3937 - MOON - glass beads of water?

 

-   3937 -  MOON  -  glass beads of water?

   Chinese researchers may have discovered billions of tons of water inside strange glass spheres buried on the moon, and they could be used as a future water source for moon bases.

---------------------  3937  -  MOON  -  glass beads of water?

-    Scientists detected water trapped inside glass spherules on the moon after analyzing soil samples brought back by China's Chang'e-5 mission. Spherules from an 800,000-year-old meteor impact was found in the Transantarctic Mountains. Similar beads on the moon may contain billions of tons of buried water.

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-   The tiny glass spherules, collected in lunar soil samples and brought to Earth by China's Chang'e-5 mission in December 2020, could be so abundant that they store up to 330 billion tons of water across the moon's surface.

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-    The glass spherules, also known as “impact glasses” or “microtektites”, form when meteorites smash into the moon at tens to hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, blasting chunks of lunar crust above the moon's surface.

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-    Inside these plumes, silicate minerals heated to molten temperatures by the force of the impact combine to form tiny glass beads that are sprinkled like crumbs over the surrounding landscape.

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-   The moon's soil contains oxygen, which means that the beads do too. When struck with ionized hydrogen atoms (protons) from solar wind, the oxygen in the molten spheres reacts to form water that is sucked inside the silicate capsules.

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-     Over time, some of the spheres become buried beneath lunar dust particles, known as regolith, and are trapped underground with the water still inside.

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-     At the right temperatures, some of these beads release the water into the moon's atmosphere and onto its surface, acting as a reservoir that is slowly refilled over time. This could make these spheres an ideal source of water, as well as hydrogen and oxygen.

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-    If we want to extract the water in impact glass beads for future lunar exploration, first we collect them, then boil them in an oven and cool the released water vapor.   Another benefit is that impact glass beads are common in lunar soils, from equator to polar and from east to west, globally and evenly.

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-    China's Chang'e 5 mission was the fifth in a series of missions that aim to lay the groundwork for future human landings on the moon's surface. The mission landed on the moon to scoop material from its surface before returning to Earth in December 2020.

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                   March 29, 2023        MOON  -  glass beads of water?          3936                                                                                                                         

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--------------------- ---  Friday, March 31, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3936 - NEW SATELLITE - in a new atmosphere?

 

-   3936 -  NEW  SATELLITE -  in a new atmosphere?    A new propulsion system could levitate vehicles in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.  There is a novel type of propulsion using only light to collect data in the Earth’s challenging-to-explore mesosphere.

------------  3936  -  NEW  SATELLITE    -  in a new atmosphere?

-    The “mesosphere” is the part of the atmosphere that ranges from 50 km to 80 km, and it has several disadvantages for current exploration technologies. It’s too high for balloons or typical aircraft to reach, making standard high-altitude exploration technologies impractical.

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-  It’s also too low for satellites, as their orbit would degrade too quickly in its relatively thick soup of molecules, making the other typical space-based sensing platform impractical as well. The only way researchers have been able to explore it so far is through research rockets that only traverse it for a few minutes before falling back to Earth.

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-   This new technology takes advantage of a phenomenon known as “photophoretic levitation” to float devices simply by hitting them with light.

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-   That propulsion technology might sound similar to that used on a solar sail, but the delicate layers of foil used on solar sails would die a horrible death in the Earth’s atmosphere.

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-    The photophoretic effect, which has been known for almost a century, uses the heating of a solid compared to the ambient gas as a lifting force.   The photophoretic force creates lift in structures that absorb light on the bottom yet stay cool on the top.

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-    Previous attempts had all been on the micrometer scale, as the lifting force is extraordinarily weak, making it difficult to exert any significant lifting force on whatever payload it might be attached to.

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-   The lab’s design relies heavily on the pressure its plates operate in, and it just so happens that the mesosphere, which ranges in pressure from 1-100 pascals, hits right in the sweet spot where the lifting action is most effective, creating enough lift to hold a centimeter-scaled probe in the air, potentially indefinitely.

