Podcaster: Dr. Pamela Gay;
Title: Escape Velocity Space News – EVSN: Black Holes Can Clear Way For Star Formation
Organization: Cosmoquest
Link: http://dailyspace.org/
Description:
From June 15, 2021.
Contrary to the destructive role supermassive black holes are thought to play in the lives of stars, it turns out that certain types of galaxies benefit from black holes clearing the way and keeping star formation going. Plus, lightning at the edge of space, a landslide in the Himalayas, and an interview with Dr. Darby Dyar and Dr. David Grinspoon about the recent selection of three different Venus missions.
Bio: Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of CosmoQuest.
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Transcript:
[Opening]
It’s the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast coming in three, two, one.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Hello and welcome to the Daily Space. I’m your host, Dr. Pamela Gay. And I am your host, Beth Johnson.
And we are here to put science in your brain. We periodically get to share news stories about solar systems where planets or moons orbit in cool rhythms. In our own solar system, the Galilean moons of Jupiter have their own syncopated beat with Ganymede taking the baseline and orbiting once for every two Europa orbits and four Io orbits.
This kind of a rhythm occurs all over space and one particular system, HR 8799, recently caught the attention of researchers Dimitri Varius and Sasha Hinckley. They decided to see what will happen as this system’s central star evolves. As it stands, the system’s four worlds currently orbit in an eight to four to two to one resonance.
But as the system’s bright, hot A-type star loses mass, those orbits will expand and the planets, all larger than Jupiter, will violently interact as they drift a bit too close together and gravitationally fling one another around like planetary nunchucks. The details of what will go down weren’t actually possible to determine because changing planetary positions by even a centimeter at the beginning of the model would lead to massive differences at the end of the model. And if those worlds have moons, their actual positions may wander significantly more than a centimeter.
According to Varius, the planets are so big and so close to each other, the only thing that’s keeping them in this perfect rhythm right now is locations of their orbits. All four are connected in this chain. As soon as the star loses mass, their locations will deviate.
Then two of them will scatter off one another, causing a chain reaction amongst all four. I have to admit, I now really want a Star Trek episode or something about a star system ending this way. Science fiction writers, you have your prompt.
The universe is a destructive place and we like to remind folks that the universe is always trying to kill us. Sometimes, however, things you might only expect to cause destruction can actually trigger creation. For instance, black holes.
A new research appearing in the journal Nature and led by Ignacio Martin Navarro. Researchers describe how the flares and outbursts of supermassive black holes in the centers of large galaxies can clear the way for orbiting dwarf systems to form stars. Normally, these small low-mass systems charge into the thin gas on the outskirts of massive galaxies and experience an effect called ram pressure stripping.
Essentially, it’s like holding a dandelion gone to seed out the window of a car and watching it get stripped of its fluff. The gas just pushes everything not held on too tightly out of the system. When black holes misbehave and outburst, however, they push all that thin gas out of the region above and below the galaxy, allowing the satellite galaxies in polar orbits to keep forming stars.
So there you go. One black hole’s destruction means surviving star formation for passing dwarfs with just the right orbit. Destruction is a terrible motivator for science.
But it does motivate science. Recently, a huge mass-wasting event in India destroyed two hydropower facilities and resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 people. Shocking and tragic, scientists raced to understand how and why this event occurred and if it could be prevented in the future.
Over 50 scientists came together to study the landslide, which began when a wedge of rock under a glacier broke off of a ridge in the Himalayas. All that rock and ice fell downhill, carrying debris with it, and the damage was extensive. Using a combination of satellite images, eyewitness videos, and seismic data, the team worked to produce computer models of the debris flow.
At first, it was thought that a glacial lake burst through its barrier and flooded the region, but the images revealed no glacier lakes large enough to flood the site. They eventually traced the slide back to a scar that was missing enough rock and ice to cover Washington, D.C. in a half-foot-deep layer. The drop from the ridge was over a mile, and the glacier ice melted as the block fell, causing the resulting flooding that destroyed the power plants.
The real culprit is likely climate change, and the images showed that several other large masses of ice had broken off and fallen in recent years in the same valley, and the frequency of such events is increasing. More study is needed to determine how to prevent such tragedies, which killed more than 200 people, from happening again in the future. The work was published in the journal Science.
As spring moves to summer, many places are finally seeing this year’s thunderstorm and tornado season come to an end. While there are few things as beautiful as a massive storm sprawling across an empty landscape, the storms don’t stick to the empty places and can cause destruction and even death. A few years ago, I found myself writing a frantic Facebook post stating, caught in a tornado, hiding at gas station.
