Innehållsförteckning för No. 141 från All About Space

ISSUE 141 SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER Join us as we reveal more about time. This month, researchers are puzzling as to whether the ‘fourth dimension’ is really an illusion – discover what physicist Sean Carroll and his team have discovered in our cover feature, and find out how time differs depending on where you are in the cosmos. This issue, we also reveal how you can increase your knowledge of the universe – and have information at your fingertips – with All About Space’s pick of the very best space apps. And if you’re looking for more recommendations for observing equipment, kit, accessories and gifts, then our experts have plenty to show you in our review and ‘in the shops’ sections. Speaking of gifts, if you’re looking…

An ambitious new survey of the Milky Way’s galactic plane has revealed 3.32 billion cosmic objects in stunning detail. The enormous celestial catalogue, possibly the largest of its type, was built using data from the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter- American Observatory in Chile, which is operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF). “Imagine a group photo of over 3 billion people and every single individual is recognisable,” Debra Fischer, division director of astronomical sciences at the NSF, said. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than 3 billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come.” Our Milky Way is populated by hundreds of billions of stars, huge numbers of star-birthing regions and massive clouds of gas and dust. Cataloguing such objects…

NASA named a huge Moon landmark after a prominent Black mathematician who worked at the agency during the ‘hidden figures’ era. The name of Melba Mouton will be designated by NASA on a Delaware-sized flat Moon mountain near the water-rich lunar south pole. The Moon’s south pole is a target of Artemis program astronauts, who are expected to land as soon as 2025. The mountain is one of 13 candidate landing sites for Artemis III, and is adjacent to where the agency’s icehunting Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will touch down in 2024 or so. It was the VIPER team who proposed Mons Mouton’s name. Mons Mouton has been proposed to the International Astronomical Union, the official designator of space landmarks. Mouton “charted a path for other women and…

From the moment the Soviet Union landed the Lunokhod 1 lunar rover on the Moon in November 1970, scientists and astronomers have been working tirelessly to 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 navigate obstacles in ways that traditional rovers are unable to. Within the next 50 to 60 years, engineers are hoping to reduce microbots to just ten centimetres (four inches) in diameter…

F or a long time, scientists believed that Mars was not only red, but dead. This didn’t make the planet any less interesting, since there’s F evidence of rivers flowing into lakes and the potential that Mars may have once harboured life. But just one look at this small, ghostly world appears to suggest that it’s a largely dry and dusty husk. Not much, it has been assumed, has happened on Earth’s neighbour for the past 3 billion years. Or so it was thought. “The geological history of Mars was understood to be very simple,” says Adrien Broquet, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “The planet formed at the same time as Earth some 4.5 billion years ago, and there was a tremendous…

PLANET OF THE MONTH Venus will be strikingly bright in the sky through March and into April, and there will be so much going on around it. Venus is the second-closest planet to the Sun and the closest planet in the Solar System to Earth. Venus is often referred to as ‘Earth’s twin’, but although Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, that’s where the similarities end. Whereas Earth is a lush green world with a breathable atmosphere, liquid water on its surface and countless species of life, Venus is a hellish world with a thick, curdled atmosphere of poisonous carbon dioxide, acid droplets in its clouds and pressures so crushing on its surface that nothing could live there. This month Venus will be visible as a metallic spark…

“It’s a simple telescope designed for seeing the Moon, planets and bright deep-sky objects” Best for beginners Celestron Inspire 100AZ Cost: £259 / $359.95 From: Celestron Beginners who want to explore the world of astronomy should consider starting with a traditional refractor telescope like the Inspire 100AZ, which is especially adept at viewing planets. It’s a simple telescope designed for seeing the Moon, planets and bright deep-sky objects, and it doesn’t feature any fancy Go-To motors or app integration, but it does come with the basic edition of Celestron’s Starry Night software to help you learn about the night sky. We were able to see the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31) and some bright star clusters, but the aperture doesn’t let in as much light for anything beyond that. However, it…

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a stunning image of a small region of Westerhout 5, also known as the Soul Nebula, glowing red. The suffusion of red light is caused by H-alpha emission, which happens when very energetic electrons within hydrogen atoms lose energy, causing the release of this distinctive red light. This red light also reveals a range of fascinating features, such as a so-called free-floating evaporating gaseous globule (frEGG). Seen as a dark, tadpole-shaped region in the upper centre of the image, this frEGG is officially named KAG2008 globule 13 or J025838.6+604259. This and other frEGGs belong to a special class of evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) that occur in nebulae when energetic radiation from young, hot stars ionises surrounding gas by stripping away electrons. This causes the gas…

