Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2024 i BBC Sky at Night

JULY HIGHLIGHTS How black holes changed everything Watch our interview with author Marcus Chown on the history of black holes and their impact on science. Download and print observing forms Keep track of your observations of the Sun and the planets through the eyepiece with our printable forms. Complete Messier Catalogue poster Download and print our PDF poster listing every Messier object, with coordinates to help you find them at your scope. The Virtual Planetarium…

A recently discovered planet just 40 lightyears away could be capable of supporting human life – if it has an atmosphere, that is. Gliese 12b, discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is about the size of Venus. It is very close to its host red dwarf star, taking just 12.8 days to orbit. But the star's cool temperature means the planet receives 1.6 times the energy Earth does from the Sun, meaning its surface temperature is around 42˚C (108˚F). This means it's in the habitable zone, where it could host liquid water. The team will now study the planet for signs of an atmosphere. Red dwarfs are known to produce powerful flares that can strip away their planets’ atmospheres, but this star doesn't seem to exhibit any extreme…

BULLETIN NASA's quest to return samples from Mars could be in trouble. The agency is still committed to returning material from the Martian surface to Earth, but after an independent review predicted the project would run over time and over budget, it is now requesting novel concepts on how to go about this. NASA's Mars Sample Return programme is a multi-phase project to return Martian rock and soil samples to Earth. The Perseverance rover is the first phase of this endeavour and is currently on Mars, collecting and caching samples. The plan is to follow up with two more missions: a NASA-led rover and ascent vehicle to collect the samples and launch them into orbit; and a spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency to capture and return them to…

In a landmark study, an asteroid has been linked to an impact crater on the Moon which is believed to have created it. The new analysis found that asteroid Kamo‘oalewa, a ‘quasi-moon’ that moves in and out of orbit around Earth, was probably hurled into space from the Giordano Bruno crater. Kamo‘oalewa is similar in appearance to lunar rock, which, along with its orbit, suggests it could have started life on the Moon. To test this theory, the study simulated the impact needed to launch a space rock like Kamo‘oalewa into orbit and found the resulting lunar crater would be 10–20km wide and 10 million or so years old. The four-million-year-old 22km-wide (14-mile) Giordano Bruno is the only lunar crater to fit those criteria. “For 50 years, we have been…

Galileo's Gaze Royal Institution, London, 6 July, 7pm Galileo discovered Jupiter's moons, took Copernicus's heliocentrism mainstream and helped invent the telescope. And as David Jamieson reveals, some now believe – based on an obscure reference in his logbooks – that he was the first astronomer to spot Neptune too! Tickets cost £16, £10 concessions. www.rigb.org Erwin Finlay-Freundlich FRSE FRAS Queen's Buildings, Cardiff University, 4 July, 7:30pm Mike Frost from the British Astronomical Association visits Cardiff Astronomical Society to present a talk about the life and work of this German astronomer who was a close associate of Albert Einstein. Free for members, non-members welcome, first two visits free. www.cardiff-astronomical-society.co.uk Quiz night and stargazing The Observatory Science Centre, Herstmonceaux, Surrey, 6 July, 7pm A quiz night with a difference, with the question-based…

Far on the outskirts of our Solar System lies the diminutive dwarf planet Pluto. Ever since its discovery in 1930, it's held a special place in the hearts of space fans the world over. This month on 23 July, the planet will be at opposition, directly opposite the Sun from Earth, and just four days later it makes its closest approach to our planet. Even then, however, it's a dim and distant cousin of our Solar System family, an incomprehensible 5.8 billion kilometres (3.6 billion miles) away. It's difficult to grasp such vast distances, which is why at these scales scientists use Astronomical Units (AU), where 1 AU is around 150 million kilometres (93 million miles). Pluto resides in a ring of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, beginning…

Thirty years ago this month, in July 1994, comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 collided with the gas giant Jupiter. The event, the impact of a comet with a planet, caused great excitement worldwide because it was the first predicted collision between two bodies in the Solar System and the first to be monitored through Earth- and space-based telescopes. It would provide astronomers with the chance to study impacts on a planet for the first time and prepare for potential collision events on Earth in the future. The comet was discovered more than a year before the collision, on a partly cloudy spring evening in March 1993 at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Comet and asteroid hunters David H Levy and Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker had gathered at the observatory to continue…

