Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Intersteller mission could last 100 years + Roaming black hole cores of dead galaxies

#1
C C Offline
If NASA greenlights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/104835875...-100-years

EXCERPT: . . . a few years ago NASA officials asked McNutt and his colleagues to come up with a plan for a new interstellar mission, so that the legacy of the Voyagers didn't just end. Their proposed probe relies on technology that's either tried-and-true or already far along in development, with a price tag similar to the recent Parker Solar Probe, which was recently sent hurtling toward the sun at a cost of $1.5 billion.

While other groups have dreamed up interstellar missions in the past or are working on them now, those efforts aren't ready for prime time because they're either incredibly expensive or involve serious engineering challenges, says Michael Paul, who serves as project manager for the interstellar probe study team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

[...] On its way out of the solar system, this proposed spacecraft could swing by a dwarf planet, similar to the New Horizons mission that made the first visit to Pluto in 2015. Kirby Runyon, also at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, notes that scientists know little about dwarf planets, even though they are the most common kind of planet in the solar system.

"We have a handful of terrestrial planets, and we have a handful of giant planets, but we've got over 130 dwarf planets," says Runyon. He points out that many of these icy bodies may have started out as ocean worlds that might even have been habitable in the past.

Besides visiting some mysterious dwarf planet, the spacecraft would be able to go about twice as fast as Voyager 1 and travel about 375 astronomical units, or over 34 billion miles, within the first 50 years. McNutt thinks it's entirely plausible that, like the Voyagers, this spacecraft could just keep going and end up more than 800 astronomical units or 74 billion miles away after traveling for a century. That may sound far, but Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own, is about 25 trillion miles away.

Still, this tiny step out into interstellar space may help in designing future missions that could actually reach other stars, says Ocke... (MORE - missing details)


Are huge black holes from dead galaxies roaming around the Milky Way?
https://www.syfy.com/bad-astronomy-black...-roam-ours

EXCERPTS: . . . We don't really know how intermediate mass black holes (or IMBHs) form, but we think they are common in dwarf galaxies, galaxies like the Milky Way but much smaller. [...]

A dwarf galaxy passing too close or even through our galaxy is in for a world of hurt; the far larger gravity of the Milky Way would strip most of the stars away from it, leaving behind just the core. Many dwarf galaxies have a central (or off-center) IMBH, with lots of stars held tightly by it.

If the IMBH can hold on to them even after our galaxy cannibalizes most of its stars, it's possible it could still be in orbit, moving through space in the Milky Way with its densely populated cadre of hundreds or possibly thousands of stars orbiting it.

The astronomers first used physical models of black holes, dwarf galaxies, and stars to determine what such an object would look like now — they call them hypercompact stellar clusters, because they'd only be literally a few light years across — including the colors of the stars, how tightly packed they'd be, and so on.

They then turned to Gaia, a European Space Agency observatory that has mapped the positions, motions, and distances of well over a billion stars in our galaxy. Using their models of clusters, they searched for places in the sky where there was an unusual number of stars in one spot, with all the stars at the same distance and moving together through space.

Gaia is amazing but can't see faint enough stars to know if these clots are hypercompact clusters or not. So the astronomers then used their candidate list to see what these objects looked like in the DECam Legacy Survey, a wide-field survey of the sky taken by the Dark Energy Camera, which can go much fainter.

The result? Of the 86 candidates they found both in Gaia and DECam observations (covering 8,000 sqaure degrees, a fifth of the entire sky!), the number of them that turned out to be hypercompact stellar clusters orbiting an intermediate mass black hole was... zero. Oof.

None of them matched the criteria needed. Some had stars that were clearly of many different ages (the cluster stars should all be about the same age) or the colors of the stars didn't match. I'll admit to being disappointed when I read that part of the paper — IMBHs are extremely difficult to pin down, and this is a clever idea to find them — but all is not lost. There could still be clusters out there, but their survey just missed them... (MORE - missing details)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Article Are white holes dawning at last? C C 0 16 Mar 15, 2024 06:33 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article Abundance of Milky Way-like galaxies in early Universe, rewriting cosmology C C 0 67 Sep 22, 2023 11:00 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article Dark matter could be building up inside dead stars — explosive consequences? C C 0 72 Aug 29, 2023 05:59 PM
Last Post: C C
  We can begin an interstellar mission today & we should + To save Earth, go to Mars C C 4 662 Jul 22, 2023 08:20 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article How long will the new supernova visible in the night sky last? C C 0 71 Jun 6, 2023 04:27 PM
Last Post: C C
  NASA's DART mission did divert asteroid + Astronomers analyzed JWST data prematurely C C 3 159 Mar 22, 2023 08:13 AM
Last Post: Kornee
  Four classes of planetary systems + "Tadpole playing" around black hole C C 0 63 Feb 18, 2023 07:15 PM
Last Post: C C
  Curved spacetime in lab + Astronomers report most distant galaxies, detected by Webb C C 1 133 Dec 11, 2022 10:25 AM
Last Post: Kornee
  Lab-grown black hole may prove + Be thankful for an out-of-equilibrium Universe C C 0 126 Nov 25, 2022 07:12 PM
Last Post: C C
  Who thought asking the internet to name NASA’s Uranus mission was a good idea? C C 1 100 Sep 14, 2022 08:09 PM
Last Post: Yazata



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)