Innehållsförteckning för No. 140 från All About Space

SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER The universe is full of wonders – from the ordinary to the truly weird and wacky. This issue, we present a hundred of our favourites, including the iconic Pillars of Creation, the methane seas of Titan, acidic atmosphere of Venus, volcanoes on Mars, diamond planets, cosmic microwave background radiation, pulsars and the very first Hubble Deep Field. This month, we’re also getting you prepared to ‘run’ the Messier marathon, an activity to see how many galaxies, nebulae and star clusters you can spot in a night. There are 110 across the Northern Hemisphere forming the catalogue initially composed by French astronomer Charles Messier. Let us know how you get on – you only need to use your unaided eyes to get started. And…

While the James Webb Space Telescope is getting a lot of press lately, its predecessor Hubble continues to impress – this time by snapping the galaxy NGC 6956, a near-perfect example of a barred galaxy located about 214 million light years from Earth. Barred galaxies, which get their name from the very prominent ‘bar’ of stars that cuts across the galactic nucleus, are among the most common types of galaxies in the known universe, making up an estimated 70 per cent of all galaxies. Bar structures are also far more common in galaxies with active galactic nuclei, as gas and other material is fed in towards the galactic core along these bars. This process helps to eventually destabilise the bar. However, the more mass that’s funnelled to the galactic core,…

A rare green comet that’s been streaking across the night sky as it approaches Earth for the first time since the Stone Age briefly grew a bizarre third tail. This ‘anti-tail’ appeared to streak in the wrong direction, seemingly breaking the rules of physics. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) – but more commonly referred to as the ‘green comet’ thanks to a chemical reaction that emits a greenish glow around the cosmic cannonball – was first discovered in March 2022 heading towards Earth from the Oort Cloud, a collection of icy objects in the outer Solar System. Normally, comets like this have two tails: one made from dust that’s blown off the comet by the solar wind, and one made of gas from within the comet that sublimates, or transitions…

Using a technique called gravitational lensing, the Fast Outgoing Cyclopean Astronomical Lens (FOCAL) will enable us to see deeper U into space than ever before. With the ability to view distant objects at huge magnifications, the telescope will be situated between 550 and 1,000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, which is the greatest area of magnification possible. Originally devised by SETI astronomer Claudio Maccone in a 1992 paper, FOCAL was formally proposed to the European Space Agency in 2000 and put forward by Maccone at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in 2010. The telescope’s magnification works by distorting space-time, an idea that was published in a 1936 paper by Einstein using his theory of relativity. This was improved upon in 1964 by Sidney Liebes’ mathematical theory of gravitational focusing…

1 Crash helmets Spin-off from 1966 research into impactabsorption foam. 2 Cordless tools Invented in 1965 to help astronauts collect lunar samples. 3 Personal computers Made possible thanks to NASA’s adoption of the tech during the Apollo program. 4 Scratch-proof sunglasses A spin-off technology that emanates from astronaut visor protective coatings. 5 Water filters Designed in the mid- 1960s to keep water on board spacecraft pollutant-free. 6 GPS myth buster While GPS technology is commonly credited to NASA , it didn’t actually invent it. 7 Modern golf balls They exist thanks to NASA’s research into drag-resistant surfaces in 1981. Many tools, machines and facilities within your home have their origins in research undertaken by NASA over the past 50 years. M Technology originally designed to aid space exploration and land…

The dimming of a distant star wasn’t caused by internal changes, but rather by it being eclipsed by a cloud of dust surrounding a T companion star. The discovery implies the star, Gaia17bpp, is part of a rare type of binary system, and its recently observed sudden brightening was the result of the eclipse by a white dwarf companion ending. Astronomers made the discovery as they searched through data from the Gaia spacecraft’s survey for unusual stars. They found that Gaia17bpp had gradually brightened over a two-and-a-half-year period, with follow-up investigations revealing it had been dimmed for seven years as a result of being obscured by dust surrounding its odd companion. The discovery was one of exceptional good fortune as the binary system has a long orbital period, meaning it’s…

They’re produced by pretty much anything – you, me, cars, planes. But we’re tiny, and space is very ‘stiff’ – it really doesn’t like to deform, and so while we do produce gravitational waves, they’re minuscule in terms of amplitude. Basically, we’re looking for violent things. To get a signal that’s strong enough to measure on Earth, or in orbit near Earth, it really has to be a very big, violent event in the universe. Gravitational waves are created by an acceleration of mass. If you think of two objects orbiting each other, you can have an angular acceleration – if you have two stars orbiting and you’re viewing them from a long way away, then at some times you see the two stars separated, with one gravity field, and…

Sending humans to the Moon is a massive technical undertaking, even with modern technology. The list of challenges includes life-support systems, water, food, sanitation, radiation, medical needs, communications… and the list goes on. All of the equipment and consumables needed to do those things need to be launched from Earth and transported to the Moon. Weight is at an absolute premium when transporting things to the lunar surface, so there’s a strong drive to reduce the mass of all of those things. But if you reduce it too far you run the risk of catastrophic equipment failures or running out of critical supplies. Balancing all those needs requires a lot of effort and will also need a lot of new technologies.…

