A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest (find previous space policy roundups here):
This weeks SpaceQ podcast is a live recording from the Canadian Space Summit. The speaker is Rob Postma, Vice President and Head of Governmental Export, Space Systems, Airbus. As you’ll hear Postma say, this talk, titled, Airbus 50 years pioneering progress, is meant to provide a picture of what Airbus has accomplished but more importantly what it’s planning. Postma’s talk followed an Airbus industry day held the day before the summit started. It was an opportunity to engage further with other Canadian organizations as Airbus looks to grow its share of the market in Canada.
Taken with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in the Chilean Atacama Desert, this stunning image shows the Milky Way’s central region with an angular resolution of 0.2 arcseconds. This means the level of detail picked up by HAWK-I is roughly equivalent to seeing a football (soccer ball) in Zurich from Munich, where ESO’s headquarters are located. The image combines observations in three different wavelength bands. The team used the broadband filters J (centred at 1250 nanometres, in blue), H (centred at 1635 nanometres, in green), and Ks (centred at 2150 nanometres, in red), to cover the near infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. By observing in this range of wavelengths, HAWK-I can peer through the dust, allowing it to see certain stars in the central region of our galaxy that would otherwise be hidden.
ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has observed the central part of the Milky Way with spectacular resolution and uncovered new details about the history of star birth in our galaxy. Thanks to the new observations, astronomers have found evidence for a dramatic event in the life of the Milky Way: a burst of star formation so intense that it resulted in over a hundred thousand supernova explosions.
“Our unprecedented survey of a large part of the Galactic centre has given us detailed insights into the formation process of stars in this region of the Milky Way,”
says Rainer Schödel from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain, who led the observations.
“Contrary to what had been accepted up to now, we found that the formation of stars has not been continuous,”
adds Francisco Nogueras-Lara, who led two new studies of the Milky Way central region while at the same institute in Granada.
Caption: ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has observed the central part of the Milky Way with spectacular resolution and uncovered new details about the history of star birth in our galaxy. Watch this video summary to find out more about the stunning image captured with the HAWK-I instrument on the VLT and the discoveries made about star formation in the central region of our galaxy.
In the study, published today in Nature Astronomy, the team found that about 80% of the stars in the Milky Way central region formed in the earliest years of our galaxy, between eight and 13.5 billion years ago. This initial period of star formation was followed by about six billion years during which very few stars were born. This was brought to an end by an intense burst of star formation around one billion years ago when, over a period of less than 100 million years, stars with a combined mass possibly as high as a few tens of million Suns formed in this central region.
“The conditions in the studied region during this burst of activity must have resembled those in ‘starburst’ galaxies, which form stars at rates of more than 100 solar masses per year,”
says Nogueras-Lara, who is now based at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. At present, the whole Milky Way is forming stars at a rate of about one or two solar masses per year.
“This burst of activity, which must have resulted in the explosion of more than a hundred thousand supernovae, was probably one of the most energetic events in the whole history of the Milky Way,”
he adds. During a starburst, many massive stars are created; since they have shorter lifespans than lower-mass stars, they reach the end of their lives much faster, dying in violent supernova explosions.
Caption: This video compares a visible light wide-field view (part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2) of the Milky Way’s central regions with a new near-infrared image taken with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The video starts by showing a visible light image of the Milky Way central regions, filled with vast numbers of stars. A moving slider then reveals that far more stars, hidden behind clouds of dust, are revealed when this region is observed in the near-infrared.
This research was possible thanks to observations of the Galactic central region done with ESO’s HAWK-I instrument on the VLT in the Chilean Atacama Desert. This infrared-sensitive camera peered through the dust to give us a remarkably detailed image of the Milky Way’s central region, published in October in Astronomy & Astrophysics by Nogueras-Lara and a team of astronomers from Spain, the US, Japan and Germany. The stunning image shows the galaxy’s densest region of stars, gas and dust, which also hosts a supermassive black hole, with an angular resolution of 0.2 arcseconds. This means the level of detail picked up by HAWK-I is roughly equivalent to seeing a football (soccer ball) in Zurich from Munich, where ESO’s headquarters are located.
Caption: This video compares a view of the Galactic centre captured with the VISTA infrared survey telescope, as part of the Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) ESO public survey, and a new, sharper view of the same region obtained with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope.
This image is the first release of the GALACTICNUCLEUS survey. This programme relied on the large field of view and high angular resolution of HAWK-I on ESO’s VLT to produce a beautifully sharp image of the central region of our galaxy. The survey studied over three million stars, covering an area corresponding to more than 60 000 square light-years at the distance of the Galactic centre (one light-year is about 9.5 trillion kilometres).
Caption: This video pans across the central regions of the Milky Way, newly observed with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in the Chilean Atacama Desert. This stunning view shows the Milky Way’s central region with an angular resolution of 0.2 arcseconds.
This beautiful image of the Milky Way’s central region, taken with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, shows interesting features of this part of our galaxy. This image highlights the Nuclear Star Cluster (NSC) right in the centre and the Arches Cluster, the densest cluster of stars in the Milky Way. Other features include the Quintuplet cluster, which contains five prominent stars, and a region of ionised hydrogen gas (HII).
1. Monday, Dec. 16, 2019; 2 pm PST (4 pm CST; 5 pm EST): No special show today.
2. Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2019; 7-8:30 pm PST (9-10:30 pm CST, 10-11:30 pm EST): We welcome back Dr. Jim Logan on human spaceflight medical information updates and more.
3. Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2019: Pre-recorded Hotel Mars Program with John Batchelor. See Upcoming Show on The Space Show website for details.
4. Thursday, Dec. 19, 2019; 7-8:30 pm PST (9-10:30 pm CST, 10-11:30 pm EST): No special program today.
5. Friday, Dec. 20, 2019; 9:30-11 am PST (11:30 am-1 pm CST, 12:30-2 pm EST): We welcome Dylan Taylor back to the show for commercial space investing, progress, fundamentals, news and more.
6. Sunday, Dec. 22, 2019; 12-1:30 pm PST (3-4:30 pm EST, 2-3:30 pm CST): We welcome back Michael Listner, Atty, to discuss policy and legal news for space in 2019 and going forward for space for 2020.
Here is the latest episode in NASA’s Space to Ground weekly report on activities related to the International Space Station:
** Expedition 61 Inflight University of New Mexico – December 10, 2019
Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 61 Flight Engineer Christina Koch of NASA discussed life and research on board the orbital outpost during an in-flight educational event Dec. 10 with students at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Koch is nearing the home stretch of a long-duration mission on the station which is expected to span 328 days by the time she returns to Earth in early February – more days in space than any other woman in history
** Expedition 61 Inflight event with Second Baptist School – December 13, 2019
Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 61 Flight Engineer Christina Koch of NASA discussed life and research aboard the outpost during an in-flight educational event Dec. 13 with the Second Baptist School in Houston, Texas. The event featured Senator Ted Cruz of Texas who attended the private school and graduated as valedictorian in 1988. Koch is nearing the home stretch of a long-duration mission on the station which is expected to span 328 days by the time she returns to Earth in early February – more days in space than any other woman in history.
New observations find that NGC 6240 contains three supermassive black holes following the collision of three galaxies. W. Kollatschny et al. Via Carnival of Space.
