This Supernova Candidate Turned Out To Be Something Completely Different

Is this a supernova ready to explode, or is it just a trick of the light? A mission to Halley's Comet in 2060. An amazing new image from Vera Rubin. Webb fails to find an exoburn. And in Space Bites Plus, some black holes formed much faster than their galaxies. All this and more in this week's Space Bites. Hello from Iceland, where I am recording this week's episode of Space Bites at the end of a pier in Reykjavik, sitting on the ground, because everyone seems to want to play music out of their boats and I had to find some place in the middle of nowhere. Hopefully I won't have to move again. But anyway, let's get into this week's space news. So the first story comes from Evan Goff, who is reporting this on Universe Today. And this is about a star that astronomers thought was ready to explode. The star is called AT2019 Blue, and it has been giving off a series of eruptions for the last couple of years. In fact, 27 since it was discovered in 2019. And astronomers thought that this is the kind of sign that you would see coming from a star moments before it's about to explode. You know, we know that Betelgeuse is set to explode in the next million years or so. But wouldn't it be great if we could find a star that is much closer to explode? Maybe something that's going to detonate in the next decade or so. And they thought that these explosions coming off the star, this is the indication, the kind of thing that you might see as a star is getting ready to finally detonate. But now a new paper says not so fast. In fact, there might be another explanation for this star with all of these eruptions. And so what happened was the astronomers used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to image the region around this star. And the star is 29 million light years away. So it is not close. And this is a very tricky observation. And what they found was that there was this blob of X-ray radiation that was very close to the star, but not actually at the star. And so the theory from these researchers is not that the star is about to explode, but in fact, that this is some kind of companion object, some kind of compact object like a black hole or a neutron star that is in orbit around this star. Or I guess the star is in orbit around the black hole. Anyway, every couple of months as it gets close, the black hole nips a little piece of material away from the star, consumes it. This causes an eruption on the star. This causes a flash of X-ray radiation coming from this compact object. And so this will explain these series of eruptions. So unfortunately, astronomers are going to have to find another example. And that's too bad because this is the dream, right? When astronomers find supernovae, they detect them after the fact. They randomly explode somewhere in the universe. But wouldn't it be great if you could find some star that's about to explode, make continuous observations up to the moment that it actually detonates. And then you see that it's exploded, you jump on it right away and catch the unfolding wreckage from the supernova. And so unfortunately, this is probably not going to be your star. It also will probably detonate in the next random few million years, if you're willing to wait. This next story comes from Andy Thomaswick. And this is coverage of a friend of the show, Dr. David Kipping. Of course, he is the host of the Cool Worlds Lab. He is a professional astronomer and a YouTuber. And it's an all-around great guy. And he has been using James Webb to search for exomoons. And originally, he used James Webb to look at the star Kepler-167e. And he figured this was the perfect candidate to find a moon orbiting around this known planet. Well, they did their observations with James Webb, and they failed to turn up an exomoon. And, you know, it's not that there wasn't something there, it's that they only were able to make one observation, and there was a lot of noise, and they were not able to definitively rule out whether this was just instrument noise, or whether this was actually a moon orbiting around this planet. And so, you know, gotta appreciate the honesty. And so Kipping and the team went back and they said, Well, let's go and look at a star with a planet orbiting around it that we can be almost sure has no moon, but we can do a lot of observations. So they picked the planet LP899c. This is a planet that orbits around a star every 8.46 days. And the star is about 105 light years away from us. And so he and his team were able to make 12 transit observations of the planet as it was passing in front of the star with James Webb. And this was, you know, 12 observations compared to one. And they were able to rule out with 99% certainty any exomoon orbiting around that planet. Anything bigger than, say, 10% the radii of the Earth, it definitely doesn't have a moon larger than that. And it's weird. Like, why are they celebrating a non-detection? Well, after learning that an actual detection with only one observation is really difficult to do, they've gone back and done 12 observations of a planet that is much more simple to observe. It's just regularly passing in front of the star, and that will help them calibrate for future exomoon searches. So I'm pretty sure David is not done with searching for exomoons, and this is just like another tool in the toolkit. Next, another story from Andy Thomaswick, and this is about Halley's Comet. Did you see Halley's Comet when it came by in 1986? I was 15 at the time, and I didn't see it with my eyes, although my father did. I was living in Vancouver at the time, and so I didn't have good, you know, non-light pollution skies. But plenty of people saw it back in 1986. And it wasn't one of its more spectacular showings, but still, I mean, this is a regular comet that comes back. And so astronomers around the world observed it, and there was a fleet of spacecraft that were sent to do imaging of it. There was some Soviet probes sent, and of course there was the European Space Agency's Giotto mission. And that's where you get this picture of Halley's Comet. It's on a regular trajectory around the Sun. It's very predictable, and it's going