Astronomy

[biometrics]

NASA makes May 27 its US independence day from Russian rockets - America's back in the astronaut business after nearly nine years

Thanks to a South African immigrant

NASA has set a launch date for the first mission by US astronauts to the International Space Station, using a locally-made rocket taking off from an American launch site, since July 8, 2011.

"NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will fly on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, lifting off on a Falcon 9 rocket at 4:32 p.m. EDT [2032 GMT] on May 27, from Launch Complex 39A in Florida, for an extended stay at the space station for the Demo-2 mission," NASA said in a blog post.

NASA makes May 27 its US independence day from Russian rockets: America's back in the astronaut business after nearly nine years

Thanks to a South African immigrant

www.theregister.co.uk

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Astronomers Took New Pics of 1998 OR2, The Asteroid About to Whoosh Past Earth

There's an asteroid closing in on a safe Earth flyby. That's nothing unusual - near-Earth space has a lot of rocks in it. But 1998 OR2 is distinguishing itself in a series of happy snaps as it draws closer to periapsis.


Both the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome and the Arecibo Observatory in Chile have managed to catch glimpses of the asteroid as it grows brighter in our skies, travelling through space at around 31,320 kilometres per hour (19,461 miles per hour).

We have nothing to fear from 1998 OR2. It's relatively large, but it's not going to come close enough to threaten Earth. The asteroid was discovered in 1998, and astronomers have been watching it carefully to calculate its orbital path, which is projected all the way until the year 2197.

This year, 2020, will mark the asteroid's closest flyby in at least a century, and it's going to sail harmlessly past at a distance of 6.3 million kilometres (around 4 million miles). That's over 16 times the average distance between Earth and the Moon.

Astronomers Took New Pics of 1998 OR2, The Asteroid About to Whoosh Past Earth

There's an asteroid closing in on a safe Earth flyby.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Stunning Hubble Images Detect a Comet Shattered in The Inner Solar System

A comet only just discovered in December of last year has already met its demise. It didn't reach perihelion, or its closest approach to the Sun. It didn't even pass inside Earth orbit. Yet Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) has now absolutely shattered.



In images taken on April 20 and April 23, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured at least 30 and 25 fragments of the comet respectively, travelling together in a cluster as they continue towards the inner Solar System.

"Their appearance changes substantially between the two days, so much so that it's quite difficult to connect the dots," said astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles.

"I don't know whether this is because the individual pieces are flashing on and off as they reflect sunlight, acting like twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, or because different fragments appear on different days."

Stunning Hubble Images Detect a Comet Shattered in The Inner Solar System

A comet only just discovered in December of last year has already met its demise.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Our Sun Is Surprisingly Weak Compared to Other Stars, Study Shows

We're pretty familiar with our Sun. We've even sent a probe to go study it; we haven't done that with any other star. Given how closely we study it, it would be tempting to think of it as a typical example of a G-type main-sequence star, or yellow dwarf.

New research suggests that this is not the case. After conducting a survey of stars similar to the Sun, scientists have discovered that our star is unusually subdued, at least at this stage of its life.

Our Sun Is Surprisingly Weak Compared to Other Stars, Study Shows

We're pretty familiar with our Sun.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Want to Mine the Moon? Here’s a Detailed Map of all its Minerals

The prospect of mining asteroids and the Moon is on a lot of peoples’ minds lately. Maybe it’s all the growth that’s happened in the commercial aerospace industry in the past few decades. Or perhaps it’s because of Trump’s recent executive order to allow for asteroid and lunar mining. Either way, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs and futurists who can’t wait to start prospecting and harvest the natural bounty of space!

Coincidentally enough, future lunar miners now have a complete map of the lunar surface, which was created by the US Geological Society’s (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center, in collaboration with NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute (LPI). This map shows the distribution and classification of the mineral deposits on the Moon’s surface, effectively letting us know what its familiar patchwork of light and dark patches the really are.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Life might survive, and thrive, in a hydrogen world: study

As new and more powerful telescopes blink on in the next few years, astronomers will be able to aim the megascopes at nearby exoplanets, peering into their atmospheres to decipher their composition and to seek signs of extraterrestrial life. But imagine if, in our search, we did encounter alien organisms but failed to recognize them as actual life.

That's a prospect that astronomers like Sara Seager hope to avoid. Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science, Physics, and Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, is looking beyond a "terra-centric" view of life and casting a wider net for what kinds of environments beyond our own might actually be habitable.

In a paper published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, she and her colleagues have observed in laboratory studies that microbes can survive and thrive in atmospheres that are dominated by hydrogen—an environment that is vastly different from Earth's nitrogen- and oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Hydrogen is a much lighter gas than either nitrogen or oxygen, and an atmosphere rich with hydrogen would extend much farther out from a rocky planet. It could therefore be more easily spotted and studied by powerful telescopes, compared to planets with more compact, Earth-like atmospheres.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Astronomers Find a Planet With Three Times the Mass of Jupiter

Jupiter is the Boss.

