Space

Supergiant Betelgeuse was recently discovered to have a companion star - it's bright blue, not yet fusing hydrogen, and actually orbiting so close that it's inside Betelgeuse's outer atmosphere! I wonder what it'll be named.

When Reaction Engines went bankrupt a few years ago there was much speculation about when -- not if -- their technology for a supercooled hybrid ramjet/rocket engine would be picked up by another entity. It seems we now have our answer as the ESA hopes to revive and complete the ambitious project for a single-stage-to-orbit, air-breathing spaceplane.

Matter and antimatter are like mirror opposites: they are the same in every respect except for their electric charge. Well, almost the same—very occasionally, matter and antimatter behave differently from each other, and when they do, physicists get very excited. Now scientists at the world’s largest particle collider have observed a new class of antimatter particles breaking down at a different rate than their matter counterparts. The discovery is a significant step in physicists’ quest to solve one of the biggest mysteries in the universe: why there is something rather than nothing.

The world around us is made of matter—the stars, planets, people and things that populate our cosmos are composed of atoms that contain only matter, and no antimatter. But it didn’t have to be this way. Our best theories suggest that when the universe was born it had equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and when the two made contact, they annihilated one another. For some reason, a small excess of matter survived and went on to create the physical world. Why? No one knows.

So physicists have been on the hunt for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of “charge conjugation–parity symmetry,” or CP violation, that could explain why some matter escaped destruction in the early universe.

Today physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s LHCb experiment published a paper in the journal Nature announcing that they’ve measured CP violation for the first time in baryons—the class of particles that includes the protons and neutrons inside atoms. Baryons are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiments dating back to 1964 had seen CP violation in meson particles, which unlike baryons are made of a quark-antiquark pair. In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks. Workers at CERN stare upwards at the comparatively large LHCb particle detector magnet

Magnet for the LHCb (large hadron collider beauty) particle detector at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory) near Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN/Science Source

“This is a milestone in the search for CP violation,” says Xueting Yang of Peking University, a member of the LHCb team that analyzed the data behind the measurement. “Since baryons are the building blocks of the everyday things around us, the first observation of CP violation in baryons opens a new window for us to search for hints of new physics.”

The LHCb experiment is the only machine in the world that can summon sufficient energies to make baryons containing beauty quarks. It does this by accelerating protons to nearly the speed of light, then smashing them together in about 200 million collisions every second. As the protons dissolve, the energy of the crash springs new particles into being.

“It is an amazing measurement,” says theoretical physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study, who was not involved in the experiment. "Baryons containing b [beauty] quarks are relatively hard to produce, and CP violation is very delicate and hard to study.”

The 69-foot-long, 6,000-ton LHCb experiment can track all the particles created during the collisions and the many different ways they can break down into smaller particles. “The detector is like a gigantic four-dimensional camera that is able to record the passage of all the particles through it,” says LHCb spokesperson and study co-author Vincenzo Vagnoni of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). “With all this information, we can reconstruct precisely what happened in the initial collision and everything that came out and then decayed.”

The matter-antimatter difference scientists observed in this case is relatively small, and it fits within predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics—the reigning theory of the subatomic realm. This puny amount of CP violation, however, cannot account for the profound asymmetry between matter and antimatter we see throughout space.

“The measurement itself is a great achievement, but the result, to me, is not surprising,” says Jessica Turner, a theoretical physicist at Durham University in England, who was not involved in the research. “The observed CP violation seems to be in line with what has been measured before in the quark sector, and we know that is not enough to produce the observed baryon asymmetry.”

To understand how matter got the upper hand in the early universe, physicists must find new ways that matter and antimatter diverge, most likely via particles that have yet to be seen. “There should be a new class of particles that were present in the early universe, which exhibit a much larger amount of this behavior,” Vagnoni says. “We are trying to find little discrepancies between what we observe and what is predicted by the Standard Model. If we find a discrepancy, then we can pinpoint what is wrong.”

