Peering into the cosmos

Let's take a break to look upward. First a quick roundup of some interesting links:

- Fast Radio Bursts release ginormous amounts of energy in fractions of a second, detectable across the cosmos.  One occurring in our own galaxy let astronomers tie it to a fast-spinning magnetic pulsar of magnetar. Fantastic.

- Elsewhere I describe how the second confirmed interstellar visitor comet 21/Borisov is emitting far more carbon monoxide than most of our local comets. This could be because Borisov’s home system had a different composition. More likely, it formed in that system’s outermost regions, helping explain also why it got torn loose to drift into our own system.

- Nineteen asteroids, known as the Centaurs, were first spotted just a few years ago with “strange” orbits, largely retrograde. Anyone with good orbital mechanics instincts would guess one possible explanation – the one I offered in Existence – that some or all of these might be past interstellar visitors that got whipped around by close-passing Jupiter, which robbed much of their momentum and sent them into solar orbit.

- A stunning-gorgeous depiction of the newly discovered binary of super-duper black holes where the smaller one crosses the bigger ones’s accretion disk with flashes bright as a trillion suns.

- The latest “zoom out into the cosmos” perspective fly-through is pretty darned amazing.

- Researchers believe "quasar tsunamis” could explain a cosmological conundrum: why there are so few truly enormous galaxies in the universe.  A quasar tsunami, heats interstellar material to billions of degrees, flinging it into interstellar space. Once a galaxy reaches a certain size, the theory goes, its central black hole goes postal in a quasar tsunami — “and the rest, as they say, is history.”

- Researchers looked at a black hole that "feeds" off a nearby star, pulling material onto a flat accretion disk. By looking closely at the X-ray light coming from the disk a team found imprints indicating that some light had been bent back toward the disk and reflected off, confirming Einstein's general theory of relativity in a new way.

- NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made an unexpected discovery last year, spotting a black hole emitting a massive cloud of X-rays some 30,000 light years away.

== And more spaaaaace! ==

- Through NASA JPL, NIAC Fellow Jonathan Sauder has launched a public challenge to help develop an obstacle avoidance sensor for a possible future Venus rover, using no heat sensitive electronics. See: NASA Tournament Lab, Mechanical Obstacle Avoidance Detector - Exploring Hell: Avoiding Obstacles on a Clockwork Rover.

- A terrific article compares concepts for “relativistic interstellar flight” (obeying Einstein’s speed limit) on the 60^th anniversary of Robert Bussard’s fantastically persuasive Interstellar Ramjet idea, that seems to find a way out of the trap of the Relativistic Rocket Equation, by sucking in its fuel as it goes. SF author Larry Niven exploited this notion with wonderful results, in novels of the 1980s. Though Poul Anderson’s earlier epic TAU ZERO won all the awards as a true classic of space fiction.

- BRUIE, a buoyant rover with two independent wheels, is designed to drive along the underside of ice crust covering ocean worlds like Europa, Enceledus and even possibly Titan. 

- With fascinating implications, researchers saw that galactic clusters with the same properties, with similar temperatures, appeared to be less bright in one direction of the sky, and brighter than expected in another direction, suggesting that the universe is anisotropic. The weird observations may have something to do with dark energy. The anisotropy can’t go all the way back… we’d see that in the images of the earliest eras in the microwave sky background.

== Shouting (nearly alone) that U.S. should avoid a loony lunar trap ==

- “NASA watchdog says Trump’s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion.” Would this fritter away all chance America might (in partnership with Japan and Europe) pioneer where all the real wealth is, out there, asteroids and maybe Phobos? Sure. There is no argument for a US manned lunar "footprint" mission that stands up under scrutiny and the light of facts. That's is 100%. But for this administration all of that is not a "bug." It is a feature.

Dig it again and again. HUMANITY is going back to the Moon! China, India, Russia... all are desperate to go, for their rites of adulthood. Their bar Moonszvahs, like we did 50 years ago. Fine. Mazel tov! Hope you find stuff to prove me wrong about that barren plain, where there's a little polar ice and absolutely nothing else of value. Except tourism.

We should be doing what others can't! Going where trillions in wealth and opportunities await. 

Oh, sure, we can do some lunar stuff to keep a hand in. The Gateway and letting Musk & Bezos rent landers and hotel rooms in lunar orbit to all those tourists.


== And finally... ==

- From Cornell University research: "We report the discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a low-mass star called Kepler-1649. The planet, Kepler-1649 c, is 1.06+0.15−0.10 times the size of Earth and transits its 0.1977 +/- 0.0051 Msun mid M-dwarf host star every 19.5 days. It receives 74 +/- 3 % the incident flux of Earth, giving it an equilibrium temperature of 234 +/- 20K and placing it firmly inside the circumstellar habitable zone. Kepler-1649 also hosts a previously-known inner planet that orbits every 8.7 days and is roughly equivalent to Venus in size and incident flux. Kepler-1649 c was originally classified as a false positive by the Kepler pipeline, but was rescued as part of a systematic visual inspection of all automatically dispositioned Kepler false positives. This discovery highlights the value of human inspection of planet candidates even as automated techniques improve, and hints that terrestrial planets around mid to late M-dwarfs may be more common than those around more massive stars."

Is it cool to be a member of a civilization that does this sort of stuff? You'll have to fight to keep it.