A Kuiper belt object with an atmosphere. The moon that became Saturn's rings. Tracking the art of its mission from Earth. And in spacebites plus, 3,000 new brown doors discovered. All this and more in this week's spacebites. Astronomers know that for an object to hold on to an atmosphere, it has to have a minimum amount of gravity. It doesn't have to be a lot. In fact, an object like the moon could hold on to an atmosphere if it had enough of the material around it. But astronomers think they've found an atmosphere around a Kuiper belt object. Something very small. The object is called 2002 XV93. And it's beyond the orbit of Neptune. And like Pluto, it is trapped in this orbital resonance with Neptune. And so it never will crash into the planet. And astronomers were using a technique called occultation, where they were watching as the object passed directly in front of a star. And this is how they're able to find moons, rings, and in this case, an atmosphere around this Kuiper belt object. They watched as it passed in front of the star and noticed that the star was dimming as if there was gas beside this Kuiper belt object. And then gas again as the star was reappearing on the other side. And astronomers did follow observations with James Webb to try and see if they could detect the presence of the atmosphere and they couldn't. And so, having an object this small, it could only hold on to an atmosphere for about 1000 years. And so, how does it have one? One possibility is that it has some form of active cryovulcanism on it, that there are ice volcanoes that are constantly spewing out material and replenishing the atmosphere. The other possibility is that it was recently under some crash with another comet. And so, we're seeing just the debris floating around this object. They're going to have to wait for another occultation to see if the atmosphere is still there. And so, this is totally unexpected. They're hoping for rings, maybe moons, but they found an atmosphere. We've got a story about this from Alan Boyle. Astronomers have been arguing for a long time where did Saturn's rings come from? One possibility is that the rings are very old, that they formed with Saturn early on in this solar system. Or the rings are very new, that some source is either replenishing them or something broke up and became the rings. The scientific consensus is starting to lean towards Saturn's rings are young. Something happened relatively recent. And by relatively recent, I mean like say within the last 100 million years or so. So now, researchers have modeled the kind of object, kind of moon that could have broken up around Saturn. They've dubbed it chrysalis and estimate that it was about 1500 kilometers across. And when it started out in a highly elliptical orbit, it was about 200 Saturn radii away from the planet. And then, over time, it got closer and closer and closer until eventually it got within about one and a half Saturn radii. And that started to bring within the roche limit of the planet. This is the point where the tidal interactions, the tidal forces from the planet, are pulling on the near side, stronger than the far side, and it actually shears it apart. And then, it gets broken again and broken again and turns into this ring system around Saturn. And so, the dinosaurs could have watched about 100 million years ago when this moon was being torn apart and turned into these rings. Got a story about this from Lawrence Tugmayby. During the recent Artemis II mission, there were plenty of eyes on the mission. And one really interesting one was the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. This giant radio telescope was watching several key points along the mission and they did these big long observations of the spacecraft as it was moving out to its farthest point away from the Earth as it was going around the moon. And the purpose of these observations was to test their tracking to see if they could determine the motion of the Artemis II mission independently from what NASA was doing. You know, we always get this comment from people who are skeptical of spaceflight who say, well, you know, why wasn't anybody watching the Artemis II mission as it was flying? Why weren't their telescopes pointed at the space? Well, there were. And so, the Green Bank Observatory was able to measure the motion of Artemis II and was able to measure its velocity to within 0.2 millimeters per second of NASA's official calculations. And one sort of really interesting thing, like the picture doesn't look great. I'm like, I'm not going to lie. But one of the astronomers who helped take this image looked at and said, you know, there are four people in this single pixel. And it's crazy that we're looking out from Earth out into space, seeing the spacecraft. And there are people in this little dot in the sky, more than 300,000 kilometers away from the Earth. That's what humanity can do. I'm going to tell you about this from Mark Thompson. Little red dots are one of the big mysteries that were discovered, uncovered, revealed by James Webb. And these are the strange mysterious objects seen within the first couple of billion years after the Big Bang. They are very compact and they are sort of pushed into the infrared and probably some hot object putting a lot of radiation, but it's then covered and shrouded in dust. The go-to explanation for this is that it's some kind of actively feeding supermassive black hole. We see these active galaxies around the modern era and we've seen them back and back in history. But one of the telltale signs that goes along with the radiation is that you see X-ray radiation because you've got all this gas and dust flowing into this supermassive black hole. It compresses, it builds a secretion disk around it and that glows hot, almost like the interior of a star. You're expecting to see those X-rays and the big mystery is that we see these little red dots, which appear to be, they should be, the region around a supermassive black hole and yet we don't see the X-ray radiation and this is forced astronomers to kind of go back to the drawing board and say, well, what could they be? I've done interviews where maybe they're the building blocks of globular star clusters and there's a bunch of ideas and yet they all start to disappear at around the two billion year mark and so what are they turning into? What modern structure are we seeing in the universe today? Well, astronomers have found an example of a little red dot that is giving off X-ray radiation. They were able to do phone observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and they did detect the presence of the X-rays and so one idea is that we are seeing this transition phase. You start out, you have this shroud of gas and dust, you have this supermassive black hole at the heart of it. It's actively feeding and it's building up these sort of powerful stellar winds, almost like the solar wind coming from the sun that's starting to blow away all of this material around it. That was obscuring the X-ray radiation and then it reaches this point where now it's in clear space again and we can detect the X-ray radiation and then these go on to become the hearts of the large galaxies that we see around us today and this is the process and like I love it. Like this is what James Webb was meant to do, to look back to the beginning of the universe, try to understand how the building blocks came together to form the modern universe that we see today. We've got a story about this from Carolyn Collins Peterson. 