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A team of researchers just confirmed the presence of oxygen in a galaxy 13.1 billion light years away—the furthest oxygen has ever been detected. Their findings suggest that this may have been the first oxygen to form in the early universe.

Hailing from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and a number of Japanese universities, the scientists based their conclusions on observational data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory. They discovered the galaxy, SXDF-NB1006-2, just four years ago, and have been trying to identify the elements that are present ever since. They describe their findings in a new paper published inScience.

As expected, the galaxy contained hydrogen. But the team was much more curious about the potential presence of oxygen, which they hoped would give key information about how the element formed in the first place.

If oxygen was present, their models of the galaxy suggested that it would be undergoing the process of cosmic re-ionization, where space radiation ionizes clouds of gas. As the gas re-ionizes, it also releases a tremendous flare of light, like you see happening in this simulation of the process over a 5 million year timelapse:

Because the flare is so bright, researchers hoped that, even at a distance of 13.1 billion light years, they would still be able to detect it with ALMA. Their hunch payed off: A sweep with ALMA found a telltale flare showing that oxygen is present.

That doesn’t mean it’s anything close to the oxygen we breathe today. For starters, there’s just not that much of it. The amount is fairly tiny—less than one-tenth of the oxygen found in the sun. This has implications for the age of that oxygen.

“The small abundance is expected because the universe was still young and had a short history of star formation at that time,” co-author Naoki Yoshida of the University of Tokyo said in a statement. “In fact, our simulation predicted an abundance ten times smaller than the Sun.”

On Earth, the presence of oxygen is tied to the presence of life, especially our own. The discovery of oxygen so far away raises questions about the possibility of life out there—either native life forms or perhaps an environment ripe for colonization by us. But this oxygen wouldn’t be something we could breathe.
“The detected oxygen is actually doubly-ionized oxygen atoms, and not oxygen molecules which we breathe,” lead researcher Akio Inoue of Japan’s Osaka Sangyo University told Gizmodo. “So, we could not breathe in the 13.1-billion-light-year-away galaxy we observed if we were there.”

Although this oxygen couldn’t support life as we know it, Inoue said that this discovery does lead us down a fascinating path: It helps answer the question of where—and when—oxygen formed in our universe in the first place.

“These oxygen atoms we found are a kind of the first oxygen ever produced in the Universe, because oxygen did not exist at the Big Bang. In fact, all elements heavier than lithium are produced inside stars and are spread out the Universe when they die,” Inoue told us. “And oxygen and other elements make up dust particles which eventually make up planets and possibly life on them. Therefore, our finding shows the origin of oxygen, one of the most important elements for humans, in this Universe.”

Now that the researchers have confirmed the presence of oxygen, their next step is to try and figure out how that oxygen moved away from that galaxy. With that information, they hope untangle even more about just what the presence oxygen means to life in our universe.

A complex organic molecule essential for biology has been discovered for the first time in interstellar space, a finding that may help understand how life originated in the universe.

Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality.

These molecules are essential for biology and have been found in meteorites on Earth and comets in our Solar System.

However, none has been detected in the vast reaches of interstellar space, until now.

Scientists using highly sensitive radio telescopes have discovered the first complex organic chiral molecule in interstellar space.

The molecule, propylene oxide (CH3CHOCH2), was found near the centre of our Galaxy in an enormous star-forming cloud of dust and gas known as Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2).

“This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the Universe and the effects they may have on the origins of life,” said Brett McGuire, postdoctoral fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the US.

“Propylene oxide is among the most complex and structurally intricate molecules detected so far in space,” said Brandon Carroll, a chemistry graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in the US.

Complex organic molecules form in interstellar clouds like Sgr B2 in several ways. To form complex molecules like propylene oxide astronomers believe thin mantles of ice on dust grains help link small molecules into longer and larger structures.

These molecules can then evaporate from the surface of the grains and further react in the gas of the surrounding cloud.

More than 180 molecules have been detected in space till date. Each molecule gives off a distinctive signature, a series of telltale spikes that appear in the radio spectrum.

Larger and more complex molecules have a correspondingly more complex signature, making them harder to detect.

Every living thing on Earth uses one, and only one handedness of many types of chiral molecules.

This trait, called homochirality, is critical for life and has important implications for many biological structures, including DNA’s double helix.

Scientists do not yet understand how biology came to rely on one handedness and not the other.

“By discovering a chiral molecule in space, we finally have a way to study where and how these molecules form before they find their way into meteorites and comets, and to understand the role they play in the origins of homochirality and life,” McGuire said.

The research was published in the journal Science.

