Space News/UFO's Etc...(Discussion/Pics/Vids)

[ilan]

The Sky This Week for October 7 to October 16
Richard Talcott, Astronomy Magazine | Friday, October 07, 2016

The first quarter Moon, shooting stars, and other beautiful things to look for in the sky this week.

Michael Seeley/ Flickr
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Friday, October 7

The waxing crescent Moon continues to climb higher in the early evening sky. Tonight, you can find it nearly 10° to the upper right of Mars. The Red Planet remains a stunning sight all this week. It shines at magnitude 0.1 and appears about 20° high in the south-southwest as twilight fades to darkness. Target Mars through a telescope this evening and you’ll see an 8"-diameter disk with a few subtle dark markings. The eyepiece view also should reveal the 9th-magnitude globular star cluster NGC 6638. In a spectacularly close conjunction tonight, the planet skims just 4' south of the cluster.

Saturday, October 8

The First Quarter Moon appears high in the south as darkness falls and remains on view until nearly midnight local daylight time. Our satellite officially reaches its First Quarter phase at 12:33 a.m. EDT tomorrow morning (9:33 p.m. PDT today), but it looks half-lit all evening. The Moon lies among the background stars of northern Sagittarius, above that constellation’s Teapot asterism.

Sunday, October 9

Mars’ eastward motion against the backdrop of Sagittarius carries it 1.6° south of the 5th-magnitude globular cluster M22. The best views should come through binoculars and rich-field telescopes.

Javier Vieras/ Flickr
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Monday, October 10

Mercury’s finest morning apparition of 2016 is winding down. Although the planet reached greatest elongation from the Sun on September 28, it continues to brighten in early October and remains well-placed. The inner world shines at magnitude –1.1 this morning and lies 6° above the eastern horizon 30 minutes before sunrise. You should be able to see it with your naked eye, though binoculars can help you to find it initially in the twilight glow. Don’t confuse it with Jupiter, which is now returning to view before dawn. (The giant planet passed behind the Sun in late September.) This morning, magnitude –1.7 Jupiter appears 1.6° below Mercury.

Tuesday, October 11

The Moon’s absence from the morning sky these next few days provides observers with an excellent opportunity to view the zodiacal light. From the Northern Hemisphere, the time around the autumnal equinox (which occurred September 22) is the best for viewing the elusive glow before sunrise. It appears slightly fainter than the Milky Way, so you’ll need a clear moonless sky and an observing site located far from the city. Look for a cone-shaped glow that points nearly straight up from the eastern horizon shortly before morning twilight begins (around 5:30 a.m. local daylight time at mid-northern latitudes). The Moon remains out of the morning sky until October 15, when the waxing gibbous returns and overwhelms the much fainter zodiacal light.

Mercury and Jupiter appear side by side in this morning’s twilight sky. Jupiter, which shines slightly brighter, lies 0.8° to Mercury’s right.

Wednesday, October 12

Although the Orionid meteor shower doesn’t peak until next week (the morning of the 21st), you should see a few “shooting stars” associated with it before dawn these next few days. The Moon-free observing conditions in the morning sky now offer better viewing prospects than the waning gibbous Moon will at the shower’s peak. These meteors appear to radiate from the northern part of the constellation Orion the Hunter.

Thursday, October 13

The variable star Algol in Perseus reaches minimum brightness at 1:00 a.m. EDT tomorrow morning, when it shines at magnitude 3.4. If you start tracking it this evening, you can watch it more than triple in brightness (to magnitude 2.1) in the span of a few hours. This eclipsing binary star runs through a cycle from minimum to maximum and back every 2.87 days. Algol remains visible all night, passing nearly overhead around 3 a.m. local daylight time.

WikiMedia Commons
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Friday, October 14

Saturn remains a gorgeous sight in the evening sky all week. It stands about 15° high in the southwest an hour after sunset and doesn’t set until 9 p.m. local daylight time. The ringed world shines at magnitude 0.5 among the background stars of southwestern Ophiuchus. When viewed through a telescope, Saturn shows a 16"-diameter disk surrounded by a dramatic ring system that spans 35" and tilts 26° to our line of sight.

Saturday, October 15

Full Moon officially arrives at 12:23 a.m. EDT tomorrow morning (9:23 p.m. PDT this evening). You can find it rising in the east around sunset and peaking in the south around 1 a.m. local daylight time. It dips low in the west by the time morning twilight starts to paint the sky. The Moon lies in southern Pisces near that constellation’s border with Cetus. October’s Full Moon also goes by the name “Hunter’s Moon.” In early autumn, the Full Moon rises about half an hour later each night compared with a normal lag close to 50 minutes. The added early evening illumination supposedly helps hunters track down their prey.

Uranus reaches opposition and peak visibility today. Opposition officially arrives at 7 a.m. EDT, when the outer planet lies opposite the Sun in our sky. This means it rises at sunset, climbs highest in the south around 1 a.m. local daylight time, and sets at sunrise. The magnitude 5.7 planet lies in southern Pisces 2.6° northwest of magnitude 4.8 Mu (m) Piscium. Although Uranus normally shines brightly enough to glimpse with the naked eye under a dark sky, you won’t see it tonight because the Full Moon lies just 3° to its south. Use binoculars to locate the planet or, better yet, wait until the bright Moon isn’t so close. A telescope reveals Uranus’ blue-green disk, which spans 3.7".

Sunday, October 16

Brilliant Venus stands out low in the southwest during evening twilight. The inner planet lies about 10° above the horizon a half-hour after sunset and sets as twilight comes to a close. At magnitude –3.9, Venus is the brightest object in the evening sky after the Moon.

The Moon reaches perigee, the closest point in its orbit around Earth, at 7:34 p.m. EDT. It then lies 222,364 miles (357,861 kilometers) away from us.

