Innehållsförteckning för No. 137 från All About Space

ISSUE 137 SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER What happened before the Big Bang? This month, we’re taken back to a time before the universe began – or at least that’s what we believe, that the cosmos as we know it simply didn’t exist. Throw in a cyclic model or the idea that it’s always been there – some cosmologists think that the Big Bang didn’t really happen – and think how the galaxies, planets and stars you can see in the night sky even came to exist. It’s an event that has the greatest minds questioning if there really was anything before the universe. If you can’t get enough of cosmology, then you’re in luck this issue – our cover feature details the glitch in our universe: could…

It’s not every day that you can peek through a keyhole in the cosmos, but Hubble did just that. A new photo of the reflection nebula NGC 1999 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by NASA and the ESA on 24 October shows a peculiar portrait of the swirling cloud of gas and dust. The nebula is a relic of a star’s formation – V380 Orionis, which can be seen in the centre of the image. The most distinctive feature of the photo, however, is the dark void in the heart of the nebula shaped like a keyhole. When the nebula was first imaged by Hubble in 1999, it was believed that the dark central region was something known as a Bok globule. These globules are cold clouds…

A spooky image of a ‘cosmic cobweb’ of galaxies is clustering in a way that confounds scientists. The eerie Hubble image was released on 27 October from officials at the European Space Agency (ESA). What astronomers are spying could contain clues about dark matter, a mysterious substance that looms in an estimated 85 per cent of the known universe. Abell 611 is located 3.2 billion light years from Earth and confuses astronomers as the whirling galaxies don’t contain enough visible mass “to prevent the cluster from flying apart.” The cluster is likely held together by dark matter, which scientists are struggling to understand because the substance cannot be sensed with conventional instruments. Dark matter theories cluster into one of two groups. It is either some type of particle that exists…

A group of scientists are getting very excited about these ultrahard diamonds. After all, they reckon they’ve found evidence of lonsdaleite having formed on a dwarf planet some 4.5 billion years ago, and the resulting study has the potential to be very useful indeed. Scientists have known about lonsdaleite for many years. It was first discovered in 1967 in a meteorite called Canyon Diablo, found in an impact crater in the desert of northern Arizona. Duly named after British crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, one of the first two women elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1945, it was soon determined to be a much harder form of diamond. Yet researchers weren’t sure whether it was a defect of a regular diamond formed under intense pressure or if it…

Stars have different masses because they are born that way, unlike humans, who continue to gain weight throughout their lifetimes. The difference lies in the fact that stars gain all their mass at birth when they accrete nearby material in their gravitational influence until there is no more material left, whereas humans ‘accrete’ food whenever their appetite says so! Stars generally have masses between one-tenth and a few hundred times the mass of the Sun. At the low end, stars with insufficient mass do not burn hydrogen because there is not enough mass to compress the material in their cores to high enough pressures. At the high end, it is not clear what limits the masses of stars. Some astronomers claim that there is an upper limit of around 150…

A tthe start of December Mars will be rising in the northeast at sunset. It will reach its highest point above the southeastern horizon around 23:00, then arc down to set in the west at sunrise, but all through December Mars will be a strikingly bright orange-red evening star, very obvious to the naked eye. Mars will spend the month in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull, which is dominated by two large and bright star clusters, the large, V-shaped Hyades cluster and the smaller Pleiades cluster, which looks like a mini Big Dipper. During December Mars will be shining close to these two celestial celebrities, presenting naked eye observers, binocular users and night-sky photographers with quite a beautiful scene. At the start of the month Mars will be brighter…

James Webb Space Telescope scientists have released a second view of the iconic Pillars of Creation, this one peering deep into the mid-infrared (inset). The dust clouds appear to glow in blue tinges, looming in front of a red-hued background. “Thousands of stars that exist in this region disappear from view, and seemingly endless layers of gas and dust become the centrepiece,” European Space Agency officials said. Dust is an essential ingredient for star formation and helps scientists in figuring out the formation and evolution of the structure, which is located in the constellation of Serpens, some 7,000 light years away from Earth. Many stars are actively forming in these dense bluegrey pillars. When knots of gas and dust with sufficient mass form in these regions, they begin to collapse…

