TESS Discovers Jupiter-Sized Exoplanet around Ancient Binary Star

The newfound circumbinary planet, named TIC 172900988b, is slightly larger than Jupiter and transits both of its host stars, according to a paper to be published in one of the AAS journals. “Long before NASA’s Kepler space telescope’s discovery of transiting circumbinary planets, astronomers discussed an unusual observational signature such planets would have — the occurrence of multiple transits during one conjunction,” Dr. Veselin Kostov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues wrote in their paper. “This effect is caused by the planet transiting one or both stars of the host eclipsing binary several times over the course of a fraction of its orbital period.” “The configuration of such transits depends on the relative sky-projected velocities of circumbinary planets and the stars being transited. Importantly, the orbital period of these planets can be estimated from such transits provided the host system is a double-lined spectroscopic binary.” “Several groups of astronomers attempted to detect transits of circumbinary planets from the ground before the turn of the century — single-conjunction or otherwise — but were ultimately hampered by the limited time sampling,” they added. “Fortunately, thanks to its long dwell time and high photometric precision, the Kepler mission enabled the discovery of a dozen transiting circumbinary planets and also demonstrated that the occurrence of pairs of transits during one conjunction is common.”

“Four of the eleven known Kepler circumbinary systems exhibit such transits: Kepler-16, Kepler-34, Kepler-35, and Kepler-1647.”

TIC 172900988b is 1.01 times larger than Jupiter and 11.07 times larger than Earth.

With a mass of 2.9 Jupiter masses, it is the most massive transiting circumbinary planet known, a factor of two times larger than the next most massive planet, Kepler-1647b.

The planet has an orbital period between 189 and 204 days and is too hot to be in the habitable zone.

It was detected in data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) using the multiple-transits-in-one-conjunction technique.

The analysis of the TIC 172900988 binary system’s light curve revealed one primary and two secondary eclipses with depths of 40% and 35%, respectively.

“TIC 172900988 was observed in a single sector and the planet produced just two transits — one across each star — during the same conjunction,” the astronomers wrote.

“The planet transited the primary star and then 5 days later it transited the secondary star.”

“The binary star is itself eclipsing, with a period of 19.7 days and an eccentricity of 0.45.”

TIC 172900988 is located approximately 824 light-years away in the constellation of Cancer.

Otherwise known as TYC 2483-160-1 and 2MASS J08343881+3133147, the system is 3.1 billion years old.

“TIC 172900988 demonstrates the discovery potential of TESS for circumbinary planets with orbital periods greatly exceeding the duration of the observing window,” the researchers wrote.

Firefly Aerospace picks SpaceX rocket to launch Blue Ghost moon lander in 2023

The space launch company Firefly Aerospace announced this week that when its Blue Ghost lander launches to the moon in 2023, it will do so on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. "Firefly is excited to fly our Blue Ghost spacecraft on the highly reliable Falcon 9, which will deliver NASA instruments and technology demonstration payloads that support NASA science goals and NASA's Artemis program," Shea Ferring, Firefly's senior vice president of spacecraft, said in a statement Thursday (May 20). The Falcon 9 will be able to carry Blue Ghost to the moon without forcing the lander to expend much of the fuel it might need for the actual touchdown, Ferring added. Firefly has yet to launch anything, though in June, the Austin, Texas-based company hopes to begin testing its own rocket for small satellite launches: Firefly Alpha. Nonetheless, the company has been active in designing lunar landers, and it's paid off; in February, NASA awarded Firefly a $93.3 million contract to deliver Blue Ghost to the moon.

Blue Ghost is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which contracts private-sector firms to land science experiments and other assorted cargo on the moon. The first CLPS missions could launch as soon as this year.

SpaceX is also no stranger to CLPS, and has even launched one moon mission — the private Israeli moon lander Beresheet — to the moon on a Falcon 9 rocket. (The Beresheet lander failed to land successfully, however.). SpaceX has already been tapped to launch a few other CLPS landers—such as Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C and Masten’s XL-1—perhaps as early as 2022.

If all goes to plan, Blue Ghost will land in Mare Crisium, a dark oval that you can see if you look to the upper right edge of the moon's face. It will carry 10 payloads weighing about 330 lbs. (150 kilograms) when it lands. Firefly Aerospace named its Blue Ghost lander after the rare Phausis reticulata firefly).

That payload will help perform a potpourri of science — studying things such as what makes up the moon's mantle, how radiation affects computer chips on a world without a magnetic field, and how well you can pick up GPS signals out there.

