China May Soon Have a Second (Artificial) Moon

A city in China may soon have a second moon in its evening sky.

Credit: Shutterstock

Moonlit skies over the Chinese city of Chengdu may soon get a boost from a second moon.

City officials recently announced plans to build an artificial moon, launching it to hang over Sichuan province's capital city by 2020, Chinese news site People's Daily Online (PDO) reported.

The illuminated orb is intended to complement the light of Earth's existing moon, and will be eight times brighter than the natural satellite, Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co. Ltd. (CASC) — the primary contractor for the Chinese space program — told PDO. [Photos: Mysterious Objects Spotted on the Moon]

In fact, light from the artificial moon is expected to save the city money by doing away with the need for streetlights, Chunfeng added. The new moon will be capable of illuminating an area of up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) in diameter, according to PDO.

Though the human-made moon will light up only Chengdu, the glowing ball will be visible across China and even overseas, Asia Times reported. The real moon, of course, can usually be seen from anywhere on Earth. But little is known about the height, size and true brightness of the proposed artificial moon — all of which are factors that could affect its visibility to distant observers.

It is also unknown if the project has secured official support from the city of Chengdu or the federal government, The Guardian reported.

This isn't the first time that a country has tried to outshine the moon. A similar project was unveiled by Russia in the 1990s, with the launch of a solar reflecting system — a "space mirror" — intended to produce light "equivalent to three to five full moons" covering an area approximately 3 miles (5 kilometers) in diameter, the New York Times reported in 1993.

Another Russian attempt to launch a space mirror in 1999 fizzled before it got off the ground, according to The Guardian.

"A dusk-like glow"

Regarding concerns about the Chinese artificial moon interfering with astronomical observations or disrupting animals that are active at night, Kang Weimin, the director of the Institute of Optics of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, said that the light would amount to only a "dusk-like glow," PDO reported.

However, research has shown that many animals are highly sensitive to the light and phases of the moon. For example, nocturnal eagle owls communicate with each other through the display of white throat feathers, and scientists have found this activity increases during the full moon, when moonlight is brightest.

And in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, hundreds of coral species simultaneously release their eggs and sperm in an annual mass spawning event linked to the level of moonlight.

The size and illumination technology of Chengdu's artificial moon are not yet available, so it remains unclear if the brightness of the proposed artificial satellite would indeed be intense enough to interfere with the routines of local wildlife. In addition, while the company is calling it a "satellite," which suggests that it will be launched into geostationary orbit — in which the orb circles the Earth above the equator — no details have been released about how the company plans to deploy the "artificial moon."

Stephen Hawking's 1st Wife Blasts Biopic 'The Theory of Everything'

Stephen Hawking with Jane Wilde Hawking Jones (left) and guests attend the EE British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Opera House on Feb. 8, 2015, in London.

Credit: David M. Benett/Getty images

Jane Hawking, the ex-wife of the late and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, asserted that "The Theory of Everything," a film about the couple's life and family, got a lot wrong.

"Don't ever believe what you see in films," Jane Hawking said this week at the Henley Literary Festival in Oxfordshire, England, while promoting her new book, "Cry to Dream Again" (Alma Books, 2018), as reported by The Guardian.

The film, released in 2014, was based on Jane Hawking's memoir "Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen" (Alma Books, 2008) and starred Eddie Redmayne as Stephen and Felicity Jones as Jane. [In Photos — 'Theory of Everything': The Love Story of Stephen and Jane Hawking]

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Hawking, whose full name is Jane Beryl Wilde Hawking Jones, said she pleaded with the producers to stick closely to her memoir, but they didn't listen, and keeping the running time to a minimum meant there were inaccuracies. For instance, she said this week that the film glossed over the very real and all-consuming realities of caring for a husband with the incurable neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The two were married in 1965, about two years after Stephen's ALS diagnosis. As the ALS progressed, Jane had to care for not only her husband but also their three young children, all the while attending physics conferences across the globe, The Guardian reported. (In fact, the couple spent their honeymoon at a physics conference at Cornell University in New York, she said.)

Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76.

"I'm sorry to say that none of these extensive travels — with all the organizing, packing for a family with a severely disabled member, transporting them, driving them, as well as the usual day-to-day care — really appears in 'The Theory of Everything,'" Jane Hawking said.

"I asked for a frenzied fast-forward version — even simply getting all the suitcases, wheelchair and passengers in the car to represent this aspect of our lives — but I was told this was not possible because of the time constraints."

And while she and other close confidants may know the true story, the misconceptions and inaccuracies portrayed in the film will remain forever, she suggested. "I knew if there were mistakes in the film that they were going to be immortalized, which they have been," she said, as The Guardian reported.

Other inaccuracies and omissions in the film included the place the two first met — it was in St. Albans in Hertfordshire, England, not Cambridge University as the film portrayed — as well as all of the support she received from her parents while she struggled to care for a husband with deteriorating health. These aspects were overlooked in the film, she noted, as reported by the Australian news site news.com.au.

Apparently, the film also messed up the dissolution of the couple's marriage. Rather than a beautiful, teary-eyed and mutual breakup, as the film portrays, Jane's book reveals that it was a prolonged crumbling of a partnership that ended in a screaming fight on vacation, The Guardian reported.