BEST TIME TO SEE: Around 03:00 BST (02:00 UT) all month, although best at the end of July The planets have been absent for the last few months, their visibility hampered by the Sun's glare in the morning sky, compounded by really short Northern Hemisphere nights near the June solstice. The ecliptic has been at a shallow angle with the horizon at sunrise too, factors adding to a poor recent performance from the main planets. But things are about to change for the better. At the start of July, bright morning skies are still present. Saturn approaches a fair altitude (for the current appearance of Saturn, at least!), of around 25° above the southeast horizon just before sunrise on 1 July. Nearer the Sun are mag. +1.0 Mars, mag. +5.8…

Jupiter Best time to see: 31 July, 03:20 BST (02:20 UT) Altitude: 16° Location: Taurus Direction: East-northeast Features: Complex atmosphere, brighter moons Recommended equipment: 75mm scope or larger Morning planet Jupiter rises around 03:00 BST (02:00 UT) at the start of the month, when it can be seen among the stars of Taurus, not too far from the beautiful Pleiades open cluster. However, the relatively short nights work against the planet at the start of July, the dawn twilight already bright by the time the planet makes its presence known above the northeast horizon. A 9%-lit waning crescent Moon sits 4.6° northwest of Jupiter on the morning of 3 July, an attractive sight if you have clear skies. As the month rolls on, Jupiter's position gradually improves and by 31…

It's that time of year when we push the definition of this section by paying homage to the fallen main planet Pluto, demoted to a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. Pluto has several class definitions beyond dwarf planet; it's also a trans-Neptunian object (TNO), Kuiper belt object (KBO) and a Plutino. It carries the minor planet designation (134340) Pluto. Mag. +14.4 Pluto reaches opposition on 23 July in an obscure part of the sky within Capricornus. Take an extended photograph of the region to get down below the mag. +14.4 threshold. This shouldn't be a problem even for smaller 50mm instruments. Compare shots over a couple of nights and see if you can detect the object that's moving between images. To find Pluto visually, it sits…

As darker skies return towards the end of July, the summer Milky Way becomes well-placed for observing. Among its many treasures is the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16, a nebula with embedded open cluster in the constellation of Serpens Cauda. This month's challenge is to observe the nebula. M16 is famous because it contains columns of gas imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope to become known as the Pillars of Creation. Turn a telescope on M16 though and, unless you're using a large-aperture scope, you might come to the conclusion that the Eagle has flown. The cluster is fairly easy to find 2.6° west and a degree north of mag. +4.7 Gamma (γ) Scuti. Alternatively, locate it by looking 2.4° to the north of the bright and easily visible nebulosity of…

DOB: 25 April 1981 McFall grew up in Hampshire, UK. While travelling in Thailand at age 19, he was in a motorcycle accident that resulted in the above-knee amputation of his right leg. He says that sport, especially running, was key to his rehabilitation “both physically and emotionally”. He went on to study for a degree in Sports and Exercise Science and became a Paralympic athlete, winning medals in the 100-metre and 200-metre sprint for Great Britain. In 2007, he was ranked first in the world for 200 metres. He then returned to university to study medicine. Before his application to ESA, he was a trauma and orthopaedic specialist registrar in the Wessex Deanery. On 23 November 2022, ESA chose McFall to be the first astronaut with a physical disability.…

According to cosmological wisdom, tremendous amounts of neutrinos must have been produced and released during the Big Bang. Today, they should permeate each and every corner of the Universe, at a predicted abundance of some 330 Big Bang neutrinos per cubic centimetre. Unfortunately, Big Bang neutrinos are expected to carry extremely little energy, meaning current technologies are not sensitive enough to detect them. But that may change soon. Princeton University physicist Chris Tully and his colleagues have devised an incredibly sensitive experiment, called PTOLEMY (Princeton Tritium Observatory for Light, Early-Universe Massiveneutrino Yield), that would be able to detect this cosmic neutrino background and measure the tiny mass of the fleeting particles. A prototype is under construction right now. The full version of the PTOLEMY experiment would test our cherished assumptions…