First Images of the Cosmic Web Reveal Unsuspected Presence of Billions of Dwarf Galaxies

In the Universe, galaxies are distributed along extremely tenuous filaments of gas millions of light years long separated by voids, forming the cosmic web.
The MUSE instrument on the Very Large Telescope has captured an image of several filaments in the early Universe…
… revealing the unexpected presence of billions of dwarf galaxies in the filaments

Figure 1: cosmological simulation of the distant Universe. The image shows the light emitted by hydrogen atoms in the cosmic web in a region roughly 15 million light years across. In addition to the very weak emission from intergalactic gas, a number of point sources can be seen: these are galaxies in the process of forming their first stars. Credit: Jeremy Blaizot / projet SPHINX

Although the filaments of gas in which galaxies are born have long been predicted by cosmological models, we have so far had no real images of such objects. Now for the first time, several filaments of the ‘cosmic web’ have been directly observed using the MUSE[1] instrument installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. These observations of the early Universe, 1 to 2 billion years after the Big Bang, point to the existence of a multitude of hitherto unsuspected dwarf galaxies. Carried out by an international collaboration led by the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CNRS/Université Lyon 1/ENS de Lyon), also involving the Lagrange laboratory (CNRS/Université Côte d’Azur/Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur),[2] the study is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Figure 2: the 2250 galaxies in the ‘cone’ of the Universe observed by MUSE are shown here according to the age of the Universe (in billions of years). The period of the early Universe (0.8 to 2.2 billion years after the Big Bang) explored in this study is shown in red. The 22 regions with galaxy over-density are indicated by grey rectangles. The 5 regions where filaments have been identified most prominently are shown in blue. Credit: Roland Bacon / David Mary

The filamentary structure of hydrogen gas in which galaxies form, known as the cosmic web, is one of the major predictions of the model of the Big Bang and of galaxy formation [figure 1]. Until now, all that was known about the web was limited to a few specific regions, particularly in the direction of quasars, whose powerful radiation acts like car headlights, revealing gas clouds along the line of sight. However, these regions are poorly representative of the whole network of filaments where most galaxies, including our own, were born. Direct observation of the faint light emitted by the gas making up the filaments was a holy grail which has now been attained by an international team headed by Roland Bacon, CNRS researcher at the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CNRS/Université Lyon 1/ENS de Lyon).

Figure 3: one of the hydrogen filaments (in blue) discovered by MUSE in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. It is located in the constellation Fornax at a distance of 11.5 billion light years, and stretches across 15 million light years. The image in the background is from Hubble. Credit: Roland Bacon, David Mary, ESO and NASA

The team took the bold step of pointing ESO’s Very Large Telescope, equipped with the MUSE instrument coupled to the telescope’s adaptive optics system, at a single region of the sky for over 140 hours. Together, the two instruments form one of the most powerful systems in the world.[3] The region selected forms part of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, which was until now the deepest image of the cosmos ever obtained. However, Hubble has now been surpassed, since 40% of the galaxies discovered by MUSE have no counterpart in the Hubble images.

Figure 4: cosmological simulation of a filament made up of hundreds of thousands of small galaxies. The image on the left shows the emissions produced by all the galaxies as it might be observed in situ. The image on the right shows the filament as it would be seen by MUSE. Even with a very long exposure time, the vast majority of the galaxies cannot be detected individually. However, the light from all these small galaxies is detected as a diffuse background, rather like the Milky Way when seen with the naked eye. Credit: Thibault Garel and Roland Bacon

After meticulous planning, it took eight months to carry out this exceptional observing campaign. This was followed by a year of data processing and analysis, which for the first time revealed light from the hydrogen filaments, as well as images of several filaments as they were one to two billion years after the Big Bang, a key period for understanding how galaxies formed from the gas in the cosmic web [figures 2 et 3]. However, the biggest surprise for the team was when simulations showed that the light from the gas came from a hitherto invisible population of billions of dwarf galaxies spawning a host of stars [figure 4].[4] Although these galaxies are too faint to be detected individually with current instruments, their existence will have major consequences for galaxy formation models, with implications that scientists are only just beginning to explore.

Notes
MUSE, which stands for Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, is a 3D spectrograph designed to explore the distant Universe. The construction of the instrument was led by the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1/ENS de Lyon).
Other French laboratories involved: Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université/CNES), Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (CNRS/Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier/CNES).

