Space

On Sunday night, December 13, countless meteors will shoot across the sky as space particles burn up in our atmosphere and meet a fiery end. Most meteor showers occur when Earth slams into debris left behind by a comet.
But not this meteor shower, which is likely to be the most spectacular of the year. Known as the Geminid shower, it strikes every December and arises not from a flamboyant comet but from an ordinary asteroid — the first, but not the last, linked to a meteor shower.
Although both comets and asteroids are small objects orbiting the sun, icy comets sprout beautiful tails when their ice vaporizes in the heat of the sun. In contrast, asteroids have earned the name “vermin of the skies” for streaking through and ruining photographs of celestial vistas by reflecting the sun’s light.
So how can a mere asteroid outdo all of the glamorous comets and spawn a meteor shower that surpasses its rivals? “It remains a mystery,” says David Jewitt, an astronomer at UCLA. It’s akin to an ugly duckling’s offspring usurping the beautiful swan’s to win first place in a beauty contest.
Astronomers still don’t know the secret to the asteroid’s success in creating a shower that at its peak normally produces more meteors per hour than any other shower of the year. Three years ago, however, the asteroid swung extra close to Earth and gave scientists their best chance to study the humble space rock. They now look forward to the launch of a spacecraft that will image the asteroid’s surface.

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Cosmic connections
Astronomers first linked a meteor shower to a comet in 1866. They connected the well-known Perseid meteors, visible to most of the world every August, with a comet named Swift-Tuttle that had passed Earth four years earlier. Astronomers later matched most major meteor showers with one comet or another.
When a comet’s ice vaporizes in sunlight, dust grains also fly off the comet. These dust particles, called meteoroids, sprinkle along the comet’s orbit like a dandelion gone to seed. If Earth plows into this long dust stream, we see a fiery shower as the particles hit our atmosphere. The typical meteoroid is no larger than a grain of sand, but it travels so fast that it energizes electrons both in its own atoms as it disintegrates and in atmospheric atoms and molecules. As these electrons lose energy, they emit the streak of light — the meteor — that looks as though a star has fallen from the sky.
Still, as comet after comet was linked to different meteor showers, the Geminids remained apart; no one knew their source.
The Geminid meteors stood out in other ways, too. Unlike the Perseid meteors, which people have been observing for nearly 2,000 years, the Geminids are relatively new. First reports of their existence came from England and the United States in 1862. The shower in those days was weak, producing at most only one or two dozen meteors an hour. During the 20th century, however, the shower strengthened. Nowadays, at the shower’s peak, a single observer under a dark sky can see more than 100 meteors an hour. That’s better than most Perseid performances.
On top of that, the Geminid meteoroid stream, the ribbon of dust that traces the asteroid’s orbit around the sun, is newer than many other streams. Over time, streams spread out, but this one is so narrow it must have formed less than 2,000 years ago and maybe only a few hundred years ago. And based on how little the meteoroids slow down when they hit the air, astronomers deduced that Geminid meteoroids are fairly dense, about three times as dense as water and twice as dense as the Perseid meteoroids.

