The pair of strange, luminescent creatures at play in this image are actually galaxies — realms of millions upon millions of stars.
This galactic duo is known as UGC 2369. The galaxies are interacting, meaning that their mutual gravitational attraction is pulling them closer and closer together and distorting their shapes in the process. A tenuous bridge of gas, dust, and stars can be seen connecting the two galaxies,, during which they pulled material out into space across the diminishing divide between them.
Interaction with others is a common event in the history of most galaxies. For larger galaxies like the Milky Way, the majority of these interactions involve significantly smaller so-called dwarf galaxies. But every few aeons, a more momentous event can occur. For our home galaxy, the next big event will take place in about four billion years, when it will collide with its bigger neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy. Over time, the two galaxies will likely merge into one — already nicknamed Milkomeda.
DescriptionThe secondary mirror – visible in the top right corner of the image – is among the most important pieces of equipment on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and is essential to the success of the mission. Folded together with the other observatory components during launch, the secondary mirror will be deployed as part of an intricate choreography that will bring the observatory to life once in space. When deployed, like in this view, it faces Webb’s iconic honeycomb-like pattern of 18 hexagonal, gold-coated primary mirror segments. This primary mirror structure is seen in the lower left of the image in its folded configuration, showing only 12 segments.Once the observatory is in space, light from distant stars and galaxies will first reach its primary mirror, which reflect it into a focused beam towards the secondary mirror. From there, the beam is then sent through the ‘hole’ in the primary mirror structure into the tertiary and fine steering mirrors, and eventually to the four scientific instruments, which sit behind the primary mirror in this view.Technicians and engineers recently tested a key part of the telescope unfolding choreography by successfully commanding Webb to deploy the support structure that holds its secondary mirror in place. This is a critical milestone in preparing the observatory for its journey to orbit, as the proper deployment and positioning of the telescope’s secondary mirror is critical to perform the mission’s revolutionary science. This successful test also provided another demonstration that the electronic connection between the spacecraft and the telescope is working properly, and is capable of delivering commands throughout the observatory as designed. Next on the list of key mission milestones is the integration of the James Webb Space Telescope’s two halves – the telescope element, which comprises the mirrors and science instruments, and the spacecraft and sunshield element – into its final form as a complete observatory. Currently at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, California, Webb is scheduled for launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in March 2021. The James Webb Space Telescope is an international project led by NASA with its partners, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. As part of its contribution to the project, ESA provides the NIRSpec instrument, the Optical Bench Assembly of the MIRI instrument, the Ariane 5 launcher, and staff to support mission operations at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, USA.
Nikolai Kardashev at the US-USSR SETI Conference, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. [credit: S. Shostak]By Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer
Nikolai Kardashev, who was one of the earliest, and most consequential, SETI practitioners, passed away on August 3, 2019. At a time when a search for extraterrestrial intelligence was more a thought experiment than one requiring actual hardware, clever physicists in the Soviet Union formulated many of the seminal ideas for this nascent discipline. Of these, Kardashev was among the best known.
Coming of age in the postwar era, Kardashev studied under Josef Shklovskii, the celebrated author of the first general treatise on how we might search for technologically capable beings in the cosmos. Shklovskii’s book was translated (and added to) by Carl Sagan, and became the inspiration for many in SETI after its 1966 publication in the West. His early exposure to the fundamental premises of SETI led Kardashev to turn his inventive mind to this new field, one that was open to big ideas.
A famous example of his early involvement occurred following the development of practical aperture synthesis, a radio astronomy technique that allowed the precise determination of positions of sources on the sky. The increased precision soon led to the discovery of radio galaxies and quasars. One of the latter, known by its catalog designation CTA 102, was claimed by the Soviets to vary in intensity, and Kardashev famously suggested that its irregular emissions might be a deliberate message from extraterrestrials. This was a sensational claim (it even led to a hit song by The Byrds), but one that was eventually ruled out when it was learned that the quasars were intrinsically variable.
