The thread for space cadets!

[Cutlass]

Discovery Of Most Powerful Supernova To Date

Researchers have observed a super-luminous supernova explosion which is twice as powerful as the previous record holder.

AsianScientist (Jan. 28, 2016) - An international team of researchers has observed a supernova explosion which is twice as powerful as the previous record holder. During the supernova explosion, luminosity of the star reached 570 billion times the luminosity of the sun, and is approximately 20 times brighter than the Milky Way combined. The article was published in the journal Science.

The supernova was discovered in Chile by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASASSN). The team was led by Dong Subo, Thousand Youth Talent Plan research professor at The Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University and member of ASASSN.

The star, named ASASSN-15lh, is a rare breed—it is classified as a “super-luminous supernova,” and at 3.8 billion light years away from the Earth, it is among the closest supernovae ever observed.

“ASASSN-15lh is the most powerful supernova discovered in human history,” said Dong. “The explosion’s mechanism and power source remain shrouded in mystery because all known theories meet serious challenges in explaining the immense amount of energy ASASSN-15lh has radiated.”

The first spectral line of the ASASSN-15lh was observed by B. J. Shappee of Carnegie Observatories in Chile. Astronomers generally use spectral lines to analyze projectiles from supernova explosions to determine their chemical components and physical conditions.

This analysis in turn helps astronomers classify supernovae and understand the physical process of their explosions. However, the spectral lines of ASASSN-15lh was significantly different from all the other supernovae discovered by ASASSN.

Initially, this perplexed many astronomers. It was only while discussing the issue with Assistant Professor Jose Prieto from Universidad Diego Portales and Professor K. Z. Stanek from Ohio State University that Dong realized that ASASSN-15lh could be a superluminous supernova.

According to his estimations, if ASASSN-15lh was indeed 3.8 billion light years away from us, then its most significant spectral characteristics should be very similar to the spectrum of a superluminous supernova discovered in 2010.

They immediately contacted various other telescopes, but due to bad weather and instrumental malfunctions, the required observations were delayed. Eventually, Saurabh Jha of Rutgers University managed to verify that ASASSN-15lh is indeed a superluminous supernova using the ten meter Southern African Large Telescope (SALT).

Multiple hypotheses have been suggested to explain the mechanism of an explosion of such a high level of energy. Dong’s research team at the School of Physics at Peking University plans to utilize more advanced equipment, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, to reveal the secrets behind ASASSN-15lh.

“ASASSN-15lh may lead to new thinking and new observations of the whole class of superluminous supernova, and we look forward to plenty more of both in the years ahead,” said Dong.

The article can be found at: Dong et al. (2016) ASASSN-15lh: A Highly Super-Luminous Supernova.

http://www.asianscientist.com/2016/01/in-the-lab/discovery-powerful-supernova-date/

 

[r16]

The couple that owns SNC have lived in the US since the 70's/80's and have owned the company since the 90's (IIRC). They do have some contracts to produce jets in Turkey but I don't see any likelihood that they will pull SNC out of America, ever.

If that's what you're getting at.

the people ı hang out out with tend to be oldies who toured NATO countries back in the day . One in particular , cap in hand , begged for Starfighter spares . And then supposedly it happened in the Netherlands , with they guy on the other side of the table couldn't keep it in . The guy naturally reminds of the day when those loyal Dutch Commies went into a Dutch airbase , stole a 'winder , rolled it in a carpet , sort broke the rear glass of their car , stuck the missile in , all 9 to 10 feet of it and drove out from the main gate . Before sending the thing , bit by bit , in parcels to Moscow by post . The guy also loved that .

then months later first info started flowing ...

the guy was throughly chewed by his superiors too .

turned out it was a fluke . As a prospective employee of Aerospace business you will know there's no way the Russians could have obtained F/M series from the Phantoms in the rice paddies of North Vietnam and no way they could have been provided to Russia by a country that didn't yet have them .

years passed , the chewed guy rose high . There was a war against the Serbs , over Kosova and stuff and the chewed guy lobbied hard to get an allotment . You will have noticed the USAF keeps all the air to air kills to itself , because they are so rare but the Dutch were set up for a killing of a Fulcrum .

the chewed guy ended up chewed once again . There's no end to Turkish lies afterall .

ı actually do not want SNC anywhere near my country , especially the entirely new and entirely Turkish Airliner they are peddling happens to ne something like Do-328 which ı used to like so much in the 1980s .

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Luxembourg to support space mining

The Luxembourg government has signalled its intention to get behind the mining of asteroids in space.

