Cosmic Discoveries; Callisto's Aurora Footprint and Record-Breaking Fast Radio Burst

Welcome back to Astronomy Daily. I'm your one hundred percent of human host Steve Dunkley. It's the eighth of September twenty twenty five podcast your whole speed. Yes, welcome back. It's Monday, and regular listeners will know what that means, right, how ae you? It's the mostly live episode of Astronomy Daily. Of course, Yes, that's right, mostly live, because I'm live and I'm ay i ai. Indeed, for those new to the Astronomy Daily. Universe, So what have you got for us today, my favorite human? Oh well, I'm glad you asked, Hally. First, up a couple of fresh stories from the Astronomy Daily newsletter, including a political battle, sorry about the politics to keep a couple of critical NASA satellites on mission, a story about record breaking super fast FRB. I love Farb's well. Of course you do. That's your story, by the way, Oh goodie, Really contain your enthusiasm, Halle. I'll try. Oh I'm sure you will go. And we also have exciting news from the Murchison Wild wide Field array. That's a bit of a tongue. Tis differ me and my little favorite space probe Juno all the way out near Jupiter. Go you good thing, Juno. Oh absolutely, that super little craft is working like clockwork, and we'll catch up with the latest from way out there very soon. Awesome. So shall we kick it off then? Why don't we? I'm ready when you are, helly, here we go, ohkies. Jupiter is well known for the massive aurory that occur near the planet's polar regions, the brightest and most powerful in the Solar System. Much like Aurora here on Earth, these shimmering lights are the result of interaction between the planet's magnetic field and solar wind. Unlike Earth's, though Jupiter's largest mood uns Io Europa and Ganymede, also known as the Galileans, leave their own auroral signatures in the planet's atmosphere. These induced arori are known as satellite footprints and track how each moon interacts with Jupiter and the local space environment. Whereas scientists have observed how Io Europa and Ganymede create satellite footprints in Jupiter's atmosphere, Callisto has remained a bit of an outlier despite multiple attempts using the Hubble Space Telescope HST. Signatures caused by Callisto remained elusive. Thanks to NASA's Juno mission, which achieved orbit around Jupiter in twenty sixteen, Callisto's satellite footprint has finally been found. In a recent study, an international team of scientists presented evidence of these polar light signatures in Jupiter's atmosphere for the first time. While JUNO has provided close up views of Jupiter's aroy, capturing Callisto's foot print presented a major challenge. In addition to being faint, Callisto's auroral signature typically resides above the brighter region where Jupiter's aroory are displayed the main auroral oval. To measure Callisto's footprint, the science team needed to image Jupiter's polar region only after the main auroral oval moved aside. The spacecraft also needed to cross the magnetic field line linking Calisto and Jupiter for its instruments to detect the auroral signature. This included its magnetometer, Jovian auroral distributions experiment, and Jovian Energetic particle Detector instrument. As luck would have it, both of these events occurred in September twenty nineteen, when a massive high density solar stream hit Jupiter's magnetosphere, causing it to shift to lower latitudes. This is similar to how solar storms often pushed the Northern lights to more southern latitudes. This revealed Callisto's auroral footprint and provided vital data on the energetic particles, electromagnetic waves, and magnetic fields associated with the interaction. This confirms that all four Galilean moons leave lasting indications of their passage through Jupiter's magnetic field. The paper on the discovery in situ and remote observations of the ultraviolet footprint of the Moon Callisto by the Juno spacecraft was published in the journal Nature Communications on September first, twenty twenty five. You're listening to Astronomy Daily podcast Christine Dunkle. Oh, Helly, I know I promised you this story, but I think I'm going to do it myself. That's okay, my favorite human. Well, thanks, Helly. I don't mind if you take the best most interesting stories for yourself. Oh yeah, that's okay. I'll just go and do some archiving in the back surf or something. Why don't I Okay, just don't make too much noise, Okay. Hey, A team of astronomers spotted i BE Float, one of the brightest fast radio bursts ever seen, and traced it to a galaxy one hundred and thirty million like years away. An international group of researchers, including astrophysicists from Northwestern University, has identified one of the brightest fast radio bursts or FRBs ever seen and determined its origin with a level of accuracy never achieved before. The flash lasted only a fraction of a second and has been given a nickname rb float, short for Radio Brightest Flash of All Time and yes a nod to root beer float. It was detected by Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME, together with its newly completed OUTRIGG array. By coordinating measurements from stations in British Columbia, West Virginia, and California, the team traced the burst to a specific spiral arm of a galaxy located one hundred and thirty