by Paul Gilster | Jun 15, 2021 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection |
Near-Earth Object Surveyor is a proposed space telescope working at infrared wavelengths, an instrument that just completed a successful mission review and now moves on to the next phase of mission development. In NASA parlance, the upcoming Key Decision Point-B moves into Preliminary Design territory. Getting a spacecraft from concept to flight is a long process, but let’s back out to the broader picture.
Planetary defense is all about finding objects that could impact the Earth with serious consequences. That means setting size targets, and on that score, we’re making progress. In 2010, NASA announced that it had identified 90 percent of all Near Earth Objects larger than 1,000 meters. That moved us to the next target, NEOs larger than 140 meters in size, a goal set by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Act of 2005. JPL now says about 40% of NEOs within this size range have been identified.
So with this work in progress, what does NEO Surveyor bring to the table? For one thing, it makes it possible to discover asteroids on dangerous trajectories much faster than current methods allow, by including objects that could approach the Earth from directions close to the Sun, a blind spot for ground-based observatories. Amy Mainzer is survey director for NEO Surveyor at the University of Arizona:
“By searching for NEOs closer to the direction of the Sun, NEO Surveyor would help astronomers discover impact hazards that could approach Earth from the daytime sky. NEO Surveyor would also significantly enhance NASA’s ability to determine the specific sizes and characteristics of newly discovered NEOs by using infrared light, complementing ongoing observations being conducted by ground-based observatories and radar.”
Image: NEO Surveyor is a new mission proposal designed to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids that are near the Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
It’s worth remembering that while there are currently no impact threats in the catalog for this century, unknown objects still pose problems. Nobody tracked the Chelyabinsk impactor of 2013, reminding us of the dangers of complacency and the need for better sensors, like those NEO Surveyor would deploy in the infrared. The Chelyabinsk object was about 17 meters in size, well below what we are currently cataloging.
But we continue to make progress. Mike Kelley, a NEO Surveyor program scientist at NASA headquarters, believes the spacecraft could bring the catalog of 140-meter objects to 90 percent completion within ten years of launch (in 2026, if NEO Surveyor continues to move on track).
Meanwhile, we should keep in mind missions further along in the pipeline. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is up for launch later this year. This one is about active planetary defense, with the plan of using a kinetic impactor to change an asteroid’s trajectory. The target is a binary near-Earth asteroid called (65803) Didymos; more specifically, DART will hit Didymos’ moon Dimorphos head on in the fall of 2022.
Image: Illustration of how DART’s impact will alter the orbit of Dimorphos (formerly called “Didymos B”) about Didymos. Telescopes on Earth will be able to measure the change in the orbit of Dimorphos to evaluate the effectiveness of the DART impact. Credit: NASA/JPL.
Interestingly, about one sixth of the known near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population are binary or multiple-body systems. Didymos and Dimorphos are separated by about one kilometer, with the 160-meter moon tidally locked to the 780 meter primary. Let’s also note the international aspects of DART, for the mission will work hand in glove with an Italian cubesat called LICIA (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroid) that will observe the impact ejecta, while the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will make a post-impact survey several years after the event.
Asteroid threat mitigation is indeed a global concern, but we’re beginning to experiment with deflection strategies using actual missions. The mission page for DART explains the plan this way:
The DART demonstration has been carefully designed. The impulse of energy that DART delivers to the Didymos binary asteroid system is low and cannot disrupt the asteroid, and Didymos’s orbit does not intersect Earth’s at any point in current predictions. Furthermore, the change in Dimorphos’s orbit is designed to bring its orbit closer to Didymos. The DART mission is a demonstration of capability to respond to a potential asteroid impact threat, should one ever be discovered.