It is going to support R&D in technologies that would make it possible and may even invest directly in some companies.

The Grand Duchy will also put in place a legal framework to give operators who are based in the country the confidence to go about their business.

Former European Space Agency boss Jean-Jacques Dordain is to be an adviser.
Home talent

He told a reporters on Wednesday that space mining was no longer science fiction in the pages of a Jules Verne novel; that the basic technologies - of landing and returning materials from asteroids - had essentially been proven.

And he urged European entrepreneurs to follow the example of start-up American companies that had already begun to consider how they could exploit the expensive metals, rare elements and other valuable resources in space bodies.

"Things are moving in the United States and it was high time there was an initiative in Europe, and I am glad the first initiative is coming from Luxembourg," he said. "It will give no excuse for European investors to go to California."

Two notable American companies, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, have begun assembling teams to design spacecraft systems that can survey potential targets and eventually grab ores at, or just below, their surface.
Legal framework

Last year, their activities were bolstered by US legislation that sought to cement the rights of any American operations that started to exploit asteroids.

Some commentators at the time suggested this legislation might contravene the UN's Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967. But Luxembourg's economic minister, Etienne Schneider, is relaxed about the move.

"These rules prohibit the appropriation of space and celestial bodies but they do not exclude the appropriation of materials which can be found there," he said.

"Roughly, the situation is equivalent to the rights of a trawler in international waters. Fishermen own the fish they catch but they do not own the ocean."
Although a small nation, Luxembourg has a prominent position is space activity.

It is the headquarters of SES, the world's largest commercial satellite telecommunications company, which relays thousands of TV stations around the world. Intelsat, the second biggest company by revenue, also has offices in the country.

Luxembourg now wants to become a hub for European space mining companies as well.

It too will pass legislation so that these firms have confidence in their rights to extract resources.

"In the very near future, we will come forward with a strategic action plan defining concrete measures for the coming years," said Mr Schneider.

"In this context, the government of Luxembourg is willing to invest in relevant R&D projects. We are willing as well to invest into the companies themselves. Not all, of course, but if a company seems very interesting to us, we are willing and able to invest into the capital," he told BBC News.

"What is more, we have the national investment bank, which is chaired by myself and the minister of finance, and this bank can give credits to these companies; and we have set up funds that will be eager to invest in this activity."

Over the past decade, space missions mounted by international agencies have tracked, landed and returned samples from asteroids.

The next phase would be to scale up this activity, to try to extract and return sufficient materials - in quantity and value - that the enormous financial outlay required just to get to an asteroid can be recovered, and ideally exceeded.

Before everyone goes 'herpa derp LUXEMBOURG CAN INTO SPACE XD', note, as the article points out, that Luxembourg is actually one of the bigger players in the space industry.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Comets May Not Explain 'Alien Megastructure' Star's Strange Flickering After All

It's looking less likely that a swarm of comets or an "alien megastructure" can explain a faraway star's strange dimming.

The star (nicknamed "Tabby's Star," after its discoverer, Tabetha Boyajian) made major headlines last October when Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, suggested that it could be surrounded by some type of alien megastructure. A more likely idea — one that's far less exciting — is that the star is orbited by a swarm of comets. But scientists can't be sure either way.

Now, Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, has probed the star's behavior over the past century by looking at old photographic plates. Not only does the star's random dipping date back more than a century, but it also has been gradually dimming over that period — a second constraint that makes it even harder to explain. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]

The first signs of the star's oddity came from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which continually monitored the star (as well as 100,000 others) between 2009 and 2013. Astronomers, citizen scientists and computers could then search for regular dips in a star's light — a sign that an exoplanet has passed in front of that star. The largest planets might block 1 percent of a star's light, but Tabby's star dropped by as much as 20 percent in brightness. That, in and of itself, would be weird. But the periodic dimmings didn't occur at regular time intervals, either — they were sporadic. The signature couldn't be caused by a planet, scientists said.

In September, a team led by Boyajian, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, tried to make sense of the unusual signal. First, the researchers looked into any angles that might mean there was something wrong with the data itself. They even checked in with Kepler mission scientists. But everything came out clean. "The data that we were observing with Kepler is, in fact, astrophysical," Boyajian told Space.com.

Still, nothing about the observations indicated what might be causing the extreme interference. After considering many possible scenarios, Boyajian determined that dust from a large cloud of comets was the best explanation. But she admits that "it's a bit of a stretch to have comets that are large enough to block that much of the light from the star." With her paper published, she hoped that other astronomers would jump in with alternative solutions.

