Innehållsförteckning för No. 131 från All About Space

Leslie Kean If you’ve ever wanted to know everything there is to know about the universe, you’ve come to the right place. This issue, we explain everything from its birth to its ultimate fate – and what’s going on in between. Over the years we’ve discovered that you, our readers, have burning questions about the cosmos, and we’ve answered the most popular in our cover feature. If yours didn’t make the list, then why not ask us via our contact details below? There’s plenty to keep you entertained this month – from our mysteries of the universe feature covering whether we’re closer to cracking a complex 2,000-year-old mystery in the Antikythera mechanism to the secrets that the Large Hadron Collider could uncover about the cosmos. For the skywatchers among you,…

The Event Horizon Telescope has captured a historic first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The image, which was taken in the light of submillimetre radio waves, confirms that there’s a black hole at the heart of the Milky Way that’s feeding on a trickle of hydrogen gas. “Until now, we didn’t have the direct picture to prove that this gentle giant in the centre of our galaxy is a black hole,” Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, said. “It shows a bright ring surrounding the darkness and the telltale sign of the shadow of the black hole.” This is an astounding achievement,” Ryan Hickox, an astrophysicist at Dartmouth College who is not a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team,…

I fthere’s water or some similar liquid under the surface, it’s possible that Europa could host life. It would most likely be microbial life – something that’s suited to living in cold temperatures. But we can’t know for sure without drilling. The 2013 movie Europa Report explored this possibility in detail when the crew needed to drill several kilometres into the ice. However, it would take quite a robust drill to make it that far. How best to design it? A few years ago, representatives from New York City-based Honeybee Robotics proposed the Inchworm Deep Drilling System (IDDS), which could potentially handle the kilometres of ice between the spacecraft and the liquid below. In papers presented as part of a Lunar and Planetary Institute workshop on Europa exploration, the drill…

The earliest documented case of an aurora dates to the early 10th century BCE. Ancient Chinese text describes ‘five-coloured light’ witnessed in the northern part of the night sky towards the end of the reign of King Zhao, the fourth king of the Chinese Zhou dynasty. The exact dates of Zhao’s reign aren’t known, but it’s likely that this event happened in either 977 or 957 BCE. Researchers discovered this colourful detail in the Bamboo Annals, a 4th-century BCE text written on bamboo slips that chronicled legendary and early Chinese history. Though scholars have been aware of the Bamboo Annals for some time, a fresh look at this particular section led to the realisation that it detailed what might be the earliest described aurorae, said study corresponding author Hisashi Hayakawa,…

Located at Groom Lake in the middle of the barren desert of southern Nevada, Area 51 is a US Air Force installation that has become infamous for a speculated connection with unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Conspiracy theories surrounding the base suggest that it’s used for the testing of alien technology recovered from supposed crash sites, like the one in Roswell, New Mexico. This has been fuelled by the fact that the base was a secret for many years and is still inaccessible to the general public. As a result, this innocuous-looking military installation has become an intrinsic part of modern mythology and urban legends of the 20th century, with a large influence on media and pop culture. WHERE IS AREA 51 AND HOW BIG IS IT? Area 51 is located…

Venus will be brighter in the sky and Saturn will be visible for longer, but Jupiter will be the most visually striking of all the worlds stretched out across the predawn sky this month. All through the month ahead, Jupiter will be a bright ‘morning star’, and even the light of the predawn sky won’t prevent it from being easily visible to the naked eye as a blue-white star, outshining the other worlds on either side of it. In mid-June Jupiter will be rising two hours before the Sun, followed soon after into the sky by fainter, ruddier Mars. As the days pass and June slips into July, the two planets will appear to move apart, and as they do Jupiter will grow brighter and more obvious. By the end…

U sually we like to set you difficult observing challenges – faint star clusters or nebulae so misty they’re almost not there – but as it’s summer and the sky never gets dark enough to see the really faint fuzzies, this month’s challenges aren’t so tough. However, providing the northern sky isn’t painted with a dramatic display of bright-blue and silver noctilucent clouds, if you stay up late the sky does get just dark enough to let you see some lovely sights through a telescope, and in the hours after midnight a telescope will give you very pleasing views of some beautiful objects. Although the broad, frothy band of the Milky Way dominates the early summer sky, running right through Cygnus (the Swan) and cutting it and the whole sky…