We can hope we’ll never have to use the DART strategy — or others that are under active consideration — to adjust the trajectory of a major impactor, but we obviously need to have the tools available just in case. The need to conduct such tests and to maintain active surveillance as a means of planetary defense is a driver for space technologies we shouldn’t overlook. The capability of adjusting orbits much further from home is a spur toward exploration and surveillance throughout the system.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 14, 2021 | Astrobiology and SETI |
When the question of technosignatures at Alpha Centauri came up at the recent Breakthrough Discuss conference, the natural response was to question the likelihood of a civilization emerging around the nearest stars to our own. We kicked that around in Alpha Centauri and the Search for Technosignatures, focusing on ideas presented by Brian Lacki (UC-Berkeley) at the meeting. But as we saw in that discussion, we don’t have to assume that abiogenesis has to occur in order to find a technosignature around any particular star.
Ask Jason Wright (Penn State) and colleagues Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback and Adam Frank (University of Rochester) as well as Caleb Scharf (Columbia University), whose analysis of galaxies in transition has now produced a fine visual aid. Described in a short paper in Research Notes of the AAS, the simulation makes a major point: If civilizations last long enough to produce star-crossing technologies, then technosignatures may be widespread, found in venues across the galaxy.
The simulation depicts the expansion of a technological civilization through the Milky Way, created along lines previously described in the literature by the authors (citation below). What we are looking at is the transition between a Kardashev Type II civilization (here defined as a species using its technology in a significant fraction of the space around the host star), and a Type III, which has spread throughout the galaxy. Wright has argued in earlier work that, contra Sagan and others, this might be a fast process considering the motions of stars themselves, which would overcome the inertia of slower growing settlements and boost expansion rates.
Image: This is Figure 1 from the paper. Caption: A snapshot of the animation showing the settlement of the galaxy. White points are unsettled stars, magenta spheres are settled stars, and white cubes represent a settlement ship in transit. The spiral structure is due to galactic shear as the settlement wave expands. The full, low-resolution video is available in the HTML version of this research note, and a high resolution version can be found archived at ScholarSphere (see footnote 7). Credit: Wright et al.
And here is the animation, also available at https://youtu.be/hNMgtRf0GOg.
Issues like starship capabilities and the lifetime of colonies come into play, but the striking thing is how fast galactic settlement occurs and how the motions of stars factor into the settlement wave. Naturally, the parameters are everything, and they’re interesting:
- Ships are launched no more frequently (from both the home system and all settlements) than every 0.1 Myr — every 100,000 years;
- Technology persists in a given settlement for 100 million years before dying out;
- Ship range is roughly 3 parsecs, on the order of 10 light years.
- Ship speeds are on the order of 10 kilometers per second; in other words, Voyager-class speeds. “We have chosen,” the authors say, “ship parameters at the very conservative end of the range that allows for a transition to Type iii.”
All told, the simulation covers 1 billion years, and about it, the authors say that:
…it shows how rapidly expansion occurs once the settlement front reaches the galactic bulge and center. The speed of the settlement front depends strongly on the ratio of the maximum ship range to the average stellar separation. Here, we deliberately set this ratio to near unity at the stellar density of the first settlement, so the time constant on the settlement growth starts out small but positive. Eventually, the inward-moving part of the front encounters exponentially increasing stellar densities and accelerates, while the outward-moving part stalls in the rarer parts of the galaxy. Note that at around 0:33 a halo star becomes settled, and at 0:35 it settles a disk star near the top of the movie and far from the other settlements. This creates a second settlement front that merges with the first…
It comes as no surprise that the central regions of galaxies, thick with stars, are places that favor interstellar migration. Can a technological culture survive against ambient conditions in a galactic bulge? If so, these regions are logical SETI targets, and perhaps the most likely to yield a technosignature. The idea has synergy with other observations we are already interested in making, as for example studies of the supermassive black hole at galactic center.
So even slow — very slow — ships will fill a galaxy.