to be coming back around to make its closest approach in 2061. And so a new paper is proposing that they could do an actual rendezvous, go into orbit around Halley's Comet. And this is a very tricky maneuver to make, because the comet is on a highly inclined orbit. It's 162 degrees. Actually, orbits retrograde from the direction that the planets are going in the solar system. And so in order to make a rendezvous with the comet, the paper's authors propose that you have to do a couple of gravitational assists. One with Jupiter, one with Saturn. And you also need to use this sort of next generation ion engine called the Hall Effect Thruster. And so if you can do that, you can do these multiple gravitational assists, use this really efficient engine for long periods of time, you should be able to end up going into orbit around the comet in 2060. And then watch as Halley's Comet goes to its perihelion, its closest point to the Sun. You'll see the outbursts on its surface, and get a much better understanding of this comet that has sort of excited astronomers for hundreds of years. And it also makes you feel old, that it's going to be coming back, you know, and I was around the last time that it did. All right, another story about 3i Atlas, and this one comes from Matt Williams on Universe Today. When 3i Atlas made its close approach to the Sun, it went behind the Sun from our perspective, and then many observatories on Earth turned to watch it as it came out from behind the Sun. And one of these was the Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer, or WEAVE, which was mounted on the 4.2 meter William Herschel telescope. And now, you know, astronomers are continuing to crunch the data on 3i Atlas. We are a year after it was discovered, and still, there's so much data to go through. We're going to, we're probably going to hear new discoveries about this comet for years. They looked at the ionized gases coming out of the comet into its coma, and they identified five different ions in the stream. Things like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and they were able to measure the ratios of these different ions. And what they determined is that, you know, they don't know which system 3i Atlas actually formed in, but wherever it did, the only way it could have these ratios of these ions in its coma, is if it actually formed in a very cold part of its home star system. It had to form in conditions that were colder than minus 240 Celsius. And so this had to be out in the Kuiper Belt, or maybe even on the edges of the Oort cloud of its home star system. We don't know where it came from, but we do know a little more about the kinds of conditions it was in when it formed. Now we're going to talk about a couple of surveys. And these are two stories from Matt Williams. So the first story is about DESI, which is the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. And this is an instrument that we've been reporting on quite a bit, that has been giving us a lot of information about dark energy. This is the thing that's been telling us that maybe dark energy is decreasing over time. And so we've got this new all sky survey from DESI. Well, actually it's 75% of the sky. And this gigantic dataset that it has produced contains 5.6 trillion pixels. There's 4 billion objects in this image. You've got galaxies, black holes, asteroids, 75% of the sky, invisible and near infrared. And DESI recently completed its five-year primary mission. I mean, it's a ground-based telescope, but still they do missions. And this was able to give those first hints that maybe dark energy is decreasing over time. And now researchers have released this gigantic two-dimensional map of the universe produced from DESI. And the 2D map is a stepping stone to an upcoming 3D map. So you've got all of these separate galaxies. And now astronomers are able to separate each one and do a spectroscopic study, essentially measure the redshift of that galaxy. And then they'll be able to put it into its place in three dimensions. How far away is it? How far back in time are we seeing this galaxy? And then the second survey story also comes from Matt Williams, and this is about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. And they've just released their 20th edition of their release. And, you know, SDSS, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is just this mainstay in astronomy research. You know, if you want to do some kind of study about the universe, you're probably using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. And it's one of the most fascinating telescopes that are out there. The survey is part of the 2.5 meter Sloan Foundation telescope. And originally, they had these plates that they would put over top of the telescope instrument. Then they'd be able to do spectroscopy on the individual galaxy, essentially being able to separate it from everything else in the field of view. But now we're on to the fifth version of the instrument, and they have these fiber optic cables that move around on this instrument. So it's able to essentially, when it moves to a new spot in the sky, the cables move to a new location, and they're able to gather the data coming into the individual fiber optics. And so they're able to then provide the spectroscopic information, in addition to all of the locations and stuff of all these galaxies and stars. Now they've released the 20th version of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is really just amazing. And with this latest release, they partnered with the eRosita, which is an X-ray mission. And they were able to then take the spectroscopic information of 500,000 black holes, and 1.5 million stars. I love surveys. Every week we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news story of the week. And the winner last week was, no surprise, the launch of Nancy Grace Roman. So thank you everybody who voted on our channel. Of course, we will put this week's vote into the post tab here on our channel. So take a second, go find it, vote, subscribe to the channel, like this video, click on the notifications bell, obey the algorithm. The next story comes from Andy Thomaswick. And this is news that China's