NASA ESA Hubble Image: Netting an Interstellar Butterfly

The "butterfly effect" says the flap of a butterfly's wings may lead to a developing hurricane on the other side of the world but what happens when a butterfly flaps its wings in the depths of space?

This cosmic butterfly is a nebula known as AFGL 4104, or Roberts 22. 

Caused by a star that is nearing the end of its life and has shrugged off its outer layers, the nebula emerges as a cosmic chrysalis to produce this striking sight. 

Studies of the lobes of Roberts 22 have shown an amazingly complex structure, with countless intersecting loops and filaments.

A butterfly's life span is counted in weeks; although on a much longer timescale, this stage of life for Roberts 22 is also transient. 

It is currently a pre-planetary nebula, a short-lived phase that begins once a dying star has pushed much of the material in its outer layers into space, and ends once this stellar remnant becomes hot enough to ionize the surrounding gas clouds and make them glow.

About 400 years ago, the star at the center of Roberts 22 shed its outer shells, which raced outwards to form this butterfly. 

The central star will soon be hot enough to ionize the surrounding gas, and it will evolve into a fully-fledged planetary nebula.

Credit: NASA, ESA

An interstellar journey for CubeSats

In Greek mythology, Icarus was the impulsive son who ignored his father's warning about flying too close to the sun but the students in the Drexel University chapter of Icarus Interstellar are much too dedicated to do anything that careless. Besides, they're aiming for a star located even farther away.

Those students went above and beyond to create the first chapter at any university of Icarus Interstellar, an international nonprofit foundation dedicated to achieving interstellar flight—travel to star systems beyond our own solar system—by the year 2100.

The research-oriented organization's mandate is to train the next generation of interstellar engineers, so the idea of a Drexel chapter organization wasn't very far-fetched.

Icarus is attempting to build the first-ever mission to Alpha Centauri, the star system located the closest to our solar system.

The timing of the project is especially important because no other similar missions are planned and the only mission that could reach a neighboring solar system—the Voyager spacecraft launched into space in 1977—will take tens of thousands of years.

Icarus' Project Tin Tin aims to reach the nearest star in about one-third of the Voyager's time, even though the Voyager will have received a 40-year head start.

Through Project Tin Tin, Icarus plans to create cost-effective technology and prototype CubeSats, or tiny cube-shaped research spacecraft nanosatellites, to test before sending to Alpha Centauri.

The Drexel students will contribute to the mission by designing, analyzing and building their own interstellar CubeSat.

"The idea is that this CubeSat will push the boundaries of what is possible with our current technology and will serve as a stepping-stone for future [faster] missions," said Damien Turchi, a pre-junior mechanical engineering and mechanics major and the president and founder of Drexel's Icarus chapter.

The group plans to send Icarus a project proposal by March 2014 to earn approval and start funding for the Drexel CubeSat, which will potentially be launched as early as 2016.

"By promoting specifically student involvement in interstellar research, the breakthroughs required for this endeavor may very well happen in our generation, because innovation tends to lie in the naïve," Turchi said.

Other activities planned for the Drexel chapter include discussions about Icarus' projects and the implications of long-term interstellar flight on human health and psychology.

The group is also planning a possible trip to the Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress in Texas and is looking into ways to aid other universities to create student chapters.

NASA IBEX Spacecraft Reveals New Observations of Interstellar Matter

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has captured the best and most complete glimpse yet of what lies beyond the solar system.

The new measurements give clues about how and where our solar system formed, the forces that physically shape our solar system, and the history of other stars in the Milky Way.

The Earth-orbiting spacecraft observed four separate types of atoms including hydrogen, oxygen, neon and helium.

These interstellar atoms are the byproducts of older stars, which spread across the galaxy and fill the vast space between stars.

IBEX determined the distribution of these elements outside the solar system, which are flowing charged and neutral particles that blow through the galaxy, or the so-called interstellar wind.

