Black Hole Merger Sparks Gamma Ray Burst and Iodine Propulsion Revolution

This is Spacetime Series twenty nine, episode thirty five, for broadcast on the twenty third of March twenty twenty six. Coming up on space Time, Amongst the black hole merger it sent ripples through space time, a new type of ion propulsion system for spacecraft, and thousands watch as a fireball streaks across Ohio skies. All that and more coming up on space time. Welcome to space Time with Stuart Garry. Astronomers have detected the merger of a pair of Stella mass black holes, which was quickly followed seconds later by a powerful gamma ray burst. The events had logged as S twenty four eleven twenty five N occurred some four point two billion light years away, sending ripples through the fabric of space time. The merger, which was picked up. By the Ligo Virgocagre gravitational wave observatories, was unusual, not just because of the extreme distance that gravitational waves were picked up from, but also because binary black hole mergers are not expected to produce electromagnetic counterparts such as gamma ray bursts. Gravitational waves are ripples in space time from violent cosmic events. Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, so S twenty four to eleven twenty five N could be a very rare gravitational wave event which has been linked to a gamma ray burst across modible wavelengths now. Although the association has not yet been definitively proven and it will require further follow up work, the probability of a chance occurrence appears fairly low, making the results statistically intriguing, while at the same time warranting caution. Black hole collisions are thought to be dark to conventional telescopes because it was thought they emit no light. However, S twenty four to eleven twenty five N appears to five that notion. About eleven seconds after the gravitational wave signal was received, NASA Swift Space telescope detected a short period gamma ray burst from the same patch of the sky, and shortly after that, China's new Einstein Probe telescope found an X ray afterglow in the same vicinity. The authors say the correlation between a gravitational wave signal, the gamma ray burst, and the X ray signal is unlikely to simply be coincidence. Their analysis reported in the Astrophysical Journal estimates. The total energy, luminosity, and duration of the event appears to be typical for a short period gamma ray burst. There's one problem, however, The photon index is far softer than usual, meaning low inferton energy, and that implies the source may have a special radiation mechanism or a different propagation effect. One of the other wrecking aspects of the detection was its extreme distance. The gravitational waves traveled for some four point two billion light years to reach Earth. That's a red shift of Z equaling zero point seven to three, meaning this collision occurred when the universe was significantly younger. The black holes involved were unusually massive. Analysis suggests the emerging pair at a combined mass of will over one hundred times that of our Sun, and that makes it one of the most massive stellar mass black hole mergers ever accorded. You see, most black hole mergers observed by LIGO involved turtles of just a few tens of solar masses, so such a massive merger is rare and intriguing, and it hints that each of the black holes involved might themselves have grown from earlier mergers or from some sort of exotic formation process. The detection of a high mass merger at Z zero point seventy three also suggests that these events can be observed across vast distances. Hearing black hole mergers billions of light years away and possibly seeing a flash from them is a remarkable achievement. The authors think the event may have been caused as two black holes merged inside a dense disk of gas and dust surrounding a galaxy central supermassive black hole, an environment known as an active galactic nucleus disc In these bustling galactic cause enormous amounts of material orbit the central super massive black hole, creating a fuel or its setting. If a binary black hole happens to coalesce with such a disc, the merger doesn't occur in isolation. It happens amid a thick soup of material, and when the black holes merged, the newly formed black hole received a powerful kick or recoll velocity from the asymmetric gravitational wave of emission. This kick black hole, now moving through the surrounding gas, would rapidly gobble up material in its path, and the accretion rate could be hyper Eddington, far exceeding the normal limit at which a black hole can steadily consume matter, a figure known as the Eddington limit, and such tense secretion in a magnetized environment is thought to have triggered relativistic jets of energy and matter launching out at superluminal speeds. As these jets plowed through the heavy disc, they generated shock waves in the dense gas. Initially, the jet's energy was locked inside the disc, thermalizing the gas, but when the jets finally put through the disc surface as photons could escape, the result a burst of hig energy radiation surging out of the galaxies nucleus, and this process would produce a short gamma ray burst, not from a neutron star merger, as is the usual case, but from a black hole merger in an unusual habitat. Such a shock breakout from the disc