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter flew yet again on 16 February, covering more Red Planet ground than it had on a single sortie in nearly a year. The flight was the 43rd overall for the 1.8-kilogram Ingenuity, which landed on the floor of Mars’ Jezero crater with the Perseverance rover in February 2021. This latest hop covered 390 metres (1,280 feet) of Red Planet ground, according to Ingenuity’s flight log. Ingenuity hadn’t flown that far since 29 April 2022, when it travelled 418 metres (1,371 feet) across Jezero’s floor. Ingenuity’s longest-ever flight occurred three weeks earlier on 8 April 2022, when the little robot put 710 metres (2,310 feet) on its odometer. During its 43 Mars flights to date, Ingenuity has covered a total of nearly 8.9 kilometres (5.5 miles). That’s quite…

A mini-planet orbiting in the frigid outer reaches of the Solar System has a Saturnlike ring of dust and debris that defies the rules of physics. The planet in question is called Quaoar, and it’s the seventh largest of the known dwarf planets. Discovered in 2002 and measuring about 1,121 kilometres (697 miles) wide, Quaoar is one of the so-called trans-Neptunian objects, small planets orbiting beyond the Solar System’s outermost planet, Neptune. Residing in the Kuiper Belt, the doughnutshaped ring of rocky and icy debris in the outer Solar System, Quaoar is a proud owner of its own moon, the 160-kilometre (100-mile) wide Weywot. And a recent observation campaign revealed that it also has a ring of material in its orbit. That by itself wouldn’t be so special. The gas…

1 ANITA “To launch a balloon, the surface winds have to be below about eight knots, which is around 14.4 kilometres (9.2 miles) an hour. You also need to have low winds up to about 244 metres (800 feet). The team use a small weather balloon to check those. You’ll see it go up, and then all of a sudden it’ll take off sideways. When these big stratospheric balloons are launched but not yet fully inflated, they’re about 183 metres (600 feet) long. If they hit a heavy wind shear, they can be completely torn apart.” W. Robert Binns, Washington University 2 Meteorite hunting “We used our eyes to scan the ice, sometimes with the aid of binoculars. Forming a line, we worked by moving in parallel spaced apart according…

B lack holes are some of the most feared objects in the universe, and falling into one might seem like the stuff of nightmares, but the reality might be less traumatising than you imagine. If you came too close to a small black hole you would be torn apart before you even reached the event horizon, as tidal forces would stretch your body like spaghetti. However, if you circled a bigger black hole, like the one at the centre of the Milky Way, you’d be able to get right into the action. With the most massive black holes, the tidal forces outside of the event horizon are lessened, so you would be able to enter unharmed. However, as you cross over this horizon, the laws of physics go a bit…

There could be evidence on other planets in the Solar System – maybe on the satellites around giant planets such as Jupiter or Saturn. There’s the possibility of life in the oceans inside these big, big moons, like Europa, because they have liquid water in their interiors. However, these hypotheses are really just speculation because we have no concrete evidence of life in another place in the Solar System, except Earth. And far away? No. On exoplanets it’s even more difficult to detect life. We are too far away, so we have to detect non-direct evidence. We have to detect products of life such as biosignatures – compounds in the atmosphere. This is evidence for the product of exolife. We have to undergo spectroscopic analysis and other non-direct methods to…

In Greek mythology, Mercury was the messenger of the gods and was quick and elusive. This is probably where the nearest planet to the Sun got its name, orbiting the Sun in just 88 days. Because of this, it’s never very far from the Sun in our skies and regularly shifts its location from either the east side or the west side of the Sun. The furthest point east or west, known as an elongation, is therefore the best time to try to see the planet. To further complicate matters, the altitude above the horizon above which Mercury can be seen can also change, and so not every elongation is favourable for viewing it. This is due to the angle of the ecliptic path – the path that the Sun…

There are a lot of craters on the Moon that would be more famous and better appreciated if they weren’t so close to other features that were bigger, more prominent or just better looking. If you scan the lunar landscape around ‘celebrity’ craters like Copernicus and Ptolemaeus, you’ll find lots of smaller craters that would be very popular targets for lunar observers if only they weren’t so close to those beasts. Likewise, in the low-lying areas on either side of the curved dinosaur spine of the jagged Montes Apenninus, you’ll find lots of smaller craters, hills and rilles worth looking at, but with their peaks jutting out of the surface so magnificently, nothing in their shadow gets a look in. The same is true of this month’s destination on our…

Born on his grandparents’ farm near Wapakoneta, Ohio, on 5 August 1930, Neil Alden Armstrong developed an early interest in flying. He had his student pilot’s licence at the age of 16, before he’d even passed his automobile driver’s test. He received a scholarship from the US Navy after high school and studied aeronautical engineering at Purdue University, Indiana. Armstrong was later called up for active duty in the Korean War, flying 78 combat missions from 1950. In 1952 he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the successor of which would become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He transferred to NASA’s Flight Research Center in California in the mid-1950s, piloting several experimental aircraft, including the 6,437 kilometre (4,000 mile) per hour X-15 rocket jet. In total…