The researchers hope to discover more cracks in the Standard Model as the experiment keeps running. Eventually LHCb should collect about 30 times more data than was used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to search for CP violation in particle decays that are even rarer than the one observed here. So stay tuned for an answer to why anything exists at all.

The Carina Nebula, by ESA’s Herschel space observatory. The image shows the effects of massive star formation – powerful stellar winds and radiation have carved pillars and bubbles in dense clouds of gas and dust.

The image covers approximately 2.3 x 2.3 degrees of the Carina Nebula complex and was mapped using Herschel instruments PACS and SPIRE at wavelengths of 70, 160, and 250 microns, corresponding to the blue, green, and red channels, respectively. North is to the upper left and east is to the lower left.

CREDIT

ESA/PACS/SPIRE/Thomas Preibisch,

Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Search?SearchText=carina+nebula&result_type=images

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is showing off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this peculiar planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras are also revealing the ice giant in a whole new light.

Most striking about Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s dynamic rings — some of which haven’t been seen at all, let alone with this clarity, since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright narrow rings, the Webb images clearly show Neptune’s fainter dust bands. Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality also permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.

Neptune has fascinated and perplexed researchers since its discovery in 1846. Located 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth, Neptune orbits in one of the dimmest areas of our Solar System. At that extreme distance, the Sun is so small and faint that high noon on Neptune is similar to a dim twilight on Earth. NIRCam image annotated NIRCam image annotated

This planet is characterised as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. Compared to the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune is much richer in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This is readily apparent in Neptune’s signature blue appearance in NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images at visible wavelengths, caused by small amounts of gaseous methane.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captures objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, so Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas is so strongly absorbing that the planet is quite dark at Webb wavelengths except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. Images from other observatories have recorded these rapidly-evolving cloud features over the years. Neptune wide-field (NIRCam image) Neptune wide-field (NIRCam image)

More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune’s winds and storms. The atmosphere descends and warms at the equator, and thus glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding, cooler gases.

Neptune’s 164-year orbit means its northern pole, at the top of this image, is just out of view for astronomers, but the Webb images hint at an intriguing brightness in that area. A previously-known vortex at the southern pole is evident in Webb’s view, but for the first time Webb has revealed a continuous band of clouds surrounding it.

Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb’s images; it’s not a star, but Neptune’s most unusual moon, Triton.

Covered in a frozen sheen of condensed nitrogen, Triton reflects an average of 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. It far outshines Neptune because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption at Webb’s wavelengths. Triton orbits Neptune in a bizarre backward (retrograde) orbit, leading astronomers to speculate that this moon was actually a Kuiper Belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune. Additional Webb studies of both Triton and Neptune are planned in the coming year. About Webb

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our Solar System, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our Universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. The major contributions of ESA to the mission are: the NIRSpec instrument; the MIRI instrument optical bench assembly; the provision of the launch services; and personnel to support mission operations. In return for these contributions, European scientists will get a minimum share of 15% of the total observing time, like for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/New_Webb_image_captures_clearest_view_of_Neptune_s_rings_in_decades

In this version of Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image of Neptune, the planet’s visible moons are labeled. Neptune has 14 known satellites, and seven of them are visible in this image.

Triton, the bright spot of light in the upper left of this image, far outshines Neptune because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption wavelengths captured by Webb. Triton reflects an average of 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. Triton, which orbits Neptune in a backward orbit, is suspected to have originally been a Kuiper belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune.

CREDIT

NASA/ESA/CSA and STScI

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/09/Neptune_NIRCam_image

If you took a straw poll of the general public, chances are that few people would have any idea what space weather is, if they’ve ever heard the term at all. In contrast to terrestrial weather, space weather cannot be felt. It doesn’t warm your skin, drench your clothes or blow down your fence. Unlike the floods, droughts and hurricanes that have beset human civilizations since ancient times, it is not an age-old threat. For the first 10,000 years of human civilization, the sun’s flares and CMEs would have had no impact on life at all.

