News in Astronomy & Geophysics – August 2022

The persistent hydrogen emission from supernova SN 2014C has been explained by a team led by Benjamin Thomas (University of Texas at Austin). The researchers propose a model where the hydrogen envelopes of the two stars in the progenitor binary system merged to form a common envelope. The pair then expelled the envelope to form an expanding, disk-like structure surrounding the two stars. When one of the stars exploded, its fast-moving ejecta collided with the slow-moving gas disk, sliding along the disk surface at a ‘boundary layer’ where the hydrogen emission arises. bit.ly/3NqJoNA The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team have released the first image of the Milky Way's very own central supermassive black hole – Sgr A*. The image looks remarkably similar to the EHT's view of M87*, released in 2019, even though our galaxy's black hole is more than a thousand times smaller and less massive than M87*. The image of Sgr A* is necessarily an averaging of many different images because the material close to the event horizon is moving so much faster than in M87*. The EHT team's results are published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. bit.ly/3byDKMl Rocket launches from the UK are coming closer to reality this summer; a CubeSat technology demonstration mission exploring the ionosphere is being readied for launch from Spaceport Cornwall in Newquay. CIRCE, the Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction CubeSat Experiment will be launched by Virgin Orbit Launcher One rocket, taking off from a modified Boeing 747. CIRCE will carry the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory's miniaturized space weather instruments in a joint mission with the US Naval Research Laboratory to explore the ionosphere. The mission uses two six-unit CubeSats carrying identical instruments flying on the same orbital path at a nominal altitude of 550 km, separated by 250–500 km in order to assess temporal variations in the ionosphere. The suite of instruments was developed by University College London (UCL), University of Bath, and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), drawing on expertise from the University of Surrey. bit.ly/3u6mJzh An exhibition at the Herschel House Museum will celebrate the bicentenary of the death of William Herschel. The exhibition, organized by the Bath Preservation Trust and the Herschel House Museum, opened on 16 July and closes at the end of 2022. The RAS has loaned William's observing notebook, including his notes from the night of 13 March 1781, when he first observed the planet Uranus, as well as a catalogue of stars recorded by his sister Caroline, the first woman to receive a salary for her astronomical work. bit.ly/2VZ8DO9 A team of scientists have identified plumes of methane emissions from offshore hydrocarbon production platforms using satellite data. Methane emissions on land can be monitored using shortwave infrared radiation, but this part of the spectrum is poorly reflected by water, giving low signal strength around the 30% of global oil and gas production based at sea. Now a team led from Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) have detected and quantified strong methane plumes from offshore oil and gas production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, near the coast of Campeche – in one of Mexico's major oil producing fields. The team found one ultra-flare event lasting 17 days that resulted in emission of 40,000 tonnes of methane; 3% of Mexico's annual emissions from oil and gas production. “The results demonstrate how satellites can detect methane plumes from offshore infrastructure,” said Luis Guanter of VPU. “This is a breakthrough in the monitoring of industrial methane emissions from space, as it opens the door to systematic monitoring of emissions from individual offshore platforms.” bit.ly/3xYhpPs Astronomers have narrowed down the value of the cosmic expansion rate to within about 1%. Based on three decades of observations of a sample of 42 Type Ia supernovae, Adam Riess (STScI/Johns Hopkins University) and coworkers have concluded that the Hubble-Lemaître constant is 73±1 km/s/Mpc. Given the large sample size, there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the team have got the value wrong. But the new results, appearing in The Astrophysical Journal, offer no explanation of the discrepancy between the expansion rate of the local versus the primeval universe, measured from the cosmic microwave background. bit.ly/3HRGwYO Yasuhiro Oba (Hokkaido University) and team have found the last two of the five informational units of DNA and RNA in meteorite samples. Cytosine and thymine have been elusive in previous analyses, likely because of their delicate structure, but the researchers isolated the nucleobases with an innovative cool water technique. While it is unlikely that DNA could be formed in a meteorite, this discovery demonstrates that these genetic building bricks are available for delivery and could have contributed to the development of the instructional molecules on the early Earth. The research appears in Nature Communications. bit.ly/39QjeWK A survey using the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, performed by Evan Rich (University of Michigan) and colleagues has found that proto-planetary disks around stars less than three solar masses tend to have dusty rings, whereas disks around higher mass stars do not. This suggests that planet-formation processes may be subtly different, depending on mass. The survey, appearing in The Astronomical Journal, targeted 44 bright Herbig Ae/Be and T-Tauri stars in near-infrared and polarized light, using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). bit.ly/3OEcLwW (International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Rich (Michigan University)) Nearby white dwarf star G238-44 is siphoning off debris from both Mercury-like and comet-like bodies. A research team, led by Ted Johnson (UCLA), detected the presence of nitrogen, oxygen, magnesium, silicon and iron, among other elements, in the atmosphere of G238-44. The detection of iron and nitrogen in high abundances is evidence