China's Space Junk // Graphene on the Moon // Best Meteor Shower Is Here

it's time for the pad's meteor shower Gaia has found hundreds of asteroid moons Starliner is still in question and where does the moon's atmosphere come from all this and more in this week's space bites we're nearing the middle of August and that means that my favorite meteor shower is back and those are the perad meteor shower now the perseids aren't the best meteor shower they're not the ones that give you the most meteors per minute that's probably the Geminids but what makes the perad meteor shower the best in my opinion is that here in the northern hemisphere it's summertime and so it's warm outside and so you can lie outside on a blanket with your eyes on the sky and you can watch an amazing spectacle of the meteors for folks in the southern hemisphere I remember you exist I know and unfortunately you know you're going to have your winter so this one's for us the per seeds occur because the Earth is passing through through the tail of comet Swift Tuttle which takes 133 years to orbit around the Sun and is constantly replenishing this trail of debris and then the earth goes through the trail and then we see that as a meteor shower here on Earth historically the perseids have gone up to about 150 meteors per minute now it's expected that we're going to see about 100 meteors per minute under perfect conditions and and the conditions aren't perfect this year so the big question of whether or not we're going to get a good meteor shower or a bad meteor shower just depends on the moon if we have a full moon it's a wash don't even bother if it's a new moon it's perfect you can go out anytime you want at night and you'll be able to see the meteor shower what we've got is a waxing crescent moon that's going to set around 11:30 p.m. so if you go before then you're going to have some light pollution coming from the moon but if you go out after the moon has set then you should be good for the rest of the night so here here's my recommendation if you want to be able to see the perad this year first plan to start later so maybe have a nap or even go to bed and then set an alarm to wake you and the kids up at midnight kids love this be woken up at midnight and then go to your planned spot and go lie down and watch the meteor shower for as long as you can stay awake and that actually matches nicely cuz typically a meteor shower will be best at the very darkest part of the night so 1:00 a.m. 2 a.m. that's when's going to be perfect the meteor shower has actually already begun and will go all the way through till September but it really Peaks between August 11th and 12th so the evening of either of those nights you should be good to go and I have the Fondest Memories of watching the pered meteor shower with my parents I then would make this a regular occurrence with my children every year and so I hope that for a lot of you watching you remember the perc IDs and you want to share this with the people that you love so PL plan something fun go out and watch the pered metor shower this year Gaia finds hundreds of moons around asteroids okay Mark off your Fraser bingo card now I'm going to talk about Gaia the Gaia mission is using astrometry to measure the positions and motions of billion plus stars in the Milky Way but that same technique has been used to observe over 150,000 asteroids here in the solar system I mean when you think about it what's the difference between a star and an asteroid well they're both just points of light in gaia's sensors Gaia can detect the presence of planets orbiting around other stars so not just watching the motion of the star but can actually watch the wobble of the stars that is making these little spirals in the sky which is caused by the gravity of the planet orbiting around it well the same thing can happen with an asteroid and its Moon astronomers knew of about 500 asteroids with moons here in the solar system and like the most famous example of course is dimus and its moon dimorphus this dimorphus is the moon that the dart Mission crashed into to see how it would change the orbit of demorphis around the larger asteroid and most recently we saw the discovery of a tiny Moon orbiting around asteroid dinkes by the Lucy Mission and in fact that Tiny Moon is not just a single moon it's a contact binary Moon where you've got two blobs of material attached together and so in the new Gaia data release 3 astronomers have located 352 new asteroids with moons so before they knew of 500 now they knew of an additional 352 and this is just the beginning so we're waiting on Gaia data release 4 which comes out in 2026 and they're going to find plenty more and it's really interesting when you think about the processes that cause asteroids to get moons they can't capture them in the same way that some planets might have captured moons instead the asteroids will spin up and as they get too fast bits of material will start to float away from the surface of the asteroid and that will collect together into a moon we talked about this last week that if you tried to just set foot on dimorphus you would just sink in like a ball pit because it's not really a solid rock it's just a collection of debris held roughly by gravity and now we know of 352 more of them China finds graphine in its lunar samples graphine is an amazing material was only recently discovered back in 2004 and it consists of carbon atoms in this hexagonal lattice I always think of it like a hex grid for a video game since its Discovery researchers have found all kinds of Novel uses for this amazing material it's used for displays it's used for medical devices it creates anti-corrosion coatings the list goes on and it's believed that graphine can form naturally in space Maybe 2% of the carbon atoms out there in space are already arranged in graphine well now researchers studying samples brought back by China's chonga 5 Mission found graphine mixed in with the lunar regli now the pieces are really small they're just a couple of millimeters across but they probably formed out there in space either landed on the moon or were formed by carbon atoms on the surface of the Moon as part of its volcanic processes one of the reasons that this is interesting is because by finding graphine on the surface of the Moon we can learn more about the processes