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

[ilan]

Festive nebulae light up Milky Way Galaxy satellite
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ESA/Hubble Information Centre | 20 December 2016

This glowing nebula, named NGC 248, is located within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and about 200 000 light-years from Earth. The nebula was observed with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in Sept. 2015, as part of a survey called the Small Magellanic cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE). Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, K. Sandstrom (University of California, San Diego), and the SMIDGE team ​

The sheer observing power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is rarely better illustrated than in an image such as this. This glowing pink nebula, named NGC 248, is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, just under 200,000 light-years away and yet can still be seen in great detail.
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Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is part of a collection of galaxies known as the Local Group. Along with the Andromeda Galaxy , the Milky Way is one of the Group's most massive members, around which many smaller satellite galaxies orbit. The Magellanic Clouds are famous examples, which can easily be seen with the naked eye from the southern hemisphere.

Within the smaller of these satellite galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured two festive-looking emission nebulae, conjoined so they appear as one. Intense radiation from the brilliant central stars is causing hydrogen in the nebulae to glow pink.

Together the nebulae are called NGC 248. They were discovered in 1834 by the astronomer Sir John Herschel. NGC 248 is about 60 light-years long and 20 light-years wide. It is among a number of glowing hydrogen nebulae in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which lies in the southern constellation of Tucana(The Toucan), about 200,000 light-years away.

The nebula was observed as part of a Hubble survey, the Small Magellanic cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE). In this survey astronomers are using Hubble to probe the Small Magellanic Cloud to understand how its dust -- an important component of many galaxies and related to star formation -- is different from the dust in the Milky Way.

Thanks to its relative proximity, the Small Magellanic Cloud is a valuable target. It also turns out to have only between a fifth and a tenth of the amount of heavy elements that the Milky Way has, making the dust similar to what we expect to see in galaxies in the earlier Universe.

This allows astronomers to use it as a cosmic laboratory to study the history of the Universe in our cosmic backyard. These observations also help us to understand the history of our own galaxy as most of the star formation happened earlier in the Universe, at a time when the percentage of heavy elements in the Milky Way was much lower than it is now.

The data used in this image were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in September 2015.

 

[Marley]

Sand dunes
Depicted is the Nili Patera region of Mars, one of the most active dune fields on the planet. The area is routinely monitored and photographed to better map and understand both seasonal and annual winds. Thankfully, the HiRISE camera transmits a new photo of this region nearly every six weeks, so there are always new photographs to pique your galactic wanderlust.

 

[Marley]

Supernova remnants
You're looking at one of the largest images ever produced by the Hubble telescope -- a rather astounding quantifier considering the telescope has taken more than one million "observations" in its lifetime. In this photo, the orbiting observatory gives humanity the most detailed image to date of the Crab Nebula

 

[Marley]

Charon up-close
This photo of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, was snapped by the New Horizons spacecraft. Charon is a very large natural satellite. In fact the moon is nearly half the size of Pluto. The combination is sometimes even referred to as a double dwarf planet system. The reddish portion at the top is a polar region known informally as Mordor Macula.

 

[Marley]

Saturnian hurricanes
The Cassini satellite completed its original four-year mission to explore the Saturn and its moons in 2008. And it's still snapping detailed photographs of the beautiful ringed planet today. This incredible image is a close-up of Saturn’s north-pole hurricane, the first close-up ever taken of the infamous storm; the clouds at the edge are traveling at roughly 335 miles per hour. The eye of the hurricane itself is roughly 1,200 miles wide. To put that in perspective, the United States is about 2,800 miles across. The vibrant colorations are added by spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light.

 

[ilan]

When astronauts 'saved' the worst year in American history (not 2016)
Eric Betz, Astronomy Magazine | Thursday, December 22, 2016

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The Apollo 8 crew, from left, Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman.

You know it’s been tough times when a Dumpster fire is the meme of the year. Indeed, 2016 has been rough: pop culture icons died, police and activists squared off in major cities, we survived a cutthroat presidential election, Syria burned, terrorists attacked around the globe.

And, like today, most people were eager to tack a new calendar on the wall by the time Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell launched for the moon on December 21, 1968 — the unofficial worst year ever in the U.S.

That year, MLK had been shot dead, Bobby Kennedy, too. U.S. soldiers were dying every day. Hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed in the Mai Lai massacre. Political unrest and violence gripped the country. Riots hit the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And Richard Nixon was elected president.

“By Dec. 31, I was literally too pessimistic to say Happy New Year,” historian Susan Strasser told Slate in July. (The piece revisits the worst years ever).

But as Christmas neared, humanity found reason for hope. Astronauts — heroes in those days — were making their first trip from the Earth to the moon. For NASA, the mission was a Hail Mary. It was a last ditch effort to beat the Russians, who U.S. intelligence believed was readying to launch their own crewed spacecraft.

In the wee hours of the morning, on Dec. 29, 1968, thousands of people gathered at the Ellington Air Force Base to welcome the members of the Apollo 8 crew back home.

So, the American space agency scrapped its plans to orbit Earth and test the lunar lander. Instead, Apollo 8 would orbit the moon. Their ride — the titanic Saturn V rocket — had seen few tests. And three astronauts had just died the previous year. MIT engineers cooked up new navigation plans and the astronauts retrained for their new destination.

As they planned the flight changes, the astronauts realized that they’d be orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve. They wanted to do something special.

