It’s time for another Weekly Space Hangout, where we give you a rundown of the big space news stories of the week, from a team of scientists and space journalists.
We record the Weekly Space Hangout live on Google+ every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch the show live here on Universe Today, or the archived version on YouTube.
Looking east from latitude 30 north on August 3rd, 30 minutes before sunrise. (Created by the author in Stellarium).
Can you feel the heat?
It’s not just your imagination. The northern hemisphere is currently in the midst of the Dog Days of Summer. For many, early August means hot, humid days and stagnant, sultry nights.
The actual dates for the Dog Days of Summer vary depending on the source, but are usually quoted as running from mid-July to mid-August. The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists the Dog Days as running from July 3rd through August 11th.
But there is an ancient astronomical observation that ties in with the Dog Days of Summer, one that you can replicate on these early August mornings.
The sky was important to the ancients. It told them when seasons were approaching, when to plant crops, and when to harvest. Ancient cultures were keen observers of the cycles in the sky. Cultures that were “astronomically literate” had a distinct edge over those who seldom bothered to note the goings on overhead.
The flooded Temple of Isis on the island of Philae circa 1905. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons under an Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 license. Author H.W. Dunning).
Sirius was a key star for Egyptian astronomers. Identified with the goddess Isis, the Egyptian name for Sirius was Sopdet, the deification of Sothis. There is a line penned by the Greco-Roman scholar Plutarch which states:
“The soul of Isis is called ‘Dog’ by the Greeks.”
Political commentary? A mis-translation by Greek scholars? Whatever the case, the mythological transition from “Isis to Sothis to Dog Star” seems to have been lost in time.
These astronomer-priests noted that Sirius rose with the Sun just prior to the annual flooding of the Nile. The appearance of a celestial object at sunrise is known as a heliacal rising. If you can recover Sirius from behind the glare of the Sun, you know that the “Tears of Isis” are on their way, in the form of life-giving flood waters.
Sopdet as the personification of Sirius (note the star on the forehead) Wikimedia Commons image under an Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license. Author Jeff Dahl).
In fact, the ancient Egyptians based their calendar on the appearance of Sirius and what is known as the Sothic cycle, which is a span of 1,461 sidereal years (365.25 x 4) in which the heliacal rising once again “syncs up” with the solar calendar.
It’s interesting to note that in 3000 BC, the heliacal rising of Sirius and the flooding of the Nile occurred around June 25th, near the summer solstice. This also marked the Egyptian New Year. Today it occurs within a few weeks of August 15th, owing to precession. (More on that in a bit!)
By the time of the Greeks, we start to see Sirius firmly referred to as the Dog Star. In Homer’s Iliad, King Priam refers to an advancing Achilles as:
“Blazing as the star that cometh forth at Harvest-time, shining forth amid the host of stars in the darkness of the night, the star whose name men call Orion’s Dog”
The Romans further promoted the canine branding for Sirius. You also see references to the “Dog Star” popping up in Virgil’s Aenid.
Over the years, scholars have also attempted to link the dog-headed god Anubis to Sirius. This transition is debated by scholars, and in his Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, Richard Hinckley Allen casts doubt on the assertion.
Sirius as the shining “nose” of the constellation Canis Major. (Created by the author using Starry Night).
Ancient cultures also saw the appearance of Sirius as signifying the onset of epidemics. Their fears were well founded, as summer flooding would also hatch a fresh wave of malaria and dengue fever-carrying mosquitoes.
Making a seasonal sighting of Sirius is fun and easy to do. The star is currently low to the southeast in the dawn, and rises successively higher each morning as August rolls on.
The following table can be used to aid your quest in Sirius-spotting.
Latitude north
Theoretical date when Sirius can 1st be spotted
32°
August 3rd
33°
August 4th
34°
August 5th
35°
August 6th
36°
August 7th
37°
August 8th
38°
August 9th
39°
August 10th
40°
August 11th
41°
August 12th
42°
August 13th
43°
August 14th
44°
August 15th
45°
August 16th
46°
August 17th
47°
August 18th
48°
August 19th
49°
August 20th
50°
August 21st
Thanks to “human astronomical computer extraordinaire” Ed Kotapish for the compilation!
Note that the table above is perpetual for years in the first half of the 21st century. Our friend, the Precession of the Equinoxes pivots the equinoctial points to the tune of about one degree every 72 years. The Earth’s axis completes one full “wobble” approximately every 26,000 years. Our rotational pole only happens to be currently pointing at Polaris in our lifetimes. Its closest approach is around 2100 AD, after which the north celestial pole and Polaris will begin to drift apart. Mark your calendars—Vega will be the pole star in 13,727 AD. And to the ancient Egyptians, Thuban in the constellation Draco was the Pole Star!
