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Exploring Your Universe (EYU) is a free science fair that draws in thousands of children, parents, and friends from the Los Angeles community to our campus every first Sunday in November. Organized by UCLA graduate students and run by volunteers, this event has been a tradition to provide a day of free science education to all. For 12 years, EYU has provided fun, hands-on experiments and presentations to curious minds and young future scientists alike.
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Check out this article that has been published in Scientific American, telling the story of the detection, and science involved with the first ever, interstellar visitor to our own Solar System; i.e. the object now known as 1I/‘Oumuamua, or, in Hawaiian: “a messenger from afar arriving first”
David Jewitt is an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studies the primitive bodies of the solar system and beyond. Credit: Nick HigginsAmaya Moro-Martín is an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. She investigates planetary systems and extrasolar comets. Credit: Nick Higgins
Everything Scientists Know So Far about the First Interstellar Objects Ever Detected
Strange bodies from beyond the solar system have defied predictions
Late in the evening of October 24, 2017, an e-mail arrived containing tantalizing news of the heavens. Astronomer Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was writing to one of us (Jewitt) about a new object in the sky with a very strange trajectory. Discovered six days earlier by University of Hawaii astronomer Robert Weryk, the object, initially dubbed P10Ee5V, was traveling so fast that the sun could not keep it in orbit. Instead of its predicted path being a closed ellipse, its orbit was open, indicating that it would never return. “We still need more data,” Farnocchia wrote, “but the orbit appears to be hyperbolic.” Within a few hours, Jewitt wrote to Jane Luu, a long-time collaborator with Norwegian connections, about observing the new object with the Nordic Optical Telescope in Spain. Many other observatories around the world were simultaneously scrambling to spot it.
So began a new era in astronomy. Renamed C/2017 U1 (the “C” standing for “comet”), then A/2017 U1 (for “asteroid”) and, finally, 1I/‘Oumuamua, the object turned out to be the first body astronomers have ever seen in the solar system that originated outside it. The “1I” in its designation indicates its official status as the first known interstellar object, and the name ‘Oumuamua—“a messenger from afar arriving first” in Hawaiian—was proposed by Weryk and his colleagues, who had used the Pan-STARRS telescope on the Hawaiian island of Maui to make the discovery.
What first caught the observers’ attention was the object’s extreme speed relative to the sun. After accounting for the pull of the sun’s gravity, ‘Oumuamua had an excess speed of 26 kilometers a second (58,000 miles an hour). No interaction with a solar system body could generate such a kick, and the sun’s gravity cannot capture something moving so quickly; ‘Oumuamua had to have come from outside.
What kind of journey must this object have taken? From what we can tell, it could have been wandering the galaxy for hundreds of millions of years. Observations suggest that it came from the direction of the bright star Vega, in the constellation Lyra, although Vega would not have been in the same spot when ‘Oumuamua was there roughly 300,000 years ago.
Although astronomers have long believed that interstellar bodies pass through the solar system, actually finding one was a big surprise. Only the year before, an exhaustive analysis by Toni Engelhardt, then at the University of Hawaii, and his colleagues concluded that prospects for identifying such an interstellar interloper “appear to be bleak”—they were thought to be just too small and faint for us to have much hope of finding them. But as we discovered more about ‘Oumuamua, our surprise turned into utter bewilderment. Everything from its shape and size to its lack of cometlike properties ran counter to our expectations. If this was a typical visitor from the greater universe, we had a lot to learn.
2I/BORISOV, the second known interstellar visitor, was first spotted in 2019. Credit: Ron Miller
Alien Artifact or Cosmic Dust Bunny?
Observations from the Nordic Optical and other telescopes soon showed that ‘Oumuamua lacked a tail and a surrounding coma of sublimated dust and ice transitioning directly from solid to gas—the hallmarks of a comet. Rather, except for its unique orbit, ‘Oumuamua looked like a rocky asteroid. Still, given that it had come from interstellar space, where the average temperature is only a few degrees above absolute zero, the absence of evidence for sublimating ice was startling. Water, the most abundant molecule in the universe after molecular hydrogen, should have been present.
