Category Archives: astronomy

astronomy, Mars, Mars Phoenix Lander

Sweatin’ Mars

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Liquid Saltwater Likely Present on Mars

What happens when you have salt water on a surface in cold weather?  On a human body, it comes out of pores as sweat and if the conditions are right, it condenses on the skin as droplets of salty water.  The saltiness means that they probably wouldn’t freeze to your skin until it gets very, very cold — which is why if you exercise outside in the winter, sweat droplets don’t turn into ice blobs right away, even if they land somewhere other than on your warm skin.

Droplets of salty water on the legs of the Mars Phoenix Lander. (Click to emibiggen.)
Droplets of salty water on the legs of the Mars Phoenix Lander. (Click to embiggen.)

It turns out that this tendency of salt water to freeze more slowly in cold weather is behind the discovery of water droplets on the legs of the Mars Phoenix Lander which is sitting silent in the Martian north polar region.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have analyzed an an image taken during the mission and say that this is proof of liquid water on Mars.  This is the first time liquid water has been detected and photographed anywhere but Earth.

So, how could this be?

The common wisdom is that water exists on Mars only as ice or vapor. This is because of the planet’s low temperature and atmospheric pressure. Any water ice that did get exposed would probably vaporize in the low pressure and dry conditions, but it wasn’t likely to just simply melt.  At least, that was the thinking before the Mars Phoenix mission landed.

It came to rest in a place where an interesting confluence of conditions exist to make the droplets of salt water found on the Phoenix lander leg possible. First, temperature fluctuation in the arctic region of Mars where Phoenix landed and salts in the soil could create pockets of water too salty to freeze in the climate of the landing site.

The droplets you see on the leg in the image grew during the polar summer. Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of “perchlorate” salts detected in the soil, scientists think that the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down. The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil.

Some of the mud droplets that splashed on the lander’s leg appear to have grown by absorbing water from the atmosphere, Images suggest that some of the droplets darkened, then moved and merged—physical evidence that they were liquid.

So, where did the salt water come from?  The wet chemistry lab on Phoenix found evidence of perchlorate salts, which likely include magnesium and calcium perchlorate hydrates. Mix these with water vapor released during landing and you have compounds with freezing temperatures of about -90 and -105 Fahrenheit respectively. The temperature at the landing site ranged from approximately -5 to -140 Fahrenheit, with a median temperature around -75 Fahrenheit. Temperatures at the landing site were mostly warmer than this during the first months of the mission.

The Michigan team did thermodynamic calculations, which provide additional evidence that salty liquid water can exist where Phoenix landed and — this is important — elsewhere on Mars.And the fact that the droplets seem to grow as time went by implies more salty water available than the amount melted when the lander came to rest on the surface.

Now, this is quite interesting of course because water is one of those things that we’re pretty sure that life needs to survive in the long term. And, we know that life can exist in pretty salty environments (the so-called halophiles). So, the discovery that liquid salty water can exist on Mars is a big boost for the search for places where life could exist on Mars (now or in the present).  Looking at it another way, knowing that such conditions exist on Mars widens the number of places where we know conditions are suitable for life.

arp 261, astronomy, eso, european southern observatory, supernova

A Space Oddity

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What You Find When You Look Deep

No doubt about it, there are strange and wonderful things to be seen in the cosmos. If you point a telescope at some area of the sky, you’re going to find weirdness. Oddities… and they stay odd until we figure out a way to explain them. At that point, they become part of the cosmic zoo — interesting, odd, but at least we kinda sorta understand them.  And, the longer you point your telescope, the deeper you look and the more you find. Sometimes you even get more than you bargained for.

A color composite image of Arp 261 created from images obtained using the FORS2 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. (Click to embiggen.)
A color composite image of Arp 261 created from images obtained using the FORS2 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. (Click to embiggen.)

That’s true of the main object in today’s image released by the European Southern Observatory. At first glance, it looks like strange lump of stuff — star-studded, clumpy clouds that have a kind of barrel-like appearance. You might think this is a planetary nebula or a starbirth cloud in our own galaxy until you look at it closely. What we are seeing here is a pair of galaxies that have collided in a slow-motion dance with each other. The action of the dance is disrupting their shapes, mingling groups of stars and clouds of gas and dust.

This slo-mo tango is taking place about 70 million light-years away from us. We can’t watch it in real time because these things take a long time to unfold. So, our views are more like cosmic snapshots of an encounter that will go on for millions of years.

Although individual stars probably aren’t going to collide, the huge clouds of gas and dust certainly do crash into each other at high speed. Those collisions lead to formation of bright, hot new stars that you can see in the blue-ish regions.

The paths of that the existing stars take as they move through their galaxies get disrupted and maneuvered into new paths. These show up as swirls of light extending to the upper left and lower right of the image.

The two galaxies involved in this cosmic dance were not spirals but more like misshapen dwarfs, similar to the Magellanic Clouds that orbit the Milky Way. They weren’t what astronomers went to look for first in this part of the sky. That would have been the ordinary-looking object just to the right of Arp 261 (indicated by the lines in the second image).

A core-collapse supernova called SN1995N (indicated by lines) was the actual subject of the images astronomers took of Arp 261. They got more than they bargained for. (Click to embiggen.)
A core-collapse supernova called SN1995N (indicated by lines) was the actual subject of the images astronomers took of Arp 261. They got more than they bargained for. (Click to embiggen.)

This object turns out to be an unusual exploding star, called SN 1995N, that is thought to be the result of the final collapse of a massive star at the end of its life. Astronomers call these objects “core collapse supernovae” (appropriately enough). SN 1995N is fading very slowly, more slowly than most supernovae. It’s bright enough that it still shows clearly on this image more than seven years after the explosion took place — from the distance of Arp 261. It is also one of the few supernovae to have been observed to emit X-rays. That probably happens because the exploding star was in embedded in a dense thicket of material, and as its blast waves moved out, they plowed into the material at high speed — creating conditions hot enough to emit x-rays.

This image has more than just a distant galaxy pair and an exploding supernova in it.  If you look closely at an enlarged version, you can find two small asteroids that orbit in our solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They happened to be crossing the field of view during the observations. They show up as the red-green-blue trails at the left and top of the first picture I’ve posted here. The trails happen because asteroids  are moving during the exposures and also between the exposures through different colored filters. The asteroid at the top is number 14670 and the one to the left is number 9735. Each of them is probably less than 5 km across. Their reflected sunlight takes about fifteen minutes to get to the Earth.

The next closest object in the scene is a star that looks bright in the image but would be impossible to see with the naked eye.  It’s most likely a sun-like star and it lies about 500 light-years from us. (For reference, Arp 261 itself, and the supernova, are about 140,000 times farther away than this star).  If you look carefully, there ARE objects much more distant than Arp 261, which is in our cosmic neighborhood by comparison. These are galaxies that make up a cluster that is visible on the right of the picture. And beyond that?  There’s something even more distant — we just have to look longer and deeper to see it!