Small Star, Large Problem
Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias announced that they have discovered two planets orbiting around a star called Gliese 1002—a red dwarf in the Cetus constellation. They are both at least as big as Earth and both travel within the habitable zone of their host star, i.e., within a distance which allows for the presence of liquid water on their surface. Theoretically, then, they could be home to life resembling that on Earth. However, upon further analysis, such hypothetical life would in practice have to overcome many obstacles.
Let’s start with the fact that Gliese 1002 is a small star (12% of the sun’s mass) and it doesn’t emit much energy—any habitable celestial bodies would need to orbit it at quite a small distance. The closeness of the host star means that a phenomenon called tidal locking might occur. This refers to the same side of the planet always being turned towards its sun—it causes freezing cold and darkness on one half of the planet, and unbearable heat on the other.
You might think that plants, at least, would find the light hemisphere heavenly, but that’s not the case. Red dwarfs give off low-energy red light. The plants would need to adapt to a wider light spectrum, which—according to Nancy Y. Kiang of NASA—would make their foliage black. Which probably wouldn’t be to everyone’s liking.
You might also expect this modest star to be quiet and peaceful. Wrong again. Red dwarves are usually very prone to flares: they can suddenly emit an enormous surge of energy. This means that the internet would be down again and again on any planets orbiting such a star, which is incredibly discouraging.
No use crying over the hypothetical inhabitants of the Gliese 1002 system, however. It is reasonable to suspect that if any life exists there, it has evolved hand-in-hand with the local conditions. The local patriots probably love their black lawns, the red, restless sun, and the unexpected data outages.
Fanciful Radio Burst
The acronym FRB stands for “fast radio burst,” but we will use our poetic license and call them “fanciful radio bursts” instead—in part, because they really are fanciful. They are also, of course, fast, or even very fast—they only last a few milliseconds—but they are undoubtedly fanciful as well. They appear suddenly in various places in the sky and nobody really has any idea where they come from. They are extremely faint: they reach us from far away, from other galaxies, so we need exceptionally sensitive equipment to record them. However, in their birth place they appear enormous. Whatever causes them is able to emit as much energy in a few milliseconds as the sun does in a few days—a fancifully huge amount.
FRBs were first recorded at the Parkes Observatory in Australia. It’s a rather—let’s not be afraid of this word—fanciful structure, comprised of a brick rotunda with three rows of windows and the radio telescope’s huge concave mesh dish attached to its roof. When the dish is aimed vertically at the sky, the whole thing looks like a massive red pine mushroom with an upturned cap. By the way, red pine mushrooms grow in Australia: they arrived there from Europe and—making Australians of Polish, Ukrainian, and Italian heritage very happy—formed a successful symbiosis with the Monterey pine, which, in turn, found its way to that continent from North America.
But let’s not digress too much, and return to the fanciful bursts. They were first detected in 2007, when astronomers were searching through archival records for something else entirely. Since then, researchers from various centers have recorded hundreds of FRBs, by specifically looking for them.
Hurtling towards us through space, fanciful bursts encounter electrons; these encounters leave traces on them. These traces allow us to decode that the signals came from afar, from beyond the Milky Way, which in turn means that they were enormously powerful in their place of origin; the equivalent of a few hundred million Suns. No star would be able to generate such a value in a continuous manner. So, it is fitting that these are only flashes, and they occur only when the conditions are momentarily right.
FRBs usually occur individually (at least on the time scale within which we observe them), but to make it more fanciful, there are exceptions to this rule. A burst called FRB 121102, for example, flashes in a slightly irregular manner for ninety days, and then stays silent for sixty-six days, before transmitting again for another ninety days. Then it goes silent again. But the vast majority of FRBs are unique: out of more than one thousand recorded sources, only twenty-nine flashed more than once. And of those twenty-nine, only one—FRB 180916—flashes with strict regularity, every 16.35 days.
