Innehållsförteckning för No. 156 från All About Space

SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER Throughout the universe, you won’t be surprised to learn that there are galactic megastructures in abundance. Some are bigger than others, and the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is the largest structure we’ve discovered so far. It has an estimated length of 10 billion light years and a width of 7 billion light years. To put that into perspective, the entire universe is only thought to be 93 billion light years wide. Also, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and it would take over 10 billion years for light to traverse its length. Elsewhere in the issue, we head over to Mars to uncover what it really takes to land astronauts on the Red Planet’s surface, chat to The Infinite Monkey Cage’s Robin…

Massive stars gain their magnetism by colliding and merging with other stars, at least according to evidence from a bizarre binary surrounded by a dusty, element-rich nebula. Inside that bipolar nebula, which has the dual designation of NGC 6164/6165, is the star system HD 148937. Located some 3,800 light years away in the constellation of Norma, HD 148937 contains two massive stars in orbit around one another. One of these stars is magnetic, and is in fact the brightest and hottest massive star known to have a magnetic field. That’s puzzling because based on what we know about the interiors of stars, massive stars should not have magnetic fields. We’re used to thinking of the Sun as a magnetic star, driving phenomena such as sunspots, flares, prominences and the solar…

Scientists were astounded when they witnessed a ‘dead’ neutron star with one of the most powerful magnetic fields in the cosmos unexpectedly spring back to life. The reactivation of this highly magnetic neutron star, or ‘magnetar’, doesn’t conform to the current understanding of these exotic celestial objects. A team made the discovery of this magnetar’s return from the dead when they spotted strange radio signals from the closest known magnetar to Earth, XTE J1810-197, located around 8,000 light years away, using the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) Parkes radio telescope, called Murriyang. Most magnetars are known to emit polarised light – light with waves orientated in one particular direction. The team’s findings show the light from this magnetar is circularly polarised, appearing to spiral as it moves…

NASA engineers have at last discovered the cause of a communications breakdown N between Earth and the interstellar explorer Voyager 1. It would appear that a small portion of corrupted memory exists in one of the spacecraft’s computers. The glitch caused Voyager 1 to send unreadable data back to Earth, and is found in the spacecraft’s Flight Data Subsystem (FDS). That’s the system responsible for packaging the probe’s science and engineering data before the telemetry modulation unit and radio transmitter send it to mission control. The source of the issue began to reveal itself when Voyager 1 operators sent the spacecraft a ‘poke’ on 3 March 2024. This was intended to prompt the FDS to send a full memory readout back to Earth. The readout confirmed to the NASA team…

When it comes to primordial black holes being dark matter suspects, their alibi may be falling apart. Tiny black holes, created seconds after the birth of the universe, may have survived longer than expected, re-igniting a suspicion that primordial black holes could account for dark matter, the universe’s most mysterious stuff. Dark matter currently represents one of the most pressing problems in physics. Despite making up an estimated 85 per cent of the matter in the cosmos, dark matter remains effectively invisible to our eyes because it doesn’t interact with light. Because the particles that comprise the atoms of everyday stuff we can see, like stars, planets and our own bodies, clearly do interact with light, this has prompted the search for dark matter particles outside the Standard Model…

PLANET OF THE MONTH Mars is a morning object this month, and gets easier to see as the days pass from May into June Mars is famously known as the Red Planet because when it’s visible at its best – high in a dark sky – its colour is very striking, although it shines with more of a bright-orange hue than a garnet-red one. Later this year Mars will indeed be a splendid sight, an eye-catchingly bright jewel gleaming in the evening sky, but this month it is a faint morning object. At the start of our observing period it will be rising some 40 minutes before the Sun, but even with a magnitude of +1.1 it will look faint in the brightening sky. However, each morning Mars will be…

Although there aren’t many hours of darkness in which to observe the night sky in late spring, if you plan your viewing there’s a good chance you will be rewarded. This time of year is especially good for globular star clusters. These objects, as the name suggests, are tightly packed balls of stars that orbit around the plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way, sometimes at surprisingly large distances from it. Each cluster is individual, and all of them are fascinating to view through telescopes. Some are very bright, such as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (Messier 13), but many are considerably fainter, and therefore will need a larger aperture telescope to be seen well. However, there’s plenty to see whatever the size of telescope you might have.…

DETAILS Cost: £3,999 / $4,899 From: Unistellar Optical design: Reflector Aperture: 4.5 inches (114 millimetres) Focal length: 17.7 inches (450 millimetres) Focal ratio: f/3.9 Highest useful magnification: 50x optical, 150x digital Total kit weight: Nine kilograms including tripod Mount type: Alt-azimuth The eVscope 2 is a step away from traditional telescope stargazing and instead hosts an in-built camera, sleek design and electronic eyepiece. It’s the second iteration of the eVscope line and has some noticeable improvements in both design and accessibility. The telescope itself is a 4.5-inch (114-millimetre) reflector with a focal ratio of f/3.9, making it perfect for wider field of view celestial objects such as nebulae. Inside is a 7.7-megapixel image sensor, and new to the eVscope 2 is an electronic eyepiece designed by Nikon for those that…

