Galaxies, Black Holes, Supernova... PLUTO... and More Space!

From Mercury to Venus, Mars, Ceres, Pluto, and comets… It’s been an amazing year for space! 

Okay here's your Pluto reminder. Tomorrow is the AWESOME encounter day, when our little robot emissary -- New Horizons -- flashes past the Ninth Planet (of our youth).  Here's my recent posting about that -- and here's a graphical guide to the Pluto Flyby. Follow the coverage on NASA TV. Celebrate. Talk to kids about it. See if you can rouse your neighbors and co-workers to feel a flicker of pride and curiosity.

== Other News from Space! ==

Astronomers may have seriously over-estimated the number of smaller-fainter galaxies there were in the early days of the universe. The universe may be less crowded than we thought...

...but black holes more abundant: By detecting the highest-energy X-rays, which can penetrate through enshrouding gas and dust, the NuSTAR satellite has been able to detect super-massive (and very active) black holes in half a dozen galaxies, invisible to other wavelengths.  This suggests that such super-busy gobblers may be more common in the modern era than previously thought.  

What would happen if you met a black hole? “According to Samir Mathur. professor of physics at The Ohio State University, the recently proposed idea that black holes have “firewalls” that destroy all they touch is wrong. He believes that a black hole converts anything that touches it into a hologram — a near-perfect copy of itself that continues to exist just as before.  Mathur says if our world could be captured by a black hole, we wouldn’t even notice.”

Okaaay!  Very interesting.  Though of course the thing to be recorded would be your bloody mess, after being tidally squished, on your way to the holographic absorption layer.  Still, this is weirdly and wonderfully reminiscent of a scene from volume three of Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem.  Volume one is up for a Hugo Award, with my blurb on the cover; get it! Volume II, The Dark Forest will be out in August. But you won’t get to see vol.III – terrifically translated by Ken Liu – till late 2016.  I have, though!  Nyah nyah...

Now...zombie black hole: this massive black hole has awakened after 26 years of dormancy!

Zowee.  Type 1a supernovas are special.  They occur when a neutron star or white dwarf or giant star hauls enough mass from a neighbor to just barely hit the Chandrasekhar Limit where an in-collapse triggers the Big Kablooie (A technical term for use only by we licensed astrophysicists.)  This threshold effect meant that type 1a supernovae are all the same… and hence perfect “standard candles” for measuring distance… the Nobel winning work that refined not only the age of the universe, but the big news of accelerating expansion. (The reason we now believe in ‘dark energy.”)  

Only now… might type 1a supernovae NOT be all the same?  Might some of them be yanked over the Chandrasekhar Limit by an excess of Dark Matter? Yipe!  This could change a number of things. Oh, such times to live in.

Gobbling galaxies! Elliptical galaxy M87 may have swallowed an entire medium -sized galaxy over the last billion years.

==What's next for NASA? ==

A submarine to explore the seas of Titan -- the depths of Kraken Mare?

NASA has selected seven technology proposals for continued study under Phase II of the agency’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program. The selections are based on the potential to transform future aerospace missions, introduce new capabilities or significantly improve current approaches to building and operating aerospace systems. The selected proposals address a range of visionary concepts, including metallic lithium combustion for long-term robotics operations, submarines that explore the oceans of icy moons of the outer planets, and a swarm of tiny satellites that map gravity fields and characterize the properties of small moons and asteroids.

“This is an excellent group of NIAC studies,” said Jason Derleth, NIAC Program executive at NASA Headquarters. “From seeing into cave formations on the moon to a radically new kind of solar sail that uses solar wind instead of light, NIAC continues to push the bounds of current technology.” (I am proud to serve on NIAC's External Council of advisers.)

== Looking ahead ==

Details of the still-tentative plans for a Europa-Clipper mission to visit and study that fascinating Jovian moon.  I wish one of these articles would expand upon such a mission’s obvious secondary purpose, to be a general probe continuing our surveys of both the biggest planet and its other moons. Speak up, if you find information about those aspects and report it here, under comments!

Is Venus geologically active? Analyses of Venus Express observations have detected multiple hot spots on the planet. 

Here's a lovely infographic of our solar system's extraterrestrial oceans -- now believed to exist on Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus, Titan, Mimas, Triton...

DARPA is already engineering the organisms that could terraform Mars -- genetically engineered extremophiles capable of surviving in the red planet's arid terrain. Will we see the onset of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars/Green Mars scenario? 

In 2019, Russia intends to land a spacecraft, Luna-25, on the moon's polar region, rather than near the equator where all other landings have occurred.

Meanwhile... The Russian government doubts the U.S. moon landings? Actually, it’s not as lurid as that: “We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it. But all of these scientific — or perhaps cultural — artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened,” said the official demanding investigation of disappearance of some of the original 1969 footage.   Still, notice how this works at multiple levels.  As with Fox News in the US, all you have to do is imply in an arched way, and let your … “challenged”… viewers bay after rumors, all by themselves.   

Again, celebrate Bastille Day with New Horizons!  Say hello to Pluto!

Oppose the cynics!  Burnish your hopefulness and pride at being a member of a civilization that does cool stuff!

Then turn and be determined to used the same can-do spirit to solve problems down here too, and make a better world.