In 1983, astronomers finally found the Geminids’ parent. Jewitt, then a graduate student at Caltech, remembers walking home one January evening when he happened to see a rocket lift off from a military base. “I assumed it was an ICBM or something that the Air Force was launching to test,” he says. Instead, it was a heat-seeking spacecraft named the Infrared Astronomical Satellite.
In October of that year, the satellite discovered a small asteroid. To Harvard astronomer Fred Whipple, best known for his “dirty snowball” model of comets (SN: 3/14/92, p. 170), that small object stood out. It followed the same path around the sun as the particles in the Geminid meteoroid stream. Half a century earlier, Whipple himself had determined the orbit of the meteoroids by photographing the paths of the meteors against the sky. The newfound asteroid, Whipple declared, must be their long-sought source. The find also explained why the meteoroids were so dense: They come from a space rock rather than an icy comet.
The asteroid revolves around the sun every 1.43 years and comes very close to the sun, cutting well inside the orbit of Mercury, the innermost planet. Astronomers therefore christened the asteroid Phaethon, a son of Helios the sun god in Greek mythology. At its farthest, Phaethon ventures beyond the orbit of Mars and reaches the asteroid belt, home of the largest space rocks, between the paths of Mars and Jupiter.
For a quarter century after Phaethon’s discovery, though, no one saw it shedding any dust particles or pebbles that could account for the many meteors that make up December’s show. Because of the sun’s glare, astronomers couldn’t observe Phaethon when it was closest to the sun. Observing during a close pass might be especially interesting because calculations indicated that the intense sunlight caused Phaethon’s surface temperature to soar to roughly 1,000 kelvins (1,340° Fahrenheit), hotter than any planet in the solar system. The torrid temperature might cause the asteroid to shoot particles into space.
A lucky break came about because Jewitt married an astrophysicist who studies the sun. “Really, the key was talking to my wife about this,” he says. Jing Li, also at UCLA, and Jewitt realized that a solar spacecraft might be able to pick up details about the asteroid when it’s nearest the sun and thus offer clues to why the space rock is such a fertile meteor-maker.
Sure enough, in 2009 and again in 2012, images taken by a NASA solar spacecraft named STEREO A caught Phaethon brightening when near the sun, which suggested the asteroid was throwing off dust particles. Then, in 2013, Jewitt and Li noticed a short dust tail in that data. The tail lasted only two days. “It’s really, really faint in basically the world’s crappiest data,” Jewitt says. The bright background sky makes the tail hard to see.
The researchers attribute Phaethon’s dust production to the extreme heat, which breaks rocks on the asteroid’s surface and sends particles aloft. Phaethon has so little gravity that those particles can escape into space. Additional dust may result from desiccation, Jewitt says: In the presence of such heat, hydrated minerals on the asteroid may dry out and crack, the way empty lake beds do on Earth, releasing more particles.
As seen from California’s Mojave Desert in 2009, a Geminid meteor streaks past Orion’s Belt. Walter Pacholka, Astropics/Science Source
Phaethon’s fast spin causes further stress. The asteroid makes a full turn every three hours and 36 minutes. Such rapid rotation is typical of small asteroids, and it means the surface freezes and then fries over a short period of time. The spin also creates a centrifugal force that might help lift particles into space.
Yet these findings don’t solve the mystery of how a modest asteroid produces such a stunning meteor shower, Jewitt says. For one thing, as he and colleagues noted in 2013 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the particles in Phaethon’s temporary tail are much too small.
Most of the Geminid meteors we see come from particles roughly a millimeter across. But the particles in the tail are even tinier, spanning only about one one-thousandth of a millimeter. Jewitt and Li deduced the small size because sunlight exerts radiation pressure, which is weak, that pushes the tail straight back away from the sun; if the particles were larger, they would resist the weak pressure and the tail would be curved.
Plus, Phaethon’s close passages to the sun don’t eject nearly enough particles to populate the Geminid stream. This suggests that some catastrophe hit the asteroid in the recent past and made so many meteoroids that they continue to delight meteor observers today.
In 2014, astronomer Richard Arendt of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County reported the first direct sighting of the Geminid meteoroid stream itself. He had reanalyzed old data from a spacecraft whose chief mission had nothing to do with the solar system: the Cosmic Background Explorer, which NASA had launched a quarter century earlier to study the Big Bang’s afterglow and probe the universe’s birth.
“They didn’t really have the tools to look at the data in the right way back then,” Arendt says. With modern computers, he made movies of the data and glimpsed glowing strands of dust threading the solar system that emit infrared light as the sun heats them. He used this approach to view the never-before-seen dust trail along the orbit of Halley’s comet, as well as Phaethon’s dust trail: the Geminid meteoroid stream, which looked like a narrow filament along Phaethon’s orbit. Arendt published his work in the Astronomical Journal.
More recently, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe also detected the stream (SN: 1/18/20, p. 6). “This is the first time it’s been seen in visible light,” says Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Sunlight hits the dust, reflecting the light to the probe. The observations put the stream’s mass at roughly 1 percent that of Phaethon itself. This is much more material than the asteroid produces when closest to the sun, which Battams says again favors the idea that the bulk of the Geminid meteoroid stream owes its existence to some past catastrophe.
Phaethon visits Earth
In December 2017, the asteroid helped astronomers by flying only 10 million kilometers from Earth, the closest the rock will come until 2093. “This was a great opportunity to look at Phaethon,” says Patrick Taylor, an astronomer then at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Hurricane Maria had devastated the island and damaged the radio telescope just three months earlier, yet the observations succeeded. “That was the result of a tremendous amount of effort by the observatory staff, the community and the local government,” Taylor says. The telescope was repaired, and commercial power was restored to the observatory by clearing roads and replacing downed poles and cables to the site. “Everyone was aware how important this observation was going to be,” he says.
Over a period of five days, his team bounced radar signals off the asteroid, watching different features come into view as the rock rotated. As published in 2019 in Planetary and Space Science, the observations indicate that Phaethon’s equatorial diameter is about 6.25 kilometers, which means the asteroid is a bit more than half the size of the one that hit Earth and did in the dinosaurs (SN: 2/15/20, p. 7). The images show what may be craters, one more than a kilometer across, on Phaethon’s surface. There’s also a possible boulder 300 meters wide.
The radar images suggest Phaethon isn’t perfectly round. Instead, it may resemble a spinning top, like Bennu and Ryugu, two even smaller asteroids that spacecraft have recently visited. Both of those asteroids have equatorial diameters larger than their polar diameters. More than a thousand Bennus could fit inside Phaethon, but the two asteroids have similar shapes, Taylor notes. He thinks Phaethon may owe its shape to its rapid spin.