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 the 12,000 new Artemis images released by NASA. So thank you everyone who voted. Now we're going to put a vote on the channel this week into the post tab so go ahead pick the story that you like the best. Of course the best chance to see these votes, subscribe to the channel, click on the notifications bell, go into the post tab, vote for a whole bunch of stuff that you like and then from this point on the algorithm will smile on you. We only know of one way to get a black hole and this is to have a massive star die. A star with over 20 times the mass of the sun has to run out of fuel, detonate as a supernova and you end up with a black hole at the heart of it. Then that black hole can go on feeding. It can merge with other black holes and eventually theoretically you can get those supermassive black holes that we see at the centers of galaxies. Now there's another possibility that you can have a direct collapse black hole. You can just have a large cloud of gas and in the right conditions it can just start turning into a giant black hole. But whatever the case needs to be a lot of material coming together to form a black hole. But one theory that hasn't been ruled out yet is that there could be primordial black holes. So these would be black holes that formed at the beginning of the universe where you had regions of higher and lower density shortly after the Big Bang and that you would get black holes of all masses. Black holes with the mass of a couple of atoms, black holes with a million times the mass of the sun, black holes with a billion times the mass of the sun. It really just depends on what kinds of density gradients you had in the early universe. Now according to Stephen Hawking black holes evaporate and he did the math for how long your regular mass black holes should last. About 10 to the power of 70 years which is a lot. Maybe up to 10 to the power of 100 for the most supermassive black holes. The lower mass black holes should evaporate more quickly and if there were black holes very small maybe the mass of an asteroid then they should have already evaporated. But how long does it take for one of these lower mass black holes to evaporate? So a team of researchers went and looked at the calculations from Stephen Hawking's and evaluated according to quantum theory and what they found is that a black hole will go through three phases of its evaporation. It'll start at the beginning with the sort of standard Hawking phase and Hawking did the calculations for how long this will last. Then it moves into a second transition phase and then into an entanglement phase and the entanglement phase sets the maximum time limit for how long. The problem is to understand to calculate how long the entanglement phase lasts we need a theory of quantum gravity which is a thing that scientists as astronomers are still working on and so they still can't calculate that maximum lifetime for how long these things will last only the minimum which is the same as Hawking predicted. But one really interesting sort of side feature of the calculations that they did is that the black holes will behave like a white hole near the end of their life and so you would have this material that is a black hole but it's starting to push away material from around it instead of being this mass that is able to accumulate new mass. And so that gives you a vector for how you could search for these black holes that in the process of evaporating sort of near the end of their life is you're going to see different behavior essentially things acting like white holes out there in the cosmos and that could be an additional line of evidence that primordial black holes exist that they evaporate according to Stephen Hawking and that they could behave like white holes at the end of their lives. But a story about this from Brian Corbett Lyme he is a PhD astrophysicist and so he explains it much better than I do. If you've taken any astronomy you have probably run into the Hertzsprung Russell diagram, an HR diagram. This is a plot that compares the temperature of stars against their luminosity and that for main sequence stars they sort of fall in this very consistent pathway from the beginning of their lives to the end of their lives and depending on the mass you get a different luminosity and it all sort of connects together and then there are other branches where you can have red giant stars and dwarf stars and so on but you can have this sort of one graph to explain them all but these are just main sequence stars. What if you wanted to widen your concept and think about every physical object in the entire universe so everything from asteroids all the way up to supermassive black holes. Can you graph them all? And so researchers did exactly that and they came up with a new graph that they called the cohesive object sequence. It's a plot of 2000 objects where you compare their density against their mass and all of the objects fit into this graph and you get some really interesting patterns at the low end where you've got very porous objects, different kinds of stars and all the way up to this hard limit of black holes. So by creating this graph you can then predict different kinds of objects that might be out there depending on their density and their mass. We've got a story about this from Andy Thomas. The astronomers have been scanning the sky for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence for a long time. One giant telescope that has been participating in the search is the Green Bank Observatory. We talked about it earlier on this episode. This is the one in West Virginia and astronomers have been scanning for a decade with the Green Bank Observatory and have gathered information on more than 70,000 stars and planetary systems and their detection pipeline is automated so they're able to essentially discount 99.5% of the objects that appear in this survey. Their detection pipeline is so efficient they're able to catch between 94 and 99% of any genuine narrowband signals that range across this full range of frequencies and they flagged 100 