Noctilucent cloud or NLC displays become all the rage during June and July, the two months of the year when, from high mid-Northern Hemisphere latitudes at least, the probability of a display is at its greatest. NLCs are impossible to predict with any certainty and can catch you on the hop unless you have a rigorous monitoring regime in place. But now smartphones are sensitive enough to record many brighter nighttime phenomena with relative ease, they're a superb grab-and-go option for recording NLCs whenever they appear. NLCs are very high-altitude ice-sheet clouds that form at around 82km up in the mesosphere. As a meteoroid vaporises in Earth's atmosphere, it leaves behind dust. If this encounters super-cooled water vapour in the mesosphere, ice crystals form around the dust particles. The same…

EYE ON THE SKY EUCLID, 23 MAY 2024 This shot of Messier 78, a reflection nebula in the constellation of Orion, is one of five new images that were recently sent back by ESA's Euclid space telescope. All the images are part of Euclid's Early Release Observations and come less than a year after the telescope launched. Incredibly, the Euclid team estimate there are more than 300,000 new objects visible in this image alone, underlining Euclid's great strength: it's capable of imaging wide swathes of the sky in unprecedented detail. It's hoped that Euclid's ability to reveal more detail in seemingly empty regions will help astronomers uncover the influence of dark matter and dark energy on the visible Universe. FREE BONUS CONTENT Explore a gallery of these and more stunning…

A trio of ancient stars found right here in our own Milky Way could be some of the oldest stars in the Universe. The earliest stars were mostly made of hydrogen and helium, as this was all that was created during the Big Bang. These stars produced heavier elements, which were then incorporated into subsequent generations of stars. The amount of heavy elements within this trio indicates they must have formed around 12–13 billion years ago, soon after the Big Bang. The stars are also moving very quickly and in the opposite direction to most other stars in our Galaxy. This indicates they started life outside the Milky Way, probably in primitive dwarf galaxies that later fell into our own. Though some of these dwarf galaxies still exist today, they…

May proved to be a particularly stormy month for the Sun, seeing some of its most intense activity in recent years. The Sun's activity rises and falls according to an 11-year cycle. It's currently in the most active part of the current Solar Cycle 25, which is expected to peak between now and mid-2025. Between 7 to 11 May, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory witnessed multiple flares erupting from the same active region, including at least eight of the most powerful, X-class flares with magnitudes up to X5.7. In addition, at least seven coronal mass ejections sent solar particles hurtling towards Earth, creating the largest geomagnetic storms seen since 2003. The resulting aurora reached far enough south they could be seen by people across the UK. A final huge X8.7 flare…

Galaxies appear to rotate much faster than Newton's laws state they should – so fast, in fact, that they should fling out their gas and stars as they turn. So why don't they? The leading theory is invisible dark matter, but the main competing theory is Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND. This says gravity behaves differently when it's weak, such as at the edges of galaxies. To put MOND through its paces, a study led by Harry Desmond from the University of Oxford looked at how the theory fared on smaller scales. According to MOND, the gravitational pull of our Galaxy should cause subtle deviations in the orbit of Saturn. The study used measurements taken by NASA's former Saturn orbiter, Cassini, to track the gas giant's orbit, but didn't find…

Being part of a team that discovers something new is always thrilling. Especially if you provide answers to a cosmic mystery that has persisted for almost 40 years. My background is in infrared astronomy, observing cool objects throughout the Universe. I planned some of the early James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations before moving to Edinburgh to work with experts at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, who were in charge of building JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). I've been having an absolute blast since JWST launched. One of its observations which I planned was of supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), the remnants of a supernova that exploded in a nearby galaxy in 1987. Even though it's 168,000 lightyears away, its explosion was visible to the human eye. The last time a supernova…