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-    Even with only a few centimeters, there are plenty of miniaturized sensors that could be packed onto that platform to relay data that had before been accessible only by research rockets.  Those microfliers could potentially stay aloft indefinitely if the technology was modified to utilize solar energy and have a day/night cycle where it would shift from ascending in the day to descending in the night.

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-    The technology could be modified slightly to enable horizontal thrust, allowing the sensing platform to travel to any point in the mesosphere using only light as a propulsion source.

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-    Did you know the Earth’s atmosphere extends beyond the orbit of the Moon?   There aren’t strict boundaries between Earth and space. Our atmosphere doesn’t just end at a certain altitude; it peters out gradually. Our atmosphere extends out to 630,000 km into space.

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-    This study is all about what’s called the geocorona. It’s a vast cloud of hydrogen atoms that’s situated where Earth’s atmosphere merges with space. SOHO has 12 science instruments onboard, and one of them is called SWAN, (Solar Wind Anisotropies.) SWAN was able to trace the hydrogen signal from the geocorona and detect its outer boundaries more precisely than ever before.

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-    A camera on the Moon shows Earth’s geocorona glowing with Ultraviolet light.   Apollo 16 astronauts actually took pictures of the geocorona with the first camera on the lunar surface, in 1972. But at the time, they didn’t know they were actually still inside Earth’s atmosphere.

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-    Lyman-alpha light is a particular wavelength of ultraviolet that interacts with hydrogen atoms. The atoms can both absorb and emit this light. The problem is that inside Earth’s atmosphere, this light is absorbed. The only way to see the extent of the corona is from space.

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-    SWAN’s design allows it to measure the hydrogen atoms in the geocorona, and filter out or discard the hydrogen atoms in space.  The scientists behind the new study found that sunlight compresses hydrogen atoms on Earth’s dayside, and it also produces enhanced density on the night side.

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-    However, that density is only relative; the dayside dense region has only 70 atoms per cubic centimeter at 60,000 km above Earth. At the distance of the Moon, there are only about 0.2 atoms per cc.

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-   The Moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere.  Even though the geocorona extends far enough to encompass the Moon, it doesn’t mean it would help space exploration in any way. Though the hydrogen is an extension of the atmosphere, the density of hydrogen atoms is still so low that it’s pretty much a vacuum.

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-    On Earth we would call it vacuum, so this extra source of hydrogen is not significant enough to facilitate space exploration.  But it is significant when it comes to exoplanets. For planets with hydrogen in their exospheres, water vapour is often seen closer to their surface. That is the case for Earth, Mars and Venus. That fact could be helpful when trying to determine which exoplanets might have water.

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-    This is especially interesting when looking for planets with potential reservoirs of water beyond our Solar System,” explains Jean-Loup Bertaux, co-author and former principal investigator of SWAN.

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-   This extended atmosphere and the ultraviolet in it don’t pose any danger to astronauts on missions in this region of space. There is also ultraviolet radiation associated to the geocorona, as the hydrogen atoms scatter sunlight in all directions, but the impact on astronauts in lunar orbit would be negligible compared to the main source of radiation – the Sun.

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-    But it’s possible that the geocorona could interfere with astronomical observations performed near the Moon. This is something that any lunar telescope would have to consider.  Space telescopes observing the sky in ultraviolet wavelengths to study the chemical composition of stars and galaxies would need to take this into account.

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-    SOHO was launched in 1995, and has been studying the Sun for over 20 years. It’s still up there orbiting L1, even though it was designed for a two-year mission. Over its lifetime so far it has a number of “firsts” under its belt.

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-    SOHO’s SWAN instrument observed Earth’s geocorona three times between 1996 and 1998. The team decided to retrieve this data from the SOHO archives and to analyze it further. This discovery makes us wonder what other discoveries are hidden in its archives.

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                   March 28, 2023       NEW  SATELLITE    -  in a new atmosphere?         3936                                                                                                                         

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--------------------- ---  Wednesday, March 29, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3935 - EUROPA - water makes a different ocean?