And then there was the object’s shape. Astronomers use the brightness of an asteroid as a measure of its size because bigger objects reflect more sunlight to Earth. ‘Oumuamua’s average brightness suggested a diameter of about 100 meters—quite small compared with most known asteroids. Indeed, if ‘Oumuamua had been as far away as the asteroid belt, where most of the asteroids in our solar system reside, we never would have seen it. Instead we got lucky: it passed very close to us—about 60 million kilometers, which is only 40 percent of the average distance between the sun and Earth. The brightness of most asteroids, shaped like lumpy potatoes rotating in space, varies cyclically as they present alternately smaller and larger sides of themselves to Earth. Observing this rotation produces a “light curve,” a plot of how the light changes that tells us the rotation period and gives us an estimate of the asteroid’s proportions. In December 2017 scientists reported ‘Oumuamua’s light curve. At about eight hours its period was unremarkable compared with those of solar system asteroids. But whereas most asteroids vary in brightness by 10 to 20 percent as they spin, ‘Oumuamua changed by an unprecedented factor of 10, suggesting an extraordinary needlelike shape that sometimes presented a large and bright surface and sometimes showed only a very narrow edge.
The object’s resemblance in size and proportions to a large rocket—for example, the Saturn V, which measures about 110 meters by 10 meters—was hard to ignore. Indeed, discarded rockets orbiting the sun are occasionally rediscovered by astronomers surveying the sky for asteroids and comets, as was the case for 2000 SG344, a likely Apollo-program relic discovered in 2000. But the orbit of ‘Oumuamua was too extreme for it to be a rocket from the 1960s. Could it be a rocket from another civilization? Incredible as it sounds, scientists could not immediately reject the possibility based on the available data.
While astronomers were pondering this conundrum, they got another surprise. In June 2018 Italian astronomer Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency and his colleagues reported measurements of the shape of ‘Oumuamua’s orbit, which revealed the action of a weak, rocketlike force pushing on the body in addition to the gravitational forces of the sun and planets.
So-called nongravitational forces are well known to exist in comets, arising from the asymmetric push of ices sublimating from the dayside of the comet’s core. But ‘Oumuamua is not a comet. And it showed no evidence that it was losing mass at all, which could have explained the force. Could it be that ‘Oumuamua emitted only gas, which is harder to detect than comet dust? Possibly, but it would make ‘Oumuamua unique: astronomers know of no other cosmic object that lets off gas but no dust or ice. Micheli suggested that ‘Oumuamua might eject very large dust particles that were invisible to our telescopes.
In November 2018 Shmuel Bialy and Avi Loeb of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian proposed that the nongravitational force could be caused by sunlight, which exerts a weak pressure on any object placed in its path. To experience enough radiation pressure that we could measure it, however, ‘Oumuamua would have to be either extraordinarily thin like a sheet of Mylar (the aluminized plastic used to make birthday balloons) or of very low density. Bialy and Loeb suggested that the object could be a “light sail,” a flat, sail-shaped vehicle sent from another civilization and designed to be pushed through space by starlight.
As intriguing as that idea may be, most astronomers favor a natural origin for ‘Oumuamua. In February 2019 one of us (Moro-Martín) calculated that for ‘Oumuamua to be propelled by sunlight, it would have to be 100 times less dense than air. Such a cosmic dust bunny—an “icy fractal aggregate”—might have grown in the outer parts of the protoplanetary disk of another star, where baby planets congeal out of ice and dust rubble. This past summer Luu, Eirik Flekkøy and Renaud Toussaint, all at the University of Oslo, proposed that ‘Oumuamua grew from a collection of dust particles in the coma of an active comet, then escaped. This type of material is unknown on Earth but could conceivably survive in the ultimate vacuum of interstellar space.
Given how odd ‘Oumuamua is, what might be most incredible of all is that objects like it must be common. We know that this relatively tiny body was detected only because it passed close to Earth and that humans have had the capability to see such an object for only a few years (the Pan-STARRS facility began operating in 2010 but reached full efficiency only recently). Based on statistics alone, these two facts allowed scientists to estimate that the number of similar interstellar interlopers per unit volume of space is about one per 10 cubic AU (one AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between Earth and the sun). Thus, in the planetary region of our solar system, defined as a sphere with the radius of Neptune’s orbit, there must be about 10,000 similar objects, of which ‘Oumuamua is only the first one close enough to be detected in the operational lifetime of Pan-STARRS. If these objects take about a decade to cross the planetary region, the average rate of interloper arrivals must be about three a day!
