Gravity Waves Hello, China Makes Plasma, and ESA Says Goodbye to Philae | Vol. 3 / No. 16

RFB

In today’s recap, we’ve got a massive discovery that’s making waves, hot news about fusion from China, and a sad goodbye as comet 67P drifts away from the sun. Read on!

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Gravity Waves Hello

Spiralling in toward a gravitational "bang" | Photo: NASA/Tod Strohmayer (GSFC)/Dana Berry (Chandra X-Ray Observatory)
Spiralling in toward a gravitational “bang” | Photo: NASA/Tod Strohmayer (GSFC)/Dana Berry (Chandra X-Ray Observatory)

In what has to be considered the top news of the week (and possibly of the year, even though it’s only February) is this Thursday’s announcement by the aLIGO team of the confirmation of (and measurement of) gravitational waves. I wrote about this at the time, but it’s worth returning to because it’s just that significant an announcement. Long story short, the team of scientists used laser interferometers stationed on opposite sides of the continental US to measure ripples in the very fabric of spacetime caused by the collision of two black holes roughly 1.3 billion years ago. If you want more of the basic details, check out this Thursdays post, but there are things I missed then too, like this awesome animation of colliding black holes released by the aLIGO team:

This BBC video that lets you hear the final “chirp” of the collision:

and also this great post over at Scientific American about just some of questions that being able to measure gravitational waves will help us answer.

More Plasma

EAST | Photo: Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
EAST | Photo: Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

In the wake of last week’s news about the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator comes another fusion announcement, this time from China. The news comes out of the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in the city of Hefei (合肥市) in eastern China, where they’re reporting having sustained plasma at 90 million degrees fahrenheit (50 million Centigrade) for 102 seconds. That’s a fantastic achievement, and goes a long way toward the 180 million f (100 million C) we’ll need for commercial fusion, even if we’re not there quite yet. The reactor team are aiming for a thousand seconds next, according to the South China Morning Post.

Goodbye Philae

The little lander that was | Photo: DLR German Aerospace Center, CC BY 2.0
The little lander that was | Photo: DLR German Aerospace Center, CC BY 2.0

BBC News is reporting that the European Space Agency has officially given up on trying to contact the little lander on the comet with the big name. Philae did remarkably well after an unfortunately rough (and bouncy) landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (cherry-gerry to its friends) in November 2014. Landing on its side down a deep chasm, it wasn’t able to collect enough sunlight to power itself, and was forced to perform what science it could in the little time its batteries afforded it. It managed to do about 80% of the initially-planned work — itself quite an accomplishment — and relay its data back up to the Rosetta orbiter in the 60 hours it had before shutoff. Last year, ESA heard a few chirps from the lander, raising hopes that with the new proximity to the Sun, we might hear more, but it was not to be. Now that 67P is heading out into the depths of space again and has dropped well below the temperatures the lander was ever designed to operate in (-180C at last check), the space agency has decided to focus on what can be accomplished with Rosetta before it, too, is “soft”-landed on the comet’s surface in September, ending the mission.

ICYMI

In case you missed it, here’s what we got up to here this week, in handy point form:

Go check them out if you haven’t already!

Best of the Rest

And here’s your weekly linkspam!

That’s all for this week. Remember, I only get paid in my own (and your) enthusiasm, so please like This Week In Tomorrow on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @TWITomorrow, and tell your friends about the site! Have a great week.