Astronomy
Watch the Full Pink Moon 2024 bloom in the night sky tonight
Sky & Telescope Joins the Northeast Astronomy Forum
Sky & Telescope met with readers old and new at the annual Northeast Astronomy Forum.
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Watch Rocket Lab launch new NASA solar sail tech to orbit today
Glucose monitors may misclassify people as being at risk of diabetes
Glucose monitors may misclassify people as being at risk of diabetes
SpaceX launching 23 Starlink satellites from Florida this evening
Is There a Human Hiding behind That Robot or AI? A Brief History of Automatons That Were Actually People
When human labor is hidden under the veneer of a robot or AI tool, that’s “fauxtomation”
How Ugandan Tobacco Farmers Inadvertently Spread Bat-Borne Viruses
By cutting trees in response to international demand for tobacco, farmers induced wildlife to start eating virus-laden bat guano
Pluto's heart-shaped scar may offer clues to the frozen world's history
Space Team Europe for Ariane 6: Julien Guiridlian
They say it takes a village to raise a child. To launch a rocket, we have the combined expertise and passion of Space Team Europe. Julien Guiridlian is one of many making the first Ariane 6 launch possible and has been interviewed as part of a series highlighting some of the people that make up this dream team.
Working for France’s space agency CNES, Julien is Ariane launch complex assistant, which means he takes care of the ground segment for the combined tests on Europe’s new rocket. Julien takes care of coordinating everything from the fuel for the launcher, to ensuring there is electricity and the mechanical connections between the rocket and the launch pad. Ariane 6 is all about teamwork, and the team is ready for the match.
Stay tuned for more from #SpaceTeamEurope: an ESA space community engagement initiative to gather European space actors under the same umbrella sharing values of leadership, autonomy, and responsibility.
NASA Restores Communications with Voyager 1
The venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft is finally phoning home again. This is much to the relief of mission engineers, scientists, and Voyager fans around the world.
On November 14, 2023, the aging spacecraft began sending what amounted to a string of gibberish back to Earth. It appeared to be getting commands from Earth and seemed to be operating okay. It just wasn’t returning any useful science and engineering data. The team engineers began diagnostic testing to figure out if the spacecraft’s onboard computer was giving up the ghost. They also wanted to know if there was some other issue going on.
It wasn’t completely surprising that Voyager 1 would have issues, after all. And, this isn’t the first time Voyager 1 has sent back garbly data. It’s been traversing space since its launch in 1977. Currently, the spacecraft is rushing away from the Solar System toward interstellar space. The spacecraft systems will eventually fail due to age and lack of power. But, people have always held out hope for them to last as long as possible. That’s because Voyager 1 is probing unexplored regions of space.
What Happened to Voyager 1?The diagnostic testing led the engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to look at old engineering documents and manuals for the onboard computers. Eventually, they found that the flight data subsystem (FDS) was having an issue. In the spacecraft’s data handling pipeline, this system takes information from the instruments and packages it into a data stream for the long trip back to Earth.
It turns out that the FDS has a bit of a memory problem. The engineers found this out by poking at the computer—literally sending a “poke” command to Voyager 1. That prompted the FDS to disgorge a readout of its memory—including the software code and other code values. The readout showed that about 3 percent of the FDS memory is corrupted due to a single chip failing. That’s just enough to keep the computer from doing its normal work of packaging science and engineering data. Unfortunately, engineers can’t replace the chip. No repair is possible, so the technical team devised a workaround.
Fixing the Faulty Code and ChipSo, how did engineers reach across 24 billion kilometers of space to restore communication with Voyager 1? They focused on a specific part of the computer. The loss of the code on that failed chip made it impossible for the computer to do its job. So, they figured out a way to divide the code into sections and store them in various locations around the FDS. Then they had to make the sections work together to do their original job.