And they did. A month later, the star exploded into the public's eye when Wright announced that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could be responsible for the signal, assuming this civilization built a megastructure, like solar panels, around the star. And Boyajian thinks the theory is definitely worth a follow-up.

"We have to look at every angle that we can — and that's one angle, as wild and crazy as it seems," she said. Slate blogger and astronomer Phil Plait, too, admitsthat "while it's incredibly unlikely, it does kinda fit what we're seeing."

A follow-up looking for alien signals, however, turned up empty-handed.

So Schaefer turned to old photographic plates from the Harvard College Observatory. Lucky for him, the star has been photographed more than 1,200 times as part of a repeated all-sky survey between the years 1890 and 1989. That many data points revealed that Tabby's star is acting strangely in more than one way: It's flickering on short timescales, as the Kepler and Harvard data show, and it's dimming over the course of a century, as the Harvard data show.

"Occam's razor [the simplest explanation is likely the best one] needs to be considered in a scenario like this," Boyajian said. A single phenomenon must be causing both behaviors, she added. But what is it?

Well, the results don't look good for a family of comets. It would take a vast number of comets to pass in front of the star for a century, astronomers say.

"It would be more mass than what we have in the whole Kuiper Belt" [the band of icy bodies in the vast region beyond Neptune], said Massimo Marengo, an associate professor of astronomy at Iowa State University who co-authored a paper supporting the comets theory in December.

"You can get out of that if you assume it's the same family of comets passing in front of the star over and over," Marengo told Space.com. But with the century-long dimming trend, too, that family of comets has to get bigger every time it passes the star. "It's a difficult thing to do," he said.

The results also change the requirements for the alien megastructure hypothesis. Plait pointed out that the general fading is actually what you'd expect to see if aliens were building a massive sphere around their star. But before you get your hopes up, consider this: Plait calculated that aliens would need to build a minimum of 750 billion square kilometers (290 billion square miles) of solar panels to account for the 20 percent drop in their star's brightness. "That's 1,500 times the area of the entire Earth," Plait wrote. "Yikes."

So astronomers now have to hope that future observations might shed light on this stellar oddity. "Nature can help us by creating another one of these events," Marengo said. "But sometimes, we don't get lucky."

 

[hobbsyoyo]

This is a cool idea and I've long thought that something like this is going to be the better near-term solution to affordable access to space between reusable rockets and a space elevator. Too bad they couldn't get the funding they needed to keep the doors open.
Advanced space propulsion startup shuts down

WASHINGTON — A Colorado company that said last year it had achieved a technological breakthrough in space transportation has decided to shut down, citing the high costs and risks associated with further development.

Escape Dynamics of Broomfield, Colorado, announced on its website recently that it decided to wind down its operations because its “external propulsion” technology was not attractive enough to potential investors to fund its continued development.

“While microwave propulsion is feasible and is capable of efficiency and performance surpassing chemical rockets, the cost of completing the R&D all the way through operations makes the concept economically unattractive for our team at this time,” the company stated in a brief note posted on its website.

“We also concluded that at current stage technical risks and uncertainty about the cost and timeline are still very high and are not attractive to private investors,” the statement continued. “Therefore, we decided to discontinue the operation of Escape Dynamics and stopped the R&D effort at the end of 2015.”

The company did not disclose additional details about its decision, and did not respond to an email inquiry Feb. 2. It’s unclear how many employees lost their jobs when the company decided to shut down, but an undated group photo on the site included 20 people.

Escape Dynamics had been working on microwave propulsion technology, where a transmitter on the ground beams microwaves to a vehicle ascending into space. The microwaves heat a propellant such as helium or hydrogen to generate thrust.

Beamed propulsion technology offers the potential of simpler and more efficient launch vehicles, and therefore less expensive access to space. Tests by Escape Dynamics indicated that microwave propulsion had a specific impulse, a measure of rocket engine efficiency, higher than the most energetic chemical propellants in common use today.

“Microwave-powered launch is the next giant leap in spaceflight because it has the capability to produce specific impulse above the threshold needed for single-stage-to-orbit operations,” said company president Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux in a presentation last July at the NewSpace 2015 conference in San Jose, California.

At the conference, Garriott announced that Escape Dynamics had completed a small-scale test of microwave propulsion in its lab, using microwaves to heat up helium propellant and generating thrust. The tests demonstrated the effectiveness of overall technology, she said.

The company had plans to scale up the tests over the next few years, conducting tests in the field using hydrogen propellant. It eventually planned to develop a reusable single-stage launch vehicle using microwave propulsion to carry payloads weighing up to 200 kilograms into orbit at about one percent the cost of current launch systems.

