Space-for-All at HobbySpace

On Monday the company Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, flew an un-crewed New Shepard reusable rocket to 105 kilometers (62.5 miles) altitude. The system returned to the ground to be prepared for another flight in a few weeks. Here is a video of the flight, which took place at Blue’s facility in West Texas:

The booster rocket and the crew capsule of the New Shepard separate at high altitude and come down separately. The booster lands via the power of its liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen engine while the crew capsule comes down via parachutes.

There was no camera view of the separation so they inserted an animation of it into the video. Here is a schematic of the phases of the flight:

Blue plans an intensive test program for the New Shepard that will lead to commercial flights for science and technology R&D flights by next summer. Passenger space tourism flights will start in a couple of years.

Jeff Bezos comments on the project in this video:

The New Shepard is just for suborbital (100 km altitude) but it will be very similar to the upper stage of Blue’s two stage orbital rocket that is expected to fly in about 4 years from now.

Artist’s rendition of Blue Origin’s two stage orbital rocket design.

The latest report from the ESO (European Southern Observatory):

Aging Star’s Weight Loss Secret Revealed
Giant star caught in the act of slimming down

A team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has captured the most detailed images ever of the hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris. These observations show how the unexpectedly large size of the particles of dust surrounding the star enable it to lose an enormous amount of mass as it begins to die. This process, understood now for the first time, is necessary to prepare such gigantic stars to meet explosive demises as supernovae.

The star VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant, one of the largest known stars in the Milky Way. It is 30–40 times the mass of the Sun and 300 000 times more luminous. In its current state, the star would encompass the orbit of Jupiter, having expanded tremendously as it enters the final stages of its life. New observations of the star using the SPHERE instrument on the VLT have clearly revealed how the brilliant light of VY Canis Majoris lights up the clouds of material surrounding it and have allowed the properties of the component dust grains to be determined better than ever before. In this very close-up view from SPHERE the star itself is hidden behind an obscuring disc. The crosses are artefacts due to features in the instrument.

VY Canis Majoris is a stellar goliath, a red hypergiant, one of the largest known stars in the Milky Way. It is 30–40 times the mass of the Sun and 300 000 times more luminous. In its current state, the star would encompass the orbit of Jupiter, having expanded tremendously as it enters the final stages of its life.

The new observations of the star used the SPHERE instrument on the VLT. The adaptive optics system of this instrument corrects images to a higher degree than earlier adaptive optics systems. This allows features very close to bright sources of light to be seen in great detail [1]. SPHERE clearly revealed how the brilliant light of VY Canis Majoris was lighting up clouds of material surrounding it.

This chart shows the location of the very brilliant red hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest stars known in the Milky Way. Most of the stars visible to the naked eye on a clear and dark night are shown and the location of VY Canis Majoris is marked with a red circle. This star is visible in a small telescope and has a strikingly red colour.

And by using the ZIMPOL mode of SPHERE, the team could not only peer deeper into the heart of this cloud of gas and dust around the star, but they could also see how the starlight was scattered and polarised by the surrounding material. These measurements were key to discovering the elusive properties of the dust.

Careful analysis of the polarisation results revealed these grains of dust to be comparatively large particles, 0.5 micrometres across, which may seem small, but grains of this size are about 50 times larger than the dust normally found in interstellar space.

This wide-field view shows the sky around the very brilliant red hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest stars known in the Milky Way. The star itself appears at the centre of the picture, which also includes clouds of glowing red hydrogen gas, dust clouds and the bright star cluster around the bright star Tau Canis Majoris towards the upper right. This picture was created from images forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2.

Throughout their expansion, massive stars shed large amounts of material — every year, VY Canis Majoris sees 30 times the mass of the Earth expelled from its surface in the form of dust and gas. This cloud of material is pushed outwards before the star explodes, at which point some of the dust is destroyed, and the rest cast out into interstellar space. This material is then used, along with the heavier elements created during the supernova explosion, by the next generation of stars, which may make use of the material for planets.

Until now, it had remained mysterious how the material in these giant stars’ upper atmospheres is pushed away into space before the host explodes. The most likely driver has always seemed to be radiation pressure, the force that starlight exerts. As this pressure is very weak, the process relies on large grains of dust, to ensure a broad enough surface area to have an appreciable effect [2].

This video sequence takes you on a voyage from a broad vista of the sky into a close-up look at one of the biggest stars in the Milky Way, VY Canis Majoris. The final image comes from the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org). Music: Johan B. Monell

“Massive stars live short lives,” says lead author of the paper, Peter Scicluna, of the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan. “When they near their final days, they lose a lot of mass. In the past, we could only theorise about how this happened. But now, with the new SPHERE data, we have found large grains of dust around this hypergiant. These are big enough to be pushed away by the star’s intense radiation pressure, which explains the star’s rapid mass loss.”

The large grains of dust observed so close to the star mean that the cloud can effectively scatter the star’s visible light and be pushed by the radiation pressure from the star. The size of the dust grains also means much of it is likely to survive the radiation produced by VY Canis Majoris’ inevitable dramatic demise as a supernova [3]. This dust then contributes to the surrounding interstellar medium, feeding future generations of stars and encouraging them to form planets.

Notes

[1] SPHERE/ZIMPOL uses extreme adaptive optics to create diffraction-limited images, which come a lot closer than previous adaptive optics instruments to achieving the theoretical limit of the telescope if there were no atmosphere. Extreme adaptive optics also allows much fainter objects to be seen very close to a bright star.

The images in the new study are also taken in visible light — shorter wavelengths than the near-infrared regime, where most earlier adaptive optics imaging was performed. These two factors result in significantly sharper images than earlier VLT images. Even higher spatial resolution has been achieved with the VLTI, but the interferometer does not create images directly.

[2] The dust particles must be large enough to ensure the starlight can push it, but not so large that it simply sinks. Too small and the starlight would effectively pass through the dust; too large and the dust would be too heavy to push. The dust the team observed about VY Canis Majoris was precisely the right size to be most effectively propelled outwards by the starlight.

[3] The explosion will be soon by astronomical standards, but there is no cause for alarm, as this dramatic event is not likely for hundreds of thousands of years. It will be spectacular as seen from Earth — perhaps as bright as the Moon — but not a hazard to life here.