Astronomy Rewind 2018: This Year in Space Science and Exploration

1950 AD: “I can’t wait for the future. I bet there will be flying cars by 2018”

2018 AD: “…flying cars in space…”

2018 is yet another chapter added to the legacy of human space exploration. We have discovered over 250 exoplanets this year, some of them Earth-like, not to mention that we even captured the birth of a gas giant. We witnessed the longest lunar eclipse of the century. We also found water almost everywhere we looked for it from Mars to Europa and even the asteroid Bennu. We have observed the most distant objects in the universe yet. There have been over 100 orbital launches this year, the highest since 1990. Many mind-boggling theories and techniques were put forward in our eternal quest for knowledge.

Clearly, the dawn of a new space age is upon us. With the year coming to an end, it is time to reflect upon the collective progress we made as a species in space sciences.

(Image: SpaceX’s Starman and Tesla Roadster Launched to Space in February 2018)

The Discoveries That Made Us Go ‘Wow’

When it comes to space, there is so much happening every single day. Finding new stuff is like a daily routine. 

As rightly quoted by Carl Sagan, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”. 

This year, we found 12 new moons of Jupiter, observed organic molecules in Enceladus (Saturn’s Moon), and even spotted evidence for water plumes in Europa (Jupiter’s Moon), and the list goes on just for the discoveries made within the solar system.

Here are some of the most impressive ones we came across.

1. The Origin of the Ghost Particle

22nd September 2017 might have been an ordinary day for most people on Earth but something that happened on that day sent astronomers from around the world into a frenzy. The 279 million dollar ice cube neutrino observatory located at the south pole alerted telescopes across the globe about the detection of a particle called a neutrino (also termed as the ghost particle) and not just any normal neutrino, but the one that carried with it an energy of about 290 TeV! The most interesting take away from this incident is, however, from the days that followed. After an in-depth analysis, in July 2018, scientists released the details of the observations they made and the insights gained out of it. (Image: Artist’s impression of a Blazar)

For the first time ever, the origin of a high energy neutrino was traced back to its source, and what we found there was a Blazar (TXS 0506+056), an elliptical galaxy with a rapidly spinning black hole at its centre. This particular Blazar was at a distance of about 5.7 billion light-years away! What makes it so special is that it opens up an entirely new field of study called the ‘Multi-messenger Astronomy’.

Find out more about this revolutionary discovery in this press release. Here are the research papers associated with the same:

• Multi-messenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A
• Neutrino emission from the direction of the blazar TXS 0506+056 prior to the IceCube-170922A alert

2. A Surprise Under the Ice

What comes to your mind when I say, “This is 31 km wide?” That’s larger than the city of Paris. A depression of such width was first discovered in 2015 hiding under the ice sheets of Greenland and by November 2018 we gathered enough evidence to confirm that it is indeed an impact crater. What’s intriguing here is the fact that it estimated to be less than 3 million years old (It could even be as young as 12000 years old!) making it one of the youngest in terms of geological time. This is yet another reminder to humanity that we aren’t prepared enough for an unforeseen meteorite impact. The following video gives a short note of this discovery.

3. Mystery Behind a Super Ancient Stone 

In 1996, Geologist Aly Barak discovered an odd-looking stone. Little did he know that what he found could be something extraordinary. Years later, in 2013 scientists confirmed that this rock had to be extraterrestrial based on careful analysis. However, there was no clue where it could have come from. Its composition was unlike anything we have ever seen in our solar system. The compounds found in it completely defied our current understanding of meteorites and their composition. In 2015, another group of scientists concluded that it may not have come from any meteorites or comets as we know them. (Image of Hypatia to Scale)

Where did it come from then? A study conducted in 2018 shows that this object is possibly from a time before the solar system even existed, a time before the Sun was even born!

That stone was named Hypatia after one of the ancient astronomer, Hypatia of Alexandria. More research needs to be carried out to understand its origin, but nevertheless, it belongs to something incomprehensible to us at this moment. If it doesn’t really predate the solar system, it would imply that our theories of the formation of the sun and the planets are flawed. We might find out the truth soon.

4. The Farthest Star Ever

They say, “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars”. Even if that was actually true, be assured, you definitely wouldn’t land on Icarus because it is just that much far away.

No, not the one from the Greek mythology. We are here referring to MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, better known as Icarus, the most distant star ever observed (so far). It is located at a humongous distance of about 14 billion light-years from us!

It is almost impossible to resolve a star properly even beyond a 50 million light years. For the fact, the next farthest star we known is just about 55 million light years away. So, how is it even possible to observe a single star at such a distance? Enter gravitational lensing. If a very massive object (like a galaxy) exists between a target object and the observer, it can act as a lens with light from the target object bending around its edges (due to curved space-time created by strong gravitational force) and reaching us, thereby giving a magnification. It helps us image much fainter and distant objects. The major requirement for this to work is the perfect alignment of the lens with respect to the object and we got extremely lucky this time with this effect magnifying Icarus by about 2000 times making it visible to us as seen in the picture below.

(Image: Detection of Star Icarus)

What’s more interesting is that similar techniques can be used to detect exoplanets in the far reaches of space.

The Accomplishments That Deserve a Pat on the Back of Mission Scientists

It is another successful year for various space missions. Most of them are extremely complex yet our scientists topped them. Let’s take a look back to some of the most amazing missions in progress this year.

1. Insight Mars Landing

(Artist’s Concept of InSight Lander on Mars: InSight is the first mission dedicated to investigating the deep interior of Mars. The findings will advance understanding of how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and evolved. (Image Credits: NASA))

On November 26 2018, the Insight Rover successfully landed on the Martian surface. Follow the mission updates on twitter where it interestingly tweets in first person. Insight is all set to do some phenomenal science in the years to come analyzing Marsquakes and mapping the planet’s interior.

