To find answers, the researchers examined iron-rich sedimentary rocks from around the world deposited in ancient coastal environments. In analyzing the chemistry of the iron in these rocks, the researchers were able to estimate the amount of oxygen present when the rocks formed, and the impact it would have had on early life like eukaryotic microorganisms—the precursors to modern animals.
"These ironstones offer insights into the oxygen levels of shallow marine environments, where life was evolving. The ancient ironstone record indicates around less than 1% of modern oxygen levels, which would have had an immense impact on ecological complexity," says Changle Wang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who co-led the study with Lechte.
When did the Earth reach oxygen levels sufficient to support animal life? Researchers from McGill University have discovered that a rise in oxygen levels occurred in step with the evolution and expansion of complex, eukaryotic ecosystems. Their findings represent the strongest evidence to date that extremely low oxygen levels exerted an important limitation on evolution for billions of years.
“Until now, there was a critical gap in our understanding of environmental drivers in early evolution. The early Earth was marked by low levels of oxygen, till surface oxygen levels rose to be sufficient for animal life. But projections for when this rise occurred varied by over a billion years—possibly even well before animals had evolved,” says Maxwell Lechte, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences under the supervision of Galen Halverson at McGill University.
McGill University's Professor Galen Halverson explores for ironstone deposits along a rocky ridge in the Wernecke Mountains (Yukon, Canada). Credit: Maxwell Lechte
Ironstones provide insights into early life
To find answers, the researchers examined iron-rich sedimentary rocks from around the world deposited in ancient coastal environments. In analyzing the chemistry of the iron in these rocks, the researchers were able to estimate the amount of oxygen present when the rocks formed, and the impact it would have had on early life like eukaryotic microorganisms—the precursors to modern animals.
“These ironstones offer insights into the oxygen levels of shallow marine environments, where life was evolving. The ancient ironstone record indicates around less than 1 % of modern oxygen levels, which would have had an immense impact on ecological complexity,” says Changle Wang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who co-led the study with Lechte.
Ironstones are sedimentary rocks deposited along coastlines millions of years ago, which contain abundant granules of iron oxides that contain chemical indicators of the amount of oxygen present at the time of formation. Credit: Maxwell Lechte
“These low oxygen conditions persisted until about 800 million years ago, right when we first start to see evidence of the rise of complex ecosystems in the rock record. So if complex eukaryotes were around before then, their habitats would have been restricted by low oxygen,” says Lechte.
Earth remains the only place in the universe known to harbor life. Today, Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are rich with oxygen, but this wasn’t always the case. The oxygenation of the Earth’s ocean and atmosphere was the result of photosynthesis, a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light into energy – releasing oxygen into the atmosphere and creating the necessary conditions for respiration and animal life.
Searching for signs of life beyond our solar system
According to the researchers, the new findings suggests that Earth’s atmosphere was capable of maintaining low levels of atmospheric oxygen for billions of years. This has important implications for exploration of signs of life beyond our solar system, because searching for traces of atmospheric oxygen is one way to look for evidence of past or present life on another planet – or what scientists call a biosignature.
Scientists use Earth’s history to gauge the oxygen levels under which terrestrial planets can stabilize. If terrestrial planets can stabilize at low atmospheric oxygen levels, as suggested by the findings, the best chance for oxygen detection will be searching for its photochemical byproduct ozone, say the researchers.
Ironstones within the sedimentary rock layers of the Grand Canyon (Arizona, USA), preserving clues about ancient marine environments. Credit: Susannah Porter
“Ozone strongly absorbs ultraviolet light, making ozone detection possible even at low atmospheric oxygen levels. This work stresses that ultraviolet detection in space-based telescopes will significantly increase our chances of finding likely signs of life on planets outside our solar system,” says Noah Planavsky, a biogeochemist at Yale University.
More geochemical studies of rocks from this time period will allow scientists to paint a clearer picture of the evolution of oxygen levels during this time, and better understand the feedbacks on the global oxygen cycle, say the researchers.
About this study
"Strong evidence for a weakly oxygenated ocean–atmosphere system during the Proterozoic" by Changle Wang, Maxwell Lechte, Christopher Reinhard, Dan Asael, Devon Cole, Galen Halverson, Susannah Porter, Nir Galili, Itay Halevy, Robert Rainbird, Timothy Lyons, and Noah Planavsky was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Founded in 1821, McGill University is home to exceptional students, faculty, and staff from across Canada and around the world. It is consistently ranked as one of the top universities, both nationally and internationally. It is a world-renowned institution of higher learning with research activities spanning three campuses, 11 faculties, 13 professional schools, 300 programs of study and over 39,000 students, including more than 10,400 graduate students.