This month's top prize: two Philip's titles The ‘Message of the Month’ writer will receive a bundle of two top titles courtesy of astronomy publisher Philip's: Nigel Henbest's Stargazing 2024 and Robin Scagell's Guide to the Northern Constellations Winner's details will be passed on to Octopus Publishing to fulfil the prize In April, my family and I went on holiday to Florida and we were lucky enough to see three great astro sights while we were out there. In the early morning of Friday 5 April, we saw the launch of SpaceX's Starlink 6-47 mission from our hotel. Even though it was 50 miles from Cape Canaveral, it was still really bright! Then, in the evening on Sunday 7th, we travelled to Titusville (12 miles from the launch site) to…

ALSO festival Park Farm, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 12–14 July ALSO Festival – tagline ‘Where ideas run wild’ – has a strong space theme for its 11th annual event. There are talks from a number of top scientists, including theoretical physicist Prof David Tong and cosmologist and author Roberto Trotta. Foreign affairs specialist and The Future of Geography author Tim Marshall will discuss the politics of space. There will also be hands-on activities, including star walks, astrophotography workshops and a chance to see the custom orrery they've built in the woods. All this, plus all the musical, foodie, arts and wellness delights your heart could wish for. Adult weekend passes cost £150, while day tickets are available from £40. www.also-festival.com…

The Kuiper Belt is believed to be made up of the icy leftovers from the Solar System's formation. It gets its name from Gerard Kuiper, who published a paper in 1951 speculating on the presence of objects in the space beyond Pluto, though astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth had previously mentioned similar objects too. The icy fragments are spread out over a huge, doughnut-shaped region. It's thought that in the early days of the Solar System, the belt could have contained a mass 10 times that of Earth. At some point in the next few hundred million years, however, the gas giants shifted in their orbits, creating gravitational chaos throughout the Solar System. This resulted in a huge number of KBOs being ejected from the Belt, and now only around 0.1 Earth…

All month July marks the second half of the Northern Hemisphere's noctilucent cloud-spotting season (see page 47). Monday 1 Shining at mag. +1.0, Mars rises nearly three hours before the Sun. The 25%-lit waning crescent Moon sits 7° west of the planet this morning, decreasing in phase to 17%-lit on 2 July, when it appears 6° northeast of Mars. Wednesday 3 A 9%-lit waning crescent Moon lies 4.6° northwest of Jupiter this morning. Thursday 4 Jupiter currently appears 5° north of Aldebaran. Friday 5 Earth is at the furthest point in its orbit from the Sun, a position known as aphelion. Saturday 6 Venus provides an opportunity to locate a less than 1%-lit Moon, just 3.3° to the northeast. Dwarf planet Ceres reaches opposition at a binocular-friendly mag. +7.3 in Sagittarius's Teapot. Sunday 7 Mag. –0.1…

The magnificent Scorpius constellation is compromised from the UK due to low altitude, so we see only the front of the scorpion's body. Its brightest star is the red supergiant Antares (Alpha (α) Scorpii), a distinctive feature of our summer night sky. Further west is a curve of stars representing the scorpion's claws; Acrab (Beta (β) Scorpii) lies to the north of the pattern. Shining at mag. +2.5, Acrab gets to an altitude around 17° for UK viewers when due south. It's a lovely sight through a telescope, appearing as a binary with mag. +2.6 and +4.9 components: Beta1 (β1) and Beta2 (β2), separated by 13.5 arcseconds. From here, things get complicated. Beta1 splits into Beta A and Beta B, 0.3 arcseconds apart and taking 610 years to complete one…

The Shuttle was conceived to drive down the expense of throwaway, single-use-only spacecraft and democratise the experience of spaceflight for more people. However, its results proved mixed. Its five-orbiter fleet launched 10 times more people and spent four times longer in space than the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programmes combined. But at $500 million per launch, flying the Shuttle was a monstrously complicated affair. Even in its heyday, it achieved no more than nine annual launches. Yet the seed of the idea of a reusable spacecraft was planted. That seed today continues its upward growth. SpaceX routinely reuses its Falcon 9 rockets up to 20 times, with plans to extend that to 40 launches, flying dozens of times into space yearly. Plans for a colossal crew-and-cargo-carrying Starship offer even…