The paper is Wright et al., “The Dynamics of the Transition from Kardashev Type II to Type III Galaxies Favor Technosignature Searches in the Central Regions of Galaxies,” Research Notes of the AAS Vol. 5, No. 6 (June 2021). Abstract. The 2019 paper is Carroll-Nellenback et al., “The Fermi Paradox and the Aurora Effect: Exo-civilization Settlement, Expansion, and Steady States,” Astronomical Journal Vol. 158, No. 3 (2019). Abstract. This earlier paper is a storehouse of references and insights into the likelihood of interstellar settlement and spread.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 11, 2021 | Exoplanetary Science |
As we learn more about how planetary systems form, it’s becoming accepted that a large number of planets are being ejected from young systems because of their interactions with more massive worlds. I always referred to these as ‘rogue planets’ in previous articles on the subject, but a new paper from Patricio Javier Ávila (University of Concepción, Chile) and colleagues makes it clear that the term Free Floating Planet (FFP) is now widespread. A new acronym for us to master!
There have been searches to try to constrain the number of free floating planets, though the suggested ranges are wide. Microlensing seems the best technique, as it can spot masses we cannot otherwise see through their effect on background starlight. Of these, the estimates come in at around 2 Jupiter-mass planets and 2.5 terrestrial-class rocky worlds per star that have been flung into the darkness. This is a vast number of planets, but we have to be wary of mass uncertainties, as the cut-off between planet and brown dwarf (usually around 13 Jupiter masses) comes into play.
Image: An artist’s conception of a free floating planet. Credit: JPL/Caltech.
Any chance for life on a world like this? It’s hard to see how unless it’s something exotic indeed, but it’s Friday, so let’s play around with the idea. A major paper on rogue worlds is a 1999 discussion in Nature by David Stevenson (Caltech), which assumes a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. I’m just going to pull this out of the abstract before moving on to the Ávila paper:
Pressure-induced far-infrared opacity of H2 may prevent these bodies from eliminating internal radioactive heat except by developing an extensive adiabatic (with no loss or gain of heat) convective atmosphere. This means that, although the effective temperature of the body is around 30 K, its surface temperature can exceed the melting point of water. Such bodies may therefore have water oceans whose surface pressure and temperature are like those found at the base of Earth’s oceans. Such potential homes for life will be difficult to detect.
To say the least. Let’s also note a later paper by Steinn Sigurðsson and John Debes that has shown that among terrestrial class planets ejected from their stars, a good number may retain a lunar-sized moon. Citations for both these papers are below.
But let’s think bigger. Ávila and colleagues go after Jupiter-sized worlds with large, terrestrial-sized moons (far larger than any we see in our Solar System, where Ganymede, larger than Mercury but much smaller than Earth, reigns supreme). They model the chemical composition and evolution of CO2 and water in an attempt to discover the kind of atmosphere that would allow liquid water on the surface. CO2 is found to produce more effective atmospheric opacity (governing atmospheric absorption) than Stevenson’s choice of molecular hydrogen.
From the paper:
…to the best of our knowledge, there are no detailed models of the chemical evolution of the atmosphere of a moon orbiting an FFP. Within this context, we introduce here an atmospheric model to tackle this limitation. We assume that in the absence of radiation from a companion star, the tidal and the radiogenic heating mechanisms represent the main sources of energy to maintain and produce an optimal range of surface temperatures.
The authors simulate the atmosphere of an Earth-sized moon in an eccentric orbit around a gas giant, analyzing its thermal structure and determining the mechanisms that can keep it warm. The assumption is that carbon dioxide accounts for 90% of the moon’s atmosphere. The model relies on radiogenic heating along with tidal factors as the main energy sources while invoking an atmosphere under changing conditions of cosmic ray ionization, chemistry, pressure and temperatures.
In a setting like this, the cosmic-ray ionization rate (CRIR) drives chemistry in the atmosphere. A bit more on this:
Due to the absence of impinging radiation, the time-scale of water production is driven by the efficiency of cosmic rays in penetrating the atmosphere. Higher CRIRs reduce the water formation time-scale when compared to low-CRIR models, implying that they play a key role in the chemical evolution, by enhancing the chemical kinetics. However, due to the attenuation of cosmic rays, in the lower layers of the atmosphere, the water production is also affected by the density structure, that determines the integrated column density through the atmosphere. This causes an altitude-dependent abundance of water as well as of some of the other chemical species, as CO, H2 and O2.