 

[ilan]

Is NASA Changing Course On Mars Exploration?
Evan Gough, Universe Today | Article Updated: 9 Oct , 2016

With an increasing number of companies and countries proposing missions to Mars, NASA may be changing how it conducts its missions there. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS ​

With rival companies SpaceX and United Launch Alliance making serious plans to get to Mars, NASA’s future role in the exploration of Mars may be about to change. As it stands now, NASA is the only organization to have a successful mission to Mars under its belt. But with private companies in the USA, and organizations from other countries setting their sights on Mars, NASA is beginning to re-think how it does things.

NASA’s Mars missions work like this: individual teams of scientists propose payloads designed to study a particular aspect of Mars. The instruments are then built into the overall design of the rover, or orbiter, then that same team of scientists manages that instrument and collects the data.

Obviously, this has worked well in the past. But the context of Martian exploration is changing. China and the European Space Agency both have plans to send rovers to Mars, and United Arab Emirates plans to send an orbiter. While NASA has been sending a steady stream of missions to Mars, there is only one more planned, the Mars 2020 Rover.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover and its suite of instruments. Image: NASA

SpaceX plans to begin sending their Dragon landers to Mars starting in 2018, though the first one will not be manned. A short time ago the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced even more ambitious plans for travel to Mars. SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System is designed to allow a permanent human colony on Mars. The proposed timeline is ambitious, with the first cargo-only flight launching no sooner than 2022, and the first trip carrying humans launching during the next Earth-Mars window about 2 years later.

Not to be outdone, rival company United Launch Alliance, (a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) recently announced that they think they can get to Mars even sooner. At The Atlantic’s “What’s Next” conference, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said “I’m convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket.”

Those are bold words, for sure. Boastful, even. But Boeing has a track record of success when it comes to space flight, having developed or co-developed projects like the Saturn-V rocket that carried the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. (Incidentally, the Saturn-V rockets remains the most powerful rocket ever built. But not for much longer.) As for SpaceX, they have a growing track record of success themselves.

So where does this game of Martian one-upmanship leave NASA?

“The era that we all know and love and embrace is really coming to an end.”
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The head of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program is Jim Watzin. On October 6th he told a meeting of the Mars advisory group that “The era that we all know and love and embrace is really coming to an end. It’s important to recognize that the future is not going to be the same as the past.”

The words sound a little foreboding, perhaps. But they don’t signal an end to NASA’s exploration of Mars so much as a change in the model of how that exploration is done. And the new model may closely resemble how telescope observing time is doled out on both terrestrial telescopes and space telescopes.

Observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope is doled out by a committe that reviews requests from astronomers. Terrestrial telescopes are managed the same way. Image: NASA/STScI

With telescopes, astronomers submit detailed requests for observing time, outlining how much time they need and what they’d like to study. A committee looks over all the proposals and decides how the telescope time will be allocated. That model has been very successful.

Future NASA Mars exploration missions would work in a similar way. An orbiter would have a suite of instruments, and planetary scientists would submit proposals to use those instruments for periods of time to study certain things.

“I’m not trying to fix something that’s broken.”
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“I’m not trying to fix something that’s broken,” Watzin said. “I’m trying to open the door to a larger level of collaboration and participation than we have today, looking to the fact that we’re going to have a larger pool of stakeholders involved in our missions.”

It’s important to note that there is no official change in NASA policy at this time. It’s just an idea. At the same meeting of the Mars advisory group, planetary scientist Jeffrey Johnson, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said “The idea right now needs to be fleshed out.” He added, “It’s a little early yet to figure out how the community is going to respond.”

“We’ve managed to do all the things [Watzin] described already without a new paradigm.”
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But the community has already begun to respond, and not everyone is enthusiastic about this potential change. Alfred McEwen, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told Nature.com that “We’ve managed to do all the things [Watzin] described already without a new paradigm.”

This image of Meridiani Planum on Mars was captured by the HiRise Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. HiRise has captured thousands of images of Mars based on requests from the public. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

McEwen would know. He is the Principal Investigator the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRise Camera. “We have distributed operations, we have multiple customers, we have a foreign contributed instrument. So my immediate reaction to this idea was not very positive,” McEwen said.

The playing field on Mars is definitely changing, though, and what has more or less been a NASA monopoly on Mars is changing. With more countries heading to Mars, and with private companies leading the charge, change is most definitely coming to Martian exploration. Whether this specific “time-share “model of investigation is adopted, or some other model, don’t expect NASA to sit idly by and keep doing things the same way.

 

[ilan]

Telescope to Seek Earthlike Planet in Alpha Centauri System
Kenneth Changoct, New York Times | 11 October 2016

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An artist’s rendition of an exoplanet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B. Scientists guess there is an 85% probability that there is at least one planet in the habitable zones of the two Alpha Centauri stars. Credit L. Calçada and Nick Risinger/European Southern Observatory

A scientific research consortium on Tuesday announced plans to build and launch a privately financed telescope the size of a small washing machine in hopes of finding an Earthlike planet in the Alpha Centauri system, one of our closest cosmic neighbors.

Jon Morse, the chief executive of the BoldlyGo Institute, one of two nonprofits leading the consortium, called it “the holy grail of exoplanet research.” If there is a “pale blue dot” — a world covered in oceans — at Alpha Centauri, the telescope would permit scientists to study it in detail, looking for signs of life in the light reflected off the atmosphere.

To be built by the end of the decade, the telescope is the type of mission that NASA rarely undertakes, experts noted: tightly focused and cheap, leading to momentous discoveries — or possibly nothing at all.

The two stars of the Alpha Centauri system are both similar to the sun, the closest such stars at 4.37 light-years away. The proposed telescope, with a mirror only about 20 inches across, would be able to make out Earth-size planets orbiting in the stars’ so-called habitable zone, where temperatures are warm enough for liquid water to flow at the surface and, hypothetically, for life to thrive.

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered a multitude of Earth-size planets in the galaxy, and in August astronomers using ground-based telescopes announced the discovery of a potentially habitable planet around Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor at a distance of 4.22 light-years.

