Only a smidge bigger than the moon, a newfound white dwarf is the smallest of its kind known. 

The white dwarf, a type of remnant left behind when certain stars peter out, has a radius of about 2,100 kilometers, researchers report June 30 in Nature. That’s remarkably close to the moon’s approximately 1,700-kilometer radius. Most white dwarfs are closer to the size of Earth, which has a radius of about 6,300 kilometers.

The white dwarf’s small girth means, counterintuitively, that it is also one of the most massive known objects of its kind, at about 1.3 times the sun’s mass. That’s because white dwarfs shrink as they gain mass (SN: 8/12/20).

“That’s not the only very amazing characteristic of this white dwarf,” astrophysicist Ilaria Caiazzo of Caltech said June 28 in an online news conference. “It is also rapidly rotating.”

The white dwarf spins around approximately once every seven minutes. And it has a powerful magnetic field, more than a billion times the strength of Earth’s. Caiazzo and colleagues discovered the unusual stellar remnant, dubbed ZTF J1901+1458 and located about 130 light-years from Earth, using the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California, which searches for objects in the sky that change in brightness.

The white dwarf probably formed when two white dwarfs orbited one another and merged to create a single white dwarf with an extra-large mass and extra-small size, the team says. That convergence would also have spun up the white dwarf and given it a strong magnetic field.

This white dwarf is living on the edge: If it were much more massive, it wouldn’t be able to support its own weight, causing it to explode. Studying such objects can help scientists understand the limits of what’s possible for these dead stars. More

Peculiar flat regions on Saturn’s moon Titan could be the dry floors of ancient lakes and seas. The suggestion, published June 16 in Nature Communications, may solve a 20-year-old mystery. Starting in 2000, astronomers using radio telescopes on Earth have seen particularly bright radio signals coming from Titan’s equator. Those signals, called specular reflections, occur […] More

Mission control rooms rarely celebrate crash landings. But the collision of NASA’s DART spacecraft with an asteroid was a smashing success.

At about 7:15 p.m. EDT on September 26, the spacecraft hurtled into Dimorphos, an asteroid moonlet orbiting a larger space rock named Didymos. The mission’s goal was to bump Dimorphos slightly closer to its parent asteroid, shortening its 12-hour orbit around Didymos by several minutes.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is the world’s first attempt to change an asteroid’s motion by ramming a space probe into it (SN: 6/30/20). Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos poses a threat to Earth. But seeing how well DART’s maneuver worked will reveal how easy it is to tamper with an asteroid’s trajectory — a strategy that could protect the planet if a large asteroid is ever discovered on a collision course with Earth.

“We don’t know of any large asteroids that would be considered a threat to Earth that are coming any time in the next century,” says DART team member Angela Stickle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “The reason that we are doing something like DART is because there are asteroids that we haven’t discovered yet.”

NASA’s DART spacecraft (illustrated) just crashed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on purpose in the world’s first test of a strategy for planetary defense.Johns Hopkins APL/NASA

Astronomers have spotted almost all the kilometer-size asteroids in the solar system that could end civilization if they hit Earth, says Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who’s also on the DART team. But when it comes to space rocks around 150 meters wide, like Dimorphos, “we only know where about 40 percent of those are,” Sunshine says. “And that is something that, if it did hit, would certainly take out a city.”

Dimorphos is a safe asteroid to give an experimental nudge, says Mark Boslough, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who has studied planetary protection but is not involved in DART. “It’s not on a collision course” with Earth, he says, and DART “can’t hit it hard enough to put it on a collision course.” The DART spacecraft weighs only as much as a couple of vending machines, whereas Dimorphos is thought to be nearly as hefty as Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza.

After a 10-month voyage, DART met up with Didymos and Dimorphos near their closest approach to Earth, about 11 million kilometers away. Up until the very end of its journey, DART could see only the larger asteroid, Didymos. But about an hour before impact, DART spotted Dimorphos in its field of view. Using its onboard camera, the spacecraft steered itself toward the asteroid moonlet and slammed into it at some 6.1 kilometers per second, or nearly 14,000 miles per hour.

After traveling about 11 million kilometers, NASA’s DART spacecraft closed in on its target: the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos. This image of the space rock was taken by DART just seconds  before the spacecraft smashed into it. NASA

DART’s camera feed went dark after impact. But another probe nearby is expected to have caught the collision on camera. The Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids rode to Dimorphos aboard DART but detached a couple of weeks before impact to watch the event from a safe distance. Its mission was to whiz past Dimorphos about three minutes after DART’s impact to snap pictures of the crash site and the resulting plume of asteroid debris launched into space. The probe is expected to beam images of DART’s demise back to Earth within a couple of days.

“I was absolutely elated, especially as we saw the camera getting closer and just realizing all the science that we’re going to learn,” said Pam Melroy, NASA Deputy Administrator, after the impact. “But the best part was seeing, at the end, that there was no question there was going to be an impact, and to see the team overjoyed with their success.”

[embedded content]
This animation shows how DART’s impact on Dimorphos will affect the space rock’s orbit around its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. DART should shove Dimorphos into a slightly tighter, shorter orbit.

DART’s impact is expected to shove Dimorphos into a closer, shorter orbit around Didymos. Telescopes on Earth can clock the timing of that orbit by watching how the amount of light from the double asteroid system changes as Dimorphos passes in front of and behind Didymos.

“It’s really a beautifully conceived experiment,” Boslough says. In the coming weeks, dozens of telescopes across every continent will watch Dimorphos to see how much DART changed its orbit. The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes may also get images.

