3984 - LIGHTNING BOLTS - can become superbolts?

 

-   3984  - LIGHTNING  BOLTS  -  can become superbolts?   Lightning forms when electrical charges in clouds and on the ground interact, and in most of these events the clouds are negatively charged. However, superbolts form during rare cloud-to-ground interactions in which the clouds are positively charged.

------------  3984  -   LIGHTNING  BOLTS  -  can become superbolts?

-  Lightning bolts or  flashes of lightning that are up to 1,000 times brighter than average do exist.  After evaluating years of data, scientists confirmed these ultrabright bolts can produce at least 100 gigawatts of power.  To put that into perspective, the power produced by all the solar panels and wind turbines in the United States in 2018 was about 163 gigawatts.

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-   “Superbolts” are lightning flashes that were over 100 times more intense than typical lightning.  Lightning data for that study came from observations by “Vela satellites”, which were launched in 1969 to detect nuclear explosions from space, and operated until 1979.

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-    Vela's instruments recorded thousands of lightning strikes per year, including superbolts that struck around the world with most frequent occurrence over the North Pacific Ocean.

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-    One superbolt flash near South Africa in 1979 was so powerful that it was thought to be the detonation of a nuclear bomb.  Another superbolt that struck Newfoundland in 1978 left a one‐mile swath of damage in its wake.

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-    Trees were split; television antennas were twisted beyond recognition; transformers were shattered and circuit breakers hung from power‐line poles, and there were craters in the new‐fallen snow.

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-   Superbolts are  super-rare, occurring only about five times in 10 million flashes.   In the southeastern United States on February 19, 2019, the lightning flash spanned several hundred kilometers and lasted nearly 7 seconds. 

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-     Research focused on superbolts that are substantially brighter than normal lightning — at least 100 times more energetic — and then looked at the top pulses above that threshold, with the top cases even going beyond 1,000 times brighter.

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-   Using the “Fast On‐Orbit Recording of Transient Events” (FORTE) satellite scientisrs learned that certain viewing conditions did affect lightning brightness, when the satellite's view was unobstructed by clouds, a bolt could appear somewhat brighter, and some suspected superbolt observations did fall into that category.

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-    GLM and FORTE are both optical instruments, but they measure slightly different aspects of lightning pulses.  FORTE recorded instantaneous peak power of the superbolts, the moment they were at their brightest.

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-     By comparison, GLM measured superbolts' total energy over a 2-microsecond period. That might not seem like very long, but it is for lightning, where much of the activity happens at microsecond scales.

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-   The scientists found that superbolts could emanate from electrical pulses between clouds, as well as from cloud-to-ground pulses. Superbolts that appeared over the ocean were fueled by the gradual buildup of electrical charges in the stormclouds.  These bolts would be more powerful when all that electricity was eventually released.

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-    The brightest superbolts tended to cluster in geographic regions where large thunderstorms are common, and superbolt appearance was associated with "long-horizontal lightning flashes” that can span hundreds of kilometers, which have been recently termed 'megaflashes”.

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-     'Gigantic jet'  shot into space may be the most powerful lightning bolt ever detected.  These lightning bolts blasting out of the top of a cloud over Oklahoma, and shooting directly into space.

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-   Instead of striking down toward the ground, or zipping sideways between clouds, this lightning bolt does something unexpected: It blasts straight upward from the top of the cloud, shooting 50 miles into the sky, grazing the lower edge of space.

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-   These are gigantic jets the rarest and most powerful sort of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and emitting more than 50 times as much energy as a typical lightning bolt.

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-     By studying the jet's radio-wave emissions using satellite and radar data, researchers learned that the bolt moved approximately 300 coulombs of energy from the top of the cloud to the lower ionosphere, the layer of charged particles that separates Earth's upper atmosphere from the vacuum of space, or roughly 60 times the 5-coulomb output of a typical lightning bolt.

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-   The charge transfer is nearly double the previous largest by a gigantic jet and is comparable to the largest ever recorded for cloud-to-ground strokes.