“We are three years into an eight-year plan,” Garriott said in July. The company did not disclose how much it had raised, or how much it expected its full development program to cost.
- See more at: http://spacenews.com/advanced-space-propulsion-startup-shuts-down/#sthash.bxA4as3y.dpuf

 

[Berzerker]

looks like a paper plane

 

[hobbsyoyo]

In a sense it was, they never built it.

The idea was that instead of burning fuel on board the ship, they would microwave energy to the ship which would use that energy to heat the fuel and expel it out of the nozzle, which is much more efficient than burning. An even more efficient set up would have been if they had been able to use the air of the atmosphere as the working fluid instead of bringing on board helium or hydrogen for that purpose. I suppose that would have been a next step in the program because that truly would have been massively efficient compared to even bringing along helium although much more difficult.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Why would using air be that harder? If not chemical reaction is needed anything could theoretically be used as propellant. We could even see working salami powered rockets finally!

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Why would using air be that harder? If not chemical reaction is needed anything could theoretically be used as propellant. We could even see working salami powered rockets finally!

Capturing and compressing the air while in flight would require the use of a complicated jet engine (minus the combustor which would be replaced by a complicated heat exchanger) that would add significantly to the total weight, complexity and drag of the aircraft. Even that would stop working around Mach 3-12, depending on which type of compressor system used (Turbojet/Turbofan, RAM or SCRAM). The air would be moving so fast (and the resulting shockwaves so hot) that it wouldn't be possible to 'scoop' the air with current technology.

In other words, at best you could use an air intake of some sort to get up ~1/2 of orbital velocity before you'd be forced to switch to on-board stores of reaction mass. That would allow you to lift much bigger payloads or reduce overall mass of the vehicle for the same payload but at the expense of being much more complicated and with many more failure modes. Come to think of it, I think it would be a fair bet that any mass savings you could make in propellant would be washed out by the weight gain of the air scoop system. So we're really only talking about being able to lift a bigger payload with a bigger vehicle rather than reducing vehicle weight for a given payload. I.E. you can make a bigger, more efficient vehicle with the above system but not a smaller, more efficient vehicle. And since they were really trying to prove the concept rather than maximize all variables, they probably made the correct engineering trade-offs.

But we're talking about what is possible with existing technology, where even the modest vehicle they tried to make is a stretch. In the future, who knows how much better of a vehicle they could make using all sorts of exotic thermodynamic cycles.

Also, air definitely has much less potential (thermodynamically speaking) as a reaction mass than a pure gas such as Hydrogen or Helium.

 

[uppi]

Also, air definitely has much less potential (thermodynamically speaking) as a reaction mass than a pure gas such as Hydrogen or Helium.

Why is that? I am trying to think of a reason why the purity should matter, but I am coming up empty.

 

[Berzerker]

What is that box-like structure below the tail?

Are those colors for real and does anyone know how much space the image represents? Like is that a light year across?

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

The colors are iust color codes used to represent specific elements (such as oxygen, hydrogen, etc). To the naked eye, it would look gray-ish.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Why is that? I am trying to think of a reason why the purity should matter, but I am coming up empty.

It depends on they cycle they are using to ingest and then expel the reaction mass.

If an air breathing system used some sort of pre-cooler to keep temperatures manageable for the compressor blades/wall, then you could end up with fractional distillation of the different components of air. (I think) I'm not sure how the Skylon system deals with this. Though upon reflection, they probably wouldn't need or necessarily want to bring inlet temperatures down to the boiling point of oxygen.

If they are providing enough energy to the system to ionize the gas which they then expel of out some sort of electromagnetic nozzle, then you would have to account for the various energies that each species requires for ionization. (Highly doubtful they were going this route) I know this sounds highly dubious but at least theoretically, if they are beaming power to the craft, I don't see a reason why they couldn't just build a big enough power plant and transmitter to send it enough energy to do electric propulsion at very high thrust. Satellites that use electric propulsion are limited in their thrust by the amount of power they can generate; by decoupling the energy generation from the vehicle, you could at least theoretically scale up thrust quite dramatically.

Finally (and most problematic in my opinion), while you can get a massive boost in efficiency by scooping up the air and expelling it, on a mass-unit basis, you are going to get a lower specific impulse from air as all of the components have different enthalpies that will average out to lower output thrust/specific impulse than a pure gas that you bring along (like say H2 or He). This, combined with the massive weight penalty and complexity penalty imposed by the scoop system itself will tend to balance out the advantages of scooping air for smaller systems. I think at a certain payload fraction, you would want to go with on-board gas. Above that point, a scoop system will make more sense.

