Innehållsförteckning för January 2023 från BBC Sky at Night

Interview: Making alien contact Exoplanet researcher Emma Johanna Puranen on what would happen if we found extraterrestrial intelligence. The Sky at Night: Multiverse of Mystery The team explore science fiction ideas like multiverses and interstellar travel, asking if they could ever become science fact. Download your 2023 Moon phases poster Access the lunar phase dates and times for the whole of the coming year, delivered directly to your smartphone or tablet. The Virtual Planetarium Pete Lawrence and Paul Abel guide us through the best sights to see in the night sky this month.…

BULLETIN Paris, 22-23 November 2022 The UK has three new potential astronauts - including the first-ever astronaut with a disability - after the European Space Agency announced its new class of 17 astronaut candidates on 23 November. Six members of the class will now undergo 12 months of basic training. Two people from this group are from the UK: astronomer Rosemary Coogan and John McFall, a paralympic sprinter and orthopaedic surgeon. McFall isjoining the class as part of the Parastronaut Feasibility Project and will work with both ESA and NASA to see if adjustments can safely be made to allow disabled astronauts to fly in space. “When it was announced that they were looking for a candidate with a physical disability, I thought it was such an inspiring and thrilling opportunity,“…

CUTTING EDGE Our experts examine the hottest new research E Earth is under continual bombardment from energetic charged particles streaming through outer space. These are known as cosmic rays and are produced by coronal mass ejections from i our own Sun, or come from beyond the Solar System, accelerated by supernovae throughout the Galaxy. When these energetic particles, travelling at near the speed of light, encounter Earth's atmosphere they trigger great showers of secondary radiation, some of which penetrates all the way to the surface. These charged radiation particles knock electrons off any atoms they pass by, causing ‘ionisation' which can damage the DNA in our cells and also affect atmospheric processes. The less energetic cosmic rays are significantly deflected by Earth's magnetic field, and so the equator receives more…

Stargazing Beneath Ingleborough Ingleborough Cave, Clapham, North Yorkshire, 14 January, 6:30pm Cold, clear winter nights make for excellent stargazing conditions. In this guided tour of the night sky, astrophotographer Pete Collins will give a talk at the Old Sawmill Cafe on the wonderful celestial sights to be seen, before heading outside for a short walk up the trail and a spot of stargazing over the Yorkshire Dales National Park, A Dark Sky Reserve, with constellations, star clusters, galaxies and planets all on show, the park has large areas that are completely free of local light pollution. Tickets cost £15 per person and booking is essential. www.yorkshiredales.org.uk/whats-on…

In 2022, almost all the major showers were gatecrashed by the Moon, its bright light overpowering dimmer meteors, reducing the number that could be seen. This year, however, all the major showers occur near to new Moon, meaning it will be both dimmer and below the horizon for most of the night. Another factor affecting how many meteors you can expect to see is how prolific the meteor shower is, which is measured by its Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR). This is the number of meteors you would see under perfect conditions, if the shower was coming from directly overhead. In reality, the number you will see will be significantly less, closer to half. Here are the dates of the meteor showers where the Moon will be most favourable:…

Two major new space telescopes are heading into space this year, beginning with ESA's Euclid telescope, which will take a deep look into the Universe's dark side - dark matter and dark energy, that is. While dark matter is the strange substance that holds galaxies together, dark energy is the force that seems to be driving them apart, accelerating the expansion of the Universe. However, even though these dark cousins have been part of our understanding of the Universe for decades, we don't really know what they are. Euclid will help astronomers understand these mysterious forces by surveying billions of galaxies, the light of which has taken over 10 billion years to reach us. Covering one third of the extragalactic sky beyond the Milky Way, astronomers will be able to…

COSMOLOGY RASH COURSE Since the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, there has been renewed interest in the most distant galaxies in the Universe, those with the highest ‘redshift'. Redshift is a term readers of BBC Sky at Night Magazine will have encountered before, but what exactly is it? Why are galaxies redshifted? And how is redshift a measure of distance? Redshift is precisely what the name implies. Light is comprised of waves, the wavelength of which determines their colour. The light of remote galaxies we observe with our telescopes has a slightly redder colour than the light emitted by that galaxy long ago - the wavelengths have shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. But why does this happen? More often than not, this redshift is erroneously…