for the disassociation of metallic cores of terrestrial planets, and icy bodies, respectively. The team's results were presented at an American Astronomical Society press conference on 15 June. bit.ly/3QNCGnO (NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)) A new technique for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a complete survey of the COSMOS field at near-infrared wavelengths. This survey covers an area of the sky six times the area of the full Moon as observed from Earth; the largest NIR survey and one including galaxies up to 10 billion years old. The new technique to cover this large area is called Drift and SHift (DASH); the telescope captures multiple images that are combined into a master mosaic eight times the size of a standard Hubble image. The results are published by Lamiya Mowla of the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues in The Astrophysical Journal. And you can explore the data online at www.lamiyamowla.com/3d-dash/explorer (made by Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Denmark) Researchers have found that the presence of metal oxides and hydrides in the hottest exoplanets invert their atmospheres. Writing in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement, Quentin Changeat (University College London) and colleagues analyzed the atmospheres of 25 exoplanets with archival HST and Spitzer data. They propose that exoplanet atmospheres hot enough to sustain these species tend to be thermally inverted because these metallic species are very efficient absorbers of stellar light. bit.ly/3NsM0dQ The UK government has invested £30 million in ESA's Ariel planet-finding mission. The additional funding will secure the UK's scientific leadership of the mission and incorporate the delivery of Ariel's payload module, cryogenic cooler and optical ground support equipment, as well as science operations and data processing. “By investing and taking the helm of the entire Ariel consortium,” said Science Minister George Freeman, “we are putting the UK at the heart of international space research.” Giovanna Tinetti, Mission Consortium Principal Investigator for Ariel at University College London, said: “We are very grateful to the UK Space Agency and the UK government for their continued support and commitment in advancing planetary science, helping us understand worlds beyond our solar system as well as within it.” bit.ly/3QNh235 Research shows that galaxies are, on average, at rest with respect to the early universe – confirming one aspect of the so-called ‘mediocrity principle’. Jeremy Darling (University of Colorado, Boulder) used two recently released radio surveys (VLASS and RACS) to study the sky distribution and brightness of extragalactic radio sources. The results also show agreement with the measured CMB-solar velocity. “We're not special,” said Darling, “as a galaxy or as observers.” bit.ly/3A7UmES Stars in distant galaxies may be more massive than previously thought. That's the conclusion of a study by Albert Sneppen (Niels Bohr Institute) and colleagues appearing in The Astrophysical Journal. In the study the team compared the distribution of blue versus red colours in a sample of 140 000 galaxies from the COSMOS catalogue. The result may be explained by a simple trend – the least massive galaxies continue to form new stars, while the more massive galaxies stop. bit.ly/3QTELhV The Hypatia stone, a meteorite fragment found in Egypt in 1996, includes elemental abundances markedly at odds with the proportions generally found in solar system materials. But a comprehensive analysis of 15 elements in the fragment, led by Jan Kramers (University of Johannesburg), eliminates many suspects for its origin. The conclusion, presented in the journal Icarus, is that the fragment matches the composition expected from a Type Ia supernova. bit.ly/3bvmUOh In 2016, researchers demonstrated that the aurorae are sometimes associated with sounds – resulting from electrical discharges across a temperature inversion layer about 70 m above the ground. Unto Laine (Aalto University) recently presented results at the EUROREGIO/BNAM2022 Joint Acoustics Conference which showed these sounds occur even when visible aurorae are absent. A strong correlation was found between recorded sounds and measurements of geomagnetic activity, but there was no correlation with auroral brightness. bit.ly/3ygOczN New observations of gamma-ray burst GRB 200826A, involving the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), the Galileo National Telescope (TNG) and the Maidanak Astronomical Observatory (Uzbekistan), have shown that the classification of GRBs based on their duration is not enough to uniquely reveal the nature of the progenitor. GRB 200826A, with a duration of about half a second, is a ‘short burst’ GRB (associated with neutron star mergers), even though almost every other characteristic of the event is consistent with a long burst GRB (associated with supernovae). The research, by Andrea Rossi (INAF, Bologna) and colleagues, appears in The Astrophysical Journal. bit.ly/3NhKSK4 Wei Wang and John E. Vidale (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) have found evidence that the Earth's inner core oscillates, contradicting previously accepted models that suggest it consistently rotates at a faster rate than the planet's surface. The oscillation, with a six-year period, can explain the variation in the length of the day over recent decades. The research, based on data recorded by the Large Aperture Seismographic Array (LASA) during two nuclear test explosions more than 50 years ago, appears in Science Advances. bit.ly/3HSz3sw Sibasish Laha (University of Maryland/NASA GSFC) and team have suggested the March 2018 outburst of galaxy 1ES 1927+654 may have been sparked by its central black hole's magnetic reversal. Writing in The Astrophysical Journal, the researchers explain how the field initially weakens at the outskirts of the accretion disk, leading to greater heating and brightening in visible and UV light. As the flip progresses, the field becomes so weak that it can no longer support the corona and the X-ray emission vanishes. The magnetic field then gradually strengthens in its