Planetary and Solar System Characteristics Archives - Page 2 of 6

Category: Planetary and Solar System Characteristics (page 2 of 6)

Cores, Planets and The Mission to Psyche

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 / Marc Kaufman / 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.

Sample Return in the Time of Coronavirus

July 7, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 1 Comment

Sample return from Mars. Artist rendering of a Mars sample return mission. The mission would use robotic systems and a Mars ascent rocket to collect and send samples of Martian rocks, soils and atmosphere to Earth for detailed chemical and physical analysis. No rocket has ever taken off from Mars and this NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) project is in early planning stages. Still, blue-ribbon science panels have recommended efforts to begin preparing the public for an eventual Mars sample return. ( Wickman Spacecraft & Propulsion)

For space scientists of all stripes, few goals are as crucial as bringing pieces of Mars, of asteroids, of other planets and moons back to Earth for the kind of intensive study only possible here. Space missions can, and have, told us many truths about the solar system, but having a piece of Mars or Europa or an asteroid to study in a lab on Earth is considered the gold standard for learning about the actual composition of other bodies, their histories and whether they could — or once did — harbor life.

In keeping with this ambition, the last National Research Council Decadal Survey listed a Mars “sample return” as the top science priority for large Flagship missions. And the Perseverance rover that NASA is scheduled to send to Mars next month will — among many other tasks — identify compelling rock samples, collect and cache them so a subsequent mission can pick them up and fly them to Earth.

Two asteroid sample return missions are also in progress, the NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to Bennu and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA’s) Hayabusa2 mission to the Ryugu. Both spacecraft are at or have already left their intended targets now and are expected to return with rock samples later this decade, with Hayabusa2 scheduled to complete its round trip later this year.

An illustration of the coronavirus. (Centers of Disease Control)

So sample return is in our future. And in the case of Mars the samples will not with 100 percent certainty be lifeless — a major difference from the samples brought back from the moon during the Apollo missions and the samples coming from asteroids.

This possibility of a spacecraft bringing back something biological — as in the 1969 book “The Andromeda Strain” — has always been viewed as a very low probability but high risk hazard, and much thinking has already gone into how to bring samples back safely.… Read more

Close and Tranquil Solar System Has Astronomers Excited

June 25, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist’s impression of the GJ 887 planetary system of super Earths. (Mark Garlick)

From the perspective of planet hunters and planet characterizers, a desirable solar system to explore is one that is close to ours, that has a planet (or planets) in the star’s habitable zone, and has a host star that is relatively quiet. This is especially important with the very common red dwarf stars, which are far less luminous than stars such as our sun but tend to send out many more powerful — and potentially planet sterilizing — solar flares.

The prolific members of the mostly European and Chilean Red Dots astronomy team believe they have found such a system about 11 light years away from us. The system — GJ 887 — has an unusually quiet red dwarf host, has two planets for sure and another likely that orbits at a life-friendly 50-day orbit. It is the 12th closest planetary system to our sun.

It is that potential third planet, which has shown up in some observations but not others, that would be of great interest. Because it is so (relatively) close to Earth, it would be a planet where the chemical and thermal make-up of its atmosphere would likely be possible to measure.

The Red Dots team — which was responsible for the first detection of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri and also Barnard’s star — describes the system in an article in the journal Science . Team leader Sandra Jeffers of Goettingen University in Germany said in an email that GJ 887 “will be an ideal target because it is such a quiet star — no starspots or energetic outbursts or flares.”

In an accompanying Perspective article in Science, Melvyn Davies of Lund University in Sweden wrote that “If further observations confirm the presence of the third planet in the habitable zone, then GJ 887 could become one of the most studied planetary systems in the solar neighborhood.”