McGill’s commitment to sustainability reaches back several decades and spans scales from local to global. The sustainability declarations that we have signed affirm our role in helping to shape a future where people and the planet can flourish.
In a few weeks’ time, a rocket launched in 2015 is expected to crash into the Moon.
The fast-moving piece of space junk is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket which hoisted the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite off our planet. It has been chaotically looping around Earth and the Moon ever since.
The booster is tumbling wildly as it travels, which adds some uncertainty to the timing and location of the predicted impact. It is likely to occur on the far side of the Moon, so it won’t be visible from Earth.
Some astronomers say the collision is “not a big deal”, but to a space archaeologist like me it’s quite exciting. It will be the Moon’s newest archaeological site, joining more than 100 other locations that document human activity on the Moon and in cislunar space.
A history of crash landing on the Moon
The impact will leave a new crater on the dark side of the Moon.
The very first human-made artefact to make contact with the Moon was the Soviet Luna 2 in 1959 – an extraordinary feat, as it was only two years after the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite.
The mission consisted of a rocket, a probe, and three “bombs”. One released a cloud of sodium gas to enable the crash to be seen from Earth. The USSR didn’t want the groundbreaking mission to be called a hoax.
The other two “bombs” were spheres of pentagonal medallions inscribed with the date and Soviet symbols. If they exploded as planned, they would have scattered 144 medallions over the lunar surface.
Other crashes have been missions gone wrong, like the Israeli Beresheet lander in 2019. This was especially controversial as the lander carried a secret cargo of dried tardigrades, tiny creatures that could be revived in the presence of water.
Various spacecraft have naturally decayed and fallen out of orbit, like the Japanese relay satellite Okina in 2009. Others have been intentionally crashed at the end of their mission life.
The NASA Ebb and Flow spacecraft were deliberately crashed into the lunar south pole in 2012, specifically to avoid any risk of damaging the Apollo landing sites. Impacting at a speed of 6,000km per hour, they left craters 6 metres across.
The upper images show the landscape before impact and the lower images show the craters and the dark ejecta. NASA
Many crashes have been used to collect seismic data. Observations from the controlled impact of Saturn third-stage boosters and ascent modules from the Apollo missions were particularly valuable, as timing, location and impact energy were known.
Environmental impacts
The Falcon 9 rocket stage is significantly larger than the tiny Ebb and Flow spacecraft and is travelling faster. The crash will make a much larger crater, which will kick up chunks of rock and dust. On this airless world, the dust could travel a fair way before settling down.
The only other spacecraft on the Moon’s far side are the US Ranger 4 probe, which crashed in 1962, and China’s Chang-e 4 lander and Yutu-2 rover. Yutu-2 is still trundling along the lunar surface on its six wheels.
Yutu’s latest results show that “soil” on the far side may be stickier than the near side, and there is a higher density of small craters.
The rocket stage could potentially cause damage to these historic spacecraft, if it lands on or near them. However, this is statistically unlikely. Current predictions have it landing in Hertzsprung crater, a long way from the Aitken basin where the Chinese spacecraft are operating.
Although there are no cameras to observe the crash, at some point NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is likely to pass over and image the impact point.
We’ll learn something about the geology of the location from the colour differences and distribution of the ejected material. It’s an opportunity to learn more about the Moon’s mysterious far side.
Changing attitudes to space junk
In the earlier Space Age, little thought was given to leaving what many call “trash” on the lunar surface.
The Moon is sometimes considered a “dead” world because it has no life. The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Planetary Protection Policy does not require any special precautions for lunar activities.
But there is a growing awareness the Moon has distinct environmental values of its own. The Declaration of the Rights of the Moon, created by a group of independent researchers, states the Moon has “the right to exist, persist and continue its vital cycles unaltered, unharmed and unpolluted by human beings”.
Canadian researchers Eytan Tepper and Christopher Whitehead have suggested the Moon could be protected by giving it legal personhood, much like the Whanganui river in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Moon is struck by meteors all the time. In many ways, the Falcon 9 impact will be just another one. What makes it interesting is how it acts as a litmus test for changing public opinions about our responsibilities to the space environment.
The public is looking for accountability from space agencies and private corporations. As plans for lunar mining and habitation accelerate, hopefully it’s a message that is ready to be heard.
A rocket launched by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is on a collision course with the Moon after seven years in orbit, according to satellite trackers.
The Falcon 9 booster rocket was first used in 2015 to propel the US Deep Space Climate Observatory to a Sun-Earth LaGrange point more than 1 million km away.
