Space: The Final Frontier

[nudge+]

First movie partially shot on ISS/in space:

Looks really beautiful. Not too sure about the storyline; basically a doctor is brought on the space station to perform a heart surgery on a Kosmonaut in zero-gravity. Will definitely give it a go though.

[nudge+]

First orbital space rocket launch from the UK is planned for Monday. 

 

 

[Tommy]

On 20/12/2022 at 22:30, nudge said:

I really should watch that new Good Night Oppy documentary... 

Have you watched it yet? Just finished it. Sometimes a bit corny, but overall very cool insights and stories. 

[nudge+]

5 hours ago, Tommy said:

Have you watched it yet? Just finished it. Sometimes a bit corny, but overall very cool insights and stories. 

Nope, not yet... But I would highly recommend watching The Farthest, it's easily the best space documentary out there.

[Stan]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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UK space launch: Historic Cornwall rocket launch ends in failure

The first ever satellite mission launched from UK soil has ended in failure.

A jumbo jet operated by the American Virgin Orbit company carried a rocket out of Newquay, Cornwall, to release it high over the Atlantic Ocean.

The rocket ignited and appeared to be ascending correctly. But word then came from the company that the rocket had suffered an "anomaly".

The satellites it was carrying could not be released and were lost.

Cosmic Girl, the carrier 747 jet, returned safely to base.

FULL REPORT

 

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Rare, green comet to be visible from Earth for the first time in 50,000 years – where and when you can see it

The comet should be visible in the northern hemisphere on 13 January.

(Stellarium - North)

A comet that hasn’t swung by our part of the solar system since the last Ice Age will revisit for the first time in 50,000 years this Friday.

The last time the comet appeared, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals shared the planet and indigenous Australians had only just made the journey over the southeast Asian land bridges to this continent.

Friday the 13^th in 2023 may not be as unlucky as we think.

The comet is named C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first spotted it passing Jupiter in March last year. With a name like that, I am surprised they didn’t go with “WTF.”

Whether the name rolls off the tongue or not, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will roll into the inner solar system coming to within around 160 million kilometres from the sun – marginally further from our central star than the Earth is from the sun.

From there it will move towards Earth, reaching as close as 42 million kilometres from the planet on 2 February, when it will be at its brightest. On its approach toward the sun, the comet will not be visible to the naked eye, but should be able to be seen through binoculars.

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Read more: Japanese asteroid visitor’s tiny payload delivers big results

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Eventually, as it gets closer to the Earth, it may become visible to the naked eye.

NASA says that comet afficionados in the northern hemisphere should be able to observe C/2022 E3 (ZTF) with binoculars or small telescopes in January, but star-gazers fixing their instruments on the southern skies will have to wait till February.

In the Sky reports that New York City observers will be able to see C/2022 E3 (ZTF) as it rises at 11:18 p.m. EST (04:18 a.m. GMT) and reaching an altitude of 64° over the eastern horizon, before fading away around 6:07 a.m. EST (11:07 a.m. GMT).

The comet was discovered in March 2022 by the wide-field survey camera at the Zwicky Transient Facility. Initially believed to be an asteroid, it revealed itself as a comet when it emerged from Jupiter’s orbit and underwent a rapid “brightening”.

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Read more: South Korea’s lunar orbiter has just taken a breathtaking ‘Earthrise’

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C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has a distinct green colour and two tails, one of which is very long. Scientists suggest the comet head’s green colour is likely due to a dicarbon molecule (chemical compounds with two bonded carbon atoms). Long exposure photographs will show these features more clearly than observations with small telescopes or binoculars.

For anyone who wishes to see the comet, the Virtual Telescope Project will host a free livestream on 13 January, 3pm AEDT (12 January, 11pm EST). Watch the live webcast on the project’s website or YouTube channel.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/comet-50000-years/

 

Edited January 11, 2023 by CaaC (John)
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Supermassive black hole pair on path to collision

The two goliaths are only 750 light years apart.

Two supermassive black holes  have been spotted on their way to a cataclysmic collision. The newly discovered pair are the closest to colliding of any SMBH pair ever observed.

Findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters say the pair is around 750 light years apart. This means they won’t actually crash into each other for another few hundred million years.

For comparison, our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is only four light years from Earth (nearly 200 times shorter in distance), and famous star Betelgeuse is a little over 700 light years away from us.

Like the SMBH in the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, the SMBH pair are each the central black holes of two galaxies which are in the midst of a galactic merger.

Between them, the pair of gargantuan black holes have a combined mass of around 325 million times that of our Sun. As their host galaxies continue into the final stages of their merger, the two black holes will eventually begin circling each other, spiralling closer together until they eventually form one truly monstrous black hole.

This artist’s conception shows a late-stage galaxy merger and its two newly-discovered central black holes. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. Koss et al (Eureka Scientific), S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF).

The astronomers, announcing their discovery at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on January 9, believe the finding will help estimate how many other SMBHs elsewhere in the universe are coming close to a collision.

Such improved surveys of SMBH collisions will aid in efforts to detect gravitational waves – ripples in the very fabric of spacetime caused by intense gravitational events.

Study co-author Chiara Mingarelli, a research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City, says the short distance between the SMBHs “is fairly close to the limit of what we can detect, which is why this is so exciting.”

Astronomers were forced to use seven different telescopes to differentiate between the two goliaths, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The bright stars, and luminous gas and dust surrounding the black holes makes them undetectable directly using optical telescopes.

But the pair was found soon after the search commenced, suggesting close-together SMBHs “are probably more common than we think, given that we found these two and we didn’t have to look very far to find them,” Mingarelli adds.

This suggests to Mingarelli and her team that the first ever detection of gravitational wave “background babble” from all the SMBH collisions going on in the universe may come “very soon.”

Previously, observations of merging galaxies showed only one SMBH because the central black holes are too close together to tell them apart using one telescope.

The new survey of galactic mergers combined 12 observations made using seven different telescopes on Earth and in orbit.

“It’s important that with all these different images, you get the same story – that there are two black holes,” says Mingarelli. “This is where other studies [of close-proximity supermassive black holes] have fallen down in the past. When people followed them up, it turned out that there was just one black hole. [This time we] have many observations, all in agreement.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/supermassive-black-hole-closest-collision/

Edited January 12, 2023 by CaaC (John)

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Can humanity's new giant leap into space succeed?

There is a new order emerging in space - a race between America and China. But with the demands of space exploration, even these great superpowers won't be able to do it alone.

Hugely technically challenging and costly goals have been touted, not least the aim of people living and working on other worlds, possibly within ten years - but in a divided world where international good will is scarce, are they realistic?

Nasa's return to the Moon has begun with its Artemis programme. The first of three missions has been successfully launched. This uncrewed flight tested that the rockets and technology worked. The second mission will take humans further in space than they have ever gone before and the third launch will put astronauts on the Moon for a week, where they will carry out experiments. The long-term goal is to use the Moon as a jumping off point to get to Mars.

But the programme is estimated to cost $93bn (£76bn), a heavy price tag for the American taxpayer, who is already feeling the economic squeeze.

In a report to Congress last year, the US Auditor General's office warned of an "unrealistic development schedule" and likely overruns, adding that Nasa needed to make cost estimates "more reliable and transparent".

Yet although Nasa will get less overall funding than it asked for in 2023, Congress, at the moment, still supports its human space exploration ventures.

China has achieved its own fully operational space station, Tiangong, in orbit on schedule. The Chinese space programme has launched probes to the Moon and Mars. It plans to establish an unmanned research station on the Moon by 2025 and then land astronauts on its surface by 2030.

FULL REPORT

 

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Light pollution: Huge fall in stars that can be seen with naked eye

The number of stars that people can see with the naked eye has reduced dramatically over the last decade.

The cause is "Skyglow" from artificial lighting - the brightness of that glow has increased every year since 2011.

Dr Christopher Kyba, a scientist from the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, told the BBC: "Our view of the stars is disappearing".

He and his colleagues published this discovery in the journal Science.

It is the conclusion of 12 years of amateur astronomers and citizen scientists going out at night to count the stars.