An artist’s impression of a flaring red dwarf star and a nearby planet. Red dwarfs are by far the most common stars in the sky, and most have planetary systems. But scientists are unsure if they can support a habitable planet because many send out more large and powerful flares than other types of stars, especially at the beginnings of their solar lives. (Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie/NASA)

GJ 877 is roughly half as massive as our sun — large for its type of star — and is the brightest red dwarf in the sky.… Read more

April 1, 2020

Theorized Northern Ocean of Mars; now long gone. (NASA)

Change is the one constant in our world– moving in ways tiny and enormous, constructive and destructive.

We’re living now in a time when a rampaging pandemic circles the globe and when the climate is changing in so many worrisome and potentially devastating ways.

With these ominous changes as a backdrop, it is perhaps useful to spend a moment with change as it happens in a natural world without humans. And just how complete that change can be:

For years now, planetary scientists have debated whether Mars once had a large ocean across its northern hemisphere.

There certainly isn’t one now — the north of Mars is parched, frigid and largely featureless. The hemisphere was largely covered over in a later epoch by a deep bed of lava, hiding signs of its past.

The northern lowlands of Mars, as photographed by the Viking 2 lander. The spacecraft landed in the Utopia Planitia section of northern Mars in 1976. (NASA/JPL)

Because our sun sent out significantly less warmth at the time of early Mars (4.2-3.5 billion years ago,) climate modelers have long struggled to come up with an explanation for how the planet — on average, 137 million miles further out than Earth — could have been anything but profoundly colder than today. And if that world was so unrelentingly frigid, how could there be a surface ocean of liquid water?

But discoveries in the 21st century have strongly supported the long-ago presence of water on a Mars in the form of river valleys, lakes and a water cycle to feed them. The work done by the Curiosity rover and Mars-orbiting satellites has made this abundantly clear.

An ocean in the northern lowlands is one proposal made to explain how the water cycle was fed.

And now, In a new paper in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, scientists from Japan and the United States have presented modelling and analysis describing how and why Mars had to have a large ocean early in its history to produce the geological landscape that is being found.

Lead author Ramses Ramirez, a planetary scientist with the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo, said it was not possible to determine how long the ocean persisted, but their team concluded that it had to be present in that early period around 4 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. That is roughly when what are now known to be river valleys were cut in the planet’s southern highlands.… Read more

Exploring Our Sun Will Help Us Understand Habitability

February 20, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

The surface of the sun, with each “kernel” or “cell” roughly the size of Texas. The movie is made up of images produced by the Daniel Inouye SolarTelescope in Hawaii. Novel and even revolutionary data and images are also expected from the Parker Solar Probe (which will travel into the sun’s atmosphere, or corona) and the just launched Solar Orbiter, which will study (among many other things) the sun’s polar regions. (NSO/NSF/AURA)

Scientists have been studying our sun for centuries, and at this point know an awful lot about it — the millions of degrees Fahrenheit heat that it radiates out from the corona, the tangled and essential magnetic fields that it creates, the million-miles-per-hour solar wind and the charged high-energy solar particles that can be so damaging to anything alive.

But we have now entered a time when solar science is taking a major leap forward with the deployment of three pioneering instruments that will explore the sun and its surroundings as never before. One is a space telescopes that will get closer to the sun (by far) than any probe before, another is a probe that will make the first observations of the sun’s poles, and the third is a ground-based solar telescope that can resolve the sun in radically new ways — as seen in the image above, released last month.

Together, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the joint European Space Agency-NASA Solar Orbiter mission and the National Science Foundation’s Inouye Solar Telescope on Hawai’i will provide pathways to understand some of the mysteries of the sun. They include resolving practical issues involving the dynamics of “space weather” that can harm astronauts and telecommunications systems, and larger theoretical unknowns related to all the material that stars scatter into space and onto planets.

Some of those unresolved questions include determining how and why heat and energy flow from the sun’s inner core to the outer corona and make it so much hotter, determining the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar wind, the make-up and effects of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and how and why the sun is able to create and control the heliosphere — the vast bubble of charged particles blown by the solar wind into interstellar space.

