Astronomy

Happy New Year!

While we celebrate one more trip of our beautiful planet around the Sun, the spacecraft New Horizons sets a record for traveling to the most distant object in our Solar System ever visited, 2014 MU69, nicknamed “Ultima Thule.” This object is currently 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, or more than 43 AU from the Sun, which means it is more than 43 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. New Horizons is expected to make its closest approach to Ultima Thule shortly after midnight EST January 1, 2019.

Check out the flyby in Universe Sandbox:

Home > Open > New Horizons Ultima Thule Encounter in 2019

New Limits for New Horizons

After the record-setting 2015 flyby of Pluto and its moons, the New Horizons spacecraft continued its journey through the outer reaches of the Solar System. In that same year, NASA selected a new target for New Horizons to observe: a Kuiper Belt object discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope the year earlier, known as 2014 MU69. Unofficially named Ultima Thule in 2018 based on a public vote, this object will be the most distant ever visited by a human spacecraft (breaking the record New Horizons itself set when it flew past Pluto).

The team says it hopes to set a new target for New Horizons once it passes Ultima Thule. With plenty of remaining fuel and equipment and instruments that remain in good condition, New Horizons is all set to head toward another distant object in the Kuiper Belt, arriving sometime in the 2020s, the team said.

Simulation Limitations

Simulations in Universe Sandbox are not perfect representations of reality. Rather, they’re meant to provide a visual — and as a result, a more intuitive understanding — of what is happening farther away than we can see or even imagine. With that in mind, there are a couple of limitations currently in this simulation:

1 –  Trajectory

The trajectory shown is according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s orbital predictions as of September 2018. Additional maneuvering with thruster burns is expected, which would change the final trajectory. New Horizons will make an approach much closer than is represented in the simulation: it should pass about 3,500 km from 2014 MU69. Once actual trajectories have been recorded, we will update the simulation.

2 – Shape

Previous observations show that 2014 MU69 is likely not spherical, but rather cigar-shaped. Researchers suspect that Ultima Thule may even be two separate bodies that are either orbiting very closely as a binary or actually touching each other, which is called a contact binary. We should know more once New Horizons sends back data from its flyby! Right now, Ultima Thule is represented in Universe Sandbox as just a single, spherical body.

Other Far Out Objects

Update 22.1 of Universe Sandbox added three other simulations that feature very distant objects in our Solar System.

1 – Voyagers 1 & 2 in Interstellar Space

In November 2018, more than 40 years after its launch, and long since trips past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, the Voyager 2 probe entered interstellar space. It now joins its twin, Voyager 1, in exploring beyond our Solar System. They are expected to continue to send back data until they run out of power in 2025.

Home > Open > Voyagers 1 & 2 Start 2019 Outside the Solar System

2 – 2018 VG18, “Farout”

On December 17, 2018, astronomers announced the discovery of the most distant known object in the Solar System, 2018 VG18. Nicknamed “Farout” (can you guess why they chose that name?), the trans-Neptunian object is currently around 120 AU (1 AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth) from the Sun. While this object is the most distant ever observed, there are other known objects, like Sedna and the Goblin (see below), that have orbits that take them much farther from the Sun.

Farout’s orbit shown in this simulation is a preliminary estimate; its distance means it will take years of observation before its precise orbit is known.

Home > Open > 2018 VG18: The Most Distant Object in the Solar System

3 – 2015 TG387, “The Goblin”

On October 1, 2018, astronomers announced the discovery of the trans-Neptunian object 2015 TG387, which they nicknamed “The Goblin.” It was observed at about 80 AU from the Sun, but because of its extremely elongated orbit, it likely travels to a distance of more than 2300 AU at its farthest point.

Home > Open > 2015 TG387: A Goblin at the Edge of the Solar System

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A black hole in Universe Sandbox ². Researchers concluded the detected gravitational waves resulted from two black holes colliding.

What’s the significance of discovering gravitational waves?

This announcement is a huge deal.  It is on par with the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle which provided the missing evidence for a prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics. Gravitational waves are a century-old (almost exactly) prediction now confirmed by a huge number of relentless, and brilliant people after many years of hard work. It is the first direct confirmation of the prediction from Einstein’s General Relativity that matter and energy determine the motion of bodies by warping the fabric of spacetime itself, and in so doing, emanate ripples when massive bodies are accelerated through that space.

It is not only confirmation of general relativity, though. It is also the first of many future observations that will look at the universe in a completely new way. Up until now we’ve used only photons (telescopes all along the electromagnetic spectrum) and sometimes neutrinos. Now we can add listening to the fabric of space to our list of tools. This will allow us to see the dark and the obscured parts of the universe: the early universe, centers of galaxies, things blocked by dust clouds, and so on, by listening for changes in space itself. It is the start of a new age in astronomy.

In addition to this detection being the first direct proof that the predictions of general relativity that matter and energy warp space time are true, and some of the strongest evidence for the reality of black holes, this is also a new kind of astronomy.  Though gravity is the weakest force and gravitational waves are very hard to detect, they do have a few advantages over observations of photons.