Celestron Cometron 7x50 Cost: £54.95 / $43.95 From: Celestron 1 What most don’t appreciate about children is that they can see a lot better in the dark than adults. That’s because their pupils can dilate wider, which makes their night vision better. So should you give a child a smaller binocular that’s easier to carry and hold, but allows less light in? That’s one option. Another is to go for a binocular like the Celestron Cometron, which manages to be both reasonably lightweight and let as much light in as possible. That way you’re allowing them to see everything in the night sky they possibly could. With 7x magnification and a 50mm objective lens, the Celestron Cometron is ideally sized for stargazing. What’s more, it boasts multi-coated optics that comprise…

A small galaxy bursts with star formation in a dazzling new image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy, called I Zwicky 18 (I Zw 18), is located roughly 59 million light years from Earth. It’s classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy, meaning it’s much smaller and less structured than our Milky Way. The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of I Zw 18 suggest the galaxy has gone through several sudden bursts of star formation, creating two distinctly bright regions of white and blue stars at its core. Wispy brown filaments surround the central starburst region in the new Webb photo. These filaments represent bubbles of gas that have been heated by stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation unleashed by hot, young stars. Previous Hubble Space Telescope observations of…

Currently in the 12th year of its mission, NASA’s Curiosity rover continues to press on while treading the world of Mars, delving into areas no rover has gone before. The latest phase of Curiosity’s adventure has brought it to what some scientists believe is the desiccated bed of an ancient river. As Curiosity prepares to follow Gediz Vallis, as scientists call this winding and boulder-choked channel, it will try to give scientists a look back through time so they can discover how the landform came to be in the first place. Originally slated for a two-year mission, Curiosity continues to trawl the Martian surface in search of new insight into the Martian environment and any life that might have once lived – or still lives – on the Red Planet.…

Boeing says it may sign up private astronauts for future Starliner missions, but the focus is on NASA for now. The spacecraft’s program manager, Mark Nappi, said on 25 April that the company is very focused on flying the first Starliner mission for NASA with astronauts on board. That mission will see NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams rocket to space aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket no earlier than 6 May. “It really is all of our attention at this point,” Nappi said. After that first mission, Boeing will make sure it has enough spacecraft manufactured for future NASA astronaut flights, which are expected to run to six or seven. Private flights are a possibility, but not the concern for now, given they are building out…

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) left Earth a year ago, embarking on a mission to explore Jupiter’s potential ocean moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – in detail. Water is a vital ingredient for life on Earth, so learning more about its distribution on these moons, and others, such as the Saturnian moon of Enceladus, can tell us about whether these ocean worlds can host life – as we know it, at least. Scientists can’t yet drill through the icy crusts of Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, however, which means they can’t yet determine the composition and characteristics of their respective bodies of water. In fact, scientists can’t even verify the existence of those oceans just yet. On the bright side, with JUICE there may be a workaround. Lacking physical…

I t’s generally accepted that planetary colonies will have to grow their own food, and no colony illustration is complete without an astronaut tending some crops. But like everything in space, this is not as easy as it looks. Various plants have been grown on the International Space Station, but the problem for planetary greenhouses is not the lack of gravity, but the lack of pressure. In the initial stages of colonisation, most materials and equipment will have to be brought from Earth, and if you can grow plants at a lower atmospheric pressure, it will save a lot of mass. The air supply itself may need to be transported from Earth, and even if there are convenient deposits of ice to split oxygen from, you still need nitrogen and…

The United States must harness emerging technological capabilities if it wants to avoid losing a future conflict against its T adversaries, the head of US Space Force warns. General B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations for the US Space Force, gave a speech at the Space Foundation’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs that stressed the need for the service to be able to partner with commercial industry to rapidly develop and field new space-based capabilities. The best and fastest way to do that, Saltzman said, is to strengthen the service’s relationship with the commercial industry. “The Space Force must harness the benefits of technological innovation and emerging capabilities if we’re going to be able to outcompete our competitors, or Space Force will lose, the Joint Force will lose…