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-   Capturing such detailed data on the massive stroke of lightning required an equally massive stroke of luck. A citizen scientist based in Hawley, Texas filmed the jet with a low-light camera on May 14, 2018, watching as the gargantuan discharge shot out of a cloud top before connecting with charged particles in the ionosphere, some 60 miles above the ground.

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-    Scientists analyzing the footage found that, as luck would have it, the jet occurred very near the center of a large lightning mapping array (LMA), a network of ground-based radio antennas used to map the locations and times of lightning strikes. The jet was also within range of several weather radar systems, as well as a weather-watching satellite network.

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-    With these sources combined, the researchers studied the size, shape and energy output of the gigantic jet in unprecedented detail. The researchers found that the jet's highest-frequency radio-wave emissions (the kind that LMAs are built to detect) came from small structures called streamers, which develop at the very tip of a lightning bolt and create a "direct electrical connection between the cloud top and the lower ionosphere.

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-    The strongest electric current, meanwhile, flowed considerably behind the streamers, in a section called the “leader”. The data also showed that while the streamers were relatively cool, with a temperature of roughly 400 degrees Fahrenheit, the leader was scorching hot, with a temperature of more than 8,000 degrees F. This discrepancy is true of all lightning strikes, not just gigantic jets.

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-   Why does lightning sometimes blast up instead of down? Scientists still aren't totally clear on that, but it likely involves some sort of blockage that prevents lightning from escaping through the bottom of a cloud; gigantic jets are typically observed in storms that don't produce many cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.

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-   There is usually a suppression of cloud-to-ground discharges.  In the absence of the lightning discharges we normally see, the gigantic jet may relieve the buildup of excess negative charge in the cloud.

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-    More research — and a lot more luck — is needed to understand these epic, upside-down lightning strikes.

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                  May 3, 2023      LIGHTNING  BOLTS  -  can become superbolts?       3984                                                                                                                        

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--------------------- ---  Friday, May 5, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3982 - SUPERNOVAE - when are they dangerous?

 

-   3982  - SUPERNOVAE  -  when are they dangerous?    Supernovae superflares may be accompanied by enormous eruptions of charged particles that could devastate life on any planets in their firing line.

------------  3982  -   SUPERNOVAE  -  when are they dangerous?          

-    Scientists scoping out a star system in the constellation Orion have witnessed one of the most gargantuan and powerful stellar flares ever seen.  This argantuan 'superflare' from a distant star has launched one of the strongest solar storms ever seen.

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-    This "superflare," was an enormous blast of stellar radiation 10 times more massive than anything ever witnessed erupting from the sun. While the mechanism behind this monster flare still isn't well understood, the new research suggests that superflares originate from stars that are highly magnetically active.

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-    In this new research, the astronomers targeted a star system called “V1355 Orionis”, which is about 400 light-years from Earth and features two stars orbiting each other. These stars belong to a class of stars known to harbor many sunspots, dark, planet-size regions that form as the result of intense electromagnetic activity, and that have been tied to other observed superflares.

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-    Stellar flares occur when magnetic-field lines in a star's atmosphere tangle, snap and reconnect, releasing a powerful gout of radiation that's visible across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

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-    On the sun, flares may be accompanied by towering loops of plasma, known as prominences, that can rise tens of thousands of miles above the sun's surface. If this solar plasma launches quickly enough, it can break free of the sun and become a coronal mass ejection (CME) which is an enormous blob of high-energy particles that can knock satellites out of orbit and short-circuit power grids on Earth, if our planet happens to be in the blob's path.

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-    Combining observations from the “Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite” and the “Seimei Telescope” in Japan, the researchers studied the distant star system in multiple wavelengths of light to capture the most complete picture possible of the superflare's evolution.

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-    They found that the flare began with one of the most powerful stellar eruptions ever seen, a high-velocity prominence that burst out of one of the stars at more than 2.2 million mph . This blast far exceeded the star's escape velocity, launching trillions of tons of electrically charged matter outward into space in what may be one of the largest CMEs ever observed.