Perhaps the most well-known of Kardashev’s contributions to SETI was the Kardashev Scale, a handy rubric for categorizing putative civilizations. A society (such as our own) that commands the energy resources of its own planet is described as a Type I civilization. Type II civilizations can avail themselves of the total energy output of their home star, and a Type III society is able to use the total energy of its own galaxy.
Kardashev was one of the important early thinkers in SETI. His supple mind and gentle manner will be missed by all who knew him.
Berkeley SETI, Breakthrough Listen, the SETI Institute, and the GNU Radio community collaborated to host a hackathon at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California last week. HCRO is home to the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, a 42-antenna telescope used to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. The GNU Radio community builds open-source hardware and software that is used both by hobbyists who want to explore the radio spectrum (from picking up and visualizing FM radio stations to decoding the signals from airplane transponders) and by professionals who use the tools for commercial and research applications.
The hackathon brought together programmers, engineers, astronomers, and experts in radio hardware and software to collaborate on a range of projects. The 36 participants came from around the US and even from overseas to work on community-focused efforts to make data more easily available, to attach new flexible hardware to the telescopes, to quantify the performance and health of the ATA and other radio observatories, and to help develop new infrastructure and standards.
Some groups plugged GNU Radio hardware directly into the outputs from the ATA’s beamformer. Others worked to get data from the ATA into GNU Radio software. Teams made observations of GPS satellites and astrophysical masers, worked on machine learning detection of signals, discussed data archiving, and worked on development of the GNU Radio tools, as well as translating the tools into other languages.
The collaborations that were formed this week are continuing to develop, and we are excited about making more data and tools available to the community! A number of participants are planning to submit their results to the GNU Radio Conference in Huntsville, AL, in September.
Photos: Nathan West, Arash Roshanineshat, Steve Croft, Kyle Logue
Dr. Eric Bell and Fr. Richard D’Souza, astronomer at the Specola Vaticana working at the University of Michigan, have published a paper in Nature Astronomy indicating that the galaxy M32, which orbits the Andromeda Galaxy, is actually the remnant of a much larger galaxy that merged with Andromeda two billion years ago. All these galaxies are members of the “Local Group” of galaxies that include our own Milky Way galaxy.
More than a million people say they want to scale the fences and assault Area 51, a top-secret Air Force installation hunkered down in the Nevada desert. Their hope is to see the aliens who are supposedly warehoused within. The blitz is scheduled for September 20, so mark your calendars.
Or not. The idea for this effort was birthed on Facebook, and it was clearly intended as a joke. But so was Johnny Carson’s 1973 claim that the U.S. was running out of toilet paper – an offhand attempt at humor that triggered a real shortage. So joke or no, the hordes might really show up at the closely guarded federal facility.
BookMaker, an Internet betting site, is already weighing the odds of a tsunami of citizens storming the chain-links and, if they do, the chances that they’ll find any aliens mothballed inside.
It’s all good fun (unless, perhaps, you’re a security guard for the Air Force.) But should you go? And, really, is there any reason to believe that extraterrestrials are stacked up at Area 51?
The Air Force says a citizen assault would be “dangerous” – a description perfectly chosen to encourage those who believe that what goes on at this hush-hush base is both suspect and probably malevolent. Signs posted around Area 51 somberly note that trespassing will be dealt with harshly, and that deadly force is authorized – as if you’d care whether or not it’s authorized when they winch your body out of the sagebrush.
Of course, secret things do go on at Area 51 – the testing of new military aircraft, for instance. The Air Force is not keen on people making photos. So trying to scale the Area’s ramparts is about as advisable as storming Fort Knox. And even if camo-clad guards aren’t enough to dissuade you, there’s always the desert itself. Daytime temperatures, even in late September, could hover around a sweaty 90 degrees. Refreshment will be hard to find, and the expected crush of people will more or less guarantee you’ll be sleeping in your car or under a creosote bush.
OK, but maybe you’re thinking that pulling the wraps off some aliens would be worth the discomfort. Which, indeed, it would. And Internet jests aside, a lot of people are convinced that the federal government really keeps evidence of extraterrestrial visitors – dead or alive – somewhere. Surveys show that one-third of the American public is convinced that aliens are visiting Earth, and a majority say that the government knows.