But Proxima Centauri is much smaller and dimmer than our sun, and the planet, even if similar in size to Earth, would not be particularly Earthlike. It orbits much closer to the star, likely with one side perpetually in daylight and the other eternally dark. Because the planet is so close to its star, the proposed telescope would not be able to study it.

So far, most exoplanets have been discovered indirectly, deduced by slight perturbations in the light traveling from a star — by a slight dimming when the exoplanet passes between its star and Earth, or by wobbles in the light’s wavelengths caused by the gravitational pull of an unseen exoplanet.

If astronomers could photograph a planet directly, they could start to look for specific wavelengths of light that serve as fingerprints of specific molecules. Detection of oxygen in the atmosphere would argue for photosynthesis and plants, for example.

Dr. Morse said the proposed telescope, called Project Blue, would most likely cost $25 million to $50 million, perhaps one-third the cost of a NASA mission with similar goals. That is still a lot of money, and not easily raised.

Crowdfunding through small individual donations might cover some of the early design work, he said, but “we do have to approach high-net-worth individuals and foundations.” Participating institutions, like the SETI Institute and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, could also offer in-kind contributions to the project rather than cash.

A rendering of the compact exoplanet imaging telescope Project Blue plans to launch into orbit and aim at Alpha Centauri. Credit Project Blue

The idea of a telescope pointed at Alpha Centauri is not new. Ruslan Belikov, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., has been working for years as principal investigator on the Alpha Centauri Exoplanet Satellite, or ACESat, developing the technology needed to pick out planets in a binary star system.

The ACESat project has not won NASA approval, however. Eduardo Bendek, ACESat’s deputy principal investigator, estimated that there was a 15 percent chance that there are no planets in the habitable zones of the two Alpha Centauri stars. “NASA is very averse to that risk,” he said.

To reduce the chances of discovering nothing, the ACESat team proposed a mission that would examine not just Alpha Centauri but also a few other nearby stars. But expanding the mission — plus other considerations to reduce risks — increased the price tag.

Dr. Belikov and Dr. Bendek declined to provided specific figures, but said the total budget fit under the required $175 million cost cap when they submitted the proposal to NASA’s Small Explorer astrophysics program in 2014.

Instead, NASA selected three other missions for further study. ACESat remains unbuilt, and the next opportunity to submit a proposal is most likely in 2019, Dr. Belikov and Dr. Bendek said.

“I can’t speak for NASA,” Dr. Beikov said, “but speaking personally, I’m excited about the possibility of doing space missions privately.”

So far, privately financed space missions have met with limited success. Competitors in the Google Lunar X Prize, to send the first private spacecraft to the moon, have had trouble finding backers. Planetary Resources, a Seattle company aiming to mine asteroids, withdrew a plan for a crowdfunded space telescope, sending back contributions collected on Kickstarter.

Another project, Lunar Mission One, intended to send a robotic lander to the moon’s south pole, successfully raised about $1 million via Kickstarter, but probably needs more than 600 times as much to pull it off.

BoldlyGo is also pursuing two more ambitious projects — a larger space telescope, and a spacecraft to collect samples from the Martian atmosphere and bring them back to Earth — that have not yet gotten off the ground.

Dr. Morse, who once ran NASA’s astrophysics division, agrees that Project Blue will not be easy, but says it is possible. For more than a century, he notes, astronomers have relied on the generosity of rich benefactors.

“All we’re doing is borrowing the model that ground-based astronomy has been using literally since the time of John Quincy Adams,” Dr. Morse said. “We think that quest is worthy, and we’re going to try to do it with private funding.”

 

[ilan]

The Universe is 10 times more vast than we thought
Nathaniel Scharping, Astronomy Magazine | Thursday, October 13, 2016
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There are at least 10 times more galaxies than once thought.
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A composite of images from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field study.
NASA/ESA
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The universe seems a little less lonely today.

Astronomers from the University of Nottingham conducted a new survey of the universe’s galaxy population and concluded that previous estimates lowballed the census by a factor of about 20. Using data from Hubble and telescopes around the world, as well as a new mathematical model, they estimate that there are ten times more galaxies in the observable universe than we thought; previous estimates put the number of galaxies in the universe at around 200 billion.

Looking Through Time and Space

To understand how the researchers accomplished their task, we first need to understand what they mean by the “observable universe.” Because the speed of light is fixed, we can never get a true picture of what the universe looks like right now. As we look farther and farther away, we must necessarily look further back in time as well.

So, in discovering how many galaxies exist in the observable universe, the Nottingham researchers haven’t discovered how many galaxies exist right now, they’ve found out how many galaxies we would be able to see if our instruments were good enough. This may seem like a big caveat, but it’s the only way can observe the far-flung universe. Being able to look back in time has its advantages, however.

To reach their conclusion, the researchers looked at the rate of galaxy mergers throughout the universe. Most galaxies likely started small, and grew through a series of mergers with other galaxies as time went on. Because the researchers could see clusters further and further back in time as they looked deeper, they could compare the concentration of galaxies long ago to more recent times — relatively speaking.

They found that galaxies appear to clump together as time goes by, forming larger structures while also reducing the total number of galaxies present. By running this rate backward, and extrapolating beyond what we can currently see, the researchers concluded that around 90 percent of the galaxies out there are too faint and too far away to view with current telescopes. This is what allowed them to drastically increase our estimation of the number of observable galaxies.

The researchers released their paper Tuesday on the preprint server arXiv, it is set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Why Can’t We See Them?

This new galaxy census gives us an answer to a decades-old question known as Olbers’ paradox. If there are so many stars and galaxies out there, why can’t we see them all? Given the nearly unimaginable number of stars and galaxies out there, the night sky should be awash in light.

The solution, say the researchers, lies in the huge distances that separate us from most galaxies. Because the universe is expanding, the light that reaches us is subject to a phenomenon called “redshift.” Similar to the Doppler effect that alters the pitch of a passing ambulance, as distant celestial objects move away from us, the wavelengths of light they emit appear to stretch out. Go far enough, and the light will redshift below the level discernible by the human eye, and eventually telescopes. In addition, galaxies and interstellar space between them is filled with tiny particles of dust that absorb and filter out light.