They started out by taking the code that packages engineering data and moving it to a safe spot in FDS. Then they sent some commands to the spacecraft for the FDS to do some tasks. That worked because, on April 20th, they heard back from the spacecraft with clear, intelligible data. Now, they just need to do the same thing with other bits of code so that the spacecraft can send back both engineering and science data.
The Voyager 1 flight team members celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20 after receiving confirmation that their repair to the spacecraft’s FDS worked. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechFor now, at least, the science and engineering teams can check the spacecraft’s health and its systems. Once they relocate the other bits of code and test them after being moved, they should be able to start receiving science data again. This could take several weeks to accomplish. They’re communicating with a spacecraft that’s 22.5 light-hours away, so having a lengthy diagnostic conversation with Voyager is going to take some time. This isn’t the only problem engineers have had to contend with recently with Voyager 1. In October 2023, they worked to overcome a fuel flow problem affecting its thrusters.
Voyager 1 Into HistoryVoyager 1 was launched on a planetary flyby trajectory on September 5, 1977. It passed by Jupiter in March 1979 and Saturn in November 1980. The mission then morphed into an extended period of exploration and exited the heliopause in 2012. On its way out of the Solar System, the spacecraft also “looked back” at Earth. Now, it’s exploring the interstellar medium but has not yet traversed the Oort Cloud, the outermost portion of the Solar System.
This updated version of the iconic “Pale Blue Dot” image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft uses modern image-processing software and techniques to revisit the well-known Voyager view while attempting to respect the original data and intent of those who planned the images. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechSeveral of Voyager 1’s science instruments are shut down, including its ultraviolet spectrometer, the plasma subsystem, planetary radio astronomy instrument, and scan platform. In the not-too-distant future, more instruments will be powered down, along with the data tape recorder, the gyroscopes, and other systems will be off. Sometime in the next decade, the spacecraft won’t have enough power to keep anything running, and that is when we’ll finally lose contact with Voyager 1.
This will probably happen by the mid-2030s, and by that time, Voyager 1 will have been “in service” for around 55 years. Along with its twin, Voyager 2, this spacecraft opened up exploration of the outer solar system and interstellar space. They’ll continue out to the stars, their last mission being as a calling card to any civilizations that might find them in the distant future.
For More InformationNASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution
The post NASA Restores Communications with Voyager 1 appeared first on Universe Today.
Some scientists say insects are conscious – it doesn't settle anything
Some scientists say insects are conscious – it doesn't settle anything
Cosmic fountain is polluting intergalactic space with 50 million suns' worth of material
Ep. 716: The God**** Particle – Remembering Peter Higgs
Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle.
Transcript(This is an automatically generated transcript)
Fraser Cain [00:01:05] Astronomy cast episode 716 The God Particle remembering Peter Higgs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know about how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmo Quest. Hey, Pam. How are you doing?
Pamela Gay [00:01:28] I am doing well, I, I am still trying to get my sleep back on schedule after having a whole bunch of our Cosmic Quest community mods come out and hang out during the eclipse week and all the events around that. It was a tremendous event, and it was so good to see so many people face to face, including some I had never met in person. At one point we had 14 humans and four spare dogs in the house during the, lead up to the eclipse as everyone was prepping in house.
Fraser Cain [00:02:01] Can absorb that.
Pamela Gay [00:02:02] It can, although keeping the dogs separated is necessary. Was was a fascinating game of gates.
Fraser Cain [00:02:11] But we were off last week because we were enjoying the eclipse and victory for both of us. Yes, both saw totality clear skies. It was perfect. So yay us!
Pamela Gay [00:02:25] We did it. We did it. No need to ever travel again for an eclipse.
Fraser Cain [00:02:30] No way. I want to see war. But it was it was amazing. And I think for everybody out there who’s listening to this, if you did get a chance to see it, congratulations. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, the the. Cosmic geometry continues, and you will get more chances in the future and some fun travel ideas. So. So keep trying out there and. Yeah, yeah. I’m so glad that we got a chance to see it after 2017. Yeah, I didn’t get a chance to see it.