The authors’ model assumes an initial 10% molecular hydrogen and measures changes depending on atmospheric pressure, semi-major axis and eccentricity, the latter generating tidal heating. In the best scenario, we wind up with an amount of water on the surface of the moon that is about 10,000 times smaller than the volume of Earth’s oceans, but 100 times larger than found in Earth’s atmosphere. Thus we have a conceivable way to keep water a liquid on the surface, offering the possibility of prebiotic chemistry:
“Under these conditions, if the orbital parameters are stable to guarantee a constant tidal heating, once water is formed, it remains liquid over the entire system evolution, and therefore providing favourable conditions for the emergence of life.
Keeping that orbit eccentric enough to produce the needed tidal forces is a challenge. The authors’ research indicates that while moons around ejected gas giants may exist up to 0.1 AU from the planet, closer orbits in the range of ≲ 0.01 AU are more probable (Jupiter’s largest moons are within 0.01 AU). Is a single moon in this configuration not going to circularize its orbit, or can earlier orbital resonances survive the ejection? A good science fiction writer should have a go at this scenario to see what’s possible.
The paper is Avila et al., “Presence of water on exomoons orbiting free-floating planets: a case study,” International Journal of Astrobiology published online 08 June 2021 (full text). The Sigurðsson and Debes paper is Debes & Sigurðsson, “The Survival Rate of Ejected Terrestrial Planets with Moons,” Astrophysical Journal Vol. 668, No. 2 (2 October 2007) L 167 (full text). The Stevenson paper is “Life-sustaining planets in interstellar space?” Nature 400 (6739):32 (1999). Abstract.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 10, 2021 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes |
Hard to believe that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) were only discovered in 2007, as it seems we’ve been puzzled by them for a lot longer. Thus far about 140 FRBs have been detected, but now we have news that the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has pulled in a total of 535 new fast radio bursts in its first year of operation between 2018 and 2019. The catalog growing from this work was presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
“Before CHIME, there were less than 100 total discovered FRBs; now, after one year of observation, we’ve discovered hundreds more,” says CHIME member Kaitlyn Shin, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics. “With all these sources, we can really start getting a picture of what FRBs look like as a whole, what astrophysics might be driving these events, and how they can be used to study the universe going forward.”
Image: The large radio telescope CHIME, pictured here, has detected more than 500 mysterious fast radio bursts in its first year of operation, MIT researchers report. Credit: Courtesy of CHIME.
CHIME involves four cylindrical radio antennas that MIT describes as “roughly the size and shape of snowboarding half-pipes” located in British Columbia, and operated by the National Research Council of Canada. A correlator instrument — a digital signaling processor — digs through data from the stationary array at a rate of 7 terabits per second, allowing it to detect FRBs at a thousand times the pace of conventional radio telescopes.
We learn, for one thing, that FRBs are common, and frequent. Kiyoshi Masui (MIT) presented the catalog to conference goers on Wednesday the 9th:
“That’s kind of the beautiful thing about this field — FRBs are really hard to see, but they’re not uncommon. If your eyes could see radio flashes the way you can see camera flashes, you would see them all the time if you just looked up.”
It becomes clear from these data that the FRBs detected in the first year were evenly distributed in space, appearing in all parts of the sky. Their rate is thus far calculated to be 800 per day across the entire sky, a figure that is considered the most precise estimate of the phenomena’s occurrence that has yet been presented. Most bursts appear to have originated within distant galaxies, meaning they were highly energetic.
Two categories of FRB also emerge: Those that repeat and those that do not. 18 of the CHIME sources do repeat, with the rest one-time events. Among the repeating signals, each burst lasts slightly longer and emits more focused radio frequencies then bursts from single, non-repeating FRBs. We seem to be looking at two different kinds of astrophysical sources, or at least separate mechanisms, and it will be a goal of future data collection to clarify the differences between the two.