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-   This mega-flare's discovery is less a cautionary tale for our planet than it is a caveat in the search for life on other worlds.   Planets around magnetically hyper star systems like V1355 Orionis may not be the best places to look.

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-     Another example of a dangerous place is a supermassive black hole that ripped a star to shreds in the center of the galaxy NGC 7392. The flash of light from the black hole's dinner finally reached Earth in 2014, and astronomers just discovered it in their data.

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-   This newly detected outburst is the closest-yet example of a “tidal disruption event” (TDE), where a star is pulled apart by the massive gravitational pull of a black hole. 

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-    This black hole was spotted 137 million light-years from Earth, or about 35 million times as far as Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun. As distant as that sounds, astronomers have only observed around 100 of these events so far, and this one is four times closer than the previous title-holder of "closest TDE to Earth”.

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-     They discovered the TDE in infrared, a different wavelength than most conventional TDE detections, which usually come in X-rays, ultraviolet, and optical light.

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-    Finding this nearby TDE means that, statistically, there must be a large population of these events that traditional methods were blind to.  astronomers should try to find these in infrared if we want a complete picture of black holes and their host galaxies.

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-   Previously discovered TDEs mostly appeared in so-called green galaxies, which don’t create quite as many stars as the more active blue galaxies but aren't totally burned-out on star-making like red galaxies.

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-    NGC 7392, however, is a blue galaxy churning out many new stars and creating a lot of dust in the process. This dust could obscure the center of the galaxy, where the supermassive black hole lives, in optical and ultraviolet light. But infrared light enables astronomers to peer through that dust.

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-    Using infrared surveys to catch the dust echo of obscured TDEs has already shown us that there is a population of TDEs in dusty, star-forming galaxies that we have been missing.

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-   By looking for TDEs in infrared  scientists could get one step closer to understanding how black holes chow down on stars.

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                  May 4, 2023        SUPERNOVAE  -  when are they dangerous?        3982                                                                                                                         

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--------------------- ---  Thursday, May 4, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3983 - QUASAR - largest found.

 

-   3983  -  QUASAR  -  largest found.     Quasars, the most extreme phenomena in the universe, are triggered when galactic collisions deliver gas to feeding black holes.

------------------------------  3983  - QUASAR  -  largest found.

-   Scientists may have solved a 60-year-old mystery by discovering that “quasars”, energetic objects that are powered by supermassive black holes and outshine trillions of stars combined, form when galaxies collide and merge.

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-    The Milky Way could host a quasar of its own when it collides with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy several billion years from now.

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-   Scientists have previously tracked quasars' bright, energetic emissions to regions at the hearts of galaxies that span roughly the width of the solar system, meaning quasars must come from incredibly compact objects.

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-    The leading theory suggests that quasars are supermassive black holes heating huge amounts of surrounding gas, thus releasing tremendous amounts of radiation before the material falls onto the black hole's surface.

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-    Since their discovery sixty years ago, quasars have puzzled scientists, mainly because it's unclear just how supermassive black holes can draw in enough raw material to fuel such powerful emissions. While supermassive black holes dwell at the centers of most galaxies, the gas needed to fuel quasars tends to orbit on the outskirts of galaxies. Thus, there must be some delivery service moving gas toward the hearts of galaxies.

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-   Deep imaging observations from the “Isaac Newton Telescope” in Spain's Canary Islands to finally solve this puzzle.  To understand how quasars are ignited we need to determine how gas can fall into the center of the host galaxies at sufficiently high rates.

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-    One idea is that the necessary radial infall is caused by collisions between galaxies, whose associated gravitational forces can perturb the gas from its usual circular orbits.

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-    When comparing  48 nearby galaxies hosting quasars to 100 non-quasar galaxies, the researchers discovered the presence of distorted structures at the edges of the quasar-hosting galaxies. These structures also indicate a past or ongoing collision and merger with another galaxy.