The change in stars' visibility that people reported - by submitting their star counts to an online project called Globe at Night - was equivalent to an almost 10% annual increase in sky brightness every year.

That means, the scientists say, that a child born in an area where 250 stars were visible, would probably see fewer than 100 stars in the same location 18 years later.

Gleaming pollution

As light pollution researchers Fabio Falchi and Salvador Bará pointed out in an expert commentary published alongside the research: "Looking at the International Space Station's images and videos of the Earth at night, people generally are struck by the 'beauty' of city lights, as if they were lights on a Christmas tree.

FULL REPORT

 

Edited January 20, 2023 by CaaC (John)
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Big step towards the upcoming orbital test flight - potentially next month already. 

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We didn’t die from 2023 BU, but why did we only find out about the asteroid on Saturday?

DARTs not much use when the asteroid is already here.

If you are still reading this it’s because the asteroid didn’t destroy Earth…

And yet, another day, another asteroid getting a little too close to Earth for comfort. Asteroid 2023 BU has just grazed Earth, skimming in-between ‘low Earth orbit’ which is 2,000km and geostationary orbit which is 36,000km. This is close enough to nab an incredibly unlucky satellite.

So, as asteroid 2023 BU begins its sail back into the distance, it’s a good time to ask questions about why it’s so difficult to track small asteroids until they’re only a few days away. And as more and more satellites are inserted into orbit, it’s also worth understanding if a rogue asteroid could be a problem for one of these satellites.

Asteroid 2023 BU has had a similar story to many small asteroids. A few days before it hits or misses us, someone discovers it. The media goes wild, nothing happens, and we all move on with our lives.

In this case, 2023 BU was discovered last Saturday and flew past us at its closest approach (around 3,900 km above Earth) earlier this morning. The asteroid was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, who also discovered the first interstellar comet 2I/Borisov in 2019.

Excitingly, 2023 BU is the fourth-closest approach we’ve ever been able to track that didn’t end up hitting Earth. The other three were discovered in 2020 and 2021.

2023 BU is about the size of a delivery van at 4-8 metres long, and scientists were not worried about it at all. Even if it had hit our atmosphere, an asteroid of that size would have burnt up completely 30 kilometres before it hit the ground.

“In this instance I think we’ll live through it,” jokes Dr Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics. “And look on the bright side, if it does hit, you won’t feel a thing!”

Saber Astronautics’ Mission Control Centre is based in Adelaide, and has worked in ‘space traffic management’ for satellites. Luckily though even the satellites probably don’t need to worry too much.

“I think most people in the industry have a big sky, little bullet kind of philosophy … with asteroids hitting satellites,” he said.

Much more likely is a satellite hitting another satellite, he told Cosmos. But he didn’t completely rule it out.

“But I don’t do Vegas. I am not known for being lucky.”

NASA’s test last year to change the path of an asteroid named Dimorphos was incredibly successful. This means that if an Armageddon asteroid was coming for us all, with enough notice NASA could send up a little spacecraft to nudge it out of our way.

But that only works if we know if the asteroids are coming. NASA knows where pretty much all of the near-Earth asteroids that are larger than one kilometre. An asteroid that big would spell global catastrophe if it hit Earth so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on them.

We’re also finding more and more asteroids larger than 140 metres in size – if an asteroid this size fell into a city it could cause mass casualties. NASA estimates they’ve located about 40% of those.

The smallest asteroids – like 2023 BU – which are unlikely to cause too much damage if they hit, are still mostly untracked. NASA suggests they’ve found only 0.4%.

But that’s not to say that these smaller asteroids can’t cause problems. In 2013 an asteroid about 20 metres long exploded over Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia. No one had any idea it was coming until it entered the atmosphere and exploded. Around 1,500 people sought medical attention, and thousands of buildings were damaged.

So why can’t we track these smaller asteroids too?

“The sensors that track all this stuff, the best ones, are still run out of the US military. There is also all these commercial sensors that are just beginning. There’s a few in Australia, there’s a few in the United States,” says Held.

“But asteroids don’t have money to pay for sensor time.”

