Science
Possible 'kilonova' explosion leaves an epic afterglow – Livescience.com
Astronomers may have spotted the afterglow from an epic cosmic event known as a “kilonova.”
Kilonovas occur after the collision of two hyper-dense neutron stars, which are the remnants of stars that have died in supernova explosions. Astronomers think they have spotted an afterglow in X-rays from the event, which is dubbed GW170817.
The discovery team suggests that as the debris expanded out from the collision, the resulting sonic-boom-like shock heated up surrounding materials. The heating generated X-rays.
Related: Monstrous ‘Kilonova’ Explosions May Be Showering a Nearby Galaxy in Gold
Alternatively, however, a similar effect may be produced due to materials falling towards a black hole caused by the neutron star merger, so astronomers caution the finding is tentative. Either type of find, however, would be the first known to science.
“We have entered uncharted territory here in studying the aftermath of a neutron star merger,” lead researcher Aprajita Hajela, an astrophysics graduate student at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “We are looking at something new and extraordinary for the very first time. This gives us an opportunity to study and understand new physical processes, which have not before been observed.”
The neutron star event was already known to science, following an Aug. 17, 2017 merger that produced the first-ever detection of such an event by gravitational waves, or ripples of space-time. Astronomers continue to study the region to find out how the area is evolving.
Astronomers spotted X-ray emissions soon after the event, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, but the emission began to fade in early 2018. Hajela’s team, however, showed the decline in brightness stopped in 2020, with the X-ray emission remaining nearly constant.
The consistency in X-ray brightness was what pointed to this being an unusual event, team members said. “A completely different source of X-rays appears to be needed to explain what we’re seeing,” Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley and a senior author of the study, said in the same statement.
Figuring out what the ultimate cause was, however, will require more follow-up study. If it is indeed a kilonova, the researchers expect to see the X-ray and radio emissions get brighter as the shock continues to plow through the nearby environment. But if it is a black hole, the output should decline or remain steady.
A study based on the research was published Monday (Feb. 28) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Science
SpaceX sends 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
Science
NASA Celebrates As 1977’s Voyager 1 Phones Home At Last
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
Science
NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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