Many Worlds

Author: Marc Kaufman (page 1 of 19)

The Faint Young Sun Paradox and Mars

December 2, 2020 / / 0 Comments

This NASA image of Mars at sunset taken by the Spirit  rover, evokes the conditions on early Mars when the planet received only 70 percent of the of the solar energy that it does now.  (NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell)

When our sun was young, it was significantly less luminous and sent out significantly less warming energy than it does now.  Scientists estimate that 4 million years ago, when the sun and our solar system were 500 million years old, the energy that the sun produced and dispersed was about 75 percent of what it is today.

The paradox arises because during this time of the faint young sun Earth had liquid water on its surface and — as has been conclusively proven in recent years — so did Mars, which is 61 million miles further into space.  However difficult it is to explain the faint young sun problem as it relates to early Earth, it is far more difficult to explain for far more frigid Mars.

Yet many have tried.  And because the data is both limited and innately puzzling, the subject has been vigorously debated from a variety of different perspectives.  In 2018, the journal Nature Geoscience published an editorial on the state of that dispute titled “Mars at War.”

There are numerous point of (strenuous) disagreement, with the main ones involving whether early Mars was significantly more wet and warm than previously inferred, or whether it was essentially cold and arid with only brief interludes of warming.  The differences in interpretation also require different models for how the warming occurred.

Was there a greenhouse warming  effect produced by heat-retaining molecules in the atmosphere?  Was long-term volcanic activity the cause? Or perhaps meteor strikes?  Or heat from the interior of the planet?

All of these explanations are plausible and all may have played a role.  But that begs the question that has so energized Mars scientists since Mars orbiters and the Curiosity rover conclusively proved that surface water created early rivers and valley networks, lakes and perhaps an ocean.  To solve the “faint young sun” paradox as it played out on Mars,  a climate driver (or drivers) that produces significant amounts of heat is required.

Could the necessary warming be the result of radioactive elements in the Martian crust and mantle that decay and give off impressive amounts of heat when they do?

A team led by Lujendra Ojha, an assistant professor at Rutgers University, proposes in Science Advances that may well be the answer, or at least part of the answer.… Read more

How Radioactive Elements May Make Planets Suitable or Hostile to Life

November 17, 2020 / / 0 Comments

An artist’s conception of a super Venus planet on the left and a super Earth on the right.  The question of what makes one planet habitable and one uninhabitable is a focus of many astrobiology researchers.  A new hypothesis looks at the presence of radioactive elements as an important factor in making a solar system habitable. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ames)

When describing exoplanets that are potentially promising candidates for life, scientists often use the terminology of the “habitable zone.”  This is a description of planets in orbit where temperatures, as predicted by the distance from the host star,  are not too cold for liquid water to exist on a planetary surface and also not to hot for all the water to burn off.

This planetary sweet spot, which not surprisingly Earth inhabits, is also more casually called the “Goldilocks zone” for exoplanets.

While there is certainly value to the habitable zone concept, there has also been scientific pushback to using the potential presence of liquid water as a primary or singular factor in predicting potential habitability.

There are just too many other factors that can play into habitability, some argue, and a focus on a planet’s distance from its host sun (and thus its temperature regime) is too narrow.  After all, several of the objects that just might support life in our own solar system are icy moons quite far from any solar system habitable zone.

With these concerns in the background, an interdisciplinary team of astrophysicists and planetary scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz has begun to look at a source of heat in addition to suns and tidal forces that might play a role in making a planet habitable.

This source is the heat generated by the decay of long-lived radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium and potassium, which are found in stars and presumably on and in planets throughout the galaxies in greater or lesser amounts.

Using theory and modeling, they have concluded that the abundance of these radioactive elements in a planetary mantle can indeed give important insights into whether life might emerge there.

Supercomputer models of Earth’s magnetic field,  which is kept going thanks in part to the heat and subsequent convection produced by radioactive decay. (NASA)

Uranium is among the most widespread  elements on Earth — 500 times more common than gold It is present on the surface and in the mantle below. (Atomic Heritage Foundation.)