The James Webb Space Telescope has peered deep into a dense molecular cloud and found a rich variety of pristine interstellar ice, including a range of molecules crucial for life. Spotted at frigid temperatures of -263 degrees Celsius (-440 degrees Fahrenheit), these finds are the coldest ices ever measured. “We simply couldn’t have observed these ices without Webb,” Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute said. Webb studied a neighbourhood that scientists call Chameleon I in the constellation of Chameleon. 500 light years away from Earth, it’s one of the closest star-forming regions, with dozens of pockets alive with young stars. The region belongs to a family of what astronomers long thought to be holes in the sky: dark molecular clouds so dense with gas and dust…

Physicists have replicated the kind of gravitational field found in or near the Sun using sound waves inside a sphere of hot plasma, creating a field analogous to gravity that’s able to overcome the effect of Earth’s gravity that can drag such experiments down. The Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, is a roiling, turbulent sea of convective plasma. Plasma is ionised gas in which the atoms have been shorn of an electron, giving them an electrical charge. Hot plasma rises from deeper within the Sun to the photosphere, with cooler plasma sinking back down, where it’s reheated and recycled back to the photosphere. This convective motion is radial, outward from the centre of the Sun, but trying to replicate radial plasma fields on Earth faces one big problem: our planet’s…

What if the other Solar System planets were the same distance from Earth as the Moon? At best, a night sky with one or more planets at the Moon’s distance would look very different. At worst, either the other planet or Earth – or both – would be radically changed by its proximity to the other. In some cases, we wouldn’t survive. There are numerous factors involved, but speculation is part of the fun of astronomy. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, is also a similar size to our Moon, with a radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516 miles). It has similar surface features to the Moon from a distance, although if it were close up we’d be able to see that the craters, rays and other features are quite…

H elium could make up almost half the mass of the atmospheres of giant exoplanets that have migrated close to their stars, explaining why there’s a mysterious size gap among these worlds. Over 5,200 exoplanets have been confirmed, and many are larger worlds that orbit close to their stars, in some cases with orbital periods lasting just a few days. However, transit observations by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and now TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, have found a puzzling dearth of planets with radii between 1.4 and 2.4 times that of Earth. Astronomers call this the ‘radius valley’. Though it seems to be telling us something fundamental about the nature, formation and evolution of planets, scientists have yet to ascertain what that something is. A new take on the…

Recently, NASA established potential landing sites near the south pole of the Moon for upcoming crewed missions of its Artemis program. But how will astronauts survive and thrive in the harsh lunar environment? One new proposal could help. Austrian company Pneumocell has developed the PneumoPlanet inflatable habitat concept for the Moon, which could contain up to 16 greenhouses and house up to 32 astronauts. “PneumoPlanet is an ultra-light inflatable structure covered by regolith that will operate self-sufficiently by producing and recycling its own oxygen and food using solar power,” said Philipp Gläser, a postdoctoral researcher at Berlin Technical University and a co-researcher on a study outlining the PneumoPlanet concept. “It can therefore serve as a permanent lunar outpost, enabling various future missions to use it as a base. The habitat…

It’s very difficult, especially now, because part of what we accomplished with Shoemaker-Levy 9 was to get the world interested in this problem of if there’s an asteroid or a comet that could collide with the Earth, and if there is, we’d better find it. Now there’s a lot of money being paid into searching the skies for asteroids or comets that could collide with Earth. We have actually found a couple within a few hours of their collisions with us – not a comet, but small asteroids. We missed the one that hit Russia a few years ago. We missed that one because it was very close to the Sun as it was approaching us and we never got to see it, and it collided with us very rapidly.…

In this issue... 80 What’s in the sky? Spring is in full swing, with warmer nights making observing more comfortable 82 Planetarium Where you can find the planets this month and the phases of the Moon 84 Month’s planets Easter brings a feast of planets in the evening sky 86 Moon tour Overshadowed by its more famous neighbour Plato, Mairan is well worth a look on a clear night 87 Naked eye and binocular targets Lone stars and globular clusters are treats on view in spring 88 Deep sky challenge Reveal a gaggle of must-see structures when looking out into deep space 90 The Northern Hemisphere Some bright stars of winter still linger after sunset 92 Review We put the Sony A6600 camera to the test 96 In the shops…

1 Alphard This star’s name means ‘the solitary one’. Alphard is aptly named, as it’s the only bright star in this region of sky. Hydra (the Water Snake), the constellation that this magnitude +2.0 star occupies, stretches across the sky. To the naked eye and binoculars, Alphard has a warm orange colour. 2 Crater This constellation is said to represent a cup of water brought to the god Apollo by a crow. +3.56 Delta Crateris and +4.07 Alpha Crateris are the constellation’s two brightest stars, which are easily detected with 10x50 binoculars. 3 Corvus Corvus represents the crow sent to collect water by Apollo, but brought him a snake instead and was thrown into the heavens. While you can’t see them, at least three of Corvus’ star systems have exoplanets.…