Space and astronomy news
A remote solar eclipse this coming weekend sets us up for the first total lunar eclipse of 2022.
The first eclipse season for 2022 is nigh. About twice a year, the two nodes where the Moon’s orbit intersects the ecliptic align and an eclipse season occurs, book-ended by one each solar and lunar eclipses spaced about two weeks apart.
Continue reading “A Partial Solar Eclipse Kicks Off the First Eclipse Season of 2022”
At the heart of the more massive galaxies in the Universe, there are supermassive black holes (SMBHs) so powerful that they outshine all of the stars in their galactic disks. The core regions of these galaxies are known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), or by their more popular-moniker “quasars.” The ongoing study of these objects has provided a testbed for General Relativity and revealed a great deal about the formation and evolution of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the Universe.
If there’s one thing astronomers have observed repeatedly, it is the fact that these massive black holes have massive appetites. In fact, a new survey of over 100 galaxies by the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory has shown that some supermassive black holes can consume stars by the thousands! These results indicate that some SMBHs needed to consume amounts of stellar matter rarely (if ever) seen in the Universe to grow and reach the sizes that astronomers see today.
Continue reading “In Some Places, Black Holes are Tearing Apart Thousands of Stars at a Time”
Launched on December 25, 2021 from ESA’s launch site in Kourou, French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reached its final orbit at the L2 Lagrange point on January 24, 2022. It has since performed several operations to get it ready for its observing mission which should begin in about a month.
As part of getting it ready for its mission, NASA has been cooling off its instruments, such as the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), to operating temperatures. Now that they have reached that point, all that’s left to cool down are the mirrors.
Continue reading “Webb Has Almost Reached its Final, Coldest Temperature”
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, currently on its way to the outer Solar System to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, has a solar panel problem. Shortly after its launch last October, engineers determined that one of Lucy’s two solar panels failed to open completely. While the spacecraft has enough power to function, the team is concerned about how the unlatched panel might hinder Lucy’s performance going forward. In an attempt to fix the problem, the team will carry out a new procedure next month that is designed to unfurl the solar panel the rest of the way, and latch it firmly in place.
Continue reading “NASA is Ready to try and fix Lucy’s Unlatched Solar Panel”
Millions of stars that can grow up to 620 million miles in diameter, known as ‘red giants,’ exist in our galaxy, but it has been speculated for a while that there are some that are possibly much smaller. Now a team of astronomers at the University of Sydney have discovered several in this category and have published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Continue reading “Slimmed Down Red Giants Had Their Mass Stolen By a Companion Star”“It’s like finding Wally… we were extremely lucky to find about 40 slimmer red giants, hidden in a sea of normal ones. The slimmer red giants are either smaller in size or less massive than normal red giants.”
PhD candidate Mr Yaguang Li from the University of Sydney, as quoted from the source article.
In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll feel a little cooler after reading about today’s topic: sunspots!
Continue reading “Astronomy Jargon 101: Sunspots”
How dating an ancient text revealed one of the oldest observations of aurora known.
It’s one of the greatest sky spectacles you can witness. Along with a total solar eclipse and a major meteor storm, I’d put a fine aurora display up there as one of the the most amazing things you can see in the night sky. And we’re not talking about the dull green glow that folks in the ‘lower 48’ see to the north and dismiss, but the glorious silent streamers of auroral curtains that can light up the entire sky.
Now, a recent study, entitled A Candidate Auroral Report in the Bamboo Annals Indicating a Possible Extreme Space Weather Event in the 10th Century BCE may have pinpointed one of the earliest accounts on ancient aurorae. In the study, University of Pennsylvania and Nagoya University researchers culled through the legendary chronicle known as the Bamboo Annals (also sometimes referred to as Zhushu Jinian) penned around the 4th century BCE. Chinese texts are some of the best documented sources of sky phenomena stretching back over the millennia, to include accounts of naked eye sunspots, supernovae and meteor outbursts.
Continue reading “Chinese Astronomers Recorded Earliest Account of Aurora”
Within Jupiter’s massive system of satellites, four large moons really stand out. They’re known as the “Galilean Moons” in honor of Galileo Galilee, who made the first recorded observations of them in 1610. The innermost of these moons is the rocky moon Io, which is slightly larger than Earth’s Moon and slightly denser. With more than 400 active volcanoes on its surface, it is the most geologically active body in the Solar System.
Add to that the intense radiation it gets from Jupiter’s magnetic field, and it’s arguably one of the most hellish environments in the Solar System! Nevertheless, scientists have long been puzzled by the meandering ridges visible on the surface, which are as large as any seen here on Earth. Thanks to a recent study led by Rutgers University, there’s now an explanation for how these formations can exist on a surface as icy and volcanic as Io’s.
Continue reading “Jupiter’s Moon Io has Dunes. Dunes!?”
In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the fabled “Ninth Planet” (or “Planet X”) while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The existence of this body had been predicted previously based on perturbations in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. After receiving more than 1,000 suggestions from around the world, and a debate among the Observatory’s staff, this newfound object was named Pluto – which was proposed by a young schoolgirl from Oxford (Venetia Burney).
Since that time, Pluto has been the subject of considerable study, a naming controversy, and was visited for the first time on July 14th, 2015, by the New Horizons mission. One thing that has been clear from the beginning is the nature of Pluto’s orbit, which is highly eccentric and inclined. According to new research, Pluto’s orbit is relatively stable over longer timescales but is subject to chaotic perturbance and changes over shorter timescales.
Continue reading “Pluto’s Orbit is Surprisingly Close to an Unstable Zone”
In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be the biggest thing in town after today’s topic: galaxy clusters!
Continue reading “Astronomy Jargon 101: Galaxy Clusters”