See ESO press release.
Until now, theory predicted that the light came from the diffuse cosmic ultraviolet background radiation (very weak background radiation produced by all the galaxies and stars) which, by heating the gas in the filaments, causes them to glow.

Starliner test flight scheduled for July 30

NASA and Boeing have scheduled a second uncrewed test flight of the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew spacecraft for July 30. In separate statements, the agency and the company said they were planning to launch the Starliner on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 at 2:53 p.m. Eastern July 30 on the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission. A launch that day would allow the spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station on the evening of July 31. The new launch date comes after NASA and Boeing completed an “integrated mission dress rehearsal” for the mission using a simulator at a Boeing facility in Houston. The five-day simulation covered activities starting 26 hours before launch and going through landing, including docking and undocking from the station. “It provided another opportunity to run the software end to end with the highest-fidelity hardware and mission controllers in the loop to simulate as close to an actual flight as possible,” John Vollmer, Starliner vice president and program manager at Boeing, said in a company statement. In addition to performing the dress rehearsal, Boeing has completed all the actions recommended by an independent review team after the original OFT mission in December 2019, which suffered several problems that prevented it from going to the ISS. NASA noted in its statement that those actions are “pending closure” by the agency. The Starliner that will fly the OFT-2 mission is, at this point, largely ready. Boeing will now focus on processing the spacecraft that will be used for the later Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission until it’s time for prelaunch activities for OFT-2 in midsummer.

While the spacecraft is nearly ready, Boeing has to wait until late July to launch because of both launch schedules on the Eastern Range as well as vehicles visiting the ISS. Starliner can dock at one of two ports on the station, one of which is currently occupied by the Crew-2 Crew Dragon spacecraft. The other will be used by a cargo Dragon mission launching June 3 and scheduled to remain at the station through mid-July.

“The traffic model up there on ISS is something else,” Bob Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center, said during a Space Transportation Association presentation May 6 when mentioning the status of the OFT-2 mission, shortly before the NASA and Boeing statements about the new launch date. “Between all the different resupply vehicles and the different crew vehicles going back and forth, it’s getting hard to find a spot to dock up there.”

However, the new launch date is still slightly earlier than expected. In mid-April, NASA officials said they were projecting a launch of OFT-2 in August or September. Boeing said at the time that the Starliner would be “mission-ready” in May should an earlier launch window become available.

NASA and Boeing are holding out hope that, if OFT-2 does launch this summer, it can still fly the CFT mission with three NASA astronauts on board before the end of the year. Cabana said they wanted to fly CFT “hopefully later this year.”

At a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel May 6, panel member David West said there was “good confidence within NASA” about the launch readiness for OFT-2. However, he added there are “several open items that will require resolution” before the CFT mission, but didn’t elaborate on those issues.

Later in the meeting, another panel member, Amy Donahue, said that NASA and Boeing had finalized plans to conduct an organizational safety assessment of the company. The panel, at its February meeting, complained that NASA had yet to start that safety culture audit, and called on the agency to perform the audit before the CFT mission. NASA said it had delayed the assessment because of complications in conducting it caused by the pandemic.

Donahue said a joint NASA-Boeing team will conduct the assessment “very soon,” and that the results of the assessment should be ready to present at the panel’s next meeting in July.

“We continue to believe that safety culture assessment must be performed soon to ensure that any lingering systemic issues related to risk management, quality and safety are identified and corrected,” she said, “certainly before CFT takes place but now even before OFT-2.”

Our Giant Universe: Hubble Spots Massive Galaxy Cluster With a Wealth of Exciting Possibilities

This detailed image features Abell 3827, a galaxy cluster that offers a wealth of exciting possibilities for study. It was observed by Hubble in order to study dark matter, which is one of the greatest puzzles cosmologists face today. The science team used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to complete their observations. The two cameras have different specifications and can observe different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, so using them both allowed the astronomers to collect more complete information. Abell 3827 has also been observed previously by Hubble, because of the interesting gravitational lens at its core. Looking at this cluster of hundreds of galaxies, it is amazing to recall that until less than 100 years ago, many astronomers believed that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the Universe. The possibility of other galaxies had been debated previously, but the matter was not truly settled until Edwin Hubble confirmed that the Great Andromeda Nebula was in fact far too distant to be part of the Milky Way. The Great Andromeda Nebula became the Andromeda Galaxy, and astronomers recognized that our Universe was much, much bigger than humanity had imagined. We can only imagine how Edwin Hubble — after whom the Hubble Space Telescope was named — would have felt if he’d seen this spectacular image of Abell 3827.