While I was okay, a two-mile-long swath of destruction passed through my neighborhood. And this year, we’ve already seen recordings of this show impacted by the weather I face here in the Midwest. As bad as it can be on the ground, we’re now learning these storms can trigger events through all layers of the atmosphere.
In a new study appearing in JGR Atmospheres, researchers led by Nikolai Ustigart observed storms using optical and gamma ray detectors near Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This work was done in collaboration with the Atmosphere Space Interactions Monitor on the International Space Station. This team found that terrestrial gamma ray flashes occurred just as a positive intracloud lightning flash takes place.
Along with this invisible high-energy burst, detectors on the ISS above the storm were able to see a feature called an ELF, which are emissions associated with electromagnetic pulses. Just 456 milliseconds later, another ELF was produced with a negative cloud-to-ground lightning flash 300 kilometers away. This research is stunning and makes it clear that to really understand storms, we need to be observing them from above and below at the same time.
This research also reminds us that while the Arecibo Radio Observatory may be broken beyond repair, the other scientific equipment at that facility is still doing great science. In a second lightning study, this one appearing in scientific reports and led by Quintana de Silva, researchers using that same facility in Puerto Rico studied how lightning and solar flares can interact as they zot the atmosphere from above and below. According to the press release, this first-of-a-kind study determined that lightning from the thunderstorms triggers unique changes to the edge of space, which is used for long-range communications such as the GPS found in vehicles and airplanes.
Put another way, lightning strikes and solar flares can work together to totally screw up GPS and communications. This is actually pretty devastating news. There have been past instances of hurricanes striking just as solar flares wrecked communications in many shortwave bands.
Now we’re seeing how lightning wrecks other bands and how these events work together to be more than the sum of their parts. According to de Silva, one of the key things we showed in this paper is that lightning and solar flare driven signatures are completely different. This study helps emphasize that in order to fully understand the coupling of atmospheric regions, energy input from below from thunderstorms into the lower ionosphere needs to be properly accounted for.
It’s hoped that this research will make it one day possible to develop communications equipment that works even in the worst combinations of lightning and solar flares. As we move into a more active period of the sun and we experience more active hurricanes than ever before, these results from Arecibo could help save lives.
[Beth Johnson]
Earlier this month we had the pleasure of hosting the State of NASA Stream where NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the selection of two Discovery class missions to Venus. The first, DaVinci Plus, will have a descent sphere that plunges through the atmosphere and measures the composition. It will also take high resolution pictures of the surface to determine if Venus had plate tectonics and or an ocean.
The second mission is Veritas, which is an orbiter that will map out the surface geology using synthetic aperture radar and determine the rock types with infrared instruments. Then, in a surprise twist, last week the European Space Agency announced the selection of their fifth medium class mission, Envision, which is going to Venus as well. Also an orbiter, Envision intends to gather data about everything from the inner core the upper atmosphere of our harsh sister planet.
All of these missions will help us gain an understanding of just how Venus formed and evolved and maybe even why it did so differently than Earth. Joining me now are two scientists from the Planetary Science Institute. Dr. Darby Dyar is a senior scientist and the deputy principal investigator for the Veritas mission. Dr. David Grinspoon is also a senior scientist and a co-investigator for the DaVinci Plus mission. Both have spent the last decade pushing for a return to Venus and I know they are incredibly excited about their mission selections. Welcome!
[Dr. David Grinspoon]
Thanks, yeah, I mean so excited and kind of in a state of disbelief because we in the Venus community, we’re kind of used to being also like we’ve been proposing missions and getting almost there and then getting rejected and you know that it’s kind of the pattern and then you you get rejected and you get together with your teammates and you go well should we propose again next time and then you get over the pain and you decide to propose again so that’s kind of what I was you know internally expecting was going to happen this time and then you get the call and you find out you’ve been selected and it’s like well wait a minute this isn’t what happens you know and it’s like what do we do now
[Beth Johnson]
so so so David I understand you scared your dog
[Dr. David Grinspoon]
yes I did I did I was I was screaming and my poor dog started barking and then came running in it’s like are we under attack
[Dr. Darby Dyar]
whereas I was sitting there with my daughter and my dog and I just tears just rolled down my cheeks and my daughter was like oh mom did you not get selected and I’m like no no we won started to laugh at me but all I could do was just weep I was just uh uh overwhelmed um it took me I think probably about a week before I woke up each morning and thinking oh so it wasn’t a dream after all it actually happened so yeah it’s great still on cloud nine so so David I know this
[Beth Johnson]
has been sort of your your passion for the the entirety of your career at this point uh can you give us um sort of a history of the exploration of Venus and why we should be going back
[Dr. David Grinspoon]
sure you know I mean do you have a few hours why should we the brief moment the brief version no I mean so so really briefly you know before the space age we thought uh we meaning you know the scientific community and the general public thought that Venus might very well be very earth-like because it was covered in clouds and you know a little closer to the sun so it was sort of seen as a swamp planet maybe and then the first mission of the space age was um was uh Mariner 2 which went to Venus and the first scientific result from any planetary exploration mission was showing that Venus is incredibly unearthly it was showing that Venus is hot and then um you know after that there was a series of missions of U.S. and Soviet of kind of characterizing just how hot and how intensely different from earth that environment is um and then a big breakthrough was a mission called Magellan in 1990 through the early 90s which mapped the whole planet or most of the planet in in radar which at the time seemed amazing but now we see is like not high resolution enough for the questions we really want to answer which is what we’re going to do next um and then you know since then the U.S. hasn’t done anything fortunately the Europeans and the Japanese have had a couple of small orbiters um so we’ve learned more about the atmosphere but we really haven’t taken those next steps which are you know enter directly into the atmosphere with 21st century instruments and see what really what it’s made out of and to orbit with you know 21st century instruments really get detailed maps which is what these two missions are going to do.
