Innehållsförteckning för No. 130 från All About Space

ALL ABOUT SPACE ISSUE 131 ON SALE 16 JUNE This issue marks the tenth anniversary of All About Space. Launched in 2012 by Editor-in-Chief Dave Harfield before later being managed by Ben Biggs, I took the helm in 2015 after joining in 2013, and I’m delighted to be taking care of the magazine as it reaches such an important milestone. We couldn’t let this occasion pass by unnoticed, so you’ll see that All About Space has had a redesign for a slicker, cleanerlooking magazine. Your favourites – as requested by you – are still here, so you can enjoy the regulars from one month to the next. From Mysteries of the universe to Ask Space, there’s plenty to keep you entertained. As always, there are some new and exciting features…

© NASA/JPL-Caltech Frost extends across the surface of a southern crater on Mars in a new photo of the Red Planet. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured this image of Mars’ frosty surface. Winters on Mars can be very cold, with temperatures near the poles dropping to -125 degrees Celsius (-195 degrees Fahrenheit). In turn, a layer of carbon dioxide frost, or dry ice, may form on the surface of some areas of the planet. By the middle of Mars’ fourmonth winter, frost can spread from the poles down to the middle latitudes of the planet, or about 50 degrees latitude, where it starts to melt under the warm rays of the Sun. This is equivalent to about the latitude of southern…

In a new analysis of gravitational-wave data, scientists with the international LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) have discovered ten new examples of merging binary black holes. Over the past seven years, the researchers have observed 90 gravitational-wave signals – ripples in the space-time continuum that indicate cataclysmic events such as black hole mergers, the research team said. They originally detected 44 such mergers during a six-month observational period in 2019, but a second look at the data using a different methodology revealed ten additional ones. © CERN; Getty These newly detected mergers suggest “exotic astrophysical scenarios” that can be studied only through the gravitational waves that emanate from them, those behind the detections argue. For instance, one of the mergers appears to be a neverbefore-observed type of system in which a heavy…

Titan is one of the most intriguing moons in our Solar System. From the outside astronomers see a ball of golden-orange haze, but what’s hiding beneath this atmosphere is what intrigues them –a freezing world with bodies of liquid. Planetary scientists are fascinated by Titan and its unusual contents. Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and second-largest moon in the Solar System behind Jupiter’s Ganymede, is an icy ball that stretches out to almost 5,150 kilometres (3,200 miles) in diameter, nearly 50 per cent wider than Earth’s Moon. Due to Saturn’s position in space, around 1.4 billion kilometres (870 million miles) from the Sun – nine times farther than Earth’s average distance – its satellite Titan receives sunlight that is 100 times fainter than the light on Earth. This freezing…

© Getty We humans aren’t particularly good at cleaning up after ourselves on Earth, and it turns out we may be even worse when we leave our planet. In over 60 years of W space exploration, we’ve rapidly filled Earth’s orbit with junk, and that could become a serious problem in the not-toodistant future. The Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 became our first piece of space junk in October 1957 after it became the first human-made object ever to orbit Earth. By January 1958 its orbit had decayed enough that it re-entered our atmosphere and burned up, never to cause any trouble. But since then we’ve launched thousands of satellites into space, and many of them have been left in Earth orbit even after they have stopped working. Space junk comes…

Scientists have mapped the motions of stars within the Milky Way’s companion galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), revealing new clues about barred galaxies. The findings could offer new insight into the processes that shape and form the structures of these galaxies, which contain bar-like bands of stars. Located about 163,000 light years from Earth, the LMC –a satellite dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way – is among the closest galaxies to Earth and is visible to the naked eye as a faint cloud in the Southern Hemisphere sky. The LMC is considered an irregular galaxy given its single spiral arm and stellar bar structure, which is offset from the galaxy’s centre. Stellar bar structures are a common feature in spiral galaxies. Scientists think these structures form when small perturbations…