"IBEX is a small Explorer mission and was built with a modest investment," said Barbara Giles, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The science achievements though have been truly remarkable and are a testament to what can be accomplished when we give our nation's scientists the freedom to innovate."

In a series of science papers appearing in the Astrophysics Journal , scientists report finding 74 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms in the interstellar wind.

In our own solar system, there are 111 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms. This translates to more oxygen in any part of the solar system than in nearby interstellar space.

"Our solar system is different than the space right outside it, suggesting two possibilities," says David McComas, IBEX principal investigator, at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

"Either the solar system evolved in a separate, more oxygen-rich part of the galaxy than where we currently reside, or a great deal of critical, life-giving oxygen lies trapped in interstellar dust grains or ices, unable to move freely throughout space."

The new results hold clues about the history of material in the universe. While the big bang initially created hydrogen and helium, only the supernovae explosions at the end of a star's life can spread the heavier elements of oxygen and neon through the galaxy. Knowing the amounts of elements in space may help scientists map how our galaxy evolved and changed over time.

Scientists want to understand the composition of the boundary region that separates the nearest reaches of our galaxy, called the local interstellar medium, from our heliosphere.

The heliosphere acts as a protective bubble that shields our solar system from most of the dangerous galactic cosmic radiation that otherwise would enter the solar system from interstellar space.

IBEX measured the interstellar wind traveling at a slower speed than previously measured by the Ulysses spacecraft, and from a different direction. The improved measurements from IBEX show a 20 percent difference in how much pressure the interstellar wind exerts on our heliosphere.

"Measuring the pressure on our heliosphere from the material in the galaxy and from the magnetic fields out there will help determine the size and shape of our solar system as it travels through the galaxy," says Eric Christian, IBEX mission scientist, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The IBEX spacecraft was launched in October 2008. Its science objective is to discover the nature of the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium at the edge of our solar system.

DARPA: U.S. military to help launch intersteller space travel

Forget about Europe and Russia working together to send people to Mars, one U.S. government agency wants to get the ball rolling on interstellar space travel.

Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is looking to award a $500,000 grant to an ambitious organisation to figure out just what it would take to transport humans to stars orbiting beyond our galaxy, according to a recent report.

The grant, scheduled to be released on November 11th, is the result of the 100-Year Starship Study, the agency’s year-long collaboration with NASA wherein collaborators explored various approaches to developing a “viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines” required to “make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible,” according to the website.

A three-day public symposium will be held on Sept. 30 in Orlando, Florida, to discuss ways to persuade more people and institutions to start asking “Why not?", "Dare we?" and "How can we?”

If the idea sounds far out, in a technical sense, it is. Voyager 1, the fastest spacecraft mankind has ever built, has a gravity-assisted top speed of 38,000 miles and, even at that rate, would take more than 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest neighbouring star system.

Clearly, a number of prominent scientists would like to be known that ideas to cut travel time to such a destination from thousands of years to a much more manageable 50 years is very much plausible. Some of these include:

• Propelling a ship using the pressure waves created by a series of atomic bomb explosions located on the back end. Originally conceived in the late 1950s by a group of prominent scientists that incuded Freeman Dyson, the method would speed up the journey, though it would still take hundreds of years to reach Alpha Centauri.

• Using tiny thermonuclear explosions to generate thrust, a more modest method that requires the use of laser blasts to compress pellets of deuterium and helium-3 - The brains behind this proposal are a group called the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), which presented the plan in the 1970s as part of their own interstellar spaceship study, Project Daedalus. They conjecture that it would create enough propulsion for a 500-ton scientific probe to reach Barnard’s Star, 5.9 light-years away, in about 50 years time. Along the way, the spacecraft would hit speeds as fast as 12 percent of the speed of light.

There is, as always a big but in the way! Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s keep in mind that for now the plausibility of journeying to other galaxies is still the stuff of science fiction.

Warp speed technologies that can easily help travelers get around time based human aging and other astro physics problems, are not yet available.