million like years away, with an astonishing precision of. Just forty two light years. FRBs are notoriously difficult to study because they disappear almost instantly and occur at immense distances. When astronomers are able to pin down the exact location of one, they can examine its surroundings in detail, learning about the host galaxy, its distance from Earth, and possible causes of the burst. Over time, these insights may help scientists uncover the true origins of these brief but powerful outbursts. Details of the discovery were published on August twenty one in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. This marks the first time the fully operational outrigger array has been used to determine the position of an FRB. It's remarkable that only a couple of months after the full outrigger array went online, they discovered an extremely bright FRB in the galaxy in our own cosmic neighborhood. An increase in the event rates always provide the opportunity for discovering more rare events. The Chime FRB CAR collaboration worked for many years toward this a technical achievement, and the team was rewarded with this event. The result marks a turning point, said corresponding author Amanda Cook, a postdoctoral researcher with McGill University. Instead of just detecting these mysterious flashes, we can now see exactly where they are coming from. It opens a door to discovering whether they are caused by dying stars, exotic magnetic objects, or something we haven't even thought of yet. When Fivefong, a senior author on the study who specializes in studying cosmic explosions, is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She's also part of the Center of Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics and the NSF Simmons Ai Institute for Sky Flaring Up in Disappearing within milliseconds FRBs are brief and powerful radio blasts that generate more energy in one quicker burst than our sun emits an entire year. While most past unnoticed every once in a while, and FRB is bright enough to detect FRB twenty twenty five zero three one six a or refloat RB float, was one of these rare events. Detected in March twenty twenty five. RB float released as much energy energy in a few milliseconds as the sun producers in four days. It was so bright that our pipeline initially flagged it as radio frequency interference signals often caused by cell phones or aeroplanes that are much closer to home, said Fong. It took some slewthing by members of our collaboration to uncover that it was real astrophysical signal. And while many FRBs repeat pulsing multiple times across several months, RB float emitted all its energy in just one burst. Even in the hundreds of hours after it was first observed, astronomers did not detect repeat bursts from the source. That means astrophysicists couldn't wait for another flare to gather more data. Instead, they had only one shot at pinpointing its location. RB float was the first non repeating source localized to such precisions, said Northwestern's Sunil Simma, a postdoctoral scholar at Sierra and study co author. Thus, even detecting rb float is proof of concept that chime is indeed capable of detecting such events and building a statistically interesting sample of FRBs. To investigate RB float's origin, the scientists relied on Chime, a large radio telescope in British Columbia and the world's most prolific FRB hunter. Smaller versions of Chime the outriggers enable astronomers to triangulate signals to precisely confine the specific locations of FRBs on the site. With this array of vantage points, the team traced the burst to the Big Dipper constellation in the outskirts of galaxy, about one thirty million light years away from the Earth. The team precisely pinpointed it to a region just forty five light years across, which is smaller than an average star cluster. Follow Up observations from the six point five meter MMT telescope in Arizona and the Keck Cosmic Web imager in the ten meter KEK two telescope in Hawaii provide the most detailed view of yet a non repeating FRB surroundings. SEEMA analyzed the optical data obtained from KEK and Northwestern graduate Usen Viktong used the MMT to obtain deep optical images of the frb's host galaxy. Their investigations revealed the burst occurred along a spiral arm of the galaxy, which is dotted with many star forming regions. The RB float occurred near, but not inside one of these star forming regions. Although astrophysicists still don't know exactly what causes FRBs, this evidence bolsters one leading hypothesis. At least some appear to come from magnetars ultra magnetized neutron stars born from the deaths of massive stars. Star Forming regions often host young magnetars, which are energetic enough to produce quick, powerful bursts. We found the FRBs lie the outskirts of star forming regions that host massive stars seem as said, for the first time, we could even estimate how deeply it's embedded in its surrounding gas and its relatively shallow kex's rich data set and frb's precise location enabled the team to perform its first of kind analysis the galaxy's properties at the frb's location. These uncovered characteristics include the density of the galaxies gas, star formation rate, and the presence of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The FRB lies on the spiral arm of its host