Some of this radiation shows up as background light, a faint diffuse glow of light that appears to have no source. The rest, however, disappears before it ever reaches us.

The James Webb Telescope, set to launch in 2018, may be able to pick out some of these elusive stars. Until then, we’ll just have to believe.

 

[ilan]

If Aliens Call, We Might Not Want To Answer, Says Stephen Hawking
Hilary Harrison, Huffington Post| 09/23/2016 08:55 pm ET
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Stephen Hawking has said it before and he’ll say it again: If extraterrestrials call, do not answer ― at least, not without careful consideration.

The renowned theoretical physicists hosts “Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places,” a new short film available on the streaming service Curiosity Stream. The film follows Hawking around the universe as he “travels” in a computer-generated imagery spacecraft, giving the audience a peek into simulations of a black hole and Gliese 832c, an earth-like planet outside our solar system that scientists believe may be able to support life.

And Gliese 832c isn’t even the closet possible second-Earth. In August, scientists announced that Proxima b, a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri — the nearest known star to our sun — has a temperature that could allow liquid water and is possibly habitable.

But if we ever get a signal from any of these places, Hawking warns that we shouldn’t be too eager to say hello.

“We should be wary of answering back,” he says in the film, according to USAToday. “Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus — that didn’t turn out so well.”

It’s an idea Hawking has expressed numerous times before — typically using human beings as an example of why we shouldn’t trust other intelligent life.

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he told The Times of London in 2010. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

Well, we’re convinced. NASA, we really hope you’re listening.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

The moon looks great tonight (last night too)


Look Up — The Moon Is Going To Be Amazing This Weekend

This weekend, you might want to take a moment to look up at what promises to be a spectacular supermoon.


Added bonus: It's also a hunter's moon. "That's because in other months, the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day, while the October moon rises just 30 minutes later," National Geographic explains. "That offers more light overall during a 24-hour day, which came in handy for traditional hunters."


Viewing will be at its best on Sunday, when the moon is both full and "at its closest point to our planet as it orbits Earth," according to NASA. National Geographic advises that the best time to see it is as it rises on Sunday evening.


NASA says the term supermoon simply means a "full moon that is closer to Earth than average."

NPR.ORG

 

[ilan]

I went for a very, very early morning walk, and the full moon was "giving off" a great deal of light. It looked like a mini-sun. Gorgeous little critter...

 

[ilan]

NASA's MAVEN mission gives unprecedented ultraviolet view of Mars
NASA | October 18, 2016
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MAVEN's Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph obtained images of rapid cloud formation on Mars on July 9-10, 2016. The ultraviolet colors of the planet have been rendered in false color, to show what we would see with ultraviolet-sensitive eyes. Mars' tallest volcano, Olympus Mons, appears as a prominent dark region near the top of the image, with a small white cloud at the summit that grows during the day. Three more volcanoes appear in a diagonal row, with their cloud cover (white areas near center) merging to span up to a thousand miles by the end of the day.
Credit: NASA/MAVEN/University of Colorado
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New global images of Mars from the MAVEN mission show the ultraviolet glow from the Martian atmosphere in unprecedented detail, revealing dynamic, previously invisible behavior. They include the first images of "nightglow" that can be used to show how winds circulate at high altitudes. Additionally, dayside ultraviolet imagery from the spacecraft shows how ozone amounts change over the seasons and how afternoon clouds form over giant Martian volcanoes. The images were taken by the Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph (IUVS) on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN).

"MAVEN obtained hundreds of such images in recent months, giving some of the best high-resolution ultraviolet coverage of Mars ever obtained," said Nick Schneider of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Schneider is presenting these results Oct. 19 at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena, California, which is being held jointly with the European Planetary Science Congress.

 

[ilan]

Planet Nine may be responsible for tilting the Sun
Shannon Stirone, Astronomy.com | Wednesday, October 19, 2016

How our possible rogue planet may be messing with our solar system

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Artist's impression of Planet Nine as an ice giant eclipsing the central Milky Way
WikiMedia Commons
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Earlier this year an announcement raised a tantalizing possibility: a ninth planet lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. The announcement turned the astronomy and planetary science world upside down.

Caltech astronomer Michael Brown and theoretical astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin found evidence for a possible 10 Earth mass planet that may be tilting long-orbiting dwarf planets on their sides and shepherding them into clusters far past the orbit of Neptune in highly eccentric orbits. In the last several months, more and more papers have been published about the possible planet and how it might prove an explanation for other strange things happening in our solar system.

At a press conference held this afternoon, at the AAS Division of Planetary Sciences annual meeting in Pasadena Ca, another announcement was made about Planet Nine’s effects on the spin-axis tilt of our Sun. This time, the paper titled Solar Obliquity Induced by Planet Nine is lead by Caltech graduate student Elizabeth Bailey, with Brown and Batygin as co-authors.

We’ve known that the Sun is tilted for about 200 years, but scientists have never known why. Only the catch here is, the Sun isn’t actually tilted at all. We are. To explain this oddity and what’s happening to our solar system we spoke with co-author and theoretical astrophysicist, Konstantin Batygin.

Astronomy Magazine: What’s happening with the alignment in our solar system?

Konstantin Batygin: When planetary systems form, they form from very flat discs. The motion that everything in our entire planetary system forms in a very proto planetary flat disc is one of the basic principles of planetary formation theory. The planetary orbits themselves are fully consistent- If you look at how inclined the planets are with respect to each other they are only inclined by no more than one degree so the planets of the solar system are remarkably flat.


AM: What about the Sun?

KB: The Sun's rotation was measured for the first time in 1850 and something that was recognized right away as that its spin axis, its north pole, is tilted with respect to the rest of the planets by 6 degrees. So even though 6 degrees isn’t much, it is a big number compared to the mutual planet-planet misalignments. So the Sun is basically an outlier within the solar system. This is a long-standing issue and one that is recognized but people don’t really talk much about it. Everything in the solar system rotates roughly on the same plane except for the most massive object, the Sun which is kind of a big deal.

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Hypothetical Planet 9, and 9 related eTNOs
WikiMedia Commons
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AM: Why is there this misalignment between the Sun and the orbits of the planets?

KB: We asked ourselves, “what obliquity, what misalignment would Planet Nine induce in the solar system?” because it must induce some. We know that Planet Nine’s orbit in inclined. As a result, when Planet Nine torques the rest of the solar system, the two sort of act as two precessing tops. Planet Nine being in its own plane induced a precession on the remainder of the solar system as if the plane of the solar system was a flat top on the surface of a table.


AM: So Planet Nine’s gravitational influence is forcing the solar system to wobble?

KB: If you imagine that the Sun and the planets were co-planar, meaning they were locked into the same plane 4 billion years ago, and allow the clock to run forward in the presence of Planet Nine, then 4 billion years later the Sun would have been apparently tilted by exactly it’s current obliquity, or 6 degrees. But what’s actually going on is that the Sun is staying put in its fixed reference frame and it’s the planetary orbits that are being tilted by Planet Nine. So Planet Nine has tilted the entire disk of the solar system by 6 degrees and because we live on that disc … to us it looks like the Sun is tilted, but it’s actually the other way around.


AM: How could Planet Nine have that much influence on our entire solar system when it’s so far out?

KB: Here’s why: Planet Nine is only 10 Earth masses as compared to Jupiter’s 300 Earth masses, but its orbit is huge. So it’s an argument that is basically like an asymmetrical see-saw or a dolly. Planet Nine has a really long orbit so it can assert quite a bit of torque on the inner planets without having to apply so much force. Planet Nine has as much angular momentum as the entire solar system combined, because it’s orbit is so big.


AM: Have there been other theories about how this tilt may have happened before your theory of Planet Nine?

KB: I actually had theorized this in 2012 and wrote about it and the theory was almost exactly the same, except for it wasn’t Planet Nine doing the torqueing but a companion star. I theorized that a young star was bound to the Sun, and tilting the entire proto-planetary disc from which planets form. It’s believed that most stars are born binary but most of them lose their companions by the time they come out of the birth cluster.


AM: Does this help us better understand planet formation or solar system formation?

KB: It does help us understand planet formation because planet formation theory dictates that all things must start out co-planar, in the same plane. The fact that the Sun is tilted with respect to the rest of the solar system is almost a violation of that very fundamental principle, so understanding what’s going on there is important. But there’s also a second component to why this calculation is interesting. We very quickly realized that Planet Nine must do something, it must tilt the solar system by some angle and we thought to ourselves what if this angle was really big? What if the Sun was tilted by 40 degrees in our calculations? That would actually be evidence against Planet Nine, instead we got this beautiful agreement of the theory.


AM: Has this new data helped with your search for Planet Nine?

KB: What we’ve found is that the direction into which the Sun is tilted by Planet Nine is intimately related to the orbit of Planet Nine itself. This is more or less a consistency check, it doesn’t help us or really provide too much new information but it gives us more confidence that we are actually barking up the right tree

 

[ilan]

Orionid meteor shower
By Jason Hanna, CNN
Updated 2:37 PM ET, Fri October 21, 2016​

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(CNN) The sky will put on a heck of a show tonight.

The annual Orionid meteor shower peaks Friday night into Saturday morning. If you have an unclouded view of the night sky, preferably away from city lights, you'll see beautiful streaks of light zipping overhead.

What are the Orionids?

They're one of a few major yearly meteor showers. The Orionids -- so named because the meteors appear to radiate out from near the Orion constellation -- happen from October to November. This year, the showtime is October 4 through November 14.

 

[ilan]

NASA’s Kepler space telescope discovered ‘heartbeat’ stars
Nicole Kiefert, Astronomy Magazine | Monday, October 24, 2016

These interesting stars will be helpful for scientists studying gravitational effects of stars

This artist's concept depicts "heartbeat stars," which have been detected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and others.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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A study using NASA’s Kepler space telescope discovered a large number of heartbeat stars, or binary stars that would look like an electrocardiogram if brightness were mapped out over time.

Scientists are interested in the heartbeat stars because they are binary systems in elongated elliptical orbits, which make them useful for studying gravitational effects of stars on each other.

Kepler discovered several heartbeat stars in the last few years; a study in 2011 it discovered star KOI-54 that increases in brightness every 41.8 days and a study in 2012 characterized 17 similar objects.

The distance between the two stars in a heartbeat star system varies as they orbit each other and can get as close as a few stellar radii to each other and as far as 10 times that distance during one orbit.

When the stars are at their closest encounter, the joint gravitational pull causes them to become an elliptical shape, which is why their light is so variable.

The mutual gravitational pull is the same type of “tidal force” that causes ocean tides on Earth. Tidal force also causes the diameters of the stars to rapidly fluctuate as they orbit each other, which makes them vibrate or “ring.”

Avi Shporer, NASA Sagan postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California was lead author on a recent study of heartbeat stars that was published in the Astrophysical Journal. The study used the HighResolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES), an instrument that measures wavelengths of incoming light, to measure the orbits of 19 heartbeat star systems, the largest group ever characterized in a one study.

The study also suggests that some heartbeat star binary systems may have a third or even a fourth star in the system that hasn’t been detected yet.

Researchers are currently doing follow-up studies to search for third-star components in heartbeat star systems.

 

[ilan]

Scientists aim largest telescope possible at ‘alien megastructure’ star (Video)
Ben Guarino, Washington Post | October 27, 2016

See 3:00 minute video at the bottom of the page - Ilan

UC Berkeley scientists are training the largest fully steerable radio telescope at Tabby's star, a star shrouded in mystery and speculation of extraterrestrial life. (Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally/UC Berkeley) ​

Early Thursday morning, a new and powerful effort was underway to explore a mystery 1,500 light-years away. West Virginia’s Green Bank Telescope was hard at work, sucking up information about a strange winking star.
​

The giant radio telescope is the biggest of its kind, with a 330-foot-wide parabolic dish, making the device the largest steerable telescope on Earth. The Green Bank Telescope is tucked away among the sleepy Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia, where state and federal laws enforce an electromagnetic quiet zone to keep interference to a minimum.