It then didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth and lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system and has been in a somewhat chaotic orbit since.
Bill Gray, who uses software to track near-Earth space objects, projects that it will crash into the Moon on March 4. He says that it is the first unintentional case of space junk hitting into the Moon that he is aware of.
However, he doesn't believe there are any safety issues to be concerned about.
“Keep in mind that this is a roughly four-ton object that will hit at 2.58 km/s,” he wrote in a blog post.
“The moon is fairly routinely hit with larger objects moving in the ballpark of 10-20 km/s; hence, the craters. It's well-built to take that sort of abuse".
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, also appeared nonplussed about any potential danger from the crash writing on Twitter that it’s “not a big deal”.
US consumers lost $770 million in social media scams in 2021
A growing number of US consumers are being scammed through social media, according to a new report from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
More than 95,000 consumers told the FTC that they had been scammed in 2021 with a con that started on social media.
The losses added up to around $770 million (€690.3 million) with fraud initiated on social media making up about one fourth of all reported fraud losses for the year, an 18-fold increase from 2017.
Investment scams topped the list of total reported money losses, followed by romance scams.
The largest number of reports came from people who lost money to online shopping scams. Most of the reports about online shopping scams involved someone who ordered a product they saw marketed on social media that never arrived.
Consumers who listed the social media platform where the undelivered products were marketed most often named Facebook or Instagram.
People aged 18 to 39 were more than twice as likely to report losing money than older adults.
To avoid falling foul of a social media scam, the FTC advised users to limit who can see their posts and information through privacy settings, to research a company before buying from them and not to deal with a vendor that requires payment by cryptocurrency, gift card or wire transfer.
Europe's tech stocks set for biggest monthly drop in more than 13 years
European technology stocks fell on Friday and were on track for its biggest monthly drop since the 2008 global financial crisis as investors sold growth stocks in January amid concerns about an aggressive Federal Reserve tightening and mounting tensions in Ukraine.
A darling of the pandemic, Europe's technology sector, which had risen to its highest level in 21 years in November, slid 15 per cent in January and were on course for its worst month since October 2008.
European tech moved in January in tandem with the Nasdaq index in the US, which also registered the worst month in more than 13 years.
Global tech stocks have been under pressure as investors have been more reluctant to pay hefty valuations for growth stocks, as the Fed said it will likely hike interest rates in March and reaffirmed plans to end its bond purchases that month in a battle to tame inflation.
Mounting tensions between Russia and the US over Ukraine also sent investors looking for safer assets.
AN ASTEROID isn't expected to crash into Earth anytime soon but space agencies keep an eye out for them just in case.
Depending on the size of the space rock, an asteroid impact could be an extinction level event and researchers have created simulations to see how bad it could be.
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A large asteroid impact could be disastrous for life on EarthCredit: Getty
What would happen if an asteroid hit Earth?
If you've seen the Netflix film Don't Look Up, you may be concerned about potential asteroid impacts.
However, not all asteroids would mean the end of humanity.
The space rock would have to be pretty large to kill us all.
Scientists think the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was about 7.5 miles wide.
If an asteroid that size hit Earth today, things would instantly change due to the force of the impact and its knock on effect on the environment.
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Experts think we'd experience fires, shock waves, heat radiation, a large crater, acid rain and giant tsunamis if the asteroid hits water.
Britt Scharringhausen, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Beloit College, told Inverse: "All of the ash from the fires and all of the finer-grain debris from the impact will hang out in the atmosphere for a long time, and we get what’s called an impact winter.
"It’s going to block the sunlight, and all that ash falling into the ocean acidifies the top layers.
"So you burn things, kill everything in the ocean, and freeze the Earth, and it goes through about two years of constant winter."
Scharringhausen doesn't think that all life on Earth would die after a large asteroid impact.
Some small creators survived the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs.
If humans took the right precautions, it is possible that they could survive too.
Scharringhausen explained: "Not everything will die. If we’re thinking about people, the way to survive would be to get underground.
"You could maybe ride it out in a bunker if you've got the supplies to make it through that period of winter where you can't grow any edible food.
"Maybe the finicky crops that humans like to grow won't come through it so well, but there’s that seed repository, so if those are well-protected enough, you could get agriculture restarted."
Plans to save Earth from asteroids
Some experts are worried that Earth isn't yet ready to defend itself from potentially deadly asteroids.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk once sparked concern by tweeting: "a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defence."
Nasa is looking into to some defence methods though.
It recently launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission.
Nasa said: "DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact."
The DART craft should slam into a small asteroid called Dimorphos in September with the aim of moving it off course.