Chang'e 7 probe has been postponed. And this is the next of China's missions to the Moon. And Chang'e 7 is on the launch pad, on top of its Long March 5 rocket. And we've gotten the news that they've decided to push back the launch for a month, at least. And we don't know why, they just said that they are delaying the launch. And Chang'e 7 is going to be equipped with an orbiter, as well as a lander rover that's going to sit down on the surface of the Moon. And then it's got this hopper, which is a really cool idea. It can fire this thruster and move across kilometers of the surface of the Moon, testing out a new method of traveling across the surface of the Moon. So I'll let you know when the Chang'e 7 actually launches. This next story comes from Matt Williams, and it's about the Haiwuzhu 2 mission. And Haiwuzhu 2, of course, was the Japanese mission that visited the asteroid Ryugu and returned samples back to Earth. And then after completing its mission to Ryugu, it did another asteroid flyby, this time of an asteroid called Torafune. And when it was doing its flyby, Haiwuzhu 2 used a LIDAR instrument on board the spacecraft. This is a laser altimeter that was designed to measure the various properties of the asteroids that it did flybys of. So, you know, the height of surface features, the density of it, the porosity of it. And in this case, they fired this laser as the spacecraft was doing its flyby, and it took two samples. One reading it took at four seconds before its closest approach at 20 kilometers away, and then another at three seconds before its closest approach at 15 kilometers away. And this was just like a great test of this laser range finding system. You can actually see sort of all of the targets where the laser fired and the two times that it actually hit. It feels like, I don't know, they're playing a game of battleship, but with a spacecraft. And next up, I don't know, did we leave the best for almost the last? And this is an image from Vera Rubin. And, you know, we've been talking so much about Vera Rubin, just how it's coming out and how we're about to get science data. And this has all been really exciting, but we haven't actually got a lot of really great pictures coming from Vera Rubin. Well, here's one. This is a region of the sky called Sextant, and many of the world's great observatories have taken images of this region. So you got images of this from the Hubble Space Telescope. You've got X-ray observatories. And in fact, James Webb is doing its Cosmos survey of this region, which is kind of like a precursor to whatever will eventually become the James Webb Deep Field Survey. And so to participate in this, Vera Rubin did its own image of the Sextant region, the same region that James Webb is surveying, and that will allow them to compare the two telescopes. And so Vera Rubin did a series of observations of the region, and then they integrated all of these data into one beautiful picture of this region. And then you can compare this to the stuff done by Hubble, stuff done by James Webb. And it's great to have this place. It's like this reference image of the sky that astronomers always point their telescopes at to just try to see what's their version of the Sextant region. And so this is Vera Rubin's and it is wonderful. And of course, this is just a preview of what Rubin is going to be doing over its 10 year survey of the sky. These are the kinds of images it will produce, not just in one area that they focus on, but the whole sky that Rubin will be able to see. I hope you're enjoying this week's episode of Space Bites. Of course, this is a version here on YouTube, where you have to watch some ads at the very beginning of the episode. We can't turn them off. But there is a place you can go and watch our episodes without any ads. And of course, that is over on Patreon. So we will release the exact same video over on Patreon with no ads. And to encourage you to go watch it there, I'm going to put one additional story. And this week's bonus story is all about how some black holes grow much more quickly in the early universe. This boat is coming right for me, isn't it? This is like no place to hide. And of course, this is just a fraction of the stories that we're covering on Universe Today. 30 to 40 stories every week on the website. So if you want to get all the space news, you should just go to our website and just refresh it every couple of minutes if you want. But if you want, you know, to save some time, you should subscribe to my weekly email newsletter, which I send out every Friday. It's completely free. There's no ads. I write every word in the newsletter. You can go to universetoday.com slash newsletter to sign up. All right. Those were all of the stories that we had this episode. I'm going to give you some updates on what's happening with my travel. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingson, Andrea Pedretti, Boldazard Galactic Invader, Brian Bowdoin, Karen, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Balak, David Gilderman, David Matz, Enthraller Reading and Math for Toddlers, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Jeremy Mattern, Jim Burke, Marcel Switz, Michael Purcell, NASA Ocean Guide, Nord Space, OneStepAnimals.org. Please follow my nephew at vvirk6994, Weyla.travel, Ray Keiter, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Team 49, Telescopes Canada, Vlad Jemplin, and Wolfgang Klotz who support us at the master of the universe level. And all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So as I said, I am recording this week's Space Bites in a light rain in the middle of a port in Reykjavik in Iceland. We just went on a tour today. Went and checked out a bunch of the really cool features. Geysers, this amazing waterfall. I'm sure if you've ever been to Iceland, you've been to these things. But we leave tomorrow and then my next video will be in the UK where I'm going to be starting a hike across the UK for two weeks. So I will keep you posted as we continue to travel. But I've brought all my travel gear, and I will continue to bring you space news while I'm also on the road for the next about a month. Alright, thanks everyone, and we'll see you next week.