What, then, does this frequency suggest about the origin of ‘Oumuamua? Aliens might be capable of sending a Saturn V–size rocket or a large piece of Mylar-like material across the galaxy and through our solar system, but why would they send so many? Even more astonishing, if we extrapolate our analysis from the solar system to the whole of the Milky Way, we find that there must be 1 × 1024 to 1 × 1025 ( a trillion trillion to 10 trillion trillion) similar objects in our galaxy. It is hard to believe that an extraterrestrial civilization would have the capacity to flood the galaxy with so much space junk, and it is even more difficult to see why it would do so. Thus, given the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, most astronomers think ‘Oumuamua is just a weirdly shaped, but natural, piece of debris from elsewhere in the galaxy.
The sheer strangeness of ‘Oumuamua left astronomers eagerly awaiting the discovery of the second interstellar interloper. Would the next one be as peculiar, or would it look like a regular solar system comet or an asteroid without nongravitational motion?
Without knowing the answers to these questions, we predicted that the second object would arrive within a year or two, based on the estimate that there must be about one body like ‘Oumuamua per 10 cubic AU. To our delight, two years after ‘Oumuamua, Ukrainian amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov discovered C/2019 Q4 using a homemade telescope; it was soon renamed 2I/Borisov—the second interstellar object. It has an orbit even more extreme than that of ‘Oumuamua, but it appears to be a rather ordinary comet. Measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope showed that its nucleus is larger than ‘Oumuamua, with a radius between 0.2 and 0.5 kilometer. In contrast to ‘Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov displays no extreme light curve, and its nongravitational motion is simply a consequence of asymmetric outgassing as ice comes off its surface, just as in solar system comets. This past March it briefly flared in brightness and then took on a doubled appearance as a small piece of the nucleus detached, something commonly observed with solar system comets. In other words, this body is pretty much exactly what we would have expected an interstellar object to be like.
Our expectations are based on theories of planet formation, which suggest a ready mechanism for kicking some objects out of their home planetary systems and into the galaxy, where they may eventually make their way to our little corner of the cosmos. Studies suggest that planet formation begins in an orderly way but ends in a chaotic mess. The sun, for instance, was born 4.6 billion years ago in a flattened, rotating disk that grew as a giant molecular cloud contracted under its own gravity. This disk of gas, ice and dust feeding the nascent star in its center was very dense, which allowed tiny grains to collide and stick to one another. At first pebbles formed, then larger bodies known as planetesimals and, eventually, the planets. Some of the planetesimals escaped further growth and heating when they were scattered to the outer solar system shortly after they formed. There, in deep freeze, they have remained mostly unaltered ever since.
The object’s resemblance in size and proportions to a large rocket was hard to ignore.
Sometimes, though, these bodies get scattered back into the inner system, where the sun’s heat causes their ice to sublimate; they develop tails of ejected material, and we call them comets. Other planetesimals are expelled from the system entirely, destined to spend eternity drifting among the stars. Once lost in the vastness of the Milky Way, such an object has a negligible chance of reentering the planetary system it came from, but it could certainly be deflected by the gravity of an alien star. Given the chaos of this process and the numerous encounters ‘Oumuamua and Borisov must have had before they reached us, we will likely never know precisely how long these objects have been adrift or determine with confidence where they came from.
Nevertheless, we can feel confident that Borisov is an ice-rich planetesimal from the outer regions of the planet-forming disk of an unknown star. In fact, everything we have learned about Borisov—and the proof it offers that some interstellar objects look much like we expected—puts the strangeness of ‘Oumuamua in stark relief. Given the extraordinary differences between the two, there is no reason to assume that they share a common origin.
Astronomers are still trying to puzzle out what ‘Oumuamua is, and new ideas come up often. One recent suggestion, proposed this past May by Darryl Seligman of the University of Chicago and Gregory Laughlin of Yale University, is that ‘Oumuamua is a novel type of body made of molecular hydrogen ice—a cosmic iceberg that originated in the coldest regions of a molecular cloud. In June, however, Loeb and Thiem Hoang of the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute argued that molecular hydrogen is so volatile that such a body could neither have formed in a molecular cloud nor have survived interstellar travel. Another option, put forward in April by Yun Zhang of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Douglas N. C. Lin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is that ‘Oumuamua might instead be shrapnel produced by gravitational shredding of a planet or other body passing too near its parent star.