… Read more

Strong Doubts Arise About the Reported Phosphine Biosignature in the Atmosphere of Venus

November 4, 2020 / / 0 Comments

An artist’s depiction of Venus and, in the inset, phosphine molecules.
(© ESO/M. Kornmesser/L. Calçada & NASA/JPL-Caltech,)

What started as a stunning announcement that the chemical phosphine — a known byproduct of life — had been found in the clouds of Venus and could signal the presence of some lifeform has now been strongly critiqued by a number of groups of scientists.   As a result, there is growing doubt that the finding, published in the journal Nature Astronomy in September,  is accurate.

The latest critique, also submitted to Nature Astronomy but available in brief before publication, is led by NASA’s planetary scientist Geronimo Villaneuva and others at the Goddard Space Flight Center. They reanalyzed the data used to reach the conclusion that phosphine was present and concluded that the signal was misinterpreted as phosphine and most likely came instead from sulphur dioxide, which Venus’s atmosphere is known to contain in large amounts.

The title of their paper is “No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.”

Another paper led by Ignas Snellen from the Leiden Observatory came to a similar conclusion, but finding fault elsewhere. She and her team analyzed the data used in the initial research to see if cleaning up the noise with a 12-variable mathematic formula, as was used in the paper, could lead to incorrect results.

According to Snellan, using this formula actually gave the original team —  false results and they found “no statistical evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.”

While this critical research does not on its own disprove that phosphine exists in Venus’ atmosphere, it clearly raises doubts about original team’s conclusions.

That original team was lead by Jane S. Greaves, a visiting scientist at the University of Cambridge when when she worked on the phosphine finding.  She herself has also has been unable to replicate the level of phosphine found by her team, and was a co-author on a paper that described that.   It is now almost impossible to collect new data because of the coronavirus pandemic.

 

Venus is roughly the size of Earth but much hotter due to its huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  (NASA)

This intense scrutiny continues as staff at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, discovered a separate, unspecified issue in the data that were used to detect the phosphine. “There are some issues with interpretation that we are looking at,” says Dave Clements, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London and co-author of the original study.… Read more

New Discoveries of Water on the Sunlit Side of the Moon. Might the H2O Be Encased in Glass-like Beads?

October 26, 2020 / / 0 Comments

This illustration highlights the moon’s Clavius Crater with an illustration depicting water trapped in the lunar soil there, along with an image of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) that found sunlit lunar water. (NASA)

The search for water on the moon has produced a discovery of tiny molecule-sized perhaps widespread amounts of H20 in a sunlit lunar crater.

The water is not in a liquid or ice or gaseous form, but rather apparently contained (and protected) inside glass beads formed when micrometeorites hit the surface.

The detection was made using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a high-flying modified airplane with an infrared telescope.

NASA scientists made clear that the lunar H2O in sunlight might prove to be too difficult to collect to be of use to astronauts, but future robotic and human missions on the lunar surface could also find more concentrated deposits now that they know some water is present.

“Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration” on the lunar surface said Casey Honniball, the lead author of a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy.  “But we didn’t know how much, if any, was actually water molecules – like we drink every day – or something more like drain cleaner.”

“Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space,” said Honniball, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Yet somehow we’re seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there.”

An artist rendering of ater and its chemical precursors spraying out from minerals on the moon’s surface after a micrometeorite impact. Researchers have delved deeper into this process in the lab, taking the influence of solar wind into account. (NASA Goddard Conceptual Image Lab.)

Scientists have searched for water on the moon since Apollo days, and have known for some time that frozen water exists in some always-dark craters of the lunar south pole. Prior lunar missions have also detected hydrogen on sunlit surfaces, and it was initially thought to be in the form of hydroxyl (OH) rather then  water (H2O.)