Jewitt also tried to take advantage of Phaethon’s close visit. “It was a bit of a letdown,” he says, laughing. “We saw absolutely nothing at all.” Neither the Hubble Space Telescope nor the Very Large Telescope in Chile discerned any dust or rocks coming off the asteroid.
But the future should hold much better views. In 2024, Japan will launch the DESTINY+ spacecraft, which will fly past Phaethon several years later. Japan has already sent spacecraft to two other small asteroids, and the new mission promises sharp images that should reveal Phaethon’s shape, structure, geologic features and dust trail. The spacecraft may even see the asteroid emit particles in real time, as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission did for Bennu (SN: 4/13/19, p. 10).
The DESTINY+ spacecraft will search for signs of a recent catastrophe that could have excavated enough material to create the Geminid meteoroid stream. The most obvious possibility — an impact with another asteroid — is also the least likely, Jewitt says, because Phaethon is a small target and the impact would have had to occur less than 2,000 years ago. Nevertheless, if such an impact did happen, it surely carved a fresh scar, which a spacecraft might pick up.
Perhaps some other catastrophe made the meteoroids. Maybe the asteroid was once a larger object that broke apart, because sunlight stressed it or it spun too fast. In fact, one or two other asteroids, smaller than Phaethon, follow similar paths around the sun and could be remnants of a super-Phaethon. After DESTINY+ zips by Phaethon, it may visit one of these other asteroids to investigate.
There’s another question the spacecraft might address: The Geminids come from Phaethon, all right, but where did Phaethon come from? It wasn’t born where it is, because it crosses the paths of four planets. Within just a few tens of millions of years, it will either crash into one of them or else their gravity will hurl the rock into the sun or far away from it.
Some astronomers have proposed that Phaethon is really a chunk kicked off of the large asteroid Pallas, a resident of the asteroid belt. “Could Phaethon be a piece of Pallas? Yes,” Jewitt says. “Is it likely to be a piece of Pallas? I’m not really sure about that.” The two asteroids resemble each other in composition, but there are also differences. Those distinctions may merely mean that strong sunlight has altered Phaethon’s surface. Or they may indicate the two asteroids have nothing to do with each other.
Whatever the case, this month’s show should be especially good because moonlight won’t interfere. Any astronomers watching may make a wish on the falling stars for greater insight into how those meteors and their unlikely parent came to be. More