Image: The first 13 FRBs found by CHIME/FRB (from CHIME/FRB Collaboration, 2019, Nature, 566, 230). In this plot, the effects of dispersion have been removed from each source. Credit: CHIME.
While researchers work to learn what could cause such bright, fast signals, it’s fascinating to compare the FRB work with the use of supernovae as ‘standard candles.’ Evidence for the accelerating expansion of the universe was found by such measurements. Can FRBs be used as standard candles for other kinds of detections? Each FRB yields information about its propagation in terms of how gas and matter are distributed along the way to us. Kaitlyn Shin refers to the possibility of using them as “cosmological probes,” a potential enhanced by this new and growing catalog.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 9, 2021 | Exoplanetary Science |
The beauty of nearby M-dwarf stars for exoplanet research is the depth of transits. If we are fortunate enough to find a planet crossing the face of the star as seen from our observatory, the star’s small size means a larger portion of its light will be attenuated. As you would imagine, this makes planets easier to spot, but the other significant advantage is that we have greater capability at analyzing the planet’s atmosphere.
TOI-1231b certainly fits the bill, although it’s a bit of an anomaly in the TESS universe. The space observatory operates with a built in observational bias because the Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC) pipeline and the Quick Look Pipeline (QLP) that comb through TESS data on a 2-minute and 30 minute cadence respectively have to show two transits for the planet’s period to be determined. Factor in that most of the TESS sky coverage is observed for 28 days and you wind up in the majority of cases with detections of planets with orbital periods of less than 14 days.
TOI-1231b’s period is 24 days, a nice catch given these constraints. The planet is a temperate sub-Neptune whose host star, NLTT 24399, is roughly 88 light years from the Sun. Already lead author Jennifer Burt (JPL) and team have been able to measure both the radius and mass of the planet, with followup data from the Planet Finder Spectrograph (PFS) on the Magellan Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory (Chile), as well as Las Cumbres Observatory and the Antarctica Search for Transiting ExoPlanets. From these parameters it was possible to calculate the planet’s density.
The temperatures on this world are calculated at 330 K (60 degrees Celsius), making TOI-1231b one of the lowest temperature exoplanets yet found whose atmosphere can be studied through transmission spectroscopy. The star is bright in the near-infrared (NIR), suggesting it will be a useful target for the James Webb Space Telescope as well as Hubble. One of the paper’s co-authors will be using the latter to mount a new series of observations within the month. Co-author Diana Dragomir (University of New Mexico) describes the team’s findings thus far:
“The low density of TOI 1231b indicates that it is surrounded by a substantial atmosphere rather than being a rocky planet. But the composition and extent of this atmosphere are unknown. TOI1231b could have a large hydrogen or hydrogen-helium atmosphere, or a denser water vapor atmosphere. Each of these would point to a different origin, allowing astronomers to understand whether and how planets form differently around M dwarfs when compared to the planets around our Sun, for example. Our upcoming HST observations will begin to answer these questions, and JWST promises an even more thorough look into the planet’s atmosphere.”
Image: An artist’s rendering of TOI-1231 b, a Neptune-like planet about 88 light years from Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
One interesting aspect of this detection is the possibility of observing hydrogen and helium surrounding the planet because of its relatively low gravitational well and expected exposure to X-ray and ultraviolet radiation from the star. Moreover, there is only one other low-density temperate sub-Neptune, K2-18 b, currently in our catalog. It has temperatures in the 250-350 K range and a transmission spectrum that allows us to analyze its atmosphere, where evidence for water vapor has been found. Thus TOI 1231b should be useful as a check on how common water cloud formation in temperate sub-Neptunes may be.
All told, say the authors, “TOI 1231 b appears to be one of the most promising small exoplanets for transmission spectroscopy with HST and JWST detected by the TESS mission thus far.” A valuable find as we keep drilling down to analyze the atmospheres of ever smaller worlds, moving toward Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone.
The paper is Burt et al., “TOI-1231 b: A Temperate, Neptune-Sized Planet Transiting the Nearby M3 Dwarf NLTT 24399,” in process at The Astronomical Journal (preprint).