 

-   3935 -   EUROPA  -  water makes a different ocean?    Salt and water are very well known at Earth conditions.  Now we have these planetary objects that probably have compounds that are very familiar to us, but in very exotic conditions.   We have to redo all the fundamental mineralogical science.

------------  3935  -  EUROPA  -  water makes a different ocean?

-    Galileo spacecraft took an image of Jupiter’s moon Europa in the summer of 2001. In the colorized version there can be seen strange red streaks, appearing almost like the capillaries feeding on a giant eyeball.

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-    Scientists assumed those streaks were a mixture of sodium chloride salts of some sort with water ice, but the chemical signature of these streaks in spectrometer readings don’t match those of any known salts on Earth.  And,  the salts on Europa appear to contain more water.

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-   Recreating the high-pressure conditions seen in the miles-thick icy crust of Europa in a laboratory and measuring how that changed the formation of ice crystals from a brine mixture qas a firt step. 

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-    They discovered the first new salty ice water crystal structures found in more than a century, structures that are likely candidates for the strange salty material on Europa’s surface.  

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-   The liquid water ocean believed to exist beneath the moon’s icy crust, in touch with a rocky core and heated geothermically, is one of the most promising spots for the development of alien life in the Solar System.

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-    The key discoveries here are two new chemical structures where salts and water form a lattice held together with hydrogen bonds, known as hydrates. They are the first new hydrates discovered since 1847, when first, and until now, only hydrate was first described.

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-    But “hydrohalite” doesn’t contain much water in its structure, with just two water molecules for every one salt molecule. The two new hydrates are “hyper hydrated,” with one containing 13 water molecules for every salt molecule, and the other holding 17 water molecules for every salt molecule.

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-    The researchers created brines with varying degrees of salt and then subjected them to intense pressures as high as 25,000 Earth atmospheres between two small diamonds, with the diamonds serving as windows to allow viewing through a microscope.

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-    Pressure just gets the molecules closer together, so their interaction changes.  That is the main engine for diversity in the crystal structures.  The crystals, born in high pressure, remained stable as the pressure was lowered to Earth levels, so long as temperatures remained at minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit or colder.

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-   Because salt can act like antifreeze and keep water liquid at colder temperatures, it may play an important role inside Europa, keeping its subsurface ocean in a liquid phase.

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-   Understanding the forms that salt takes on the moon could help scientists interpret the findings of upcoming planetary science missions, like NASA’s Europa Clipper mission scheduled to launch in 2024, the space agency’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan scheduled for 2026, and the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, which is scheduled to launch in April,2023.

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-   These are the only planetary bodies, other than Earth, where liquid water is stable at geological timescales, which is crucial for the emergence and development of life.   They are the best place in our solar system to discover extraterrestrial life.

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-   We need to study their exotic oceans and interiors to better understand how they formed, evolved, and can retain liquid water in cold regions of the Solar System, so far away from the Sun.

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                   March 28, 2023       EUROPA  -  water makes a different ocean?           3935                                                                                                                          

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--------------------- ---  Wednesday, March 29, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3934 - DESI - galaxies grow by merging?

 

-   3934  -   DESI  -  galaxies grow by merging?    Astronomers know that galaxies grow over time through mergers with other galaxies. We can see it happening in our galaxy. The Milky Way is slowly absorbing the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy.

------------------  3934  -  DESI  -  galaxies grow by merging?

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-    Astronomers have found evidence of an ancient mass migration of stars into another galaxy. They spotted over 7,000 stars in Andromeda (M31), our nearest neighbour, that merged into the galaxy about two billion years ago.

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-   One of the James Webb Telescopes's main scientific objectives is to look back in time to the Universe’s earliest galaxies to understand how they’ve grown and evolved into what they are today.

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-   Galaxies like M31 and our Milky Way are constructed from the building blocks of many smaller galaxies over cosmic history.  These new observations of Andromeda and the inward migration of stars comes from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI.)