KEEP IN TOUCH /AllAboutSpaceMagazine @spaceanswers space@spaceanswers.com The NASA–Italian Space Agency (ASI) Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has peered deep into the hot gas surrounding a black hole, teaching us how black holes swallow and spit out matter. IXPE launched in December 2021 to study some of the most highly energetic objects in the universe, including accreting black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. It does this by observing the polarisation of the X-rays emitted by these extreme objects. Polarisation is the principle by which sunglasses work – they block all light except that which oscillates in a specific direction. Similarly, the polarised X-rays that IPXE detects are electromagnetic waves vibrating mostly in a particular direction. The polarisation “carries information about how the X-rays were emitted,” said lead researcher Henric Krawczynski of…

Hubble captured the sight of a beautiful spiral galaxy adorned with the sparkle of two nearby stars. NGC 5495 lies 300 million light years from Earth, far behind the jewel-like celestial bodies to the top-left of the galaxy’s centre, and another to the right. These are stars within the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy, which like NGC 5495 is a spiral galaxy. According to the ESA, which wrote a description of the “stately sweeping spiral arms” of the galaxy in a new NGC 5495 image, 60 per cent of galaxies are spiral galaxies. This means that most of the stars in the universe are contained within a galaxy like our own, or like the one seen in the new Hubble image. NGC 5495 is a Seyfert galaxy. These are galaxies…

From the moment the Soviet Union landed Lunokhod 1 on the Moon in November 1970, scientists have been working tirelessly to F create more efficient and effective methods for searching a planet’s surface. We have seen rovers, landers and probes, but a team from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on microbots, the next generation of planetary investigators. These tiny spherical robots – often no larger than a baseball – are able to hop, bounce and roll around the surface of a planet, get into crevices and negotiate obstacles in ways that traditional rovers can’t. Engineers are hoping to reduce microbots to just ten centimetres (four inches) in diameter and have them weighing no more than 100 grams so they are able…

1 Solid rocket boosters Two solid propellant boosters generated thrust of 1.2 million kilograms. 3 Orbiter Each orbiter was 37 metres (121 feet) long, with a wingspan of 24 metres (78 feet) . 4 Crew quarters The crew were housed in the front of the orbiter, the payload in the middle and the engines in the aft. 2 Main engines The main engines used a mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen to generate thrust of up to 213,188 kilograms. 5 External tank The external tank, for fuel storage, was the only part of the Shuttle that wasn’t reused. Manufacturer: United Space Alliance/ATK/Lockheed Martin/Boeing Dates: 12 April 1981 to 21 July 2011 Total launches: 135 Successes: 133 Height: 56.1 metres (184.2 feet) Max payload: 24,950 kilograms Total mass: 2 million…

Gravitational waves are vibrations in space-time itself. They are emitted by almost anything that moves, like planets orbiting or even your hands. However, only the most extreme phenomena in the universe can produce gravitational waves strong enough to be perceived. So far we have only detected extreme objects like black holes and neutron stars, and only when they’re orbiting each other closely or merging. As gravitational waves pass, they cause minute distortions in relative distances between objects. To feel this event in our body we would need to be quite close to the black holes. Instead we can use technology to record fainter signals from distant galaxies. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo detectors have lasers and mirrors arranged to measure a relative stretch or contraction of minuscule…

TOP TIP You should observe this lunar sea when the Moon’s northeastern limb is visible, between 1 and 8 December. A Moon filter will improve contrast. T his month we turn to the very edge of the Moon and take a look at one of the most elusive lunar seas visible from Earth – Mare Humboldtianum. Located on the Moon’s northeastern limb, Mare Humboldtianum is a dark patch of ancient lava some 270 kilometres (170 miles) across on the lunar nearside. The sea’s eastern edge just touches the 90 degrees east line of longitude. Since the Moon rotates once on its axis in precisely the same time as it takes to revolve around Earth, keeping the same face turned towards us, it might be thought that Mare Humboldtianum should always…

These galaxies may look like they’re performing a cosmic waltz, but the spirals are actually trapped in a dance of death that will someday end in a violent crash. The Hubble Space Telescope recently captured an image of two galaxies, dubbed ESO 364-65 and ESO 364-66, collectively known as Arp-Madore 608-333, gradually warping each other with their gravitational forces. The telescope, managed by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), took the image while it was turning around. The photo comes from a ‘snapshot’ program designed to make use of tiny slivers of time between other observations, since Hubble needs to use every second of its observing time to the best of its ability. The warping galaxy observations are part of an effort to identify targets that will possibly be…