Manilius Type: Crater Size: 40km Longitude/Latitude: 9.1° E, 14.5° N Age: Approximately 1.1—3.2 billion years Best time to see: Five days after full Moon (12/13 January) or six days after new Moon (28 January) Minimum equipment: 50mm refractor Manilius is a distinctive 40km crater that lies in the northeast region of Mare Vaporum. Its rim appears sharp and well-defined, with a shape that follows a circular profile to the east, but has distinct undulations across a section to the west. The section to the south appears to be pushed further southward than it should. Bright outer ramparts lead up to the upper rim lip. These are extensive and contrast well with the dark lava surface of Mare Vaporum. The ramparts remain close to the crater's rim in the west, extending…

1. The Three Leaps of the Gazelle 10×50 We begin with an asterism that contains only six stars, in three evenly-spaced pairs, spread over 30° of sky. In North African sky lore these are the hoof-prints left by a gazelle that, startled by a lion (Leo is at the south of the chart), leapt from the watering hole. Binoculars will help to bring out their colour differences, ranging from brilliant-white Kappa (κ) Ursae Majoris to orange Alula Borealis (Nu (v) Ursae Majoris). □ SEEN IT 2. The Sailboat 15x70 Use the chart to identify the location of 22 Leonis Minoris. This giant star is in the centre of a triangle made by 20, 23 and 28/30 Leonis Minoris. Once you have it in your binoculars, you will notice that 22…

This is the year that the UK hopes to demonstrate it is a serious player in space. It already has established expertise in space science and satellite production, but 2023 will see it become a launch-capable nation. According to the UK Space Agency, our nation offers the right mix of regulations, environment, business and geography for commercial launch services, with the aim of attracting business in an industry worth $20 billion globally. With the UK due to host its first rocket launch (and the first from European soil) in late 2022 from Spaceport Cornwall, and two more sites hoping to begin operations in 2023, these hopes may not be unfounded. Meanwhile, the UK is also building its relationships with private companies and spacefaring nations, and is already involved with several…

Take the perfect astrophoto with our step-by-step guide The full Moon on 6 January occurs 34 hours and 11 minutes from lunar apogee, the point in the Moon's orbit when it is furthest from Earth. The opposite position is lunar perigee, when the Moon is closest to Earth. Having an elliptical orbit around the Earth-Moon centre of mass (barycentre) means the Moon passes through apogee and perigee once every lunar month. Apogee and perigee aren't that big a deal astronomically, but when full Moon occurs close to one of these positions, it does present a good opportunity to catch the full Moon when it appears largest (at perigee) or smallest (at apogee) in our sky. The distance between the Moon and Earth is constantly varying and so the Moon's apparent…

EYE ON THE SKY JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, 16 NOVEMBER 2022 This extraordinary image shows a new star in the process of growing up. Taken by the NIRCam instrument on board the JWST, the protostar, a tiny speck at the centre of the cloud, is drawing new substance from the molecular cloud that surrounds it. There's more to the image than the spectacular hourglass shape, however. Ejections from the star - L1527 in Taurus - have cleared out cavities above and below it whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this infrared view. In fact, the star-forming region is only visible in infrared, as the colours are created by layers of dust between the star and telescope, with the blue areas being where the dust is thinnest. The cloud is…

Powerful bursts of solar radiation, known as Miyake events, strike Earth around every 1,000 years, but their origin is uncertain. To track the cosmic storms, astronomers from the University of Queensland turned to an unexpected record-keeper - tree rings. “Because you can count a tree's rings to identify its age, you can also observe historical cosmic events going back thousands of years,” says Qingyuan Zhang, one of three undergraduate students who led the study. “When radiation strikes the atmosphere, it produces radioactive carbon-14, which filters through the air, oceans, plants and animals, and produces an annual record of radiation in tree rings.” The team found Miyake events last much longer than expected, some even going on for one or two years. “Rather than a single instantaneous explosion or flare, what…