would produce a compromized gamma ray spectrum, which intriguingly matches whatswift observed. The gamma ray burst's prompt mission was unusually soft compared to typical short gammaray bursts. Now, if this gravitational wave and gamma ray burst association is confirmed, it heralds a new era of exploring black hole mergers using both ears and eyes. Until now, binary black hole mergers have only ever been heard through their gravitational waves, but s twenty four eleven twenty five n suggest that under special conditions they can also be seen in high energy light, and that would provide rich opportunities to study the environmental conditions around merging black holes and the physics of how their jets form in dense media. Such a two prong measurement can even refine science's estimates of cosmic expansion by using the event as a sort of stadded gravitational wave distance marker with an identified host galaxy redshift. This is space time still to come, a new type of ion propulsion system for spacecraft, and thousands witness a fireball streaking across the Ohio Skies. All that and more still to come on space Time. This episode of space Time is brought to you by square Space. If you've ever wanted to make your mark online, whether you're just getting started or ready to take your business to new heights, Square Space is the all in one website platform specifically designed to help you stand out and succeed. I guess you can think of square space sort of like a tidy roommate for your business. It handles all the scheduling crumbs, the unpaid invoices under the couch, and actually answers the door when customers knock. If you offer services, consulting, classes, events, whatever you call your expertise, square space makes booking and getting paid straightforward. 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So why not try it for free at squarespace dot com slash space time and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code space time to save ten percent of your first purchase of a website or domain that squarespace dot com slash space time and the promo code space time and remember you'll find the links in. Our show notes. Scientists to developing a new type of ion propulsion system for spacecraft which will be easy to produce and provide better performance than current ZON based plasma propulsion systems. You see instead of ZON the new research centers around the use of id in. Thousands of satellites are launched every year and it's critically important to be able to maneuver those spacecraft once they reach orbit, and this is where on board propulsion systems come in. Almost all propulsion systems used today are effectively classified as rockets. That means the system carries its own onboard propellant and a thrust force is generated by ejecting this propellant away from the spacecraft at high velocity. Now, space propulsion typically uses either chemical or electric propulsion systems. Chemical proportion systems, be they liquid fueled or solid, provide an immense amount of power needed for launch into space, and whilst spacecraft in orbits still require fuel systems for critical maneuvers, they're limited by the amount of fuel they can carry. That's where ion propulsion systems come in. They can provide stained power for extremely long periods of time because they don't use much fuel. Iron propulsion systems use electrical power, typically generated from solar panels or stored in batteries, to accelerate. They're propellant using electric or magnetic fields, but there's a disadvantage. The force they produce is extremely weak. Put a sheet of paper on your hand and that's roughly the force level that many electric propulsion systems provide. That's why ion propulsion can't be used to launch rockets or for emergency maneuvers in space. Because of its attractive properties, zeon has traditionally been the propellant of choice for many ion proporsion systems. However, xenon does present several challenges. It's a relatively rare gas and production is through a fractional distillation of air, a process that's both time consuming and energy intensive. For every one thousand metric tons of oxygen produced, only about a kilogram of xenon's obtained. Consequently, xenon is expensive, costing around five thousand dollars a kilogram in today's money, and global productions also limited to around fifty to sixty metric tones a year. Current estimates suggest over two thousand satellite are likely to be launched per year on average in the near future. That means demand for xenon will greatly outstrip its availability, and of course this also ignores that demand for xenon from other sectors such as the semiconductor industry, medical uses, and lighting industries. Also, Russia and the Ukraine produced about thirty percent of the word's zenon, and prices of surge significantly since Moscow's invasion of the Ukraine a few years ago. So this is where idine comes in. University of New South Wales researcher Trevor Laffler and colleagues have been looking into idine as an alternative ion propellant. Leafler says idine is commonly found in at the septics table, salt, and pregnancy supplements, and it has many properties that make it attractive for use in space. It has a similar atomic mass to zeneon and requires slightly less energy to ionize. That means it can achieve similar or even