A surprisingly bright cosmic blast might have marked the birth of a magnetar. If so, it would be the first time that astronomers have witnessed the formation of this kind of rapidly spinning, extremely magnetized stellar corpse.
That dazzling flash of light was made when two neutron stars collided and merged into one massive object, astronomers report in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Though the especially bright light could mean that a magnetar was produced, other explanations are possible, the researchers say.
Astrophysicist Wen-fai Fong of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and colleagues first spotted the site of the neutron star crash as a burst of gamma-ray light detected with NASA’s orbiting Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on May 22. Follow-up observations in X-ray, visible and infrared wavelengths of light showed that the gamma rays were accompanied by a characteristic glow called a kilonova.
Kilonovas are thought to form after two neutron stars, the ultradense cores of dead stars, collide and merge. The merger sprays neutron-rich material “not seen anywhere else in the universe” around the collision site, Fong says. That material quickly produces unstable heavy elements, and those elements soon decay, heating the neutron cloud and making it glow in optical and infrared light (SN: 10/23/19).
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A new study finds that two neutron stars collided and merged, producing an especially bright flash of light and possibly creating a kind of rapidly spinning, extremely magnetized stellar corpse called a magnetar (shown in this animation). 
Astronomers think that kilonovas form every time a pair of neutron stars merge. But mergers produce other, brighter light as well, which can swamp the kilonova signal. As a result, astronomers have seen only one definitive kilonova before, in August 2017, though there are other potential candidates (SN: 10/16/17).
The glow that Fong’s team saw, however, put the 2017 kilonova to shame. “It’s potentially the most luminous kilonova that we’ve ever seen,” she says. “It basically breaks our understanding of the luminosities and brightnesses that kilonovae are supposed to have.”
The biggest difference in brightness was in infrared light, measured by the Hubble Space Telescope about 3 and 16 days after the gamma-ray burst. That light was 10 times as bright as infrared light seen in previous neutron star mergers.
“That was the real eye-opening moment, and that’s when we scrambled to find an explanation,” Fong says. “We had to come up with an extra source [of energy] that was boosting that kilonova.”
Her favorite explanation is that the crash produced a magnetar, which is a type of neutron star. Normally, when neutron stars merge, the mega-neutron star that they produce is too heavy to survive. Almost immediately, the star succumbs to intense gravitational forces and produces a black hole.
But if the supermassive neutron star is spinning rapidly and is highly magnetically charged (in other words, is a magnetar), it could save itself from collapsing. Both the support of its own rotation and dumping energy, and thus some mass, into the surrounding neutron-rich cloud could keep the star from turning into a black hole, the researchers suggest. That extra energy in turn would make the cloud give off more light — the extra infrared glow that Hubble spotted.

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But there are other possible explanations for the extra bright light, Fong says. If the colliding neutron stars produced a black hole, that black hole could have launched a jet of charged plasma moving at nearly the speed of light (SN: 2/22/19). The details of how the jet interacts with the neutron-rich material surrounding the collision site could also explain the extra kilonova glow, she says.
If a magnetar was produced, “that could tell us something about the stability of neutron stars and how massive they can get,” Fong says. “We don’t know the maximum mass of neutron stars, but we do know that in most cases they would collapse into a black hole [after a merger]. If a neutron star did survive, it tells us about under what conditions a neutron star can exist.”
Finding a baby magnetar would be exciting, says astrophysicist Om Sharan Salafia of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics in Merate, who was not involved in the new research. “A newborn highly magnetized, highly rotating neutron star that forms from the merger of two neutron stars has never been observed before,” he says.
But he agrees that it’s too soon to rule out other explanations. What’s more, recent computer simulations suggest that it might be difficult to see a newborn magnetar even if it formed, he says. “I wouldn’t say this is settled.”
Observing how the object’s light behaves over the next four months to six years, Fong and her colleagues have calculated, will prove whether or not a magnetar was born.
Fong herself plans to keep following up on the mysterious object with existing and future observatories for a long time. “I’ll be tracking this till I’m old and grey, probably,” she says. “I’ll train my students to do it, and their students.” More

Hot blue stars kicked out of their cradles may explain a mysterious ultraviolet glow that surrounds the disks of many spiral galaxies.
A new computer simulation demonstrates that these runaway stars can populate the vast expanses beyond a galaxy’s visible disk (SN: 3/23/20). These distant regions have gas that is too warm and tenuous to make new stars, yet young stars nevertheless exist there.
“It’s a big problem for classical star formation theory,” says Eric Andersson, an astrophysicist at Lund Observatory in Sweden.
The mystery of the far-flung young stars has persisted for some time. In 2003, NASA launched the Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope, which surprised astronomers by discovering diffuse far-ultraviolet light in the hinterlands of nearby spiral and irregular galaxies (SN: 2/15/05). Unlike ordinary ultraviolet radiation, far-ultraviolet light has such a short wavelength that most of it doesn’t penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere.