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-    Astronomers found a high rate of such structures in quasar-hosting galaxies, three times that measured for a carefully matched control sample of non-quasar galaxies that were imaged with the same techniques.   This provides strong evidence that quasars are triggered in galaxy collisions.

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-    Quasars can have a large influence on the evolution of galaxies that host them; better understanding how quasars ignite could help scientists hone their models of galaxy evolution and the evolution of the universe as a whole.

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-    It's important to understand how, when, and where quasars are triggered, as once triggered, the enormous radiative power generated by a quasar can have a major, damaging effect on the surrounding host galaxy.

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-    The pressure of the radiation can expel the remaining gas in the remnant galaxy system. Since gas is required to form new stars, this will cut off any future star formation activity, effectively the death throes of the galaxy.

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-     The nearest large galaxy,  the “Andromeda Spiral”,  is coming directly towards us at a high velocity, and will collide and merge with the Milky Way in around 5 billion years.  When this happens, it's likely that a quasar will be triggered as gas falls into the center of the remnant system.

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-     Black holes like these, known as quasars, are the biggest types of black holes we know about.   Black holes are some of the most massive single objects in space, but what's the biggest one in existence, and how big can they get?

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-    There is a theoretical limit to the size of black holes, celestial  objects so massive that even light cannot escape them. And the largest directly observed black hole with a confirmed mass is right around this limit.

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-    This monster, named “TON 618”, weighs roughly 40 billion solar masses. TON 618 has a radius of over 1,000 astronomical units (AU), which means that if the black hole was placed in the center of the solar system, by the time you reached Pluto, you would  be less than 5% of the way from the center of the black hole to its edge.

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-   TON 618 sits about 18.2 billion light-years away from Earth. In the night sky, it sits  on the border between the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices. Astronomers first spotted it in a 1957.   They first thought it was a faint blue star, but observations a decade later revealed that the astronomers had glimpsed intense radiation from the material falling into the giant black hole.

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-    TON 618 powers a quasar, one of the brightest objects in the entire universe with the illuminating power of 140 trillion suns. Quasars draw light from the gravitational energy of the central black hole. Material around the black hole falls in, and as it does so it compresses and heats up, releasing enormous amounts of radiation.

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-     While individual events like the most powerful supernovas can briefly outshine quasars, they only last a few weeks. In contrast, quasars can shine for millions of years.   However, quasars are so far away that they only appear as faint spots of visible light in even the most powerful telescopes, and astronomers first detected them by their powerful radio emissions.

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-    Supermassive black holes become enormous through a combination of merging with other black holes and by constantly feeding on surrounding material.

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-    The  feeding rate is what sets the limit on the size of a black hole. These cosmic vacuum cleaners can only consume so much material in a given amount of time. As material falls in, it heats up and releases radiation (creating a quasar), but that radiation heats the material itself, preventing it from quickly falling into the black hole.

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-    This self-regulation prevents black holes from growing too quickly. Astronomers can estimate a maximum mass for a black hole by taking that feeding rate and multiplying it by the known age of the universe, giving an estimated maximum mass of around 50 billion solar masses.

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-   That is only an estimate. There may be other, more exotic, ways to create large black holes, such as from the direct collapse of large clumps of dark matter in the early universe. So,  it's still possible that there are even more massive black holes out there.

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                   April 30, 2023                 QUASAR  -  largest found.            3983                                                                                                                          

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--------------------- ---  Tuesday, May 2, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3981 - TESS - exoplanet survey?

 

-   3981  - TESS -  exoplanet survey?    TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission recently reached its fifth anniversary of service to humanity as it continues to tirelessly scan the heavens for worlds beyond. Dubbed as an all-sky mission.

-------------------------  3981  -  TESS -  exoplanet survey?

-    TESS was launched on April 18, 2018, aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket. During its five years in space, TESS’s four 24 degrees by 24 degrees field-of-view CCD cameras have successfully mapped greater than 93% of the universe.

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-    To create its sky map, TESS scans large portions of the sky known as sectors, with each sector encompassing 24 by 96 degrees and taking approximately one month to complete.