It is only since humanity constructed a planet-scale network of electromagnetic technologies, and subsequently grew to depend on that network for just about everything, that the sun’s activity became a potential hazard. In basic terms, the primary danger of space weather is its capacity to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Upon making contact with the upper reaches of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), charged particles thrown out by the sun can instigate a “geomagnetic storm”, inducing currents in the Earth’s crust that overwhelm electrical equipment and its infrastructure, resulting in cascading malfunctions, power surges and blackouts. Anything that relies on electricity is vulnerable. Satellites, power grids, aviation, railways, communications, farming, heavy industry, military installations, global trade, financial transactions — the categories of vital systems that could be impacted by a sun-borne EMP are endless and interconnected, affecting every facet of our networked society.

The United Kingdom-based MOSWOC is one of only three institutions worldwide tasked with assessing and forecasting that risk. (The other two are in Boulder, Colorado, and Adelaide, Australia.) Each monitors solar activity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Low-severity space weather, like the expulsions Waite was scrutinizing during my visit, occurs all the time. During the solar maximum, MOSWOC usually records around 1,000 such events per year.

But playing at the back of every forecaster’s mind is the hypothetical centennial event, the moment when a sunspot might dispatch a solar storm at a scale that we know has happened historically, but never in our modern, technological age.

The curious paradox at the heart of space forecasting is that the satellites and supercomputers that empower the observations are themselves vectors of vulnerability. The more umbilical our relationship to technology becomes — the more our lives and livelihoods become governed by algorithms and automation — the greater the risk of disaster.

Webb’s infrared image highlights the planet’s dramatic rings and dynamic atmosphere. Following in the footsteps of the Neptune image released in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of the solar system’s other ice giant, the planet Uranus. The new image features dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere.

The Webb data demonstrates the observatory’s unprecedented sensitivity for the faintest dusty rings, which have only ever been imaged by two other facilities: the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986, and the Keck Observatory with advanced adaptive optics. Zoomed-in image of Uranus (Annotated) Zoomed-in image of Uranus (Annotated)

The seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus is unique: it rotates on its side, at a nearly 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. This causes extreme seasons since the planet’s poles experience many years of constant sunlight followed by an equal number of years of complete darkness. (Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun.) Currently, it is late spring for the northern pole, which is visible on the images of this article; Uranus’ northern summer will be in 2028. In contrast, when Voyager 2 visited Uranus it was summer at the south pole. The south pole is now on the ‘dark side’ of the planet, out of view and facing the darkness of space.

This infrared image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) combines data from two filters at 1.4 and 3.0 microns, which are shown here in blue and orange, respectively. The planet displays a blue hue in the resulting representative-color image.

When Voyager 2 looked at Uranus, its camera showed an almost featureless blue-green ball in visible wavelengths. With the infrared wavelengths and extra sensitivity of Webb we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is.

On the right side of the planet there’s an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus – it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanishes in the fall; this Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb’s NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen with other powerful telescopes like the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Keck Observatory.

At the edge of the polar cap lies a bright cloud as well as a few fainter extended features just beyond the cap’s edge, and a second very bright cloud is seen at the planet’s left limb. Such clouds are typical for Uranus in infrared wavelengths, and likely are connected to storm activity.

This planet is characterized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. Most of its mass is thought to be a hot, dense fluid of “icy” materials – water, methane and ammonia – above a small rocky core. Wider view of the Uranian system (Annotated) Wider view of the Uranian system (Annotated)

Uranus has 13 known rings and 11 of them are visible in this Webb image. Some of these rings are so bright with Webb that when they are close together, they appear to merge into a larger ring. Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings (such as the diffuse zeta ring closest to the planet) that weren’t discovered until the 1986 flyby by Voyager 2. Scientists expect that future Webb images of Uranus will reveal the two faint outer rings that were discovered with Hubble during the 2007 ring-plane crossing.

Webb also captured many of Uranus’s 27 known moons (most of which are too small and faint to be seen here); the six brightest are identified in the wide-view image. This was only a short, 12-minute exposure image of Uranus with just two filters. It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet. Additional studies of Uranus are happening now, and more are planned in Webb’s first year of science operations.