A real-life spaceship capable of interstellar space travel may take centuries to build and can easily cost trillions of dollars to develop. The trip would also most likely be a one-way ticket.

David Neyland, Darpa’s director of tactical technology, also won’t hesitate to point out that the grant is merely intended to serve as financial assistance for the development of a business plan, not a spaceship, that may enable mankind to travel to the stars.

“We don’t intend to carry it forward,” Mr. Neyland said. “Darpa hands the keys over to this entity, and we wish them well.”

Star Found Shooting Water "Bullets"

Seven hundred and fifty light-years from Earth, a young, sunlike star has been found with jets that blast epic quantities of water into interstellar space, shooting out droplets that move faster than a speeding bullet. 

The discovery suggests that protostars may be seeding the universe with water. These stellar embryos shoot jets of material from their north and south poles as their growth is fed by infalling dust that circles the bodies in vast disks.

"If we picture these jets as giant hoses and the water droplets as bullets, the amount shooting out equals a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second," said Lars Kristensen, a postdoctoral astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

"We are talking about velocities reaching 200,000 kilometers [124,000 miles] per hour, which is about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun," said Kristensen, lead author of the new study detailing the discovery, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Aliens and Interstellar Archaeology on the Kardashev Galactic Scale

Kardashev Type III and Its Traces
What would happen if a true galaxy-spanning civilisation went to work on astro-engineering?

We call this a Kardashev Type III civilisation, one that could exploit the power resources of an entire galaxy, and the assumption made has always been that such a culture would be very high profile, if not, blindingly obvious. It's projects would be so vast that our astronomers would be able to detect them by noting anomalies, outside of natural occurences.

Imagine, for example, a galactic culture that encloses each individual star in a Dyson sphere.

Image: M81, a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. A ‘wavefront’ Dyson sphere culture might spread across such a galaxy, causing stars to drop out of visible light spectrum entirely, and then one by one, to be detected in the infrared. Credit and copyright: Giovanni Benintende.

A Dyson sphere or ‘shell’ would absorb all of the visible light from a star, re-radiating stellar energy at infrared wavelengths. A Dyson ‘ring’ would use planetary materials that would mask only part of the star’s light.

Scientists have used a list of very interesting infrared sources from the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) in their searches, but have come up with no strong Dyson sphere candidates. Nonetheless, Dyson spheres remain interesting, if only because they vastly increase the habitable area around a star.

What would a Type III civilisation do with technologies that could create Dyson spheres not only in one place but across the galaxy?

Whatever the answer, you would think it would be clearly noticeable. Freeman Dyson himself has said that “…a type III (Kardashev civilisation) in our own galaxy would change the appearance of the sky so drastically that it could hardly have escaped our attention.”

James Annis, who has studied anomalous galaxies in a quest for signs of a Type III civilisation, reports: “It is quite clear that the Galaxy itself has not transformed into a type III civilisation based on starlight, nor have M31 or M33, our two large neighbours.” Nonetheless, we wonder whether we should take these statements as conclusive or definitive:

…what would happen for a civilisation that was on its way to becoming a type III civilisation, i.e. a type II.5 civilisation that is developing?

If it was busily turning stars into Dyson spheres the civilisation could create a “Fermi bubble” or void in the visible light from a patch of the galaxy with a corresponding upturn in the emission of infrared light.

This bubble would grow following the lines of a suggestion attributed to Fermi… that patient space travellers moving at 1/1000 to 1/100 of the speed of light could span a galaxy in one to ten million years.

To read more on Interstellar Archaeology ......

Herschel & Planck satellites ready to go

Herschel, the monster space telescope, will position itself in an extended orbit (1.5Mn Km) on the other side of the Earth from the Sun (L2, Le Grange point). It will use the Earth as a shield to protect it from the Sun's local radiation. Its mission is to reveal the young universe in new detail.

Whereas the Planck satellite will take up a similar orbit at the L2, Le Grange point and start to record the background radiation left after the Big Bang. (Image: ESA)