Pamela Gay [00:03:05] We tried. We tried. The universe mocked us.
Fraser Cain [00:03:08] Yes. Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and the discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle. All right. Pamela. What? Who is Peter Higgs?
Pamela Gay [00:03:29] He was a British theoretical physicist. Who? Every single thing I found to read described him as shy, as filled with creativity and curiosity and. Just not wanting to be a famous person, but willing to explain science to anyone and break down the concepts. As much as it was needed to help them understand. He’s not someone I ever met, but after all the reading I did for this episode, I really am sad I never met him. There aren’t enough personable theoretical physicists who actually can break things down, because most of the time they’re just working at such a high level that bringing it down to even the level of an observational astronomer isn’t something that happens.
Fraser Cain [00:04:26] But let’s talk about his, I don’t know, discovery. His his what? You call it his background. His. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, his background, but also leading up to his. Ma’am. What’s the right word? I guess his theory of that there should be a particle that connects mass to the universe. So? So how did. Was he the person that figured this out?
Pamela Gay [00:04:55] So he was one of them. And so. So basically, this is the story of everything working exactly the way it’s supposed to. He he went to a private school when he was in high school or a magnet school. I’m not sure quite what the right words are.
Fraser Cain [00:05:12] Yeah, I know, it’s like public school means not what you think he does in private schools. I mean, what you think it means.
Pamela Gay [00:05:16] So he wanted England now?
Fraser Cain [00:05:18] Right, right. So did did he go to the one where the regular people go to? Or the one where people pay for them to go?
Pamela Gay [00:05:25] He went to the one that that Paul Dirac had gone to. And that’s the key point. Okay, is he went to the same, high school. I think that’s the closest explanation word. But Paul Dirac had graduated from well before him, but he knew about Paul Dirac because he was an alumni, and he decided that he wanted to follow in Paul Dirac’s footsteps and become a physicist. He moved to the City of London so that he could go to a more exclusive, finishing off the rest of high school before starting university. And so this really starts by being this is someone who had a role model, and that role model inspired them to do great things with their life. So first of all, when I like this story already. Yeah. He then bounced around, did his undergraduate hitchhike for a while, fell in love with the city of Edinburgh while hitchhiking. Which which is just pleasing. It was is the 50s. It was safer back then. When got his PhD when he was 25, did the same thing that still happens today. He bounced around. He was a lecturer here, a lecturer there. And when he was 35, he submitted a paper to Physics Letters that outlined how maths, which at that point in time couldn’t be explained. Like everything we knew about particle physics at that point in time, said a lot of the key particles should not have any mass, but they have mass. And so there was this very deeply confusing issue.
Fraser Cain [00:07:10] And at this point, I mean, there was the standard model of particle physics that had a lot of the bits and pieces already figured out. There was it.
Pamela Gay [00:07:17] Wasn’t as complete.
Fraser Cain [00:07:19] Right? Right. I mean, we knew about the proton, the neutron, the electron, but also the quarks and the various particles that the subatomic particles, some of which had been confirmed in with particle accelerators and others which hadn’t, but everyone just assumed they had to be. There was just a matter of time before they were found.
Pamela Gay [00:07:38] And and so he was working in trying to understand how symmetries get broken, how you make space for mass to exist. And he put together a theory that brought together both the, the boson that would go on to hold his name, and a scalar field that permeated all of space and time. The particles couple went through that boson, and it’s through that coupling that objects end up having what we discern as mass in our laboratories. And the paper was soundly rejected. And I love this part of the story because he submits the work. The paper gets rejected from a journal that was published out of CERN. So like the laboratory that would eventually be the one that discovers the Higgs boson said, no science for you do not believe.