However, we are getting better at tracking these smaller asteroids. The Centre for Near Earth Object Studies has already found over 18,000 asteroids smaller than 100 metres.

Projects and telescopes like NEOWISE and ATLAS have been helping to track those asteroids around us. NEOWISE keeps an eye on asteroids before they get to close, and ATLAS is a last-ditch effort to allow people to evacuate an area before potential impact.

But, in the meantime, amateur astronomers like Borisov might be the best we’ve got. You can rewatch 2023 BU as it hit its closest point to Earth as part of the Virtual Telescope Project.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/australia/bu-2023-asteroid-satellite-discovery/

 

Edited January 28, 2023 by CaaC (John)
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Rapidly spinning dead star slows down, and scientists think they know why

They’re supposed to speed up, but maybe a volcanic eruption changed things

A magnetar — or highly magnetic dead star — with the unassuming name of SGR 1935+2154 is attracting a lot of attention.

Back in October 2020 it suddenly slowed down. A few days after that, there were three fast radio bursts (FBR), and pulsed radio waves for a month coming from the same area.

A new study has looked into what could have caused this, and the team has come to the conclusion that a volcano-like rupture on the dead star’s surface could have caused the slow down or what’s known as a ‘spin-down glitch’.

“People have speculated that neutron stars could have the equivalent of volcanoes on their surface,” said Rice University astrophysicist Professor Matthew Baring.

“Our findings suggest that could be the case and that on this occasion, the rupture was most likely at or near the star’s magnetic pole.”

Magnetars are a type of neutron star — the compact remains of a dead star that collapsed under intense gravity. They can be as dense as the nucleus of an atom, and only a few kilometres wide. They rotate once every few seconds and feature the most intense magnetic fields in the universe.

SGR 1935+2154 has been in the news before. Not long after it glitched, researchers linked the FRBs to SGR 1935+2154, making it the first FRBs to have come from a known object. More excitingly, it was the first FRB inside the Milky Way.

But this doesn’t explain what happened to the magnetar to have caused the spin-down glitch, and both the FRBs and the pulsing radio waves.

Although glitches occur pretty regularly, mostly the magnetars speed up, not slow down. Only one other magnetar has ever been conclusively caught undergoing a spin-down glitch (also known as an anti-glitch).

“In most glitches, the pulsation period gets shorter, meaning the star spins a bit faster than it had been,” said Baring.

“The textbook explanation is that over time, the outer, magnetised layers of the star slow down, but the inner, non-magnetised core does not. This leads to a build-up of stress at the boundary between these two regions, and a glitch signals a sudden transfer of rotational energy from the faster spinning core to the slower spinning crust.”

But spin-down glitches can’t work like that. Instead, the team suggested that a volcano like explosion on the surface could do the trick.

The team suggest that the spin-down glitch occurred when surface plasma close to the magnetic pole of SGR 1935+2154 shed itself. This could have spewed a wind of particles into space, which could alter the star’s magnetic field and become radio emissions.

“Here we unveil the detection of a large spin-down glitch event from the magnetar SGR 1935+2154 on 5 October 2020,” the team write in the new paper.

“Given the rarity of spin-down glitches and radio signals from magnetars, their approximate synchronicity suggests an association, providing pivotal clues to their origin and triggering mechanisms with ramifications to the broader magnetar and FRB populations.”

Considering what we’ve already discovered, this isn’t likely to be the last time we’ll hear of super star magnetar SGR 1935+2154. The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/magnetar-anti-glitch-spin-down-dead-star/

 

[Tommy]

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Newly discovered green comet comes close to Earth

A newly discovered comet will make its closest approach to our planet on Wednesday.

Astronomers say the object's journey toward us took around 50,000 years.

Photographs captured by astronomers show a distinct green hue around the body of the comet.

But those expecting a brilliant streak of emerald in the sky will be disappointed. Its brightness is right at the threshold of what is visible to the naked eye.

"You might have seen these reports saying we're going to get this bright green object lighting up the sky," says Dr Robert Massey, deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Sadly, that's not going to be anything like the case."

However, away from light pollution and below dark skies, you might be able to see a smudge in the sky - if you know what you're looking for.