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Stars that emit profuse amounts of this energetic radiation are hot, blue and usually much more massive than the sun. These stars don’t live long, so they must have formed recently. But the gas on the galactic outskirts isn’t cold and dense enough to collapse and create new stars.
Andersson and his colleagues propose a solution to the paradox: Many of these far-out far-ultraviolet-emitting stars weren’t born where they are now. Instead, they arose closer to the galaxy’s center and ran away from their homes.
The researchers conducted a computer simulation to model the motion of massive stars in a spiral galaxy. Some of the runaway stars in the simulation dart across thousands of light-years of space to take up residence beyond the visible edge of the galaxy’s disk, thereby explaining the far-ultraviolet light there, the researchers report online at arXiv.org on October 22.
The Milky Way has many of these runaway stars. A star can become a runaway when other massive stars fling it away through their gravity. Or, if the star orbits close to a massive star that explodes, the surviving star races away at the same speed it had been dashing around its companion. Most runaway stars are hot and blue, radiating just the type of far-ultraviolet light seen beyond the visible edges of galactic disks.
Mark Krumholz, an astronomer at the Australian National University in Canberra, calls the idea “a plausible explanation.” He also offers a way to test it: by exploiting the properties of different types of massive stars.
The rarest and most massive blue stars are so hot they ionize hydrogen gas, causing it to emit red light as electrons settle back into position around protons. But these very massive stars don’t live long, so any that reside on a galaxy’s outskirts must have been born there. After all, the stars didn’t have time to travel from elsewhere in the galaxy during their brief lives.
In contrast, less massive blue stars live longer and therefore could have reached the galactic periphery from elsewhere during their lifetimes. If the ratio of far-ultraviolet light to red light from ionized gas is much greater beyond the galaxy’s visible edge than in its disk, Krumholz says, that would suggest much of the far-ultraviolet glow in the exurbs does indeed come from runaway stars. More