When it comes to the cause of the fanciful bursts, we can only guess. Some claim that such a phenomenon could be triggered by a neutron star in a strong magnetic field. But this isn’t certain.
Although scientists don’t know how these signals are created, they’ve already set them to work. Because the bursts change depending on what they fly through, astronomers from the California Institute of Technology have come up with the idea that this might help them establish the proportion between ordinary and dark matter in the Milky Way. The result they have arrived at is that our galaxy contains more than 90% dark matter. This is more than the universe’s average, but still less than in the recently-discovered dark dwarf galaxy FAST J0139+4328, which we describe later (as to whether that galaxy is fanciful or not, our readers can judge for themselves).
Jupiter versus Saturn
On January 31, 2023 the official number of Jupiter’s moons increased by twelve and there are now ninety-two. This means that Jupiter has overtaken Saturn, whose number of known natural satellites is eighty-three. But the race shouldn’t be considered over just yet. Let’s hope that Saturn has a few more moons up its sleeve and soon reveals them to astronomers.
An Invisible Galaxy
A decent radio telescope is not to be sneezed at! With such a device, one can find objects that do not shine at all, or shine very weakly. For example, Chinese scientists recently used their FAST radio telescope (the largest one in the world, with a 1,600-feet diameter dish) to locate a dwarf galaxy which emits no light in the visible spectrum.
If this discovery is confirmed, it may contribute to the progress of research into dark matter—the strange, hypothetical substance which interacts with ordinary matter only gravitationally. Astronomers need dark matter to explain why galaxies do not fall apart into pieces as they whirl around at enormous speeds. It is the dark matter’s gigantic gravity that holds them together.
But if we take dark matter into consideration in our model of the universe, another mystery appears: our calculations lead us to believe that we should be observing many more dwarf galaxies than we manage to find. So where are they?
It’s possible that the object located by the astronomers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences provides an answer to that question. Dwarf galaxies might be very numerous in the universe, only we can’t see them. Dark matter makes up 98% of the galaxy we’re discussing here. The other 2% is mostly a gas cloud, and stars comprise a tenth per mille of the entire mass. And those stars shine only in infrared and ultraviolet. It’s no wonder such a galaxy is impossible to notice.
The Chinese researchers are of the opinion that the galaxy they discovered is at a very early stage of its life. The majority of its stars are yet to emerge from the gas cloud. But we can still only speculate as to the nature of the dark matter which forms the gravitational foundation of this and other galaxies. It’s as if we were familiar with a city’s lights, but knew nothing about its buildings, roads, or cars.
How Wrong Bard Was
On 8 January, 2023 Google lost no less than $100 billion because of the James Webb Space Telescope. This is how it happened: during a live-streamed event, Google presented an artificial intelligence they’d developed, a chatbot called Bard. It was asked, among other questions, about the discoveries that had been made thanks to the Webb telescope. The AI, not thinking twice, mentioned that one of these achievements was the first photograph of a planet outside of the Solar System. The problem is that the world saw that photograph in 2004, and the above-mentioned telescope has only been operational for a year.
That mistake was enough for the value of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, to tumble by $100 billion. It’s worth noting, however, that on that day Bard answered many other questions correctly, but none of these right answers managed to restore its image, even a little. That’s just how people are.
Fumes over Eden
NASA scientists have announced that thanks to a satellite called Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) they will be able to measure carbon dioxide emissions of specific industrial plants from orbit. In order to test this new capacity, they started with the Bełchatów Power Station in Poland. In terms of CO2 emissions, it is the indisputable European leader, and thus an easy and obvious target. Scientists claim that they managed to detect even the slightest fluctuations of emissions, according to hourly changes in energy production and maintenance breaks.
By the way, so many disapproving words have recently been said about the Bełchatów Power Station that, for balance, it would be appropriate to say something nice about the city that unfortunately shares its name with it. For example: have you ever noticed how wonderful the Bełchatów coat of arms is? It depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, under the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Really very original!
Read similar:
