How Deadly Would a Nearby Gamma Ray Burst Be?

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the brightest electromagnetic blasts known to occur in the Universe, and can originate from the collapse of the most massive types of stars or from the collision of two neutron stars. Supernovae are stellar explosions that also can send harmful radiation hurtling towards Earth. Both GRBs and supernovae are usually observed in distant galaxies, but can pose a threat if they occur closer to home, where they can strip the Earth’s upper atmosphere of its protective ozone layer leaving life exposed to harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.

A new paper, titled “Ground-Level Ozone Following Astrophysical Ionizing Radiation Events – An Additional Biological Hazard?” published in the journal Astrobiology took a look at the ramifications of a nearby GRB or supernova and the effects on life. The research was funded by the Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology element of the NASA Astrobiology Program.

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Star trails at Paranal

A view from the desert landscape around ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile reveals stars' paths — star trails — as they appear to journey through the night sky. Caused by the Earth's rotation relative to a static sky, the stars appear to travel around one fixed point — Earth's Celestial South Pole — which is just visible above the rust-tinted horizon.

Credit: R. Wesson/ESO

Image info: http://buff.ly/2dbh0Tg

CAMS News: October 5 - outburst of October Camelopardalids

The dust trail of an unknown long-period comet wandered in Earth's path on October 5. The outburst of October Camelopardalids (IAU code "OCT") peaked at around 14:45 UT. CAMS California recorded 9 meteors from a compact radiant between 8:45 and 13:15 UT, while the the new network in the United Arab Emirates on the other side of Earth detected 3 between 14:48 and 19:15 UT. Carl Johannink reports that a first look of CAMS BeNeLux data also shows four OCT. Geocentric radiants cluster on the border of the constellations Camelopardalis and Draco.

More info: http://buff.ly/2e8PNSM

A Friend For Pluto: Astronomers Find New Dwarf Planet In Our Solar System

It's about 330 miles across and some 8.5 billion miles from the sun. It takes 1,100 years to complete one orbit.

But one of the most interesting things about the new object, known for the time being as 2014 UZ224, is the way astronomers found it.

David Gerdes of the University of Michigan led the team that found the new dwarf planet. "We often just have a single observation of the thing, on one night," he says. "And then two weeks later one observation, and then five nights later another observation, and four months later another observation. So the connecting-the-dots problem is much more challenging."

But they were able to develop software that can do just that.

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Hubble pictures planetary nebula with spiral arms

When stars like the Sun are nearing the end of their lives, they let go of their gaseous outermost layers. As these clouds of stellar material move away from the central star they can acquire irregular and complex shapes. This complexity is evident in the faint scattered gas you see at the centre of the image. But there is also beautiful symmetry in PK 329-02.2, as the two bright blue spiral arms perfectly align with the two stars at the centre of the nebula.

It may look like the spiral arms are connected, but it is the stars that are companions. They are part of a visual binary, though only the one at the upper right gave rise to the nebula. While the stars will continue to orbit each other for millions or billions of years, the nebula – and its spiral arms – will spread out from the centre and eventually fade away over the next few thousands of years.

This planetary nebula with spiral arms is also known as Menzel 2, after the US astronomer Donald Menzel who discovered it in the 1920s. It is located in Norma, a constellation in the Southern celestial hemisphere where you can also find Menzel 1 and 3, two ‘bipolar planetary nebulas’ (shaped like butterflies or hourglasses).

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Acknowledgement: Serge Meunier

Larger image: http://buff.ly/2esbvjx

You may not know that Big Picture Science depends almost entirely on financial support from listeners. The cost of producing an episode is about $4,000. This includes recording and editing, as well as arranging off-site studio facilities for guests and the research required to talk to the cutting-edge (and sometimes Nobel-prize winning) scientists we interview on a weekly basis.

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The Ancient Mars Water Story, Updated

Curiosity famously provided confirmation early on [of a watery past] with the discovery of pebbles that had clearly been shaped in the presence of flowing surface water, followed by the months in Yellowknife Bay which proved geologically, geochemically and morphologically the long-ago presence of substantial amounts of early Martian water.

Since the presence of a fossil lake was confirmed and announced, the water story has taken something of a backseat as the rover made its challenging and revelatory way across the lowlands of Gale Crater, through some dune fields and onto the Murray formation — a large geological unit that is connected to the base of Mount Sharp itself. And all along the path of the rover’s traverse mudstone and sandstone were present, a clear indication of ever larger amounts of water.

I spoke recently with geologist and biogeologist John Grotzinger, the former NASA project scientist for Curiosity and now a member of the science team, to get a sense of how things had progressed for the Gale water story. He said there was no longer any doubt that the crater was once quite filled with water.

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Hi, everyone.

I'm Gary Niederhoff, producer of the radio show Big Picture Science, crafted each week at the SETI Institute.

Do you realize that parts of our universe seem to be speeding away from us faster than the speed of light? Or that dinosaurs suffered from arthritis?

And did you know that the asteroid mining industry will likely be the catalyst for the technology necessary to thwart a devastating meteor impact?

These are only a few of the many things I've learned while working as a producer on Big Picture Science. And while the show has helped me to be a better conversationalist at cocktail parties, we've also heard from teachers across the country who include it in their lessons.
Gary presents a highly accurate model of Venus, and likens it to our October Challenge.