Horror simulation shows 'God of Chaos' asteroid hitting Earth
In other news, Nasa has upgraded its asteroid hazard software with some key changes that should help it better detect potentially dangerous space rocks.
A natural impact on the moon created this crater in 2013. It's about to get another.
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University
The remains of the upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will go on an unplanned extended mission in March when the roughly 4-ton hunk of space junk creates a new crater on the far side of the moon by slamming into it at over 5,000 miles per hour.
The terminal trajectory was first noticed by Bill Gray, an amateur astronomer and software developer in Maine. His software picked up the impact in an orbital model and Gray worked with observatories around the world to gather additional data and increase his confidence in the prediction.
"With all the data, we've got a certain impact at March 4 12:25:58 Universal Time (4:25 a.m. PT)," Gray writes in a blog post. Jonathan McDowell, a leading watcher of orbit and everything near Earth in space, confirmed the prediction.
Gray expects the spent rocket to crash into the lunar surface in a crater named Hertzsprung that's a little bit larger than the state of Iowa. The location is remote enough that the impact doesn't pose any threat to the Apollo mission or other space program landing sites.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Besides adding a new feature to the dark side of the moon, there's some concern it could also introduce tiny hitchhikers to our natural satellite.
"So I'm not bothered by one more crater being made on the moon," David Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the UK's Open University, wrote in The Conversation. "It already has something like half a billion craters that are 10 meters or more in diameter. What we should worry about is contaminating the moon with living microbes, or molecules that could in the future be mistaken as evidence of former life on the moon."
"In essence, this is a 'free' Lcross... except we probably won't see the impact," Gray says.
While the impact and the new crater it creates won't be visible from Earth, Gray and others are hopeful the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft will eventually be able to get a glimpse of the damage.
"It will be the moon's newest archaeological site," writes space archaeologist Alice Gorman. "We'll learn something about the geology of the location from the color differences and distribution of the ejected material. It's an opportunity to learn more about the Moon's mysterious far side."
In a case of cosmic irony, Gray points out there's one spacecraft well positioned to view the impact: the Deep Space Climate Observatory, the same satellite that the wayward rocket launched seven years ago.
"Except that it's about 600,000 kilometers (373,000 miles) away, and tends to stay focused on the Earth; I don't expect they would swerve it sideways to observe an impact that would probably be too faint for it to observe anyway."
Someone check with Elon Musk to see about turning on the cameras on that old Falcon 9....
A 19 metre lunar crater made by a natural impact on 17 March 2013. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University
It's not often that the sudden appearance of a new impact crater on the moon can be predicted, but it's going to happen on March 4, when a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into it.
The rocket launched in 2015, carrying NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) probe into a position 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, facing the Sun. But the expended upper stage of the rocket had insufficient speed to escape into an independent orbit around the Sun, and was abandoned without an option to steer back into the Earth's atmosphere. That would be normal practice, allowing stages to burn up on re-entry, thus reducing the clutter in near-Earth space caused by dangerous junk.
Since February 2015, the 14 meters long, derelict upper stage, massing nearly four tons, has therefore been in a wide orbit about the Earth. Its precise movements have been hard to predict, because they were influenced by lunar and solar gravity as well as the Earth's.
But we can now tell that it is going to hit the moon on March 4 at a speed of about 2.6 kilometers per second. This will make a crater about 19 meters in diameter—a prospect that has provoked outrage in social media circles from people who are appalled that human negligence will disfigure the moon in this way.
Time lapse movie made from 5 hours of images, recorded by DSCOVR.
Misplaced concern
It is, however, surely more environmentally friendly for a dead rocket to end up on the moon than being scattered through Earth's upper atmosphere in the form of metal oxide particles, which is what happens during a re-entry burn up. The moon also lacks an atmosphere to shield it from space debris, so it is accumulating naturally occurring impact craters all the time.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has already imaged a 19 meter crater formed when a half a ton lump of asteroid rock traveling about ten times faster than the Falcon 9 struck the surface in March 2013. Over the past decade, hundreds of smaller impacts, by chunks of rock weighing as little as half a kilogram, have been spotted by NASA's lunar impact monitoring project.
The coming impact will be on the lunar far side, so we wont be able to see it happen. But spacecraft orbiting the moon will be able to image the impact crater afterwards. Will we learn anything new? There have been several previous deliberate crashes onto the moon, so we know what to expect.
For example, the considerably larger upper stages of rockets used in the Apollo landing missions were crashed so that vibrations detected by seismometers installed on the surface could be used to investigate the lunar interior. The Apollo seismometers were turned off long ago, and is not clear whether the seismometer on China's Chang'e 4 far side lunar lander will be able to provide any useful data this time.