SOFIA offered a new means of looking at the moon. Flying at altitudes of up to 45,000 feet, this modified Boeing 747SP jetliner with a 106-inch diameter telescope reaches above 99% of the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere to get a clearer view of the infrared universe.… Read more

October 21, 2020
Captured on Oct. 20 during the OSIRIS-REx mission’s Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection, the NASA spacecraft approached and touches down on asteroid Bennu’s surface. The dramatic sampling event, a NASA first,  brought the spacecraft down to sample site Nightingale.  The team on Earth received confirmation of successful touchdown at 6:08 p.m. EDT. (NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)

Over 200 million miles away,  NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on Tuesday unfurled its robotic arm and descended to the surface of the asteroid Bennu.  It appeared to crush some rock as it touched down, quickly fired some nitrogen gas to kick up the sample and then after 5 or 6 seconds it flew away to safety after a back-away burn.

One day after the “tag,” NASA officials announced that the sample collection appeared to have been it to be a successful,  and they released images and video of the dramatic scoop.  The spacecraft touched down within three feet of the Nightingale target location and NASA officials said that most of the sample collection occurred in the first three seconds.

The sample will consist of grains of a surface that has experienced none of the ever-active geology on Earth,  no modifications caused by life,  and little of the erosion and weathering.  In other words, it will be a sample of the very early solar system from which our planet arose.

The asteroid visit is the first ever accomplished by NASA, following in the path set by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and its two Hayabusa missions.

“This amazing first for NASA demonstrates how an incredible team from across the country came together and persevered through incredible challenges to expand the boundaries of knowledge,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “Our industry, academic, and international partners have made it possible to hold a piece of the most ancient solar system in our hands.”

Artist rendering for OSIRIS-REX spacxecrsft as it approaches the asteroid Bennu to collect a sample and quickly depart. The “tag” took place on Oct. 20. (NASA)

While it remains somewhat unclear how much sample was collected by OSIRIS-REx, the mission’s principal investigator,  Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said he was optimistic.

The sampling mechanism touched down in part on a rock about 8 inches wide, something that could have prevented the gathering mechanism from pressing up properly against the surface.

“I must have watched about a hundred times last night,” Lauretta, said during a news conference on Wednesday.

… Read more

Surprising Insights Into the Asteroid Bennu’s Past, as OSIRIS-REx Prepares For a Sample-Collecting “Tag”

October 8, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Artist rendering of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it will approach the asteroid Bennu to collect a sample of ancient, pristine solar system material. The  pick-up”tag” is scheduled for Oct. 20. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Arizona)

Long before there was an Earth, asteroids large and small were orbiting our young sun.  Among them was one far enough out from the sun to contain water ice, as well as organic compounds with lots of carbon.  In its five billion years or so as an object,  the asteroid was hit and broken apart by other larger asteroids, probably grew some more as smaller asteroids hit it,  and then was smashed to bits again many millions of years ago.  Some of it might have even landed on Earth.

The product of this tumultuous early history is the asteroid now called Bennu, and the destination for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission.  On October 20, the spacecraft will make its dramatic final descent, will touch the ground long enough to collect some samples of the surface, and then will in the months ahead return home with its prized catch.

The sample will consist of grains of a surface that have experienced none of the ever-active geology on Earth,  no modifications caused by life,  and little of the erosion and weathering.  In other words, it will be a sample of the very early solar system from which our planet arose.

“This will be our first chance to look at an ancient, carbon-rich environment – the most pristine example of the chemistry of the very early solar system,” said Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Space Flight Center and a co-investigator of the OSIRIS-REx team.  “Anything as ancient on early Earth would have been modified many times over.”

“But at Bennu we’ll see the solar system, and the Earth,  as it was chemically before all those changes took place.  This will be the kind of pristine pre-biotic chemistry that life emerged from.”

This image of Bennu was taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a distance of around 50 miles (80 km).
(NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)

Bennu is an unusual asteroid.  It orbits relatively close to Earth — rather than in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — and that’s one of several main reasons why it was selected for a visit.  It is also an asteroid with significant amounts of primeval carbon and organics, which is gold for scientists eager to understand the early solar system, planet formation and the origin of life on Earth.… Read more

Why Not Assemble Space Telescopes In Space?

