Rosetta Spacecraft Raises New Questions About Comet’s Origin

Rosetta – To Orbit a Comet’s Nucleus

According to a new research released recently, Scientists using Europe’s comet-orbiting Rosetta spacecraft have discovered that its complicated ancient body is coated with simple organic molecules surrounded by a changing cloud of gases.Rosetta will be the first mission to orbit a comet’s nucleus to land and probe on its surface and will also be the first spacecraft to fly along with a comet heading towards the inner Solar System, to observe how a frozen comet gets transformed by the warmth of the Sun.

After a long journey of 10 years, Rosetta reached Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August, placing itself in an orbit for an unprecedented long term study. It released a piggyback-riding spacecraft in November which descended on the comet’s surface for various series of independent research.

Comets are presumed to be frozen leftovers from the formation of planets around 4.6 billion years back and the Rosetta mission would probably give us some understanding on the solar system’s early days, on studying one of its pristine comet remnants. Though the results from the Philae spacecraft experiments remains pending, scientists recently released 7 papers in the journal Science which provides information on Rosetta’s discoveries during its initial two months around 67P.

Discovery of Wide Variation in Gases

It was found that the comet’s body which is around 100 million time more massive than the International Space Station is covered in ripples and dunes with little water ice on its surface together with generous amount of hydrocarbons. Scientists are of the opinion that they are expecting to find more complex carbon containing molecule though have found mostly simple hydrocarbons.

This has led them to queries on how organic compounds could have been formed and spread through the solar system. The first thing that scientists need to figure out is how the comet has changed over a period of time, details of which will emerge as 67P travels towards the sun and heats up developing a coma or a visible atmosphere together with a tail.

Researchers have already discovered wide variation in the gases that are released from the nucleus, the comet’s body and the changes in the quantities of these gases seems to appear to be tied to speculation on a section of the rotating nucleus which is made of dust, rock and frozen gas, is in daylight or darkness.
Research – Understanding of Comet Formation & Evolution

According to Rosetta scientist, Myrtha Hassig of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonia, Texas, she states that seasonal effects could also be discovered over a period of time. These studies would have an ultimate impact on the scientist on their understanding of comet formation and evolution.

Another scientist, Stephen Fuselier, also from Southwest Research Institute, commented that they were taught that comets were made mostly of water ice and for this comet, the coma sometimes contains much more carbon dioxide than water vapour’.

Scientists are working in figuring out if the 67P which is shaped as a rubber duck, was actually two smaller comets which had melded together. Rosetta will carry on flying around the comet moving towards and then away from the sun, the closest approach being about 116 million miles away from the Sun on August 13.

Kepler-438b and 442b: Are These the Planets We're Looking For?

Tuesday was one of best days for astronomers as they announced that they have discovered eight new planets which are potentially habitable planets and they are further than our solar system. Two of discovered planets are mostly similar to our planet Earth. All these eight planets have been located for the first time in their far-away suns by NASA's Kepler mission. These planets are pretty much in their habitable zone or so called region which is expected to have liquid water existing on the surface of their orbiting planet. However, two of these eight planets are expected to be made out of Rock and similar to Earth.

What are these planets? 

Kepler-438b, which is 12 percent greater than Earth in diameter and made up of 70 percent of being rocky actually lies nearly 475 light-years away. On the other hand, Kepler-442b is expected to be light-years away and nearly one-third larger than Earth. This also has 60 percent chances of being rocky. These new candidates have already been added to the "Hall of Fame" of NASA Kepler for being a potential habitable-zone planet.

All about these promising candidates

Both Kepler-442b and Kepler-438b, orbit red dwarf stars. These stars are not only smaller but also cooler when compared to the sun. Kepler-438b has been expected to circle its star every 35 days but still can receive more than 40 percent light when compared to Earth. According to the parameters, this planet has 70 percent chances of being in the habitable zone of its star.

On the other hand, Kepler-442b usually completes its orbit in about 112 days and can get 2/3rd as lighter as Earth. According to the scientists, there are 97% chances of the planet being in the habitable zone. According to David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and second author on the paper, they are not sure if the planets are habitable based on their samples but still they fall in being the promising candidates.

According to the records, the two most Earth-like planets known were Kepler-186f is 1.1 times the size of Earth and Kepler-62f, which is 1.4 times as big as Earth.

Neighbourhood like Earth: 

At the moment, the data can only help in giving details about the size of the planet, the distance of the planet and the amount of energy it gets from its sun. The data still doesn’t give a clear picture about the actual facts about a planet. However, Kepler-438b is expected to be the closest to Earth. Astronauts have been able to find many planets not only similar to Earth but they are most likely filling up our neighbourhood.

According to NASA, Kepler mission was mainly designed to establish the statistics of Earth-like planets and finding planets similar to stars is no longer rare. Even though there are a promising future in studying these planets, but still it is difficult to find complete information about them. Scientists believe that there are millions and millions of planets in our milky way.