An illustration of Kepler2-33b, , one of the youngest exoplanets detected to date using NASA Kepler Space Telescope.

Tatooine Worlds

January 13, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 1 Comment

Science fiction has become science. No habitable planets orbiting two suns like the fictional Tatooine have been detected so far, but more than a dozen “circumbinary planets” have been identified and many more are predicted. Exoplanets orbiting a host star that orbits its own companion star are even more common. (Lucasfilm)

When the the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, it featured the now-iconic two-sun, “circumbinary” planet Tatooine. At that time astronomers didn’t really know if such solar systems existed, with more than one sun and at least one planet.

Indeed, the first extra-solar planet wasn’t detected until the early 1990s. And the first actual circumbinary planet was detected in 2005, and it was a Jupiter-size planet orbiting a system composed of a sun-like star and a brown dwarf. Tatooine was definitely not a Jupiter-size planet.

But since then, the presence and distribution of circumbinaries has grown to a dozen and some the planets discovered orbiting the two stars have been smaller. The most recent discovery was announced this week and was made using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope

The new planet, called TOI (TESS Object of Interest)-1338 b, is about 6.9 times larger than Earth. It orbits its pair of host stars every 95 days, while the stars themselves orbit each other in 15 days.

As is common with binary stars, one is more massive and much brighter than the other (5976 K and 3657 K, respectively, with our sun at 5780 K), and as the planet orbits around it blocks some of the light from the brighter star.

This transit allows astronomers to measure the size of the planet. The transit — as scientific luck, or skill, would have it — was first found in the TESS data by a high school student working at NASA with over the summer, Wolf Cukier

“I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other and from our view eclipse each other every orbit,” Cukier said. “About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338.”

“At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”

With all of the data available from observations past and current, planet hunting clearly isn’t the scientific Wild West that it used to be — although the results remain often eye-popping and surprising.… Read more

How Long Were the Wet Periods on Early Mars, and Was That Water Chemically Suitable For Life?

December 10, 2019 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist rendering, based on scientific findings, of Gale Crater in Mars during one of its ancient, wet periods. (NASA)

There is no doubt that early Mars had long period of warmer and much wetter climates before its atmosphere thinned too much to retain that liquid H₂0 on the surface.

As we know from the Curiosity mission to Gale Crater and other orbital findings, regions of that warmer and wetter Mars had flowing water and lakes periodically over hundreds of millions of years. That’s one of the great findings of planetary science of our times.

But before approaching the question of whether that water could have supported life, a lot more needs to be known than that water was present. We need answers to questions like how acidic or basic that water likely was? Was it very salty? Did it have mineral and elemental contents that could provide energy to support any potential life?

And most especially, how long did those wet periods last, and the dry periods as well?

In a recent paper for Nature Communications, some more precise answers are put forward based on data collected at Gale Crater and interpreted based on geochemical modeling and Earth-based environmental science.

The water, say geochemist Yasuhito Sekine of the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in Tokyo and colleagues from the U.S. and Japan, had many important characteristics supportive of life. It was only mildly salty, it had a near-neutral pH, it contained essential minerals and elements in state of disequilibrium — meaning that they could give and receive the electrons needed to provide life-supporting energy. The area was hardly lush — more like the semi-arid regions of Central Asia and Utah’s Great Salt Lake — but it contained water that was plausibly life supporting.

Based on an analysis of the patterns and quantities of salt remains, they estimate the water was present numerous times for between 10,000 to one million years each period.

Were those warm eras long enough for life to emerge, and the dry period short enough for it to survive?

“We don’t have a clear answer,” Sekine said. “But it is now more clear that the key question is which is more important: the chemistry of the water or the duration of its presence?”

And the way to address the question, he said, is through a mix of planetary science and environmental science.