September 24, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Artist rendering of an in-space assembled observatory concept with a 20-meter diameter primary mirror. (NASA’s  In Space Assembled Telescope Study, iSAT)

As we grow more ambitious in our desires to see further and more precisely in space, the need for larger and larger telescope mirrors becomes inevitable.  Only with collection of significantly more photons by a super large mirror can the the quality of the “seeing” significantly improve.

The largest mirror in space now is the Hubble Space Telescope at 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) and that will be overtaken by the long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) when it launches (now scheduled for late 2021.)  But already astronomers and space scientists are pressing for larger mirrors to accomplish what the space telescopes of today cannot do.

This is evident in the National Academies of Sciences Decadal Survey underway which features four candidate Flagship-class observatories for the 2030s.    Three proposals call for telescope mirrors that are significantly larger than the Hubble’s, and the most ambitious by far is LUVOIR  which has been proposed at 15.1 meters (or 50 feet) or at 8 meters (about 30 feet), or maybe something in between.  A primary goal of LUVOIR, and the reason for the large size of its mirrors, is that it will be looking for signs of biology on distant exoplanets — an extremely ambitious and challenging goal.

The LUVOIR team would have argued for an even larger telescope mirror except that 15.1 meters is the maximum folded size that would fit into the storage space available on the super heavy lift rockets expected to be ready by the 2030s.

This desire for larger and larger space telescopes has rekindled dormant but long-present interest in having an alternative to sending multi-billion dollar payloads into space via one launch only.  The alternative is “in-space assembly,” and NASA has shown increased interest in pushing the idea and technology forward.

Nick Siegler, Chief Technologist of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Lab, and others proposed a study of robotic in-space assembly in 2018.  The idea was accepted by the NASA Director for Astrophysics Paul Hertz and Siegler said the results are promising.

The International Space Station’s robotic Canadarm2 and Dextre carry an instrument assembly after removing it from the trunk of the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship (upper right), which is docked at the Harmony node of the ISS. (NASA

“For space telescopes larger than LUVOIR, in-space assembly will probably be a necessity because it’s unlikely that heavy-lift rockets will be getting any bigger than what’s being built now,” Siegler said. … Read more

An “Elegant” New Theory on How Earth Became a Wet Planet

August 27, 2020 / / 0 Comments

About 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and vast quantities of water are also locked up in minerals on and beneath the surface.  This image of Earth comes from NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) on NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), orbits Earth from a distance of about 1 million miles away. (NASA)

One of the enduring puzzles of our planet is why it is so wet.

Since Earth formed relatively close to the sun,  planetary scientists have generally held that any of the water in the building blocks of early-forming Earth was baked out and so was unavailable to make oceans or our atmosphere.

That led to theories explaining the oceans and wet atmosphere of Earth as a later addition, brought to us by meteorites and comets formed beyond the solar system’s so-called “snow line,” where volatile compounds such as water can begin to condense into ice.

This snow line is a general area between Mars and Jupiter, and that means under this theory that our water would have had to come from awfully far away.   Further complicating this view is that the isotopic makeup of that distant water ice is somewhat different from much of the water on Earth.

Now, a new paper in the journal Science from Laurette Piani of  the Université de Lorraine and colleagues, argues that Earth’s water was simply acquired like most other of our materials, through accretion when the planet formed in the inner solar nebula.

To reach that conclusion, the group re-examined 13 meteorites of the parched type formed between Earth and the sun, and they found more than of enough hydrogen present to explain how Earth got so wet (wet for our solar system, that is.)

In fact, they extrapolated from their data that enough water was available in the nebular cloud  that accompanied the formation of our sun and formed those early meteorites — called enstatite chondrites — to create three times as much water as our oceans hold.

 

 

New measurements of enstatite chondrites indicate that water could have been primarily acquired from Earth’s building blocks. Additional water was delivered to Earth’s early oceans and atmosphere by water-rich material from comets and the outer asteroid belt. (Science)

“Our discovery shows that the Earth’s building blocks might have significantly contributed to the Earth’s water and that hydrogen bearing material was present in the inner solar system at the time of the Earth and rocky planet formation, even though the temperatures were too high for water to condense,'” Piani told me.… Read more

Cores, Planets and The Mission to Psyche

August 20, 2020 / / 0 Comments

The asteroid Psyche will be the first metal-rich celestial body to be visited by a spacecraft.  The NASA mission launches in 2022 and is expected to arrive at the asteroid in late 2026.  A central question to be answered is whether Psyche is the exposed  core of a protoplanet that was stripped of its rocky mantle. (NASA)

Deep inside the rocky planets of our solar system, as well as some solar system moons,  is an iron-based core.

