Delivery (11/10/22)

Happy Thursday. On Tuesday, the moon passed into the shadow of the Earth—the last lunar eclipse for the next three years. Did anyone catch it? If you did, reply and let me know what it was like.

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ISS experiments incoming

On Sunday, Northrop Grumman launched the NG-18 mission, sending a Cygnus full of supplies and new science experiments to the ISS.

After the Antares launcher deployed the Cygnus capsule, a problem arose: One of the craft’s two solar arrays failed to deploy. Luckily, it still had enough power to reach the station. Early yesterday morning, the crew used the station’s robotic Canadarm to capture the craft and bring it in to dock.

The ISS crew received an exciting shipment—40 new science experiments for the microgravity lab, including seven courtesy of the National Science Foundation.

Stop the flow: The first of the seven experiments stems from a destructive mudflow that killed 21 people in California in 2018. Through parallel experiments on the ISS and on the ground, a research team will examine the effects of gravity on mudflows in hopes of forming a better system for early warning and risk detection.

Have a heart: A research team at the Emory School of Medicine plans to grow cardiac muscle cells in a dish. The microgravity environment allows the researchers to use tissue engineering to accelerate the development of cardiac muscle cells, which could potentially be used to replace damaged cells in people suffering from heart disease.

Mix and mingle: Oil and water don’t mix…or do they? One NSF experiment will investigate what happens when two fluids that don’t mix are placed under different conditions. The researchers hope to learn more about how these fluids combine at a microscopic level, and the findings could have applications in medicine and engineering.

Strong bones: Bones don’t like the microgravity environment. Prolonged stays in space lead to lower bone density in astronauts, and those effects can’t always be reversed upon return to Earth. A University of Michigan team will study the effects of compression on osteoblasts—i.e., bone-forming cells—to see if they can solve this problem.

Bubble, bubble: Three different NSF experiments involve blowing bubbles in the microgravity environment.

1. A team from the City College of New York will investigate how foams and emulsions behave in microgravity.

2. A researcher will use light to manipulate the surface tension of floating droplets, controlling them remotely.

3. A collaboration between Auburn and UC Davis will use engineered surfaces to try to encourage vapor bubbles to detach, speeding up heat dissipation.

Solid state

Scientists have found evidence that a star might sometimes, unexpectedly, have a solid crust.

Out in the void of space is a type of star that looks very different from our own called a magnetar. It’s made of the dense core of gas left over from a supernova and can erratically eject millions of times more energy than our Sun through the power of its intense magnetic field.

A study published last week in Science outlined the researchers’ new observations on this magnetar. The team used data gathered by the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), a NASA and Italian Space Agency joint mission and the first science mission dedicated to investigating the polarization of light.

Simply put, to measure the polarization of light is to measure the direction that light is “wiggling.” Polarized light wiggles all in the same direction. An atmosphere often acts as a filter to polarize light.

In a highly magnetized environment such as that of a magnetar, quantum theory predicts that light is polarized in two directions—parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field.

In this case, the magnetar's magnetic field and polarization were so strong that a strange effect was induced: it pulled the gas making up the star into a solid crust, composed of a lattice of elongated ions, with no atmosphere. This effect, called magnetic condensation, has never been directly measured before.

“The star’s gas has reached a tipping point and become solid in a similar way that water might turn to ice,” Silvia Zane, a member of the IXPE science team and a lead author on the paper, said in a statement. “This is a result of the star’s incredibly strong magnetic field. But, like with water, temperature is also a factor – a hotter gas will require a stronger magnetic field to become solid.”

This is the first observation of light polarization in a magnetar that indicates a solid crust with no atmosphere. Now, the team is on the hunt for hotter neutron stars and other magnetars to understand how the relationship between temperature and the magnetic field affects surface conditions.

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Other News from the Cosmos

• ULA launched the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 mission for NOAA from Vandenberg this morning.

• The mission also deployed the LOFTID inflatable heat shield demonstration, which successfully splashed down in the ocean.

• NASA is going ahead with a 2023 launch for its Psyche asteroid probe mission at the cost of a three-year delay of its VERITAS mission to Venus.

• Einstein’s theory of general relativity hasn’t yet fully explained the speed of the universe’s expansion. University of Portsmouth researchers modified models of the relationship between matter and spacetime to try to get a better answer.

• Astronomers have found the closest black hole to Earth yet, only ~1,600 light-years away.

• Ultrathin solar cells developed by a University of Cambridge team promise to improve satellite performance.

• YSE (Young Supernova Experiment) astronomers identified a black hole in a galaxy as it swallowed a nearby star.

• A solar storm “cracked” open the Earth’s magnetic field last week, creating rarely seen pink auroras.

The View from Space