Space News (May 2020)

Steph P. Bianchini May 17, 2020 2 Comments

There has been some interesting news in these last weeks about space, both in terms of missions (I have talked about Lucy in my last post) and discoveries. Here some of the things I’ve found worth reading.

We are two weeks away from the first SpaceX’s Crew Dragon launch with astronauts on board, scheduled for 27 May 2020. This is going to make history. And yet, tests are still ongoing as we speak. “With this SpaceX mission, known as Demo-2, veteran NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are set to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on May 27. The historic launch will be the first crewed launch from the United States to orbit since NASA’s space shuttle program ended in 2011.” How not to be excited?

By the way, if you are a gamer and fancy a challenge, NASA and ‘Kerbal Space Program’ asked people to recreate this SpaceX launch to the ISS. “Kerbonauts, we have a mission for you!,” the game publisher wrote. “We challenge you to simulate the mission and share your footage by May 25 using #LaunchAmerica. We’ll show NASA the best ones to see what they think!”. (Read the story and the terms of the contest here).

Have you ever wondered where those weird X-shaped galaxies come from? Now the scientists have a possible explanation. According to a new study, the shape can be explained “by a theory known as the “hydrodynamical backflow model.” Here’s what’s happening, in a nutshell: First, the galaxy’s central black hole gobbles up matter for millions of years, until it experiences a bout of cosmic indigestion. The black hole belches twin jets of matter into space, each travelling in opposite directions at incredible speed.

Eventually (tens of thousands of years later), those jets blast through the galaxy’s gassy halo, travelling onward into intergalactic space. Pressure slowly builds up in the jets as they travel farther and farther out of the galaxy, ultimately forcing some material in each jet to flip around and flow back toward the centre again. This phenomenon is known as “backflow“‘.
For more about this fascinating discovery, see this.