“So we thought, well how about changing the words to ‘The Night Before Christmas’?” Lovell told Astronomy magazine in a recent interview. “That didn’t sound too good. Or how about ‘Jingle Bells’? No, that was even worse. So we were at an impasse.”

A friend suggested farming it out to a newspaper reporter he knew, figuring he was pretty good with words.

As Lovell tells it:

He spent one night trying to figure out what these three people should say. It was going through quite a bit of the evening, and pretty soon, around midnight, his wife came down the stairs and said, “What are you doing?” And he told her the story that he was writing this thing for the Apollo 8 crew. He hadn’t really come up with anything yet. And she said, “Well, you know, that’s simple — why don’t they read from the Old Testament the first 10 verses of Genesis? I mean, it’s an emotional time, sort of a holy time, but Genesis, the first 10 verses, is the structure of most of the world’s religions — especially Christianity, but Judaism and also Islam.” All had their origins somehow from the Old Testament. So that’s what we did. Got it down and put it on fireproof paper, and it was put in the back of the flight manual.

The Dec. 21 launch went off without a hitch. Anders, Borman and Lovell soon became the first to leave Earth’s gravity behind. And on Christmas Eve, as the trio completed their fourth orbit around the moon, something totally unexpected happened: The spacecraft turned perfectly just as Earth broke over the lunar horizon.

“Oh, my God, look at that picture over there,” Anders told Lovell. “There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”

The iconic Earthrise photo.

That Earthrise image became one of the most iconic in human history.

Five orbits later, just as evening settled across America, the astronauts appeared on television as scheduled. The eyes of the world — an audience estimated at half a billion people — turned to watch. The space farers showed Earth rising out the spacecraft window, and panned their cameras across the lunar surface. Then they took turns reading from the book of Genesis.

“For all the people on Earth,” Anders said, “the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.”
After concluding, Lovell added: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”

At the time, with their focus solely on the mission, the astronauts hadn’t realized how powerful the event was for humans back on Earth. Time magazine went so far as to name them people of the year.

“It really wasn’t until we came back that we suddenly realized what the flight had accomplished as to the attitude of the Americans,” Lovell said in 2014. “We got so many telegrams, and one I remember distinctly, all it said was ‘You saved 1968’.”

Apollo 8's Christams Eve 1968 Message

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToHhQUhdyBY

 

[ilan]

More Cool, Amazing Astronomy Facts
About Education

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Even though humans have studied the heavens for thousands of years, we still know very little about many objects and processes in the universe. As we continue to explore, we learn more about the stars, planets, and galaxies. Some of the things we find out are amazing, and others are confusing. Here is a collection of amazing, interesting, and strange astronomy facts, based on our current knowledge of the cosmos.

• We can only detect about 5% of the matter in the universe. The rest is made up of invisible matter (called dark matter) and a mysterious form of energy known as dark energy.

• Neutron stars are the leftovers of the deaths of massive stars in supernova explosions. These stars are so dense a soup can full of neutron star material would have more mass than the Moon. They are among the fast-spinning objects astronomers have studied, with spin rates up to 500 times per second!

• The Sun's core releases the the equivalent of 100 billion nuclear bombs every second. All that energy works its way out through the various layers of the Sun, taking thousands of years to make the trip. The Sun's energy is emitted as heat and light and it powers the solar system.

• Galileo Galilei is often incorrectly credited with the invention of the telescope. Historians now think the Dutch eyeglass maker Johannes Lippershey was its creator. Galileo was probably the first to use the device to study the heavens to make his discoveries.

• Black holes are so dense, and produce such intense gravity, that nothing — not even light —can escape their gravitational clutches. However, there are some unusual situations where a form of radation — called Hawking radiation — can slip away.

• When supermassive black holes collide, gravitational waves are released. These waves were known to exist, and were finally detected in 2015.

• If you somehow got too close to a black hole and were sucked in by its gravitational pull, it would pull harder on your feet than on your head. You would get stretched out — or spaghettified — by the intense pull. You would NOT survive the experience!

• Light from distant stars and galaxies takes so long to reach us that we are actually seeing these objects as they appeared in the past. As we look up at the sky, we are really looking back in time. For example, the Sun's light takes almost 8.5 minutes to travel to Earth, so we see the Sun as it looked 8.5 minutes ago. The nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away, so it appears as it was 4.2 years ago. The nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away, and it looks as it did when our australopithecus hominid ancestors walked the planet.The farther away something is, the further back in time it appears.

• The Crab Nebula was produced by a supernova explosion that appeared in our skies in the year 1054 A.D. The Chinese and Arab astronomers at the time noted that the explosion was so bright that it was visible during the day, and it lit up the night sky for months. It was likely also observed by the Anasazi people of the U.S. southwest.

• Shooting stars really aren't stars. They are usually just tiny dust particles falling through our atmosphere and they vaporize due to the heat of friction with the atmospheric gases. Earth sometimes passes through cometary orbits. As comets travel around the Sun, they leave behind dust trails. When Earth encounters that dust, we see an increase in meteors as the particles travel through our atmosphere and are burned up.

• Even though Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, temperatures there can reach -280 degrees F on its surface. How can this happen? Since Mercury has almost no atmosphere, there is nothing to trap heat near the surface. So, the dark side of Mercury (the side facing away from the Sun) gets very cold.

• Venus is considerably hotter than Mercury, even though it is farther away from the Sun. The thickness of Venus’s atmosphere traps heat near the surface of the planet. Venus also spins very slowly on its axis.