The Colossi of Memnon Near Luxor, just one of the amazing architectural projects carried out by the ancient Egyptians. (Photo by author).
Keep in mind, atmospheric extinction is your enemy in this quest, as it will knock normally brilliant magnitude -1.46 Sirius a whopping 40 times in brightness to around magnitude +2.4.
Note that we have a nice line-up of planets in the dawn sky (see intro chart), which are joined by a waning crescent Moon this weekend. Jupiter and Mars ride high about an hour before sunrise, and if you can pick out Mercury at magnitude -0.5 directly below them, you should have a shot at spotting Sirius far to the south.
And don’t be afraid to “cheat” a little bit and use binoculars in your quest… we’ve even managed on occasion to track Sirius into the broad daylight. Just be sure to physically block the Sun behind a building or hill before attempting this feat!
Of course, the heliacal rising of Sirius prior to the flooding of the Nile was a convenient coincidence that the Egyptians used to their advantage. The ancients had little idea as to what they were seeing. At 8.6 light-years distant, Sirius is the brightest star in Earth’s sky during the current epoch. It’s also the second closest star visible to the naked eye from Earth. Only Alpha Centauri, located deep in the southern hemisphere sky is closer. The light you’re seeing from Sirius today left in early 2005, back before most of us had Facebook accounts.
Sirius also has a companion star, Sirius B. This star is the closest example of a white dwarf. Orbiting its primary once every 50 years, Sirius B has also been the center of a strange controversy we’ve explored in past writings concerning Dogon people of Mali.
Sirius B is difficult to nab in a telescope, owing to dazzling nearby Sirius A. This feat will get easier as Sirius B approaches apastron with a max separation of 11.5 arc seconds in 2025.
Some paleoastronomers have also puzzled over ancient records referring to Sirius as “red” in color. While some have stated that this might overturn current astrophysical models, a far more likely explanation is its position low to the horizon for northern hemisphere observers. Many bright stars can take on a twinkling ruddy hue when seen low in the sky due to atmospheric distortion.
Let the Dog Days of Summer (& astronomy) begin! (Photo by author).
All great facts to ponder during these Dog Days of early August, perhaps as the sky brightens during the dawn and your vigil for the Perseid meteors draws to an end!
There’s a potential “cometary graveyard” of inactive comets in our solar system wandering between Mars and Jupiter, a new Colombian research paper says. This contradicts a long-standing view that comets originate on the fringes of the solar system, in the Oort Cloud.
Mysteriously, however, 12 active comets have been seen in and around the asteroid belt. The astronomers theorize there must be a number of inactive comets in this region that flare up when a stray gravitational force from Jupiter nudges the comets so that they receive more energy from the Sun.
The researchers examined comets originating from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a spot where it is believed there are only asteroids (small bodies made up mostly of rock). Comets, by contrast, are a mixture of rocks and ice. The ice melts when the comet gets close to the sun, and can form spectacular tails visible from Earth. (Here’s more detail on the difference between a comet and an asteroid.)
This illustration shows three views of cometary activity. Top: The accepted view of comets, showing them coming from the outer solar system. Middle: The new proposal, saying some could come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Bottom: How the asteroid belt comets could have appeared during the early solar system’s history. Credit: Ignacio Ferrin / University of Antioquia
“Imagine all these asteroids going around the Sun for aeons, with no hint of activity,” stated Ignacio Ferrín, who led the research and is a part of the University of Antioquia in Colombia.
“We have found that some of these are not dead rocks after all, but are dormant comets that may yet come back to life if the energy that they receive from the Sun increases by a few per cent.”
The team believes this zone was far more active millions of years ago, but as the population got older they got more quiet.
“Twelve of those rocks are true comets that were rejuvenated after their minimum distance from the Sun was reduced a little,” the researchers stated.
“The little extra energy they received from the Sun was then sufficient to revive them from the graveyard.”
Astronaut Charles Duke collecting samples during Apollo 16. Credit: NASA.
Ask someone if they know the names of the astronauts who have walked on the Moon, and most people would be able to list Neil Armstrong, and maybe even Buzz Aldrin. But can you name the rest of the Apollo astronauts who made it down to the lunar surface? How many people have walked on the Moon?
In total twelve people have walked on the Moon. Besides Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – who were the first two astronauts to leave their bootprints on the Moon — there were also Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan, and Harrison Schmitt.
Interestingly, out of the dozen people who walked on the Moon, no one ever did it more than once.
The HiRISE Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Curiosity rover descending on its parachute to land on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University.