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-   DESI was built to measure the effect dark energy has on the expansion of the Universe.   DESI does that by gathering optical spectra on tens of millions of objects, mostly galaxies and quasars, and then constructing a 3D map of the results.

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-    DESI is similar to the more well-known “Gaia spacecraft”. Gaia has an ambitious goal to precisely map the positions and motions of billions of stars in the Milky Way. Gaia data led to a wealth of discoveries about our own galaxy. But it’s confined to mapping stars in the Milky Way.

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-    Now, thanks to DESI, astronomers have at least a partial map of the stars in Andromeda for the first time. And that map, including the motions of nearly 7,500 stars in the inner halo of the Andromeda Galaxy, is revealing their history.

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-    DESI shows that about two billion years ago, another galaxy merged with Andromeda. The positions and motions of about 7,500 stars DESI measured reveal that they came from another galaxy.

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-   Our new observations of the Milky Way’s nearest large galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, reveal evidence of a galactic immigration event in exquisite detail.  Although the night sky may seem unchanging, the Universe is a dynamic place. Galaxies like M31 and our Milky Way are constructed from the building blocks of many smaller galaxies over cosmic history.

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-    The Milky Way experienced a similar merger between 8 to 10 billion years ago. Most of the stars in our galaxy’s halo originated in a different galaxy and joined the Milky Way as a result of the ancient merger. Astronomers can learn more about the Milky Way’s ancient history by closely observing this similar, more recent merger event in Andromeda.

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-    The expected observational signatures of galactic migration include debris streams, shells, rings, and plumes, the expected outcomes of merger interactions between large galaxies and their companions.

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-    The results are consistent with the interpretation that much of the substructure in the inner halo of M31 is produced by a single galactic immigration event 1–2 billion years ago.

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-    The new observations reveal intricate coherent kinematic structure in the positions and velocities of individual stars: streams, wedges, and chevrons. Though the positions and velocities of the 7,500 stars play a major role in these findings, so did stellar metallicity.

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-    The observastions found high-metallicity stars in all of the sub-structures stemming from the merger.  A significant numbers of metal-rich stars across all of the detected substructures, suggests that the progenitor galaxies had an extended star formation history, one perhaps more representative of more massive galaxies.

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-    M31 is remarkably similar to the Milky Way in that the inner halos of both galaxies are dominated by stars from a single accretion event.  DESI’s power is on full display in this research. The results stem from DESI’s ability to gather spectra from 5,000 objects simultaneously.

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-    This complex instrument is the most powerful multi-object survey spectrograph in the world and can reconfigure its 5,000 separate focal planes in only two minutes as it slews between targets.  It’s amazing that we can look out at the sky and read billions of years of another galaxy’s history as written in the motions of its stars.”

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-    It was designed to measure the spectra of over 40 billion distant galaxies and quasars to map the large-scale structure of the Universe and how dark energy fuels its expansion. Along the way, it’s showing us how galaxies merge over time.

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-    We can look out at the sky and read billions of years of another galaxy’s history as written in the motions of its stars, each star tells part of the story.

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-    Over the course of billions of years, galaxies grow and evolve by forging new stars and merging with other galaxies through aptly named “galactic immigration” events.

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-    By measuring the motions of nearly 7,500 stars in the inner halo of the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), the team discovered telltale patterns in the positions and motions of stars that revealed how these stars began their lives as part of another galaxy that merged with M31 about 2 billion years ago.

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-   New observations of the Milky Way’s nearest large galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, reveal evidence of a galactic immigration event in exquisite detail.   Although the night sky may seem unchanging, the Universe is a dynamic place. Galaxies like M31 and our Milky Way are constructed from the building blocks of many smaller galaxies over cosmic history.

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-   Our emerging picture is that the history of the Andromeda Galaxy is similar to that of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. The inner halos of both galaxies are dominated by a single immigration event.

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-    DESI was constructed to map tens of millions of galaxies and quasars in the nearby Universe in order to measure the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the Universe.

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-     It is the most powerful multi-object survey spectrograph in the world, and is capable of measuring the spectra of more than 100,000 galaxies a night.

