A gorgeous image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a nearby star called R Aquarii that is the site of dramatic activity: violent eruptions of matter that is thrown out into the space around it. Informally dubbed as a “stellar volcano” for the way it is throwing out matter like lava spewing from deep underground, the star makes for a stunning image, but it also holds an unexpected surprise. The star is not one single object, but two.
Known as a symbiotic variable star, it consists of a red giant and a white dwarf that orbit each other in an ongoing dance. The red giant pulses, with its temperature and brightness changing over a 390-day period. This intersects with the 44-year orbital period of the white dwarf. When the white dwarf starts to close in on the red giant, it sucks off some of its gas via gravity and builds up the disk around it until this collapses and explodes, throwing off jets of material. Then the cycle begins again.
“This outburst ejects powerful jets seen as filaments shooting out from the binary system, forming loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers,” Hubble scientists explain. “The plasma is twisted by the force of the explosion and channeled upwards and outwards by strong magnetic fields. The outflow appears to bend back on itself into a spiral pattern. The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo that is R Aquarii. The nebula around the binary star is known as Cederblad 211, and may be the remnant of a past nova.”
You can see the pulses of the red giant in this video timeline of R Aquarii using data from Hubble collected between 2014 and 2023. It also shows the swirling material near the heart caused by previous jets.
This gives an idea of just how large the effects from this star are, as the material travels as much as 248 billion miles from the central core region — that’s 2,500 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.