It sure is amazing, but the next mission we are discussing here is even better. 

2. The Launch of the Parker Solar Probe

Humanity’s first mission to a star is in a league of its own. Launched this year, the Parker Solar Probe is the fastest man-made object ever. It is expected to reach a speed of 191 km/sec. With that speed, you can travel from Delhi to Chennai in 11 seconds!

It will also be the closest man-made object ever to orbit the Sun, far nearer than Helios B Spacecraft. One interesting innovation among all the state of the art equipment on the probe is the heat shield that is used to protect it from solar radiation and high temperatures. The side facing towards the Sun can reach up to 2500 F but the other end will remain at room temperature!

Parker Solar Probe is a true modern marvel and will help us understand our home star much better.

(Illustration of Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun (Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben))

3. The launch of TESS

Just in time as the Kepler mission for finding exoplanets concluded, we have another mission in place to continue our search. Kepler was a huge success. It discovered over 3800 exoplanets and confirmed that there are definitely more planets than stars in our galaxy.

Following upon its trail, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS) was launched in April 2018 and our hunt for new worlds goes on. This mission is better, bigger and will survey the sky up to 400 times larger than what Kepler did. (Image: An Artist Impression of TESS in Space (Credits: NASA))

How will TESS discover exoplanets?

As the name suggests, TESS tries to identify transiting exoplanets, the intuition being, when an object is transiting a star from our viewpoint, it blocks some of the light from it and hence causes a dip in the star’s brightness. If this dip is periodic, it implies that it’s revolving around that star, a potential candidate for an exoplanet. This is then followed up with ground-based observations to confirm the same.

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 (Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

Does life exist elsewhere? Can life exist elsewhere in the universe? We are closer than ever in finding the answer.

4. Landing on Asteroid Ryugu

While all eyes are on the spacecraft OsirisREx which reached the near-Earth asteroid Bennu recently, it is not the first one of its kind. Landing on an asteroid is no simple feat and the Japanese scientists aced it when they landed not one, but two robots on the asteroid Ryugu from their Hayabusa2 spacecraft this year. These rovers have an array of sensors equipped with them to collect valuable scientific data. This research will help us understand the early solar system and how everything came to be as we know it today.

(This is a stunning image of a view from an asteroid captured by the MINERVA-II1B rover on Sept. 21 2018, shortly after separating from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft. (Image Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency))

The Pictures Worth a Million Words

Exploring space without visualizations is like watching the Universe’s greatest movie closing your eyes. Every photograph has so much detail and history to it that it’s just unfathomable. These pictures are our time machines. Let me now show you the stories from a distant past and the current times through the breathtaking photographs captured by astronomers in 2018.

The above spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the centre of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. (Image Credit: ESO/A. Müller et al)

The circular arc-like structure you can observe here is called an Einstein Ring, captured by Hubble. This is formed due to distortion of space-time by the galaxy cluster as seen here. (Image Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt)

This sequence of images of Jupiter was created from the data of Juno’s Imager on April 1 2018.

(Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran)

A Tribute to the Scientists Who Transcended to the Cosmos

All the phenomenal things we are discovering today are a result of countless hours of efforts and the groundwork laid by Earth’s leading researchers. The year 2018 saw some of our beloved scientists take their last breath. 

They say, a person truly dies when they are no longer remembered. These people have immortalised themselves in human history with their exemplary discoveries and theories. Let’s take a moment to celebrate their life and remember their legacy.

I am sure scientists like them will continue to inspire the generations to come to as we progress further into a technologically advanced civilization.

This Year at Nakshatra

It’s been an eventful year at our space science and the astronomy club. We have organised some amazing stargazing sessions. The most memorable one was during the Super Blood Blue Moon on January 31. We have also organised some telescope workshops.

Student lecture series was another highlight of this year. Stardust 2018 was a grand success in the even semester. We had started a special series called, ‘The Sky This Month’ in the odd semester.

The New Year and Beyond

Space enthusiasts have something very special to look forward to for this new year. The NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft (rightful to its name) will do a close flyby towards a peculiar Kuiper belt object called ‘Ultima Thule’. At about a billion miles away from Pluto, this will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. This flyby can help astronomers to better understand the Kuiper belt objects and the origins of the solar system. You can visit NASA TV for live coverage of this event on the New Year’s day. Tune in for some exciting updates. Nobody exactly knows what will be found when the destination is reached and we are all set to get surprised. (The New Horizons Spacecraft (Image Credits: NASA))

There is a lot more to follow up for the future. China has sent a probe to the far side of the Moon. More missions are underway to Mercury, Moon, and Mars. India has its Chandrayaan II mission coming up. In between all this chaos we also have a Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa set to become the first space tourist to travel around the moon. He booked for a round trip with SpaceX!

We are building bigger and better telescopes and our understanding of the cosmos is improving at an unprecedented rate and yet, we still can’t explain everything we see. The unusual supernovas, dark matter, recurring fast radio bursts, and many other phenomena continue to baffle us. The more we discover, the more elusive the Universe gets.

Above all, one of the most significant events of this year has to be the Voyager 2 spacecraft reaching interstellar space after a remarkable journey spanning over 41 years. This is the second human-made probe to ever do so. The spacecraft that represents all of humanity, our existence, and everything we are through the golden record on board it is expected to stay adrift in space for a very very long time. (Image Credits: NASA)

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Amidst all these discoveries, inventions, and missions, the Earth completed one revolution around the Sun, just like how it has been doing for billions of years. As we continue exploring this unending chasm of reality let us take a moment to celebrate another year of life, space, and time.

Happy New Year

This article was first published on the Nakshatra blog on Medium here.

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