that formed both the moon itself as well as the surface that we can see today but also graphine is this kind of amazing material that probably future Space Explorers on the moon will be able to use for some purposes and so we've got interesting scientific discovery but also a potential resource that we can use for a future mission to the moon now to be clear this was in the chonga 5 Mission which returned to samples back in 2020 the new one chonga 6 the one that brought in samples from The Far Side of the Moon we haven't heard if they found the same kind of samples but we must assume they're probably there I wouldn't say that because we don't know and they weren't found in the Apollo Moon samples so no answer for Starliner so last week week I told you that we didn't know what was going to happen with the Boeing Starliner Capsule that's attached to the International Space Station of course it had problems with its thrusters with helium leaks and here we are a week later and we still don't know but NASA held a press conference this week where they explained that they are wrestling internally with the issue so it is not that simple obviously there are some camps that think okay it's safe to bring them back on on the Starliner there are other camp that think it is probably unsafe to bring them back on Starliner and they need to find out so at some point Starliner will be brought home and it may or may not have astronauts on board if it does pass through the safety requirements then we could see Williams and Wilmore get on board Starliner and come back to earth but if there's still ambiguity and concern then they might have to come up with Plan B and so plan B is that the next crew of astronauts that was going to launch to the International Space Station was going to have four people on board that would be crew nine and so instead of launching four people they'll only launch two and then the two astronauts that were stranded on the station will become part of that mission they'll stick around for several more months fulfill the requirements of those other two astronauts and then come back down to earth with the other two astronauts so that's the plan the backup plan and that sounds pretty reasonable to me I'm sure for two as astronauts to spend an extra 5 months in orbit or I guess what will it be by the time this is over 8 months in orbit anyway for astronauts to be able to spend many more months in orbit I think that's probably looking like a pretty sweet deal and if they can ride home on a crew Dragon which we know is a very safe spacecraft that's a that's icing on the cake so I think at this point Boeing is the one who's losing out here futurism had the best title which was that that NASA is going to clown car astronauts to the International Space Station which I thought was so good just imagine them jamming astronauts into a crew Dragon to see how many will hold and that the title that I was going to probably use it's finally we'll learn how many astronauts will fit inside a crew Dragon but it's only going to be four so I want to see six one other note on a story that we've been following and that is the Polaris Dawn Mission this is where a group of private astronauts are going to fly into orbit on a crew Dragon spacecraft spend a week in space and then return they have new SpaceX space suits that are capable of doing a spacewalk so they're going to have a tether attached to the spacecraft and they're going to be able to go outside and walk in space we weren't sure when this mission was going to launch we thought maybe by the end of July now we got an official launch date August 26th so we're just a few weeks away from the next private launch for po and the first private spacewalk planets forming around binary stars now we know of over 5,000 exoplanets but most of these are Singleton where you've got a single star with one or several planets orbiting around it but many stars in the universe are binary stars trary stars and in some cases planets have been found in multiple star systems so we know they can form and we've seen planets forming around young Stars I'll show you a couple of examples of pictures actual pictures of protoplanetary discs around stars and now astronomers have found examples of protoplanetary discs around binary stars in other words you've got planetary discs around stars that are orbiting around each other so there's a couple of examples that astronomers have found one is called DF and the other one is called fo to and the discovery was made in com com ation between the alma telescope the ATAC comma large millimeter array and this is the one that gives us those incredible images of protoplanetary systems around young stars and that was contributed to by the kek 2 Observatory which is one of the largest telescopes in the world and so with the DF example they had two stars orbiting around 14 astronomical units apart so 14 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun in the DFT to example you've got one star with an accretion disc around it and you've got material that is actively being accreted in the planets are forming and then in the other star in the system it's older and so this process of accretion has finished and so probably the planets are more mature in this region and so it's really interesting to see that we're actually able to watch not just single stars with planets forming around them but also see multiple star systems with planets forming around them and this is really interesting because we don't know the kind of Mayhem that happens with all of the gravitational interactions between the two stars do binary star systems kick out more planets than single systems and when we think about the discovery of these Jupiter Mass objects in the Orion Nebula are these the source of these free floating Jupiter Mass planets orbiting around in the Orion Nebula so of course this is the next thing that astronomers are finding examples of and it's really exciting to me every week we do a vote on our Channel where you tell us what you thought was the most interesting space news story of the week and the winner this week was the discovery that oxygen is being produced by nodules at the bottom of the ocean so thank you everybody who voted now we will post the vote for the stories this week into the community tab on our YouTube channel but if you're