1 The Sickle asterism This group of stars, looking like a backwards question mark, is the head and mane of Leo the Lion and is a sign that spring is here. The Sickle contains the blue-white star Regulus, orange Algeiba and yellow Adhafera. 2 Castor and Pollux These two bright stars mark the heads of the Twins. Pollux, a giant star with an orange hue, is the brighter of the two stars at +1.14. Castor, which glows at a magnitude of +1.57 and with a blue-white colour, is a multiple star system – you’ll need at least a small telescope to resolve these. 3 Messier 67 One of the oldest known open clusters, Messier 67 contains more than 100 stars that are similar to the Sun, along with numerous red…

A dazzling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures a stunning view of a nearby open cluster of stars that is slowly dissolving into the dwarf galaxy around it. The photo shows part of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way that is just 200,000 light years from Earth and is the smaller partner of the slightly closer Large Magellanic Cloud, also a neighbouring dwarf galaxy. Its proximity lets us observe it in such great detail that the Hubble Space Telescope can see a relatively tiny gathering of stars with remarkable clarity. The new photo shows only a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud – an open cluster designated NGC 376. An open cluster is distinguished from a globular cluster by its more open,…

The most comprehensive plans need a sprinkle of luck, even in space. In October 2022 the T James Webb Space Telescope watched as Chariklo, a tiny ringed asteroid, eclipsed a star. This event, called an occultation, marked a first for Webb. At the month’s end, Webb turned towards Chariklo again and notched another victory: For the first time, astronomers analysing the telescope’s data spotted clear signs of water ice, the presence of which was only hinted at until now. These observations will guide astronomers to better understand the nature and behaviour of tiny bodies in the outer reaches of our Solar System. But the two feats almost didn’t happen. Although it’s the largest of its kind, Chariklo is still too small and too far for even the mighty Webb to…

Europe’s mission to explore three icy moons of Jupiter is all set to begin its voyage to the outer Solar System. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, also known as JUICE, will study Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to provide insights into their nature, evolution, possible subsurface oceans and the potential to harbour life. JUICE has been undergoing final testing at Airbus facilities in Toulouse, France, and will shortly begin its journey to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana on South America’s Atlantic coast. From there, the 6,200 -kilogram spacecraft will launch on one of the last two Ariane 5 rockets. “The launch is currently targeted for 14 April,” ESA director general Josef Aschbacher said. JUICE is scheduled to reach Jupiter in 2031 and will then make…

Why do think that exomoons play such an important role in understanding our universe? I think that there’s a couple of reasons why we’re so interested in exomoons. First of all, I think that they could really tell us a lot about the formation of our Solar System and the formation of other solar systems. Certainly they tell us about the system we see them in, but the question always arises about life evolving on Earth. Were these circumstances on Earth ver y common across the galax y, or were they ver y special? I think that it’s very much an open question. I think exomoons can play a part in answering that question because we’ve seen moons all over the place in our Solar System, and there’s good reason…

When watching footage of the Apollo astronauts exploring the lunar surface, possibly the most striking thing is how they move in the lower lunar gravity. We’re quite used to seeing people working in microgravity conditions, whether on the International Space Station or experimental aeroplanes, but only 12 people have ever properly felt that curious low gravity of the Moon. Gravity is the force that occurs between any objects with mass. The Moon has onesixth the gravity of Earth because it has only one-sixth the mass of our planet. With less gravity, we get a combination of effects Friction between surfaces, like between your shoes and the ground, depends on the force pushing the surfaces together, so less gravity means slippery shoes. This tendency to slip, and the physical restrictions of…

Sometimes I think there must be an ultimate reality and there must be an ultimate explanation. But then other times I wonder whether there is an all-encompassing theory of everything that you could stick on your T-shirt, because so far we’ve been able to unify ideas. We didn’t know electricity and magnetism were connected to each other, but we found out that they are. We thought Newton’s theory of gravity was right, but then Einstein came along and said, “no, it’s all about geometry and the shape of space and time,” and so on. Then we developed quantum mechanics, which describes all the subatomic particles, and that unifies lots of ideas. We keep thinking we’re finding deeper, simpler, more unified theories, and we think ultimately there must be some theory…

PLANET OF THE MONTH As February draws to a close, Venus will already be a very bright object, a silvery spark above the southwestern horizon that catches the eye in the twilight soon after sunset, and as the sky darkens it will become strikingly bright, so bright that many will mistake it for the lights of a plane or even the International Space Station.. On the evening of 23 February, Venus will be part of a lovely celestial gathering. Close by, to its upper left, will shine a beautiful slim crescent Moon, and between that Moon and Venus you’ll see another spark of light – the planet Jupiter. This cosmic trio will look very striking to the naked eye, and even more striking through binoculars. The three objects will be…