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-    Even though the “Mayall Telescope” was completed 50 years ago (it achieved first light in 1973), it remains a world-class astronomical facility thanks to continued upgrades and state-of-the-art instrumentation.  With renewal and reuse, a venerable telescope like the Mayall can continue to make amazing discoveries despite being relatively small by today’s standards.

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                   March 27, 2023      DESI  -  galaxies grpw by merging?             3934                                                                                                                         

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---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com ----- 

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---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Wednesday, March 29, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3933 - SUN - our sun's solar cycle? -

 

          -   3933 -  SUN  -  our sun's solar cycle?    March 24, 2023, sees the strongest solar storm in nearly 6 years.   The powerful solar storm supercharged auroras as far south as Colorado and New Mexico.

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------ ----------------  3933  -  SUN  -  our sun's solar cycle?

-   The geomagnetic storm peaked as a severe G4 on the 5-grade scale used by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the severity of space weather events. The storm's unexpected ferocity not only made auroras visible as far south as New Mexico in the U.S., but it also forced spaceflight company Rocket Lab to delay a launch by 90 minutes.

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-    Geomagnetic storms are disturbances to Earth's magnetic field caused by solar material from “coronal mass ejections” (CME), large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the sun's atmosphere.  A huge solar tornado as tall as 14 Earths hurls plasma cloud into space.

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-   NOAA's National Space Weather Service originally announced a "geomagnetic storm watch" on March 22, to come into effect on 23-25 March with possible moderate G2 storm conditions expected on March 24. Forecasters weren't completely caught off-guard, they however didn't expect a magnitude G4 storm.

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-  The G4 storm caused high aurora activity in the northern polar regions, bright red band across the globe.   NOAA ranks geomagnetic storms on a scale running from G1, which could cause an increase in auroral activity around the poles and minor fluctuations in power supplies, up to G5.

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-   G5 includes extreme cases like the Carrington “Event”, a colossal solar storm that occurred September 1859, which disrupted telegraph services all over the world and triggered auroras so bright and powerful that they were visible as far south as the Bahamas.

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-    Strong geomagnetic storms increase the density of gases in Earth's upper atmosphere, thereby increasing the drag on satellites and other spacecraft. In February 2022 SpaceX lost up to 40 brand-new Starlink satellites when they failed to reach orbit after being launched into a minor geomagnetic storm.

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-    Another side effect of powerful geomagnetic storms is the incredible aurora displays they trigger. When energized particles from the sun slam into Earth's atmosphere at speeds of up to 45 million mph, our planet's magnetic field funnels the particles toward the poles.

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-     The ensuing supercharging of molecules in Earth's atmosphere triggers the colorful spectacles, which usually remain limited to areas at high latitudes.  Skywatchers around the world are treated to a dazzling auroral display that reaches as far south as Colorado and New Mexico.

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-   Astronomers can expect more extreme space weather events like this powerful geomagnetic storm as the sun builds towards a peak in its 11-year solar activity cycle, expected to occur in 2025.

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                   March 26, 2023      SUN  -  our sun's solar cycle?            3933                                                                                                                          

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---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Monday, March 27, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3931 - GALAXIES - oldest and farthest?

 

-   3931 -    GALAXIES  -  oldest and farthest?   Astronomers pin down the age of the most distant galaxy seen 367 Million years after the Big Bang.  The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was built to peer back in time and identify the Universe’s very first galaxies.

------------  3931  -  GALAXIES  -  oldest and farthest?

-    Those James Webb observations are meant to forge a link between the ancient galaxies and the galaxies we see now, including our own. That link will help astronomers understand how galaxies like ours formed and evolved over billions of years

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-    The expansion of the Universe stretches the light emitted by ancient objects billions of years ago. The stretching shifts the light toward the red end of the visible light spectrum. The James Webb Space Telescope was built to see this light and identify the ancient galaxies that emitted it.

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-    The telescope’s “GLASS Survey” used the galaxy cluster called Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744) as a gravitational lens to magnify distant galaxies behind it and found 19 bright objects that appear to be early galaxies.