‘Oumuamua’s strange properties aside, the fact that the object was detected at all runs counter to the conventional wisdom about planetary system formation, which suggests that interstellar visitors should be very rare. We can estimate the number of interstellar planetesimals we expect to exist per unit volume of space based on the observed number of stars and on our knowledge of star and planet formation, stellar evolution and dynamics. The calculation involves many uncertainties, but a generous upper limit is at least a tenth to a hundredth the size of the previously mentioned statistical frequency estimate of 10,000 such objects in the planetary region. Put simply, we cannot account for that much litter in the galaxy. Perhaps as we detect more interlopers and understand them better, the inferred and estimated values of their space density will start to converge. But it is also possible that we are missing an important source of interstellar objects—maybe some process in space other than the planetesimal scattering we have described creates bodies that find their way to us.
Besides teaching us about how planetary systems form, the discovery of interstellar visitors may have a bearing on one of the most fundamental mysteries in science: How did life on Earth begin? One idea, called panspermia, is that the seeds of ancient organisms hitched a ride on asteroids hailing from other systems.
Just as we expect interstellar bodies to enter our solar system occasionally, we must also assume that they sometimes hit our planet. Based on the value of one object per 10 cubic AU that we inferred from the detection of ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, we can estimate that similar objects strike about once every 100 million to 200 million years, thousands of times less frequently than asteroids of comparable size. Most would probably detonate and disperse in the atmosphere, but a few would actually reach the ground. Scientists estimate that over the eons several billion tons of interstellar material must have crashed into Earth.
Could these impacts have delivered life to our planet? The modern scientific notion of panspermia dates back to the 19th century. Surprisingly, asteroids and comets might be good protectors of fragile cellular life. Damaging cosmic rays, capable of breaking DNA, penetrate only a few meters into solid material, so living cells buried inside rocks might survive interstellar journeys lasting millions or even hundreds of millions of years. At near-zero interstellar temperatures, any cells would be in suspended animation. They would need to withstand the shock of planetary impact, but this might not be as problematic as it sounds. Experiments have already shown that earthly bacteria can survive impacts at cosmic speed. Although there is no evidence that life spreads through the galaxy while riding in the bellies of asteroids and comets, given our present state of ignorance, we must acknowledge that this possibility remains.
To improve our understanding of interstellar objects, we need to find more examples. Currently, with only two to go on, our grasp is limited. Fortunately, new developments in astronomy make it very likely that we will soon observe dozens of similar objects, and those discoveries will allow us to better pin down the statistics and to understand their physical properties. Most professional telescopes have very small fields of view, often only a few thousandths of the area of the full moon. But optics and large detectors are now capable of capturing the whole moon and more in a single shot and the entire sky in a night or two of continuous scanning. Powerful computers make it possible to compare successive all-sky scans to find moving objects, including interstellar interlopers.
Having a larger sample of interstellar objects will help us answer many questions about the objects themselves. How many interlopers are strangely iceless and oblong like ‘Oumuamua versus akin to a comet like 2I/Borisov? Are there bigger examples? Are there smaller ones? What are they made of? Are some really porous enough to be pushed around by the pressure of light? New data from the Rubin Observatory, now under construction on a Chilean mountaintop, should provide fresh insights. The Rubin telescope has a collecting mirror 8.4 meters in diameter and a three-billion-pixel detector that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. Each image from this gigantic camera will cover an area 40 times that of the moon, an enormous advance. It will also systematically survey the sky more deeply than has ever been attempted and on a repeated basis. This new facility is expected to reveal interstellar interlopers in abundance, along with vast numbers of asteroids, comets and Kuiper belt objects from our own solar system.
To truly understand the nature of any given interloper, we would like to send a spacecraft to visit it or even land on it. One practical problem is that there is not much time to make plans because these objects move so fast. ‘Oumuamua faded to invisibility for even the largest telescopes within a few months of its discovery. 2I/Borisov will be too faint to detect within a year or two. For comparison, space missions often take a decade or more, including their design, approval, construction and launch, making it impossible to plan for any particular interstellar target. A solution might be to send the spacecraft into a storage orbit before even knowing where the mission will go. This is the idea behind the European Space Agency’s Comet Interceptor, due to be launched in 2028. The Interceptor will park at Earth’s L2 Lagrangian point 1.5 million kilometers away, where it can easily maintain a stable orbit as it awaits the flyby of an interesting object. The Interceptor lacks the power to rendezvous with an interloper unless one happens by chance to pass very close to L2, however.
