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The SR-71 Blackbird hypersonic spy plane may be back and faster than ever.

Or maybe not. Ambiguous wording at an aerospace-conference presentation last week suggested that the SR-72, a successor to the infamous Cold War spy plane, might already be in production, but neither the military nor the plane’s possible maker, Lockheed Martin Corp., is talking.

Bloomberg reported that Lockheed Vice President Jack O’Banion projected an artist’s conception of the hypersonic SR-72 during a talk at the annual SciTech Forum of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Florida on Jan. 8. Standing by the image of the sleek gray aircraft, O’Banion reportedly spoke about recent advances in computing and design and then said, “Without the digital transformation, the aircraft you see there could not have been made.” [Supersonic! The 11 Fastest Military Airplanes]

The wording implies that the aircraft has, in fact, been made, as does O’Banion’s later comments, also in the present tense.

“We couldn’t have made the engine itself — it would have melted down into slag if we had tried to produce it five years ago,” O’Banion said, according to Bloomberg. “But now, we can digitally print that engine with an incredibly sophisticated cooling system integral into the material of the engine itself, and have that engine survive for multiple firings for routine operation.”

No comment

Both the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin declined to confirm the existence of a real hypersonic spy plane to Bloomberg. Outside defense experts told the news outlet that the plane could be anywhere in the development process, from the digital design phase to the prototype phase.

The SR-71 Blackbird was a speedy, stealthy spy plane specifically designed to absorb, rather than reflect, radar signals and, hence, remain relatively hidden. Though it’s more than 107 feet (33 meters) long, the plane appeared on radar as an object somewhere between the size of a bird and a human, according to Lockheed Martin’s history of the plane.

The Blackbird was made from titanium so that it would have the strength to withstand the heat generated while flying at above Mach 3 (2,045 mph or 3,300 km/h), or three times the speed of sound. Developers painted the plane black to dissipate some of the heat, lending the aircraft its “Blackbird” moniker, according to Lockheed Martin. The two-seat SR-71 first flew on Dec. 22, 1964. It was retired in 1990, retaining the record of fastest manned aircraft ever made. According to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the final flight of the Blackbird now displayed at its hangar in Chantilly, Virginia, set a speed record: The plane flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in 64 minutes and 20 seconds.  

The future of hypersonic travel

Lockheed Martin’s interest in developing hypersonic “scramjets” — which use oxygen from the environment rather than a tank for combustion in the engine — is no secret, according to Bloomberg. However, the engineering challenges are steep. 

Jets like the purported SR-72 could enable the Air Force to make ultrafast bombing runs into enemy airspace without being detected, defense analyst Richard Aboulafia told Bloomberg. (Lockheed Martin engineers said in 2013 that they hoped to develop an SR-72 that could fly at Mach 6 (4,603 mph or 7,407 km/h) by 2030.)

Secrecy and rumors are the norm in the development of new stealth aircraft. According to a Central Intelligence Agency history of the development of the SR-71, the government tried very hard to keep the development of the original Blackbird classified, but a former U.S. Navy admiral named John B. Pearson said he figured out that Lockheed was up to something by 1961, just three years after the project started. A newspaper in Fort Worth, Texas, also reported the possibility of a new hypersonic airplane in 1963.  

Original article on Live Science. 

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. — The visual aid could’ve been a bit more visible.

NASA brought a small piece of the moon to the Dec. 11 White House signing ceremony for Space Policy Directive 1, which instructs NASA to send astronauts back to the moon, and then on to Mars (but gives no details about timelines or budgets).

And that piece was very small indeed, stressed Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who bagged its parent sample — a 17.7-lb. (8 kilograms) rock known as 70215 — on the lunar surface back in December 1972. [Apollo 17: NASA’s Last Apollo Moon Landing in Pictures]

“I’m explaining in this picture how big that sample was, compared to the [fragment] that we had to show the president,” Schmitt said Wednesday (Jan. 10) at the Lunar Science for Landed Missions Workshop, which was held here at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

“This picture” is a photo from the signing ceremony that shows Schmitt and Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser, examining the fragment, which was sealed in a clear container the size of a pickle jar.

“And that’s a lesson, Jim — we should’ve had a bigger rock,” Schmitt said with a laugh, addressing NASA Planetary Science chief Jim Green, who was also in attendance at the workshop Wednesday. The comment elicited hearty laughter from the audience, which was composed of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs interested in sending spacecraft to the lunar surface.