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-   Astronomers set out decades ago to build the JWST with these findings in mind. But there’s a problem: our theories and models of galaxy formation suggest there shouldn’t be so many of these earliest galaxies. The JWST’s findings needed to be confirmed.

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-   A team of researchers used the ESO’s ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array) to examine a candidate galaxy from GLASS and to try to confirm it. Their paper is titled “Deep ALMA redshift search of a z = 12 , GLASS-JWST galaxy candidate”.

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-    If all of these ultra-distant galaxy candidates were real, we’d have too many of them too early, forcing us to rethink how galaxies begin forming within the Universe.  There’s a tremendous difference between the light that a distant galaxy emits and the light that arrives at our eyes after journeying for billions of light-years across the Universe.

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-   A galaxy named GHZ2/GLASS-z12, one of the brightest and most robust candidates at z > 10, according to the JWST observations. z > 10 means that the light from the galaxy has been travelling for over 13.184 billion years and has traveled a distance of at least 26.596 billion light-years.

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-   Spectroscopy is needed to confirm the primeval nature of these candidates.  It’s possible that the light from some of these galaxies is red due to dust rather than distance, and spectroscopy could help differentiate between the two. The astronomers turned to ALMA, the world’s most expensive ground-based telescope currently operating.

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-    They used it to look for an oxygen line (O III) in the spectroscopy at the same frequency found in the JWST observations. O III is doubly-ionized oxygen, and it’s key because oxygen has a short formation time relative to other elements. Focusing on oxygen increased the likelihood of detection.

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-   Stars can generate oxygen on a short 50 Myr time scale. Other elements, like carbon, for example, take nearly 500 Myr to appear in a galaxy. This means that oxygen is generally the best redshift indicator, and is likely the brightest emission line in the early Universe. Could ALMA find it?

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-   Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field revealed thousands of galaxies in a seemingly empty spot in the sky. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has taken deep field observations to the next level with its COSMOS-Web survey, revealing 25,000 galaxies in just six pictures, the first from this new survey. 

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-    The first images to be released from the survey accounts for just 4% of the data that will eventually be collected with COSMOS-Web. The images show many types of galaxies, including spiral galaxies, examples of gravitational lensing, and evidence of galaxy mergers.

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-    JWST’s first year and the goal of the survey is to map the earliest structures of the universe, as well as create a deep survey of up to 1 million galaxies. With a total of 255 hours of observing time, COSMOS-Web will map 0.6 square degrees of the sky with NIRCam, roughly the size of three full moons, and 0.2 square degrees with MIRI.

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-     While the Hubble Deep Field imagers were stunning, these new images from JWST contain details that are inaccessible to Hubble.  Basically, everywhere ever we look, it’s a Deep Field. These engineering images are as sharp and crisp as images that Hubble can take, but at a wavelength of light that Hubble can’t see.

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-    The goal of COSMOS-Web is to map the earliest structures of the universe and create a wide and deep survey of up to 1 million galaxies. The survey hopes to map cosmic reionization, study galaxy evolution and determine if dark matter can be linked to visible matter.

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-   Over the course of 255 hours of observing time, COSMOS-Web will map 0.6 square degrees of the sky with NIRCam, roughly the size of three full moons, and 0.2 square degrees with MIRI.  (as of March, 2023)

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-    This first snapshot of COSMOS-Web contains about 25,000 galaxies—an astonishing number larger than even what sits in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.    It’s one of the largest JWST images taken so far. And yet it’s just 4 percent of the data we will get for the full survey.

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-    The first epoch of COSMOS-Web MIRI observations obtained on January 6, 2023.   What were thought to be compact objects based on the best images we had so far, the JWST observations are now able to resolve these objects into multiple components, and in some cases even reveal the complex morphology of these extragalactic sources.

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-    With these first observations, we have just barely scratched the surface of what is to come with the completion of this program, next year.”

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                   March 26, 2023         GALAXIES  -  oldest and farthest?         3931                                                                                                                        

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-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

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---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Monday, March 27, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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