Fraser Cain [00:08:39] Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:08:40] And he added one paragraph to the paper, submitted it to a different journal, Physics Review. And and it got published. Now here is where he is such an awesome human. So his work was not the only work on on trying to understand this. There are three different teams at the time that were all working on this at the same time, and throughout his entire life, he always gave credit to all the other teams. And so you see it called the Higgs field. You see it called by a variety of other different names. And he made sure every time he referred to it, he listed everyone involved, usually by an alphabet soup of all their names, which is about the nicest thing a human being could do. And in preparing for this episode, I was rewatching and I didn’t make it all the way through. But I was rewatching, Particle Fever, which is a documentary.
Fraser Cain [00:09:53] That’s great documentary.
Pamela Gay [00:09:54] Yeah, yeah, it’s by David Kaplan. It’s available. Not for streaming, but you can purchase it or rent it, pretty much everywhere. And he’s he’s not playing a major role in it. And so while they have all these other physicists where they’re like, this human only writes papers with three authors because Nobel Prizes can only go to three people. Peter Higgs is, like, shown crying when they find the well, I mean, he’s not doing this. He’s wiping away tears. But, like, Peter Higgs is just like they they found it. He’s so sweet, so nice. And they catch him crying, and everyone else is just like, oh. Because they weren’t the ones getting the Nobel Prize. And here he is the day. This is my favorite story so far. So, like, everyone knows when they’re going to be making the calls for the Nobel Prize. The people who are nominated often have an idea they don’t know who’s going to be the winner, but they know to stay home and stay next to the phone. And Peter Higgs went out for a walk and left his phone at home because he didn’t want to deal with it. And it was one of his neighbors. As he’s walking home, that lets him know, right, that you got the Nobel Prize in physics and it’s just awesome.
Fraser Cain [00:11:12] So, you know, he had predicted this particle and the field and the interactions between these two. And I think that’s that’s the key. You know, it’s very easy to just say, oh, there’s got to be some field that contributes to mass. There’s got to be some particle that makes mass. But to recognize this connection between the particle, the boson and the field, and there’s some great analogies to describe how the Higgs boson would work. Do you have a do you have a favorite?
Pamela Gay [00:11:42] I do, I read this initially in Scientific America back in the 90s. So the way to think about the the Higgs boson in the Higgs field is if you’re trying to walk through a room and you’re a nobody, you have no mass, you just fly through the room because there’s nothing slowing you down. You have nothing dragging you. You have nothing connecting. You zoom. You’re through the room. Now, if you have. A few friends, you might get slowed down because like, hey, how’s it going? Hey, great. How’s how’s how’s the trip?
Fraser Cain [00:12:20] What do you think about this? Yeah. What do you think about this? Yeah. I want you to meet this person.
Pamela Gay [00:12:25] And so this is someone who has or something that has a little bit of mass. They have a few bosons coupling them to the Higgs field, and this slows down their passage. Now, the more famous you are, or the more massive you are, the more you have dragging you down by coupling you to that field. And so more massive objects have a stronger coupling. They have more Higgs bosons tying them to that Higgs scalar field. And so there’s no direction to the field is just everywhere all the time. And, we all get stuck to it by these Higgs bosons. And I, for one, could do with a few fewer Higgs bosons.
Fraser Cain [00:13:07] Right? But like Taylor Swift trying to move through that party and make no progress.
Pamela Gay [00:13:12] And that is a massive particle.
Fraser Cain [00:13:15] A very massive particle. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So so key predicts the particle predicts the field. But but how did this get translated into what is one of the greatest scientific experiments in human history?
Pamela Gay [00:13:30] Well, this is a combination of really good promotion by another Nobel Prize winner and also the entire field, trying really hard to check all the boxes in the standard model, trying to find all the things. So first we have Leon Letterman, who won his Nobel Prize for work on neutrinos, who wrote a book that he intended to call the God four letter word, I’m not going to say on Air Particle. And his publisher was like, no, no, Leon, we cannot do that. And so the God four letter word that I’m not going to say on air particle, became the book The God particle. Right. And and what.
Fraser Cain [00:14:16] It would be the it was the god damn particle, right?