A precisely targeted, deliberate crash was also achieved in 2009 when NASA's LCROSS mission sent a projectile into a permanently shadowed polar crater—making a smaller crater on its icy floor and throwing up a plume that proved to contain the hoped for water vapor.
Biological contamination
So I'm not bothered by one more crater being made on the moon. It already has something like half a billion craters that are ten meters or more in diameter. What we should worry about is contaminating the moon with living microbes, or molecules that could in the future be mistaken as evidence of former life on the moon.
30 metre wide crater on the Moon from the Apollo 13 Saturn IVB upper stage. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
Most nations have signed up to planetary protection protocols that seek to minimize the risk of biological contamination from Earth to another body (and also from another body back to Earth). The protocols are in place for reasons both ethical and scientific. The ethical argument is that it would not be right to put at risk any ecosystem that may exist on another body by introducing organisms from Earth that might thrive there. The scientific argument is that we want to study and understand the natural conditions on each other body, so we should not risk compromising or destroying them by wanton contamination.
The biggest recent breach of the COSPAR protocols was in 2019 when the privately funded Israeli lunar lander Beresheet crashed on the moon, carrying DNA samples and thousands of tardigrades. Those are half millimeter long organisms that can tolerate, though not be active in, the vacuum of space. These, and presumably also the microbes that lived in their guts, are now scattered across the Beresheet crash site.
Most likely none of these will end up in a niche where there is enough water for them to revive and become active, but that is not a risk we should be taking. The DSCOVR Falcon 9 was not sterile upon launch, but nor did it carry a biological cargo. It's also been seven years in space, so by now the risk of biocontamination is vanishingly small—but the more things we send to the moon, the more careful we must be and the harder it will be to enforce any rules.
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Scientists have detected what appears to be an incredibly dense star behaving unlike anything else ever seen - and suspect it might be a type of exotic astrophysical object whose existence has until now been only hypothesised.
The object, spotted using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in outback Western Australia, unleashed huge bursts of energy roughly three times per hour - every 18 minutes or so for a minute - when viewed from Earth during two months in 2018, the researchers said.
It may be the first known example of what is called an "ultra-long period magnetar," they said.
This is a variety of a neutron star - the compact collapsed core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova - that is highly magnetised and rotates relatively slowly, as opposed to fast-spinning neutron star objects called pulsars that appear from Earth to be blinking on and off within milliseconds or seconds.
"It's mind-bogglingly wonderful that the universe is still full of surprises," said radio astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature.
Switching on and off
The object may be continuously beaming strong radio waves from its north and south poles. As that beam swept through the line of sight from Earth's vantage point, it appeared to switch on every 18 minutes and 11 seconds for about 30 to 60 seconds, then off again.
That is an effect similar to a lighthouse with a rotating light that seems to blink on and off from the perspective of a stationary observer.
It was found in a broader research effort mapping celestial sources of radio waves.
"This is an entirely new kind of source that no one has ever seen before," Hurley-Walker said.
"It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that. And it’s really quite close to us... It’s in our galactic backyard.
"And while we know the Milky Way must be full of slowly spinning neutron stars, no one expected them to be able to produce bright radio emission like this. It's a dream come true to find something so totally unexpected and amazing".
It is located relatively close to Earth in cosmic terms, roughly 4,200 light years - the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km - away.
"It's incredibly bright when it's 'on.' It's one of the brightest radio sources in the sky," said study co-author Tyrone O'Doherty, a Curtin ICRAR node doctoral student who found the object.
It fits into a category called "transients" - astrophysical objects that appear to turn on for limited amounts of time. "Slow transients" like a supernova can suddenly appear then disappear a few months later as the stellar explosion dissipates.
White dwarf
Pulsars are "fast transients," rapidly blinking on and off. Transients between these two extremes had remained elusive until now.
Neutron stars including pulsars are among the universe's densest objects. They are roughly 7.5 miles (12 km) in diameter - akin to the size of a city - but with more mass than our sun. A neutron star with an extreme magnetic field, a magnetar, could potentially power the radio pulsations, the researchers said.
As for why its rotation is so slow, it could be that it is very old and has slowed over time, according to Curtin ICRAR node astrophysicist and study co-author Gemma Anderson.
"This is more likely to be the 'first of its kind' rather than 'one of a kind," Anderson said.
It also perhaps could be another type of dead star called a white dwarf or something completely unknown, Hurley-Walker said.
The researchers have not detected it since 2018.