If you’re looking for life beyond the solar system, there’s strength in numbers.
A new study suggests that systems with multiple planets tend to have rounder orbits than those with just one, indicating a calmer family history. Only child systems and planets with more erratic paths hint at past planetary sibling clashes violent enough to knock orbits askew, or even lead to banishment. A long-lasting abundance of sibling planets might therefore have protected Earth from destructive chaos, and may be part of what made life on Earth possible, says astronomer Uffe Gråe Jørgensen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
“Is there something other than the Earth’s size and position around the star that is necessary in order for life to develop?” Jørgensen says. “Is it required that there are many planets?”
Most of the 4,000-plus exoplanets discovered to date have elongated, or eccentric, orbits. That marks a striking difference from the neat, circular orbits of the planets in our solar system. Rather than being an oddity, those round orbits are actually perfectly normal — for a system with so many planets packed together, Jørgensen and his Niels Bohr colleague Nanna Bach-Møller report in a paper  published online October 30 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Bach-Møller and Jørgensen analyzed the eccentric paths of 1,171 exoplanets orbiting 895 different stars. The duo found a tight correlation between number of planets and orbit shape. The more planets a system has, the more circular their orbits, no matter where you look or what kind of star they orbit.
Earlier, smaller studies also saw a correlation between number of planets and orbit shapes, says astrophysicist Diego Turrini of the Italian National Astrophysics Institute in Rome. Those earlier studies used only a few hundred planets.
“This is a very important confirmation,” Turrini says. “It is providing us an idea of … how likely it is there will be no fight in the family, no destructive events, and your planetary system will remain as it formed … long enough to produce life.”
Systems with as many planets as ours are exceedingly rare, though. Only one known system comes close: the TRAPPIST-1 system, with seven roughly Earth-sized worlds (SN: 2/22/17). Astronomers have found no solar systems so far, other than ours, with eight or more planets. Extrapolating out to the number of stars expected to have planets in the galaxy, Jørgensen estimates that about 1 percent of planetary systems have as many planets as we do.
“It’s not unique, but the solar system belongs to a rare type of planetary system,” he says.
That could help explain why life seems to be rare in the galaxy, Jørgensen suggests. Exoplanet studies indicate that there are billions of worlds the same size as Earth, whose orbits would make them good places for liquid water. But just being in the so-called “habitable zone” is not enough to make a planet habitable (SN: 10/4/19).
“If there are so many planets where we could in principle live, why are we not teeming with UFOs all the time?” Jørgensen says. “Why do we not get into traffic jams with UFOs?”
The answer might lie in the different histories of planetary systems with eccentric and circular orbits. Theories of solar system formation predict that most planets are born in a disk of gas and dust that encircles a young star. That means young planets should have circular orbits, and all orbit in the same plane as the disk.
“You want the planets to not come too close to each other, otherwise their interactions might destabilize the system,” says Torrini. “The more planets you have the more delicate the equilibrium is.”
Planets that end up on elliptical orbits may have gotten there via violent encounters with neighboring planets, whether direct collisions that break both planets apart or near-misses that toss the planets about (SN: 2/27/15). Some of those encounters may have ejected planets from their solar systems altogether, possibly explaining why planets with eccentric orbits have fewer siblings (SN: 3/20/15).
Earth’s survival may therefore have depended on its neighbors playing nice for billions of years (SN: 5/25/05). It doesn’t need to have escaped violence altogether, either, Jørgensen says. One popular theory holds that Jupiter and Saturn shifted in their orbits billions of years ago, a reshuffling that knocked the orbits of distant comets askew and send them careening into the inner solar system. Several lines of evidence suggest comets could have brought water to the early Earth (SN: 5/6/15).
“It’s not the Earth that is important,” Jørgensen says. “It’s the whole configuration of the planetary system that’s important for life to originate on an earthlike planet.” More

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa could give the word “moonlight” a whole new meaning. New lab experiments suggest the nightside of this moon glows in the dark.
Europa’s surface, thought to be mostly water ice laced with various salts, is continually bombarded with energetic electrons by Jupiter’s intense magnetic field (SN: 5/19/15). When researchers simulated that interaction in the lab by shooting electrons at salty ice samples, the ice glowed. The brightness of that glow depended on the kind of salt in the ice, researchers report online November 9 in Nature Astronomy.
If the same interaction on Europa creates this never-before-seen kind of moonlight, a future mission there, such as NASA’s planned Europa Clipper spacecraft, may be able to use this ice glow map Europa’s surface composition. That, in turn, could give insight into the salinity of the ocean thought to lurk under Europa’s icy crust (SN: 6/14/19).
“That has implications for the temperature of that liquid water — the freezing point; it has implications for the thickness of the ice shell; it has implications for the habitability of that liquid water,” says Jennifer Hanley, a planetary scientist at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. not involved in the new work. Europa’s subsurface ocean is considered one of the most promising places to look for extraterrestrial life in the solar system (SN: 4/8/20).

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The discovery of Europa’s potential ice glow “was serendipity,” says Murthy Gudipati, who studies the physics and chemistry of ices at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Gudipati and colleagues originally set out to investigate how electron bombardment might change the chemistry of Europa’s surface ice. But in video footage of their initial experiments, the team noticed that ice samples pelted with electrons gave off an unexpected glow.
Intrigued, the researchers turned their electron beam on samples of pure water ice, as well as water ice mixed with different salts. Each ice core was cooled to the surface temperature of Europa (about –173° Celsius) and showered with electrons that had the same energies as those that strike Europa. Over 20 seconds of irradiation, a spectrometer measured the wavelengths of light, or spectrum, given off by the ice.
The ice samples all gave off a whitish glow, because they emitted light at many different wavelengths. But the brightness of each ice sample depended on its composition. Ice containing sodium chloride, also known as table salt, or sodium carbonate appeared dimmer than pure water ice. Ice mixed with magnesium sulfate, on the other hand, was brighter.

