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Elon Musk isn't convinced that aliens have ever visited Earth, according to remarks the SpaceX CEO and founder made during a conference on Tuesday (May 7).

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson gives remarks during a NASA town hall event, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Continuing his engagement to deepen international collaboration and the peaceful use of space, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will travel to Italy and Vatican City, followed by Saudi Arabia, beginning Thursday.

Nelson will meet with key government and space officials in each country.

Italy is a longstanding partner in human spaceflight and Earth science. Nelson will meet with President Teodoro Valente, Italian Space Agency (ASI) and other officials to discuss current and future collaboration, including the Artemis campaign to return to the Moon, partnership on the International Space Station, the exploration of Mars and Venus, and Earth science missions to study our home planet.

In Saudi Arabia, Nelson will meet with Saudi Space Agency and other senior officials to discuss future collaboration and underscore the importance of civil space cooperation for the broader United States and Saudi Arabia relationship. Students will interact with Nelson about the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and their roles as members of the Artemis Generation.

For more information about NASA’s international partnerships, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/oiir/

-end-

Faith McKie
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
faith.d.mckie@nasa.gov

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Details Last Updated May 09, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms

• Opportunities For International Participants to Get Involved
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For decades, cosmologists have been fighting over the Hubble constant, a number that represents the expansion rate of the universe – it may have finally been pinned down

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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA superalloy GRX-810 will soon be available to aviation and space industry parts manufacturers as a result of new licensing agreements with four U.S. companies. Credit: NASA/Jef Janis

NASA’s investment in a breakthrough superalloy developed for the extreme temperatures and harsh conditions of air and spaceflight is on the threshold of paying commercial dividends.

The agency is licensing its invention, dubbed “GRX-810,” to four American companies, a practice that benefits the United States economy as a return on investment of taxpayer dollars.

GRX-810 is a 3D-printable high-temperature material that will lead to stronger, more durable airplane and spacecraft parts that can withstand more punishment before reaching their breaking point.

The co-exclusive license agreements will allow the companies to produce and market GRX-810 to airplane and rocket equipment manufacturers as well as the entire supply chain.

The four co-exclusive licensees are:

• Carpenter Technology Corporation of Reading, Pennsylvania
• Elementum 3D, Inc. of Erie, Colorado
• Linde Advanced Material Technologies, Inc. of Indianapolis
• Powder Alloy Corporation of Loveland, Ohio

GRX-810 is one example of many new technologies NASA’s Technology Transfer Program managers review and file for patent protection. The team also works with inventors to find partners interested in commercialization. 

“NASA invests tax dollars into research that demonstrates direct benefit to the U.S. and transfers its technologies to industry by licensing its patents,” said Amy Hiltabidel, licensing manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

New Approach to Developing Materials

NASA engineers designed GRX-810 for aerospace applications, including liquid rocket engine injectors, combustors, turbines, and hot-section components capable of enduring temperatures over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

“GRX-810 represents a new alloy design space and manufacturing technique that was impossible a few years ago,” said Dr. Tim Smith, materials researcher at NASA Glenn.

Smith co-invented the superalloy along with his Glenn colleague Christopher Kantzos using a time-saving computer modeling and laser 3D-printing process that fuses metals together, layer-by-layer. Tiny particles containing oxygen atoms spread throughout the alloy enhance its strength.

Impacts and Benefits

Compared to other nickel-base alloys, GRX-810 can endure higher temperatures and stress and can last up to 2,500 times longer. It’s also nearly four times better at flexing before breaking and twice as resistant to oxidation damage.

“Adoption of this alloy will lead to more sustainable aviation and space exploration,” said Dale Hopkins, deputy project manager of NASA’s Transformational Tools and Technologies project. “This is because jet engine and rocket components made from GRX-810 will lower operating costs by lasting longer and improving overall fuel efficiency.”

Research and development teams include those from Glenn, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, The Ohio State University, and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where the most recent testing included 3D-printed rocket engine parts.

NASA develops many technologies to solve the challenges of space exploration, advance the understanding of our home planet, and improve air transportation. Through patent licensing and other mechanisms, NASA has spun off more than 2,000 technologies for companies to develop into products and solutions supporting the American economy.

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When astrophysicists observe the cosmos, they see different types of black holes. They range from gargantuan supermassive black holes with billions of solar masses to difficult-to-find intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) all the way down to smaller stellar-mass black holes.

But there may be another class of these objects: primordial black holes (PBHs) that formed in the very early Universe. If they exist, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope should be able to spot them.

Stellar-mass black holes form when massive stars explode as supernovae. SMBHs grow over time by merging with other black holes. How IMBHs form is still unclear, but it could involve mergers between stellar-mass black holes or multiple stellar collisions in dense star clusters.

Primordial black holes, if they exist, didn’t have any of these mechanisms available to them.

“If we find them, it will shake up the field of theoretical physics.”

William DeRocco, postdoctoral researcher, University of California Santa Cruz. Artist’s impression of merging binary black holes. When they merge, they emit gravitational waves that observatories like LIGO can detect. Image Credit: LIGO/A. Simonnet.