"We are now monitoring this object using many different radio telescopes in the hope it switches 'on' again," Anderson said.
Astronomers are still finding strange objects that defy expectations. According to BBC News, researchers from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have discovered a strange spinning Milky Way object about 4,000 light-years away. The repeating transient sent a giant burst of polarized radio energy for a full minute every 18 minutes, and was appearing and disappearing over the course of a few hours of observations — for context, a pulsar's burst lasts a few seconds or less.
The curiosity is smaller than the Sun, but is one of the brightest radio objects in the sky during its bursts. The disappearances were also unique, according to team lead Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker. Curtin student Tyrone O'Doherty first spotted the object using the combination of Australia's Murchison Widefield Array and a new observation method.
There might be an existing explanation. Hurley-Walker said the data matched a predicted (but as-yet undiscovered) object known as an ultra-long period magnetar. That is, it's a neutron star spinning at a relatively lethargic pace. Even if that's the case, though, scientists want to know why the object is converting magnetic energy to radio waves at such an efficient rate. It could also be a white dwarf with an unusually strong magnetic field, or something else altogether.
The frenzy appears to have subsided, but Hurley-Walker is still tracking the object in case it exhibits the odd behavior again. She also plans to sift through the Murchison array's archives to learn if there were similar objects before. Whatever this entity might be, the findings are significant — they could shape our understanding of stars and the universe at large.
(Bloomberg) -- Debris from one of Elon Musk’s rockets will crash into the moon in March, astronomers said, highlighting the growing risk from space junk as companies plan on launching tens of thousands of satellites.
The second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, sent into orbit by Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in 2015, will hit on March 4, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, which is operated by Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution.
“For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4,” he tweeted on his verified Twitter account, confirming predictions made by Bill Gray of Project Pluto, which supplies software to amateur and professional astronomers.
SpaceX is in the midst of a rapid expansion of Starlink, a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites that will eventually number more than 30,000 and provide high-speed internet coverage around the world.
Rivals such as OneWeb, backed by Indian telecommunications tycoon Sunil Mittal, have similar constellations planned. Boeing Co., Astra Space Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kuiper Systems LLC are among companies that have applied to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for more than 35,000 satellites.
All those launches raise the chances of more uncontrolled crashes, space experts say.
The Chinese government last month filed a complaint with the United Nations alleging that two of Musk’s satellites had near misses with China’s space station.
Australian scientists say they have discovered an unknown spinning object in the Milky Way that they claim is unlike anything seen before.
The object - first discovered by a university student - has been observed to release a huge burst of radio energy for a full minute every 18 minutes.
Objects that pulse energy in the universe are often documented. But researchers say something that turns on for a minute is highly unusual.
The team is working to understand more.
The object was first discovered by Curtin University Honours student Tyrone O'Doherty in a region of the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array, using a telescope and a new technique he had developed.
Mr O'Doherty was part of a team led by astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
"[It] was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations," she was quoted as saying in a media release from ICRAR that documented the discovery.
"That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that."
Objects that turn on and off in the Universe are not new to astronomers—they call them "transients".
But an object that turned on for a full minute was "really weird," ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist Dr Gemma Anderson, was quoted as saying in the release.
ICRAR added that after trawling back through years of data, the team was able to establish that the object is about 4,000 light-years from Earth, is incredibly bright and has an extremely strong magnetic field.
Theories around what the object might be include a neutron star or a white dwarf - a term used for the remnants of a collapsed star. However, much of the discovery remains a mystery.
"More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we'd never noticed before," Dr Hurley-Walker said. "I'm looking forward to understanding this object and then extending the search to find more."
The much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is unfurled and parked in its final orbit, roughly one million miles away from Earth.
While we’ll likely never see it up close and personal ever again, a remotely-controlled telescope has provided us with one of the first images of the Webb in orbit — showing the JWST as a distant dot that’s virtually indistinguishable amongst the stars and galaxies in the image.
Check out the photo for yourself below:
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Credit: Virtual Telescope Project
Robot Astronomer
The stunning image itself was captured by a 17-inch telescope dubbed “Elena.” It’s managed by the Virtual Telescope Project 2.0, which provides astronomers access to two remotely-controlled robotic telescopes in Rome, Italy.
The photo was snapped just as the Webb arrived at its final destination at the Lagrange Point 2 (L2) — and if that’s not enough for you, they were able to cobble together a short video of it moving through the inky blackness of space.
Webb’s Future
NASA initially estimated that the Webb had enough fuel for a roughly 10 year mission. During that time, scientists hope that it’ll provide us with the most detailed — and hopefully revealing — images of deep space we’ve ever seen.