We really need your support during our October Challenge. Several generous supporters who are big fans of the show have offered us a matching gift opportunity. Our goal is to raise $30,000 by October 23.

You may not know that Big Picture Science depends almost entirely on financial support from listeners. The cost of producing an episode is about $4,000. This includes recording and editing, as well as arranging off-site studio facilities for guests and the research required to talk to the cutting-edge (and sometimes Nobel-prize winning) scientists we interview on a weekly basis.

Right now, if you support the Big Picture Science radio show and podcast, your gift will be doubled.

I'm excited to bring you the most innovative, pioneering science in our world today. Not to mention nonstop puns from Seth and Molly.

Please make a gift of $50, $100 or more during our October Challenge and your gift will be doubled.

Thank you for supporting Big Picture Science!

Gary Niederhoff
Producer
Big Picture Science

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24 new isolated exoplanet star systems found that could qualify as 'hot Earths'

A team of researchers with members from NASA Ames Research Center, the SETI Institute and the University of Nevada has identified 24 "hot Earth" star systems where the planets are isolated from other planets. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how they began with a large set of possible star system candidates and whittled them down to two dozen by focusing on those that were not in close proximity to other planets.

Hot Earths are Earth-sized exoplanets that exist close to their stars, making them interesting but unlikely to support life, because most do not rotate—instead, like the moon relative to the Earth, one side always faces the sun. This means one side would be too hot for life to exist while the other side would be too cold.

In this new study, the researchers were interested in looking at near Earth-size planets that orbit very close to their star—so close that it would take just two days for them to make the trip. They started with a part of the sky captured by Kepler that had over 3000 known planet candidates in it—they sifted those down to 144 planets by excluding systems that clearly had more than one planet and then reduced the number down to just 24 by including only those that had hot Earths. Their sifting efforts led to them estimate that approximately one of every six hot Earths has no nearby companion.

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Be extraordinarily cautious about the newest alien claim

There have been quiet rumblings after a pre-print paper was released on ArXiv from two French-Canadian researchers who interpreted certain sky signal data to be possibly of intelligent extraterrestrial origin.

According to their research, it’s not just one star candidate. There are several, all coming from data in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These stars experienced rapid bursts of light that, to some researchers, would be the calling card of an intelligent civilization turning on an optical (rather than radio) beacon. There’s something quite tantalizing about the conclusion, “We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” and the paper has been accepted into Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

But about that whiff ... hold your nose on this one for now.

“Apparently several — more than three or four — referees have been disinclined to see this published,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute says in an email. “I am quite skeptical, in particular of the data processing that can take spectrally sampled data, and infer time variations. So I’d be a little careful.”

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The Push to Photograph Earth-Like Planet Begins With Launch of Project Blue

A consortium of prominent science and research institutions led by BoldlyGo Institute and Mission Centaur today announced Project Blue, an endeavor for a new era of discovery and space exploration. Employing recent technological advances, Project Blue is designed to be the first mission capable of obtaining an image of another planet like Earth -- a powerful next step to understanding and exploring worlds outside our solar system. This new kind of privately-led, non-profit space initiative unites an extraordinary range of experts, including teams from the SETI Institute and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, on a daunting scientific and technical challenge.

Project Blue will work to fund, build and launch a compact exoplanet imaging telescope aimed at Alpha Centauri -- the closest star system to Earth -- to determine whether Earth-like planets exist around it and if so, to capture a direct "pale blue dot" image. While NASA's Kepler mission has shown that terrestrial-sized planets are common in our galaxy, no one has yet been able to take a picture of one as small as Earth, in an orbit that could potentially sustain life. Project Blue would be the first. The mission will take about three years to construct and will conduct an intensive two-year study once in orbit.

"We're excited to be an original member of this distinguished consortium working on this seminal project," said Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute. "The SETI Institute has accumulated world-class scientific and technical expertise from previous space missions that we can contribute to make Project Blue a success."

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Aiming High! The Search for Biosignatures on Mars Starts High on Earth | Nathalie A. Cabrol

My team and I are heading back to Chile. Between October 14 and November 12, we’ll be returning to South America to explore extraordinary landscapes and planetary analogs, and to my delight, we are going back to the Andes.

This time, I am taking the SETI Institute NAI (NASA Astrobiology Institute-funded) team to some of our previous research areas, but also to some new, very exciting ones. During the month-long expedition, we will explore the Atacama, the Altiplano, and the Andes at five different sites between 8,000 and nearly 20,000 ft. There, we will try to decrypt how environmental conditions on early Mars could have affected its habitability, and the formation and preservation of biosignatures. Most importantly, we will try to understand how we can detect these biosignatures in the geological record during the next mission to Mars. Our work is meant to provide context to the upcoming Mars 2020 mission, help develop exploration strategies, and new detection tools. We are taking with us a number of in situ instruments that are highly relevant to the Mars 2020 and ExoMars scientific payloads.

The region we will examine has been the focus of astrobiological investigations – and a training ground for planetary exploration technologies – for over two decades now, and that’s not by accident. While the Atacama is known as one of the driest places on Earth, that’s only one aspect of its planetary analogy. As we go higher through a transect that crosses the Atacama, the Altiplano, and the Andes, we complete what we call a space-for-time substitution experiment. Basically, since we do not know how to build a time machine yet, we are asking Mother Nature to provide it to us, and she obliges.

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