More information Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Under an international collaboration agreement, ESA provided the telescope’s launch service, using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

[Image description: The planet Uranus on a black background. The planet appears light blue with a large, white patch on the right side. On the edge of that patch at the upper left is a bright white spot. Another white spot is located on the left side of the planet at the 9 o’clock position. Around the planet is a system of nested rings. The rings of Uranus are vertical.]

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_scores_another_ringed_world_with_new_image_of_Uranus

With giant storms, powerful winds, aurorae, and extreme temperature and pressure conditions, Jupiter has a lot going on. Now, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of the planet. Webb’s Jupiter observations will give scientists even more clues to Jupiter’s inner life.

In this wide-field view, Webb sees Jupiter with its faint rings, which are a million times fainter than the planet, and two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea. The fuzzy spots in the lower background are likely galaxies “photobombing” this Jovian view.

This is a composite image from Webb’s NIRCam instrument (two filters) and was acquired on 27 July 2022.

CREDIT NASA, ESA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/08/Jupiter_showcases_aurorae_hazes_NIRCam_widefield_view

This is one of a series of images taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025 as the spacecraft sped by for its sixth and final gravity assist manoeuvre at the planet. Flying over Mercury's north pole gave the spacecraft's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters.

M-CAM 1 took this long-exposure photograph of Mercury's north pole at 07:07 CET, when the spacecraft was about 787 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft’s closest approach of 295 km took place on the planet's night side at 06:59 CET.

In this view, Mercury’s terminator, the boundary between day and night, divides the planet in two. Along the terminator, just to the left of the solar array, the sunlit rims of craters Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer can be seen, including some of their central peaks.

Because Mercury’s spin axis is almost exactly perpendicular to the planet's movement around the Sun, the rims of these craters cast permanent shadows on their floors. This makes these unlit craters some of the coldest places in the Solar System, despite Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun!

Excitingly, there is already evidence that these dark craters contain frozen water. Whether there is really water on Mercury is one of the key mysteries that BepiColombo will investigate once it's in orbit around the planet.

The left of the image shows the vast volcanic plains known as Borealis Planitia. These are Mercury’s largest expanse of ‘smooth plains' and were formed by the widespread eruption of runny lava 3.7 billion years ago.

This lava flooded existing craters, as is clearly visible in the lower left Henri and Lismer craters. The ‘wrinkles’ seen in the centre-left were formed over billions of years following the solidification of the lava, probably in response to global contraction as Mercury’s interior cooled down.

The volume of lava making up Borealis Planitia is similar in scale to mass extinction-level volcanic events recorded in Earth’s history, notably the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago.

The foreground of the image shows BepiColombo's solar array (centre right), and a part of the Mercury Transfer Module (lower left).

[Technical details: This image of Mercury's surface was taken by M-CAM 1 on board the Mercury Transfer Module (part of the BepiColombo spacecraft), using an integration time of 40 milliseconds. Taken from around 787 km, the surface resolution in this photograph is around 730 m/pixel.]

[Image description: Planet Mercury in the background with its grey, cratered, pockmarked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.]

CREDIT ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Search?SearchText=mercury&result_type=images

A little less than four years from now, a killer asteroid will narrowly fly past planet Earth. This will be a celestial event visible around the world—for a few weeks, Apophis will shine among the brightest objects in the night sky.

The near miss by the large Apophis asteroid in April 2029 offers NASA a golden—and exceedingly rare—opportunity to observe such an object like this up close. Critically, the interaction between Apophis and Earth's gravitational pull will offer scientists an unprecedented chance to study the interior of an asteroid.

This is fascinating for planetary science, but it also has serious implications for planetary defense. In the future, were such an asteroid on course to strike Earth, an effective plan to deflect it would depend on knowing what the interior looks like.

"This is a remarkable opportunity," said Bobby Braun, who leads space exploration for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an interview. "From a probability standpoint, there’s not going to be another chance to study a killer asteroid like this for thousands of years. Sooner or later, we’re going to need this knowledge."