Would-be stargazers have a better chance of spotting it using binoculars, in which it will appear as a faint white blur.

"Even a small pair of binoculars will help you find it," says Massey.

Comets are mostly composed of ice and dust. As they approach the Sun, the ice is vaporised and the dust shaken off to create the signature long tail.

"If you're lucky, you'll see a hint of the tail coming off it, so it'll look more like a classic comet," says Massey.

Astronomers discovered the comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) last March at the Palomar Observatory in California.

It has been visible to those in the Northern Hemisphere through binoculars for the past few weeks.

But it will make its closest approach to Earth at around 41 million km (26 million miles) away this Wednesday.

The object originates in the Oort cloud, a collection of icy bodies at the edge of the Solar System.

To find it, Massey suggests first searching for the pole star, which is always in the same place in the sky.

You can identify the pole star by looking directly north and locating a star that hangs distinctly by itself.

You can then use free planetarium software online to determine where the comet will be moving in relation to the pole star on the night you're looking at it.

The best time to view it will be in the early hours of Thursday morning when the Moon has set.

At that time the comet should appear just to the right of the pole star.

A green appearance for comets is not uncommon and is usually the result of breakdown of a reactive molecule called dicarbon - two carbon atoms joined together by a double bond.

Such colour is better picked up by digital cameras, which are more sensitive to colour.

The comet will not match the spectacle of the 2020 Comet NEOWISE - the brightest comet visible from the Northern Hemisphere since 1997.

But the Planetary Society said "an opportunity to see it will only come once in a lifetime".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64388483

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Space collision avoided by only about 6 metres

Space watchers hold their breath as Soviet-era rocket debris narrowly misses satellite and avoids “worst case scenario.”

An old rocket body missed colliding with a defunct satellite over Antarctica by about six meters, just days before Australia activated a new space radar that can help map the fallout from such a “catastrophic” event.

The LeoLabs West Australian Space Radar (WASR) at Collie Shire, near Bunbury in the state’s southwest, was officially switched on yesterday. It capped eight months of work assembling and calibrating the S-band active phased array radars brought in from the United States.

The incident over Antarctica is an omen of what is to come.

Similar radar arrays in New Zealand, Alaska, Texas, Costa Rica and the Azores had pinpointed the orbits of an old SL-8 rocket upper stage and the defunct Cosmos 2361 satellite and extrapolated a high probability of collision.

Leo Labs Australia Managing Director, Terry van Haren, says the new WA radar – which had just finished its calibration process – was watching for telltale signs of a collision and any resulting debris cloud.

“We were in a good position to see the first evidence of any breakup,” he told Cosmos. “We’d also have been able to speed up the tracking process from days to hours”.

The two bulky objects were projected to pass just 6m from each other. But even relatively small margins of tracking error meant that both the satellite and rocket body could be more than 10 meters out of position.

LeoLabs declared the conjunction as being very close to a “worst-case scenario”.

“Had the SL-8 rocket body and Cosmos 2361 collided, it likely would’ve resulted in thousands of new debris fragments that would have persisted for decades,” LeoLabs tweeted as the event unfolded.

The Soviet Union launched the rocket body in 1986. The Parus data relay satellite was put into orbit by the Russian Federation in 1998.

LeoLabs reports the objects are orbiting at a height of 984km. That’s what it calls a “bad neighbourhood” – a region full of derelicts and debris. 

Among them are some 160 other abandoned SL-8 rocket bodies amid a similar number of now-defunct payloads. All were deployed more than 20 years ago.

“These rocket bodies stick around for decades,” a LeoLabs report states. “In fact, the rocket body from the seventh space launch ever, Vanguard 2 in 1959, is still in LEO today… more than 64 years later.”

All are highly vulnerable to further breakup, with any fresh debris cloud potentially creating a devastating cascade of collisions. LeoLabs says there were 836 incidents where these objects passed within 100m of each other last year alone.

Previously in Cosmos: How to prevent a space collision

And the number of these discarded rocket and fuel-carrying stages, often weighing about 2000kg, keeps climbing. Another 50 or so were abandoned in 2022. 

