Now we just need to find plausible evidence that there might be important natural resources so we can gear up a squad of space miners/marines.

paywall bypass: https://archive.is/N7m24

Supergiant Betelgeuse was recently discovered to have a companion star - it's bright blue, not yet fusing hydrogen, and actually orbiting so close that it's inside Betelgeuse's outer atmosphere! I wonder what it'll be named.

When Reaction Engines went bankrupt a few years ago there was much speculation about when -- not if -- their technology for a supercooled hybrid ramjet/rocket engine would be picked up by another entity. It seems we now have our answer as the ESA hopes to revive and complete the ambitious project for a single-stage-to-orbit, air-breathing spaceplane.

Matter and antimatter are like mirror opposites: they are the same in every respect except for their electric charge. Well, almost the same—very occasionally, matter and antimatter behave differently from each other, and when they do, physicists get very excited. Now scientists at the world’s largest particle collider have observed a new class of antimatter particles breaking down at a different rate than their matter counterparts. The discovery is a significant step in physicists’ quest to solve one of the biggest mysteries in the universe: why there is something rather than nothing.

The world around us is made of matter—the stars, planets, people and things that populate our cosmos are composed of atoms that contain only matter, and no antimatter. But it didn’t have to be this way. Our best theories suggest that when the universe was born it had equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and when the two made contact, they annihilated one another. For some reason, a small excess of matter survived and went on to create the physical world. Why? No one knows.

So physicists have been on the hunt for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of “charge conjugation–parity symmetry,” or CP violation, that could explain why some matter escaped destruction in the early universe.

Today physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s LHCb experiment published a paper in the journal Nature announcing that they’ve measured CP violation for the first time in baryons—the class of particles that includes the protons and neutrons inside atoms. Baryons are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiments dating back to 1964 had seen CP violation in meson particles, which unlike baryons are made of a quark-antiquark pair. In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks. Workers at CERN stare upwards at the comparatively large LHCb particle detector magnet

Magnet for the LHCb (large hadron collider beauty) particle detector at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory) near Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN/Science Source

“This is a milestone in the search for CP violation,” says Xueting Yang of Peking University, a member of the LHCb team that analyzed the data behind the measurement. “Since baryons are the building blocks of the everyday things around us, the first observation of CP violation in baryons opens a new window for us to search for hints of new physics.”

The LHCb experiment is the only machine in the world that can summon sufficient energies to make baryons containing beauty quarks. It does this by accelerating protons to nearly the speed of light, then smashing them together in about 200 million collisions every second. As the protons dissolve, the energy of the crash springs new particles into being.

“It is an amazing measurement,” says theoretical physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study, who was not involved in the experiment. "Baryons containing b [beauty] quarks are relatively hard to produce, and CP violation is very delicate and hard to study.”

The 69-foot-long, 6,000-ton LHCb experiment can track all the particles created during the collisions and the many different ways they can break down into smaller particles. “The detector is like a gigantic four-dimensional camera that is able to record the passage of all the particles through it,” says LHCb spokesperson and study co-author Vincenzo Vagnoni of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). “With all this information, we can reconstruct precisely what happened in the initial collision and everything that came out and then decayed.”

The matter-antimatter difference scientists observed in this case is relatively small, and it fits within predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics—the reigning theory of the subatomic realm. This puny amount of CP violation, however, cannot account for the profound asymmetry between matter and antimatter we see throughout space.

“The measurement itself is a great achievement, but the result, to me, is not surprising,” says Jessica Turner, a theoretical physicist at Durham University in England, who was not involved in the research. “The observed CP violation seems to be in line with what has been measured before in the quark sector, and we know that is not enough to produce the observed baryon asymmetry.”

To understand how matter got the upper hand in the early universe, physicists must find new ways that matter and antimatter diverge, most likely via particles that have yet to be seen. “There should be a new class of particles that were present in the early universe, which exhibit a much larger amount of this behavior,” Vagnoni says. “We are trying to find little discrepancies between what we observe and what is predicted by the Standard Model. If we find a discrepancy, then we can pinpoint what is wrong.”

The researchers hope to discover more cracks in the Standard Model as the experiment keeps running. Eventually LHCb should collect about 30 times more data than was used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to search for CP violation in particle decays that are even rarer than the one observed here. So stay tuned for an answer to why anything exists at all.

The Carina Nebula, by ESA’s Herschel space observatory. The image shows the effects of massive star formation – powerful stellar winds and radiation have carved pillars and bubbles in dense clouds of gas and dust.

The image covers approximately 2.3 x 2.3 degrees of the Carina Nebula complex and was mapped using Herschel instruments PACS and SPIRE at wavelengths of 70, 160, and 250 microns, corresponding to the blue, green, and red channels, respectively. North is to the upper left and east is to the lower left.

CREDIT

ESA/PACS/SPIRE/Thomas Preibisch,

Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Search?SearchText=carina+nebula&result_type=images

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is showing off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this peculiar planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras are also revealing the ice giant in a whole new light.

Most striking about Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s dynamic rings — some of which haven’t been seen at all, let alone with this clarity, since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright narrow rings, the Webb images clearly show Neptune’s fainter dust bands. Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality also permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.

Neptune has fascinated and perplexed researchers since its discovery in 1846. Located 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth, Neptune orbits in one of the dimmest areas of our Solar System. At that extreme distance, the Sun is so small and faint that high noon on Neptune is similar to a dim twilight on Earth. NIRCam image annotated NIRCam image annotated

This planet is characterised as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. Compared to the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune is much richer in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This is readily apparent in Neptune’s signature blue appearance in NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images at visible wavelengths, caused by small amounts of gaseous methane.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captures objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, so Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas is so strongly absorbing that the planet is quite dark at Webb wavelengths except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. Images from other observatories have recorded these rapidly-evolving cloud features over the years. Neptune wide-field (NIRCam image) Neptune wide-field (NIRCam image)

More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune’s winds and storms. The atmosphere descends and warms at the equator, and thus glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding, cooler gases.

Neptune’s 164-year orbit means its northern pole, at the top of this image, is just out of view for astronomers, but the Webb images hint at an intriguing brightness in that area. A previously-known vortex at the southern pole is evident in Webb’s view, but for the first time Webb has revealed a continuous band of clouds surrounding it.

Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb’s images; it’s not a star, but Neptune’s most unusual moon, Triton.

Covered in a frozen sheen of condensed nitrogen, Triton reflects an average of 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. It far outshines Neptune because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption at Webb’s wavelengths. Triton orbits Neptune in a bizarre backward (retrograde) orbit, leading astronomers to speculate that this moon was actually a Kuiper Belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune. Additional Webb studies of both Triton and Neptune are planned in the coming year. About Webb

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our Solar System, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our Universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. The major contributions of ESA to the mission are: the NIRSpec instrument; the MIRI instrument optical bench assembly; the provision of the launch services; and personnel to support mission operations. In return for these contributions, European scientists will get a minimum share of 15% of the total observing time, like for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/New_Webb_image_captures_clearest_view_of_Neptune_s_rings_in_decades

In this version of Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image of Neptune, the planet’s visible moons are labeled. Neptune has 14 known satellites, and seven of them are visible in this image.

Triton, the bright spot of light in the upper left of this image, far outshines Neptune because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption wavelengths captured by Webb. Triton reflects an average of 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. Triton, which orbits Neptune in a backward orbit, is suspected to have originally been a Kuiper belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune.

CREDIT

NASA/ESA/CSA and STScI

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/09/Neptune_NIRCam_image