A side from the fact that the Sun is orbited by the only planet in the universe known to be home to life, it’s pretty normal as far as stars go. Along with 90 per cent of the other stars in the universe, it’s classed as ‘main sequence’ and is powered by fusing hydrogen to make helium. It’s medium sized, is using up its fuel relatively slowly and will die quite quietly – without the drama of a supernova and with no risk of leaving behind a black hole. However, some of the other stars out there are seriously strange. In the Milky Way and its surrounding satellite galaxies, astronomers have uncovered some weird and wonderful things. There are stars shrouded in clouds of lead, stars spinning so quickly that…

Scientists cannot definitively explain the exact nature of dark energy. It’s believed to have a significant effect, accelerating the expansion of the cosmos, but despite making up about 70 per cent of all of the mass and energy in the universe, it remains a mystery which researchers have longed to get to the bottom of. By amassing and analysing an abundance of data, astronomers have been getting closer and closer to a better understanding. One of the big breakthroughs in recent times has been the Dark Energy Survey, which was published in 2021. Based on observations made between 2013 and 2019, this huge dark matter map has provided a solid amount of data for researchers and is proving capable of throwing up many interesting results. One of the problems with…

The energetic particles often associated with solar flares can damage or disrupt our satellite operations. Space-based electronics are usually shielded enough to protect themselves from the energetic X-ray photons from a solar flare, but energetic particles that may also be emitted from the Sun during a solar flare can penetrate into the electronics and create a single-event upset in them. Most single-event upsets can be cleared by power cycling the electronics, but some single-event upsets can cause permanent damage to the electronics. These energetic particles of concern are most common with the larger solar flares classified as X-class flares. There is on average one X-class flare per month, but there are fewer X-class flares during the 11-year solar cycle minimum period. The Sun has been coming out of its solar…

“Higgs thought that when the universe was born, it might have been filled with what’s called the Higgs field” On 8 April 2024, British theoretical physicist Peter Ware Higgs passed away at the age of 94. It was almost 12 years ago, on 4 July 2012, in a fairly inauspicious lecture hall located in Geneva, Switzerland, when Higgs became an iconic figure in modern science. That was the day it was announced that collisions between particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility – arguably the most ambitious and audacious science experiment ever – revealed the existence of the Higgs boson. The discovery of the Higgs boson, named for Higgs himself, has been vital for the field of particle physics. It was the last occupant of the particle zoo…

Almost five years ago we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which saw the first humans walk on the surface of the Moon. One thing that became clear during those anniversary celebrations was that many people seem to believe that Apollo ended with the Eagle’s landing, and that everything that followed was just a postscript. That’s just not true. Every subsequent mission had its own highlights and its own firsts, even if they have now been largely forgotten by everyone except space historians and Apollo fanatics. If any mission deserves the title of ‘the forgotten Apollo mission’, it would be Apollo 16, which went to the Moon 52 years ago. Apollo 16 landed 50 kilometres (31 miles) to the north of the crater Descartes, and unlike the…

Hubble has imaged a powerful jet erupting from a natal envelope of gas and dust that represents a newly born star announcing itself to the cosmos. Hubble spotted the infant star slicing its way out of the nebula that birthed it when it zoomed in on the youthful multi-star system FS Tau. Located 450 light years from Earth, it’s part of the Taurus-Auriga region, which houses a stellar nursery of molecular clouds that are home to numerous newly forming protostars and young stars. Astronomers previously discovered binary infant stars in this 2.8-million-yearold nebula, and now a second infant star, designated FS Tau B, has made itself known. Both FS Tau B and the previously discovered infant stars in the FS Tau stellar nursery – a binary named FS Tau A…

KEEP IN TOUCH /AllAboutSpaceMagazine @spaceanswers space@spaceanswers.com It would appear that the so-called ‘great instability’ event that wreaked chaos among the planets, sending the gas giants I careening through space until they settled into the orbits we know today, occurred between 60 and 100 million years after the birth of the Solar System. This is the conclusion of some careful scientific detective work that has connected a type of meteorite to an asteroid that was once pushed around by those marauding planets. What’s more, scientists believe the migrating planets – primarily Jupiter – could have led to the formation of Earth’s Moon by destabilising the orbit of a Mars-sized protoplanet called Theia. Thanks to studies of the compositions and locations of various types of asteroids and comets, scientists know the carnage…

A 3.7-billion-year-old record of our planet’s ancient magnetism has been unearthed, providing evidence that Earth’s magnetic field already existed very early in history. But this discovery is quite surprising. Rocks approaching 4 billion years old are hard to find – most have been recycled through Earth’s tectonic activity, slipping into the mantle through subduction zones before being belched back out via volcanoes. et, somehow, a sequence of rocks in the Isua Greenstone Belt in Greenland has survived the ravages of time thanks to its unique geology, situated on top of a thick continental plate like a life raft amid an ocean of tectonic upheaval. Researchers from the University of Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have dug up some of those Isua rocks, finding that they contain an ironclad…