© Getty A gifted teen, Fermi won a scholarship to the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore University in Pisa with an entry essay so impressive it would have been commendable for a doctorate. Fermi was even asked by his teachers to organise his own seminars on quantum physics, as there was nothing they could teach him. Fermi’s skills meant he was largely self-taught, and he graduated with honours in 1922. He went on to win a Rockefeller fellowship, studying under renowned physicist Max Born in Germany, where he also met Albert Einstein. Between 1926 and 1927, Fermi and English physicist Paul Dirac developed new statistics known as Fermi-Dirac statistics, concerned with subatomic particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle. These particles, now known as fermions, were a monumental contribution to atomic…

© NASA/JPL-Caltech Giant Jupiter and the shadow of its biggest moon Ganymede dominate the view in this latest image from the system. NASA’s Juno mission whizzed close to the radiation-spewing planet for the 40th time on 25 February, with the resulting raw images of the encounter beamed home to Earth. Once there, citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos created this stunning view based on what was seen by the JunoCam instrument. Juno was flying roughly 71,000 kilometres (44,000 miles) above Jupiter’s cloud tops during the encounter, which is roughly 15 times closer than Ganymede’s orbital distance of 1.1 million kilometres (666,000 miles). If an observer could brave the radiation to float within the oval seen in the picture, that person would experience a total eclipse of the Sun. Total eclipses are more…

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk will acquire Twitter for about $44 billion (£35 billion) The newly upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just broke a world record with its proton beams. The LHC, located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, restarted on 22 April after a planned three-year hiatus, during which a number of upgrades were made to the facility. These improvements are already being put to the test. In restarting and preparing for its new operating phase, called Run 3, the LHC has already beaten a previous record. This particle accelerator is both the largest and most powerful in the world, and in a test run conducted shortly after being switched back on, the LHC accelerated beams of protons to a higher energy than ever before. “Two LHC pilot beams…

The most distant single star yet dates back to less than 1 billion years after the universe’s birth in the Big Bang and may shed light on the earliest stars. Scientists nicknamed the star ‘Earendel’, from an Old English word meaning ‘morning star’ or ‘rising light’.Earendel, technical designation WHL0137-LS, is at least 50 times the mass of the Sun and millions of times as bright. This newfound star is so far away that its light has taken 12.8 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it was when the universe was about 900 million years old, just seven per cent of its current age. Until now, the most distant single star detected, discovered by Hubble in 2018, existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or…

When comets first appear near Earth, their bright tails of ionised gas stun observers, but on every return they become dimmer.Astronomers believed that these objects become dimmer on return because they released too much ice and gas during earlier visits to the inner Solar System. The comets melted and shrank because of the Sun’s warmth, so when they return there’s less material left to release, and therefore a fainter coma. But a new study by scientists from the University of Oklahoma found that even comets that only skirt the inner Solar System and remain beyond the orbit of Saturn fade over time. That makes no sense as in those far reaches of the Solar System, the Sun’s light is so weak that it shouldn’t be able to melt a comet’s…

Walk carefully over to a fire and you’ll find it gets hotter the closer you get. As you walk away you start to feel cooler again. But if you were to do that at the surface of the Sun, the opposite would happen. You’d walk away from the intense heat, start to feel cooler and then suddenly begin to feel hot again. Moving far away from this hot source only puts you in the midst of an even hotter upper atmosphere. Although the Sun’s surface burns at a blisteringly hot 6,000 degrees Celsius (10,800 degrees Fahrenheit), the outermost layer of our host star’s atmosphere – which extends thousands of miles above the visible surface – reaches temperatures of around 1 to 2 million degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 million degrees…

When is the best time to buy a telescope? For many enthusiasts, the ideal answer would be right now. If you’ve got the astronomy bug, then it’s never too soon to join the telescope community and explore the wonders of the sky up close. But a realistic answer will always factor in cost and availability, so let’s explore how planning and patience can get you a bargain. Unfortunately, telescope prices are on an upward trend due to a variety of factors. Global supply chains have been under exceptional pressure in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, while geopolitical events only tighten the squeeze on what can be shipped, and where. This all results in increased production and shipping costs, which are naturally passed on to the customer. It’s just another…