• A day on Venus is 243 Earth-days long, while Venus's year is only 224.7 days. Even weirder, Venus spins backwards on its axis compared to the other planets in the solar system.

• Space isn't completely empty. We often hear about the vacuum of space, but it turns out that there are a few atoms of matter in each cubic meter of space. The space between galaxies, which was also once thought to be quite empty can often be filled with molecules of gas and dust.

• The universe is filled with galaxies and the most distant ones are moving away from us at more than 90 percent of the speed of light.

 

[ilan]

2016—the year in space and astronomy (Videos Abound)
Alan Duffy And Rebecca Allen, The Conversation | December 28, 2016

The discovery of the year was the first detection of gravitational waves. Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle
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The achievements of astrophysicists this year were as groundbreaking as they were varied. From reuniting a lander with a mothership on a comet, to seeing the most extreme cosmic events with gravitational waves, 2016 was truly out of this world for science.

Here are some of the highlights of the year that was.

1. Gravitational Waves

The spectacular announcement that ripples in the very fabric of spacetime itself had been found (and from surprisingly massive black holes colliding) sent similarly massive ripples through the scientific community. The discovery was made using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and represents a fundamentally new sense with which to see the universe.

The gravitational waves cause one arm of the LIGO detector to stretch relative to the other by less than a thousandth of the width of a proton in the centre of the atom. Relatively speaking, that's like measuring a hair's-width change in the distance to the nearest star.

This discovery was the end of a century-long quest to prove Einstein's final prediction that these gravitational waves are real. It also allows us to directly "see" that famously and fundamentally invisible entity: the black hole (as well as definitively proving its existence). The fact that the two black holes collided 1.3 billion years ago and the waves swept through Earth just days after turning the detector on only add to the incredible story of this discovery.

Animation showing how colliding black holes cause a ripple in spacetime that moves outwards into the universe as a gravitational wave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLAmF0H-FTM

2. SpaceX lands (and crashes) a rocket

The year started so well for SpaceX with the incredible achievement of sending a satellite into orbit, which is no mean feat itself at such low cost, before then landing that launch rocket on a barge in the ocean. A seemingly unstoppable sequence of launches and landings made it appear that a new era of vastly cheaper access to space through rockets that could be refuelled and reused was at hand.

Unfortunately, with the explosion of a Falcon 9 on the launchpad, the company was grounded, but apparently hopes for a resumed launch in early January.

Add to that the visionary plans to settle Mars outlined by Elon Musk, albeit not without some audacious challenges, and it's been a year of highs and lows for SpaceX.

The ‘sound’ of the black holes colliding where the measured signal from LIGO is converted to audio, the rising chirp sound towards the end is the two black holes spiralling together ever more quickly. A surprisingly wimpy sound for the most extreme collision ever detected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyDcTbR-kEA

3. Closest star may harbour Earth-like world

Proxima Centauri is our Sun's nearest neighbour at just over four light years away, and it appears that its solar system may contain an Earth-like world. Until this year, astronomers weren't even sure that any planets orbited the star, let alone ones that might harbour the best extrasolar candidate for life that spacecraft could visit within our lifetime.

The planet, creatively named "Proxima b", was discovered by a team of astronomers at Queen Mary University in London. Using the light of Proxima Centuari, the astronomers were able to detect subtle shifts in the star's orbit (seen as a "wobble"), which is the telltale sign that another massive object is nearby.

While Proxima Centuari is barely 10% the size of our Sun, Proxima b's orbit is only 11 days long, meaning it is very close to the star and lies just within the so-called habitable zone. However, follow-up with either Hubble or the upcoming James Webb Space telescope is necessary to determine if the exoplanet is as well suited for life as Earth.

A Falcon 9 first-stage automatically returns to the barge/droneship ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyDcTbR-kEA

4. Breakthrough Listen listening and Starshot star-ted

With a potential Earth twin identified in Proxima b, now the challenge is to reach it within a human lifetime. With the breakthrough initiative starshot, which has been funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and endorsed by none other than Stephen Hawking, lightweight nanosails can be propelled by light beams to reach speeds up to millions of kilometres an hour.

Such speeds would allow a spacecraft to arrive at Proxima b in about 20 years, thus enabling humans to send information to another known planet for the first time.

However, there are many challenges ahead, such as the fact that the technology doesn't exist yet, and that high-speed collisions with gas and dust between stars may destroy it before it can reach its target.

SpaceX outlines a vision for travel to Mars with planned Interplanetary Transport System.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA

But humans have proven to be resourceful, and key technology is advancing at an exponential rate. Incredibly the idea of sailing to another world is no longer science fiction, but rather an outrageously ambitious science project.

Perhaps, aliens are already sending out their own information in the form of radio transmissions. In another breakthrough initiative called Listen, also championed by Hawking, astronomers will be searching the habitable zones around the million closest stars to try to detect incoming radio transmissions. Involving Australia's very own Parkes telescope (as well as the Green Bank Telescope and Lick Observatory at visible wavelengths of light), observations have been running through 2016 and the search for alien signals will continue for the next decade.


5. Philae reunited with Rosetta

In 2014 the Philae lander became the first space probe to land on a comet, and even though its crash landing dictated that its science transmission would be a one-off, its recent rediscovery by Rosetta has allowed it to continue to contribute to analysis of comet 67P.

What a trip to the Sun’s closet neighbour would look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uBG_Xowyp4

Philae's crash location, as well as the orientation of the doomed probe, has allowed astronomers to accurately interpret data taken by Rosetta regarding the composition of the comet.