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a pair of galaxies distorting each other as they merge in a great galactic get together. The ongoing cosmic collision imaged by Webb is known as ZW II 96. It’s roughly 500 million light years from Earth and located in the constellation of Delphinus. The image was created by Webb bringing to bear its cutting-edge Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) payloads on ZW II 96 and details how the shape of both galaxies are being distorted by their respective gravitational attraction. The observation is part of a wider effort by Webb to examine how galaxies evolve, focusing particularly on nearby so-called luminous infrared galaxies. These galaxies – of which ZW II 96 is an example – are particularly bright at infrared…

The Moon is about to host one giant leap in artificial intelligence (AI). A Canadian machine-learning system will make its way to the Moon’s surface on board a United Arab Emirates rover that launched with SpaceX on 11 December. The Rashid rover, hosted on the Japanese ispace lander, is expected to touch down this spring in search of minerals and other items of interest on the lunar surface. Canada’s system will inform the rover’s decision-making in a big first for AI. If this works, the technology will be big for NASA’s Moon push, said Mission Control Space Services (MCSS) CEO Ewan Reid. “AI will be a critical enabling tool to making decisions on board spacecraft,” Reid said. That work not only extends to seeking out water on the Moon, which…

After recently passing a critical test, NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor – an infrared telescope that will search for A potentially threatening asteroids – has entered the building phase. NEO Surveyor is scheduled to launch in June 2028 and is the successor to the space agency’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, which discovered thousands of near-Earth objects and classified them as asteroids or comets. When NEO Surveyor launches, it will be the first mission to seek out multiple near-Earth asteroids at once. Some of its hardware and instruments are now being built so that the telescope can ultimately detect even faint asteroids. “NEO Surveyor represents the next generation for NASA’s ability to quickly detect, track and characterise potentially hazardous near-Earth objects,” Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer for…

NASA’s newest space telescope has notched another milestone with observations of its first rocky world. A little over a year after its launch, the historic James Webb Space Telescope has detected its first rocky exoplanet, and the distinction goes to LHS 475 b – an Earth-sized planet as hot as Venus located just 41 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Octans. Webb’s design process began when scientists had identified only a handful of exoplanets, and the observatory wasn’t tuned to discover alien worlds. However, the telescope’s formidable optics – and particularly its ability to split light from a source by wavelength – make it a powerful tool for studying planets and planet candidates that scientists have already spotted. Using Webb’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, Jacob Lustig-Yaeger,…

In 1951, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky was observing the Coma Cluster of galaxies using a telescope at Palomar Observatory I in San Diego County, California. This cluster, containing more than 1,000 identified galaxies, is located in the constellation of Coma Berenices, and it’s known to be one of the densest in the universe. While looking at the Coma Cluster, Zwicky noticed there was light in the region between the galaxies. Although the glow was faint, this luminescent intergalactic matter nevertheless pointed to the presence of stars. The difference is, these stars were rogue. Since they were outside of the galaxies, they were considered homeless. Their fate, it would seem, was to wander endlessly in the vastness of space. But how did they get there? The presence of such stars has…

One of the curious things about Mars is that because it doesn’t have a large moon to stabilise its axis of rotation, it flops around in an entirely chaotic and unpredictable manner. Currently, the axis is at 25 degrees to the orbital plane – similar to that of Earth – and it has summer and winter seasons just like us. But in the past the axis has been anywhere between 0 and 60 degrees, and this has enormous effects on the Martian climate. If the axis was at 40 degrees, both ice caps would melt and we’d see free water on the surface of Mars again. And it wouldn’t take a billion years… just a few thousand would do it.…

After centuries of intensive study with the naked eye, through telescopes and more recently using the amazingly powerful cameras of orbiting satellites, we’re pretty clear on how the craters we see spattered across the face of the Moon formed – and it’s really not rocket science. Over millennia, countless thousands of big rocks have come barrelling in from space, slamming into the Moon and blasting great big holes out of it. Some of these craters are huge, measuring hundreds of kilometres across. Others are barely one kilometre (0.6 miles) from side to side. Some are surrounded by beautiful, bright rays – dust that sprayed away from the impact and then splashed back down across the Moon’s surface. Most of the Moon’s craters have changed in some way since they were…

Born in Siberia on 30 May 1934, Leonov graduated from a selection of air force academies with honours and was quickly picked to be one of the first 20 people for the Soviet space program. In 1965 the Soviet Union was well ahead of the US in the race to land humans on the Moon: they had already launched the first satellite, animal, man and woman into space. When the Soviet Union learned that the US was planning the first spacewalk, their efforts became focused on beating them to it. Leonov underwent 18 months of intensive weightlessness training, and while the US spacewalk was scheduled for June, Leonov was first blasted into orbit on 18 March 1934. Leonov shared the two-man Voskhod with Pavel Belyayev. Once it had completed one…