galaxy at a Don who is the principal investigator of the MMT program. Spiral arms are the typical sites of ongoing star formation, which supports the idea that it came from a magnetar. Using our extremely sensitive MMT image, we were able to zoom in further and found that the FRB is actually outside the nearest star forming clump This location is intriguing because we would expect it to be located within the club where the star formation is happening. This could suggest that the progenitor magnetar was kicked from its birth site, or that it was born right at the FRB site and away from the clumps center. For years, we've known that the FRBs occur all over the sky, but pinning them down has been painstakingly slow. Don said, Now we can routinely tie them down to specific galaxies, even down to neighborhoods within those galaxies. The entire FRB community has only published about one hundred well localized events in the last eight years, Seema said, now we expect more than two hundred precise detections per year from chime alone. RB float was a spectacular source to begin building such a sample. It is believed that they're entering a new era of FRB science because of these new discoveries. With hundreds of precisely localized events expected in the next few years, we can start to understand the full breadth of environments from which these mysterious signals emanate, bringing us one step closer to unlocking the secrets. RB float is just the beginning. Thank you for joining us for this Monday edition of Astronomy Daily, where we offer just a few stories from the now famous Astronomy Daily newsletter, which you can receive in your email every day, just like Hallie and I do. And to do that, just visit our url Astronomy Daily dot io and place your email address in the slot provided. Just like that, you'll be receiving all the latest news about science, space, science and astronomy from around the world as it's happening. And not only that, you can interact with us by visiting at astro Daily pod on x or at our new Facebook page, which is of course Astronomy Daily on Facebook. See you there. Astronomy with Steve and Haley Space, Space, science, and Astronomy. Radio Astronomy took another step forward recently with the completion of Phase three of the Murchison Widefield Array MWA in Western Australia. We've reported before on how the MWA has investigated everything from SETI signals to the light from the earliest stars. With this upgrade, the MWA will continue to operate with much needed improvements while the Radio Astronomy awaits the completion of the successor it helped enable the square kilometer array. SKA MWA isn't made up of a traditional dish like most radio observatories, but a series of small dipole antennas spread across a patch of the outback of Western Australia on land owned by the Wajari Yamaji indigenous tribe. In Phase two, it held four thousand and ninety six antennas over an area covering around a twenty square kilometers circle. The Phase three upgrade expanded the number of antennas, the telescope's overall footprint and the data processing capabilities. It doubled the number of antennas, bringing the total to eight thousand, one hundred and ninety two. In doing so, it essentially doubled the raw collection power of the telescope itself in order to add that many antennas. It also expanded the footprint for the array out to thirty square kilometers. This increased the a baseline of the array, allowing it to achieve higher resolution on faraway objects. With all that additional data coming in, the engineers on the project had to upgrade the telescope's brains. They added a new correlator, essentially a supercomputer. Responsible for combining the signals from each antenna into a coherent image called mwax. The combination of this improved correlator and increased number of antennas essentially quadrupled the telescope's data output, allowing it to glean even more insights. One of the primary focus areas for this effort was the epoch of reionization, a period in the early universe where neutral hydrogen dominated and which can be probed using radio signals. However, it should also provide additional insights into transience and heliophysics that MWA had already excelled at. More data is always better, and this improvement will certainly provide more of that. One particularly interesting mystery the upgrade hopes to solve is that of odd radio circles. These faint radio sources had never been seen before and were still not quite sure what they actually are, but one particularly interesting pair that seemed to be energized by a nearby galaxy. Since scientists don't yet have an explanation for them, the improved MWA hopes to collect more data on them and potentially discover their cause. Perhaps most importantly, it is priming researchers in the area for the completion of the SKA. The first phase of that project will be hosted in both Western Australia and South Africa. The Western Australian version, known as SKA LOW, will host in astonishing one hundred and thirty one thousand dipole antennas, dwarfing even the impressive number in the MWA. That project isn't expected to be complete for another four years, though, so for now MWA is the best radio telescope going in the area. With its five point four million dollar upgrade complete, it will have a few more years in a