For more information please watch the following video :

NASA is planning to check how fire spread in space capsule in space. NASA has set off tiny controlled fires in space in the past, but never tested how large flames react inside a space capsule in space. This research "is crucial for the safety of current and future space missions," Gary Ruff, one of the engineers heading the experiment at the US space agency's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, said Tuesday.

The goal is to measure the size of the flames, how quickly they spread, the heat output, and how much gas is emitted. The experiment will be conducted in an Orbital ATK Cygnus capsule after the craft ferries supplies to the International Space Station. The Cygnus capsule is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop an Atlas 5 rocket on its final mission on March 23. Once the capsule undocks from the ISS and is far away from the space station, ground control will trigger the fire on board, Ruff said. The results of this experiment, dubbed Saffire-1, will determine how much fire resistance is needed in the ultra-light material used in the spacecraft and the astronaut's gear.

It will also help NASA build better fire detection and suppression systems for their spaceships, and study how microgravity and limited amounts of oxygen affect the size of the flames. "Understanding fire in space has been the focus of many experiments over the years," said Ruff. While many "small, centimeter-sized fires have been lit in space before, to really understand fire, you've got to look at a more realistic size."

Temperature, oxygen and carbon dioxide sensors will record data on the fire, which is expected to last about 20 minutes, in real time. Cameras also will film the material as it burns.

A few days after the blaze, NASA expects the remnants of the Cygnus capsule to plunge towards Earth and disintegrate in the atmosphere.

Technology is about to destroy humanity, according to famous physicist Stephen Hawking.

While technology has paved the way for mankind's progress and development, Hawking says it will also be detrimental to the Earth's survival in the future.Humans should take caution since science could spell new ways of how things could go wrong for the survival of humans.

According to Hawking, who turned 74 this month, the end of Earth and humankind could be a major technological disaster which is a "near certainty" in about 1,000 to 10,000 years. He also warned that the only way to escape this is for us to leave Earth,Hawking made the alarming comments on January 7 at BBC's annual Reith Lectures, where he lectured about black hole research. He made the warnings during the Q&A portion with the audience, where he was asked how he thought the world would end.

According to the Radio Times, the world-renowned scientist said ahead of the lecture that the end of the world could be from a combination of major technological disasters such as global warming, nuclear war and/or engineered viruses.However, the professor from the University of Cambridge also said that there is still hope as long as humans figure out a way of leaving the planet and colonizing other planets.

"Although the chance of a disaster on planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, becoming a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years...By that time, we should have spread out into space and to other stars, so it would not mean the end of the human race," he said.

He added that this possibility could be 100 years away, and we should still be careful about not destroying Earth."We are not going to stop making progress or reverse it, so we must recognise the dangers and control them," Hawking said.

"We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period," he added.According to the Daily Mail, Professor Hawking and Tesla founder Elon Musk made an open letter warning that "Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," which means artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming powerful enough to become a risk and the cause of humanity's downfall.

In his latest lecture, Hawking gave young scientists advice about retaining their sense of wonder about "our vast and complex" universe.He added that it is also future scientists' responsibility to help the public understand the effects of technology to the Earth.

"It's important to ensure that these changes are heading in the right directions," he said. "In a democratic society, this means that everyone needs to have a basic understanding of science to make informed decisions about the future."Stephen Hawking will be broadcasting his Reith Lecture on BBC Radio 4 on January 26 and February 2.

An astrophysics student at The Australian National University (ANU) has turned to artificial intelligence to help her to see into the hearts of galaxies.

PhD student Elise Hampton was inspired by neural networks to create a program to single out from thousands of galaxies the subjects of her study -- the most turbulent and messy galaxies.

"I love artificial intelligence. It was actually a very simple program to write, once I learnt how," said Ms Hampton, who is studying at the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"The program took eight minutes to analyse 300,000 data points from 1,188 galaxies. For one person to do it would have taken years."

Ms Hampton is studying galaxies with brightly glowing centres powered by black holes that cause huge galactic winds.

"We believe these winds blow so much material out of the galaxies that they eventually starve themselves to death," she said.

Galactic winds can also trigger the formation of new stars, so Ms Hampton's goal is to work out how the different processes compete in these turbulent galaxies and ultimately understand how galaxies live and die.

Astronomers can interpret the spectra of these messy galaxies to distinguish between light from stars forming, matter falling into black holes, and supersonic galactic winds, but it is a painstaking process.

Enormous numbers of galaxy spectra are being measured by robotic telescopes such as the ANU 2.3 metre and the Anglo-Australian Telescope and so Ms Hampton's automation of the analysis process with artificial neural networks is a welcome success after a number of approaches failed.