For astronomers and space buffs, the star in question, KIC 8462852, has been anything but quiet. The new Green Bank Telescope effort, announced Tuesday, is the deepest probe of KIC 8462852 yet, part of University of California at Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen program — the $100 million project backed by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner with support from Stephen Hawking.

“We can look at it with greater sensitivity and for a wider range of signal types than any other experiment in the world,” said Andrew Siemion, of Berkeley’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center, in a news release.

Last year, scientists led by Louisiana State University astronomer Tabetha S. Boyajian published a lightning rod of a study: Observations taken from the Kepler spacecraft revealed that KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star after Boyajian, did not behave like other stars.

Specifically, Tabby’s Star flickered.

The star’s flux — its brightness — dipped by as much as a fifth over the course of Kepler’s observations, The Washington Post reported last October. By way of comparison, should a planet as huge as Jupiter swoop in front of KIC 8462852, in a move known as a transit, such a gas-giant-size journey would dim the star only by 1 percent. (Tabby’s Star is also known as the WTF Star — for Where’s the Flux. Though, we suspect the abbreviation could stand for something else too.)

What’s more, the extreme dimming did not follow a constant pattern. The dips varied in duration, as though the star were blinking fast and slow. For a star of its size and age, this was unprecedented behavior.

If you are familiar with what happens when a space-science mystery meets an unprecedented observation, you might be able to guess where speculation went. Even some astronomers, meticulous by profession, were not afraid to float the a-word: Could the dimming, however unlikely, be signs of alien life?

“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider,” Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright told the Atlantic magazine, “but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

One popularly cited idea was a Dyson structure, a hypothetical device that could collect energy from a sun using a network akin to orbiting solar panels. Tabby’s Star gained yet another nickname, the “alien megastructure” star.

When asked during a live chat Wednesday afternoon about the meaning of a non-natural source of flicker, Siemion said that “the implications could be as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as could possibly be imagined,” paraphrasing “Contact.”

To be clear, scientists remained incredibly skeptical that the dimming had a technological cause. “I don’t think it’s very likely – a one in a billion chance or something like that,” said Berkeley SETI’s chief scientist, Dan Werthimer, on Tuesday. That there was a star acting in an unprecedented way was itself not unprecedented, as the 1967 discovery of pulsars showed.

Since the fall of 2015, various scientists, astronomers and SETI researchers have pointed a host of devices at Tabby’s Star. In November, the SETI Institute revealed it had failed to detect narrow or broadband radio signals using the 42 antennas of the Allen Telescope Array, near San Francisco.

“So far,” as The Post’s Rachel Feltman wrote at the time, “we’ve got nothing.”

Later that month, Iowa State University scientists argued that a natural cause, a collection of comets, could explain the winks of Tabby’s Star. That explanation has been a source of debate, leading one astronomer to declare in January that all hypotheses published thus far had been unsatisfactory. Where’s the Flux, indeed.

“It’s been looked at with Hubble, it’s been looked at with Keck, it’s been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments,” Siemion said. “Nothing has been found.”

Enter the Green Bank Observatory. Pointed at Tabby’s Star, the telescope has embarked on a project to comb hundreds of millions of individual radio channels. The telescope’s observations Thursday were associated with human technologies, exploring a spectrum from 1 to 12 gigahertz, which would include some cellphone operating frequencies up to those of television satellites. At the end of the three eight-hour nights, spaced out over two months, the astronomers will have collected about a petabyte of data (a million gigabytes, or the data equivalent to what 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets can hold).

If there are two things for certain about KIC 8462852, it is that the star remains fascinating, and that scientists 1,500 light-years away are committed to taking the hardest look at Tabby’s Star they can.

See Video:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/54001a2e-9c1b-11e6-b552-b1f85e484086

 

[ilan]

2016’s longest lunar month starts today
Bruce McClure, Astronomy Essentials | October 30, 2016

The lengths of lunar months vary in part because the moon’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle.
​

​

Simulated view of the moon’s phases.
​

What is a lunar month? It’s just the duration between successive new moons. Also called a lunation or synodic month, it has a mean period of 29.53059 days (29 days 12 hours and 44 minutes). That’s the mean, but the the actual length varies throughout the year. The lunar month beginning today – October 30, 2016 – is the longest lunar month of 2016. It lasts for 29 days 18 hours and 40 minutes, until November 30.

That’s 5 hours and 56 minutes longer than the mean.

And it’s 11 hours and 20 minutes longer than 2016’s shortest lunar month, which happened between the new moons of May 6 and June 5.

 

[ilan]

Astronomers Snap Picture of Giant Exoplanet 1,200 Light-Years Away
Sergio Prostak, Sci News | Oct 31, 2016

An international team of astronomers has discovered a giant extrasolar planet orbiting a young star called CVSO 30. Not only have the scientists detected the planet, but they’ve also taken a direct image of it.

CVSO 30c is the small dot to the upper left of the frame. The large blob
is the star CVSO 30 itself. Image credit: ESO.
​

CVSO 30, also known as 2MASS J05250755+0134243 and PTFO 8-8695, is a young T Tauri star of spectral type M3.

It is located in the constellation Orion, approximately 1,200 light-years from us, and is a member of a cluster of almost 200 low-mass stars collectively known as the 25 Orionis association.

A highly variable, fast rotating star, CVSO 30 has a mass of 0.39 solar masses and a temperature of about 5,800 degrees Fahrenheit (3,200 degrees Celsius).

CVSO 30 is also very young, with an estimated age between 2 and 3 million years, making it one of the youngest objects within the 25 Orionis group.

In 2012, astronomers with the Palomar Transit Factory survey found that the star hosted a so-called ‘hot-Jupiter’ exoplanet, CVSO 30b.