Whew — the past year flew by fast! Can you believe it’s almost been a year already since the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity thrilled the world with its nail-biting, sky-craning, engineer-high-fiving landing on Mars on August 6, 2012? Now for something even faster, here you can see what Curiosity has done since landing — where she’s roved, drilled, shook, and captured the views in this sped-up look at her travels, explorations and discoveries.
And since you can never see the landing highlight video too many times, we’ve posted it below:
An idea that really captures my imagination is what kinds of future civilizations there might be. And I’m not the only one. In 1964, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev defined the future of civilizations based on the amount of energy they might consume.
A Type I civilization would use the power of their entire planet. Type II, a star system, and a Type III would harness the energy of an entire galaxy. It boggles the mind to think about the engineering required to rearrange the stars of an entire galaxy.
Is it possible to move a star? Could we move the Sun?
This idea was first proposed by physicist Dr. Leonid Shkadov in his 1987 paper, “Possibility of controlling solar system motion in the galaxy”.
Here’s how it works.
A future alien civilization would construct a gigantic reflective structure on one side of their star. Light from the star would strike this structure and bounce off, pushing it away.
If this reflective structure had enough mass, it would also attract the star with its gravity.
The star would be trying to push the structure away, but the structure would be pulling the star along with it.
If a future civilization could get this in perfect balance, it would be able to “pull” the star around in the galaxy, using its own starlight as thrust. At first, you wouldn’t get a lot of speed. But by directing half the energy of a star, you could get it moving through the galaxy.
Over the course of a million years, you would have changed its velocity by about 20 meters/second. The star would have traveled about 0.3 light years, less than 10% of the way to Alpha Centauri. Keep it up for a billion years and you would be moving a thousand times faster. Allowing you to travel 34,000 light years, a significant portion of the galaxy.
Imagine a future civilization using this technique to move their stars to better locations, or even rearranging huge portions of a galaxy for their own energy purposes.
This may sound theoretical, but Duncan Forgan, from the University of Edinburgh suggests a practical way to search for aliens moving their stars. According to him, you could use planet-hunting telescopes like Kepler to detect the bizarre light signatures we’d see from a Shkadov Thruster. There’s nothing in the laws of physics that says it can’t happen.
It’s fun to think about, and gives us another way that we could search for alien civilizations out there across the galaxy.
An artist's conception of a spacecraft designed to pick up an asteroid. Credit: NASA/Advanced Concepts Laboratory
It’s still unclear if NASA will receive Congressional funding or authorization to do an asteroid retrieval proposal backed by President Barack Obama’s administration, but as missions take time to plan, the agency is moving ahead with its work for now.
NASA just did a mission formulation review this week to look at some internal studies on the mission. It also is starting to wade through hundreds of ideas the space community submitted concerning the mission.
“With the mission formulation review complete, agency officials now will begin integrating the most highly-rated concepts into an asteroid mission baseline concept to further develop in 2014,” NASA stated. The agency was light on details, but more information should be forthcoming when the process is further along.
Concept of Spacecraft with Asteroid Capture Mechanism Deployed. Credit: NASA.
The agency’s fiscal 2014 budget proposal suggests robotically picking up an asteroid, steering it closer to Earth, and putting it in a safe orbit where probes and possibly astronauts could visit. The budget is still being moved through Congressional committees and we won’t know until later this year just how much money will be available for NASA, and what initiatives the agency will be allowed to do.
For more information, be sure to read this past article from Universe Today editor Nancy Atkinson looking in detail at NASA’s asteroid retrieval mission. It includes information on what technology could be used, and the history of NASA’s quest to explore asteroids.
Space rocks have hit the headlines several times this year, particularly when one exploded over the area of Chelyabinsk, Russia earlier in 2013. NASA and several other groups have ongoing searches for asteroids and other small bodies in our solar system to catalog and calculate the orbits for as many as they can find. No imminent threats are known.
Tagus Valles on Mars. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
Don’t let the dry appearance of the Martian desert region near Tagus Valles fool you. Some pictures snapped by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express shows there was plenty of water in that area of the Red Planet in the past. The pictures show yet another example of how water once shaped the planet, as scientists try to figure out when and how it disappeared.
“This region is one of many that exposes evidence of the Red Planet’s active past, and shows that the marks of water are engraved in even the most unlikely ancient crater-strewn fields,” ESA stated.
The unnamed region, which is just a few degrees south of the Martian equator, partially caught scientists’ attention because of that crater you see in the top left of the image. (A closer view is below.)
Deformation in a crater that was once flooded on Mars. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
“Numerous landslides have occurred within this crater, perhaps facilitated by the presence of water weakening the crater walls,” ESA stated. “Grooves etched into the crater’s inner walls mark the paths of tumbling rocks, while larger piles of material have slumped en masse to litter the crater floor.”