“I was doing some back of the envelope calculations [of] what would be the brightness of Europa, if we were to be standing on it in the dark,” Gudipati says. “It’s approximately … as bright as me walking on the beach in full moonlight.”
Based on the specs proposed for a camera to fly on the Europa Clipper mission, Gudipati and colleagues estimate that the spacecraft could see Europa’s ice glow during a flyby of the dark side of the moon. Dark patches of Europa could reveal sodium-rich regions, while brighter areas may be rich in magnesium.
But seeing ice glow in the lab does not necessarily mean it happens the same way on Europa, Hanley cautions. Jupiter’s icy moon has been barraged by high-energy electrons for a lot longer than 20 seconds. “Is there ever a point where you might break down the salts, and this glow stops happening?” she wonders.
Other planetary scientists, meanwhile, are not convinced that Europa’s surface is highly salted. These researchers, including Roger Clark of the Planetary Science Institute in Lakewood, Colo., think the apparent hints of salts on Europa are actually created by acids, such as sulfuric acid. Europa’s surface may be coated in both salts and acids, Clark says. “What [the researchers] need to do next is irradiate acids … to see if they can tell the difference between salt with water ice and acids with water ice.” More

If you’re a small galaxy and want to mint new stars, come to the Milky Way — but don’t get too close if you want a long-lasting star-making career. New observations with the Gaia space telescope show that our galaxy is both friend and foe to the lesser galaxies that revolve around it.
Some 60 known galaxies orbit the Milky Way. About a dozen of these satellite galaxies are dim dwarf spheroidals, which each emit just 0.0005 to 0.1 percent as much light as the Milky Way (SN: 12/22/14). Their few stars are spread out from one another, giving the galaxies such a ghostly appearance that the first one found was initially suspected to be only a fingerprint on a photographic plate.
But these ghostly galaxies once sparkled with young stars. A new study finds that most of these galaxies lit up when they first crossed into our galaxy’s gravitational domain as fresh stars arose. But then, in most cases, the little galaxies stopped making stars soon afterward, because the Milky Way stripped the dwarf galaxies of gas, the raw material for star formation.
Astronomer Masashi Chiba of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and his then-graduate student Takahiro Miyoshi studied seven of the dwarf spheroidal galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. The researchers used the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which had measured the galaxies’ motions, to compute their orbits around the Milky Way’s center. The orbits are elliptical, so the galaxies approach and then recede from our galaxy’s center. The astronomers then compared those paths to the times when the galaxies formed their stars.

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“We found that there’s a very nice coincidence between the timing of the first infall of the satellite [toward the Milky Way] and the peak in the star formation history,” Chiba says. In work posted online at arXiv.org on October 23, the astronomers attribute the burst of star formation in the small galaxies to the Milky Way. Encountering the giant galaxy squeezes the dwarf galaxies’ gas, causing that gas to collapse and spawn lots of new stars.
As an example, the Draco dwarf galaxy first crossed into the Milky Way’s domain 11 billion years ago and formed numerous stars then — but never again. More recently, the Leo I dwarf galaxy entered our galaxy’s realm just 2 billion years ago, a time that coincided with its last burst of star birth. But today Leo I creates no new stars and, like Draco, has no gas to do so.
Dwarf galaxies that kept their distance also kept their gas longer, the researchers found. The galaxies that came closest to the Milky Way’s center, such as Draco and Leo I, ceased all star formation soon after crossing the Milky Way’s frontier. However, the galaxies that entered our galaxy’s domain but remained farther out, such as Fornax and Carina, fared better.
“Those two galaxies kept their interstellar gas inside them, so that the star formation still continued,” Chiba says. Both galaxies managed to eke out new stars for many billions of years after crossing into the Milky Way’s realm. Today, however, neither galaxy has any gas left.
“I think it all makes sense,” says Vasily Belokurov, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, who notes how essential the Gaia spacecraft was to the discovery. “It’s a beautiful demonstration of what we’ve never been able to do before Gaia, and suddenly we can do these magical things.” More