“It’s imperative that we not only focus on collision avoidance but also debris mitigation and debris remediation to combat Space Debris. This requires investing in debris removal technologies and missions,” a spokesperson added.

That’s where WASR comes in.

Leo Labs’ van Haren says the WA facility “turns the lights on in LEO in the southern hemisphere”.

“It’s been a bit of a dark spot,” he told Cosmos Magazine. “Overall, it boosts our global network by some 20 per cent. But it is working in unison with the Kiwi space radar now to give both nations total coverage. People don’t realise how strategic these radars are.”

The WA facility’s day job, however, will be to further refine orbital tracks and pinpointing increasingly small pieces of debris. While far more lethal than a bullet, these remain largely untracked.

And a whole new space services industry is growing up around collision early warning and the provision of small, lightweight thrusters to allow valuable space assets to dodge them.

It’s not so much a “boom-bust”  industry as it is dynamic, says van Haren. “It’s congested, contested and competitive. And it’s changing every day. The great challenge is keeping up with that”.

It took the first 50 years of the Space Age to place 10,000 catalogued objects in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Between 2007 and late 2021, that figure doubled to 20,000. And in 2022 alone a further 2500 objects were added to that tally.

“This growth shows no sign of slowing down,” the LeoLabs report states. “While exciting, we must be aware of and prepare for the challenges to come.”

Less than 30 per cent of these orbital objects are operational. And only the most recent launches carry the thrusters or equipment necessary to direct them back into the Earth’s atmosphere to burn up after their usefulness has expired.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/news/space-collision-narrowly-avoided/

 

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Flying (Not Quite) Blind

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Largest galaxy in the universe brought into sharp relief in stunning new composite image

The galaxy is roughly 522,000 light years across.

A spectacular new photo has been released showing the record-holder for largest galaxy in the universe.

NGC 6872, also known as the Condor Galaxy, stretches 522,000 light years from tip to tip. The Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years across.

The galaxy is visible in the southern skies as part of the Pavo constellation, and is 212 million light-years from Earth.

It was always thought to be among the largest stellar systems in the universe, but NGC 6872 was officially designated the largest galaxy known to science by NASA in 2013.

The new image of NGC 6872 combines different wavelengths of light from three different observatories to show the galaxy in all its glory.

It combines visible light from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile; far-ultraviolet data from NASA’s now decommissioned space telescope Galaxy Evolution Explorer; and infrared information from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Not only is NGC 6872 massive, it also has a very different structure to our home galaxy. The galactic goliath is known as a barred spiral galaxy with two smooth bars of stars emanating from either side of the object, tipped with smooth and continuous arms. This galaxy type is known as a SBb galaxy.

It is thought that the elongated appearance of NGC 6872 is due to its proximity to nearby galaxy IC 4970. The dwarf galaxy is about one-fifth the size of its monstrous neighbour, but is believed to impart enough gravitational tidal forces on the Condor Galaxy to give it its distinctive shape.

Interactions between galaxies like these usually lead to mergers. However, data, including the information gleaned from the new composite image, suggests that NGC 6872 and IC 4970 are actually doing the opposite – giving birth to a new galaxy.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/largest-galaxy-new-composite-photo/

 

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Strange things are happening with the solar system’s rings

Dwarf planet has a ring that shouldn’t exist and Saturn’s unexplained ring “spokes” return.

The vast expanse of space is throwing up more unexplained phenomena and bizarre cosmic happenings which have astronomers dumbfounded.

As they say, if you love it, put a ring on it!

Saturn is famous for its rings which are the most impressive in the solar system.

But proximity and notoriety hasn’t brought with it comprehension. There are still mysteries emanating from Saturn’s rings.

In the early 1980s, NASA’s Voyager mission first revealed transient features on the rings of the solar system’s second largest planet. These “spokes” or “smudges”, as they became known, have confounded scientists since.

Now, the Hubble Space Telescope (yep, it’s still giving us the goods despite being usurped by the James Webb Space Telescope) has released images which herald the start of another “spoke season” for the gas giant.