STEP 1 Get in the habit of making regular NLC checks. Identify a viewing location with a flat northwest horizon for the evening checks and another with a flat northeast horizon for the morning ones. This can be harder than you think and it's surprising just how cluttered and elevated horizons can be. STEP 2 Keep an eye on the weather. If the sky looks clear after the Sun sets, head to your evening viewing location 90–120 minutes after sunset. If it's clear in the morning, check the northeast direction 90–120 minute before sunrise. The good news is that you can do both in early July and still get a decent amount of sleep! STEP 3 If NLCs are present, it's time to take a shot. Use a tripod or…

BULLETIN For the first time, astronomers have observed the ‘plunge region’ surrounding a black hole, where orbiting material can no longer resist gravity's pull and plummets inward. The region is predicted by Einstein's theories, but has eluded the gaze of scientists until now. Most black holes pull gas from surrounding stars, surrounding themselves with an accretion disc. According to Einstein's theories of gravity, there is a point at which any particle straying too close to a black hole would no longer be able to continue in a circular path. Instead, it plunges rapidly inwards, towards the event horizon at close to the speed of light. While matter in this plunge region is doomed to fall inwards, light is still able to escape, meaning it should be possible to observe. Accretion…

Starliner launch delayed Boeing's Starliner has struggled to get off the ground again after multiple delays to its first crewed test. At the time of writing, the next attempt was set for 1 June. Starliner has been plagued with problems: in 2019 an uncrewed test failed to reach the ISS, while in 2023 Boeing discovered safety issues with the parachutes and wiring, which have now been fixed. Evidence grows for Planet 9 The irregular movements of long-period comets add more evidence of a ‘Planet 9’ hiding in the outskirts of our Solar System. Astronomers found the most plausible explanation for peculiarities in the comet's motions is the influence of a large, distant planet. Unfortunately, the observations don't pin down the location of the planet. TESS's first rogue world NASA's exoplanet-hunting…

NASA to help take ESA rover to Mars ESA has signed an agreement with NASA to work together on the Rosalind Franklin rover. It was intended to be transported to Mars in 2022 in collaboration with Russia, but the almost completed rover was left without a ride when ESA broke ties with Russia following the latter's invasion of Ukraine. RAS's new president The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has named Mike Lockwood – a University of Reading astronomer specialising in space weather, the aurora and solar radiation – as its new president. The RAS has over 4,000 members, encouraging the study of astronomy and geophysics. lo always volcanic Jupiter's moon Io has always been volcanically active, a study has found. Scientists have struggled to study Io's history, as its volcanism constantly…

Our experts examine the hottest new research CUTTING EDGE White dwarf stars are formed when all but the most massive stars run out of hydrogen fuel for their nuclear fusion and exit the main sequence. The star swells up as an enormously inflated red giant, puffing off its outer layers into a beautiful nebula of ionised gases. The core is all that remains of the original star and, as it can no longer support fusion, this ‘white dwarf’ slowly cools over billions of years. The majority of white dwarfs are composed of mostly carbon and oxygen, as these are the elements most red giants create towards the end of their lives. If the progenitor star was nearer eight times more massive than our Sun, however, there's an extra final step…

Those who minted the first coins could never have envisaged that one day their rounded lumps of copper, zinc and precious metals would be bought and sold by a community of collectors and never used for the original purpose for which they were created. Coinage and its usage came about with the realisation that a handful of beans did not always make for a decent transaction. The once-acceptable means of payment was unsuited to societies that had become more complex, and to trade networks that were less familiar or local. These necessities saw the introduction of a standardised means of currency in the form of coins. Debate exists over who was responsible for the very first coins to be minted and circulated. On the one hand, it could well have…

New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 19 January 2006. A year later, it flew past Jupiter, using the planet's gravity to boost its speed to 84,000km/h (52,000mph). It still took the spacecraft over nine years to travel the five billion kilometres (three billion miles) to Pluto. On 14 July, the spacecraft passed just 12,500km (7,800 miles) away from Pluto and its moons Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. Despite the speed at which it whipped past the planet, New Horizons was able to conduct detailed observations. Pluto was unveiled as a complex world with a jumble of different terrains, including a wide heart-shaped region of bright nitrogen ice called Tombaugh Regio, after Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto. Even before the Pluto encounter, the New Horizons team had looked…

