One of my goals as a human being is to remain in touch with cosmic events and findings, not only because they fascinate me but also because I think a mass understanding of science is imperative to our enlightenment as a species. Thus, I bring you this week's space news.
1. NASA's Swift detects its 1,000th gamma-ray burst.
A gamma-ray burst (GRB) is no joke. GRBs are incredibly bright flashes of high-energy gamma rays born of powerful electromagnetic explosions (e.g., supernovae or hypernovae), and these flashes can last from ten milliseconds to several hours. If a GRB were to occur near enough to us (say, somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy), and if its beam were pointed right at earth, the radiation would deplete a significant portion of our atmosphere -- in particular, the ozone layer. We would be completely vulnerable to the lethal doses of radiation washing over the surface of our planet, and this would lead to mass extinctions.
OK, now go change your pants and come back to me. Are we calm now? Good. Fortunately, the likelihood of such a catastrophic event is low, because the conditions needed to create GRBs (supermassive stars, dangerously-close binary compact object systems, etc.) are rare in our galaxy. And even if a GRB event occurred in the Milky Way, the probability that it would beam directly at us is even lower.
Still, GRBs are fun to watch -- and NASA's Swift spacecraft has a front-row seat to GRB events in distant galaxies. So get out the space popcorn -- Swift has seen its 1,000th GRB, and there are still many more to come.
2. Enormous galaxy cluster spotted 8.5 billion light-years away.
8.5 billion light-years is a whole lot of goddamn light-years. One light-year (so named because it measures the distance light travels in one year) equals about 5.88 trillion miles. Now multiply that by 8.5 billion. That's pretty far. And NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope can see what's going on out there, 8.5 billion light-years away. I'm just going to let that blow your mind for a second.
What's going on 8.5 billion light-years away is a whole galaxy cluster called MOO J1142+1527. (Insert cow joke here.) A galaxy cluster is a structure composed of hundreds, even thousands, of galaxies bound together by gravity. Earth lives in the Virgo Supercluster, along with Andromeda Galaxy and a bunch of other galaxies we've lazily named "M49," "M58," etc. NASA's newly-discovered supercluster lives out in the boondocks of the universe, and, as NASA put it, it's "the most massive structure yet found at such great distances." Translation: It's a really big thingy, it's really far away, and it makes space nerds freak the fuck out. (Especially if those space nerds have smoked the buds of a specific green plant.)
3. MAVEN mission reveals speed of solar wind stripping Martian atmosphere.
It's 2015, and who isn't interested in Mars? Don't answer that, because you'll probably depress me. In any event, Mars has been the most popular girl at the dance for decades now. How many science fiction stories have been written about Martians and terraforming Mars? More recently, scientists have been finding traces of water on the surface of the red planet, and NASA is seriously planning for a manned mission. Mars is a pretty big deal.
Well, this week NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission has pinpointed the process heavily involved in the Martian climate's transition from "an early, warm and wet environment that might have supported surface life to the cold, arid planet Mars is today." Whoa, pause. Is that not the coolest thing since David Bowie's hair? That we're discovering how Mars got to be so... Mars-y? What if there were Martian civilizations millions of years ago?!
OK, I'm good, I'm chill.
So anyway, what scientists are thinking is that solar-wind erosion might have played a key role in Mars' change of climate and water, because it could have stripped away large portions of the atmosphere. MAVEN is also looking into other contributing loss processes, like loss due to impact of ions or escape of hydrogen atoms, and will conclude its primary mission on November 16th.
4. Supermassive black hole shreds passing star.
Click that link and watch the video. Tell me that isn't the most metal shit you've ever seen.
Signing off this week's space news. Keep looking up, people.