new orientation. go.nasa.gov/3QTEFH5 On 8 June, ESA formally adopted the innovative Comet Interceptor mission led from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) and the University of Edinburgh. This means that the mission team can move towards building the spacecraft, instruments and a robotic probe to work alongside that supplied by the Japanese Space Agency. “It's fantastic to get the green light after almost four years of hard work since the European Space Agency's invitation to propose came out,” said Geraint Jones of MSSL. “The international team of scientists and engineers, working with colleagues at ESA, kept mission development on track despite the many complications raised by Covid-19.” bit.ly/3ymCXa9 Lunar soil could generate oxygen and fuel on the Moon. That's the conclusion of material scientist Yingfang Yao (Nanjing University), and colleagues, after analyzing lunar samples returned by China's Chang'e 5 spacecraft. The researchers found their regolith sample contains iron- and titanium-rich compounds that could work as catalysts to electrolyze water extracted from the Moon's subsurface (and released by astronauts' breathing). Oxygen and hydrogen could thus be produced, merely by the action of sunlight, while hydrogenation of exhaled carbon dioxide is also catalyzed by lunar soil, yielding hydrocarbons such as methane. The research appears in the journal Joule. bit.ly/3a1ZoYC Astronomers have discovered that an unassuming nearby star called HD 222925, has the widest range of chemical elements yet found outside the solar system. In a new study they identified 65 elements formed by the r-process, including selenium, silver, tellurium, platinum, gold and thorium, in HD 222925 – all elements rarely detected in other stars. The elements were produced in either a supernova or a merger of neutron stars. HD 222925 can now be used as a proxy or standard for the chemical signature of such events. The research, led by Ian Roederer (University of Michigan) appears in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement. bit.ly/3y0eOox The following were elected Fellows of the RAS in March 2022: Suman Chowdhury, UK Nils de Vries, UK Jimi Harrold, UK Carys Herbert, UK Holly Hourston, UK Manasvi Lingam, USA Alex Lyne, UK Frederik Madsen, UK Matthijs Mars, UK Mike Marsh, UK Henrik Melin, UK Laura Millson, UK Sanjida Nivu, UK Katarzyna Nowak, UK Jeremy Phillips, UK Pratyaksha Purohit, UK Thomas Rintoul, UK Rahul Sharma, UK Exodus Sit, Hong Kong Ioan Cai Stoddard-Jones, UK Elizabeth Taylor, UK Jordan Van Beeck, Belgium Michael Wilson, UK The following were elected Fellows of the RAS in May 2022: David Arnot, UK Maxim Ballmer, UK Agnibha Banerjee, UK Brian Barley, UK Michael Barratt, UK Neil Bellis, UK Luke Booth, UK Derek Borland, UK Martin Bracken, UK James Carmichael, UK Emily Charles, UK Soumyadeep Das, UK Jamie Dumayne, UK Jools Elliott, UK William Foster-Hall, Australia Jenni French, UK Medha Ganapathiraju, UK Andrew Gillan, UK David Harris, UK Daniel Higgins, USA Jarita Holbrook, UK David Hymers, UK Christopher Inman, UK Wasim Javed, UK Alexander Kitchen, UK Ka Hou Leong, UK Kai Pei Lo, UK Jun Yu Loh, UK Freya Martinez-Hurtado, UK Hayden Ng, UK Elizabeth UK UK UK UK UK UK Jeremy UK UK UK Martin UK UK Michael UK UK UK Wilson, UK UK The in has been to of of and of the University of Los They receive this their work and leadership in the development of and research has the of solar and stellar structure and our of the of The the in this based on work and in such as the ESA mission. to RAS John on the of the the by the The Society was in New in to and research of the space and for the of the and In the of University was of the of the for his work on and sky of the University of was the for online with during the and Michael University College the in They are for their to space and in for their in the and of the European Space Agency's and The that they this million to the of scientists and work these has been the Herschel is at the for a at both University of is also of the in the Herschel is the with the will of the leading to the the in the and the and its results, including the black has been This one has the orbital yet the and star are other every The appears to be in that it a star that around the two inner stars every 10 000 The system likely from a that may have into the Milky Way's where the of the central black hole was enough to the while the black and colleagues their results in A new study has an explanation as to how can form on an icy surface where the atmosphere is and are The led by George the processes with an analysis of images from the mission of Galileo spacecraft. When dioxide the it results in that is and moving enough to move surface – and the of The study was published in Nature Communications. blue optical could result from the that launched by stars. That's to research by and colleagues published in the of the Astronomical The researchers that stars tend to hydrogen in their – that are for a to But in these stars, a can all its to the which becomes the only to the The will including hydrogen from the of the The Large Array has observed a of gas in the of the galaxy emission is more common in so may be a of previous activity, a that led to the of gas to large But that it may also and galaxies are much than previously thought. The work appears in The Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers have found a strong correlation between mass and in The study at least within or so of all of disks show the same mass distribution at a And they all to be in the same for and team analyzed disks around stars in the A using the Large Array The results in A has researchers to elusive discharges called to in the Earth's magnetic field recorded by the ESA satellites a low are in the lasting from a to two Researchers have their into the ionosphere the Earth's magnetic Now a of by Martin a at the of has been with data from ESA's magnetic field monitoring mission with data from the US satellite and from the Array up from discharges such as and can in the Earth's one of its satellites is close to the data that the released and observed by was close to

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