While Philae has literally been living under (crashed on) a rock for the past two years, Rosetta has been the busy bee, taking numerous images, spectroscopy and other data of the comet.

In fact, data taken from Rosetta's spectrometer has been analysed and revealed that the amino acid, glycine, is present in the comet's outgassing, which breaks away from the surface of the comet as it becomes unstable from solar heating. Glycine is one of the fundamental building blocks of life; necessary for proteins and DNA, and its confirmed extraterrestrial confirms that the ingredients for life are unique to Earth, and that we may have comets to thank for providing our microbial ancestors with those crucial ingredients.

One of the founders of the Breakthrough initiatives, Yuri Milner, discusses the technology needed for breakthrough starshot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoCm6vZDDiQ

Outlook for Down Under

The future for astrophysics in Australia in 2017 looks particularly bright, with two ARC Centres of Excellence: CAASTRO-3-D studying the build of atoms over cosmic time; and OzGRav exploring the universe with gravitational waves; as well as SABRE, the world's first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere, installed by end of the year.

If you thought 2016 was a great year in space, then you're in for a treat in 2017.

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[ilan]

Hubble gazes at a cosmic 'megamaser'
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center | December 29, 2016
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This entire galaxy essentially acts as an astronomical laser that beams out microwave emission rather than visible light (hence the 'm' replacing the 'l').

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This megamaser galaxy is named IRAS 16399-0937 and is located over 370 million light-years from Earth. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image belies the galaxy's energetic nature, instead painting it as a beautiful and serene cosmic rosebud. The image comprises observations captured across various wavelengths by two of Hubble's instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

This galaxy has a far more exciting and futuristic classification than most -- it hosts a megamaser. Megamasers are intensely bright, around 100 million times brighter than the masers found in galaxies like the Milky Way. The entire galaxy essentially acts as an astronomical laser that beams out microwave emission rather than visible light (hence the 'm' replacing the 'l').

A megamaser is a process that involves some components within the galaxy (like gas) that is in the right physical condition to cause the amplification of light (in this case, microwaves). But there are other parts of the galaxy (like stars for example) that aren't part of the maser process.

This megamaser galaxy is named IRAS 16399-0937 and is located over 370 million light-years from Earth. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image belies the galaxy's energetic nature, instead painting it as a beautiful and serene cosmic rosebud. The image comprises observations captured across various wavelengths by two of Hubble's instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

NICMOS's superb sensitivity, resolution, and field of view gave astronomers the unique opportunity to observe the structure of IRAS 16399-0937 in detail. They found it hosts a double nucleus -- the galaxy's core is thought to be formed of two separate cores in the process of merging. The two components, named IRAS 16399N and IRAS 16399S for the northern and southern parts respectively, sit over 11,000 light-years apart. However, they are both buried deep within the same swirl of cosmic gas and dust and are interacting, giving the galaxy its peculiar structure.

The nuclei are very different. IRAS 16399S appears to be a starburst region, where new stars are forming at an incredible rate. IRAS 16399N, however, is something known as a LINER nucleus (Low Ionization Nuclear Emission Region), which is a region whose emission mostly stems from weakly-ionized or neutral atoms of particular gases. The northern nucleus also hosts a black hole with some 100 million times the mass of the sun!

 

[ilan]

Why the New Year begins on January 1
Daniela Breitman and Deborah Byrd in Human World | January 1, 2017

We celebrate the New Year on January 1 for reasons that are mainly historical, not astronomical. And yet nature cooperates to make January 1 a satisfying time to start anew.

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The date of a new year isn’t precisely fixed by any natural or seasonal marker. Instead, our celebration of New Year’s Day on January 1 is a civil event. That’s despite the fact that, for us in the Northern Hemisphere where the amount of daylight has ebbed to its lowest point and the days are getting longer again, there’s a feeling of rebirth in the air.

Our modern celebration of New Year’s Day stems from an ancient Roman custom, the feast of the Roman god Janus – god of doorways and beginnings. The name for the month of January also comes from Janus, who was depicted as having two faces. One face of Janus looked back into the past, and the other peered forward to the future.

To celebrate the new year, the Romans made promises to Janus. From this ancient practice comes our tradition of making New Year’s Day resolutions.

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January 1 hasn’t been New Year’s Day throughout history, though. In the past, some New Year’s celebrations took place at an equinox, a day when the sun is above Earth’s equator, and night and day are equal in length. In many cultures, the March or vernal equinox marks a time of transition and new beginnings, and so cultural celebrations of a new year were natural for that equinox. The September or autumnal also had its proponents for the beginning of a new year. For example, the French Republican Calendar – implemented during the French Revolution and used for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805 – started its year at the September equinox.

The Greeks celebrated the new year on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Today, although many do celebrate New Year’s Day on January 1, some cultures and religions do not. Jews use a lunar calendar and celebrate the New Year on Rosh Hashana, the first day of the month of Tishri, which is the first month of their calendar. This date usually occurs in September.

Most are also familiar with the Chinese New Year, celebrated for weeks in January or early February. In 2017, the Chinese New Year of the Rooster begins on January 28.

By the way, in addition to the longer days here in the Northern Hemisphere, there’s another astronomical occurrence around January 1 each year that’s also related to Earth’s year, as defined by our orbit around the sun. That is, Earth’s perihelion – or closest point to the sun – happens every year in early January. In 2017, perihelion comes on January 4.