What role did Jenn, astrophysicist and Universe Sandbox ² developer, play in the discovery?

While I was in the field I ran super-computer simulations to make predictions about the gravitational wave signals that would be produced by binary black hole mergers. Those waveforms are used as templates in the detector pipeline. The detector matches the template banks against the incoming data to find real signals amidst the noise of the detector, while also doing searches for large burst signals (how this one was found). Those waveforms are then used again to determine where the signal came from, what it was (two black holes, a neutron star and a black hole, two neutron stars, etc), and the properties of the bodies that created the signal (spins, masses, separation, etc.). I also worked on developing the analytical formulas to determine those spins and masses from those signals.

Here’s one of the scientific papers on the process of determining the properties of the source of the signal, with three papers cited on which Jenn Seiler was an author:

https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0122/P1500218/012/GW150914_parameter_estimation_v13.pdf

The Einstein equations for general relativity are ten highly non-linear partial differential equations. This means that it is only possible to obtain exact solutions for astrophysical situations for some very idealized conditions (such as spherical symmetry and a single body). In order to predict the gravitational waveforms produced by compact multi-body systems, or stellar collapse, it is necessary to solve the equations numerically (computationally). This means formulating initial data for spacetimes of interest (such as two in-spiralling black holes of various spins and mass ratios) and evolving them by integrating the solutions of the Einstein equations stepping forward in time by discrete steps. To prove that these computer simulations approximate reality more than just by equations on paper we would run these simulations at multiple resolutions for our discrete spacetimes and show that our solutions converged to a single solution as we approach infinite resolution (that would represent real continuous space) at the rate we expect for the method we were using. 

There were many obstacles in creating these simulations: vast amounts of computational power required for accuracy; the fact that we needed to run tons of these large, slow, computationally intensive simulations in order to cover the parameter space (spins, masses, orientations, etc) of potential sources of gravitational waves; and so on. For black holes, one major challenge was the fact that they contain a singularity. A singularity means an infinity, and computers don’t like to simulate infinities. Numerical relativity researchers had to find a way to simulate black holes without having the singularity point in the slicing of the spacetime integrated in the simulation. The first successful simulation of this kind didn’t happen until 2005 (http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.121101).

Once we had working simulations, groups around the world set to work on simulating the gamut of major potential gravitational wave signal sources. These simulation results were not just useful to the detectors to help identify signals, but also to the theorists to help formulate predictions about the results of such astrophysical events. Predictions such as: the resulting velocity of merged black holes from binaries of various spins, the amount of energy released by black hole mergers, the effect that black hole spins have on the spins and orbits of other bodies, etc.

When will you add gravitational waves into Universe Sandbox ²?

We really can’t do gravitational waves in an n-body simulation, which is the method Universe Sandbox ² uses to simulate gravity. N-body simulations look at the effect that each body has on each other body in a system at small discrete time steps.

General relativity requires simulating the spacetime itself. That is, taking your simulation space, discretizing it to a hi-res 3-D grid and checking the effect that each and every point in that grid has on all neighboring points at every timestep. Instead of simulating N number of bodies, you are simulating a huge number of points. You start with some initial data of the shape of your spacetime and then see how it evolves according to the Einstein equations, which are 10 highly non-linear partial differential equations. Accurate general relativity simulations require supercomputers.

There are some effects and features related to relativity that would be possible to add to Universe Sandbox ², however. Here are a few we are discussing:

• Gravity travelling at the speed of light.

  • Currently if you delete a body in a simulation, the paths of all other bodies instantly respond to the change. The reality is that it would not be instantaneous; it would take time for that information about the altered gravitational landscape to reach a distant object.

• Spinning black holes.

  • Most black holes are very highly spinning. If you imagine a spinning star collapsing it is easy to understand why. This is the same effect as when a spinning figure skater pulls in their arms; because of conservation of angular momentum, they spin faster. A consequence of this spin is that, while the event horizon would remain spherical, there would be an oblate spheroid (squished ball) around the black hole called an ergosphere. This ergosphere twists up the spacetime contained within it and accelerates bodies that enter this region (as well as affecting their spins). Because it is outside of the event horizon, this means one can slingshot away from this region and even steal energy from the rotation of that black hole.

• Corrections to the motions of bodies to approximate general relativity.

  • Loss of momentum due to the emission of gravitational waves causes close massive bodies to inspiral. With this you could recreate the decaying orbits of binary pulsars.

  • Spins of close bodies affect each other’s motion and spins (see above). This would give you things like spun up accretion disks around black holes.

  • These corrections would be made by adding post-newtonian corrections to body velocities.

Learn more

Bad Astronomy article: LIGO Sees First Ever Gravitational Waves as Two Black Holes Eat Each Other

Video and Comic Explaining Gravitational Waves

Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) by LIGO Scientists

Paper by LIGO Researchers: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger