Universe Today (Page 363)

Watch Comet 45P Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková Fly Past Earth This Week A recent image of Comet 45P from February 4th. Image credit and copyright: Hisayoshi Kato. Hankering for some cometary action? An interplanetary interloper pays us a visit this weekend, sliding swiftly through the pre-dawn northern hemisphere sky. If you’ve never caught sight of periodic comet 45/P Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková, this week is a good time to try. Currently shining at magnitude +6.5, the comet makes a close 0.08 AU (7.4 million miles or 12.3 million kilometers) pass near the Earth on Saturday, February 11, at 14:44 Universal Time (UT) or 9:44 AM Eastern Standard Time. This is theRead More →

How Long is a Day on Venus? Venus is often referred to as “Earth’s Sister” planet, because of the various things they have in common. For example, both planets reside within our Sun’s habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks Zone“). In addition, Earth and Venus are also terrestrial planets, meaning they are primarily composed of metals and silicate rock that are differentiated between a metallic core and a silicate mantle and crust. Beyond that, Earth and Venus could not be more different. And two ways in which they are in stark contrast is the time it takes for the Sun to rise, set, and return to theRead More →

A Black Hole’s Record Breaking Lunch Does a distant black hole provide a new definition of pain and suffering? The black hole, named XJ1500+0154, appears to be the real-life equivalent of the Pit of Carkoon, the nesting place of the all-powerful Sarlacc in Star Wars, which slowly digested its victims. Over ten years ago, this giant black hole ripped apart a star and has since continued a very long lunch, feasting on the stars’ remains. Astronomers have been carefully monitoring this slow ‘digestion,’ because it is so unusual for what are called tidal disruption events (TDEs), where tidal forces from black holes tear stars apart.Read More →

Messier 34 – the NGC 1039 Open Star Cluster Welcome back to Messier Monday! In our ongoing tribute to the great Tammy Plotner, we take a look at the Triangulum Galaxy, also known as Messier 33. Enjoy! During the 18th century, famed French astronomer Charles Messier noted the presence of several “nebulous objects” in the night sky. Having originally mistaken them for comets, he began compiling a list of them so that others would not make the same mistake he did. In time, this list (known as the Messier Catalog) would come to include 100 of the most fabulous objects in the night sky. OneRead More →

Ancient Annular: Dating Joshua’s Eclipse The May 2012 annular eclipse low to the horizon. Image credit and copyright: Jared Bowens. Astronomy turns up in fascinating junctures in history. Besides just the romantic angle, we can actually pin down contextual events in ancient history if we can tie them in with a spectacle witnessed in the heavens. A recent look at the story of ‘Joshua’s eclipse’ is one such possible tale. Lunar and solar eclipses are especially dramatic events, something that would have really made the ancients stop and take notice. A recent study published in an edition of the Beit Mikra Journal (in Hebrew) byRead More →

See a Flirtatious Lunar Eclipse This Friday Night This sequence of photos taken on October 18, 2013 nicely show the different phases of a penumbral lunar eclipse. The coming penumbral eclipse will likely appear even darker because Earth’s shadow will shade to the top (northern) half of the Moon rich in dark lunar “seas” at maximum. Credit: AstroTripper 2000 Not many people get excited about a penumbral eclipse, but when it’s a deep one and the only lunar eclipse visible in North America this year, it’s worth a closer look. What’s more, this Friday’s eclipse happens during convenient, early-evening viewing hours. No getting up in the raw hoursRead More →

Juno Buzzes Jupiter a mere 4,300 Km’s above the Cloud Tops On July 4th, 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made history when it became the second mission to establish orbit around Jupiter – the previous being the Galileo spacecraft, which orbited the planet from 1995 to 2003. Since that time, it has circled the massive gas giant three times, collecting data on the gas giant’s composition, interior and gravity field. This past Thursday, February 1st, the mission conducted its fourth orbit of the planet. In the process, the spacecraft collected more vital data on the gas giant and snapped several dozen pictures. And in what isRead More →

Used SpaceX Booster Set for Historic 1st Reflight is Test Fired in Texas SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage previously flown to space is test fired at the firms McGregor, TX rocket development facility in late January 2017. Credit: SpaceX The first orbit class rocket that will ever be reflown to launch a second payload to space was successfully test fired by SpaceX engineers at the firms Texas test facility last week. The once fanciful dream of rocket recycling is now closer than ever to becoming reality, after successful completion of the static fire test on a test stand in McGregor, Texas, paved the path toRead More →

The Race To Image Exoplanets Heats Up! Thanks to the deployment of the Kepler mission, thousands of extrasolar planet candidates have been discovered. Using a variety of indirect detection methods, astronomers have detected countless gas giants, super Earths, and other assorted bodies orbiting distant stars. And one terrestrial planet (Proxima b) has even been found lurking in the closest star system to Earth – Proxima Centauri. The next step, quite logically, is to observe these planets directly. Hence why the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument was commissioned at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in  Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Designed to allow forRead More →

The Cassiopeia Constellation Welcome back to Constellation Friday! Today, in honor of the late and great Tammy Plotner, we will be dealing with the “keel of the ship”, the Carina constellation! In the 2nd century CE, Greek-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus (aka. Ptolemy) compiled a list of all the then-known 48 constellations. This treatise, known as the Almagest, would used by medieval European and Islamic scholars for over a thousand years to come, effectively becoming astrological and astronomical canon until the early Modern Age. One of the most famous of these constellations is Cassiopeia, which is easily recognized by its W-shape in the sky. As oneRead More →