Well, in terms of planets in our Solar System it is. It’s played a huge role in shaping the Solar System due to its mass and its gravity. Here’s a few ways it’s shaped our system:

• Most of the orbits of the Solar System’s planets are closer to Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane.
• It has shepherded a whole population of asteroids into its LaGrangian points, and they’re called Trojan asteroids.
• Jupiter has created gaps in the asteroid belt.
• It may have been responsible for the Late Heavy Bombardment when it migrated.

That’s just a sample of the effects that massive Jupiter has on the Solar System. It’s all due to Jupiter’s mass, which is about 2.5 times greater than all the other planets.

 

[Textile Guy]

Astronomy is something I cant do. It all sounds hilarious to me, and pisses off the folks who take it seriously. And I am not trying to be poephole or anything.

Its just some of the terms .....

Like black holes, little sons, yur anus, ma arse, ..... and astronomers say the dandiest things, like,

While observing a little son, Dr Spock noticed a an orb the size of Mars, circling a black hole close to Uranus.

9 people say Oooh ..... the one starts laughing ..... nee fok dit.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Yes, a Solar Minimum Is Coming. No, It's Not Going to Mess Up The World

Because we are normal people living in normal times, normal things are happening. Like news tabloids reporting that the Sun is in "lockdown", and that Earth is doomed to crazy weather famine and… earthquakes, for some reason.

Well, you can relax. Nothing the Sun is currently doing is going to create freezing weather, famine, or earthquakes. While humans are experiencing things that are decidedly not okay, the Sun is doing nothing unusual whatsoever.
What could be happening is a very normal period in the Sun's 11-year cycle; it's called solar minimum. And it's nothing to be afraid of - if you're reading this, chances are you've already lived through several solar minimums without even noticing.

Currently, we're in solar cycle 24. We don't know precisely when the next solar minimum will occur, but we can broadly predict it. Back in 2017, NASA noted that solar minimum was expected in 2019-2020.
In December of last year, the NOAA's Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel narrowed it down further, stating that "solar minimum between cycles 24 and 25 will occur in April, 2020 (+/- 6 months)."
So, we're either going through solar minimum already, or are just about to do so. Here's what that actually entails.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

New study estimates the odds of life and intelligence emerging beyond our planet

Humans have been wondering whether we alone in the universe since antiquity.

We know from the geological record that life started relatively quickly, as soon our planet's environment was stable enough to support it. We also know that the first multicellular organism, which eventually produced today's technological civilization, took far longer to evolve, approximately 4 billion years.

But despite knowing when life first appeared on Earth, scientists still do not understand how life occurred, which has important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.

In a new paper published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences today, David Kipping, an assistant professor in Columbia's Department of Astronomy, shows how an analysis using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference could shed light on how complex extraterrestrial life might evolve in alien worlds.

"The rapid emergence of life and the late evolution of humanity, in the context of the timeline of evolution, are certainly suggestive," Kipping said. "But in this study it's possible to actually quantify what the facts tell us."

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Meet NASA's Roman Space Telescope, named after the "Mother of Hubble"

NASA has officially named its next planet hunter. Previously known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the project has now been named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – or simply, the Roman Space Telescope – after NASA’s first chief astronomer, who has often been referred to as the Mother of Hubble.
The Roman Space Telescope is set to launch in the mid-2020s, as the successor to the aging Hubble. While it sports the same size mirror – measuring 2.4 m (7.9 ft) wide – it uses a wide field instrument to examine a patch of sky that’s 100 times larger than Hubble is capable of.

Watching the heavens in infrared, the Roman Space Telescope has a few primary goals. The first is to search for and study exoplanets, using spectroscopy and an experimental coronagraph instrument to take high contrast images of these worlds. It will also investigate dark energy, the mysterious force that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Roman may also help study dark matter and a range of other astrophysical questions.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Stunning images of swirling gas and dust may show a planet forming

For the first time, astronomers may have seen direct evidence of a planet forming around a young star.

A spiral disk of gas and dust surrounding the star AB Aurigae contains a small S-shaped twist near the spiral’s center, infrared telescope images show.

That twist “is the precise spot where a new planet must be forming,” says astrophysicist Emmanuel Di Folco of the University of Bordeaux in France.

Previously, astronomers have seen gaps (SN: 11/6/14) and large-scale spirals (SN: 6/14/18) that are thought to be created by unseen planets in disks of gas and dust around young stars. Theories of how planets coalesce and gather material from these disks predict that planets’ motions would further twist the gas around them like swirling skirts, pinpointing a planet’s location (SN: 5/11/18).

 

[Mortymoose]

The English HO bought me this a few months back for me birthday, used it twice, still getting the hang of it and only peered at the moon, think I might get into it sometime

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Astronomers see 'cosmic ring of fire,' 11 billion years ago

Astronomers have captured an image of a super-rare type of galaxy—described as a "cosmic ring of fire"—as it existed 11 billion years ago.

The galaxy, which has roughly the mass of the Milky Way, is circular with a hole in the middle, rather like a titanic doughnut. Its discovery, announced in the journal Nature Astronomy, is set to shake up theories about the earliest formation of galactic structures and how they evolve.