We don’t celebrate New Year’s Day on January 1 for this reason, but it would make sense if we did. Perihelion – our closest point to the sun in our yearly orbit – takes place each year around January 4. Image via NASA

Bottom line: The reason to celebrate New Year’s Day on January 1 is historical, not astronomical. The New Year was celebrated according to astronomical events – such as equinoxes and solstices – eons ago. Our modern New Year’s celebration stems from the ancient, two-faced, Roman god Janus, after whom the month of January is also named. One face of Janus looked back into the past, and the other peered forward to the future.

 

[ilan]

Mysterious radio signal traced to dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away
James Griffiths, CNN | 4 January 2016
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(CNN) A mysterious signal that has confounded scientists for years has been traced to a spot in the sky more than 3 billion light-years away.

Almost a decade after the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered, an international team of researchers has pinpointed the origin of one such signal as a dwarf galaxy in the pentagon-shaped constellation Auriga.

Scientists originally thought the signal -- sporadic bursts of radio waves -- was coming from within the Milky Way itself, or from our closest galactic neighbors, but a new report in the journal Nature confirms it emanates from a tiny galaxy 1% the mass of our own.

"These radio flashes must have enormous amounts of energy to be visible from over 3 billion light-years away," Cornell University researcher Shami Chatterjee said in a statement.

Visible-light image of the dwarf galaxy from which signal FRB121102 is emanating.
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Distant signals

Fast radio bursts were first discovered in 2007, and scientists have been trying to ascertain their origin and cause ever since.

There are currently 18 known FRBs, but they were all detected by non-specialist radio telescopes that were unable to narrow down their origin to a precise location, according to researchers at McGill University.

In 2012, scientists at Cornell spotted that one signal just three one-thousandths of a second long -- FRB121102 -- was repeating sporadically.

"There's a patch of the sky from which we're getting this signal -- and the patch of the sky is arc minutes in diameter. In that patch are hundreds of sources. Lots of stars, lots of galaxies, lots of stuff," Chatterjee said.

After more than 50 hours examining the skies hoping to get a spot of the signal, they got lucky, and were able to trace it to its origin.

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What next?

Now than an FRB has been traced to its origin, scientists may finally be close to explaining what causes the peculiar signals.

Unfortunately for alien enthusiasts, extraterrestrial intelligence is not near the top of the list of explanations.

"We think it may be a magnetar -- a newborn neutron star with a huge magnetic field, inside a supernova remnant or a pulsar wind nebula -- somehow producing these prodigious pulses," Chatterjee said.

Neutron stars are incredibly small and dense objects with a mass around twice that of the sun. They are formed by the supernova explosion of a massive star as it reaches the end of its lifespan and detonates its remaining fuel in spectacular fashion.

The signals could also be caused by a black hole at the center of the dwarf galaxy -- also known as an active galactic nuclei -- which gives off bursts of light as particles fall into at incredible speed.

While these are the most common explanations for FRBs, Bryan Butler of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory pointed out that they may not apply to this particular signal.

"We do have to keep in mind that this FRB is the only one known to repeat, so it may be physically different from the others," he said in a statement.

 

[ilan]

NASA’s NEOWISE mission spies one comet, maybe two
Stephen Clark, Astronomy Now
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An artist’s rendition of 2016 WF9 as it passes Jupiter’s orbit inbound toward the sun. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
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NASA’s NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another — definitely a comet — might be seen with binoculars through next week.

An object called 2016 WF9 was detected by the NEOWISE project on Nov. 27, 2016. It’s in an orbit that takes it on a scenic tour of our solar system. At its farthest distance from the sun, it approaches Jupiter’s orbit. Over the course of 4.9 Earth-years, it travels inward, passing under the main asteroid belt and the orbit of Mars until it swings just inside Earth’s own orbit. After that, it heads back toward the outer solar system. Objects in these types of orbits have multiple possible origins; it might once have been a comet, or it could have strayed from a population of dark objects in the main asteroid belt.

2016 WF9 will approach Earth’s orbit on Feb. 25, 2017. At a distance of nearly 32 million miles (51 million kilometers) from Earth, this pass will not bring it particularly close. The trajectory of 2016 WF9 is well understood, and the object is not a threat to Earth for the foreseeable future.

A different object, discovered by NEOWISE a month earlier, is more clearly a comet, releasing dust as it nears the sun. This comet, C/2016 U1 NEOWISE, “has a good chance of becoming visible through a good pair of binoculars, although we can’t be sure because a comet’s brightness is notoriously unpredictable,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

As seen from the northern hemisphere during the first week of 2017, comet C/2016 U1 NEOWISE will be in the southeastern sky shortly before dawn. It is moving farther south each day and it will reach its closest point to the sun, inside the orbit of Mercury, on Jan. 14, before heading back out to the outer reaches of the solar system for an orbit lasting thousands of years. While it will be visible to skywatchers at Earth, it is not considered a threat to our planet either.

NEOWISE is the asteroid-and-comet-hunting portion of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. After discovering more than 34,000 asteroids during its original mission, NEOWISE was brought out of hibernation in December of 2013 to find and learn more about asteroids and comets that could pose an impact hazard to Earth. If 2016 WF9 turns out to be a comet, it would be the 10th discovered since reactivation. If it turns out to be an asteroid, it would be the 100th discovered since reactivation.

What NEOWISE scientists do know is that 2016 WF9 is relatively large: roughly 0.3 to 0.6 mile (0.5 to 1 kilometer) across.