Pamela Gay [00:14:19] Yeah. Now you’re going to say the word that I. Yeah. That’s fine. You do it. Yeah, yeah. So, so, when Letterman was going to name his book The Goddamn Particle, his publisher was like, no, no, we cannot do that. And, and and one of the reasons it was called that is because it was so frustrating to find it’s such a massive particle.
Fraser Cain [00:14:38] Right, right. So the name is not is not like its incredible purpose in the universe. It is just like it. How frustrating it’s been to find this thing that the most powerful particle accelerators, which have been trying to find it, have failed because they don’t have enough energy. You don’t have the right tools to get to this stupid, elusive particle.
Pamela Gay [00:15:01] Yeah. And and then, of course, because early on, Letterman had done that, a lot of people were like, oh, we’re going to to make this the most important particle ever, because it is what gives the universe mass. And with mass, gravity can evolve all the things. And so it’s it’s not so much a back rename as a back rename where they, they gave it all the import after it had been done by a publisher trying to. Yeah. But I think that because of the book, because of the popularity of the idea, that probably helped with keeping the funding turned on to make this happen. So, so the idea that we needed to build bigger and bigger and bigger particle accelerators have been around for a while here in the United States. We’ve been trying to build the super collider, super colliding.
Fraser Cain [00:15:59] Superconducting SuperCollider.
Pamela Gay [00:16:00] Thank you in Texas. And then Congress canceled it after it had mostly been dug, after they had taken all of the land from the farmers via eminent domain, they sold the land to, real estate people who built McMansions, and they actually sold in the tunnel instead of using it for geologic research, which had been proposed. So that was just a hot mess. U.S was not going to find this particle. And and CERN was like, okay, we’re a multinational consortium. We have partners from nations that are all but at war with each other, and we’re still in the name of science going to use the wealth of all of these nations, the intellectual capabilities of all of these nations, to work together to build a. Accelerator capable of sending particles at higher and higher velocities. And collecting them in these instruments. Atlas being the key to finding the Higgs boson. And and full disclosure when I was a baby student at Michigan State University, I spent a summer weaving fiber for instruments for Atlas. Oh, wow. So, my skin cells are probably somewhere in Atlas.
Fraser Cain [00:17:19] This is personal.
Pamela Gay [00:17:21] Yeah, yeah. So I, I just, like, listened to audiobooks all summer and attach fibers very carefully over and over. Hundreds and hundreds of them. This is what undergraduates in physics do. But this is just an idea of how many members of the physics community in the astronomy community have been part of building this. There were thousands of students. There were hundreds of graduate students. There were probably hundreds of thousands, just fewer, hundreds working on all levels of this experiment, from the electronics to the optics to the control systems. It was a true, truly global endeavor to find the reason my bathroom scale makes me sad in the morning.
Fraser Cain [00:18:12] Right? So let’s talk about the experiment then. What was the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? What was sort of some of the key parts to this experiment?
Pamela Gay [00:18:24] So they needed to get a extremely large amount of energy, tens of electron volts, confined in the tiniest of volumes. And the reason they needed to do this is so that. That energy could then turn into the ever so briefly lived Higgs boson. So Higgs bosons have a mean lifetime, and I have to look at my screen for this. Of between 1.2 and 4.6 times ten to the -22 seconds. So 0.0, right? That zero 21 times.
Fraser Cain [00:19:13] Right?
Pamela Gay [00:19:14] 1.2 to 4.6.
Fraser Cain [00:19:17] Right. That is a very tiny amount of time. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second.