NASA Releases Over 60 Space Audio Recordings on Soundcloud

After many decennaries, NASA has been able to put up a SoundCloud account, which will allow them to stream out the audio clips they have collected and which includes celestial sounds like the ones from the launching of the rockets, the dialogue of the astronaut with that of alien lightning and also the interstellar plasma.

Now, NASA has released nearly 60 space recording for people to hear anywhere online. These released recordings contain sounds that came from the launching of the shuttle, Saturn’s rings, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and some of the most famous quotes from the astronauts.

So what’s special about these recordings?

At the moment, there are 63 recordings in offering, but the emphasis was on the fact they uploaded the very first audio consisting on Neil Armstrong’s voice. If the reports from 'mother nature network' have to be believed, the first video which was posted by NASA contained the most famous word “A Giant Leap”, said by Neil Armstrong when he first put his foot on the surface of the moon and touched it.

Earth-song:

The Chorus, which is also known as “Earth-song” is known to be one of the most popular NASA feeds. Earth-song is essentially the noise which is made by the electromagnetic phenomenon, which is actually caused by the plasma waves in the radiation belts of Earth.

These plasma waves become visible at least 12,874 km (8,000 miles) on top of the surface. These Earth-song recordings were recorded by NASA in 2012 with the help of the EMFISIS probe.

Saturn Radio:

Saturn Radio is one of the other recordings uploaded by NASA. Saturn is known to be the hub of dramatic sounds and aurora which are similar to that of the southern light and the northern sounds which roams around the Earth’s pole, and this happens when the upper atmosphere is hit by the solar wind.

The Northern and the Southern lights look similar to that of the strong radio emissions from the planet and this was detected the very first time in 2002 by the Cassini spacecraft.

The Sounds of Interstellar:

The Sounds of Interstellar is another audio clip which basically represents the data that was collected outside the Heliosphere by NASA's Voyager 1in 2012 and 2013.

Lift Off:

These sounds were from the very first manned-mission, Apollo 11. This mission conducted on the moon was called as Lift off. These clips consist of the sounds of lift off as well as the appreciation in the space center.

On the similar lines, even ISRO (India's space research Organization) reached out to millions of the people from the social media by giving out the step by step information about all their historic Mars Orbit Insertion which were successful in the month of September.

The ISRO got lots of appreciation for their initiative from the users of the social media. Constant tweets between NASA and ISRO became the trending news in the media and very much appreciated.

Space-Time Affects Behaviour of Hypothetical Quantum

With regards to quantum physic, one often comes across a phrase `quantum field theory’, which is referred to the general idea that quantum particles are just localized excited states of a general quantum field that underlies them, though it is mathematically a useful idea which interacts with Einstein’s classical conception of space-time in a complex ways.

Gravity is the outcome of curvature in the ineffable medium of space-time and modern quantum physics states that curved space-time should somehow affect the behaviour of hypothetical quantum.

One option to explore the link between the general relativity and quantum mechanics is to learn the physics which occurs on a small scale in highly curved space-time, though these conditions tend to occur only in most extreme environments like at the edge of block holes or in instances after the Big bang. However, physicists now tend to describe the possibility to create curved space-time in ordinary quantum optics lab.

Space-time Curving – Difficult Synthetically

Space-time curving is quite difficult synthetically. It is easy through classical means though to generate a curve steep with measurable effects on single quantum particles; it may need densities which are found only near black holes and the like. In a more direct way, curving space-time with magnetic fields or `exotic matter, was proposed in halls as hallowed like those at NASA, though such technology enables to build a literal warp drive.

German researcher, Nikodem Szpak had found a loophole which helped to study the effects of curved space-time without the need to actually curve it. His idea was that the ultracold atoms embedded in optical lattice were mathematically equivalent to quantum field in curved space-time and instead of finding a solution to the equations which describe quantum fields and together with curved space-times, there was a possibility to measure the behaviour rather than in any decent quantum optics lab.

Laws of Quantum Mechanics

The overlapping of two laser beams created an interference pattern and on careful control on the shape and frequency of the lasers, physicists were capable of creating interference patterns which took the shape of egg boxes.

This comes useful in trapping ultracold atoms that could settle in the minima in the field wherein the structure is known as optical lattice which is a standard fare in any quantum optic lab across the globe.

When the atoms tend to be close to absolute zero, they are not entirely still which is due to the laws of quantum mechanics enabling them to tunnel from a position to another in the optical lattice. Moreover, Szpak has also indicated that there is a formal mathematical analogy with this movement of atoms through the optical lattice together with their movement through quantum field in a flat space-time.

The pattern of movement of the atoms in an optical lattice is equivalent to the way they would move in a quantum field in a flat space-time and when the optical lattice tends to be regular, it is equivalent to a flat space-time. However, changing the optical set up in order that it varies in space would be equivalent in creating a curved space-time.