“This is a first step in the application of environmental chemistry to Mars,” Sekine said.… Read more

A Southern Sky Extravaganza From TESS

November 7, 2019 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

Candidate exoplanets as seen by TESS in a southern sky mosaic from 13 observing sectors. (NASA/MIT/TESS)

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has finished its one year full-sky observation of Southern sky and has found hundreds of candidate exoplanets and 29 confirmed planets. It is now maneuvering its array of wide-field telescopes and cameras to focus on the northern sky to do the same kind of exploration.

At this turning point, NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — which played a major role in designing and now operating the mission — have put together mosaic images from the first year’s observations, and they are quite something.

Constructed from 208 TESS images taken during the mission’s first year of science operations, these images are a unique space-based look at the entire Southern sky — including the Milky Way seen edgewise, the Large and Small Magellenic galaxies, and other large stars already known to have exoplanet.

“Analysis of TESS data focuses on individual stars and planets one at a time, but I wanted to step back and highlight everything at once, really emphasizing the spectacular view TESS gives us of the entire sky,” said Ethan Kruse, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who assembled the mosaic at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Overlaying the figures of selected constellations helps clarify the scale of the TESS southern mosaic. TESS has discovered 29 exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, and more than 1,000 candidate planets astronomers are now investigating. NASA/MIT/TESS

The mission is designed to vastly increase the number of known exoplanets, which are now theorized to orbit all — or most — stars in the sky.

TESS searches for the nearest and brightest main sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which are the most favorable targets for detailed investigations.

This animation shows how a dip in the observed brightness of a star may indicate the presence of a planet passing in front of it, an occurrence known as a transit. This is how TESS identified planet.
(NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

While previous sky surveys with ground-based telescopes have mainly detected giant exoplanets, TESS will find many small planets around the nearest stars in the sky. The mission will also provide prime targets for further characterization by the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other large ground-based and space-based telescopes of the future.

The TESS observatory uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85% of the sky.… Read more

Searching for the Edge of Habitability

August 21, 2019 / Elizabeth Tasker / 0 Comments

Topographical map of Venus by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft (1990 – 1994). Color indicates height. (NASA/JPL/USGS)

How many habitable worlds like our own could exist around other stars? Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, the answer to this question has seemed tantalizingly close. But to estimate the number of Earths, we first need to understand how our planet could have gone catastrophically awry.

In other words, we need to return to Venus.

We have now discovered over 4000 planets beyond our solar system. Approximately one-third of these worlds are Earth-sized and likely to have rocky surfaces not crushed under deep atmospheres. The next step is to discover how many of these support temperate landscapes versus ones unsuitable for life.

The Earth’s habitability is often ascribed to the level of sunlight we receive. We orbit in the so-called ‘habitable zone’ where our planet’s geological cycle can adjust the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to keep our seas liquid. In a closer orbit to the sun, this cycle could not operate fast enough to keep the Earth cool. Our seas would evaporate and our atmosphere fill with carbon dioxide, sending the planet temperature into an upwards spiral known as a runaway greenhouse.

If our solar system had just one Earth-sized planet, this would suggest we could simply count-up similar sized planets in the habitable zones around other stars. This would then be our set of the most likely habitable worlds.

However, this idea is shredded in a new paper posted this month to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Led by Stephen Kane from the University of California, Riverside, the paper is authored by many of the top planetary scientists we have met before in this column.

Their message is simple: our sun is orbited by two Earth-sized planets but only one is habitable. To identify habitable planets around other stars, we need to explain why the Earth and Venus evolved so differently. And the data suggests this is not just a climate catastrophe.

Orbiting beyond the inner edge of the habitable zone, Venus does appear at first to be a runaway Earth. The planet’s atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide, smothering the surface to escalate temperatures to a staggering 863°F (462°C). Images from NASA’s Pioneer Venus mission in the late 1970s revealed a surface of highlands and lowlands that resembled the continents of Earth. This is all consistent with a picture of an Earth-like planet with a runaway greenhouse atmosphere.… Read more

Many Worlds