1. The Scutum Star Cloud This fabulously rich star cloud is so easy to find that it has been mistaken for a real cloud on a clear night. Once you have it in your binoculars, look for the ripples of stars formed by the tenuous dark nebulae that weave among them. You will also see the densest of all open clusters, M11, the Wild Duck Cluster, which is an even richer condensation of nearly 3,000 hot blue stars. ■ SEEN IT 2. The Swan Nebula, M17 Use the chart to help you identify Gamma (γ) Scuti, then pan 2.5° to the southwest where you will find the misty patch that Charles Messier described as “a train of light without stars, in the shape of a spindle, of five or six…

In 2022, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed its astronaut class, made up of 17 individuals from 11 different countries. Among them was British astronaut John McFall, the first disabled person ever to be chosen as a potential astronaut. As well as being a bronze-medal-winning Paralympian and orthopaedic surgeon, McFall is an above-the-knee amputee. As the world celebrates Disability Pride month this July, we take a look at the work McFall, ESA and others are doing to break down the barriers that stand in the way of making space accessible to everyone. Spaceflight has a long history of inaccessible design. NASA spacecraft were initially built with only male astronauts in mind; on the Apollo spacecraft, the only option for urine collection was a tube not compatible with female anatomy, for…

PARTICLE HYSICS 101 Stick up your thumb. Do you feel anything particular? Probably not much. Still, some hundred billion neutrinos pass through your thumb every second. Day in, day out. The ghost-like particles are literally everywhere – they even pass right through planets and stars, as if the Universe is transparent to them. With zero electrical charge, a negligibly small mass and no susceptibility to the strong nuclear force, neutrinos are the most ephemeral elementary particles in nature. Yet, we wouldn't exist without them. In 1930, scientists studying radioactive decay discovered something strange: sometimes, energy seemed to ‘disappear’ during the decay process. Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli boldly suggested the existence of an as-yet-undiscovered neutral particle to explain the deficit. The hypothetical culprit was named the neutrino (Italian for ‘little neutral…

Here I'm going to explain how I created ‘Close Encounters of the Haslingden Kind’, my Highly Commended image in 2023's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. In brief, this was a composite of star trails and the Halo sculpture that overlooks Haslingden, Lancashire. I took 151x 25-second exposures of the night sky with my Sony A7IV camera (20mm f4, ISO 160) and stacked these with StarStax (freeware) to make the star trails. The Halo's extremely bright LED lights necessitated taking an additional shorter five-second shot to expose for the structure. This shorter exposure also made it easier to capture a movementfree shot of myself standing underneath. This brighter foreground was then merged with the star trail in Photoshop. My start image was of the foreground (above right), a TIFF file…

VITAL STATS • Price £319.99 • Optics ED glass, fully multicoated • Aperture 70mm • Magnification 15x • Prisms Porro, BaK-4 glass • Angular field of view 4.4º • Focusing Centre and diopter • Eye relief 15.7mm • Interpupillary distance 56–74mm • Weight 2.1kg • Supplier Wex Photo Video • Tel 01603 486413 • www.wexphotovideo.com Celestron might be best-known for its telescopes, but it also produces a wide selection of well-regarded, good-value astronomy binoculars. Its popular SkyMaster 15x70s have recently been updated to include extra-low dispersion (ED) glass lenses. With an aperture that allows plenty of light-gathering that's contained in a portable frame, we were keen to see how the SkyMaster Pro ED version performed. They arrived in a single box, containing the binoculars with all eye caps attached,…

What is the LEAF experiment? LEAF stands for Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora and is essentially a plant growth chamber, similar to those in an indoor farm on Earth. LEAF provides the plants with everything that they need to survive – water, nutrients, light, a comfortable climate – but also protects them from the extreme environment in space. The instrument will observe plants as they grow, monitoring their growth, shapes and colours, as well as how they exchange gases with their environment in photosynthesis. We'll also conduct investigations at a biomolecular level to look at how the plants change their behaviour to protect themselves in space environments. How does LEAF fit into the Artemis III mission? Artemis III will be the first mission to return humans to the Moon's surface…