"It is a very curious object that we've never seen before," said lead researcher Dr. Tiantian Yuan, from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D). "It looks strange and familiar at the same time."

The galaxy, named R5519, is 11 billion light-years from the Solar System. The hole at its centre is truly massive, with a diameter two billion times longer than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. To put it another way, it is three million times bigger than the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, which in 2019 became the first ever to be directly imaged.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

What Are Some Clues to the Climates of Exoplanets?

In the past few decades, the number of planets discovered beyond our Solar System has grown exponentially. To date, a total of 4,158 exoplanets have been confirmed in 3,081 systems, with an additional 5,144 candidates awaiting confirmation. Thanks to the abundance of discoveries, astronomers have been transitioning in recent years from the process of discovery to the process of characterization.

In particular, astronomers are developing tools to assess which of these planets could harbor life. Recently, a team of astronomers from the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI) at Cornell University designed an environmental “decoder” based on the color of exoplanet surfaces and their hosts stars. In the future, this tool could be used by astronomers to determine which exoplanets are potentially-habitable and worthy of follow-up studies.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Black Hole Seen Blasting Out Jets at Close to the Speed of Light

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has spotted a distant black hole shooting out jets of material, at close to the speed of light. No worries, this beast is about 10,000 light years away from us. It’s more of a spectacle than a danger.

But it’s a spectacle laden with scientific insights.

I know what you might be thinking. Some version of “I thought nothing could escape a black hole?” You’re right, nothing can. But this material isn’t acually coming out of the black hole. It’s coming from the material circling around the black hole and being heated by that motion.

These jets of material are called astrophysical jets, or relativistic jets. They’re emitted by swirling disks of material called accretion disks. These disks can be around things like pulsars and neutron stars, or as in this case, around a black hole.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Class of stellar explosions found to be galactic producers of lithium

A team of researchers, led by astrophysicist Sumner Starrfield of Arizona State University, has combined theory with both observations and laboratory studies and determined that a class of stellar explosions, called classical novae, are responsible for most of the lithium in our galaxy and solar system.

The results of their study have been recently published in the Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society.

"Given the importance of lithium to common uses like heat-resistant glass and ceramics, lithium batteries and lithium-ion batteries, and mood altering chemicals; it is nice to know where this element comes from," said Starrfield, who is a Regents Professor with ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. "And improving our understanding of the sources of the elements out of which our bodies and the solar system are made is important."

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Evidence of universe's oldest state of matter lurking inside neutron stars

Astrophysicists have found evidence of a strange substance called quark matter at the heart of compact stars. Combining recent theoretical calculations with measurements of gravitational waves from neutron star collisions, the researchers found that the most massive neutron stars most likely have “quark cores.”

In normal matter, elementary particles called quarks are only ever found inside protons and neutrons. But if that normal matter is subjected to extreme temperatures, or clumped together in very high densities, it can “melt” together, giving the quarks free reign to roam anywhere within that matter. This exotic new state is known as quark matter.

It’s believed that a form of this strange stuff called quark-gluon plasma filled the universe about 20 microseconds after the Big Bang, behaving like an immensely hot liquid before cooling into the regular matter that fills the universe today. Nowadays, the only places you’ll find quark matter are (briefly) in particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider – and perhaps, at the heart of neutron stars.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

Mysterious Radio Burst Coming From Deep Space Repeats in a Cycle Every 157 Days

For the second time ever, astronomers have found a fast radio burst (FRB) that repeats on a regular, predictable cycle. This could mean that - at least in some cases - the wild unpredictability of mysterious deep-space FRBs could actually be a problem with our detection capabilities.

FRB 121102 is already famous for being the most active FRB discovered yet, spitting out repeated bursts several times since its discovery in 2012. It was thought that there was no rhyme or reason to it - but new analysis of those bursts has revealed a pattern.

According to a careful study of new observations and previously published ones, FRB 121102 exhibits repeated burst activity for a period of about 90 days, before going quiet for about 67 days. Then this whole 157-day cycle repeats again. If this analysis is correct, the source should have entered a new activity cycle around June 2 this month.

 

[Seldom Bucket]

The Milky Way’s giant gas bubbles were seen in visible light for the first time

Mysterious cosmic bubbles are being seen in a new light.


For the first time, scientists have observed visible light from the Fermi bubbles, enormous blobs of gas that sandwich the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The newly spotted glow was emitted by hydrogen gas that was electrically charged, or ionized, within the bubbles. Astronomer Dhanesh Krishnarao of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues described the finding June 3 in a news conference at the American Astronomical Society virtual meeting and in a paper posted at arXiv.org on May 29.


Originally observed in 2010, the bubbles spew high-energy light known as gamma rays. The towering structures, each 25,000 light-years tall, are thought to be relics of an ancient outburst of gas from the galaxy’s center (SN: 11/9/10). But scientists don’t know the source. The outflow could have been the result of the black hole at the center of the galaxy messily gobbling up matter, or emissions caused by bursts of stars forming.