More capable rockets are intrinsically heavy and expensive to launch; even if a flyby is possible, accelerating to hyperbolic orbit speed to grab a sample will not be easy. Spacecraft powered by novel propulsion methods, such as light sails accelerated by a laser beam from Earth or by solar radiation pressure, are another option, but they involve difficulties of their own. Still, the prospect of being able to closely examine an object that unequivocally originated beyond our solar system is extraordinary, and scientists have not been shy in proposing ways to do so. One way or another, we will pry the secrets from our interstellar visitors.
This article was originally published with the title “Interstellar Interlopers” in Scientific American 323, 4, 42-49 (October 2020)
The moon, or supermoon, is seen as it sets over the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on Monday, Nov. 14, 2016. A supermoon occurs when the moon’s orbit is closest (perigee) to Earth. Early Monday morning, the moon was the closest it has been to Earth since 1948 and it appeared 30 percent brighter and 14 percent bigger than the average monthly full moon. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
Please join us on the evening of Saturday 20 October, 2018 from 7 to 9 PM to participate and celebrate the 2018 edition of International Observe the Moon Night! We will have telescopes set up on the roof (9th floor) of UCLA’s Mathematical Sciences Building. It’s FREE, open to the public, and you’ll be able to observe the Moon (weather permitting).
Specific information and details on International Observe The Moon Night hosted by UCLA’s Institute for Planets and Exoplanets can be found at:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A newly discovered object from another star system that’s passing through ours is shaped like a giant pink fire extinguisher.
That’s the word this week from astronomers who have been observing this first-ever confirmed interstellar visitor.
“I’m surprised by the elongated shape – nobody expected that,” said astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the observation team that reported on the characteristics.
Scientists are certain this asteroid or comet originated outside our solar system. First spotted last month by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii, it will stick around for another few years before departing our sun’s neighborhood.
Jewitt and his international team observed the object for five nights in late October using the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands and the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.
At approximately 100 feet by 100 feet by 600 feet (30 meters buy 30 meters by 180 meters), the object has proportions roughly similar to a fire extinguisher — though not nearly as red, Jewitt said Thursday. The slightly red hue — specifically pale pink — and varying brightness are remarkably similar to asteroids in our own solar system, he noted.
Astronomer Jayadev Rajagopal said in an email that it was exciting to point the Arizona telescope at such a tiny object “which, for all we know, has been traveling through the vast emptiness of space for millions of years.”
“And then by luck passes close enough for me to be able to see it that night!”
The object is so faint and so fast — it’s zooming through the solar system at 40,000 mph (64,000 kph) — it’s unlikely amateur astronomers will see it.
In a paper to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists report that our solar system could be packed with 10,000 such interstellar travelers at any given time. It takes 10 years to cross our solar system, providing plenty of future viewing opportunities, the scientists said.
Trillions of objects from other star systems could have passed our way over the eons, according to Jewitt.
It suggests our solar system ejected its own share of asteroids and comets as the large outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune — formed.
Why did it take so long to nail the first interstellar wanderer?
“Space is big and our eyes are weak,” Jewitt explained via email.
Anticipating more such discoveries, the International Astronomical Union already has approved a new designation for cosmic interlopers. They get an “I” for interstellar in their string of letters and numbers. The group also has approved a name for this object: Oumuamua (OH’-moo-ah-moo-ah) which in Hawaiian means a messenger from afar arriving first.
The Scientific Paper is available HERE: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.05687.pdf
And you can read more HERE: https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/11/16/science/ap-us-sci-interstellar-visitor.html
As well as HERE: https://www.noao.edu/news/2017/pr1706.php
This year’s Exploring Your Universe (EYU) event at UCLA will be held on Sunday, November 5th, 2017. Exploring Your Universe is an annual event held on the UCLA campus that includes science exhibitions, hands-on activities, demonstrations and experiments. The event is free, open to the public, and promises an exciting time and a great learning experience for kids and adults alike.
EYU 2017 will be held in UCLA’s Court of Sciences (located in South Campus) from 12PM-5PM. Nighttime activities will take place from 5PM-8PM (weather permitting). Parking is available in Parking Structure #2 but expected to sell out so please be sure to arrive early.
To read more about previous years’ EYU events and other iPLEX outreach events, please visit our Exploring Your Universe page and stay tuned for more updates!
Be sure to follow @UCLAiPLEX (Twitter, Instagram), uclaiplex.tumblr.com (Tumblr) and @eyu_ucla (Twitter)
UCLA’s Professor David Jewitt has most recently been involved in using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to image the farthest active inbound comet yet seen.
