Our Solar System and Beyond

An exciting week for space news—we landed on a comet!

Here are some more headlines from our solar system and beyond that we didn’t want you to miss…

Organics on Mars?

Physically studying Mars from here on Earth has major, obvious challenges. So far, no missions have returned samples from the Martian surface back to Earth. However, we do have a few pieces of Mars itself—rare meteorites that have been knocked off Mars by major impacts and which landed here on our world. We have learned much about the red planet from these fragments, especially when we compare and contrast with findings from our rovers and orbiters.

For example, both the Viking lander and Curiosity rover have detected the methane compound chloromethane in rocks on Mars. A paper published this week in Scientific Reports found that one sample of Martian meteorite (the Murchison meteorite—a piece of which resides here at the Academy!) also contained chloromethane compounds. By studying the compound in our Earth-based labs, researchers were able to tell that this Martian chloromethane is chemically, but not physically, similar to the chloromethane we find here on Earth. Therefore, it seems it was produced off-Earth, and probably on Mars by pyrolysis, the decomposition of organic matter at high temperatures without oxygen, which would indicate the presence of organic material on Mars.

Organic? Like, no pesticides? Well not quite. For scientists, “organic” has nothing to do with what might or might not have been sprayed on your apple. In chemistry, organic means a carbon-based molecule. Life on Earth is carbon-based, and therefore organic. However, there are many ways for carbon to combine, so detecting organics does not necessarily mean detecting life. The study, however, refines our ability to distinguish between material that is actually from Mars as opposed to the result terrestrial contamination.

-Elise Ricard, Senior Presenter, Morrison Planetarium

Extreme Storms on Uranus

For years, Uranus has been known as the quiet, calm neighbor in the solar system. With no internal heat source, scientists thought the only stormy periods were during the planet’s equinoxes, which occur once every 42 years, or twice during its 84-year orbit around the Sun. Only during these periods does the Sun shine directly on the equator of the planet, which is almost three million kilometers (or close to two million miles) away from our star.

So imagine UC Berkeley astrophysicist Imke de Pater’s surprise in August when she saw eight storms in two days on the seventh planet from the Sun using the Keck telescopes. The most recent equinox was in 2007, however even after studying weather patterns on the planet for more than a decade, she’d seen nothing like these non-equinox storms prior. The storms were so bright that amateur astronomers—using smaller telescopes than Keck—were able to spot them even weeks later!

In addition, on October 14, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed multiple storms extending over a distance of more than 9,000 kilometers (5,760 miles) and clouds at a variety of altitudes. “The colors and morphology of this cloud complex suggests that the storm may be tied to a vortex in the deeper atmosphere similar to two large cloud complexes seen during the equinox,” says de Pater’s colleague, Larry Sromovsky of the University of Wisconsin.

The researchers presented their findings this week at the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting. They write, “These unexpected observations remind us keenly of how little we understand about atmospheric dynamics in outer planet atmospheres.”

-Molly Michelson

Black Holes in Interstellar

Since the release of the new sci-fi film Interstellar, black holes have been on the forefront of many minds. While the idea of black holes has been often used (and much abused) by science fiction authors for decades, there have been many recent discoveries which call into question the plausibility of how we imagine these massive mysteries.

Films like The Black Hole (1979), Event Horizon (1997), and Star Trek (2009) depict black holes in ways that are short on science and long on fiction. Interstellar, however, represents a new kind of movie, where science advisors don’t just offer input, they shape the universe that the film operates within. While the levels of mathematics and general relativistic physics are quite lofty, experts in those fields who have seen the movie laude and applaud physicist Kip Thorne and the model of a supermassive black hole he created.

In fact, that model, developed by the film’s special effects unit based on his calculations, actually had research value and resulted in two new papers written by Thorne.

But black holes are not the only elements of Interstellar that are accurate! While the jury is still out on the plausibility of humans being put into cryogenic stasis, or hibernation (without incurring unfortunate side effects), the film’s designs for spacecraft, rockets, spacesuits, and robots all seemed realistic and highly believable.

No matter how you feel about the need for scientific accuracy in your films, Interstellar shows off some of the stranger parts of space travel and drives home an important point; humans are natural born explorers and while Earth has been a wonderful starting point for humanity, we should do everything we can to ensure that it is not our endpoint as well.

-Josh Roberts, Senior Presenter, Morrison Planetarium

Image of Uranus: Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley) & Keck Observatory