Weekly Space Hangout – February 3, 2017: Meredith Rawls & the LSST Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Special Guest: Meredith Rawls Meredith is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. She writes software to prepare for the coming onslaught of data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and studies weird binary stars. She is also the lead organizer of the ComSciCon-Pacific Northwest workshop for STEM graduate students in Seattle this March. Meredith holds degrees in physics and astronomy from Harvey Mudd College, San Diego State University, and New Mexico State University. When she’s not science-ing or telling people all aboutRead More →

Meteorite Confirms 2 Billion Years of Volcanic Activity on Mars Mars is renowned for having the largest volcano in our Solar System, Olympus Mons. New research shows that Mars also has the most long-lived volcanoes. The study of a Martian meteorite confirms that volcanoes on Mars were active for 2 billion years or longer. A lot of what we know about the volcanoes on Mars we’ve learned from Martian meteorites that have made it to Earth. The meteorite in this study was found in Algeria in 2012. Dubbed Northwest Africa 7635 (NWA 7635), this meteorite was actually seen travelling through Earth’s atmosphere in July 2011.Read More →

A Novel Concept For Braking Breakthrough Starshot In April of 2o16, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced the creation of Breakthrough Starshot. As part of his non-profit scientific organization (known as Breakthrough Initiatives), the purpose of Starshot was to design a lightsail nanocraft that would be capable of reaching the nearest star system – Alpha Centauri (aka. Rigel Kentaurus) within our lifetime. Since its inception, the scientists and engineers behind the Starshot concept have sought to address the challenges that such a mission would face. Similarly, there have been many in the scientific community who have also made suggestions as to how such a concept couldRead More →

Superbowl Smackdown: Watch the Moon Occult Aldebaran on Sunday Can you see it? Dave Walker accidentally (!) caught Aldebaran near the daytime Moon on October 19th, 2016. Image credit and copyright: Dave Walker Author’s note: This Superbowl Sunday event and 101 more like it are featured in our latest free e-book, 101 Astronomical Events for 2017, out now from Universe Today. Sure, this Superbowl Sunday brings with it the promise of sacks, fumbles and tackles… but have you ever seen the Moon run down a star in the end zone? Just such an event, referred to as an occultation, happens this weekend for folks livingRead More →

Get Away From It All with these Amazing DTM Views of Mars By day, Kevin Gill is a software engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But on nights and weekends he takes data from spacecraft and turns them into scenes that can transport you directly to the surface of Mars. Gill is one of many so-called “amateur” image editing enthusiasts that take real, high-resolution data from spacecraft and create views that can make you feel like you are standing on the surface of Mars, or out flying around the Solar System. Gasa Crater on Mars. Rendered using Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop. HiRISE data processedRead More →

Preleminary Results In NASA Twins Study Released In 1996, something remarkable happened at NASA. Twin brothers Mark and Scott Kelly were accepted into NASA; Mark as a shuttle pilot, and Scott into technical operations on the ground, at least initially. Eventually, both brothers became astronauts. They are the only siblings to have both been in space. Whether it was intentional or not, having twin brothers gave NASA an important opportunity. They could use one twin as a control group, and send the other on a prolonged mission into space. That allowed NASA to carry out important research on the effects of space travel on theRead More →

What is the Weather like on Mars? Mars is often referred to as “Earth’s Twin”, due to the similarities it has with our planet. They are both terrestrial planets, both have polar ice caps, and (at one time) both had viable atmospheres and liquid water on their surfaces. But beyond that, the two are quite different. And when it comes to their atmospheres and climates, Mars stands apart from Earth in some rather profound ways. For instance, when it comes to the weather on Mars, the forecast is usually quite dramatic. Not only does Martian weather vary from day to day, it sometimes varies fromRead More →

Outstanding Opportunity Rover Making ‘Amazing New Discoveries’ 13 Years After Mars Touchdown 13 Years on Mars! On Christmas Day 2016, NASA’s Opportunity rover scans around vast Endeavour crater as she ascends steep rocky slopes on the way to reach a water carved gully along the eroded craters western rim. This navcam camera photo mosaic was assembled from raw images taken on Sol 4593 (25 Dec. 2016) and colorized. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo NASA’s truly outstanding Opportunity rover continues “making new discoveries about ancient Mars” as she commemorates 13 Years since bouncing to a touchdown on Mars, in a feat that is “truly amazing” –Read More →

What is a Butte? During the 16h century, Spanish explorers ventured north from Mexico looking for gold and the legendary “Seven cities of Cibola”. What they found instead were some of the most amazing natural formations in the world, which are today known as “buttes”. To the local Hopi, Navajo, and other indigenous nations, these features – which resemble tall, isolated plateaus – have been regarded as sacred sites since time immemorial. By the beginning of the 19th century, the term “butte” entered common parlance and quickly became adopted by the geological community. And while their existence was something of a mystery for thousands ofRead More →

Vortex Coronagraph A Game Changer For Seeing Close In Exoplanets The study of exoplanets has advanced a great deal in recent years, thanks in large part to the Kepler mission. But that mission has its limitations. It’s difficult for Kepler, and for other technologies, to image regions close to their stars. Now a new instrument called a vortex coronagraph, installed at Hawaii’s Keck Observatory, allows astronomers to look at protoplanetary disks that are in very close proximity to the stars they orbit. The problem with viewing disks of dust, and even planets, close to their stars is that stars are so much brighter than objectsRead More →