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However, some experts believe it’ll be able to work for a lot longer than that.
“You’ve heard numbers around 20 years. We think that’s probably a good ballpark,” Keith Parrish, the JWST observatory commissioning manager at NASA, said in a press teleconference attended by SpaceNews after the Webb reached L2 on Monday. “This is capping off just a remarkable 30 days.”
So hopefully, we’ll have plenty more images of — and from — the Webb for a long time to come.
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An out-of-control booster from a SpaceX rocket has been drifting through space for seven years, and astronomers say it’s now on a collision course with the moon.
The booster was originally launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral in February 2015 as part of the Falcon 9 interplanetary mission.
The booster, also known as the second stage, was left derelict and on a shaky orbit after propelling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Deep Space Climate Observatory far into space to help monitor space weather.
Here, it was left in a kind of purgatory, where it was too far from Earth to tumble back down, but not far enough to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth-moon system.
Bill Gray of space blog projectpluto.com first reported the upcoming crash, and said he believes it’s “the first unintentional case” of space junk colliding with the moon.
Gray, along with other space observers, believes the booster, which weighs approximately four metric tons, will strike the far side of the moon near its equator at 2.58 kilometres per second on March 4.
Unlike Earth, the moon doesn’t have a thick atmosphere to help break up foreign objects, so the booster is expected to slam into the surface and add another mark to the moon’s already heavily cratered crust.
Astronomers, including Harvard University’s own Jonathan McDowell, say that there’s nothing to worry about — this won’t destroy the moon or really cause much damage.
For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. It's interesting, but not a big deal.
Even still, it’s tough to predict exactly what will happen and where the booster will hit as there are many extraneous factors like sunlight “pushing” on the rocket and “ambiguity in measuring rotation periods,” which may slightly alter its orbit, according to Gray.
Because it looks like the booster will hit the far side of the moon, it will more than likely not be visible to the naked eye (or with a telescope) from Earth. Additionally, the collision is projected to take place a few days after the new moon, which means the majority of the moon will be obscured from vision anyway.
Interestingly, while this may be the first instance of space junk hitting the moon, it’s not the first time a human-made device has collided with it; NASA launched a rocket at the moon in 2009 — on purpose — in order to detect what would emerge upon impact.
The LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission and collision, which was not visible from Earth, helped confirm that there is water on the moon.
Many space experts and enthusiasts are excited for the upcoming crash, as it could also inadvertently provide further information about our satellite neighbour.
As of this writing, SpaceX and NASA have not publicly commented on the impending collision.
There's been a lot of breath-holding since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on Dec. 25, but now astronomers can exhale: The $10-billion US telescope safely reached its destination Monday afternoon.
🏠 Home, home on Lagrange! We successfully completed our burn to start <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NASAWebb?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NASAWebb</a> on its orbit of the 2nd Lagrange point (L2), about a million miles (1.5 million km) from Earth. It will orbit the Sun, in line with Earth, as it orbits L2. <a href="https://t.co/bsIU3vccAj">https://t.co/bsIU3vccAj</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/UnfoldTheUniverse?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#UnfoldTheUniverse</a> <a href="https://t.co/WDhuANEP5h">pic.twitter.com/WDhuANEP5h</a>
"We're just really excited to announce today that Webb is officially on station at it's L2 orbit," Keith Parrish, Webb observatory commissioning manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said in a media teleconference. "This is just capping off a remarkable 30 days."
Lagrange Points are a kind of sweet spot in space where there is a pull between two objects like the sun and Earth and spacecraft can operate in either a stable or semi-stable orbit. Webb will sit at Lagrangian Point 2, or L2.
Webb is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990. Hubble is still hard at work, providing astronomers with insight into our universe, but Webb is a new and improved telescope that will peer further back to a time when our universe was in its infancy.
Although Webb has arrived safely at the Lagrange Point 2, the telescope will still undergo several months of testing to ensure everything is functioning properly.
After that, the science begins.
Lagrange Points are positions in space where the gravitational forces of a two-body system like the sun and the Earth produce enhanced regions of attraction and repulsion. These can be used by spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position. (NASA/WMAP Science Team)
"It's going to be amazing when we get the first data coming back," said Chris Willott, an astronomer with National Research Council Canada's Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre.
"I can't even predict the things we're going to discover just within the first year. There are so many new things we're going to discover."
Willott heads the CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) observing program, which will study some of the first galaxies that formed, as well as galaxy clusters. NIRISS stands for Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph.
One of the things Willott is most interested in is black holes.