Artificial Neural Networks are a family of computer programs inspired by the brain that work as an interconnected set of individual processors, similar to neurons. Unlike traditional rule-based computer programs, they are adaptive and capable of learning.

Ms Hampton taught her computer program how to analyse galaxies using about 4,000 spectra that had been analysed previously by astrophysicists.

As they snack on anything and everything around them, the feeding sessions can get pretty "noisy."

Universal History Archive via Getty Images : A black hole located in Centaurus A, a prominent galaxy in the constellation of Centaurus.

What does a black hole sound like?

Actually, since sound waves don't propagate in the near-vacuum of outer space, we can't hear black holes. But if we could, they might sound somewhat similar to the static from a badly tuned TV set.

That's the word from the authors of a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. In addition to giving us a sense of what black holes might "sound" like, the study sheds new light on the behavior of accretion disks. Those are the disk-shaped collections of matter, such as gas and dust, that surround black holes.

Accretion disks are often used as tools to study black holes since, unlike black holes themselves, they give off light.

"Since black holes cannot be observed directly it is only because of the existence of these disks that we can infer what a black hole might 'sound' like," Dr. Simone Scaringi, lead author of the study and a Humboldt research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, said in an email. "It is important to realize, however, that because space is almost a vacuum, there is no real sound. What we did is observe brightness variations over time for accreting black holes (and other systems too). I then converted these light variations into sound variations."

In other words, Scaringi and his colleagues took observations of the shifting light patterns from accretion disks (taken by NASA's Kepler space telescope, ground-based telescopes, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite) and converted them into sound waves.

For instance, if the light intensity from an accretion disk fluctuated 10 times a second, it was converted to a sound wave of 10 cycles per second, or 10 Hertz, Space.com reported.

Scaringi then had to "translate" the sounds into a range that humans can hear.

"[T]he variations we see in accreting systems are very low or very high in frequency, depending on the size of the system, and would fall outside of the human hearing range," Scaringi said. "Because of this I had to shift the 'sounds' of accreting systems into the human audible range for us to listen to."

The researchers said that they were surprised to find similar brightness variations not only in accretion disks surrounding black holes but also in disks surrounding other celestial objects, including white dwarf stars and young stellar objects.

All rockets work on the same basic principle: Throw something out the back of the rocket and it will provide a thrust force. Really, it’s just like a collision between two objects. Let’s start with the simplest case: a rocket that just shoots one ball of fuel out the back.

Since there is an interaction between the rocket and the fuel, the force on the fuel has the same magnitude (but opposite direction) as the force on the rocket. Also, since the rocket pushes on the fuel for the same time that the fuel pushes on the rocket they will have opposite changes in momentum.

This is the essence of a rocket—throw stuff out the back. There are four basic types of rockets.

Chemical Rocket. A chemical reaction shoots some of the propellant out the back of the rocket.
Ion Engine. An ion engine uses an electric field to accelerate charged particles out the back of the rocket.
Water rocket. Just like a chemical rocket, but instead of a chemical reaction high pressure gas (maybe air) pushes the propellant (maybe water) out of the rocket.
Nuclear propulsion. Place a small nuclear bomb behind your spacecraft (hopefully with some type of shield). Boom. The debris flies away from the rocket and pushes the rocket forward.

Now for some theoretical rockets. Here are three starting assumptions.

When fuel is expelled from a rocket, it leaves with a constant velocity that is relative to the rocket. I will call this the exhaust velocity and use the symbol u.
Momentum is conserved when stuff is shot out the back of the rocket (I already said this).
As fuel is consumed, the total mass of the rocket decreases. In fact, it might be easier to separate the mass into two parts: the mass of the fuel (m_f) and the mass of the payload (M). Here, “payload” mass includes everything that is not fuel (rocket parts, humans, robots, computers, iPhones).

This leads to a conceptual question. Yes, I really want you to think about this answer. Yes, this will be on the test.

Suppose you have a rocket with a mass M and total fuel of mass m_f. The fuel will always be shot such that it leaves the rocket at a relative velocity u. Which would give the greatest change in velocity for the rocket, shooting out all the fuel at once (as with a nuclear propulsion engine) or letting it out slowly (like an ion engine)? Be sure to support your answer.

Just to separate the question from the answer below, here is a video of a rocket made from pouring butane on top of soda. Yes, it’s as awesome as it looks and yes, I will be writing a future post on this topic (but we need to collect more data first).