It is also rather dark, reflecting only a few percent of the light that falls on its surface. This body resembles a comet in its reflectivity and orbit, but appears to lack the characteristic dust and gas cloud that defines a comet.

“2016 WF9 could have cometary origins,” said Deputy Principal Investigator James “Gerbs” Bauer at JPL. “This object illustrates that the boundary between asteroids and comets is a blurry one; perhaps over time this object has lost the majority of the volatiles that linger on or just under its surface.”

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) absorb most of the light that falls on them and re-emit that energy at infrared wavelengths. This enables NEOWISE’s infrared detectors to study both dark and light-colored NEOs with nearly equal clarity and sensitivity.

“These are quite dark objects,” said NEOWISE team member Joseph Masiero, “Think of new asphalt on streets; these objects would look like charcoal, or in some cases are even darker than that.”

NEOWISE data have been used to measure the size of each near-Earth object it observes. Thirty-one asteroids that NEOWISE has discovered pass within about 20 lunar distances from Earth’s orbit, and 19 are more than 460 feet (140 meters) in size but reflect less than 10 percent of the sunlight that falls on them.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has completed its seventh year in space after being launched on Dec. 14, 2009.

 

[ilan]

Astronomers predict explosion that will change the night sky in 2022
Matt Kucinski, Lynn Rosendale, Phys.Org | January 9, 2017

Molnar’s prediction is that a binary star (two stars orbiting each other) he is monitoring will merge and explode in 2022. Credit: Calvin College

Calvin College professor Larry Molnar and his students along with colleagues from Apache Point Observatory (Karen Kinemuchi) and the University of Wyoming (Henry Kobulnicky) are predicting a change to the night sky that will be visible to the naked eye.

"It's a one-in-a-million chance that you can predict an explosion," Molnar said of his bold prognostication. "It's never been done before."

Molnar's prediction is that a binary star (two stars orbiting each other) he is monitoring will merge and explode in 2022, give or take a year; at which time the star will increase its brightness ten thousand fold, becoming one of the brighter stars in the heavens for a time. The star will be visible as part of the constellation Cygnus, and will add a star to the recognizable Northern Cross star pattern.

A question leads to exploration

Molnar's exploration into the star known as KIC 9832227 began back in 2013. He was attending an astronomy conference when fellow astronomer Karen Kinemuchi presented her study of the brightness changes of the star, which concluded with a question: Is it pulsing or is it a binary?

Also present at the conference was then Calvin College student Daniel Van Noord '14, Molnar's research assistant. He took the question as a personal challenge and made some observations of the star with the Calvin observatory.

"He looked at how the color of the star correlated with brightness and determined it was definitely a binary," said Molnar. "In fact, he discovered it was actually a contact binary, in which the two stars share a common atmosphere, like two peanuts sharing a single shell.

"From there Dan determined a precise orbital period from Kinemuchi's Kepler satellite data (just under 11 hours) and was surprised to discover that the period was slightly less than that shown by earlier data" Molnar continued.

This result brought to mind work published by astronomer Romuald Tylenda, who had studied the observational archives to see how another star (V1309 Scorpii) had behaved before it exploded unexpectedly in 2008 and produced a red nova (a type of stellar explosion only recently recognized as distinct from other types). The pre-explosion record showed a contact binary with an orbital period decreasing at an accelerating rate. For Molnar, this pattern of orbital change was a "Rosetta stone" for interpreting the new data.

Making a bold prediction

Upon observing the period change to continue through 2013 and 2014, Molnar presented orbital timing spanning 15 years at the January 2015 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, making the prediction that KIC 9832227 may be following in the footsteps of V1309 Scorpii. Before taking the hypothesis too seriously, though, one needed to rule out other, more mundane, interpretations of the period change.

In the two years since that meeting, Molnar and his team have performed two strong observational tests of the alternative interpretations. First, spectroscopic observations ruled out the presence of a companion star with an orbital period greater than 15 years. Second, the rate of orbital period decrease of the past two years followed the prediction made in 2015 and now exceeds that shown by other contact binaries.

Moving from theory to reality

"Bottom line is we really think our merging star hypothesis should be taken seriously right now and we should be using the next few years to study this intensely so that if it does blow up we will know what led to that explosion," said Molnar.

To that end, Molnar and colleagues will be observing KIC 9832227 in the next year over the full range of wavelengths: using the Very Large Array, the Infrared Telescope Facility, and the XMM-Newton spacecraft to study the star's radio, infrared and X-ray emission, respectively.

"If Larry's prediction is correct, his project will demonstrate for the first time that astronomers can catch certain binary stars in the act of dying, and that they can track the last few years of a stellar death spiral up to the point of final, dramatic explosion," said Matt Walhout, dean for research and scholarship at Calvin College.

Watching in wonder

"The project is significant not only because of the scientific results, but also because it is likely to capture the imagination of people on the street," said Walhout. "If the prediction is correct, then for the first time in history, parents will be able to point to a dark spot in the sky and say, 'Watch, kids, there's a star hiding in there, but soon it's going to light up.'"

Molnar says that this is the beginning of a story that will unfold over the next several years, and people of all levels can participate.

"The orbital timing can be checked by amateur astronomers," said Molnar. "It's amazing the equipment amateur astronomers have these days. They can measure the brightness variations with time of this 12th magnitude star as it eclipses and see for themselves if it is continuing on the schedule we are predicting or not."