Pamela Gay [00:19:24] Yeah. So. So they not only needed to get a 125 giga electron volts divided by c squared, which is the crazy units that we use in particle physics of energy confined in one small area. They also had to have instruments capable of measuring the trails made by the particles created in that energy. Combine in that small area all at once. And so the way this was done was they were accelerating protons. They needed to get them going super, super fast. They needed to then make them go smash as you do. And then one of the biggest features of Atlas was layers upon layers of fiber optics of varying, kinds, with color sensitivities that would then be able to channel the energy through the photo multiplier tubes that could sense the light, the flickers of energy of these particles coming in and out of existence. And. They did it in there. What was amazing is there had been hints that this was the correct energy. There have been hints that things had previously been seen, at Fermi National Lab when they were running some of their high energy experiments. They had to turn off Fermi’s experiments while they were working on upgrading their things. Then they upgraded everything at CERN. CERN was the place that ultimately did the experiment, and it’s hoped with the next generation of of the CERN accelerator and all of its instruments, that they’ll be able to see more than just a signal created by these things, but they’ll actually start to be able to measure more and more of their properties and hopefully be able to start doing things like prove once and for all that the supersymmetric particles are or aren’t there, and find any particles that may or may not be dark matter. So it’s not that they did CERN just to find the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson helped. And Leon Letterman’s book popularizing the Higgs boson really helped. But this is fundamental physics. This this is what we do. We we go, okay, we have a theory. The theory says all these particles are going to exist. We’re now going to make sure all those particles actually exist, because if they don’t, the theory is wrong. Yeah. This was the last of the the core particles that should be discoverable. There’s a graviton out there that we probably will never find if it exists. But this was the last of the particles we knew we could find. If we could just turn the energy up to 11.
Fraser Cain [00:22:22] Right, right. And and there’s, like, a real beauty to that. I mean, was it 2012? They announced the the findings, but but we had for a couple of years leading up to that, we knew that they were that they were on the right track.
Pamela Gay [00:22:37] It was going on.
Fraser Cain [00:22:38] With higher level signals. It was going to work. They’d found it. It was really a matter of exactly, you know, trying to pin down the mass of this, of this particle. But how did the physics community, I guess, how did Higgs I mean, you mentioned early on he he wiped away tears from his eyes. Yeah, yeah. So, so how did that sort of change his perspective on on what he had originally proposed.
Pamela Gay [00:23:06] So, so he’s a shy human. So finding things like that wasn’t something I was able to do. He was the kind of person who showed up to these events, looked spectacularly happy in front of giant pictures of Atlas. And then when people were like, I don’t understand, he just explained the physics. This this was a human being that, as near as I can tell from everything I read, his true joy came in understanding our universe, having the theory proven true. But then it wasn’t all about, oh, look at me. It was, hey, let me explain the science to you. My favorite description was is he is someone whose shyness was overcome by explaining physics to others.
Fraser Cain [00:23:53] That’s wonderful.
Pamela Gay [00:23:54] It’s true. I wish I had met him, I really do.
Fraser Cain [00:23:57] Yeah, yeah, that sounds amazing. So I guess what comes next? What do you think is his legacy for physics and the future of of particle accelerators?
Pamela Gay [00:24:09] So he had some ideas on dark matter that that will either get proven or disproven. But mostly he’s been retired and following along for the past few years. And his legacy is all the particle physicists who inspired who he taught, who are going to be the humans working to figure out what is dark matter, what is dark energy? He worked as a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He got to be at the place he loved when he went hitchhiking, and he trained generations of students. And that, in a lot of ways, is the best legacy anyone could have, other than, of course, the Nobel Prize.
Fraser Cain [00:24:50] I love the idea of an international physics community coming together to do this basic research work, too. Yeah, like on the one hand, the Higgs, you know, the the particle that interacts with the scalar field, that is the source of mass, the, you know, in the universe. Yeah, it seems very esoteric and and yet it is this basic building block of us to understand better the true nature of the cosmos. And who knows if there will ever be a practical use for it. But but we do know that we that we have one less mystery out there.
Pamela Gay [00:25:36] And and let this also just be a lesson about history. Remembers the workers, the helpers. And this is a human who was one of three different collaborations who proposed what became the Higgs mechanism, the Higgs boson and the Higgs field. And, well, pretty much everyone in everything refers to them as Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Higgs field. He was like, no, he called it the a b e g h k prime t h mechanism for Anderson, Brout, it Guralnik Hagen, Higgs, kibble, and to Hooft, right, right. He gave credit to everyone every time.