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“It’ll be really interesting to see what comes out,” says Amy Mainzer, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who is not involved in DART. “Asteroids have a way of surprising us,” she says, because it’s hard to know a space rock’s precise chemical makeup and internal structure based on observations from Earth. So Dimorphos’ motion post-impact may not exactly match researchers’ expectations.

The DART team will compare data on Dimorphos’ new orbit with their computer simulations to see how close those models were to predicting the asteroid’s actual behavior and tweak them accordingly. “If we can get our models to reproduce what actually happened, then you can use those models to [plan for] other scenarios that might show up in the future” — like the discovery of a real killer asteroid, says DART team member Wendy Caldwell, a mathematician and planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“No matter what happens,” she says, “we will get information that is valuable to the scientific community and to the planetary defense community.”  More

SpacefarersChristopher WanjekHarvard Univ., $29.95 By 20th century expectations, we are way behind schedule on colonizing the solar system. After the Apollo moon landings, some scientists and NASA officials envisioned launching astronauts to Mars in the 1980s and building cities in space to be habitable by the 2000s. But the only humans in space today are […] More

In the film The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) survives being stranded on the Red Planet by farming potatoes in Martian dirt fertilized with feces.
Future Mars astronauts could grow crops in dirt to avoid solely relying on resupply missions, and to grow a greater amount and variety of food than with hydroponics alone (SN: 11/4/11). But new lab experiments suggest that growing food on the Red Planet will be a lot more complicated than simply planting crops with poop (SN: 9/22/15).
Researchers planted lettuce and the weed Arabidopsis thaliana in three kinds of fake Mars dirt. Two were made from materials mined in Hawaii or the Mojave Desert that look like dirt on Mars. To mimic the makeup of the Martian surface even more closely, the third was made from scratch using volcanic rock, clays, salts and other chemical ingredients that NASA’s Curiosity rover has seen on the Red Planet (SN: 1/31/19). While both lettuce and A. thaliana survived in the Marslike natural soils, neither could grow in the synthetic dirt, researchers report in the upcoming Jan. 15 Icarus.
“It’s not surprising at all that as you get [dirt] that’s more and more accurate, closer to Mars, that it gets harder and harder for plants to grow in it,” says planetary scientist Kevin Cannon of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo., who helped make the synthetic Mars dirt but wasn’t involved in the new study.

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Soil on Earth is full of microbes and other organic matter that helps plants grow, but Mars dirt is basically crushed rock. The new result “tells you that if you want to grow plants on Mars using soil, you’re going to have to put in a lot of work to transform that material into something that plants can grow in,” Cannon says.
Biochemist Andrew Palmer and colleagues at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne planted lettuce and A. thaliana seeds in imitation Mars dirt under controlled lighting and temperature indoors, just as astronauts would on Mars. The plants were cultivated at 22° Celsius and about 70 percent humidity.
Seeds of both species germinated and grew in dirt mined from Hawaii or the Mojave Desert, as long as the plants were fertilized with a cocktail of nitrogen, potassium, calcium and other nutrients. No seeds of either species could germinate in the synthetic dirt, so “we would grow up plants under hydroponic-like conditions, and then we would transfer them” to the artificial dirt, Palmer says. But even when given fertilizer, those seedlings died within a week of transplanting.
In lab experiments, lettuce was able to grow in Marslike soil from the Mojave Desert (pictured) as long as the soil was fertilized with nitrogen, potassium, calcium and other nutrients.Nathan Hadland
Palmer’s team suspected that the problem with the synthetic Mars dirt was its high pH, which was about 9.5. The two natural soils had pH levels around 7. When the researchers treated the synthetic dirt with sulfuric acid to lower the pH to 7.2, transplanted seedlings survived an extra week but ultimately died.
The team also ran up against another problem: The original synthetic dirt recipe did not include calcium perchlorate, a toxic salt that recent observations suggest make up to about 2 percent of the Martian surface. When Palmer’s team added it at concentrations similar to those seen on Mars, neither lettuce nor A. thaliana grew at all in the dirt.
“The perchlorate is a major problem” for Martian farming, says Edward Guinan, an astrobiologist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the work. But calcium perchlorate may not have to be a showstopper. “There are bacteria on Earth that enjoy perchlorates as a food,” Guinan says. As the microbes eat the salt, they give off oxygen. If these bacteria were taken from Earth to Mars to munch on perchlorates in Martian dirt, Guinan imagines that the organisms could not only get rid of a toxic component of the dirt, but perhaps also help produce breathable oxygen for astronauts.
What’s more, the exact treatment required to make Martian dirt farmable may vary, depending on where astronauts make their homestead. “It probably depends where you land, what the geology and chemistry of the soil is going to be,” Guinan says.
To explore how that variety might affect future agricultural practices, geochemist Laura Fackrell of the University of Georgia in Athens and colleagues mixed up five new types of faux Mars dirt. The recipes for these fake Martian materials, also reported in the Jan. 15 Icarus, are based on observations of Mars’ surface from the Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity rovers, as well as NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Each new artificial Mars dirt represents a mix of materials that could be found or made on the Red Planet. One is designed to represent the average composition across Mars, similar to the synthetic material created by Cannon’s team. The other four varieties have slightly different makeups, such as dirt that is particularly rich in carbonates or sulfates. This collection “expands the palette of what we have available” as test-beds for agricultural experiments, Fackrell says.
She’s now using her stock to run preliminary plant growth experiments. So far, a legume called moth bean, which has similar nutritional content to a soybean but is more drought resistant, has grown the best. “But they’re not necessarily super healthy,” Fackrell says. Future experiments could explore what nutrient cocktails help plants survive in the various fake Martian terrains. But this much is clear, Fackrell says: “It’s not quite as easy as it looks in The Martian.” More