The Comet that Came in from the Cold
A solitary frozen traveler has been journeying for millions of years toward the heart of our planetary system. The wayward vagabond, a city-sized snowball of ice and dust called a comet, was gravitationally kicked out of the Oort Cloud, its frigid home at the outskirts of the solar system. This region is a vast comet storehouse, composed of icy leftover building blocks from the construction of the planets 4.6 billion years ago.
The comet is so small, faint, and far away that it eluded detection. Finally, in May 2017, astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii spotted the solitary intruder at a whopping 1.5 billion miles away – between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. The Hubble Space Telescope was enlisted to take close-up views of the comet, called C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS (K2).
The comet is record-breaking because it is already becoming active under the feeble glow of the distant Sun. Astronomers have never seen an active inbound comet this far out, where sunlight is merely 1/225th its brightness as seen from Earth. Temperatures, correspondingly, are at a minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit. Even at such bone-chilling temperatures, a mix of ancient ices on the surface – oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide – is beginning to sublimate and shed as dust. This material balloons into a vast 80,000-mile-wide halo of dust, called a coma, enveloping the solid nucleus.
Astronomers will continue to study K2 as it travels into the inner solar system, making its closest approach to the Sun in 2022.
Be sure to join us on Monday the 21st of August 2017 from 9:30AM to 11:30AM for ‘The Great UCLA Eclipse’ at UCLA’s Court of Sciences. A partial Solar Eclipse (~60 percent coverage) will be visible at UCLA and we would like to showcase exceptional research and our collaboration between Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, Astronomy Live! and The Optical Society (UCLA Chapter).
Solar telescopes will be set up (weather permitting) for you to get to safely see this eclipse. FREE,FUN and open to the public! 300 Solar Eclipse glasses will be given away, first come, first served to the public as well!
Stay tuned to this page for more details, and be sure to use hashtag #UCLAeclipse on your social media!
Local times for eclipse in Los Angeles on Monday, August 21, 2017
Event
Time in Los Angeles
Direction
Altitude
Comments
Partial Eclipse begins
Aug 21 at 9:05:42 am
98°
33.4°
The Moon touches the Sun’s edge.
Maximum Eclipse
Aug 21 at 10:21:10 am
113°
48.4°
Moon is closest to the center of the Sun.
Partial Eclipse ends
Aug 21 at 11:44:44 am
140°
62.5°
The Moon leaves the Sun’s edge.
Times are local for Los Angeles (PDT – Pacific Daylight Time).
UCLA EPSS Professor Margaret Kivelson Wins American Astronomical Society’s 2017 Gerard P. Kuiper Prize
UCLA EPSS Professor Margaret Kivelson has won the 2017 Gerard P. Kuiper Prize, the highest award given to planetary scientists from the American Astronomical Society’s Division For Planetary Sciences. The Kuiper Prize is given for Outstanding Contributions to Planetary Science.
From the AAS news release:
“The Gerard P. Kuiper Prize for outstanding contributions to planetary science goes to Margaret G. Kivelson (University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Michigan) for her work studying Jupiter’s magnetospheric plasmas to understand the interiors of planets and their moons. Kivelson’s pioneering discoveries of an ocean inside Jupiter’s moon Europa and a magnetic field generated by neighboring Ganymede showed us that these icy bodies are not inert but dynamic worlds. Her insights have spurred us to recognize that habitability need not depend on proximity to the Sun in the traditional habitable zone. As a direct result of Kivelson’s advancements, we now recognize that the ocean worlds of the outer solar system may represent our best chances for discovering life beyond Earth.”
UCLA Staff and Researcher, Emmanuel V. Masongsong’s artwork has made the cover of the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) which is a major AGU publication journal.
UCLA EPSS research findings are featured on the February 2017 cover of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics. The study describes the properties of a newly discovered form of the northern lights, called throat aurora, on the dayside of Earth facing the sun (upward, out of frame). Using observations on the ground and in interplanetary space, the aurora are postulated to form through a novel combination of plasma flows inside and outside of the Earth’s magnetic field (the magnetosphere). Under certain conditions, solar wind interactions at the bow shock (~2 Earth widths upstream of the magnetosphere) can produce fast jets of hot plasma that perturb the outer boundary of the magnetosphere, as shown by previous UCLA EPSS studies. Sometimes cooler plasma “fingers” within Earth’s magnetosphere extend outward towards this boundary. The interaction of these two plasmas manifests as throat aurora, with radial spokes uniquely aligned along the north-south longitudinal axis.