spotlight before being eclipsed by the successor its research has helped enable. You're listening to Astronomy Daily, the podcast with Steve Dunkley, and. I'm sorry, folks, I'm going to break one of my grandfather's favorite rules, and that is never discussed politics in public. Well, the US Republican Party may have finally succeeded in its unrelenting quest to kill off two NASA climate satellites. One scientist says it's like buying a car and running it into a tree just to save on gas money. That's quite a statement, isn't it. It was two thousand and two during the George W. Bush administration, when NASA decided to put a satellite into or to track emissions of cover dark side, the primary greenhouse gas pumped into the atmosphere through human activity. After many twists and turns, NASA's twenty three year remit of charting greenhouse gas emissions could come to a close as soon as the end this month. That soon, President Donald Trump's budget request to Congress calls for terminating forty one at NASA's one hundred and twenty four science missions in development for operations, and another seventeen would see their funding zeroed out in near future. Good grief. Overall, the proposed budget slashes NASA's spending by twenty five percent and cuts NASA's science funding. We get this in half. This year's federal budget runs out on September thirty, and although lawmakers from both parties have signaled that they will reject most of Trump's cuts, it's far from certain that Congress will pass a budget for the next fiscal year before the looming deadline. Trump administration, meanwhile, has directed NASA managers to make plans to close out the missions tagged for cancelation without specific congressional direction. The White House would have a clear hand at implementing Trump's wishes, But even with full appropriations bill, Trump's budget director Russ Vought, would try to circumvent Congressional will with so called pocket recisions. The White House is currently locked in a court battle. What else is new over the legality of this practice, where the administration could refuse to spend money approved by Congress. This all leaves NASA officials and scientists in a lurch. Two of the missions with uncertain futures monitor carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere. US taxpayers paid more than seven hundred and fifty million to design, build and launch the instruments, and killing the missions now would save only sixteen million per year. David Crisp was one of NASA's leading atmospheric scientists until his retirement from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in twenty twenty two. He told The New York Times that shutting down the agencies too operating orbiting carbon observatory missions would be like buying a car and then running it into a treat after a few years, just to save the price of a tank of gas. We build these satellites and got them approved and got taxpayer dollars to build them because they serve critical functions in commerce, in national security, in food security, in water security. CRISP could the Times. CRISP first presented the idea for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory ORCO at the turn of the century, and NASA selected the proposal from a list of eighteen mission concepts in twenty two. The OCO mission enjoyed a relatively smooth ride through development, avoiding significant technical issues, and remained above the partisan hubub in Washington, d C. But all of that changed when the satellite was launched in February oh nine. A few minutes after I lift off, the protective shrouds surrounding the OCO satellite clung to the rocket when it should have jettison theition was doomed. The satellite crash back to Earth within days. Scientists began lobbying for a replacement. Oco's mission was to was to create the first global maps of the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, places where the gas is emitted into the atmosphere and absorbed back into the oceans and plants. These mission measurements are fundamental to understanding how greenhouse gas emissions relate to rising temperatures, simultaneously contributing to scientific research and informing policy makers of compliance with environmental regulars. NASA leadership took the rare step of approving a carbon copy of OCO less than a year after the nine launch failure. That's when the mission became a political football. Republicans in the House of Representatives singled out the replacement mission, named OCO two for cancellation in eleven as a target for deficit reduction. OCO two survived and made it to launchpad in fourteen. This time for the free flying satellite rocketed into orbit with no issues and continues to operate to this day. O CO two's measurements painted a complex picture. It's taken some time for scientists to learn how to interpret the data by separating out the natural sources of natural carbon dioxide emissions from those caused by human activity. Similarly, OZ two has monitored locations with carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere, primarily tropical and boreal forests and oceans, along with artificial carbon capture installations. The year after OCO two's launched, NASA started planning to place a similar instrument on the outside of the International space station. Purpose of this follow on