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-   The size of each sector is approximately one hand’s width and spans from the horizon to the sky’s highest point, also called the zenith, with each full-frame image consisting of 192 million pixels.

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-     TESS’s primary mission ended on July 4, 2020, during which time it was able to record each sector once every 30 minutes. This timing has improved during its extended mission with TESS now recording one sector almost 90 percent faster at 3 minutes and 20 seconds.

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-    The astronomers have more than 251 terabytes just for one of the main data products, called full-frame images. That’s the equivalent of streaming 167,000 movies in full HD.

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-    TESS extracts parts of each full-frame image to make cutouts around specific cosmic objects, more than 467,000 of them and together they create a detailed record of changing brightness for each one. Astroomers use these files to produce light curves, a product that graphically shows how a source’s brightness alters over time.

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-    TESS is currently placed in a highly elliptical orbit around the Earth with its farthest point (an apogee) at an approximate one-Moon distance from Earth. This allows TESS to orbit the Earth twice for every one orbit of the Moon, meaning it has a 2-to-1 orbital resonance with our Moon.

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-    This type of orbit not only allows TESS an unobstructed view of the heavens, but also keeps it free of the Van Allen Belts, and it has been estimated the stability of this orbit could last at least 10 years..

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-    Along with its impressive night sky map, TESS has also confirmed the existence of 330 exoplanets with 6,400 exoplanet candidates using the “transit method” to locate and identify them.

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-   Some of the most notable exoplanet findings include the confirmed discovery of “TOI 700 d” in January 2020, which is an Earth-sized world located within its star’s habitable zone approximately 100 light-years. This was later complimented with the confirmed discovery of “TOI 700 e” in January 2023, which is also an Earth-sized world located in the star’s habitable zone.

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-   Other key exoplanet discoveries from TESS include 'GJ 367 b', which is a Mars-sized exoplanet located approximately 31 light-years from Earth, and the triple-planet system of “TOI 11”, which contains one super-Earth and two mini-Neptunes and located approximately 205 light-years from Earth.

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-    Aside from exoplanets, TESS has also observed black holes and hundreds of supernovae.   TESS completed its primary mission in July 2020 and officially started its first extended mission, which lasted until September 2022. This was when NASA approved a second extended mission, which is currently ongoing and expected to last until September 2025.

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-    With TESS’s orbit allowing it to observe the heavens through at least 2028, what new science will it uncover and how many more new exoplanets will it discover? Could it even be responsible for finding Earth 2.0? Only time will tell, and this is why we do science!

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                   April 30, 2023                TESS -  exoplanet survey?               3981                                                                                                                          

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--------------------- ---  Tuesday, May 2, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3979 - UNIVERSE - first light?

 

-   3979  -  UNIVERSE  -   first light?    By measuring the Cosmic Microwave Background for redshift and comparing these to local distance measurements (using variable stars and supernovae), astronomers have sought to measure the rate at which the universe is expanding.

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-----------------------  3979  -   UNIVERSE  -  first light?

-    In the 1960s, astronomers began noticing a pervasive microwave background visible in all directions. This became known as the “Cosmic Microwave Background” (CMB), the existence of this relic radiation confirmed the Big Bang theory that all matter was condensed onto a single point of infinite density and extreme heat that began expanding 13.8 billion years ago.

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-   Scientists observed that the rotational curves of galaxies were much higher than their visible mass suggested. This meant that either Einstein's Theory of General Relativity was wrong or the universe was filled with a mysterious, invisible mass.

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-  Astronomers are using improved measurements of parameters that describe the very early universe by monitoring the light that emerged during "Cosmic Dawn" (when the universe was only 380,000 years old), which is visible today as the CMB.

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-   According to the cosmological model,the “Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM)”,  Dark Matter accounts for 85% of the mass in the cosmos. Unfortunately, it doesn't interact with normal ("luminous") matter via electroweak or strong nuclear forces, only with gravity (the weakest of the fundamental forces).

