch
explosive events like supernovae and to track
asteroids, new research by Eleanor Gallet,
James Davenport and Steve Croft is
demonstrating their untapped potential for
seti, the search for Extraterrestrial
intelligence. Their work shows how we can
totally repurpose these existing astronomical
systems to search for those subtle signatures
that might indicate artificial structures or
technology around distant stars. The
inspiration for this approach actually comes
partly from Boyajian's Star, also known as
Tabby's Star. This star, officially KIC
846-2852, really puzzled
astronomers with its mysterious dimming
patterns a few years back. And while natural
explanations like dust clouds ultimately
proved most likely in that case, the study of
Boyajian's star highlighted how unusual
stellar behavior could potentially indicate
artificial megastructures like a Dyson
sphere, which is a hypothetical construct an
advanced civilization might build around its
star. So this new research takes that
concept even further, creating automated
systems to identify what they call stellar
dippers. These are stars that suddenly and
dramatically dim without any obvious natural
causes like a classical stellar variability
or other astrophysical phenomena. The
challenge of course, is immense. How do you
filter millions of nightly alerts? To find
the handful that might represent something
truly anomalous, the researchers
developed a two stage approach. First,
they use the alert broker's built in
filtering capabilities to narrow down
candidates. Then they apply additional
analysis using historical data to identify
stars showing unprecedented dimming behavior.
They're even deploying clever optical SETI
techniques like looking for planetary transit
zone geometries. And using something called
the Ceti ellipsoid The SETI ellipsoid
is this particularly neat concept that
identifies the zone in space where
hypothetical alien observers would have seen
Earth transit across our sun, potentially
prompting them to send signals in our
direction. Now the researchers are
honest about the current limitations. The
SETI methods that these alert brokers can
execute are still somewhat limited, but
they're providing suggestions to enhance
future technosignature and anomaly searches.
Especially in the era of the Vera C Rubin
Observatory. The existing systems weren't
designed with SETI in mind, so some
modifications and new approaches will
definitely be needed to fully realize their
potential. However, the foundation is
really solid. Alert brokers already have
sophisticated tools for identifying unusual
astronomical events. The LaserRE alert
broker, for instance, offers a watchmap
feature that can monitor specific regions of
the sky for anomalous signals. And as the
Vera C Rubin Observatory comes online with
lsst, the volume of astronomical
alerts is just going to increase
dramatically, which creates both huge
opportunities and challenges for
technosignature research. More data means
better chances of catching rare anomalous
events. But it also means developing even
more sophisticated filtering techniques so we
don't get completely overwhelmed. This work
represents a really sensible approach to SETI
because it uses existing infrastructure
rather than requiring dedicated alien hunting
telescopes. By utilizing systems
that are already scanning the entire visible
sky every few nights, we're essentially
getting a free ride on one of the most
comprehensive surveillance networks ever
pointed at the sky. And
while we shouldn't expect to find alien
megastructures next week, this research is
definitely establishing the groundwork for a
new generation of SETI that could operate
continuously, scanning millions of stars
for those signs that we are not alone in the
universe.
Okay, so we've talked about searching for
life, but, what about the formation of
planets themselves? Let's turn our attention
to one of the really big mysteries in
planetary why are enormous and
mysterious worlds sometimes found silently
looping around their stars far beyond the
orbit of known planets? Like some drift
as far as 10,000 times the distance
between Earth and the Sun? For decades,
astronomers really struggled to explain how
these lonely giants ended up so far from the
warm center of their systems. But thanks to
new research out of Rice University, the
mystery might finally have a solution.
A new study published in Nature Astronomy
reveals that these distant worlds aren't just
cosmic flukes. They're actually the natural
results of wild early life behavior in
planetary systems. During this chaotic
stage, young planets collide. They bounce,
and they scatter, almost like balls on a
pinball machine. And sometimes, if the
conditions are just right, one of these
planets Gets pushed to the outer limits of
the system. And believe it or not, it just
stays there. As Andre Isidoro,
A lead author and assistant professor at
Rice, put it, essentially, we're watching
pinballs In a cosmic arcade. He explained
that when giant planets Scatter each other
through gravitational interactions, Some are
flung really far away. But if the timing and
the surrounding environment Are just right,
those planets don't get ejected completely.
Instead, they get trapped in these extremely
wide orbits. This happens while
stars are still part of crowded birth
clusters, which contain hundreds or even
thousands of stars. The Rice team,
along with collaborators, Ran thousands of
computer simulations of early planetary
systems Living in these dense clusters.
Many of these virtual universes Showed
planets being kicked into orbits between one
hundred and ten thousand astronomical units
from their stars. That's up to 250
times farther than Neptune. Now. Usually
when planets are pushed that far, they don't
survive. They just get ejected into deep
space and become rogue planets Wandering the
galaxy alone. But in these simulations,
Some actually survived.
Gravitational nudges from neighboring stars
in the cluster Helped stabilize these extreme
orbits. As Nathan Kaib, A co author
of the study, explained, when these
gravitational kicks happen at just the right
moment, A planet's orbit becomes decoupled
from the inner planetary system. This creates
a wide orbit planet that's essentially frozen
in place after the cluster disperses.
And get this. These findings Might shed new
light on one of our own solar system's Most
intriguing mysteries, Planet Nine.
This theorized world, if it exists, could
be between five and ten times Earth's mass
and orbits somewhere between 250 and
a thousand astronomical units from the sun.
It hasn't been observed directly, but several
icy bodies Beyond Neptune have these strange
clustered orbits. That suggests they're being
pulled by something big and unseen. Planet
nine could be that something. According to
the study, if the early solar system
Experienced two specific instability phases,
One during the growth of Uranus and Neptune,
and another during the later scattering among
gas giants, there's up to a 40% chance
that Planet Nine was actually trapped in its
current location. Isidoro said. Our
simulations show that these kinds of orbits
Are entirely possible. The solar system
might not be unique, but it could be One of
the more efficient ones when it comes to
trapping these wide orbit planets. The
study also provides A bit of a roadmap for
future exoplanet hunters. Wide orbit planets
Are super hard to detect because they're so
far away and dim, but the research suggests
they're more likely to appear around metal
rich stars that already have gas giants.
These stars could become prime targets for
deep imaging surveys, and instruments like
the upcoming Vera C Rubin Observatory will be
absolutely essential. This telescope is
expected to help either find Planet nine or
disprove its existence by scanning the sky in
unprecedented detail. It's really
fascinating to think that the chaos of early
planetary systems, combined with the
gravitational influence of a crowded stellar
neighborhood, could be responsible for these
distant, stable worlds. It really
adds another piece to the complex puzzle of
how planetary systems, including our own,
came.
And that wraps up another exciting episode of
Astronomy Daily. It's always amazing to
delve into the latest breakthroughs and
mysteries of the cosmos, isn't it? From
delayed space missions and unexpected
incidents to the ancient secrets of life on
Earth and even the search for alien
civilizations, there's just so much to
explore. Thank you so much for joining me
on this journey through the universe's latest
happenings. If you want to catch up on all
the latest space and astronomy news with our
constantly updating news feed, or if you want
to listen to all our back episodes, be sure
to visit our website@astronomydaily.IO
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looking up.