Now, a research team led by Dr. Tobias Schmidt of the Universities of Hamburg and Jena has imaged what is likely to be a second planet.

To produce the image, the team exploited the astrometry provided by NACO and SINFONI instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope.

CVSO 30b is 6 times the mass of Jupiter, while the newly-discovered planet, named CVSO 30c, has a mass between 4 and 5 Jupiter masses.

CVSO 30b orbits very close to the parent star, whirling around it in 10.76 hours at an orbital distance of 0.008 AU.

CVSO 30c orbits significantly further out, at a distance of 660 AU, taking 27,000 years to complete a single orbit.

The astronomers are still exploring how such an exotic planetary system came to form in such a short timeframe, it is possible that the two exoplanets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits.

“CVSO 30 is the first system, in which both a close-in and a wide planet candidate are found to have a common host star,” Dr. Schmidt and co-authors said.

“The orbits of the two possible planets could not be more different, having orbital periods of 10.76 hours and about 27,000 years.”

“Both orbits may have formed during a mutual catastrophic event of planet-planet scattering.”

The discovery was reported in the Sept. 26, 2016 issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (arXiv.org preprint).

 

[ilan]

Twenty Five Amazing Astronomical Facts
Amazing Space Facts

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1. Saturn's moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere. 2. Life is known to exist only on Earth, but in 1986 NASA found what they thought might be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock from Mars. 3. Most scientists say life's basic chemicals formed on the Earth. The astronomer Fred Hoyle said they came from space. 4. Oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting. 5. The middle layers of space suits are blown up like a balloon to press against the astronaut's body. Without this pressure, the astronaut's body would boil! 6. The gloves included in the space suit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch. 7. The full cost of a spacesuit is about $11 million although 70% of this is for the backpack and the control module. 8. Ever wondered how the pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies? It's simple. Just multiply their masses together, and then divide the total by the square of the distance between them. 9. Glowing nebulae are named so because they give off a dim, red light, as the hydrogen gas in them is heated by radiation from the nearby stars. 10. The Drake Equation was proposed by astronomer Frank Drake to work out how many civilizations there could be in our galaxy - and the figure is in millions. 11. SETI is the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence - the program that analyzes radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life. 12. The Milky Way galaxy we live in: is one among the BILLIONS in space. 13. The Milky Way galaxy is whirling rapidly, spinning our sun and all its other stars at around 100 million km per hour. 14. The Sun travels around the galaxy once every 200 million years – a journey of 100,000 light years. 15. There may be a huge black hole in the very middle of the most of the galaxies. 16. The Universe is probably about 15 billion years old, but the estimations vary. 17. One problem with working out the age of the Universe is that there are stars in our galaxy which are thought to be 14 to 18 billion years old – older than the estimated age of the Universe. So, either the stars must be younger, or the Universe older. 18. The very furthest galaxies are spreading away from us at more than 90% of the speed of light. 19. The Universe was once thought to be everything that could ever exist, but recent theories about inflation (e.g. Big Bang) suggest our universe may be just one of countless bubbles of space time. 20. The Universe may have neither a centre nor an edge, because according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity bends all of space time around into an endless curve. 21. If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti. 22. Matter spiraling into a black hole is torn apart and glows so brightly that it creates the brightest objects in the Universe – quasars. 23. The swirling gases around a black hole turn it into an electrical generator, making it spout jets of electricity billions of kilometers out into space. 24. The opposite of black holes are estimated to be white holes which spray out matter and light like fountains. 25. A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth.

 

[ilan]

Asteroid, discovered yesterday, swept past
Gianluca Masi, Space | November 2, 2016

Astronomers discovered asteroid 2016 VA on November 1, 2016, just hours before it passed within 0.2 times the moon’s distance of Earth. Images here.

Near-Earth asteroid 2016 VA swept within only 0.2 times the moon's distance last night. Image via Virtual Telescope Project.
​

The near-Earth asteroid 2016 VA was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Sky Survey in Arizona (USA) on 1 Nov. 2016 and announced later the same day by the Minor Planet Center. The object was going to have a very close encounter with the Earth, at 0.2 times the moon’s distance – about 75,000 km [46,000 miles]. At Virtual Telescope Project we grabbed extremely spectacular images and a unique video showing the asteroid eclipsed by the Earth.

The image above is a 60-seconds exposure, remotely taken with “Elena” (PlaneWave 17?+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E robotic unit) available at Virtual Telescope. The robotic mount tracked the extremely fast (570″/minute) apparent motion of the asteroid, so stars are trailing. The asteroid is perfectly tracked: it is the sharp dot in the center, marked with two white segments. At the imaging time, asteroid 2016 VA was at about 200,000 km [124,000 miles] from us and approaching. Its diameter should be around 12 meters or so.

During its fly-by, asteroid 2016 VA was also eclipsed by the Earth’s shadow. We covered the spectacular event, clearly capturing also the penumbra effects.

The movie below is an amazing document showing the eclipse. Each frame comes from a 5-seconds integration.

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Asteroid 2016 VA eclipsed by Earth’s shadow. Image via Virtual Telescope Project.
​

The eclipse started around 23:23:56 UT and ended about at 23:34:46. To our knowledge, this is the first video ever of a complete eclipse of an asteroid. Some hot pixels are visible on the image. At the eclipse time, the asteroid was moving with an apparent motion of 1500″/minutes and it was at about 120,000 km [75,000 miles] from the Earth, on its approaching route. You can see here a simulation of the eclipse as if you were on the asteroid.

Bottom line: An asteroid called 2016 VA was discovered on November 1, 2016 and passed closest to Earth – within 0.2 times the moon’s distance – a few hours later. Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project caught images of the asteroid as it swept by.

 

[ilan]

Astronomers find a ‘nearly-naked’ supermassive black hole
Nicole Kiefert, Astronomy | November 02, 2016

A close galactic encounter gave these astronomers an interesting discovery

Artist's conception of how the "nearly naked" supermassive black hole originated
Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
​

Astronomers found a nearly-naked supermassive black hole emerge from the shredded remains of a galaxy and speed away at more than 2,000 miles per second.