Astronomers have confirmed that a suspicious space rock that hit Earth in 2014 came from another star system, predating the famous ‘Oumuamua by three years. Researchers found the meteor in the catalogue of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) in 2019. At that time, some of the data about the rock’s trajectory was kept secret by the US Department of Defence (DoD), whose sensors collected them. But in March this year, the DoD released a statement confirming the measurements, allowing scientists to complete their calculation of the mysterious rock’s origin. The 0.9-metre (2.9-foot) wide mini-asteroid, which entered Earth’s atmosphere on 8 January 2014, arrived at a very fast speed of 215,974 kilometres (134,200 miles) per hour. It also followed an odd trajectory that suggested it may have come…

The finestructure constant On Earth, alpha is just right for life to exist. Any larger and atoms would fall apart; any smaller and molecular bonding could not happen. 300 quasars In 2010 a study looking at 300 distant quasars showed hints that alpha varies across the universe along a specific axis. Measuring alpha We can study the value of alpha at different parts of the universe by measuring the wavelength of absorption from objects like distant quasars. Alpha on Earth On Earth we know alpha to a high degree of certainty; one divided by alpha is 137.035999074, with an uncertainty of just 0.000000044. Almost 14 billion years ago Looking back this far, we are studying the very first light in the universe. The further away we look, the more hints…

Three years after a black hole shredded and devoured a small star, the cosmic titan is lighting up the night sky with violent emissions as it burps out material from its messy stellar meal. In October 2018 the black hole, located in a galaxy 665 million light years from Earth, was observed tearing up a star that had wandered too close. The event itself wasn’t surprising to astronomers, who often observe these violent encounters between stars and greedy black holes. These so-called tidal disruption events (TDEs) happen when objects such as stars approach black holes and the massive gravitational influence they encounter generates tidal forces that stretch the star in one direction while squashing it in the other direction, thus ‘spaghettifying’, or stretching out, the stellar body. As this spaghettified…

Imagine two ring particles – little chunks of ice – in contact with each other near Saturn. The planet’s gravitational attraction is a little stronger on the particle closer to Saturn. This difference is called a tidal force, and is closely related to the tides in the oceans. Because of tidal forces, it’s difficult or impossible for a moon to form very close to a planet. Saturn’s rings are probably the remnants of a large icy body that formed elsewhere and was ripped apart when it came too close to Saturn. In one scenario, a moon like Titan spiralled in through the disc of gas and dust that surrounded the young Saturn. The moon’s icy shell could have been torn off, with the fragments going into orbit around Saturn and…

In this issue... 78 What’s in the sky? Observe some exciting targets over the festive season 80 Planetarium Where you can find the planets this month and the phases of the Moon 82 Month’s planets Mars reaches opposition, glowing like a ruby in the sky 84 Moon tour Great views of the northeastern limb make this elusive lunar sea an intriguing target this month 85 Naked eye and binocular targets As Christmas looms on the horizon, relax by enjoying these celestial treats 86 Deep sky challenge Turn your telescope to the Hunter for a splendid selection of deep-sky targets 88 The Northern Hemisphere The December constellations offer an impressive array of targets to enjoy 90 Your astrophotos The best of our readers’ astrophotography images 92 Review We put the Celestron…

1 Pollux (Beta Geminorum) Pollux is the secondbrightest star in Gemini and the 17th-brightest in the sky, shining at a magnitude of +1.14. It is also one of the few naked-eye stars we know has an extrasolar planet orbiting it – it’s bigger than Jupiter and orbits Pollux once every 589 days. 2 Orion Nebula (Messier 42) This is probably the most famous nebula in the entire sky. It’s a vast glowing cloud of gas and dust, a stellar nursery where stars are being born. A ‘fuzzy star’ to the naked eye, binoculars show it as a small misty-grey smudge on a moonless night. 3 Betelgeuse(Alpha Orionis) Betelgeuse is an enormous red star, with a diameter over 650 times that of our Sun. With its distinctive orange-red colour and magnitude…