[Beth Johnson]
So Darby uh I know I know David has been has been looking forward to this on so many levels we’ve talked to him about it for years what’s what’s your perspective where did you come from uh putting in Veritas as a mission?
[Dr. Darby Dyar]
Oh so a long time ago when I was first a graduate student they were planning this big mission called Venus Orbiter Imaging Radar which got canceled so that’s that was my first experience with Venus disappointment so subsequent to that I worked on the moon mostly and uh Mars meteorites until about 15 years ago when people started approaching me on two different fronts one to help develop a new technology for analyzing the surface in situ with with lasers and then also uh trying to understand what high temperature spectroscopy would look like if you could put uh an orbiter around Venus so both of those interesting problems sucked me right back into Venus which I gotta say was kind of my first love um so it’s amazing I get to bookend my career here with you know starting out getting intrigued by Venus and then finally 40 years later I get to answer the questions I was wondering about then it’s really amazing.
[Beth Johnson]
Do either of you think that that the the phosphine controversy discovery of last year uh helped with your selection?
[Dr. David Grinspoon]
It’s an interesting question because of course both these missions were um designed well before phosphine was discovered and the proposals were basically complete before that and um that announcement certainly raised the profile of Venus in the news but it also you could see it as a bit of a red herring because there’s been a lot of um sort of um a lot of reaction a negative reaction to that a lot of criticism of that and there’s a that that wasn’t that important that because neither of these missions really hinges on whether or not there’s phosphine there um it’s hard to know that might have helped because because of the visibility thing but on the other hand we in the Venus community really have had a strong sense that our time has come and and um that would have been true whether or not phosphine was found.
[Beth Johnson]
Uh so Darby you are the deputy investigator on principal investigator on Veritas tell us your elevator pitch Veritas description.
[Dr. Darby Dyar]
So in planetary science one of the first things you always do when you go to a planet is look at the topography and look at the rock types and as a geologist that’s the first thing I want to know about any planet and so that’s what Veritas is going to do we’re going to improve the resolution of the topography by two orders of magnitude over Magellan which was 35 years ago and we’re going to do the first ever geologic map of 98 percent of the surface um using a never before used machine learning algorithm that uh looks through the few little gaps in the clouds in the CO2 uh around Venus so I’m I’m just really excited that we are doing foundational science um and we’re going to answer so many interesting Venus questions one of my one of my favorite ones though is we’re going to look for water vapor and maybe we’ll catch an active volcano on Venus that would be oh that would that would be so exciting I would be amazing I am
[Beth Johnson]
all for volcanoes everywhere and and one of the things that I got to look at uh briefly during my graduate days was the the pancake domes so I’m really excited to to find out if we were those are
[Dr. Darby Dyar]
more recent than we think yep I love pancake domes my favorite Venus feature that maybe in the tick the tick craters are also cool but the pancake domes are pretty darn neat so David how about
[Dr. David Grinspoon]
your elevator pitch for DaVinci plus yeah I have to just comment though just hearing Darby’s elevator pitch I’m so excited about Veritas because you know with these two missions we’ve been in this kind of competition mode and we kind of have known about them and I’ve I’ve got a history with Veritas too a couple of the previous incarnations I was actually on the team and I’m like I’m like go Veritas but at the same time we’ve been in this sort of competition mode where our community you know we’ve been um sort of everybody’s hoping desperately that their own mission will get selected and now the wonderful thing is since we’re both selected we can move into this totally different mode of like okay how do we work together what are the synergisms so I can’t help but just get so excited hearing about about Veritas but so DaVinci is an entry probe which is going to take a very detailed trace very detailed measurements going down in one place in the atmosphere and there are some crucial aspects of the composition of the atmosphere that have never been measured like the rare gases you know what we call the noble gases which contain clues to the origin and evolution of the planet they’ve never been really measured or not measured well on Venus we know how to do it with such precision and measure a lot of the interesting reactive gases also on the way down and just characterize the atmosphere in one trace with much more precision and accuracy than we’ve ever been able to do and then as it approaches the surface it also can image in the visible in the infrared this one very interesting area of what we call the tessera on Venus which um you know is some of the oldest um and most tortured terrain that we think has clues to the the overall history and what I what I just love and thinking about these two missions is that now we’re going to have the opportunity to have these very detailed geologic maps of the planet that uh that Darby was describing with the ground truth of this descent imagery of this one interesting place and you know combining those together is going to like really help us to I think crack some some mysteries that we’ve been wondering about for a long time but on the on
