Astro Blog

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Cerro Pachón in Chile ...the giant telescope is built for speed. ...The camera at its heart is fast, too, capable of spitting out a 3200-megapixel image from each exposure in less than 3 seconds. ...10 May, ...commissioning scientist Kevin Fanning prepares to take his 350-ton baby out for a spin. At the press of a button on his laptop, the towering structure begins to move and is soon rotating effortlessly on a thin film of oil. ...Rubin needs to be fast because it must cover a lot of sky—all of it. ...Rubin will march relentlessly across the firmament, capturing swaths in a field of view that covers the equivalent of 45 full Moons. At each stop its 3-ton, car-size camera will record the view with an array of 189 light sensors cooled to –100°C, producing an image so rich it would take a wall of 400 ultrahigh-definition TV screens to display it in full. Each snapshot takes 30 seconds; then the telescope slews in less than 5 seconds to a new vist...

By European Space Agency (ESA).  Excerpt: Thanks to its  newly tilted orbit  around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led  Solar Orbiter  spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the  solar cycle  and the workings of space weather. ...Any image you have ever seen of the Sun was taken from around the Sun’s equator. This is because Earth, the other planets, and all other operational spacecraft orbit the Sun within a flat disc around the Sun called the ecliptic plane. By tilting its orbit out of this plane, Solar Orbiter reveals the Sun from a whole new angle....  Full article at https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_gets_world-first_views_of_the_Sun_s_poles . 

By Adithi Ramakrishnan, Associated Press Excerpt: Scientists have unlocked one of the solar system’s many secrets from an unexpected source: a planetarium show opening to the public on Monday. At the American Museum of Natural History last fall, experts were hard at work preparing “Encounters in the Milky Way,” .... They were fine-tuning a scene featuring what’s known as the Oort Cloud, a region far beyond Pluto filled with icy relics from the solar system’s formation. ...scientists have never glimpsed its true shape. One evening while watching the Oort Cloud scene, scientists noticed something strange projected onto the planetarium’s dome. “Why is there a spiral there?” ...The inner section of the Oort Cloud, made of billions of comets, resembled a bar with two waving arms, similar to the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. ...Scientists had long thought the Oort Cloud was shaped like a sphere or flattened shell, warped by the push and pull of other planets and the Milky Way itself. Th...

By Phie Jacobs , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers...aren’t quite sure why...the corona, is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface—or why it can violently eject huge volumes of plasma that can mess with Earth’s magnetic field and scramble power grids. ...air turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere blurs our view of it, making it hard to discern fine details. Now, using an adaptive optics system installed at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), the authors of a new  Nature Astronomy  study have removed this blur—producing  the clearest images and videos to date of the Sun’s atmosphere . In  a statement , BBSO optical engineer and study co-author Nicolas Gorceix likened the new technology to “a pumped-up autofocus and optical image stabilization in your smartphone camera, but correcting for the errors in the atmosphere rather than the user’s shaky hands.” ...researchers also captured a phenomenon known as coronal rain, where city-size droplets of hot plasma in the Sun’s corona...

By Dennis Normile , Science.  Excerpt: Following its successes retrieving lunar samples from both the near and far sides of the Moon, China is planning an encore, sending a probe to snatch material from a near-Earth asteroid. The target of the Tianwen-2 mission, which is expected to launch by the end of the month, is a chunk of rock named 469219 Kamo‘oalewa. It is one of just seven asteroids that fall into a little-understood class known as quasi-satellites of Earth—and it could also be the first known asteroid comprised of lunar material. That hypothesis could be confirmed by laboratory studies of fragments collected by Tianwen-2, which are due to be returned to Earth about 2.5 years after launch. ...Kamo‘oalewa was discovered in 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakalā in Hawaii. It ... has been in its current orbit for about 100 years  and will likely remain there for another 300.... University of Arizona planetary scientist Benjamin Sharkey and colle...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers have found promising hints that the atmosphere of a distant planet contains gases linked to life,  BBC reports today . A team led by University of Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan reports in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters  that it  used NASA’s JWST telescope to detect the signatures of the gases  dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in starlight that had passed through the atmosphere of K2-18b, a massive planet 120 light-years from Earth. On Earth, those gases are produced by marine phytoplankton and give sea air its distinctive scent. ...It’s also possible that DMS and DMDS are produced on the planet  by some nonbiological process . Last year, a different team of researchers reported signs of DMS  within the dust and gas of the definitively lifeless comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko , calling into question the gas’ usefulness as a biosignature....  See also New York Tim...