However, crashed saucers or broken bodies aren’t on display at the Smithsonian or Roswell’s UFO Museum. So that lack of obvious evidence encourages true believers to take another tack: Namely, claiming that the feds, thanks to their hi-tech equipment and cloak-and-dagger talents, are the only successful gatherers of alien artifacts. And of all the places they could squirrel away this evidence, they’ve chosen southern Nevada.
Frankly, this is a poor argument. Wayfaring aliens are unlike new missiles or Mach 3 fighter jets. Alien spacecraft would, one presumes, be routinely noticed by many of the billions of people who are not employed by the U.S. military, nearly all of whom have cell phones with cameras. Sure, the recently released videos made by some Navy pilots are suggestively mysterious. But they’re ambiguous. And what about the one-hundred thousand commercial flights that take off every day, apparently without the slightest concern with – or notice of – extraterrestrial craft? Does the International Airline Pilots Association offer training on how to deal with aliens in our airspace?
It beggars belief to think that the thousands of employees and contractors who’ve worked at Area 51 in the 7 decades since the celebrated Roswell incident have been capable of keeping news of stockpiled aliens under wraps, despite the fact that it would be the biggest story ever. The oft-repeated argument that secrecy is necessary in order to avoid panicking the populace doesn’t wash. Folks already believe E.T. is here, and they still go to the office every morning.
If nothing else, the suggested blitz of Area 51 demonstrates Nevada’s continuing success in cornering the alien market. In 1996, state officials christened route 375 as the Extraterrestrial Highway. This 100 mile stretch of straightaway, which parallels the northern border of Area 51, might have qualified as the world’s most boring two-hour drive if it weren’t for the fact that some people have seen strange objects in the sky while en route.
It’s also noteworthy that the Nevada Commission on Tourism, which promoted the highway re-branding, didn’t point to the fact that, three years earlier, state senator Richard Bryan had introduced an amendment to cancel the NASA project to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. But then again, those aliens would have been light-years away and of little benefit to the Nevada economy.
As for Area 51, the truth may not be out there. But some high-speed aircraft and a lot of prickly pear probably are.
Plans are nearly complete for the first LaserSETI installation at the Robert Ferguson Observatory (RFO) in Sonoma County, California. LaserSETI Principal Investigator Eliot Gillum has built a collaborative and productive relationship between the SETI Institute and RFO, after locating the site based on complex astronomical suitability criteria. The SETI Institute collaborated with RFO founding board member Dr. Gordon Spear, RFO Board President Dave Kensiski, and RFO Executive Director Chris Cable; the final logistics are being worked out for the placement of LaserSETI’s first observatory at RFO’s idyllic facility.
Dr. Spear is also an Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Sonoma State University and is “extremely excited” that RFO will be partnering with the SETI Institute. He added that LaserSETI is significant to the scientific research being performed at RFO since their primary mission focuses on education. RFO hosts numerous events, field trips, and a steady stream of drop-ins from the public, adding up to more than 8,000 visitors each year. Visitors will be able to take advantage of this location to visit LaserSETI. RFO has been a 100% volunteer organization since its founding in 2000, until recently hiring its first executive director.
Andrew Fraknoi, SETI Institute Trustee and Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at Foothill College, provided the initial introduction to Dr. Spear. Spear became immediately intrigued by LaserSETI’s novel approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “We’re thrilled to be able to make a difference for SETI in this way,” stated Dr. Spear. “There were some challenges gaining the buy-in of other board members.” He described that even with an educated group of astronomy advocates, the idea of SETI was not immediately well understood. But after sharing information about the SETI Institute and the LaserSETI proposal, the RFO board members quickly realized that SETI is serious science and LaserSETI is cutting edge. Learning about the SETI Institute’s expansive public outreach and education programs “really sealed the deal.”
The SETI Institute looks forward to working closely with RFO to create a LaserSETI exhibit within RFO’s museum and classroom. Discussions are underway to develop collaborative educational programming as well.
The SETI Institute is working to identify a second observatory site for LaserSETI and hopes to announce news soon.
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