Because of Saturn’s tilt, it like Earth has four seasons. The planet’s equinox occurs when its rings are edge-on to the sun. The spokes disappear near summer or winter solstice. May 6, 2025 marks the beginning of Saturn’s autumnal equinox – and the spokes are believed to become increasingly prominent until then.

The cause of the “smudges” on Saturn’s rings is unknown, but the most likely candidate is the planet’s variable magnetic field. It is thought that the dusty, icy particles in Saturn’s rings may become charged as the magnetic field interacts with them, temporarily raising those particles above the larger objects in the rings.

“It’s a fascinating magic trick of nature we only see on Saturn – for now at least,” comments NASA senior planetary scientist Amy Simon.

Similar processes wherein the planetary magnetic field charges surrounding particles causes the aurora borealis and australis on Earth.

“Thanks to Hubble’s OPAL [Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy] program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn’s spokes this season than ever before,” says Simon, who is head of OPAL.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the solar system’s newest ring system shouldn’t exist.

Astronomers have discovered a new ring system around a dwarf planet, Quaoar. But the catch is that the ring system orbits the planet much further than is typical – seven times the dwarf planet’s radius (for comparison, Saturn’s rings lie within three of Saturn’s radii).

Normally, material orbiting so far out should evolve into a moon, not a ring system.

“It was unexpected to discover this new ring system in our Solar System, and it was doubly unexpected to find the rings so far out from Quaoar, challenging our previous notions of how such rings form,” says Professor Vik Dhillon from the University of Sheffield.

Quaoar has a diameter of approximately 1,100 kilometres (roughly half the size of Pluto).

The dwarf planet was discovered in 2002 and shows signs of ice volcanism. It already has a little moon friend called Weywot which measures 170 kilometres across.

Researchers found the ring system through occultation – when Quaoar passed in front of a distant star, the rings dimmed the star’s light slightly – using the world’s largest optical telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias on La Palma, the most north-westerly island of the Canaries off the coast of Spain.

Their results are published in the journal Nature.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/saturn-rings-spokes-quaoar/

 

 

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Dark Skies: Welsh island is first sanctuary in Europe

VIDEO

An island in north Wales has been officially recognised for having one of the best night skies in the world.

Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island), off the Llŷn Peninsula, has become the first site in Europe to be awarded International Dark Sky Sanctuary certification.

It joins 16 other sites worldwide recognised as the most remote and dark places on earth.

The trust which owns the island said it was a "huge achievement".

Wales already has several Dark Sky places and reserves, but areas designated as sanctuaries are much rarer and have stricter criteria in terms of the quality of the night sky.

The island's trustees hope that the new status will raise the island's profile as well as establishing Wales as a "dark sky nation".

FULL REPORT

 

Edited February 24, 2023 by CaaC (John)
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[nudge+]

There's a massive geomagnetic storm happening in the last few days, and as a result, beautiful auroras have been visible in places where they are not common at all, even reaching mid-Europe... Anyone caught it last night??? There's a good chance of it happening tonight, too!

 

(the higher the Kp number, the larger the storm)

[CaaC (John)+]

9 hours ago, nudge said:

There's a massive geomagnetic storm happening in the last few days, and as a result, beautiful auroras have been visible in places where they are not common at all, even reaching mid-Europe... Anyone caught it last night??? There's a good chance of it happening tonight, too!

 

(the higher the Kp number, the larger the storm)

Aye, heard about it and keeping track of the news here in Scotland.

Quote

Northern Lights set to be visible again tonight after rare Aurora display across UK

Vivid green, red streaks were witnessed through the night sky - Scotland had the most vibrant show but other parts of the UK caught a glimpse too.

Sky-gazers could be set for another Northern Lights treat tonight after Sunday's Aurora display was seen as far south as Cornwall.

Also known as Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights are usually best seen in high latitude regions closer to the Arctic, such as Scandinavia.

In the UK, usually only Scotland and parts of northern England are lucky enough to see the special sight, but this time even parts of southern England - such as Kent and Cornwall - reported sightings.

FULL REPORT

 

Edited February 27, 2023 by CaaC (John)
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