Scientists saw evidence of mesas (flat-topped blocks) and yardangs, which were both features that were built from sediments that a regional flood once deposited there. The lighter bits have eroded away, but you can still see the leftovers.
There also is evidence of volcanic activity, as there was ash scattered around the area. Scientists guess the origin was the Elysium volcanic region to the northeast.
This image shows 20 of the quenched galaxies — galaxies that are no longer forming stars — seen in the Hubble COSMOS observations. Each galaxy is identified by a crosshair at the centre of each frame. Quenched galaxies in the distant Universe are much smaller than those seen nearby. It was thought that these small galaxies merged with other smaller, gas-free galaxies to grow bigger, but it turns out that larger galaxies were "switching off" at later times and adding their numbers to those of their smaller and older siblings, giving the mistaken impression of individual galaxy growth over time. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Carollo (ETH Zurich)
Are you ready for a new galactic puzzle? Then let’s start with some clues. It has been long assumed that some galaxies reach a point in their evolution when star formation stops. In the distant past, these saturated galaxies appeared smaller than those formed more recently. This is what baffles astronomers. Why do some galaxies continue to grow if they are no longer forming stars? Thanks to some very astute Hubble Space Telescope observations, a team of astronomers has found what appears to be a rather simple explanation. Which came first? The chicken or the egg?
Until now, these diminutive, turned-off galaxies were theorized to continue to grow into the more massive, saturated galaxies observed closer to us. Because they no longer have active star-forming regions, it was assumed they gained their extra mass by combining with other smaller galaxies – ones five to ten times less in overall size. However, for this theory to be plausible, it would take a host of small galaxies to be present for the saturated population to consume… and it’s just not happening. Because we simply did not have the data available about such a large number of galaxies, it was impossible to count and identify potential candidates, but the Hubble COSMOS survey has provided an eight billion year look at the cosmic history of turned-off galaxies.
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“The apparent puffing up of quenched galaxies has been one of the biggest puzzles about galaxy evolution for many years,” says Marcella Carollo of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, lead author on a new paper exploring these galaxies. “No single collection of images has been large enough to enable us to study very large numbers of galaxies in exactly the same way — until Hubble’s COSMOS,” adds co-author Nick Scoville of Caltech, USA.
According to the news release, the team utilized a large set of COSMOS images – the product of close to a 1,000 hours of observations and consisting of 575 over-lapped images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) . Needless to say, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by Hubble. The HST data was combined with additional observations from Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the Subaru Telescope to look back to when the Universe was about half its present age. This huge data set covered an area of sky almost nine times the size of the full Moon! The saturated – or “quenched” – galaxies present at that age were small and compact… and apparently remained in that state. Instead of getting larger as they evolved, they kept their small size – apparently the same size they were when star-formation ceased. Yet, these galaxy types appear to be gaining in girth as time passes. What gives?
“We found that a large number of the bigger galaxies instead switch off at later times, joining their smaller quenched siblings and giving the mistaken impression of individual galaxy growth over time,” says co-author Simon Lilly, also of ETH Zurich. “It’s like saying that the increase in the average apartment size in a city is not due to the addition of new rooms to old buildings, but rather to the construction of new, larger apartments,” adds co-author Alvio Renzini of INAF Padua Observatory, Italy.
If eight billion years teaches us anything, it teaches us that we don’t know everything…. and sometimes the most simple of answers could be the correct one. We knew that actively star-forming galaxies were far less massive in the early Universe and that explains why they were smaller when star-formation turned off.
“COSMOS provided us with simply the best set of observations for this sort of work — it lets us study very large numbers of galaxies in exactly the same way, which hasn’t been possible before,” adds co-author Peter Capak, also of Caltech. “Our study offers a surprisingly simple and obvious explanation to this puzzle. Whenever we see simplicity in nature amidst apparent complexity, it’s very satisfying,” concludes Carollo.
Fishing Boats Meet the Milky Way on the Isle of Wight (south of England) on May 16, 2013. Credit and copyright: Chad Powell.
We’ve shared many images of the Milky Way in our featured photos from astrophotographers, but this might be one of the most vibrant I’ve seen! The blue of the sky and sea is incredible and almost pulsates with its stunning azure color. Photographer Chad Powell explained on Flickr: “Where I live on the Isle of Wight (south of England) is known to have minimal light pollution but I only ever shot the Milky Way from my back garden. I decided to finally trek it down to my local beach. The Milky Way was so bright in the sky, it was breathtaking! The lights on the left are from fishing boats tens of miles out to sea.”
Simply beautiful, especially if you are a blue-o-file like I am!
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