just scrolling through YouTube videos on your phone you see the vote just give a second and give us a vote now the best chance to see that is if you are subscribed to our Channel you click on the notifications Bell and you watch a bunch of our videos to train the algorithm that you want to see more of our stuff China just added a bunch of space debris several groups are building satellite Mega constellations the most famous example of this of course is the starlink constellation that will eventually launch about 40,000 satellites into low earth orbit there's the Kyper constellation from Amazon and other groups are working on their own versions of these satellite Mega constellations and of course China is doing its own version there's is called chanan which translates to thousand sales and these are going to orbit at a bit of a higher altitude than the Starling satellites and we saw the first launch of 18 of their satellites this week the problem is that the upper stage that boosted them into their orbit tore itself apart I guess rotated broke into pieces and now people are tracking about 50 chunks of space debris following the satellites as they go to their orbit and the problem is that these were on their way to an 800 kilm orbit which is a lot higher than starlinks than the International Space Station and with these Mega constellations although they are a lot of satellites they orbit very low and so they experience a lot of atmospheric resistance if they're not f firing their thrusters constantly to maintain their altitude the aerodynamic resistance picks up and drags them back into the atmosphere and they burn up within just a couple of years but at 800 kilm then debris can last for decades so the problem is we've got 18 satellites for Omega Constellation and 50 pieces of debris that are going to be stuck in this orbit for a long long time and the plan is eventually they want to launch about 14,000 of these communication satellites to provide high-speed internet to China just like starlink will provide it to the world now I want to give a shout out to Andrew Jones at space news who did the reporting on this Andrew is like the most knowledgeable person about China's rocket launches their space exploration has done amazing reporting and so when you see his name you can feel pretty confident that it's really good reporting on what China is up to where is the Moon's atmosphere coming from the moon has an atmosphere now now I know that sounds crazy we always say that the moon has no atmosphere so how can the moon have an atmosphere well it doesn't actually have an atmosphere it has what's called an exosphere and these are a very sparse collection of particles that are above the surface of the Moon you wouldn't feel them you wouldn't notice them but with the right kinds of instruments you can detect this and the question the scientists have had is where does this exosphere come from now there's a bunch of sources that are fairly welln one is that the solar wind is blasting and is hitting the moon and particles from the solar wind can Ricochet off of the surface of the Moon they can release new particles of the regolith and these can sort of scatter around the area around the moon and then the other source is micrometeorites that are crashing into the moon all the time and so now a new paper suggests that in fact the vast majority of the Moon exosphere is coming from these meteoroids and when you think about the physics involved like you're going to have this little piece of dust that's going to strike the surface of the Moon it's going to kick up some debris that debris in the lower gravity on the moon is going to bounce a bit on the surface of the Moon eventually it's going to either come to rest on the surface of the Moon or it's going to be kicked back out into orbit so fast that it's going to escape the grasp of the Moon and just go into Earth orbit or go into a solar orbit and so there is so much debris striking the surface of the Moon that is able to keep this exosphere replenished nonstop so if you are going to go to the Moon just watch your head now you're watching this week's space bites but I am writing this week's email newsletter which I send out to 70,000 of my closest friends every Friday and it contains many more stories than what we're talking about here in space bites for example if you read this week's edition you will see stories about how a black hole could eat a neutron star from the inside out how elliptical orbits could be essential to the habitability of rocky planets and how advanced civilizations could be using Quantum communication systems and that's why we don't detect them so those are just examples there's many more stories in the newsletter it's completely free I write every word there's no ads in the newsletter you can sign up go to Universe today.com newsletter have you been wondering about when we're going to find out the results of James web observing the trapis one planet well I've got an answer for you but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Adam Schaefer David gilonite David matz Dennis alberty Dustin cable Jeremy murn Jim Burke Jordan young Josh ultz Paul Roach spiders swap. Steven kraki Steven fer monley and Vlad chiplin who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon this has got to be one of the biggest questions that I get from the viewers when are we going to find out the status of the trapis one planets these are some of the closest most obvious perfect places for James web to scan for evidence of an atmosphere seven Earth siiz worlds orbiting around a red dwarf star several of which are in the habitable zone do they have an atmosphere James web can find out and has been tasked to scan their atmospheres and we still haven't found out the answer I did a really interesting interview with Julian DT from MIT he is working on the road map for obser serving the trapis one exoplanets and I put the question to him why haven't we found out about trapis 1 what is it going to take when will we learn and what are the implications for red dwarf stars having exoplanets so people thought this interview was amazing really eye openening and so if you have this question and you want the answer it's not going to be the answer you you want but it is an answer definitely check out that interview all right we'll see you next week