This discovery, which was made using the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VBLA), was part of a program to detect supermassive black holes that are not in the center of their galaxies.

While most supermassive black holes are at the center of the galaxies, an object called B3 1715+425 seems to be breaking that pattern. This object was in a cluster of galaxies called ZwCl 8193 and is a supermassive black hole that is in an unexpectedly small, faint galaxy. The object is leaving ionized gas behind as it speeds away from a much larger galaxy’s core.

“We were looking for orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes, with one offset from the center of a galaxy, as telltale evidence of a previous galaxy merger,” James Condon, of the National Radio Observatory, said in a press release. “Instead, we found this black hole fleeing from the larger galaxy and leaving a trail of debris behind it.”

The galaxies the astronomers were observing are more than 2 billion light-years away from Earth and were stripped of their stars and gasses after an encounter where the galaxy passed through a smaller galaxy passed through a larger one. The only remnants of the galaxy are its black hole and a small area about 3,000 light-years across.

According to Concon, the remnant will lose mass and stop forming stars as it continues speeding on until it becomes untraceable, as black holes are invisible to most instruments unless they are interacting with gases or other matter.

 

[ilan]

Hole-punch clouds are made by jets (Part 1)
Jorge Salazar and Deborah Byrd in Earth | Human World | November 4, 2016

Sometimes people report them as UFOs, but they’re called hole-punch clouds and they’re made by jets. The connection between hole-punch clouds, jets and snowfall.

Patricia Evans spotted this hole-punch cloud about a year ago, on November 21, 2015, in a restaurant parking lot.
​

You’re probably familiar with contrails, the wispy strands of clouds made by jet exhaust high in the sky. But if you’ve ever seen a hole-punch cloud, sometimes called a fallstreak hole, you’ll be surprised by their strange appearance. They look like strange clearings in an altocumulus cloud layer, often-circular patches of clear sky, surrounded by clouds. Sometimes people report them as UFOs. Airplanes create hole-punch clouds – but just how do they do it?

According to weather.com, an altocumulus cloud layer is:

… composed of small water droplets that are below freezing called ‘supercooled water droplets.’ If ice crystals can form in the layer of supercooled droplets, they will grow rapidly and shrink or possibly evaporate the droplets completely.

Studies, including this one by Andrew Heymsfield and collaborators, have shown that aircraft passing through these cloud layers can trigger the formation of the heavier ice crystals, which fall to Earth and then leave the circular void in the blanket of clouds.

They concluded that aircraft propellers and wings cause the formation of those initial ice crystals. There are zones of locally low pressure along the wing and propeller tips which allow the air to expand and cool well below the original temperature of the cloud layer, forming ice crystals.

Hole-punch clouds over Caledonia, Wisconsin. Photo via Lisa Anderson

Image via Andrew Heymsfield. Used with permission.

Houston, Minnesota. Photo via Jamie Vix.
​

 

[ilan]

Hole-punch clouds are made by jets (Part 2)
Jorge Salazar and Deborah Byrd in Earth | Human World | November 4, 2016
​

Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research spoke with EarthSky some years ago, when his study first appeared. He told us:

This whole idea of jet aircraft making these features has to do with cooling of air over the wings that generates ice.

His team found that – at lower altitudes – jets can punch holes in clouds and make small amounts of rain and snow. As a plane flies through mid-level clouds, it forces air to expand rapidly and cool. Water droplets in the cloud freeze to ice and then turn to snow as they fall. The gap expands to create spectacular holes in the clouds. He said:

We found an exemplary case of hole-punch clouds over Texas. From satellite imagery you could see holes just pocketing the sky, holes and long channels where aircraft had been flying at that level of the cloud for a while.

Hole-punch cloud. Image via NOAA[/IMG]

Another hole-punch cloud via NOAA

Hole-punch cloud via Editor B
​

Dr. Heymsfield used a weather forecast model developed at NCAR – and radar images of clouds from NASA’s CloudSat satellite – to explain the physics of how jet aircraft make hole-punch clouds.

Heymsfield’s team found that every measurable commercial jet aircraft, private jet aircraft and also military jets as well as turbo props were producing these holes. He said a hole-punch cloud expands for hours after being created. Major airports, where there’s a lot of aircraft traffic, would be a good place to study cloud holes. He said:

What we decided to do was look at major airports around the world, especially where there’s low cloud cover and cold clouds in the wintertime, and found that the frequency of occurrence suitable for this process to occur is actually reasonably high, on the order of three to five percent. In the winter months, it’s probably two to three times higher, 10 to 15 percent.

Image via Andrew Heymsfield. Used with permission.
​

He said people who look out their airplane window in flight can see for themselves how the wing changes a cloud.

When an aircraft lands or takes off sometimes – especially in humid, tropical areas – you see a little veil of clouds over the wings of the aircraft. And basically, what’s happening over the wings of the aircraft, there’s cooling. And the cooling produces a cloud.

It’s basically a super-cooled cloud. It’s just like a fog you see at the ground except that its temperature is zero degrees centigrade. So in that process of expanding, the air expands over the wing and cools. And that cooling can be as much as 20 degrees centigrade.

The cooling of air over the wings generates ice, said Heymsfield.

About the Texas incident where satellite imagery showed many hole-punch openings and channels, Heymsfield said:

What we found was that there were about a hundred of these little features. We decided to, first of all, identify their location and see if we could link them to particular aircraft. Then the second thing we did was say, okay, why do these long channels last for the period of time it would take for a satellite to take a snapshot of them? We got high-time-resolution satellite imagery and were able then to track these features, these holes, and watch them develop with time, watch how they developed.

Bottom Line: Scientists have found that, at mid-altitudes, jet aircraft can punch holes in clouds and make small amounts of rain and snow. These are the strange hole-punch clouds that are sometimes reported as UFOs.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Or.... interdimensional worm holes.