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-    To track down this illusive and "invisible" mass, the ACT collaboration uses the “Atacama Cosmology Telescope” (ACT), a custom-built six-meter (20-foot) millimeter-wave telescope located in northern Chile.

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-   Astronomers used data from the ACT's Data Release 6 (DR6), which consisted of five seasons of CMB temperature and polarization observations. These light readings were essentially used to backlight all of the matter between the present day and the Big Bang ( 13.8 billion years ago).

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-    It's a bit like silhouetting, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light were streaming through a fabric curtain that had lots of knots and bumps in it. The CMB image is a snapshot of what the universe was like in a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this is giving us the information about all the epochs since.

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-    The full-sky image is based on data collected by the “Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe” (WMAP) between 2001 and 2003. This mission (which remained in operation until 2010) built on the previous work by the “Cosmic Background Explorer” (COBE), which collected data on the CMB from 1989 to 1993.

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-   Then came the ESA's “Planck” satellite, which measured the CMB from 2009 to 2013 to map tiny temperature fluctuations. The increasingly accurate maps that resulted have provided insight into the evolution of the cosmos by showing what its initial conditions were.

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-    This latest map has taken that research a step further by using it to measure how the structure of matter has evolved since, 85% of which is Dark Matter.

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-     To visualize the presence and distribution of this mysterious mass, the research team examined how its gravity affected the curvature of spacetime between the CMB and Earth. This effectively showed how large collections of mass (both visible and invisible) altered the path its light followed as it traveled for billions of light-years distance (and billions of years time) to reach us.

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-     The astronomers tracked how the gravitational pull of massive dark matter structures can warp the CMB on its 14-billion-year journey to us, just as antique, lumpy windows bend and distort what we can see through them. The resulting map revealed the "scaffold" of Dark Matter that holds visible matter and surrounds and connects galaxies and galaxy clusters.

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-    This led to the universe's large-scale structure, referred to as the "Cosmic Web". This map breaks with convention by measuring the distribution of matter in our universe, not in terms of light but in terms of mass.

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-   This is stunning evidence that we understand the story of how structure in our universe formed over billions of years, from just after the Big Bang to today. Remarkably, 80% of the mass in the universe is invisible. By mapping the dark matter distribution across the sky to the largest distances, our ACT lensing measurements allow us to clearly see this invisible world.

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-    It provides measurements that show that both the 'lumpiness' of the universe, and the rate at which it is growing after 14 billion years of evolution, are just what you'd expect from our standard model of cosmology based on Einstein's theory of gravity.

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-    These results could also provide new insight into the so-called "Crisis in Cosmology," where light measurements using the CMB vs. local stars produce different values. Also known as the "Hubble Tension," this disparity suggests that Dark Matter was not "lumpy" enough and that the standard model of cosmology (LCDM) may be incorrect.

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-    However, the ACT team's latest results precisely assessed the size and distribution of these lumps and determined that they were perfectly consistent with the LCDM model.

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-    The CMB is famous already for its unparalleled measurements of the primordial state of the universe, so these lensing maps, describing its subsequent evolution, are almost an embarrassment of riches. We now have a second, very primordial map of the universe.

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-    We have an extraordinary opportunity to use these different data sets together. This map includes all of the dark matter, going back to the Big Bang, and the other maps are looking back about 9 billion years, giving us a layer that is much closer to us. We can compare the two to learn about the growth of structures in the universe.  The two approaches are getting different measurements.

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-    While the ACT was decommissioned in September 2022 (after 15 years in operation), the data it gathered still inspire new research and breakthroughs. More papers presenting results from the final set of observations in the DR6 are expected soon, and the Simons Observatory will conduct future observations from the same sight.

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-     These will be done using a new telescope scheduled to begin operations in 2024 that will be capable of mapping the sky almost ten times as fast as the ACT. Perhaps we can look forward to all-sky surveys that map the distribution of Dark Matter going back to the beginning of the cosmos.

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                   April 30, 2023            UNIVERSE  -  first light?                3979                                                                                                                         

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--------------------- ---  Monday, May 1, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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