[Beth Johnson]
that same kind of note where you two are talking about you know how your missions fit together we now have this third mission going um can either of you tell me tell us about Envision and what
[Dr. Darby Dyar]
how that’s going to fit in with the mix I can tell you I can start and then Dave can um fill in because it turns out that the same spectrometer that we’re building for Veritas the exact same one is on Envision so I’m excited to be already helping that team um with the spectroscopy there and the one on Veritas and Envision is a near infrared there’s also an a uv spectrometer on um on Envision which will be which will be awesome uh Envision also does a different a slightly different kind of radar and it will be focused more on very covering very small areas but again in high detail so it’s kind of the an extension of the yin and yang between Veritas and DaVinci we will have even more up close and personals and of course Envision follows these two missions by well it’ll probably be 10 years between the missions so we’ll have time to make a really good map and to really make some very sound logical predictions on where we want the Envision close-ups to be so that’ll be really exciting but there’s other things on Envision too Dave I’ll let
[Dr. David Grinspoon]
you you can remember yeah so one thing Envision also has is um you mentioned an ultraviolet spectrometer and that is um basically one of the big mysteries of Venus is that there’s something absorbing ultraviolet radiation in ridiculously huge amounts like there’s this stuff and it’s literally referred to by the scientific community as the unknown ultraviolet absorber um and whatever it is it absorbs more than half the solar energy that hits Venus um and we don’t know what it is and it’s almost an embarrassment because we’ve been studying Venus with all these missions and all these instruments for decades and we still have this stuff that’s really important in the energy budget of the planet that we refer to as the the unknown ultraviolet absorber so one thing that Envision will do is it has a spectrometer that’s specifically designed to hopefully help us gain new insight into that so basically we have three missions
[Beth Johnson]
that will solve so many mysteries about Venus we hope and I am really excited for all of you I am really excited for the science um I’m I’m now I think I’m I’m team Venus a little bit here so
[Dr. Darby Dyar]
go Beth go thanks guys don’t forget we need a lander though we’re this is not we’re not done
[Dr. David Grinspoon]
oh yeah we’re gonna do more in the future we’re gonna do balloons we’re gonna do landers
[Beth Johnson]
we’ll do a sample return everything is Venus all right uh thank you both for joining us today and thank you for your patience uh for for getting this interview done we really appreciate it and uh thank you for for being on and for being here so um we will have you back when there are updates and results and we’re very excited for both of you so thank you again this has been the Daily Space.
[Closing]
Today’s episode was written by Dr. Pamela Gay and Beth Johnson. Engineering is provided by Allie Pelfrey and web content is produced by Beth Johnson. You can get a complete transcript show notes and see images related to each of our stories at our website dailyspace.org The Daily Space is a product of the Planetary Science Institute, a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to exploring our solar system and beyond. We are here thanks to the generous contributions of people like you. The best way you can support us is through patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. Like us?
Please share us. You never know whose life you can change by adding a daily dose of science.
[Closing]
You are listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. Cool. The 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute.
Audio post-production is by me, Richard Drum. Project management is by Aviva Yamani and hosting is donated by Libsyn.com. This content is released under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 4.0 international license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free. This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you. Please consider supporting our show on patreon.com forward slash CosmoQuestX and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won’t be able to share the stories and inspire the world. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide. As we wrap up today’s episode, we’re looking forward to unraveling more stories from the universe.
With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it. Until next time, let the stars guide your curiosity.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you! Please consider supporting our show on Patreon.com/CosmoQuestX and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won’t be able to share the stories and inspire the worlds. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide.
As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!