"We know that today most galaxies have large black holes in their centres, including our own galaxy," he said. "So I'll be trying to look at how those black holes got started in the very early universe because we know that some of them got very large, very quickly, which is kind of surprising."
This picture from a NASA TV broadcast shows the James Webb Space Telescope shortly after launching from French Guiana, on December 25. (NASA TV)
Large telescopes (even ground-based ones) are available to professional astronomers who want to use them. However, they first have to submit proposals and have them approved.
The reason Willott and more than a dozen other Canadian astronomers are getting time on Webb is that Canada contributed to the groundbreaking telescope by providing instruments: the fine-guidance sensor, which allows it to point and focus on objects. and the NIRISS that will be used to study the composition of the atmospheres on distant planets — called exoplanets — that orbit other stars.
Now, these astronomers are eagerly awaiting their time to study everything from the earliest galaxy formations to rogue planets (planets that don't have stars), and look for possible signs of life on other exoplanets.
Using Webb, they will practically time-travel as they look back to a nascent universe.
Black holes and habitable worlds
Any light that reaches us takes time. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach us. So, when we (safely) look at the sun, we are looking at it as it was eight minutes ago.
The same applies to any light that reaches us from stars or galaxies. The farther they are, the farther back in time we're looking. But we need powerful telescopes to look farther back, and Webb is the most powerful telescope capable of doing that.
To put it in perspective, our universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. Webb will be able to see back to when it was roughly 100,000 years old, when the first stars and galaxies were forming.
WATCH | The National: Why Webb is such a big deal:
Why the James Webb Space Telescope is such a big deal
1 month ago
Duration 1:59
NASA is gearing up to launch the James Webb Space Telescope — a device 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, capable of seeing ancient light from billions of years ago. 1:59
Els Peeters will be one of the first Canadian astronomers to use Webb. Her research centres around radiation — which is mostly seen in infrared light, something that Webb is built to see in — and how it influences young stars. Until now, she hasn't been able to peer through the dust and debris that so often surrounds nebulas hosting young stars.
"The way I think about it is if you take a picture of a crowd cheering on, for example, a basketball game of the Raptors — with the old cameras, every face of the person would be maybe four pixels," said Peeters, who is a professor in the physics and astronomy department at Western University in London, Ont.
"With the new cameras, every face, [will be] maybe 1,000 pixels. And so if you have many, many pixels over the same area, that means that you can track how the characteristics of a person's face can change.
"Now, you can say 'has blue eyes,' 'it has a broad nose' or 'a tiny nose' and these kinds of stuff."
This illustration compares the abilities of several space-based telescopes and their ability to see back in time. (NASA and Ann Feild)
This preciseness will allow her and her team to study new star formation in an unprecedented way.
Erik Rosolowsky is an associate professor of physics at Edmonton's University of Alberta who will be using the telescope to study star formation.
"What I'm going to be doing is trying to establish how long it takes for stars to form," he said. "This is a big question in astrophysics, and you might think that this is a boring kind of science topic or something, but the time it takes for stars to form actually tells us a bunch about how they form."
And that can tell us a lot about not only our universe, but our galaxy as well as perhaps our own solar system.
"With James Webb, for the first time, we [will be able to] see individual stars forming in this nearby spiral galaxy called the Triangulum Galaxy," Roslowsky said. "It's a relatively simple experiment, but it's been impossible to do until we've had the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope."
One of the most intriguing observations will be of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
"We don't know if those planets have an atmosphere or not," said Olivia Lee Hamilton, a Ph.D. student at the University of Montreal who will be using Webb to study the atmospheres of the innermost of these planets — the ones with the best chance of habitability.
LISTEN | Quirks and Quarks: Webb launches with some help from Canada
Quirks and Quarks16:16NASA's 10 billion dollar space telescope is finally going to launch — with CanCon
Canada gets a hefty role with the James Webb Space Telescope, thanks to new instruments 16:16
"They might be balls of rock with no atmosphere at all, we don't know that. So we're trying to figure that out," she said. "If they do have an atmosphere, that means there may be a chance to look for traces of life in those atmospheres."
Studying these things — star and galaxy formation, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — may seem inconsequential and unimportant. But astronomers believe that it's all part of humanity: understanding our place in the universe.
"It's really about understanding our whole universe, understanding where we came from and what the future will be," Willott said. "It's a fundamental question for humans, I think, to understand, you know, what are we doing here and what is the nature of the universe?"
McGill University's Professor Galen Halverson explores for ironstone deposits along a rocky ridge in the Wernecke Mountains (Yukon, Canada). Credit: Maxwell Lechte