better performance. It's one hundred times less expensive than xenon to produce, and global production is six hundred times higher, and that means it can meet both existing and future space demands. But idine has its own problems. Being stored as a solid complicates how the propellants delivered and the control of propellant flow to the thruster. Gaseous propellants can simply be directed to the thruster by opening a valve. However, idine needs to be heated to just above one hundred degrees celsius first in order to allow it to supplement, that is, transition from a solid state into a gas state, with that first becoming a liquid. Also, idine is significantly more chemically reactive than xenon and can corrode many common materials such as iron and aluminum, so that means you're going to need special systems to manipulate it. Also, idine has a very complex plasma chemistry compared to xenon, meaning that when you attempt to use it, many different types of reaction can occur. Still, currently there are already over one hundred iydine electric propulsion systems in space, but most only operate at low power below one hundred watts. While larger satellites require up to ten killer whatts or more to generate greater thrust. So these are the challenges that Laflare and colleagues are facing. So there's two. Broad classes of propulsion, chemical and electric propulsion, and at least for electric the propellant of the choice has historically been zenon because it's a very noble gas. It doesn't react with many substances or materials, and it's got some very nice properties that make it suitable for propulsion. But there's a lot of change happening in the industry and so they're searching for some alternatives because i xenon has a few challenges with it. One of those challenges is that it's quite expensive. It's quite a difficult gas to process, and so because of this and growing space industry demand has been a big push to look for some alternative propellants. And that's where idne comes in. So iden is an interesting substance. It has only i would say being considered as a propellant about twenty years ago, but that was too soon for technology and it's only in the last five years or so that has actually been demonstrated in space. Is interesting because currently it's about one hundred times cheaper than xenon, and global production sits at almost five hundred times higher than xenon, So it can more than meet the growing space industry demand, and the cost is so low that it is particularly attractive. The other thing is iodine begins life as a solid essentially, and so solid usually has a much higher storage density than a gas like xenon, and so because of this, you can have a much smaller propellant tank than you would need for xenon. And so all of these factors have made iodine attractive emerging propellant, and so there's been a lot of research undertaken to try and develop technologies now to be compatible with iodine. And so, yeah, within the last five years has finally been some demonstrations of iodine in space, and now that it's showing that it can work, there's a lot of research going on to develop next generation propulsion systems and adapts other technologies to use iod There are. Some challenges assuch as with using iodine. We'll get to that in a moment, but basically, how does an ion propulsion system work? Actually, it turns out there's a whole zoo of different electric repulsion technologies, and one of them, at least the one that has so far been demonstrated in space with iodine, is something known as a gridded ion thruster or sometimes just an ion engine. And basically how this works is you have a chamber that you inject your iodine into and then you turn that id in into plasma, and the plasma is basically like a soup of electrons and positive aisles, and so what happens is you provide energy to this chamber and you strip electrons from the iodine atoms, and so you get left with this sort of soup of electrons and heavy positive iions. Then at the end of the thruster of the chamber, you have a set of grids with many little holes in them, and you apply a high voltage across these grids, and if you choose the polarity of your voltage correctly, you can extract and accelerate the positive ions and generate thrust in this way. And what happens to the negative ones a good question. So this is one of the key points that has made ideas with challenging. If you just extract positive ions, then the thruster and the spacecraft would actually charge up negatively, and so all of these technologies usually need a second device called a neutralizer, which emits electrons negative charges, that is to say, back into the exhaust plume of the thruster, and so in this way you can maintain current balance charge balance. The problem with iodine is it's very reactive with many common materials, and so some of the more advanced neutralizers so far we have not successfully achieved stable operation wariety. Okay, so basically it makes things rust I take is what you're saying. That's not quite a rust, but it's very chemically aggressive many common materials like iron, copper and in aluminiums and so it means you have to very carefully design your propulsion system. But for the neutralizer, most of the conventional neutralizers have a very special material inside that they use to operate, and so far