PLANET OF THE MONTH Venus will dominate the morning sky, where an array of worlds, large and small, bright and faint, will be visible, stretched from east to south like beads on a string. Although Venus has always been popular with amateur astronomers because of its brilliance and its beautiful telescopic phases, until recently many planetary scientists considered it a forgotten world, rather lost in Mars’ ruddy celebrity light. While probe after probe was sent to Mars – landers, rovers and orbiters – Venus was pretty much ignored. But that’s about to change. In the next few years a veritable fleet of space probes will head for Venus, and if they all work as intended they will provide us with highly detailed maps of its surface and a wealth of…

© NASA, ESA The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a unique group of merging galaxies that provides a glimpse into processes in the early universe. The five galaxies, known as Hickson Compact Group 40 (HCG 40), are in the process of merging into a single entity, a process that will be complete roughly a billion years from now. The image was released in anticipation of the venerable telescope’s 32nd anniversary on 24 April and is part of Hubble’s long-standing work in studying galactic evolution. “Studying nearby groups like HCG 40 helps astronomers learn about how galaxies formed,” the Hubble team said. “Tight groups like this may have been more common in the early universe, when their superheated, infalling material may have fuelled very energetic black holes called quasars.” The…

© Tobias Roetsch When it comes to surviving in space, the tiniest things can be the difference between W life and death. As Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said: “An astronaut who doesn’t sweat the small stuff is a dead astronaut.” That may be the case for human space travel, but astronomers are increasingly suspecting that the same mantra also applies to the wider universe.When it comes to the cosmos, it seems chaos theory is king. Chaos theory traces its origins back to the 19th century. French polymath Henri Poincaré was attempting to win a prize of 2,500 crowns –a third of a professor’s yearly salary – offered up by King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway to celebrate his 60th birthday. To win you had to predict the orbits of…

We continue to listen out for alien civilisations, but a few projects have tried sending specific messages in the hope of attracting communication. As a technological civilisation, we’ve been sending inadvertent radio noise into space for over 100 years, but to communicate across the stars, radio signals need to be specifically focused and not random. The first calling card to the stars was the Arecibo Message in 1974, sent towards a globular cluster of stars 25,000 light years away. It was designed by Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute founder Frank Drake and astronomer Carl Sagan as a 210-byte message that can be assembled into a picture. It covered mathematics, DNA, the human form, the Solar System and Arecibo radio telescope. The 1974 message will take a very long time…

A fresh assessment of a distant risky asteroid brings good news: it’s even less of a threat than astronomers had feared. The chances of an asteroid dubbed 1950 DA crashing into Earth were always tiny and long in the future. As of 2015, scientists had calculated that the object had a 1-in-8,000 chance of impacting Earth in the year 2880. But a new analysis knocks the asteroid out of the top spot of NASA’s list of known asteroids that are potentially hazardous to Earth. “1950 DA shouldn’t be of any concern,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “I’d say that it’s encouraging that we can identify the remote possibility of an impact for this object more than 800 years in advance.” The…

If you have a small telescope or a powerful pair of binoculars and look to the lower left of the great triple crater chain of Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel, depending on the time of the month you will see either a short, dark line or a short, bright line. Moon atlases and astronomy apps identify it as Rupes Recta. It doesn’t look like much at first glance – nothing more than a dark pencil line or a white chalk scratch drawn on the Moon’s ash-grey face – but Rupes Recta has another name and is one of the most famous and beloved features on the whole of the Moon – the Straight Wall. Of course, it’s not actually a wall; it wasn’t built by lunar labourers leaning on shovels! Rupes…

For your home Alien Abduction Lamp Cost: £99 / $129 From: abductionlamp.com 1 This lamp seemingly hovers over your tabletop as the light beam underneath captures an unsuspecting cow, while little glow-in-the-dark aliens peer out. There are four different functions on the Alien Abduction Lamp: off; cockpit only, where the cockpit light pulses and phases through green and yellow lights; beam only, which features a steady glow from the bottom of the lamp and all on, where the cockpit pulses and phases while the beam glows steady. The flying saucer is made of steel, with a black-pearl finish. For bookworms The Simulated Universe Cost: £9.99 / $14.95 From: Waterstones / Barnes and Noble 2 Bestselling author Rizwan Virk explores the wild notion of a complex multiverse. Virk offers up mind-scrambling…