The #DailySpace brings you the universe at 10am PST / 1pm EST / 5pm GMT on twitch.tv/CosmoQuestX. Today’s #spacenews includes the following stories:

In today’s first story, I would like to start by reminding you,
“It isn’t aliens. It’s never aliens… unless of course it’s aliens, but today… it is not aliens.”

https://www.foxnews.com/science/ufos-black-holes-galaxies.amp

For reasons I can’t explain, Google started my day with the suggest I read a story titled “UFO’s are coming out of black holes and altering galaxies forever.” Concerned this might lead to Space Force being sent to attack black holes, I clicked the story open

to discover that the authors of a paper appearing in “Astronomy and Astrophysics” had abbreviated the term “Ultra-fast outflow” as UFO, and Fox had done what any journalist trying to make a buck would have done, and they took that abbreviation and made one hell of a click bait headline.

http://sci.esa.int/xmm-newton/61487-how-black-holes-shape-galaxies/

The truth is, astronomers analysed 8 years of X-Ray observations of the galaxy PG 1114+445 that were taken with the XMM-Newton space observatory and discovered that outflows of ultrafast winds that push at the interstellar gas and dust in the central parts of the galaxy. These winds originate from the accretion disk surrounding the system’s active central black hole. The wind pushes on material as much as tens to hundreds of light years out from the black hole, and effectively clears the region of material that might otherwise have formed stars. This also adds energy into the outer regions of the galaxy. It had previously been known that there is a relationship between the mass of a SMBH and the size of a systems central bulge or spheroid of stars and the velocity of those stars.

This works helps build out our understanding of how materials flows and jets out of accretion disks. These Ultra-Fast outflows are made of ionized gas traveling at 40% the speed of light and complement warm absorber flows that move at hundreds of kilometers per second and are observed at even greater distances from galaxy centers.

So… in this case, the science is good, it’s not aliens, and one should never abbreviate Ultra-Fast Outflow as UFO unless they want to be click bait.

https://anu.prezly.com/scientists-detect-a-black-hole-swallowing-a-neutron-star-like-pac-man
Continuing our destructive theme of the day, our next story is one of a black hole swallowing a neutron star whole.

Last Wednesday, Aug 14, the LIGO and VERGO gravitational wave detectors sensed a ripple through space time that was generated by two massive stellar remnants merging into a single object. Following up on this detection was the Australian National University’s SkyMapper Telescope… and it saw nothing. And sometimes nothing actually means something. In this case, the combined observations imply that a black hole likely ate the neutron star all at once, without any exciting fireworks. In the press release associated with this story, the event is likened to how Pac Man ate ghosts, or for those of you who don’t remember the early 1980s, this is like a frog eating a firefly – the neutron star’s light was simply snuffed out.

ANU’s SkyMapper isn’t the only telescope searching for the light associated with gravitational wave events. A press release from the University of Arizona has announced that the Catalina Sky Survey is also joining in on the alert followup bandwagon. Known for its observations of asteroids and comets, this 60inch telescope on Mt Lemmon in Arizona started it’s campaign work in April and followed up on 3 different events in that month alone. 20,000 different potential sources littered there followup fields, and because Catalina is a survey scope, they were able to quickly use machine learning software to classify those sources as known objects of not-useful types – think galaxy, random star, stuff like that – and cool things like supernova that when followed up on were still cool but not the source of the gravitational waves. This work shows just how frustrating it’s going to be to do multi-messenger astronomy that combines what we can learn from light and from gravitational waves.

Returning closer to home, we also have news on Mars and flowing water.

Now, I’m not talking about Elon Musks tweet about Nuking Mars

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/3723/chemical-alteration-by-water-jezero-crater-delta-annotated/
I’m talking about new research that continues to build the case that Mars once had warm enough weather to support rain and surface water. In this image of Jezero Crater, scientists using data from multiple instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance ORbiter have been able to identify sediments and minerals that can best be explained by alteration from water. This isn’t a recent event – rather torrential rains fell 3-4 billion years ago, and sense then the world has frozen and water has ceased to flow.

Probably… We know the ceased to flow part appears to be true, but exactly when Mars has been wet, and when it has been ice is bit of a mess. Models for the heat produced by the Sun don’t match with our current understanding of the temperature on Mars across time. There are clearly pieces we’re missing, relating to sources of heat, or sources or water, or other physical characteristics that would effect computer models. While we still don’t understand the how our why of Mars water, we do clearly see what an amazing impact it made on Mars surface.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/19/weather/greenland-nasa-climate-battle-intl/index.html

Mars isn’t the only world shaped by water. Earth is in many ways defined by how water has shaped it, and continues to shape it. Today, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. People living all over the world have watched their glaciers receded, and often disappear completely has human-driven climate change raises our world’s temperatures. Greenland is ground zero for many of the more terrifying effects we’re seeing, and for this reason scientists are using every tool they can to track the rate of ice melt on the largest island on Earth. If all the glaciers on greenland melt, the Earth’s sea levels will rise more than 7m and water will engulf many of the world’s densest population centers. It now looks like that melting is going even faster than anyone imagined it could, and for reasons we didn’t anticipate. A team of NASA funded scientists working in the “Oceans Melting Greenland” program dropped sensors from a modified DC-3 along the Helheim glacier. 4 miles wide and the height of the Statue of Liberty, this glacier is now moving fast enough to make videos using the stop action photo feature on an iphone. From the probes they dropped, scientists were able to measure the temperature to a depth of 2000ft in the waters along the glacier. They found this water is warm along the entire column, and these warm waters are supercharging the melting the same way warm water will quickly melt the submerged parts of an ice cube.

Melting from like Helheim have been adding 6mm to ocean sea levels each year – but that rate is accelerating. It’s unclear what we can do at this point… but by understanding the problem maybe we can find an icer way forward.

Ok, I can’t end on news like that, so here is a shout out to Chandrayaan 2 for making it to lunar orbit. Annie will be talking about this more tomorrow.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/pluto-discovered-110-years-ago-18964194.amp

And a reminder that while Pluto wasn’t discovered until the 1930s, searches through old images found that it’s first photo was taken 110 years ago today. Never throw out your astronomical images – you don’t know what classic planet might be hiding in the background.

Join us tomorrow for more Daily Space news – and keep mapping Bennu!