iodine seems not to be very compatible with this material. It causes a lot of erosion or chemical reactions, and so it shortens the lifespan. And often with electric propulsion systems, we may need these things to operate for thousands of hours just because of the duration of a space mission and so on, and as of today, the last numbers we've seen, I think some of the high performance neutralizers have not been operated for more than one hundred hours. So yeah, there's a lot of challenges there with neutralizer that's still remain Is. It difficult to transform a solid cake of id in into a game? So far no, but for high power thrusters that may be a challenge that emerges at the moment. As I said, idine begins as a solid, and luckily, if you heat the iodine propellant, it starts to sublimate, which is to say, it transforms directly from a solid to a gas. And so as long as you control your temperature, you can control your sublimation rate and therefore your propellant flow rate. And so that's what's been done in all of the iiding propulsum systems that are currently flying. The problem is that for very high powered thrusters, where you need a much higher flow rate, you can't keep doing this so easily because once you hit the propellants above a certain temperature, it actually turns into a liquid first, and so that can cause some issues with your flow control and so on. A number of organizations working on technical solutions for this. So I have no doubts that will be solved. This is more a question of engineering rather than physics. But you do have to be a bit careful because yeah, starting life is a solid. Depending on your temperature and pressure, you might get turned into a liquid first before it gaps, and so that's something we have to be aware of when we're designing this system. And the work you're doing. What does that entail? Yes, So I was originally an industry and actually it was lucky enough to work on the first ID in good trust to test in a space, and then I left industry. I wanted to get back into academia to some more fundamental research and education, and so I've taken some of that expertise with me and we've set up a number of research projects to try and advance iodine propulsion and so some of the work we're doing, for example, is associated with better understanding how iodine functions in these neutralizers so that we can help develop new neutralizers for the future. We've also developed now one of the most advanced iodine plasma chemistry models and understandings together with some of our collaborators in France, and so we're applying these chemistry sets and these models to help design new iodine propulsion systems understand some of the basic physics because it's much more complicated than genon, and it is said to try and rarely push forward to develop feasible neutralizers to help make iodine propulsion a much more widespread in these based industry. You mentioned earlier that most iodine engines that have become operational they're only producing around one hundred wts or less. What sort of propulsion figures are you needing? Yes, so the original iodine gritted trusts they were designed for cube taps or small satellites, and so the power level you need it to be quite low. But if you look at space industry trends, this kind of average massive satellites now is sitting in the maybe two hundred and fifty to five hundred kilogram range, and so because the mass is so much higher, you also need a correspondingly higher frust level, and that means you therefore need a higher power level. And so a good kind of target that a lot of people are looking forward looking towards is typically a few hundred wats, so maybe five hundred works or even as high as one killer watch. And if you want to do some very science missions you may even need in multiple killer wats or even tens of killer wats. So low power has been nicely demonstrated in space. There's a lot of work that still needs to be done with high power, but that's probably where the future is because the needs of the space industry sit kind of like between the five hundred and what to one killer? What range? Would you use this sort of a system for main propulsion or orbital maneuvering? It Well, up until now primary target has just been orbital maneuvers and you would only have one of the systems. But on bigger satellites you could potentially use clusters of these FIAD trust crusters, and if you synchronize the firing of different combinations, then you can achieve some so called attitude control, which is to say, you change the orientation of the spacecraft. And for bigger satellites sometimes they even allow the thruster to articulate, which is to say, they had something called a gimbal which allows the thrust a head, if you will, to swivel slightly, and so you can change the direction of your thrust vector when you fire the thruster. So in this way you can enable a combination now of both large maneuvers to change your orbit and also small maneuvers to either change the orientation of your spacecraft or even very slight maneuvers to allow, for example, maybe proximity operations or formation flying or something like this. That's doctor Treva Leflower from the University of New South Wales and this is space time still to come. Residents across northeastern Ohio witnesses spectacular daytime media strinking across