Some, such as Earth’s core,  have an inner solid phase and outer molten phase, but the solar system cores studied so far are of significantly varied sizes and contain a pretty wide variety of elements alongside the iron.  Mercury, for instance, is 85 percent core by volume and made up largely of iron, while our moon’s core is thought to be 20 percent of its volume and is mostly iron with some sulfur and nickel.

Iron cores like our own play a central role in creating a magnetic field around the planet, which in turn holds in the atmosphere and may well be essential to make a planet habitable.  They are also key to understanding how planets form after a star is forged and remaining dense gases and dust are kicked out to form a protoplanetary disk, where planets are assembled.

So cores are central to planetary science, and yet they are obviously hard to study.  The Earth’s core starts about 1,800 miles below the surface, and the cores of gas giants such as Jupiter are much further inward, and even their elemental makeups are not fully understood.

All this helps explains why the upcoming NASA mission to the asteroid Psyche is being eagerly anticipated, especially by scientists who focus on planetary formation.

Scheduled to launch in 2022, the spacecraft will travel to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and home in on what has been described as an unusual “metal body,”  which is also one of the largest asteroids orbiting the sun.

While some uncertainty remains,  it appears that Psyche is the  exposed nickel-iron core of a long-ago emerging rocky protoplanet, with the rest of the planet stripped away by collisions billions of years ago.

An artist’s impression of solar system formation, and the formation of a protoplanetary disk filled with gases and dust that over time clump together and smash into each other to form larger and larger bodies. (Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook )

That makes Psyche a most interesting place to visit.… Read more

How Many Habitable Zone Planets Can Orbit a Host Star?

August 10, 2020 / / 0 Comments

This representation of the Trappist-1 system shows which planets could potentially have temperature conditions which would allow for the presence of liquid water, seen generally as essential for life.  The inner three planets are likely too hot, and the outer planet is probably too cold, but the middle three planets might be just right. (NASA / JPL-Caltech)

Our solar system has but one planet orbiting in what is commonly known as the habitable zone — at a distance from the host star where water could be liquid at times rather than always ice or gas.  That planet, of course, is Earth.

But from a theoretical, dynamical perspective, does this always have to be the case?  The answer to that question is no because a number of stars are known to have more than one habitable zone planet.

Now a team from the University of California, Riverside has produced a study that concludes as many as seven Earth-sized, habitable zone planets could orbit a single star — if there were no large Jupiter-sized planets in the system and if the star was of a particular type.

The article, published in the Astronomical Journal, concluded that seven habitable zone planets was the maximum for a star, but a sun such as ours could potentially support six planets with sometimes liquid water — a condition considered essential for life.

Study leader Stephen Kane, an astrobiologist who focuses on potentially habitable exoplanets, said he had been studying the nearby solar system Trappist-1, which has three Earth-like planets in its habitable zone and seven planets all together.

“This made me wonder about the maximum number of habitable planets it’s possible for a star to have, and why our star only has one,” Kane said.

With the discovery of an eighth planet, the Kepler-90 system is the first to tie with our solar system in number of planets. Artist’s concept. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel

His conclusion:

“Even though (our solar system) only has one planet in the habitable zone, it’s not necessarily the typical situation. A far more typical scenario may be to have many planets in the habitable zone, depending on the presence of a giant planet.”

More later about the destabilizing effects of giant planet, but the Kane (and others) say that looking for solar systems without Jupiter-size planets has become increasingly important because of this effect on other terrestrial planets.

To determine how many habitable zone planets might be possible in a solar system, his team created a model system in which they simulated planets of various sizes orbiting their stars.

… Read more
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