I mean, designs for nuclear thermal rockets use hydrogen for just this reason (much higher isp) despite extremely low propellant densities (and thus higher tank weights).

 

[Michkov]

What is that box-like structure below the tail?

Landing Gear door?

 

[uppi]

Thanks, hobbsyoyo.


There have been pervasive rumors that Advanced LIGO has made a direct detection of a gravitational wave emitted by a merger of two black holes. Now they have scheduled a press conference for tomorrow. If true, distant objects in space can now be observed by the gravitational effect they have on spacetime here on earth. That is particularly interesting for black holes, because they do not emit much else that we could detect.

 

[dutchfire]

I've also been hearing increasingly open rumours and announcements of press conferences and seminars to discuss "first scientific results".

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks, hobbsyoyo.


There have been pervasive rumors that Advanced LIGO has made a direct detection of a gravitational wave emitted by a merger of two black holes. Now they have scheduled a press conference for tomorrow. If true, distant objects in space can now be observed by the gravitational effect they have on spacetime here on earth. That is particularly interesting for black holes, because they do not emit much else that we could detect.

I've also been hearing increasingly open rumours and announcements of press conferences and seminars to discuss "first scientific results".

I'm reading the same rumors - the press is all but declaring they have found gravitational waves.

Given how hard it has proven to detect any waves, how long do you think it will take to translate this experiment into a practical observation technique and how expensive do you think that effort will be? I would guess it would cost something like the LHC (and be of similar size) but I have no idea.

 

[trader/warrior]

Watching the announcement stream right now, sounds like they are very confident about their findings and giving a lot of good laymans info and explanations. Their website seems to be overloaded right now so cant access the more detailed info yet.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/upgraded-ligo-detectors-spot-gravitational-waves/

LIVINGSTON, Louisiana—In a large press event today, the scientists behind the LIGO experiment announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by strong gravitational interactions. The news, following weeks of rumors, confirms a major prediction of general relativity, and comes a century after Einstein first formulated the theory.

The waves, produced in the final moments of a black hole merger, arrived precisely at 5:51 in the morning (US Eastern), and were picked up by both LIGO detectors—one in Louisiana, one in Washington. Since the Louisiana detector picked up the signal a few milliseconds sooner, the event that produced the gravitational waves occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.

--

Based on the details of the signal detected, the LIGO team estimates that the event that generated the gravitational waves occurred 1.3 billion years ago. That's when two black holes, one 29 times the mass of the Sun, the second 36 times, spiraled into each other. When the collision took place, the equivalent of three times the mass of the Sun was converted directly to energy and released in the form of gravitational waves. For a brief fraction of a second, this single event produced more power than the entire rest of the visible Universe combined. eek

These events are exceedingly rare. But the successful detection of one means that we now have the hardware in place to pick them up whenever they occur. Its success doesn't mean that LIGO will be shut down; instead, with this discovery, gravitational waves move from a theoretical construct to another avenue for studying the cosmos. Gravity wave astronomy could tell us key things about the dynamics of our galaxy, and spot extremely energetic events elsewhere. It would be a bit like gaining the ability to do observations at a new set of wavelengths.

In this sense, LIGO is now a bit like the IceCube neutrino detector. After confirming that astronomical events sent extremely high-energy neutrinos screaming towards Earth, IceCube has now started to search for the source of these neutrinos, ushering in the era of neutrino cosmology.

"This detection is the beginning of a new era: the field of gravitational wave astronomy is now a reality," said Gabriela González of Louisiana State University. Black hole expert Kip Thorne stated, "With this new discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest: the quest to explore the warped side of the Universe—objects and phenomena that are made from warped spacetime."

To provide more precision to that astronomy, the LIGO collaboration will be integrating with the European Virgo detector, which is based on a similar approach. And negotiations are under way to build a LIGO-like detector in India. With four in operation, we'll someday be able to say something more than "somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere."

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Well, it must be great to observe gravitational waves for first time and all, but it is not a breakout of physics or something because since the very moment we accept general relativity as a proven theory, we accrpt that: 1) gravity as any interaction propages not faster than light and 2) gravity blends spacetime. So, as i understand it, once the previous points are accepted gravity waves are an immediate consequence.

 

[red_elk]

since the very moment we accept general relativity as a proven theory

I think there is no such concept in physics. There are only theories which are proven to be wrong, and theories used as "working hypotheses" (not sure if correct English term).