For the first time, astronomers have been able to see the full chemical profile of an exoplanet's atmosphere, thanks to recent observations by the James Webb Space Telescope. The spectra revealed dozens of chemicals within the atmosphere of WASP-39b, including sulphur dioxide. The compound has never been seen on an exoplanet before and is created during chemical reactions triggered by the star's high-energy light. “This is the first time we see concrete evidence of photochemistry - chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light - on exoplanets,” says Shang-Min Tsai from the University of Oxford, who was lead author on one of the five papers already written on the observations. The planet is a gas giant orbiting its star eight times closer than Mercury orbits the Sun, and is located just…

The amateur astronomer's forum At 3pm on St Patrick's Day, 17 March 2022,1 found myself in the media pen at NASA Kennedy Space Center, standing alongside US and foreign national press. We waited patiently, hoping for that first glimpse of the enormous Space Launch System and Orion capsule assembly that was soon to roll out of the Vehicle Assembly Building. When it did finally crawl past us at around 8pm, I could barely take it in. It was enormous. Four months later, NASA announced that Artemis I - the first mission in the agency's new lunar landing programme - would launch on 29 August. I made my travel plans and returned to Cape Canaveral. The big night finally arrived. I was on site at about 10:30pm, preparing fora launch window…

Throughout the first half of the year, Venus will be well-placed high in the evening sky. Its clear visibility makes it the perfect time to conduct a longterm observing or imaging project, such as capturing the planet's phases. The planet will start the year around 95%-lit, but slowly become less illuminated as it moves around the Sun. Around 30 May it will appear around 50%-lit through a telescope, then will rapidly fade to just 19%-illuminated by the end of July when it moves into the morning skies. Another project is to try to catch Venus as it passes all the other major planets throughout the year. The planet reached conjunction with Mercury on 29 December 2022, but remains close by for the first week of 2023 before moving towards Saturn…

Human spaceflight is entering a new era. In November 2022, NASA successfully tested its new Orion crew module that will take humans back to the Moon - and ultimately perhaps beyond. But that doesn't mean low-Earth orbit is being forgotten. The Roscosmos's Soyuz, the Chinese Shenzhou and SpaceX's Crew Dragon will continue ferrying astronauts to their respective space stations, but two more vehicles could be about to join their ranks. In April, Boeing hopes to launch the first crewed test of its reusable Starliner space craft, to ensure the spacecraft is ready to begin ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station full time. The mission will have two experienced astronauts on board and will dock with the ISS for several days. The flight is years behind schedule after its first…

The further out into space you look, the further back in time you are seeing. The most remote galaxies ever observed are so far away that their light - even though it moves at the incredible speed of 300,000km per second - has taken more than 13 billion years to reach Earth, meaning we are seeing them as they were in the childhood days of the Universe. Back then, the very first stars emitted copious amounts of energetic ultraviolet light, at typical wavelengths of a few hundred nanometres. But thanks to the long light travel time and the corresponding large cosmological redshift, these high-energy light waves get redshifted all the way into the infrared part of the spectrum, at wavelengths of a few micrometres. That's one of the reasons why…

THE BIG THREE BEST TIME TO SEE: Last week of January DON'T MISS Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF makes a dash for it this month. Having held position in the region of Corona Borealis over the past weeks, the comet rapidly heads north during January. C/2022 E3 ZTF begins the month at a predicted magnitude of +7.5. On the nights of 10/11 and 11/12 January, it is expected to have brightened to mag. +6.8 and will be approximately 5° east of Alkalurops (Mu (μ) Bootis). It formally exits the border of Corona Borealis on 13 January, continuing its northerly track. It then sits 5° west of mag. +3.9 Tau (τ) and +4.2 Phi ((φ) Herculis on 17/18 January. After this date, if it follows its predicted brightness curve, the comet will…