the sky, and later in the science reports, scientists may have discovered the region of the human brain responsible for controlling hypocrisy politicians and celebrities. Watch out all that and more coming up on spacetime. Residents across northeastern Ohio have witnessed a spectacular daytime meteor streaking across the sky. The morning fireball was spotted by thousands of people in areas from Wisconsin to Maryland. It was moving southeast at a velocity of over twenty thousand meters per second before fragmenting over Valley City in Medina County. NASA says an analysis of currently available data places first visibility of the meteor above Lake Erie at an altitude of around ninety kilometers. They estimated it to be around two meters wide with a mass of about seven thousand kilograms. Witnesses in the Cleveland area reported hearing a boom and filling the vibrations as the rocket thicker layers of the atmosphere. NASA says fragments of the meteor continued southward, producing meteorites in the vicinity of Medina County. The agency says the asteroid unleashed as much energy as two hundred and fifty tons of tea and tears that fragmented, resulting in a pressure wave which propagated to the ground, causing the booms and explosive noises heard by the public. Actually, there appears to have been two explosions, an initial event over the center of Lake Erie, followed by a second, brighter explosion much closer to shore, possibly over the city of Cleveland or just west of the town. NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office lead Bill Cook from the Marshall Space Flight Center says fragments of the meteor collected from the ground suggest that the space rock was a rare a chondrite, a type of meteoroid created by the melting and recrystallization of larger asteroids. So we now think we know where that small asteroid that came me and over Cleveland on Saint Patrick's Day came from. So based on a recent orbit and based on the meteorites people are beginning to find, it looks like that seven ton rock came from the inner asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. So NASA provides some resources for people who went to hunt for meteorites. So we produce a web page here called Meteorite Falls. We produce what's called the stream field, which is a map of where all the meteorites lie on the ground. They can be anywhere. They could be on alongside a road, they can be on top of a building, they can be in a field. Then you finally things you're looking for. Something glossy, shiny, if it's broken open, the inside of it is kind of a light gray color, and keep them in something soft. You don't want to handle them too much. The meteorite won't hurt you, but you know, the more you handle it, the more you're getting oils from your fingers and dirt on it. Take pictures of a place where it's found for ecor keeping purposes. For your own memories and yeah, I enjoyed it. Event was followed by reports of another fireball, this time on the West Coast above Los Angeles. However, that wasn't a meteor, but the launch of a SpaceX falcon iine rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Space carrying a payload of Starlink. Broadband satellites into orbit. This is space. Time, and time now for a brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week. With the Science Report, a new study is found that a half kilometter thick ice storm on the Greenland ice sheet likely melted completely more than seven thousand years ago. The findings were reported in the journal Nature GS Science, with hope researchers better understand how much warming the region can take. By into the preder dorm. Scientists were able to collect and test sediments under the ice, and these provide clues to the local climate history. The authors say the top of the sediment likely last saw the sun some seven one hundred years ago, suggesting the area was ice free at the time. Scientists say temperatures were likely around three to five degree celsius warmer around that time than what they are now. And while it's unclear how long the ice stone would take to milk, it's possible that it could note entirely again if the climate warms back to copparable conditions, which would in turn cause sea levels to rise. Scientists are warning that worsening health impacts from the production of plastics might reach numbers more than double those of twenty sixteen by twenty forty. A report in the Lancet Medical Journal examined how the global plastic system generates high levels of greenhouse gases, air polluting particles, and toxic chemicals released from plastic production. The authors model the potential outcomes for plastic production nder an unchanged system. Importantly, they say they couldn't assess the potential health impacts associated with the use of plastics, nor the effects of the chemicals contained in plastics, or the health dangers posed by micro and nanoplastics, so instead they focused on the overall correlation between plastic production and declines in human health. Scientists may have found the region of the human brain responsible for controlling hypocrisy. The discovery, published in the journal's Cell Reports, follows efforts by scientists to look for brain regions linked to moral consistency, behaving the same way we expect others to behave. They monitored brain activity in people performing a task