Nobody knows if primordial black holes exist. They’re theoretical. No physical process we know of can form them. But the early Universe was much different.

New research published in Physical Review D shows how the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could detect these primordial Earth-mass objects. It’s titled “Revealing terrestrial-mass primordial black holes with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.” The lead author is William DeRocco, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz.

via GIPHY

“Detecting a population of Earth-mass primordial black holes would be an incredible step for both astronomy and particle physics because these objects can’t be formed by any known physical process,” lead author DeRocco said. “If we find them, it will shake up the field of theoretical physics.”

In the modern Universe, only stars with at least eight stellar masses can become black holes. Less massive stars will become neutron stars or white dwarfs. (The Sun will become a white dwarf.)

But things were different in the early Universe. During a period of rapid inflation, space expanded faster than the speed of light. In these unusual conditions, dense areas could have collapsed into PBHs. The scale of these objects is remarkably small. They would be the size of Earth or smaller and have event horizons about as wide as a coin.

PBHs could’ve formed when overdense regions in the inflationary or early radiation-dominated universe collapsed. Image Credit: By Gema White – https://www.slideserve.com/gema/primordial-black-hole-formation-in-an-axion-like-curvaton-model slide 19. Cropped to remove all elements of original authorship.Based on Kawasaki, Masahiro (2013-03-18). “Primordial black hole formation from an axionlike curvaton model.” Physical Review D 87 (6): 063519. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.87.063519., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=131103715

The least massive of these ones would’ve disappeared due to evaporation. That’s what Stephen Hawking figured out. But some, the ones as massive as Earth, could’ve survived.

<Click on image for larger version> Stephen Hawking came up with the idea of black hole evaporation. He theorized that black holes slowly shrink as radiation escapes. The slow leak of what’s now known as Hawking radiation would, over time, cause the black hole to simply evaporate. This infographic shows the estimated lifetimes and event horizon –– the point past which infalling objects can’t escape a black hole’s gravitational grip –– diameters for black holes of various small masses. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Even though they’re theoretical, there are some evidential hints of their presence. Those hints come from gravitational microlensing.

Two efforts have used microlensing to study objects in the Universe. One is OGLE, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. Another is MOA, Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics. OGLE found 17 isolated Earth-mass objects in space.

Planet OGLE-2012-BLG-0950Lb was detected through gravitational microlensing, a phenomenon that acts as Nature’s magnifying glass. CREDIT: LCO/D. BENNETT

These objects could be PBHs, or they could be rogue planets. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to differentiate on an individual basis. But since theory predicts the masses and the abundance of rogue planets, that could provide a way for the Roman Telescope to tell them apart from PBHs.

“There’s no way to tell between Earth-mass black holes and rogue planets on a case-by-case basis,” DeRocco said. “Roman will be extremely powerful in differentiating between the two statistically.”

In their research, the authors explain it more fully. “The key point is that though PBH and FFP events cannot be discriminated on an event-by-event basis, the two populations can be distinguished by the statistical distribution of their event durations.” Scientists think that Roman will find 10 times as many objects in this mass range than ground-based efforts like OGLE and MOA.

Artist’s impression of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy. When launched later this decade, the telescope should make a significant contribution to the study of FFPs and will hopefully detect PBHs. Credits: NASA

Finding primordial black holes would create a big upheaval.

“It would affect everything from galaxy formation to the universe’s dark matter content to cosmic history,” said Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Sahu wasn’t involved in the research but understands the impact the results would have. “Confirming their identities will be hard work and astronomers will need a lot of convincing, but it would be well worth it.”

If the Roman Space Telescope can find the black holes and confirm them, it could be a defining moment in astronomical history. The discovery would be strong evidence in favour of a period of rapid inflation in the early Universe, an epoch that so far is unproven. Physicists think there must have been a period like this as it helps explain so much else about the Universe.

More excitingly, these primordial black holes could comprise a percentage of dark matter. A small percentage, but a massive improvement over our current understanding of what dark matter is. Scientists keep looking for things like WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and other particles that could be dark matter, but they never find them.

“The nature of dark matter remains one of the most pressing open questions in fundamental physics. While multiple lines of compelling evidence indicate its existence, its microphysical nature remains unknown,” the authors explain.

The elegant thing about the Roman and PBHs is that it won’t require a special effort to find them. The Roman will already search for planets. “Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey is expected
to observe hundreds of low-mass microlensing events, enabling a robust statistical characterization
of this population,” the authors write in their paper.

via GIPHY

Each space telescope we launch is a new window into some aspect of the Universe. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope sure will be. “Though its Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey targets bound and unbound exoplanets, we have shown that it will have unprecedented sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model as well,” DeRocco and his co-researchers write in their paper. That’s because it can “probe the fraction of dark matter composed of primordial black holes,” they write.

“This is an exciting example of something extra scientists could do with data Roman is already going to get as it searches for planets,” Sahu said. “And the results are interesting whether or not scientists find evidence that Earth-mass black holes exist. It would strengthen our understanding of the universe in either case.”

And who doesn’t want a stronger understanding of the Universe?

The post Roman Space Telescope Will Be Hunting For Primordial Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.