Mars Best time to see: 1 January, 21:54 UT Altitude: 62° Location: Taurus Direction: South Features: Albedo markings, polar caps, weather Recommended equipment: 75mm or larger Mars was at opposition on 8 December 2022 and remains bright, prominent and beautiful to observe through a telescope. However, things are changing and not for the better. Mars is currently in Taurus, shining at mag. -1.2 on 1 January, a bright orange beacon to the west of the Pleiades open star cluster. Through the eyepiece it shows a 14-arcsecond disc and detail should be easily discernible through a 150mm or larger instrument at high powers. It has a close encounter with a 91%-lit waxing Moon on the evening of 3 January, both objects appearing just 1.6° apart (centreto-centre) at 19:15 UT. After its…

With all eyes tuned to comet C/2022 E3 ZTF and its potential rise to naked-eye visibility, it is worth noting that there is another reasonably bright comet visible during January. Comet C/2020 V2 ZTF starts the month in northern Cepheus, around 7° from Polaris (Alpha (α) Ursae Minoris). From here, it moves south to pass very close to mag. +2.7 Ruchbah (Delta (δ) Cassiopeiae), ending the month 3° south of this star. It maintains a fairly constant magnitude, starting the month at +9.3 and ending it at +9.2. That is on the edge of binocular visibility, but a small telescope is probably the best way to go. C/2020 V2 ZTF passes very close to mag. +5.3 40 Cassiopeiae on the evening of 11 January, a track that then takes it…

Star colours can be hard to perceive. The difference between a hot blue-white star and a white star may not always be obvious. However, red stars are a different matter. Typically appearing to our eyes as orange, in the star universe red equates to cool. Your challenge this month is quite simple: find and observe or photograph the reddest star you can. There are plenty of stars whose redness isn't too hard to determine. In the winter sky the two obvious naked-eye candidates are Betelgeuse (Alpha (α) Orionis) and Aldebaran (Alpha (α) Tauri). Star redness is quantified by a value called the B-V index. This is calculated by determining the star's apparent magnitude through a standard blue (B) filter and a standard visual filter (V). The more positive the number,…

Based at Newquay Airport, Spaceport Cornwall is able to host horizontal launches, which involve a carrier aircraft taking off from a runway to reach the desired launch altitude and releasing a rocket in mid-air. Virgin Orbit's modified Boeing 747, called Cosmic Girl, will release the LauncherOne rocket at an altitude of around 35,000 feet (10,700 metres). The system can transport up to 300kg of cargo into orbit. The ‘Start Me Up' mission from Spaceport Cornwall is due to launch by the end of 2022, and was granted a licence to fly by the Civil Aviation Authority on 16 November, though a launch date was yet to be announced at time of writing. It will deploy seven payloads into low-Earth orbit. These will be a range of satellites, with five from…

As well as spaceports, other initiatives are helping to bolster the UK spaceflight sector, one example of which is Space Park Leicester, which officially opened in March 2022. “It's a university-owned space facility, built around the idea that we host space businesses in the same facility as the researchers work,“ says Martin Barstow, their director of strategic partnerships and a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester. ”Space is expensive. In terms of building things like clean rooms, they're costly. They're beyond the means of small companies.” Making such facilities available in the Space Park reduces the cost of access for small and mediumsized enterprises and start-ups, he adds. They are also able to lean on the academic expertise in space that already exists at the…

What makes Gemini stand out is the presence of two bright and beautiful stars only 4.5° apart, mag. +1,9 Castor and mag. +1.1 Pollux. These stars form the heads of the legendary twins, and a stream of bright stars extends south from each. The best way to visualise Gemini is as a huge 'U' lying on its side. M35 (mag. +5.2, 25' across), located at the southern end of the constellation at the 'foot' of Castor, the western twin, is one of the finest star clusters in the sky. Easy to find even with a small telescope in heavy light pollution, M35 is a round, dense crowd of bright sparklers almost as large as the full Moon - its brightest stars are mag. +8.0. NGC 2158 (mag. +8.6, 5' across)…

