What’s Aboard SpaceX’s Dragon?

You’ve seen things floating in space, but why does that happen and how does it affect science being conducted aboard the International Space Station?

Sure, floating looks like fun, but it could also unlock new scientific discoveries!

Microgravity makes the International Space Station the perfect place to perform research that is changing the lives of people on Earth, and preparing us to go deeper into space. This season on our series NASA Explorers, we are following science into low-Earth orbit and seeing what it takes to do research aboard the space station. 

Follow NASA Explorers on Facebook to catch new episodes of season 4 every Wednesday. https://www.facebook.com/NASAExplorersSeries/

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It's very useful information about White Dwarfs.

What are white dwarfs?

Some curiosities about white dwarfs, a stellar corpse and the future of the sun.

Where a star ends up at the end of its life depends on the mass it was born with. Stars that have a lot of mass may end their lives as black holes or neutron stars.

A white dwarf is what stars like the Sun become after they have exhausted their nuclear fuel. Near the end of its nuclear burning stage, this type of star expels most of its outer material, creating a planetary nebula.

In 5.4 billion years from now, the Sun will enter what is known as the Red Giant phase of its evolution. This will begin once all hydrogen is exhausted in the core and the inert helium ash that has built up there becomes unstable and collapses under its own weight. This will cause the core to heat up and get denser, causing the Sun to grow in size.

It is calculated that the expanding Sun will grow large enough to encompass the orbit’s of Mercury, Venus, and maybe even Earth.

A typical white dwarf is about as massive as the Sun, yet only slightly bigger than the Earth. This makes white dwarfs one of the densest forms of matter, surpassed only by neutron stars and black holes.

The gravity on the surface of a white dwarf is 350,000 times that of gravity on Earth. 

White dwarfs reach this incredible density because they are so collapsed that their electrons are smashed together, forming what is called “degenerate matter.” This means that a more massive white dwarf has a smaller radius than its less massive counterpart. Burning stars balance the inward push of gravity with the outward push from fusion, but in a white dwarf, electrons must squeeze tightly together to create that outward-pressing force. As such, having shed much of its mass during the red giant phase, no white dwarf can exceed 1.4 times the mass of the sun.

While many white dwarfs fade away into relative obscurity, eventually radiating away all of their energy and becoming a black dwarf, those that have companions may suffer a different fate.

If the white dwarf is part of a binary system, it may be able to pull material from its companion onto its surface. Increasing the mass can have some interesting results.

One possibility is that adding more mass to the white dwarf could cause it to collapse into a much denser neutron star.

A far more explosive result is the Type 1a supernova. As the white dwarf pulls material from a companion star, the temperature increases, eventually triggering a runaway reaction that detonates in a violent supernova that destroys the white dwarf. This process is known as a single-degenerate model of a Type 1a supernova. 

If the companion is another white dwarf instead of an active star, the two stellar corpses merge together to kick off the fireworks. This process is known as a double-degenerate model of a Type 1a supernova.

At other times, the white dwarf may pull just enough material from its companion to briefly ignite in a nova, a far smaller explosion. Because the white dwarf remains intact, it can repeat the process several times when it reaches the critical point, briefly breathing life back into the dying star over and over again. 

Image credit: www.aoi.com.au, NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Fsgregs, quora.com, quora.com, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, S. Wiessinger, ESO, ESO, Chandra X-ray Observatory

Source: NASA, NASA, space.com

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It's a great thing.....

New Science from our Mission to Touch the Sun

In August 2018, our Parker Solar Probe mission launched to space, soon becoming the closest-ever spacecraft from the Sun. Now, scientists have announced their first discoveries from this exploration of our star!

The Sun may look calm to us here on Earth, but it’s an active star, unleashing powerful bursts of light, deluges of particles moving near the speed of light and billion-ton clouds of magnetized material. All of this activity can affect our technology here on Earth and in space.

Parker Solar Probe’s main science goals are to understand the physics that drive this activity — and its up-close look has given us a brand-new perspective. Here are a few highlights from what we’ve learned so far.

1. Surprising events in the solar wind

The Sun releases a continual outflow of magnetized material called the solar wind, which shapes space weather near Earth. Observed near Earth, the solar wind is a relatively uniform flow of plasma, with occasional turbulent tumbles. Closer to the solar wind’s source, Parker Solar Probe saw a much different picture: a complicated, active system. 

One type of event in particular drew the eye of the science teams: flips in the direction of the magnetic field, which flows out from the Sun, embedded in the solar wind. These reversals — dubbed “switchbacks” — last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes as they flow over Parker Solar Probe. During a switchback, the magnetic field whips back on itself until it is pointed almost directly back at the Sun.

The exact source of the switchbacks isn’t yet understood, but Parker Solar Probe’s measurements have allowed scientists to narrow down the possibilities — and observations from the mission’s 21 remaining solar flybys should help scientists better understand these events. 

2. Seeing tiny particle events

The Sun can accelerate tiny electrons and ions into storms of energetic particles that rocket through the solar system at nearly the speed of light. These particles carry a lot of energy, so they can damage spacecraft electronics and even endanger astronauts, especially those in deep space, outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field — and the short warning time for such particles makes them difficult to avoid.

Energetic particles from the Sun impact a detector on ESA & NASA’s SOHO satellite.

Parker Solar Probe’s energetic particle instruments have measured several never-before-seen events so small that all trace of them is lost before they reach Earth. These instruments have also measured a rare type of particle burst with a particularly high number of heavier elements — suggesting that both types of events may be more common than scientists previously thought.

3. Rotation of the solar wind

Near Earth, we see the solar wind flowing almost straight out from the Sun in all directions. But the Sun rotates as it releases the solar wind, and before it breaks free, the wind spins along in sync with the Sun’s surface. For the first time, Parker was able to observe the solar wind while it was still rotating – starting more than 20 million miles from the Sun.

The strength of the circulation was stronger than many scientists had predicted, but it also transitioned more quickly than predicted to an outward flow, which helps mask the effects of that fast rotation from the vantage point where we usually see them from, near Earth, about 93 million miles away. Understanding this transition point in the solar wind is key to helping us understand how the Sun sheds energy, with implications for the lifecycles of stars and the formation of protoplanetary disks.

4. Hints of a dust-free zone

Parker also saw the first direct evidence of dust starting to thin out near the Sun – an effect that has been theorized for nearly a century, but has been impossible to measure until now. Space is awash in dust, the cosmic crumbs of collisions that formed planets, asteroids, comets and other celestial bodies billions of years ago. Scientists have long suspected that, close to the Sun, this dust would be heated to high temperatures by powerful sunlight, turning it into a gas and creating a dust-free region around the Sun.

For the first time, Parker’s imagers saw the cosmic dust begin to thin out a little over 7 million miles from the Sun. This decrease in dust continues steadily to the current limits of Parker Solar Probe’s instruments, measurements at a little over 4 million miles from the Sun. At that rate of thinning, scientists expect to see a truly dust-free zone starting a little more than 2-3 million miles from the Sun — meaning the spacecraft could observe the dust-free zone as early as 2020, when its sixth flyby of the Sun will carry it closer to our star than ever before.

These are just a few of Parker Solar Probe’s first discoveries, and there’s plenty more science to come throughout the mission! For the latest on our Sun, follow @NASASun on Twitter and NASA Sun Science on Facebook.