 

[ilan]

An asteroid swooped right between the Earth and the moon today
Nicole Kiefert, Astronomy | Monday, January 09, 2017

The newly discovered asteroid came within half the distance from the Earth to the Moon

A diagram of the asteroid's orbit
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An asteroid came within half the distance from Earth to the Moon, flying through cis-lunar space this morning. Scientists at the Catalina Sky Survey discovered the asteroid, which is being called asteroid 2017 AG13, on Saturday.

The asteroid was between 50-111 feet across and was moving at about 10 miles (16 kilometers) per second, which was the same size as the asteroid that hit Russia in 2013. The size of the asteroid coupled with how fast it was moving and its low albedo (brightness) made it difficult to view through a telescope.

Asteroid 2017 AH13 is particularly interesting to astronomers because of its proximity to Earth in a group called the Aten Asteroids. Slooh Astronomer Eric Edelman said in a video that this asteroid is following an elliptical orbit versus the usual circular orbit, and crosses through the orbits of both Venus and Earth.

 

[ilan]

Seeking Alpha Centauri’s unseen planets
Deborah Byrd, Space | January 9, 2017

A new agreement between the European Southern Observatory and Breakthrough Initiatives will let ESO’s Very Large Telescope seek planets in the star system next door.

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Things are getting exciting, both in the search for planets beyond Earth and in our ability to visit these worlds, someday. Earlier today (January 9, 2017), the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced it has signed a new agreement with Breakthrough Initiatives – which was founded by Russian high-tech billionaire Yuri Milner – to adapt ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to the task of seeing planets in the Alpha Centauri system, the nearest star system to Earth. Such planets could be the targets for an eventual launch of very fast nano space probes by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative.

Cool, yes?

The Alpha Centauri system is an attractive place to seek planets – and possibly someday visit – especially since ESO’s 2016 discovery of a planet for Proxima Centauri, the closest of Alpha Centauri’s three stars. ESO’s Pale Red Dot campaign searched … and found it. The planet appears to be only slightly more massive than Earth, and it’s in Proxima Centauri’s habitable zone, meaning there’s a potential for liquid water to exist on its surface.

And it’s only, approximately, 4 light-years away. By conventional wisdom, it would take a spacecraft tens of thousands of years to travel that distance. But Breakthrough Initiatives isn’t satisfied with convention wisdom. More about that below.

First, the newly announced agreement, which was signed in late 2016. It provides funds for the VISIR (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) instrument, mounted at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to be modified in order to greatly enhance its ability to see Proxima Centauri’s planet. That’s important because no one has actually seen it yet. Like most of the several thousand known exoplanets – planets orbiting distant suns – Proxima’s planet is known only by the the tiny back and forth wobble of its star, presumably caused by the unseen planet’s gravitational pull.

The agreement also provides for telescope time to allow a careful search program to be conducted in 2019.

​

ESO explained in today’s announcement:

Knowing where the nearest exoplanets are is of paramount interest for Breakthrough Starshot, the research and engineering programme launched in April 2016, which aims to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven ‘nanocraft,’ laying the foundation for the first launch to Alpha Centauri within a generation.
​

In fact, Breakthrough Starshot plans not only to launch within a generation, but to get somewhere on a timescale we humans can fathom.

The plan is to spend $100 million to begin proof-of-concept studies for a 100-million-mile-per-hour flyby mission to the Alpha Centauri system. The stars are about 4 light-years or 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km) away. Breakthrough Starshot is seeking confirmation that it’s possible to use a 100-gigawatt light beam to propel approximately 1,000 ultra-lightweight nanocraft to 20 percent of light speed.

If it’s shown to be possible, this fleet of nanostarships could reach Alpha Centauri within about 20 years of launch.

Due to the finite travel speed of light (including radio waves), we would then wait 4 more years to hear back from any nanocraft that successfully swept through the Alpha Centauri system.

The first step in all of this, of course, is to examine the Alpha Centauri system closely using earthly telescopes. That is what the agreement between ESO and Breakthrough Initiatives is all about.


Bottom line: On January 9, 2017, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced a new agreement with Breakthrough Initiatives. It’ll allow an instrument upgrade – and purchase telescope time – to gain more information about planets in the Alpha Centauri system, the star system next door.

 

[ilan]

Watch 2017’s 2nd spacewalk January 13
Eleanor Imster in Human World | January 12, 2017

ISS astronauts will work on a complex upgrade to the station’s power system during Friday’s spacewalk. Live TV coverage starts at 5:30 a.m. EST (1030 UTC). The spacewalk begins at 7 a.m. EST (1200 UTC) and is expected to last about 6 hours.
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NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson went spacewalking January 6, 2017, to upgrade power systems on the International Space Station. Photo via @Space_Station

ISS astronauts will work on a complex upgrade to the station’s power system during Friday’s spacewalk. Live TV coverage starts at 5:30 a.m. EST (1030 UTC). The spacewalk begins at 7 a.m. EST (1200 UTC) and is expected to last about 6 hours.

On Friday, January 13, 2017, two International Space Station (ISS) astronauts will perform the second spacewalk of 2017 to continue work on a complex upgrade to the station’s power system. The year’s first spacewalk happened on January 6. This week’s spacewalk will begin at 7 a.m. EST (1200 UTC) and last about six hours. Coverage of the spacewalk will begin at 5:30 a.m. EST (1030 UTC) on NASA TV.

Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough of NASA and Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) will perform Friday’s spacewalk. This will be Kimbrough’s fourth spacewalk. He’ll be be designated extravehicular crew member 1 (EV 1), wearing the suit with red stripes. Pesquet will be making the first spacewalk of his career. He’ll be designated extravehicular crew member 2 (EV 2), wearing the suit with no stripes.

Here’s what the astronauts will be doing outside the station, according to a NASA statement:

Working on the right side truss of the space station, the crew members will install adapter plates and hook up electrical connections for six new lithium-ion batteries that were delivered to the station in December, 2016.

Prior to each spacewalk, the new batteries will be robotically extracted from a pallet to replace 12 older nickel-hydrogen batteries through a series of robotic operations. Nine of the older batteries will be stowed in a cargo resupply craft for later disposal, while three will remain on the station’s truss, disconnected from the power grid. The robotic operations will not air on NASA TV.
​

===============
By the way, we carry NASA TV. Look for it a little bit below CNN US. - Ilan

 

[ilan]

The Moon is much older than everyone thought
Nicole Kiefert, Astronomy Magazine | Thursday, January 12, 2017

Somewhere between 40 million and 140 million years older, to be exact.

Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon
NASA
​

The Moon has been a constant in the sky, but have you wondered just how old it actually is? A team of researchers at UCLA wondered that exact thing and conducted a study to find an exact age and found the Moon is as much as 140 million years older than we’ve previously known. This moves the potential age back to 4.51 billion years old.

The team studied zircons, or minerals from the Moon, brought back from the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. In 2016, a UCLA research team reported that the collision between the Earth and planetary embryo Theia was a violent, head-on collision that resulted in the creation of the Moon.

Mélanie Barboni, a research geochemist in UCLA’s Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences and lead author on this study, said in a press release that looking for the age of the Moon has been difficult because “whatever was there before the giant impact has been erased.”

To find some answers, Barboni studied eight zircons in a lab at Princeton using a mass spectrometer.

“Zircons are nature’s best clocks,” Kevin McKeegan, a UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry, and a co-author of the study said in the press release. “They are the best mineral in preserving geological history and revealing where they originated.”

The Moon was initially covered in a magma ocean after the collision between Earth and Theia, which later cooled and became the Moon’s mantle and crust. To see when that happened, Barboni studied the uranium zircon and how it had decayed to lead. To figure out when the magma itself formed, she studied the lutetium zircons and how it decayed to hafnium.

“Mélanie was very clever in figuring out the moon’s real age dates back to its pre-history before it solidified, not to its solidification,” said Edward Young, a UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry and a co-author of the study.

These findings were published in the Science Advances journal on January 11, 2017. The team is still studying the zircons to find more information about the early ages of the Moon.

 

[ilan]

Farthest stars in Milky Way might be ripped from another galaxy
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | 11 January 2017

The 11 farthest known stars in our galaxy are located about 300,000 light-years from Earth, well outside the Milky Way's spiral disk. New research shows that half of those stars might have been ripped from another galaxy: the Sagittarius dwarf. Moreover, they are members of a lengthy stream of stars extending one million light-years across space, or 10 times the width of our galaxy.

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In this computer-generated image, a red oval marks the disk of our Milky Way galaxy and a red dot shows the location of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. The yellow circles represent stars that have been ripped from the Sagittarius dwarf and flung far across space. Five of the 11 farthest known stars in our galaxy were probably stolen this way. Credit: Marion Dierickx / CfA

The 11 farthest known stars in our galaxy are located about 300,000 light-years from Earth, well outside the Milky Way's spiral disk. New research by Harvard astronomers shows that half of those stars might have been ripped from another galaxy: the Sagittarius dwarf. Moreover, they are members of a lengthy stream of stars extending one million light-years across space, or 10 times the width of our galaxy.

"The star streams that have been mapped so far are like creeks compared to the giant river of stars we predict will be observed eventually," says lead author Marion Dierickx of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

The Sagittarius dwarf is one of dozens of mini-galaxies that surround the Milky Way. Over the age of the universe it made several loops around our galaxy. On each passage, the Milky Way's gravitational tides tugged on the smaller galaxy, pulling it apart like taffy.

Dierickx and her PhD advisor, Harvard theorist Avi Loeb, used computer models to simulate the movements of the Sagittarius dwarf over the past 8 billion years. They varied its initial velocity and angle of approach to the Milky Way to determine what best matched current observations.

"The starting speed and approach angle have a big effect on the orbit, just like the speed and angle of a missile launch affects its trajectory," explains Loeb.

At the beginning of the simulation, the Sagittarius dwarf weighed about 10 billion times the mass of our Sun, or about one percent of the Milky Way's mass. Dierickx's calculations showed that over time, the hapless dwarf lost about a third of its stars and a full nine-tenths of its dark matter. This resulted in three distinct streams of stars that reach as far as one million light-years from the Milky Way's center. They stretch all the way out to the edge of the Milky Way halo and display one of the largest structures observable on the sky.

Moreover, five of the 11 most distant stars in our galaxy have positions and velocities that match what you would expect of stars stripped from the Sagittarius dwarf. The other six do not appear to be from Sagittarius, but might have been removed from a different dwarf galaxy.

Mapping projects like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have charted one of the three streams predicted by these simulations, but not to the full extent that the models suggest. Future instruments like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will detect much fainter stars across the sky, should be able to identify the other streams.

 

[Capt.Kangaroo]

We are saddened by the loss of retired NASA astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon.
NASA


R.I.P. Gene

 

[Farmer1]

RIP Gene ..............