Expert processing tips to enhance your astrophotos BEFORE AFTER The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is free imageprocessing software that can be used to process astronomy images. Its layout, adjustment and filter capabilities are very similar to Adobe Photoshop and it can be a good alternative for newcomers to astrophotography. Plug-ins are an excellent way to automate, simplify and speed up some of the complex image adjustments astrophotographers often need to make, such as star removal, colour (or ‘chroma') control and data stretching. While Photoshop and Pixlnsight have some well-known examples, GIMP also has a few options that have been around for over a decade. We take a look at a couple of Georg Hennig's from his 'Astronomy' suite of plug-ins. To begin, if you don't already have it, you…

BULLETIN NASA has finally taken a small step towards putting the first woman and person of colour on the Moon, after its Artemis I mission successfully launched and arrived in lunar orbit. “What an incredible sight to see NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft launch together for the first time,“ says NASA administrator Bill Nelson. ”This uncrewed flight test will push Orion to the limits in the rigours of deep space, helping us prepare for human exploration on the Moon and, ultimately, Mars.” The flight is the maiden voyage of the rocket and crew module that will eventually return humans to the Moon. But the $4 billion project has been beset by delays, twice returning to the Vehicle Assembly Building to repair leaking fuel lines and shelter from…

A stellar mass black hole just 1,600 lightyears away has set a new record for the closest known black hole. Its presence was revealed after ESA's Gaia space telescope observed the unusual motion of its stellar companion, a Sun-like star. Closer inspection of the star's motion revealed it was orbiting around an unseen black hole with a mass 10 times that of our Sun. “This is the first unambiguous detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellarmass black hole in our Galaxy,” says Kareen El-Badry from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, who led the study. The stellar pair, called Gaia BH1, are about as far apart as Earth and the Sun, leaving astronomers struggling to explain how the star managed to survive the hypergiant…

The largest potentially hazardous asteroid discovered in eight years has been found hiding in the inner Solar System, along with two other large asteroids. Astronomers believe they have already located over 95 per cent of near-Earth asteroids over 1km in diameter, which would have a global effect if any hit our planet. But finding the elusive last five per cent has proved challenging. “Only about 25 asteroids with orbits completely within Earth's orbit have been discovered to date because of the difficulty of observing near the glare of the Sun,” says Scott S Shepard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, that led the recent discovery. In the hope of finding these, Shepard's team observed during 10-minute windows each twilight when the asteroids were above the horizon and the background sky…

Working on The Sky at Night has been quite unlike any other experience I've had in TV. Before this I was a researcher on Brian Cox's landmark series Universe, but despite having similar content, the two shows couldn't be more different. On Universe I spent most of the year behind a desk, making sure our scripts all stayed scientifically accurate. In just a few months on The Sky at Night I've been on a road trip to meet scientists working on the James Webb Space Telescope, I've been on set with a live studio audience filming our Question Time episode, and I've explored obscure mysteries in the multiverse with four Chris Lintotts. There aren't many shows that can offer that kind of variety, especially in the world of astronomy. As…

The Moon is a wonderful thing to observe at any time of year, but there are times this year when you will want to pay special attention to our nearest neighbour. Several planets will be occulted by the Moon in 2023, meaning their path across the night sky passes behind the Moon, temporarily blocking it from view. The first is on 1 January, when the occupation of Uranus will be visible across much of the UK (turn to page 47 for more details). On 17 May it is Jupiter's turn to be occulted, though only for those in Scotland and the northern tip of Ireland - for the rest of the UK it will be a near miss. To make the observation even more challenging, it will be in the…

SPACEFLIGHT Of the three new explorers heading out into the Solar System this year, the showpiece is undoubtedly the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE). It will be the first time that the European Space Agency has sent a spacecraft beyond the asteroid belt, and it is bound for the three largest moons of Jupiter: Europa, Calisto and Ganymede. All three could harbour potential subsurface oceans and there have even been plumes of water seen erupting high over Europa, which JUICE will look for during its two fly-bys of the moon. It will also make 12 passes of Calisto - home of the most densely cratered surface in the Solar System, indicating the longdead world is an ancient relic of the Solar System's creation. However, JUICE's primary target is the largest…