Schmitt added that Ivanka Trump wasn’t just feigning fascination with the moon rock for the cameras: “Ivanka was very interested in that.”

The moon rock known as Lunar Sample 70215 was collected by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972. The sample weighs 14 grams, and was sliced off a parent rock that originally weighed 8,110 grams.

Credit: NASA

The workshop crowd gave Schmitt — who has a doctorate in geology, and is the only trained scientist among the 12 Apollo moonwalkers — a standing ovation before his talk here Wednesday, which detailed the Apollo 17 sample-collecting efforts on the moon’s surface in December 1972.

His experiences, and those of his Apollo colleagues, could help guide the development of future moon missions, be they robotic or crewed. For example, Schmitt stressed that drilling into the lunar surface — which several future resource-prospecting craft aim to do — is a difficult task.

The Apollo 13, 15, 16 and 17 missions carried rotary percussion drills that allowed astronauts to place heat probes up to 10 feet (3 meters) below the lunar surface and collect samples from a similar depth. These drills worked well going in, but pulling them out of the ground was tough, Schmitt said.

“I think what happens is, the larger fragments rotate into the flutes, and, since it’s incompressible down there, you can’t move that fragment out of the way without an extraordinary amount of effort,” he said. “On Apollo 15, Dave Scott actually wrenched his shoulder doing it.”

“We’ve got to think about that,” Schmitt added. “Anybody who’s thinking about drilling on the moon — I don’t think we have those issues settled yet.”

NASA astronauts brought a total of 842 lbs. (382 kg) of lunar material back to Earth from 1969 to 1972 over the course of the six Apollo landed missions. Schmitt and his Apollo 17 crewmate Gene Cernan collected more than any other team — 243.7 lbs. (110.5 kg), according to NASA officials.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

WASHINGTON — An independent safety panel recommended NASA not certify SpaceX’s commercial crew system until the agency better understands the behavior of pressure vessels linked to a Falcon 9 failure in 2016.

That recommendation was one of the stronger items in the annual report of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) released by NASA Jan. 11, which found that NASA was generally managing risk well on its various programs.

The report devoted a section to the composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) used to store helium in the second stage propellant tanks of the Falcon 9. The investigation into the September 2016 pad explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9  while being prepared for a static-fire test concluded that liquid oxygen in the tank got trapped between the COPV overwrap and liner and then ignited through friction or other mechanisms. [Watch: SpaceX, Boeing Launching Space Taxi Test Flights in 2018]

SpaceX has since changed its loading processes  to avoid exposing the COPVs to similar conditions, but also agreed with NASA to redesign the COPV to reduce the risk for crewed launches. NASA has since started a “rigorous test program” to understand how the redesigned COPV behaves when exposed to liquid oxygen, the report stated.

ASAP argued that completing those tests is essential before NASA can allow its astronauts to launch on the Falcon 9. “In our opinion, adequate understanding of the COPV behavior in cryogenic oxygen is an absolutely essential precursor to potential certification for human space flight,” the report stated, a sentence italicized for emphasis in the report.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a routine prelaunch test on Sept. 1, 2016. A Falcon 9 should return to flight in early January 2017 if all goes according to plan, SpaceX representatives said.

Credit: USLaunchReport.com video

The report added that NASA and SpaceX are working on an alternative design for the pressure vessels that does not involve the use of composite overwrap materials should the ongoing test effort fail. It warned, though, that the alternative design is heavier, which may require redesign of supporting structures within the liquid oxygen tank.

The report raised issues in general about the commercial crew program, including concerns that neither Boeing nor SpaceX, the two companies developing vehicles to transport NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, will meet a requirement of no greater than a 1-in-270 “loss of crew” (LOC) risk of an accident that causes death or serious injury to a crewmember. That includes, the report stated, a risk of no more than 1 in 500 for launch and re-entry.

“The Panel has been monitoring the providers’ progress in working toward the LOC requirements, and it appears that neither provider will achieve 1 in 500 for ascent/entry and will be challenged to meet the overall mission requirement of 1 in 200 (without operational mitigations),” the report stated. The “operational mitigations,” such as on-orbit inspection, are intended to ease the overall 1-in-270 requirement.

At a Nov. 29 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee, Lisa Colloredo, deputy program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program, said she expected the two companies to meet that requirement or come close to it. “We have a very difficult LOC requirement to meet, and we knew that when we going in,” she said then, noting it was more stringent than the 1-in-90 requirement for the space shuttle at the end of the program.