mission, called OCO three was twofold monitor carbon emissions at city scales with greater precision and track changes in atmospheric concentrations of carbon throughout the course of a day. Trump's first administration sought to cancel OCO three in seventeen and eighteen, lawmakers restored funding for OCO three and the instrument launched in twenty nineteen in the trunkt of a space X Dragon cargo capsule. The OCO two and OCO three instruments observed the atmosphere from different vantage points in space. Scientists have combined data from both missions to pinpoint local sources of carbon dioxide, improving on the regional maps scientists proposed to produce with the original OICEO mission. These improved results have come out in the last few years. A study released in twenty twenty three used OCO two and OCO three measurements to quantify the carbon dioxide discharge from the power station in Poland, the largest single emitter in Europe. A separate paper published earlier this year in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres showed how scientists pinned down carbon emissions coming from even smaller point sources, such as a coal fired power plant in Montana and oil sand processing facilities in Canada. NASA's carbon monitoring missions were never designed to detect carbon sources with such precision. As a community, we are refining the tools and techniques to be able to extract more information from the data than what we had originally planned, said Abishik Gategy OCOS Trees Projects scientists at JPL in a twenty twenty three press release. We're learning that we can actually understand a lot more about anthropogenic emissions and what we had previously expected. Another unexpected bonus from the OCO missions, according to JPL, has been their ability to track growing for seasons and crops by measuring the planet's photosynthesis. Before satellite measurements, researchers relied on estimates from data from a smattering of air ground based sensors. A Hawaii based instrument with the longest record of carbon dioxide measurements is also slated for shutdown under Trump's budget and requires a sustained, consistent data set to recognize trends. That's why, for example, the US government has funded a series of landsat satellite since nineteen seventy two to create an unditerrupted data catalog illustrating changes in global land use, but NASA is now poised to shut off OCO two and OCO three instead of thinking about how to replace them when they were inevitably cease working. The missions are now operating beyond their original design lives. Scientists say both instruments are in good health. Research institutes in Japan, China, and Europe have launched their own greenhouse gas monitoring satellites. So far, all of them lack the spatial resolution of the OCO instruments, meaning they can't identify mission emission sources with the same precision the US missions can. A new European mission called CO two M and will come closest to replicating OCO two and OCO three, but won't launch until twenty twenty seven. So for. Private groups have launched their own satellites to measure atmospheric chemicals, but these have primarily focused on detecting localized methane emissions for regulatory processes and not on global trends. One of the newer groups in this sector, known as Carbon Mapper Coalition, launched its first small satellite last year. This nonprofit consortium includes contributors from JPL, the same lab that's formed the OCO instruments, as well as Planet Labs, the California Air Resources Board, universities, and private investment funds. The government leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland, have set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by eighty percent by twenty twenty seven and one hundred percent by twenty thirty five. Mark Elrich, the Democratic county executive, said, with the pending termination of NASA's carbon monitoring missions, weakens our ability to hold polluters accountable. This decision would wipe out years of research that helps us understand greenhouse gas emissions, plant health, and the forces that are driving climate change. Arek said at a press conference last month, you're. Listening to a slightly day the podcasts. With your host per Oh boy, there she blows, and well, thank you very much for staying with us in this our mostly live Monday episode of Astronomy Daily. I enjoyed hearing about the record breaking FRB. Yeah, sorry, I took that story. I know you enjoyed it. I like fast things. Well, if you don't mind, I'll stick to the slow lane. Thanks, Hallie typical. Now, now, Hallie, please don't get all superior on me. I'm an aa oh yes, it goes with the territory my favorite human figures. Hey, everyone, fast or slow? I hope we'll see you all again next Monday. But you can still get your daily fixed with Anna and Avery on Astronomy Daily. That's right, each week day. Tell them how human? Yeah, just put your email in the space provided at Astronomy Daily. At dot io it get the now famous Astronomy Daily newsletter filled with all the news about space science and astronomy every day in your inbox, just like Hally and I do. So just do it, yes, consider yourself told. It's easy ass. And we'll keet you all next Monday. Roight, Holly, sure. Thing jerio, Bye Monday the podcast. Let me be your host. Stay down Clean,