Space and Astronomy News for the 24th of May 2025

A Solar storm far more destructive than the Carrington Event

A lot of keen astro folks would be familiar with the Carrington Event, where a large storm on the Sun sent a huge stream of charged particles called a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME towards the Earth in 1859. This produced spectacular aurora even at latitudes close to the equator. More importantly, it happened when there was a new network of telegraph and powerlines. The current these charged particles induced burnt out miles of wiring and caused widespread electrical fires. 

Sunspots of 1st September 1859 as drawn by Richard Carrington

It's always been a sobering thought about the damage a Carrington type event would cause to our complex electrical communications networks, transport systems. and to our society in general. Solar storms are not rare, with events like the 1989 storm causing widespread power outages in the USA and the 1972 storm which was severe enough to damage spacecraft in Earth orbit. In 2012, a Solar storm large enough to produce another Carrington level event was observed. Luckily for us, it was pointed away for Earth.

Even more concerning is that multiple even larger solar storms have been recorded both through remarkable displays of aurora observed by writers of the time and also in tree rings which can then be carbon dated.

Scientists had recorded a huge spike in 12,350 BCE, some 14,300 years ago, but didn't have enough information about to work out the strength of the event.  Researchers from the University of Oulu, Finland, have now been able to model the event in more details and found it be some 18% stronger than the 775 AD storm which was the largest ever recorded in the tree ring history. 

“Compared to the largest event of the modern satellite era — the 2005 particle storm — the ancient 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense, according to our estimates”, says Dr. Golubenko, one of the finding's authors. 

It certainly indicates just how strong Solar storms can get. While a Carrington type event  might cause severe damage to our modern infrastructure, the Sun has a long history of throwing even more dangerous events our way.

Read more here.

Jupiter used to be double its current size

New research released this week by astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Fred C. Adams have calculated the size of Jupiter around 3.8 million years after the Solar System's first solid bodies formed and the cloud of material from which the planets and other bodies formed was disappearing. 

At the time Jupiter was about twice its current size or about 2,000 times that of the Earth. Its magnetic field was also 50 times stronger than what we currently observe. This was discovered by looking the orbits of some of the gas giant planet's moons.

An illustration of the magnetic fields surrounding Jupiter. Image via: K. Batygin

"Our ultimate goal is to understand where we come from, and pinning down the early phases of planet formation is essential to solving the puzzle," Batygin says. "This brings us closer to understanding how not only Jupiter but the entire solar system took shape."

These results help to complete more details around the early history and formation of the Solar System.  

Read more about this discovery at the Caltech news site here.

"Clean rooms" not as clean as we thought

All interplanetary spacecraft go through a rigorous decontamination process in clean rooms here on Earth before they head off on their missions. There's a few reasons for this, with the one main being the need to avoid possible contamination of another world with terrestrial microbes that might take up residence in their new, pristine environment.  As many interplanetary missions look for signs of life as part of the main science objectives, sterilization also increases the chances of instruments spotting local lifeforms instead of hitchhikers from Earth. 

Even NASA's Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s underwent a long and thorough sterilization process to avoid Earth microbes making the journey to the red planet and taking up residence there.  

A Viking Mars lander in its bioshield for sterilization in nitrogen gas at more than 110 degrees C for 40 hours prior to launch in 1975. Image via NASA

Researchers have now discovered 26 unique species of bacteria in NASA Spacecraft Assembly facilities. What's more, they were previously unknown and their DNA included characteristics found in microbes known to able to handle extreme environment like space.  Critters like these microbes are often referred to as extremophiles.

"Our study aimed to understand the risk of extremophiles being transferred in space missions and to identify which microorganisms might survive the harsh conditions of space. This effort is pivotal for monitoring the risk of microbial contamination and safeguarding against unintentional colonization of exploring planets," explained King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Professor Alexandre Rosado, the lead KAUST researcher on the project and a contributor to several NASA working groups on planetary protection and space microbiology.

Not only does this study point to ways that spacecraft sterilization can be further improved, it also shows how just how hardy life is, even in the most hostile of environments.

Have we found Planet 9? No - not that Planet 9, another one.... 

There's been a lot of speculation about a large planets that orbits the Sun at enormous distance, with the only way to detect it is by the effects of a group of small asteroids referred to as ETNOs (Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects). There seems to be something BIG on the fringes of the Solar System that we haven't been able to track down and identify. There's a BINTEL blog article from last year about it here. 

If identified this large "Planet 9" might help explain the history of the Solar System and add to our knowledge of how planetary systems form.  It's been a long and arduous search but hopes are high that it will be found. 

An illustration of what Planet 9 might look like. Image via Caltech

Astronomers have been trawling through archival data from Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS), a NASA-Netherlands-U.K. satellite launched in 1983; and AKARI, a Japanese satellite launched in 2006. By comparing catalogues compiled decades apart by these two spacecraft and shifting through millions of points of data, they narrowed down two points of small dots that might be a distant planet. The problem is that this "Planet 9" lies in a completely different direction from the original region that appeared to be effected by a large and hidden body. It's effectively another Planet 9. 

This mismatch “doesn’t mean it’s not there, but it means it’s not Planet Nine,” says Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who, along with his colleague Konstantin Batygin, came up with the Planet Nine proposal nearly a decade ago. “I don’t think this planet would have any of the effects on the Solar System that we think we’re seeing.”

Hopefully when next generation telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory start imaging the entire sky every few nights for year on end,  we'll more easily be able to spot small movements in the outer regions of the Solar System.

Read more here.

SpaceX Starship 9 Flight

At this point, the next launch of the massive Starship is due for the next week. Stay tuned for news.....

Cheers,

Earl White 

BINTEL 24th of May 2025