Fraser Cain [00:26:21] What a gentleman.
Pamela Gay [00:26:22] So yeah. Be be the helper.
Fraser Cain [00:26:25] Thank you, Peter Higgs. And thank you, Pamela.
Pamela Gay [00:26:30] And and thank you to all the people out there who make this show possible. We would not be here without you. And I regret to say the names for this week were not listed. So I’m going to really, really hope that the names for April are good enough. And I’m going to read the April 3rd names, and I will make sure that everyone else who should have been read today, all of our $10 and up we break you across the month, people get. Acknowledged. So our $10 and up patrons whose names are going to be read are David Everson, Michael Proctor, John Faiz, Barry Gowan, Stephen Vai, Jordan Young, Jeannette Wang, Nano Phillips, Andrew Lester, Venkatesh Chaudhry, Brian Cagle, David Trog, Gerhard Gear hard Schweitzer, David Buzz parsec, Laura. Carlson, Robert. Plasma, les. Howard, Jack. Mudd, Joe. Holstein, Alexis. Gordon, doers, Richard. Drum, Adam, Annie’s Brown, Frank. Tippin, Greg Davis, William Andrews, and gold. And if you two would like to hear me stumble horribly over your name and be extremely grateful for you while doing it. Join at the $10 and up level. Thank you all.
Fraser Cain [00:27:51] So thanks everyone. We’ll see you next week.
Pamela Gay [00:27:53] And bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.
After Months of Gibberish, Voyager 1 Is Communicating Well Again
NASA scientists spent months coaxing the 46-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft back into healthy communication
India aims to achieve 'debris-free' space missions by 2030
Scientists use AI to reconstruct energetic flare blasted from Milky Way's supermassive black hole
Will We Know if TRAPPIST-1e has Life?
The search for extrasolar planets is currently undergoing a seismic shift. With the deployment of the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), scientists discovered thousands of exoplanets, most of which were detected and confirmed using indirect methods. But in more recent years, and with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the field has been transitioning toward one of characterization. In this process, scientists rely on emission spectra from exoplanet atmospheres to search for the chemical signatures we associate with life (biosignatures).
However, there’s some controversy regarding the kinds of signatures scientists should look for. Essentially, astrobiology uses life on Earth as a template when searching for indications of extraterrestrial life, much like how exoplanet hunters use Earth as a standard for measuring “habitability.” But as many scientists have pointed out, life on Earth and its natural environment have evolved considerably over time. In a recent paper, an international team demonstrated how astrobiologists could look for life on TRAPPIST-1e based on what existed on Earth billions of years ago.
The team consisted of astronomers and astrobiologists from the Global Systems Institute, and the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics and Statistics, and Natural Sciences at the University of Exeter. They were joined by researchers from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria and the Natural History Museum in London. The paper that describes their findings, “Biosignatures from pre-oxygen photosynthesizing life on TRAPPIST-1e,” will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
The TRAPPIST-1 system has been the focal point of attention ever since astronomers confirmed the presence of three exoplanets in 2016, which grew to seven by the following year. As one of many systems with a low-mass, cooler M-type (red dwarf) parent star, there are unresolved questions about whether any of its planets could be habitable. Much of this concerns the variable and unstable nature of red dwarfs, which are prone to flare activity and may not produce enough of the necessary photons to power photosynthesis.
With so many rocky planets found orbiting red dwarf suns, including the nearest exoplanet to our Solar System (Proxima b), many astronomers feel these systems would be the ideal place to look for extraterrestrial life. At the same time, they’ve also emphasized that these planets would need to have thick atmospheres, intrinsic magnetic fields, sufficient heat transfer mechanisms, or all of the above. Determining if exoplanets have these prerequisites for life is something that the JWST and other next-generation telescopes – like the ESO’s proposed Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) – are expected to enable.