Cassini's Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring 'Rain' & Other Surprises

An artist's depiction of the Cassini mission during its "Grand Finale" in 2017.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To distant, Earthling eyes, the gap between Saturn and its rings looks calm, like a deep breath of empty space between one beautifully intricate structure and another. But in 11 new papers, born from the demise of one of NASA's most beloved planetary science missions, scientists destroy that illusion, laying out a set of unexpectedly complicated phenomena dancing through that emptiness.

Those papers, published today in two key science journals, represent the first research to be published with data from the Cassini mission's so-called "Grand Finale," a daring set of orbits during which the spacecraft threaded itself between Saturn and its rings. Taken together, the papers paint a detailed picture of what's happening between the planet's innermost rings and its upper atmosphere — surprising, eye-catching phenomena like a pounding hail of compounds pummeling the planet's equatorial region and an electric current produced merely by the planet's winds and magnetic field.

"We really did think of it as a gap," Linda Spilker, project scientist for the Cassini mission at NASA, told Space.com of the region between Saturn and its rings. The team was optimistic about what Cassini could learn during its demise, but the operation ended up producing what she called "a much richer science return than we had imagined" — she went so far as to compare it to a brand-new mission. [Amazing Saturn Photos from NASA's Cassini Orbiter].

The Cassini spacecraft spent a total of 13 years studying Saturn and its moons. But when it was due to run out of fuel, the scientists behind the mission designed a daring trajectory that would send the spacecraft looping through Saturn's rings before burning up in its atmosphere. That destruction ensured that potentially habitable moons in the system wouldn't catch any Earth germs that might have hitched a ride aboard the spacecraft.

But it also let scientists squeeze a little extra data out of its instruments — and pushed the spacecraft further than they thought might be possible, since neither Cassini nor its instruments was designed to accomplish such an incredible feat. Scientists gathered for the first dive, wondering whether the spacecraft would survive long enough to even begin the Grand Finale.

Spilker and other Saturn scientists say the spacecraft's revelations sifted from the data are far from complete, even after the papers published today (Oct. 4). "You look at basically the firehose of data that's come back from Cassini in the past 13 years, really, we've only skimmed the cream across the top of the data set," Spilker said. That work has helped scientists begin to understand individual phenomena taking place at Saturn. "The next step that's happening even now is to take those pieces and put them together into a coherent picture to look across all of the data sets and ask is there one common story," Spilker said.

But in the meantime, here's a peek at what scientists have already learned about the ringed planet.

An artist's depiction of the Cassini spacecraft's view as it completed the "Grand Finale" of its mission in 2017.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It's raining, it's pouring

One new discovery was prompted by instrument results so strange that scientists on the team and beyond it at first thought there had to be a mistake. That instrument, called the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer, or INMS, can sniff out the chemical composition of material it catches.

Scientists are particularly excited to see these results because word had gotten out that the instrument was onto something. "Since the end of the mission, there's been a lot of talk about these INMS results," Bonnie Meinke, a Saturn scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who was not involved in any of the new research, told Space.com. "At first glance, it's the kind of thing that you almost don't believe, and as a scientist, you have to do a little gut check," Meinke said.

The instrument had a good track record, having gathered critical data earlier in the mission while Cassini explored moons like Titan and Enceladus. "Then we really got to focus in on Saturn and let it be the star for that final part of the mission," Rebecca Perryman, the operations lead for INMS at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. "We'd done a lot of work to get everything planned initially and had really boasted that INMS would be able to get some fantastic results once we started dipping down into the atmosphere." [In Photos: Cassini Mission Ends with Epic Dive into Saturn]

They had expected those results to be measurements of the masses of "ring rain," which scientists knew as a trickle of tiny particles falling from Saturn's innermost ring down toward the planet's upper atmosphere — some hydrogen and helium mostly — nothing fancy.

But what they seem to have found was far more material than they had expected, coming from far more exotic compounds. The instrument spotted not just hydrogen and helium but also carbon monoxide, methane, nitrogen and the unidentifiable remains of organic molecules.

Other instruments suggested that this downpour also included water ice and silicate particles and showed that the downpour is triggered by the interaction of these particles with the highest levels of Saturn's atmosphere. Around the whole ring structure, it all adds up to somewhere around 10 tons (9,000 kilograms) per second.

"The complexity of what was going on there and the amount of material that was infalling was very surprising," Hunter Waite, the principal investigator on INMS and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. And the discovery doesn't just reveal an intriguing phenomenon about a distant world — scientists say that if the finding holds up, it might have much deeper implications in our own solar system and beyond.

Waite said that the unexpected diversity of compounds in the ring rain might affect scientists' estimates for the composition of the atmosphere, which could in turn mean adapting hypotheses about how Saturn and its neighbors formed and evolved. "It might just have this facade," Waite said of Saturn. "[That might have] been a little bit deceptive in steering our thinking about formation and evolution."

Moreover, because there's so very much of the material, the new results pose a puzzle: Where does it all come from? "This can't be a continuous process, or the rings wouldn't be there," Meinke said. They would run out of material in perhaps tens of thousands of years, leaving Saturn bare. "The real story that [the paper is] telling is about the churn of Saturn's rings … rings can be long-lived because they're constantly moving and turning over."