that required them to choose between honesty and profit and judge the behavior of others. They say a region of the brain called the ventral medeal prefrontal cortex appeared similarly active in those who judged themselves and others by the same moral standards, or the same region was less active in those whose morals were more inconsistent when they were making their own decisions. And a second. Experiment, the authors found that stimulating the brain region before the task was linked to more morally consistent behavior, which they believe is in indication that hypocrisy does have biological mechanisms behind it. If the discovery is confirmed, it could revolutionize the hypocritical comments consistently made by politicians and Hollywood celebrities. A new study claims that some fifty six percent of Americans now believe flying sources probably exist. Now that's a lot more than the number of Americans who believe in Bigfoot. That's around twenty eight percent, the Yeti twenty three percent, the like Less Monster at twenty two percent, and the Supercabra at sixteen percent. The study also found that sixty one percent of Democrats and fifty nine percent of independents believe in flying sources and extraterrestrials, compared to just forty six percent of Republicans. Of those true believers, thirty percent think unidentified flying objects are probably alien spacecraft or life forms, and forty five percent believe they have another explanation. Thirty four percent of Democrats believe UFOs are probably alien in origin, compared to twenty six percent of Republicans. Of all believers, thirty percent think unidentified flying objects are probably alien spacecraft or life forms, or forty five percent believe they have some other explanation, such as black military projects or unexplained natural phenomena. Thirty four percent of Democrats believe UFOs are probably alien in origin, compared to just twenty six percent of Republicans. Now, other findings show that nearly half forty seven percent of Americans believe aliens have definitely or probably visited the Earth at some point. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say aliens have visited our planet fifty one percent compared to forty one percent and sixteen percent of Americans think we definitely will or probably will make contact with alien life within the next ten years, twenty nine percent think we'll make contact within the next fifty years, forty two percent think we'll do so within the next century, and forty six percent think we'll make contact with alien life within the next two hundred years. Seventy three percent of Americans, including seventy five percent of Democrats and seventy two percent of Republicans, think that if the United States government did have evidence of u offos, they'd probably hide it from the public. Only thirteen percent think the government would tell people the skeptics. Timendum says the figures present a fascinating snapshot of America's growing belief in extraterrestrial activity, with. The Yugov poll normally fairly reliable that most Americans believe aliens exist and many think that aliens have paid a visit to Earth in recent years. More of than believe it's going to have a negative effect on human civilization than beneficial. I don't doubt the figures. I've got no reason to doubt the figures. The question is why are those figures? And lately, of course, there's been a lot of UFO promotion obviously the presentations to the US Congress and some US congressmen promoting. And it seems like the publicity around Skinwalker Ranch in America, whether. Everything, weather, balloons, and. It's high profile. Man, it's probably highest profile UFOs have been for a long long time. Therefore, if this is the story, if it's there a lot, it must be true. But it's they're a lot because a lot of people are making the same claims over and over and over again without any evidence. And yeah, a lot of bad evidence does not made good evidence. So in this particular case, Americans are picking up on this plethora self report, a lot of TV programs, a lot of YouTube videos, a lot of movies, and therefore it becomes this sort of title wave of quote evidence and it's not evidence, but it's just a lot of mentioning that it becomes evidence, and that's obviously the wrong way to go. So, yeah, there's a lot of people who believe it, especially and believers tend to believe it's going to be not good for us, like an invasion. It's not many USO films. Stories in the USOS are nights. I guess when you look at the world's history, whenever a more sophisticated civilization meets comes to the contact with a less sophisticated one, it's never good for the underdog, is it. That's right, But that's probably why idea that they say this is being a negative thing, because these people, these aliens are alsously going to be a bit smarter than we are, have a bit more powerful. That's the skeptics timendum. And this space Time, and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through at bytes dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of bonnus audio content which doesn't go to air, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to space Time with Stewart Gas dot com for full details. You've been listening to Space Time with Stuart Gary. This has been another quality podcast production from bytes dot com