Scratches and grooves on the Martian surface look like a huge fingernail was gouging out regolith on the Red Planet, but there’s a volcanic origin to these features. Scientists believe that these faults, dubbed Tantalus Fossae, were created by the volcano Alba Mons, which is located to the west of the terrain visible in the striking new views. The images are based on data gathered by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express mission, which has been orbiting Mars since 2003. These intriguing gouges around the flanks of Alba Mons are known as grabens, which formed as the mountain grew. As volcanic activity pulled at the Martian surface, parallel fault lines opened up circling the peak; the rock between them dropped into the empty space this created, like geologic stretch…

A crewed Mars mission could happen sooner than you think. Astronauts will likely make it to the Red Planet’s surface before the end of the 2020s, SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said recently. “I think it will be in this decade, yes. People on the Moon sooner,” Shotwell said. “I think we need to get a large delivery to the surface of Mars, and then people will start thinking harder about it,” she added. “Then I think within five or six years, people will see that that will be a real place to go.” SpaceX aims to be the one to make this ambitious vision a reality. The company is developing a huge, reusable rocketspaceship combo called Starship to take people and payloads to the Moon, Mars…

A space balloon start-up which plans to fly paying customers to the edge of space as early as 2024 has signed up its 1,000th customer, making it the most sought-after space tourism operator in the world. The Arizona-based World View sells rides on its space balloons for $50,000 per seat, about one-ninth the price of a spaceflight ticket with Virgin Galactic. Relying on heliumfilled balloons, World View won’t deliver the full space tourism experience with weightlessness, but its customers will see planet Earth from 23 miles (37 kilometres) above, almost three times higher than the cruising altitude of a passenger jet. At this altitude, you can observe the curvature of Earth as well as the star-studded blackness of the sky. The experience is more of a slow-burn six to eight…

China could soon begin its first space-based hunt for exoplanets if a proposal from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SAO) gets the go-ahead this summer. The new telescope would spend four years orbiting Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, about 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) from Earth. Once there, it would fix its seven telescopes on a portion of the sky towards the galactic centre and watch for signs of dimming as planets pass in front of their star as they orbit. The main targets are roughly Earth-size exoplanets with similar orbits around Sun-like stars. This requires high sensitivity to spot the signals of small-planet transits, as well as long-term monitoring to glimpse planets that take an Earthly year to go around their star. The Earth 2.0 telescope wouldn’t be able to confirm…

In1900, sponge diver Elias Stadiatis was in the waters off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera when he made a startling discovery. What lay before him appeared to be rotting corpses and horses scattered over the seafloor amid the remains of a Greek shipwreck. After a team of divers were sent to take a look later that year, it didn’t take long to work out what Stadiatis had seen: a treasure trove of bronze and marble statues, some of which dated back to the 4th century BCE. But the divers didn’t know they had also recovered something even more remarkable. An object roughly the size of a large book was discovered in the depths of the wreck in 1901. The following year, archaeologist Spyridon Stais happened to be…

The shimmering northern lights, or aurora borealis, are a natural light show that occurs in a loop around the poles. The southern version is known as aurora australis. Aurorae occur when charged particles emanating from the Sun – the solar wind – crash into the upper atmosphere. A mixture of electrons, protons and helium nuclei, they lose energy as they collide with atmospheric gas molecules. These gas molecules become ionised – some of their electrons are pulled away – and the gases form a glowing plasma. The gas mix governs the colours we see. Red is generated by low concentrations of oxygen at high altitudes. This changes to green as oxygen density increases, with blue generated by nitrogen. Pink, yellow and orange have all been observed, presumably due to the…

On11 December 1972, the sixth and final Apollo landing took place when the Lunar Module Challenger set down on the surface of the Moon. It was a bittersweet occasion for thousands involved in the Apollo program and for millions of people around the world; after the incredible success of Apollo 11, which saw the world holding its breath and then erupting with joy as the first boots stepped onto the dusty surface, the Apollo program had been cut short, and missions scheduled to follow Apollo 17 had been cancelled. After reaching the Moon in triumph and exploring it with wonder and excitement, we were retreating back to Earth, called back early by politicians seeking to save money and responding to waning public support for and interest in the lunar landings.…

Kepler was born on 27 December 1571 in the small town of Weil der Stadt in what is now the German state of Baden-Württemberg. He became a proponent of the Copernican system of planetary motion in the early 1590s, and in 1596 he published Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmographic Mystery), a detailed public defence of the theory, but it was a position that was still frowned upon. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion wouldn’t be formalised until after he began working with Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1600. Upon Brahe’s death in 1601, Kepler was given access to the entirety of Brahe’s observations of Mars, which allowed him to tackle the Martian conundrum that had been a thorn in the side of astronomers. The problem was that Mars appeared to move in…

