WEIRD GAS GIANT HOLDS SOLAR SYSTEM’S SECRETS

A gigantic alien world’s long orbit may tell us more about the outer planets in our solar neighbourhood

Scientists have managed to measure both the size and orbit of a gas giant exoplanet nearly 1,300 light years away from Earth. Dubbed GOT ‘EM-1b, which stands for Giant Outer Transiting Exoplanet Mass, the planet is roughly five times the mass of Jupiter.

Usually scientists struggle to measure the size of giant gas planets, like Jupiter and

Saturn, because they’re far away from the stars they orbit. Yet this planet showed up in what researchers call our ‘solar neighbourhood’ in 2010, when NASA’s Kepler space telescope first discovered the object. Astronomers then noticed periodic decreases in the brightness of a nearby star, called Kepler-1514, which clued the researchers in to the possibility of planets.

The research team at the University of California, Riverside, discovered that the planet, officially Kepler-1514 b after its parent star, has an unusually long orbit of 218 days. “Taking

218 days to orbit a star is an order of magnitude longer than most giant exoplanets we’ve measured,” said Paul Dalba, the astronomer who led the research. Of the thousands of planets Kepler has discovered, only a few dozen have had orbits of 200 days or longer.

It’s possible that learning more about GOT ‘EM-1b and giant planets like it could tell us more about the Solar System. “This planet is like a stepping stone between the giant planets of our own Solar System, which are very far from our Sun, and other gas giants that are much closer to their stars,” said Dalba.

The discovery of a giant planet that hasn’t moved closer to its star over time will serve as an analogue to the gas giants in our Solar System and tell us about how normal our Solar System is in its stability and development. Astronomers believe that Jupiter might be protecting Earth from other objects in space that might otherwise impact our planet, giving our ‘blue marble’ relative stability.

“Usually scientists struggle to measure the size of giant gas planets because they’re far away from the stars they orbit”

Over the last 18 years, SpaceX has cut the cost of space access dramatically, forcing competitors to reluctantly follow its lead, but it is with the new Starship and Super Heavy that SpaceX could revolutionise space travel.

Elon Musk’s overarching goal with SpaceX is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars and make life multi-planetary. The biggest obstacle to this is space transport; the Falcon 9 was designed from a clean sheet to prove the technology and build SpaceX as a business that could reach for Mars. SpaceX focused on fast, simplified manufacturing and operations to bring costs down, but probably its biggest innovation so far was realising reusability could be achieved with conventional two-stage rockets.

As the design has evolved, Falcon 9 has become more capable, but a bigger vehicle was always going to be required to reach the

Red Planet. After running through a number of concepts and names – Falcon XX, Mars Colonial Transporter, Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), Interplanetary Transport System – that vehicle has become the Starship reusable spacecraft and Super Heavy reusable first stage.

Space enthusiasts have been following the slow build-up at Boca Chica, but Starship flights have broken out into the broader world, capturing attention in a way reminiscent of the early Space Race. While not as spectacular as the launches themselves, SpaceX’s next great innovation shows in the rate new test vehicles arrive, with Starships SN1 to SN9 tested over roughly 12 months.

Driven by the huge number of spacecraft needed for Musk’s Mars ambitions, and building on Tesla’s mass-production experience, SpaceX

Flaps

Crew ship

has built a production line for Starships even as it builds prototypes. Musk is targeting only $5 million (£3.6 million) per Starship. Airliners from Airbus and Boeing are in the region of $100 million (£73 million), though they are admittedly more complex. Even if SpaceX is ten-times above that target, the availability of an off-the-shelf spaceship for less than the cost of an A320 or 737 would transform spaceflight beyond SpaceX.

The first sign of this is SpaceX’s involvement in NASA’s lunar lander program; to achieve NASA’s current lunar return plans, the agency needs a cost-effective lunar lander capable of delivering a significant payload to the surface. Two other teams, including Blue Origin, are building relatively conventional landers, but SpaceX is producing a revision of Starship, a now-proven vertical-landing cargo rocket. Shorn of its atmospheric flaps for the airless Moon and with the addition of mid-mounted landing engines to avoid blasting its landing point with its main engines, SpaceX expects to be able to provide a lunar Starship in time for 2024. Another potential application for Starship is as the basis for space stations; the International Space Station (ISS) has been progressively assembled by 40 launches over 22 years, with a total cost of around $150 billion (£109 billion), and has a pressurised volume of 1,000 cubic metres (35,314 cubic feet). Figures have varied, but Starship is expected to have somewhere between 850 and 1,000 cubic metres (30,000 and 35,314 cubic feet) of pressurised volume. Even though it’s designed to be a spaceship, at anywhere less than $100 million (£73 million) plus launch costs, the mass production of Starship would make it cost effective to buy one to be a space station.

In a similar manner, SpaceX intends to launch dedicated tanker Starships to refuel the Martian Starships in Earth orbit ready for their trip. Of great interest to the broader space industry is the establishment of orbital fuel depots, which could enable full-time multi-mission spacecraft to be refuelled. The Starship tankers will be ready-to-go fuel depots kitted out for dispensing liquid oxygen and methane in zero gravity, and likely even cheaper than the passenger carriers. Again their mass production would make them cost effective to use to build a permanent depot, supplied by more Starship tankers.

Though built in the service of Musk’s Mars plans, Starship has the potential to do more. By building the ‘machine to build the machine’ making Starship cheap and standardised, Starship could be a combination of the DC-3, the first modern airliner, and the shipping container – those ubiquitous metal boxes that move most global freight, and then get used for offices, sheds, houses and all manner of things because they are cheap and available.