ASAP, in its report, was skeptical that either company would meet those requirements. “NASA will need to determine if the risk portrayed by the analysis, with its large uncertainties, is acceptable,” it concluded.

The panel expressed fewer concerns about other elements of NASA’s human spaceflight program, including the development of the Space Launch System and Orion crew vehicle and continued operations of the ISS.

The report concurred with NASA’s conclusion reached last year that putting crew on the first SLS mission, Exploration Mission 1, was technically feasible but would add “significant crew safety risk” and additional resources. NASA ultimately decided to keep the EM-1 mission uncrewed.

ASAP also recommended that NASA pursue development of a second mobile launch platform rather than modify the one being completed now. Those modifications are needed to accommodate the larger Block 1B version of the SLS, which will be flown on the second and subsequent SLS missions, but will create a gap of 33 months between the first and second SLS missions regardless of the status of SLS or Orion. NASA officials have said they are considering seeking funding for a second launch platform.

The panel said in its report it was encouraged by NASA’s proposed Deep Space Gateway (DSG), a crew-tended habitat in cislunar space the agency is considering developing in conjunction with international partners in the 2020s. The Gateway is intended to develop experience in spaceflight beyond Earth orbit in preparation for later human missions to Mars, and can also support human spaceflight activities by the U.S. or other countries in the vicinity of the moon.

“In general, the Panel feels the DSG framework has excellent potential for appropriate risk mitigation related to a journey to Mars and looks forward to the ongoing detailed concept development,” the report stated.

It did, though, warn that any plans for a human return the moon, including a change to national space policy announced by the Trump administration last month, will require additional funding. “If the direction for NASA in cislunar space now includes a mandated return to the moon’s surface and no additional funds are supplied, it will create inevitable pressures on existing programs to execute safely,” it stated.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

Carie Lemack is co-founder and CEO of DreamUp, the first company to bring space into classrooms and classrooms into space. A former national security policy expert and advocate and producer of an Academy Award-nominated film, Lemack is a proud alumna of Space Camp and supporter of all space cadets reaching for the stars. Lemack contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a reminder of what King called “the fierce urgency of now,” of the need to act quickly and decisively for the good of an inclusive America. It also serves as a summons from a minister whose heavenly mission speaks to our urge to explore the heavens. 

Few things would be a greater honor to King’s memory, and there is no greater way for us to also honor ourselves, than to make space-based research as diverse as the world is — as diverse, in its multitude of opportunities and its opportunities for a multitude of races, as the world must be. [‘Hidden Figures’ Explores NASA and Civil Rights History]

King’s words are still relevant today, and they will always be relevant to matters of justice and peace. However, he very rarely spoke publicly about space, save his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, where he contrasted the astonishing peaks of science and the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space with the earthly realities of poverty and racism.

King’s speeches are replete with references to the triumphs of black professionals, from doctors and lawyers to engineers and entertainers, and from writers and teachers to reporters and legislators. But somehow, despite the overlap between when the civil rights movement occurred and the commencement of the space race, despite the launch of Sputnik and the rise of NASA during King’s time, despite President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth, despite the nation’s passion for those men with the right stuff — despite all of these things, and in spite of the lack of color among the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo crews, King was silent about a subject of such scientific achievement and political ambition.

This is not a criticism of King, but rather a call to further his dream and advance the cause of freedom in a realm he didn’t often discuss. Although there are and have been African-American astronauts (both men and women), as well as Muslim and Jewish astronauts, we can do more to encourage minority involvement in space-based research.

And we must do more, because we cannot explore the diversity of space without a diversity of explorers. Recruiting these men and women is no act of tokenism; we need the best Americans, regardless of race or gender, to maximize the best of America. These citizens are students at our colleges and universities, pupils at our primary and secondary schools, and our dreamers — and doers — throughout this country of 300 million people.

Now is the time to introduce these individuals to the power of space-based research, continuing King’s work. This is not the work of a single day or of a single person, or even of a single generation. But today — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — is a singular day honoring a singular leader. It is a day to seize the moment. 

Let us, therefore, do our duty and ensure that the cause endures, the hope lives on and the dream shall never die.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy’s central hub are zipping along at different speeds depending on how they are made, according to new research. 

Researchers looking at the bulge of stars near the Milky Way’s center found that stars rich in heavier elements — those more massive than hydrogen and helium — move twice as fast as those without. The new findings may help answer questions about whether the bulge formed by the motion of the stars or from an ancient collision with another galaxy, or through some combination of the two.

“The Milky Way bulge is an important galactic component. It contains about 10 to 20 percent of the mass of the galaxy, yet its formation evolution is still not well understood,” Will Clarkston said Thursday (Jan. 11) at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland. [Stunning Photos of Our Milky Way Galaxy (Gallery)]

Clarkston, an astronomer at the University of Michigan, was part of a study that combed through nearly a decade of data captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to measure how fast the stars swirled around the center of the galaxy.

Whereas ground-based telescopes have measured the movement of the stars toward or away from the sun, the new research with Hubble reveals how they orbit the center of the galaxy sideways along the sky.

“Ours is the first study to show that, in the sideways part of that motion, there are differences,” Clarkston said.

The birth of the bulge

The Milky Way is a classic spiral galaxy, with arms curving in a plane around its bulging center. But the formation of the bulge formation remains a mystery. In the past, astronomers thought that the bulge was made up of old stars, researchers said in a statement, but a growing body of evidence has revealed young stars, as well. Combined with other observations, this suggests that the Milky Way may have suffered a collision with another galaxy in its past. 

“There are many theories describing the formation of our galaxy and central bulge,” Annalisa Calamida, a member of the Hubble research team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said in the statement. 

“Some say the bulge formed when the galaxy first formed about 13 billion years ago. In this case, all bulge stars should be old and share a similar motion,” Calamida added. “But others think the bulge formed later in the galaxy’s lifetime, slowly evolving after the first generations of stars were born.”

To better understand how the bulge came to be, Clarkston, Calamida and their colleagues turned to nine years of archival Hubble data to track how about 10,000 of the bulge’s normal sun-like stars moved. They then relied on spectra from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to help estimate those stars’ chemical composition.

After comparing the two, the team discovered that the motions of bulge stars varied depending on a star’s chemical composition. Stars high in metals — for astronomers, all elements other than hydrogen and helium are considered metals — circle the bulge at a higher speed than older, metal-poor stars. 

“We actually dissected chemically these stars into metal-rich and metal-poor,” Clarkston said.

Charting the motion of the stars compared to one another revealed what Clarkston called the “fingerprints” of the two populations, a smeared graph that highlights their different velocities.

“There is a definite sense of rotation that seems a bit startling,” Clarkston said.

A 3D bulge

Like fingerprints at a crime scene, the new results don’t immediately indicate what happened in the past, but they provide strong clues to follow up on.

“The stars in our study are showing characteristics of both models,” Calamida said. “Therefore, this analysis can help us in understanding the bulge’s origin.” Metal-rich stars could have formed from the material expelled by previous generations of stars, with different birth scenarios causing a difference in velocity, or they could have been brought in by a colliding galaxy, she said. 

The new data will help the scientists better understand the bulge’s formation. According to Clarkston, other researchers are already plugging the discovery into models, which will make detailed predictions to test the observations.

“Having found the fingerprint, we want to develop the forensic science so we can develop in detail how the bulge actually worked,” Clarkston said.

The new research will serve as a pathfinder for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2019. One of the new telescope’s tasks will be to probe the archaeology of the Milky Way.

In the meantime, Clarkston’s team plans to comb through the archival data for even more stars, comparing their chemistry to their rotation. 

“Hubble gave us a narrow, pencil-beam view of the galaxy’s core, but we are seeing thousands more stars than those spotted in earlier studies,” Calamida said. 

“We next plan to extend our analysis to do additional observations along different sight-lines, which will allow us to make a three-dimensional probe of the rich complexity of the populations in the bulge.”

Follow Nola Taylor Redd at @NolaTRedd, Facebook, or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and the chief scientist at COSI science center. Sutter is also host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and leads AstroTours around the world. Sutter contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Solid. Liquid. Gas. The materials that surround us in our normal, everyday world are divided into three neat camps. Heat up a solid cube of water (aka ice), and when it reaches a certain temperature, it changes phases into a liquid. Keep cranking the heat, and eventually, you’ll have a gas: water vapor.

Every element and molecule has its own “phase diagram,” a map of what you should expect to encounter if you apply a specific temperature and pressure to it. The diagram is unique to each element because it depends on the precise atomic/molecular arrangement and how it interacts with itself under various conditions, so it’s up to scientists to tease out these diagrams through arduous experimentation and careful theory. [The Strangest Space Stories Of 2017]

When it comes to hydrogen, we usually don’t encounter it at all, except when it’s buddied up with oxygen to make the more familiar water. Even when we do get it by lonesome, its shyness prevents it from interacting with us alone — it pairs up as a diatomic molecule, almost always as a gas. If you trap some in a bottle and pull the temp down to 33 kelvins (minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 240 degrees Celsius), hydrogen becomes a liquid, and at 14 K (minus 434 degrees F or minus 259 degrees C), it becomes a solid.

You would think that on the opposite end of the temperature scale, a hot gas of hydrogen would stay … a hot gas. And that’s true, as long as the pressure is kept low. But the combination of high temperature and high pressure leads to some interesting behaviors.

Jovian deep dives

On Earth, as we’ve seen, hydrogen’s behavior is straightforward. But Jupiter isn’’t Earth, and the hydrogen found in abundance within and beneath the great bands and swirling storms of its atmosphere can be pushed beyond its normal limits. 

Buried deep below the planet’s visible surface, the pressures and temperature rise dramatically, and the gaseous hydrogen slowly gives way to a layer of supercritical gas-liquid hybrid. Due to these extreme conditions, the hydrogen can’t settle into a recognizable state. It is too hot to stay a liquid but under too much pressure to float freely as a gas — it’s a new state of matter.

Descend deeper, and it gets even stranger. 

Even in its hybrid state in a thin layer just beneath the cloud tops, hydrogen is still bouncing around as a two-for-one diatomic molecule. But at sufficient pressures (say, a million times more intense than the Earth’s air pressure at sea level), even those fraternal bonds aren’t strong enough to resist the overwhelming compressions, and they snap.

The result, below roughly 8,000 miles (13,000 km) under the cloud tops, is a chaotic mix of free hydrogen nuclei — which are just single protons — intermingled with liberated electrons. The substance reverts to a liquid phase, but what makes hydrogen hydrogen is now completely disassociated into its component parts. When this happens at very high temperatures and low pressures, we call this a plasma — the same stuff as the bulk of the sun or a lightning bolt.

But in the depths of Jupiter, the pressures force the hydrogen to behave much differently than a plasma. Instead, it takes on properties more akin to those of a metal. Hence: liquid metallic hydrogen.

That’s metal

Most of the elements on the periodic table are metals: They’re hard and shiny, and make for good electrical conductors. The elements get those properties from the arrangement they make with themselves at normal temperatures and pressures: They link up to form a lattice, and each donates one or more electrons to the community pot. These dissociated electrons roam freely, hopping from atom to atom as they please. 

If you take a bar of gold and melt it down, you still have all the electron-sharing benefits of a metal (except the hardness), so “liquid metal” isn’t all that foreign a concept. And some elements that aren’t normally metallic, like carbon, can take on those properties under certain arrangements or conditions. 

So, at first blush, “metallic hydrogen” shouldn’t be that strange an idea: It’s just a nonmetallic element that starts behaving as a metal at high temperatures and pressures. [Lab-Made ‘Metallic Hydrogen’ Could Revolutionize Rocket Fuel]

Once a degenerate, always a degenerate

What’s the big fuss?

The big fuss is that metallic hydrogen is not a typical metal. Garden variety metals have that special lattice of ions embedded in a sea of free-floating electrons. But a stripped-down hydrogen atom is just a single proton, and there’s nothing a proton can do to build a lattice. 

When you squeeze on a bar of metal, you’re trying to force the interlocking ions closer together, which they absolutely hate. Electrostatic repulsion provides all the support a metal needs to be strong. But protons suspended in a fluid? That ought to be much easier to squish. How can the liquid metallic hydrogen inside Jupiter support the crushing weight of the atmosphere above it?

The answer is degeneracy pressure, a quantum mechanical quirk of matter under extreme conditions. Researchers thought conditions that extreme might be found only in exotic, ultradense environments like white dwarfs and neutron stars, but it turns out that we have an example right in our solar backyard. Even when electromagnetic forces are overwhelmed, identical particles like electrons can only be squeezed so tightly together — they refuse to share the same quantum mechanical state.

In other words, electrons will never share the same energy level, which means they will keep piling on top of each other, never getting closer, even if you squeeze really, really hard.

Another way to look at the situation is via the so-called Heisenberg uncertainty principle: If you try to pin down the position of an electron by pushing on it, its velocity can become very large, resulting in a pressure force that resists further squeezing.

So the interior of Jupiter is strange indeed — a soup of protons and electrons, heated to temperatures higher than that of the sun’s surface, suffering pressures a million times stronger than those on Earth, and forced to reveal their true quantum natures. 

Learn more by listening to the episode “What in the world is metallic hydrogen?” on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the web at askaspaceman.com. Thanks to Tom S., @Upguntha, Andres C., and Colin E. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul@PaulMattSutterfacebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

AUSTIN, Texas — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratio nannounced plans Jan. 8 to retire its decade-old Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) 13 to make way for its next generation: GOES 16 launched in 2016 and GOES-S scheduled to launch in March.

After a year of on-orbit checkout and validation of onboard instruments, GOES-16 was officially dubbed GOES-East in December when it began to act as NOAA’s primary weather satellite staring down on the continental United States and Atlantic Ocean. [GOES-16 Satellite’s Most Amazing Photos of Earth from Space]

NOAA plans to launch its second next-generation geostationary weather satellites, GOES-S, in March on an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Once NOAA confirms that satellite’s capabilities, which can take as long as a year, it will replace GOES-15 as the agency’s primary weather satellite focused on the western United States, Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Ocean.

A family of four planets orbiting a distant star was discovered last April, with the help of citizen scientists around the world. In a new paper, researchers reveal some fascinating features of this alien solar system, including the presence of a fifth planet. 

The planetary system K2-138 is home to at least five “sub-Neptune” planets, meaning they are between the size of Earth and that of Neptune, according to the new study. The planets all orbit extremely close to their parent star, even closer than Mercury orbits the sun. 

What’s more, the paper suggests that these planets may have formed farther away from their parent star than they are now, then journeyed inward together in an exceptionally calm manner. [Kepler Space Telescope’s Alien Planet Bonanza Explained (Infographic)]

A mountain of data

K2-128 was discovered using data from the K2 mission, which has observed over 280,000 stars in three years, according to a statement from the California Institute of Technology. The mission utilizes the Kepler space telescope, which suffered a series of hardware failures and could no longer operate the way it was initially intended. The K2 mission allowed Kepler to continue operating in another way. 

Software programs can sort through the initial K2 data and select those stars that might be home to planets, but those programs aren’t yet good enough to independently confirm the presence of a planet around a star in the K2 data. That leaves thousands of stars that need to be analyzed by the K2 scientists, which is far more than those researchers can handle in a reasonable amount of time, according to Jessie Christiansen, a K2 collaboration member and staff scientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who spoke at a news conference at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Washington, D.C. yesterday (Jan. 11). 

To try and sort through the K2 data faster, the mission scientists initiated a crowdsourcing project. In this effort, members of the public would be able to review the data that the K2 software had sifted out and help identify the systems that host planets. The result was the Exoplanet Explorers citizen scientist project, developed by Christiansen, along with Ian Crossfield, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The program was launched in April and hosted on Zooniverse, an online platform for crowdsourcing research.

(Another citizen scientist project hosted on Zooniverse, called Planet Hunters, was started during the Kepler telescope’s primary mission and allowed citzen scientists to search through telescope data for exoplanets before the data had been filtered by software.)

“People anywhere can log on and learn what real signals from exoplanets look like, and then look through actual data collected from the Kepler telescope to vote on whether or not to classify a given signal as a transit or just noise,” said Christiansen. “We have each potential transit signal looked at by a minimum of 10 people, and each needs a minimum of 90 percent of ‘yes’ votes to be considered for further characterization.”

Project beginnings

The Exoplanet Explorers program got a big boost in publicity two weeks after it launched, when it was featured on the Australia Broadcasting Company’s television series “Stargazing Live,” co-hosted by celebrity physicist Brian Cox, for three consecutive nights. Within 48 hours of the program’s debut, more than 10,000 people had participated in Exoplanet Explorers and classified over 2 million systems, according to the statement.

Following the first night of the program, the researchers watched the results roll in, as citizen scientists helped sift through the data. On the second night, enough people had participated that the researchers were able to share the demographics of the planet candidates that had already been flagged and were undergoing additional analysis: 44 Jupiter-size planets, 72 Neptune-size planets, 44 Earth-size planets and 53 sub-Neptunes (larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune). 