Picture caption: “Observational properties of a newly discovered auroral form near local noon, called throat aurora, revealing combined contributions for its generation from inside and outside of the magnetosphere. The image gives a schematic summarizing the physical process leading to the formation of throat aurora. From Han et al. [pp. 1853–1870, doi: 10.1002/2016JA023394 ]. Image credit: E. Masongsong, H. Hietala (UCLA EPSS), D.-S. Han (Polar Research Institute of China).”
Experiment resolves mystery about wind flows on Jupiter
Using a spinning table and a massive garbage can, UCLA geophysicist leads team in simulating the planet’s atmosphere
Views Jupiter’s south pole (upper left and lower right) and images from the lab experiment to re-create the planet’s winds (upper right and lower left). Image Credit: Jonathan Arnou
Jupiter’s colorful, swirling winds known as “jets” have long puzzled astronomers.
One mystery has been whether the jets exist only in the planet’s upper atmosphere — much like the Earth’s own jet streams — or whether they plunge into Jupiter’s gaseous interior. If the latter is true, it could reveal clues about the planet’s interior structure and internal dynamics.
Now, UCLA geophysicist Jonathan Aurnou and collaborators in Marseille, France, have simulated Jupiter’s jets in the laboratory for the first time. Their work demonstrates that the winds likely extend thousands of miles below Jupiter’s visible atmosphere.
“We can make these features in a computer, but we couldn’t make them happen in a lab,” said Aurnou, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences, who has spent the past decade studying computer models of swirling winds. “If we have a theoretical understanding of a system, we should be able to create an analog model.”
The challenge to re-creating swirling winds in the lab was building a model of a planet with three key attributes believed to be necessary for jets to form: rapid rotation, turbulence and a “curvature effect” that mimics the spherical shape of a planet. Previous attempts to create jets in a lab often failed because researchers couldn’t spin their models fast enough or create enough turbulence, Aurnou said.
The breakthrough for Aurnou’s team was a new piece of laboratory equipment. The researchers used a table built on air bearings that can spin at 120 revolutions per minute and support a load of up to 1,000 kilograms (about 2,200 pounds), meaning that it could spin a large tank of fluid at high speed in a way that mimics Jupiter’s rapid rotation.
The scientists filled an industrial-sized garbage can with 400 liters (about 105 gallons) of water and placed it on the table. When the container spun, water was thrown against its sides, forming a parabola that approximated the curved surface of Jupiter.
“The faster it went, the better we mimicked the massively strong effects of rotation and curvature that exists on planets,” Aurnou said. But the team found that 75 revolutions per minute was a practical limit: fast enough to force the liquid into a strongly curved shape but slow enough to keep water from spilling out.
While the can was spinning, scientists used a pump below its false floor to circulate water through a series of inlet and outlet holes, which created turbulence — one of the three critical conditions for the experiment. That turbulent energy was channeled into making jets, and within minutes the water flow had changed to six concentric flows moving in alternating directions.
“This is the first time that anyone has demonstrated that strong jets that look like those on Jupiter can develop in a real fluid,” Aurnou said.
The researchers inferred that the jets were deep because they could see them on the surface of the water, even though they had injected turbulence at the bottom.
The researchers are looking forward to testing their predictions with real data from Jupiter, and they won’t have to wait long: NASA’s Juno space probe is orbiting Jupiter right now, collecting data about its atmosphere, magnetic field and interior. Initial results from the Juno mission were presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco, and Aurnou was there.
“The Juno data from the very first flyby of Jupiter showed that structures of ammonia gas extended over 60 miles into Jupiter’s interior, which was a big shock to the Juno science team,” Aurnou said. “UCLA researchers will be playing an important role in explaining the data.”
This year, Aurnou and his team will use supercomputers at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois, to simulate the dynamics of Jupiter’s interior and atmosphere. They’ll also continue their work at the laboratory in Marseilles to make the spinning table simulation more complex and more realistic.
One goal is to add a thin, stable layer of fluid on top of the spinning water, which would function like the thin outer layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere that’s responsible for the planet’s weather. The researchers believe this will help them simulate features like Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Geophysics Program, the French Agence Nationale pour la Recherche and the Aix-Marseille University Foundation.
The full article appeared in the UCLA Newsroom here: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-geophysicist-models-jupiters-swirling-winds