A civilisation-destroying asteroid may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the threat is very real. These rocky fragments range in size from mere metres to hundreds of kilometres across, and while most of them orbit the Sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, the gravitational pull of planets can sometimes alter their path. If an asteroid – or a fragment of one, known as a meteoroid – makes it to Earth’s atmosphere, it usually burns up as a meteor or shooing star. However, some explode in a massive fireball, and others make it down to Earth’s surface as meteorites. In 2013, a 10,000-tonne meteor measuring 18 metres (59 feet) across hurtled into Earth’s atmosphere at 67,000 kilometres (41,600 miles) per hour before exploding 23.3 kilometres (14.4…

Satellites in low-Earth orbit can venture hundreds of miles off their expected trajectories when bad space weather hits. The problem affects the International Space Station (ISS), China’s Tiangong space station and many Earth-observing satellites that need a close view of our planet. This positioning uncertainty increases the risk of orbital collisions, which threaten to worsen the space debris problem. “At altitudes of 500 kilometres [310 miles], we can determine the position of our satellites with the accuracy of two centimetres [0.8 inches],” Alex Saltman, CEO of California-based satellite company GeoOptics, which makes meteorological measurements of Earth’s upper atmosphere, said. “But at lower altitudes, it becomes a big problem.” The lower the orbit, the bigger the inaccuracy. That’s because space weather affects the density of Earth’s upper atmosphere. As atmospheric density…

One answer considered especially useful by astronomers is the barycentre, the point where the masses of the Sun, the planets and of all bodies in the system balance out. Imagine placing those masses on a huge platform supported by a single pin; slide the platform until you find the place where it remains perfectly balanced on the pin, and that is the barycentre. Now generalise your intuition to three dimensions. The barycentre is important because the equations of gravitation guarantee that it remains still while all bodies move in their orbits subject to their mutual attraction. Because the Sun is so massive, the barycentre lies relatively close to the solar core – in fact, it lies ‘inside’ the Sun about half of the time. However, the balancing is very sensitive…

Colliding black holes emit a powerful burst of gravitational waves – ripples in the geometry of space-time. Black holes are disconnected regions of the universe defined by an invisible one-way membrane called the event horizon: you can enter, but never escape. Black holes form when massive stars die, and they grow by swallowing up stars, other black holes or interstellar gas. Like the stars from which they formed, they often live in binary pairs. Over time these binaries get closer and their orbits strongly perturb spacetime, emitting gravitational waves like a moving finger makes waves in a pool. As these waves remove potential energy from the binary, the black holes spiral closer and orbit faster. Eventually they touch – the event horizons merge like two liquid drops, releasing a final…

Red-light friendly In order to preserve your night vision, you should read our observing guide under red light 17 MAY Asteroid 2 Pallas reaches opposition in Hercules at magnitude +9.0 19 MAY Mercury is at its highest altitude in the morning sky, dazzling at magnitude +0.4 31 MAY The Moon and Saturn make a close approach, passing within 20.2’ of each other in Aquarius 31 MAY The Moon will pass in front of Saturn, creating a lunar occultation visible from certain parts of the world 1 JUNE The Moon and Neptune make a close approach, passing within 1.1’ of each other in Pisces 1 JUNE The Moon will pass in front of Neptune, creating a lunar occultation visible from Sub-Saharan Africa 2 JUNE The Great Globular Cluster (Messier 13) is…

1 The Wild Duck Cluster Visible in binoculars, this lovely cluster looks like a flight of birds. Many of the stars that comprise it are brighter than 14th magnitude, with binoculars revealing a hazy spot as bright as a magnitude +6.0 star. From locations untouched by light pollution, Messier 11 can be glimpsed by the unaided eye. 2 Scutum ‘The Shield’ constellation isn‘t particularly conspicuous, but it lies in a dense part of the Milky Way. It’s brightest star, Alpha Scuti, glimmers at a magnitude of +3.83, while its faintest star, Delta Scuti – a bluish-white giant – glows at a magnitude of +4.72. 3 The Milky Way From a dark-sky site at this time of year, the Milky Way arcs across the sky from north to south. A dusty…

Summer has almost returned, bringing with it warmer nights. While the cold evenings of winter provide dark skies and longer observing sessions, May and June still have a lot to offer in the way of vibrant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies. The constellation of Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs) is joined by Virgo (the Virgin), Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair) and parts of Centaurus (the Centaur), while globular cluster Omega Centauri glows at magnitude +3.9 and makes its appearance from the east to set in the west. NGC 3628, the Hamburger Galaxy, is a spiral that contains multiple layers of dust. Nebulae are soon to be rich pickings the further we move into summer, with the Owl Nebula (Messier 97) and NGC 4361 being easy targets this month. Using the sky…