On the third night, the scientists announced the detection of the K2-128 system, although at the time they could identify only four planets around the star. The researchers said in the statement that K2-128 is the “first multiplanet system of exoplanets discovered entirely by crowdsourcing.” 

An artist’s concept of the K2-138 planets, showing their orbits and sizes, to scale. (The size of the parent star is not to scale).

Credit: R. Hurt (IPAC)/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Resonance

Some of the major findings reported in the new paper are the discovery of a fifth planet and hints of a possible sixth planet in the data. 

The star at the center of this system is slightly smaller and cooler than our sun. While the innermost planet might be rocky like Earth, the other four known planets are gaseous, like Neptune. All five planets orbit around the star with periods shorter than 13 days. (Mercury’s orbit around the sun is 88 days.) That close proximity means the planets have temperatures ranging from 800 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit (425 to 980 Celsius), so even the rocky planet is not habitable for life as we know it.

All five of the confirmed planets, which are lettered a through e, orbit their star in resonance with each other, meaning the length of each planet’s orbit is related to the next planet’s orbit in the same way. More specifically, dividing the length of one planet’s orbit by that of the next nearest planet produces nearly the same ratio each time: 3:2 or 1.5. In each case, the exact ratio of two orbital lengths is slightly higher or lower than 1.5, but by less than 0.1. The TRAPPIST-1 system, which contains seven planets orbiting very close to their star, also displays orbital resonances but the ratio does not work out to whole integers. Resonances with whole integers are called “fundamental” resonances.

This planetary resonance indicates that the orbits of the planets are influencing each other and have probably been influencing each other for a long time, according to the statement. Some planetary-formation theories predict that these relatively large planets formed at locations farther away from their parent star than they are now, and the resonances indicate that they moved in toward the star together, in a relatively calm manner, Christiansen said at the news conference. 

“Some current theories suggest that planets form by a chaotic scattering of rock and gas and other material in the early stages of the planetary system’s life. However, these theories are unlikely to result in such a closely packed, orderly system as K2-138,” Christiansen said in the statement. “What’s exciting is that we found this unusual system with the help of the general public.”

Konstantin Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech who was not involved with the study, agreed that the resonances of the five planets indicated a calm migration period, according to the statement. 

“Orbital commensurabilities among planets are fundamentally fragile, so the present-day configuration of the K2-138 planets clearly points to a rather gentle and laminar formation environment of these distant worlds,” Batygin said. 

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

LOS ANGELES — Get ready, space fans: “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” has been renewed for a second season.

Fox and National Geographic announced yesterday (Jan. 13) that the series will return in the spring of 2019. Astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson will return as the series’ host.  

“Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” is a follow-on to the 1980 TV series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” which was co-created and hosted by the late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan. Sagan’s widow and frequent collaborator, Ann Druyan, was a writer on the original series and created the new iteration of “Cosmos.” She will also return for the second season as an executive producer and writer. [Inside ‘Cosmos’: Q&A with Host Neil deGrasse Tyson] 

“Following a wildly successful run in 2014 as the most-watched series ever on National Geographic Channels internationally, and seen by more than 135 million people worldwide on National Geographic and FOX, the new season will once again premiere in the U.S. on both FOX and National Geographic and globally on National Geographic in 171 countries and 43 languages,” according to a news release from National Geographic.

In an interview with reporters here in Los Angeles, Druyan said the new season would offer a hopeful view of the future, which she said is particularly important for young people.

“‘Cosmos’ has a view of the future which I believe has the power to inspire people,” Duyan said. “So much of what we see and so much of what our kids and grandchildren see is so dystopic and despairing. It’s like … our punishment for all our sins is just around the corner, and humanity doesn’t have a future except the one that’s choking and dying. And in ‘Cosmos’ we imagine the future that we can still have.”

Seth MacFarlane will also return as an executive producer for the show. MacFarlane is the creator multiple TV shows including “Family Guy,” and the Star-Trek spoof “The Orville,” in which he also stars.

Druyan and series co-writer Steven Soter won an Emmy Award for the show’s first season, which debuted in March 2014. Druyan said the time delay between the premier of the first and second season was due to the pace of her own writing, and the extensive amount of time she invested in finding the right stories for the show.

National Geographic also announced today that it will publish a companion book to the series, “Cosmos: Possible Worlds,” by Druyan. The book is a follow-up to Sagan’s book, “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” according to a statement from National Geographic.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.