A newly released image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the mesmerising spiral of Messier 99. Particularly on display are the galaxy’s welldefined stellar arms, branching from the dusty, yellow centre of the galaxy. The glittering strands of Messier 99 are located 42 million light years away from Earth. Separate observations allowed Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to capture a sharper view of the prominent, star-embellished arms of the spiral galaxy. The image displays a stark contrast between the radiant purple-blue hues of the extending star-dense regions and dark surrounding space. Messier 99, like the Milky Way, is a grand design galaxy, meaning that it has particularly pronounced spiral arms. This category includes about ten per cent of all spiral galaxies. The Hubble image was a result of two…

The universe he universe almost seems to have come out of nowhere. A concoction of high temperatures T and a thick gloop of exotic particles that would go into an overdrive of expansion through several phases of varying conditions to create the universe as we see it today some 13.8 billion years later: the Big Bang, creator of time and space – or at least that’s what our current understanding of how our universe sprang into existence leads us to believe. But what we have come to learn about the cosmos’ somewhat mysterious past wasn’t always as tacked down, going back to the days of Georges Lemaître, who would later be dubbed the father of the Big Bang theory. What the Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics did suspect…

Evidence is growing that Mars, now cold and dry, had liquid water running on its surface much more recently than previously thought. Scientists have long believed that Mars was wet around 3 billion years ago, during the planet’s Hesperian period, then lost much of its water. But a new study presents evidence of water activity from just 700 million years ago, well into the current Amazonian period, posing a new puzzle to crack about the Red Planet and its history. The new study is based on data from China’s Zhurong rover, part of the Tianwen-1 mission that touched down on the surface of Mars in May 2021. In particular, the scientists used data the rover gathered during its first 92 Martian days, or sols, at its landing site in Utopia…

When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it explodes in a brilliant burst of light known as a supernova. This bright explosion can briefly outshine entire galaxies, which is how the star’s surviving partner remained hidden from view. Using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, researchers were able to study the supernova SN 2013ge in ultraviolet light. The scientists found that while the light from the bright stellar explosion has been fading since 2016, another nearby source of ultraviolet light has maintained its brightness over time, suggesting SN 2013ge has a surviving binary companion. “This was the moment we had been waiting for, finally seeing the evidence for a binary system progenitor of a fully stripped supernova,” Ori Fox, lead investigator on the Hubble research program, said. “The…

In this issue... 78 What’s in the sky? Now into summer, make sure you’re well prepared for the short dark hours 80 Planetarium Where you can find the planets this month and the phases of the Moon 82 Month’s planets If you’re a planetary observer, you’re in for a treat from June through to July 84 Moon tour Visit the historic landing site of the final Apollo mission 85 Naked eye and binocular targets The summer Milky Way offers a plethora of targets 86 Deep sky challenge Glittering star clusters, a dead star and a beautiful double star await 88 The Northern Hemisphere A selection of targets for whatever observing kit you have in your arsenal 90 Your astrophotos The best of our readers’ astrophotography images 92 Model review We…

1 Deneb (Alpha Cygni) At magnitude +1.25, Deneb is the 19th-brightest star in the sky. A blue-white supergiant more than 100 times wider than the Sun, it’s between 55,000 and 200,000 times more luminous than our star. It will become the Pole Star around the year 9800. 2 Messier 13 Also known as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, Messier 13 is an enormous cluster of stars 145 light years wide and 22,200 light years away. This ancient star cluster, which looks like an out-of-focus star in binoculars, contains around 300,000 stars and was discovered by the great astronomer Edmond Halley in 1714. 3 Cygnus X Look below Deneb and you’ll see what looks like a long, misty ‘cloud’ to the naked eye. Through binoculars this is revealed to be…

MODEL ADVICE From: LEGO Price: £159.99 / $199.99 Model number: 10283 Pieces: 2,354 Finished item dimensions: 21 by 34 by 54 centimetres (9 by 14 by 22 inches) Recommended age: 18+ N ASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery is an amazing feat of engineering, and we’re thrilled to say that the LEGO Space Shuttle Discovery kit is too! You can tell that a lot of time and care went into designing this kit. The attention to detail will blow you away, from playing with the retractable landing gear to opening the payload bay and deploying the Hubble Space Telescope. From start to finish, the LEGO NASA Space Shuttle Discovery is a joy to build and will be an impressive display piece for any home. Part of the advanced LEGO Creator Expert series,…