Alhena (Gamma (γ) Geminorum) is a bright star in Gemini marking the position of the twin Pollux's left foot. Its name is derived from the Arabic word for a brand applied to the neck of a camel. It is the third -brightest star in Gemini and stands out in a region with few other stars to rival it, roughly midway between the Twin stars Castor (Alpha (α) Geminorum) and Pollux (Beta (β) Geminorum), and Betelgeuse (Alpha (α) Orionis). Compared to mag. +1.6 Castor, at mag. +1.9 Alhena is not far behind in brightness. Alhena lies 109 lightyears away. At that distance, to appear as bright as it does to us it must be 123 times more luminous than our Sun. Its spectral classification is A1 IV + G, which means…

With the first horizontal launch on its way, the race is now on between SaxaVord on Unst in the Shetland Islands, the most northerly point of the UK, and Sutherland on the northwest Scottish coast to stage the UK's first vertical rocket launch. These two facilities will launch satellites using traditional rockets taking off directly from a launchpad on the ground. SaxaVord aims to be a multi-use spaceport supporting launches by several operators, but Lockheed Martin is keen to be the first to launch there as part of the UK Space Agency's Pathfinder launch. It is bringing over a new rocket from the US called RS1, by ABL Space Systems, that can carry payloads up to 1,350kg. The launch will carry up to six CubeSats into low-Earth orbit, deployed by…

Although it never gets high enough in the sky to rival other open clusters, M41 (mag. +4.5, 39' x 39'), the Little Beehive Cluster, is still a marvel – a large group of 60 stars spread across an area larger than the full Moon. Most of M41's suns are bright, making it a naked-eye object from sufficiently dark sites. Luckily, M41 is located in the more northerly area of the constellation, 4° south of Sirius, and is somewhat away from the haze of the horizon. To improve the appearance of this group in the city, try using a mild light-pollution filter, a ‘Skyglow' or ‘Deep Sky'-type filter. This has the effect of darkening the background a bit, but not dimming the bright cluster stars too much. One of M41's more…

DIY ASTRONOMY Practical astronomy projects for every level of expertise With the drama of Mars disappearing behind the Moon last month, interest in occupations - when one Solar System body moves in front of a more distant astronomical object - is at a high. Most commonly occupations involve stars or a planet, but they can be, for example, an asteroid occulting a star. The common factor is that light from the distant object is blocked for a short time as the occulting body passes in front of it. As the Moon orbits Earth, it hides stars and planets, and these are known as lunar occupations. The Moon moves within five degrees either side of the ecliptic and so doesnt occult the same objects all the time. Occultations are time- and…

More ONLINE A gallery containing these and more of your images PHOTO OF THE MONTH The Lion Nebula Daniel Hightower, Hardeeville, South Carolina, USA, 15-20 October 2022 Daniel says: “I've always loved Ha regions that are filled with lots of Olll. It makes for such a dramatic image. The intense ionising gas in the Lion Nebula, including a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars, is just too exciting not to try and go deep with narrowband data. I went for 130-150 frames each at 300 seconds of Ha, Oll and Sll, which got me more than 34 hours of data.“ Equipment: ZWO ASI6200MM Pro camera, Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 refractor, Planewave L-350 mount Exposure: 34.6h total Software: SG Pro, Pixlnsight Daniel's top tips: “Narrowband imaging produces some beautiful palettes and the false colour combinations…

How are planets destroyed at the end of a star's life? In the process of becoming a white dwarf, a star like our Sun undergoes major changes involving its size and luminosity, when the star transforms into a so-called ‘giant star'. The star's size increases by a factor of hundreds, and it will easily swallow planets that are too close. For example, in the Solar System, Mercury and Venus will be swallowed. Some of the planets that are further away will be gravitationally perturbed into a close orbit around the star. We have a few examples of giant planets perturbed in this manner, but still no terrestrial planets. Just after the giant phase, the star shrinks into a small, compact white dwarf. How did you go about researching how some…