The Rocket Equation

Before I give my answer to the question above, I am going to derive the classic rocket equation. This tells you the change in speed for a rocket that shoots out fuel. Yes, there will be some maths, so hold on. So, let’s start with a rocket. It has a mass m and is moving with a velocity v. Next it shoots out some fuel of mass dm with a speed u relative to the rocket giving the rocket a new velocity of v + dv.

Since momentum is conserved (and I am writing everything in just one dimension), the momentum of the initial rocket must be equal to the momentum of the new rocket (with a smaller mass) and the ejected exhaust. Note that the exhaust has a velocity of u with respect to the rocket. This means that when it is ejected it has a velocity of v – u with respect to the background axis. Also notice that the velocity and mass of the rocket change. So, here is the conservation of momentum equation.

Now I just need to multiply everything and some stuff will cancel (do this for yourself to check) and I get:

Most textbook derivations will take the following step. They will say “hey look, we have dm multiplied by dv—both of those are tiny so the product will be super tiny.” So they make the approximation that as the fuel size goes to zero (for continuous fuel use), this term also goes to zero. Let’s go with that assumption for now.

This gives a differential equation. All of the velocity terms are on one side and all the mass terms are on the other (remember that u is constant). Integrating both sides:

Remember that when I started I said everything was in one dimension. For this case, the exhaust is in the negative direction (so it has a negative value). If I just want u to be the speed of the exhaust gas, I can write the rocket equation in the following (and more common) form:

But does this expression answer my rocket question from above? According to this derivation, the change in velocity for a rocket depends only on the exhaust velocity and the fuel to rocket (payload) ratio. It doesn’t matter how fast you use the fuel, just the amount. So, the answer should be that releasing all the fuel at once is the same as releasing it slowly. This is incorrect though.

Another Example

Let me show you a simple situation we can use to answer the rocket question from above. Suppose I have two rockets with a mass M and fuel mass m. Rocket A shoots all the fuel at once (again, like a nuclear propulsion engine) with a fuel speed of u and rocket B shoots two blobs of fuel—first a shot of m/2 and another one of m/2. Both start from rest. Here’s a diagram showing the two rockets after shooting the fuel out.

Maybe you can already see the solution. The key is that second blob of fuel shot from the second rocket. It leaves the rocket with a speed u relative to the rocket. However, the rocket is already moving in the opposite direction. This means that the speed of the second blob is less than u. That makes the total momentum of the propellant coming out rocket B has a smaller momentum than the one ball of fuel coming out of rocket A. Since momentum is conserved, rocket B must also have a smaller momentum than rocket A. These rockets have the same mass which means that rocket B has a smaller velocity. It’s better to shoot all your fuel at once instead of spreading it out.

A Better Rocket Equation

You might protest and say that the “rocket equation” says that the rate of fuel use doesn’t matter. Well, that’s what the equation says—but go back to the derivation. Remember the part where we let dm*dv be zero? We said that it was just really small? Well, if you shoot out fuel all at once, dm isn’t so small and neither is dv. Leaving that term back into the derivation, I have the following (same as before). Now I can solve this for dv: Note that this dv should really be Δv since we are doing discrete fuel instead of continuous—the same is true for the dm mass. But now that we have an expression for the change in velocity for each pellet shot, I can easily make a numerical model. With that expression and the change in mass, I can calculate the total change in velocity for the different number of fuel pellets. Notice also that the change in velocity only depends on the fuel speed (u), the fuel pellet size dm and the mass of the rocket. It does not depend on time or the rate at which fuel is used. The fewer fuel pellets shot, the greater the change in speed compared to continuous rockets. However, this increase in speed is only really noticeable when the fuel to payload ratio is high. If the mass of the fuel is small compared to the total mass of the rocket, it doesn’t really matter how you use the fuel.

But What Does It All Mean?

Which is better? A fusion powered nuclear explosion propulsion or a fusion powered ion engine? The nuclear explosion engine isn’t completely crazy. There’s even a Wikipedia page on it. Of course in actual use, a nuclear explosion would send “fuel” out in many directions, not in one big mass as in the simulator. But still, it similar to the theoretical case above. And here is the answer: If the mass of the rocket is large compared to the mass of all the fuel—it doesn’t matter. If your rocket consists of mostly fuel, the nuclear propulsion would be best (theoretically).

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As they snack on anything and everything around them, the feeding sessions can get pretty "noisy."

Universal History Archive via Getty Images : A black hole located in Centaurus A, a prominent galaxy in the constellation of Centaurus.

The Rocket Equation

Another Example

A Better Rocket Equation

But What Does It All Mean?

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