million candidate signals for further study and then they processed them through a bunch of automated filters. They got rid of stuff that they obviously knew what they were and they were left with about 0.5% of all of these objects and then they checked them manually to see if they didn't have a way to explain them and after checking 100 million signals none of them survived this level of inquiry and so they were able to detect a message from an extraterrestrial civilization after 10 years of data 100 million signals 70,000 targets but now like obviously if we had heard the Green Bank Observatory had detected the presence of an alien civilization that would have been very big news but this allows them to put an upper bound on how many civilizations there are that are out there. This search is so comprehensive if there are aliens out there and they were transmitting then they would have stood a good chance of detecting them and so they were able to set an upper bound of less than one in 16,000 stars within 20,000 light years of the earth holds a transmitter powerful enough to be detected by that search and over time as they continue to scan more and more locations they will be able to keep setting that upper bound higher and higher and higher which means that there's like a larger and larger volume of the space around us that doesn't contain any alien civilizations. I've got a story about this from Mark Thompson and this is your bonus story. Brown Dwarfs are notoriously difficult to observe. These objects don't have enough mass enough core temperature to have full stellar fusion. They can fuse deuterium and produce heat but they don't produce the same kind of radiation that a regular star does but you can see them in the infrared spectrum and that's the main way that people do this. So there was this telescope several years ago from NASA called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer did this scan of the entire sky looking for faint objects in the infrared. In fact astronomers used this to see if there was like a red dwarf companion star to the solar system and ruled it out because it would have been out there we would have detected it but now citizen scientists have poured through this wise survey data and found an additional 3,000 brown dwarfs in our stellar neighborhood which is a huge jump of the number of brown dwarfs that we know about and in fact the volunteers identified over like a hundred thousand objects and then the scientists went through and confirmed the ones that had all the hallmarks of being brown dwarfs and a cool thing is that then many of the citizen scientists who contributed in this work were able to get their name in the science paper. This is part of Zunaverse's citizen science project called Backer World's Planet Nine and many of the citizen scientists who found these brown dwarfs were able to get their name in the science paper which is a really cool reward that you are a published science author so congratulations everybody who were able to find all these additional brown dwarfs an extra 3,000 who can do follow and study for different kinds of objects and get a much better sense of how these are formed how common they are and so I've got a story about this from Andy Thomas Week. Of course this is just a fraction of all the stories that we're covering on University and this is another big week so many stories like 35 to 40 stories this week so I'm working on my weekly email newsletter which is taking me a long time mostly because I'm traveling but also because it's a very big episode but I will have a write-up of every single story that we're covering on University today and so if you just want like a big overview of everything we're talking about everything that's interesting in space news definitely check that out you can go to university.com slash newsletter to sign up as no ads I write every word it's completely free. I want to talk about some ways that you can follow some of the team on other projects out there on the internet but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pagretti, Brian Bode, Karen Chalkhawkens, Commander Baila, Darkfinger, David Gilton and David Matz, and through all the reading and math for toddlers Eric Lindstrom, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Schultz, Mike Purcell, Nord Space, OneSet for Animals.org, please follow my nephew at Vbrick6994, Rain Kairu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Fallon-Munley, Team 49, Teleslips Canada, Vlad Jepelin, Wolfgang Klotz, Zeldelborg, Galactic Defender, who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons all your support means the universe to us. So you can hear me say the names of the people on the team every week names like Matt Williams, Brian Coburnline, Paul Sutter, they are writers for universe today but these people also have other outlets that they are able to get their work published and so I you know if you're interested you want to learn a little bit more behind the scenes about these various people I want to just kind of point you towards some interesting resources you can find them. So first Dr. Paul Sutter also known as the ASKA Space Band podcast. He does these really cool series about different concepts in space astronomy every month on universe today but he has the ASKA Space Band podcast he has shown up on various television shows so I'll put a link to Dr. Paul Sutter. Dr. Brian Coburnline who is also a PhD astrophysicist he has his own Patreon you can go and follow his blog and that he does. Alan Boyle is a legendary science journalist in fact he was one of my mentors one of the first people that I reached out to when I wanted to become a space journalist and he runs his own blog called Cosmic Log is a regular contributor to Geekwire and writes for us universe today and then Matt Williams who writes a ton of stuff for universe today has his own podcast and he's recently been posting the audio of all of his podcasts onto his YouTube channel and so you can go and check that out. In some cases he's interviewing people other times he's just doing a solo episode where he's talking about concepts that are interesting to him so definitely check that out. Carolyn Collins Peterson is again a legendary science writer and also has written many of the planetarium shows that you have ever seen. Mark Thompson is a regular contributor for BBC and various science television shows in the UK and I'm sure there's other projects that the people are working on that I haven't been aware of so we'll try and put links to as many things as we can down in the show notes but and when the team are working on other side projects that are important I will try to let you know as you just get a better sense of who all these people are and what they're working on. All right, goodbye from Tokyo, we'll see you next week.