But even with these and other next-generation instruments, there is still the question of what biosignatures we should look for. As noted, our planet, its atmosphere, and all life as we know it have evolved considerably over the past four billion years. During the Archean Eon (ca. 4 to 2.5 billion years ago), Earth’s atmosphere was predominantly composed of carbon dioxide, methane, and volcanic gases, and little more than anaerobic microorganisms existed. Only within the last 1.62 billion years did the first multi-celled life appear and evolve to its present complexity.
Moreover, the number of evolutionary steps (and their potential difficulty) required to get to higher levels of complexity means that many planets may never develop complex life. This is consistent with the Great Filter Hypothesis, which states that while life may be common in the Universe, advanced life may not. As a result, simple microbial biospheres similar to those that existed during the Archean could be the most common. The key, then, is to conduct searches that would isolate biosignatures consistent with primitive life and the conditions that were common to Earth billions of years ago.
This artistic conception illustrates large asteroids penetrating Earth’s oxygen-poor atmosphere. Credit: SwRI/Dan Durda/Simone MarchiAs Dr. Jake Eager-Nash, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Victoria and the lead author of the study, explained to Universe Today via email:
“I think the Earth’s history provides many examples of what inhabited exoplanets may look like, and it’s important to understand biosignatures in the context of Earth’s history as we have no other examples of what life on other planets would look like. During the Archean, when life is believed to have first emerged, there was a period of up to around a billion years before oxygen-producing photosynthesis evolved and became the dominant primary producer, oxygen concentrations were really low. So if inhabited planets follow a similar trajectory to Earth, they could spend a long time in a period like this without biosignatures of oxygen and ozone, so it’s important to understand what Archean-like biosignatures look like.”
For their study, the team crafted a model that considered Archean-like conditions and how the presence of early life forms would consume some elements while adding others. This yielded a model in which simple bacteria living in oceans consume molecules like hydrogen (H) or carbon monoxide (CO), creating carbohydrates as an energy source and methane (CH4) as waste. They then considered how gases would be exchanged between the ocean and atmosphere, leading to lower concentrations of H and CO and greater concentrations of CH4. Said Eager-Nash:
“Archean-like biosignatures are thought to require the presence of methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor would be required as well as the absence of carbon monoxide. This is because water vapor gives you an indication there is water, while an atmosphere with both methane and carbon monoxide indicates the atmosphere is in disequilibrium, which means that both of these species shouldn’t exist together in the atmosphere as atmospheric chemistry would convert all of the one into the other, unless there is something, like life that maintains this disequilibrium. The absence of carbon monoxide is important as it is thought that life would quickly evolve a way to consume this energy source.”
Artist’s impression of Earth in the early Archean with a purplish hydrosphere and coastal regions. Even in this early period, life flourished and was gaining complexity. Credit: Oleg KuznetsovWhen the concentration of gases is higher in the atmosphere, the gas will dissolve into the ocean, replenishing the hydrogen and carbon monoxide consumed by the simple life forms. As biologically produced methane levels increase in the ocean, it will be released into the atmosphere, where additional chemistry occurs, and different gases are transported around the planet. From this, the team obtained an overall composition of the atmosphere to predict which biosignatures could be detected.
“What we find is that carbon monoxide is likely to be present in the atmosphere of an Archean-like planet orbiting an M-Dwarf,” said Eager-Nash. “This is because the host star drives chemistry that leads to higher concentrations of carbon monoxide compared to a planet orbiting the Sun, even when you have life-consuming this [compound].”
For years, scientists have considered how a circumsolar habitable zone (CHZ) could be extended to include Earth-like conditions from previous geological periods. Similarly, astrobiologists have been working to cast a wider net on the types of biosignatures associated with more ancient life forms (such as retinal-photosynthetic organisms). In this latest study, Eager-Nash and his colleagues have established a series of biosignatures (water, carbon monoxide, and methane) that could lead to the discovery of life on Archean-era rocky planets orbiting Sun-like and red dwarf suns.
Further Reading: arXiv
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