Jupiter may be the first planet besides Earth known to host atmospheric light shows called “sprites” or “elves.”
Sprites (SN: 6/14/02) and elves (SN: 12/23/95) are two kinds of atmospheric glows that form when lightning alters the electromagnetic environment in the atmosphere above a storm. On Earth, these electromagnetic upsets cause nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere to emit a brief, reddish glow. Sprites can brighten a region of the sky tens of kilometers across, while elves can span hundreds of kilometers (SN: 12/21/96).
Scientists suspected these atmospheric phenomena might appear on other planets that crackle with lightning (SN: 6/19/18). But until now, no one had seen hints of sprites or elves on another world.
From 2016 to 2020, the ultraviolet spectrograph on NASA’s Juno spacecraft, in orbit around Jupiter, caught 11 superfast flashes of light across the giant planet. Those flares, reported online October 27 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, lasted an average 1.4 milliseconds, which is about as fleeting as sprites and elves on Earth. The ultraviolet light was at wavelengths emitted by molecular hydrogen — the type of glow expected of sprites or elves on Jupiter, whose atmosphere is made mostly of hydrogen, rather than nitrogen.
Juno would need to spot a lightning strike at the same place as one of these bright flares to confirm that they actually are sprites or elves, says study coauthor Rohini Giles, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “But there is reasonably good circumstantial evidence,” she says. The flashes originated a few hundred kilometers above Jupiter’s layer of water clouds, where lightning typically forms, and several appeared in known stormy regions.
Observations of these events when Juno is closer to Jupiter may reveal their size, and help determine whether it is sprites or elves (or both) lighting up Jupiter’s atmosphere. More

Past observations have suggested that there’s water on the moon. New telescope observations conclude that those findings hold water.
Spacecraft have seen evidence of water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles (SN: 5/9/16), as well as hints of water molecules on the sunlit surface (SN: 9/23/09). But water sightings in sunlit regions have relied on detection of infrared light at a wavelength that could also be emitted by other hydroxyl compounds, which contain hydrogen and oxygen. 
Now, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, has detected an infrared signal unique to water near the lunar south pole, researchers report online October 26 in Nature Astronomy. “This is the first unambiguous detection of molecular water on the sunlit moon,” says study coauthor Casey Honniball, a lunar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This shows that water is not just in the permanently shadowed regions — that there are other places on the moon that we could potentially find it.”
These observations could inform future missions to the moon that will scout out lunar water as a potential resource for human visitors (SN: 12/16/19).

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SOFIA, operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, is a 2.5-meter telescope that rides aboard a jumbo jet to get clear views of the sky (SN: 2/17/16). During a flight in August 2018, the telescope detected 6-micrometer infrared light emanating from a region near the moon’s southern Clavius crater. This wavelength of light is generated by the vibrations of sunlight-heated water molecules, but not other compounds containing hydroxyl, which consists of an oxygen atom bound to a hydrogen atom.
“I thought it was really brilliant” to confirm the presence of water on the moon with observations at this wavelength, says Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park. Sunshine was involved in past observations that spotted hints of water on the moon, but was not involved in the new study.
Based on the brightness of the observed infrared light, Honniball’s team calculated a water concentration of about 100 to 400 parts per million around the Clavius crater. That’s less than half a liter of water per metric ton of lunar soil. This concentration was about what the researchers expected, based on past spacecraft observations.
These water molecules are not frozen in ice, like the water in permanently shadowed regions of the moon. Nor is it liquid, Sunshine says. “There’s no moon puddles.” Instead, the water molecules are thought to be bound inside some other material on the lunar surface.
“The only way for us to be seeing water on the [sunlit] moon is if it is sheltered from this harsh environment,” Honniball says. These water molecules could be encased in glass forged by micrometeorite impacts, or wedged between soil grains that shield the water from blistering solar radiation.
Water could have formed on the moon itself, from hydrogen ions in the continual outward flow of charged particles from the sun reacting with oxygen on the surface (SN: 10/6/14). Or, if the water is stored in impact glass, it could have been delivered to the moon by micrometeorites. More