Astro Blog

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-snaps-highly-detailed-infrared-image-of-actively-forming-stars   By NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) .  Excerpt: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the “antics” of a pair of actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. ...They are buried deeply in a disk of gas and dust that feeds their growth as they continue to gain mass. The disk is not visible, but its shadow can be seen in the two dark, conical regions surrounding the central stars. The most striking details are the two-sided lobes that fan out from the actively forming central stars, represented in fiery orange. Much of this material was shot out from those stars as they repeatedly ingest and eject the gas and dust...over thousands of years. When material from more recent ejections runs into older material, it changes the shape of these lobes. ...The stars’ more recent ejections appear in a th

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/spot-venuss-creeping-cusps-at-solar-conjunction By Bob King, Sky & Telescope.  Excerpt: With Venus approaching inferior conjunction in August, here’s a foolproof way to follow its thinning crescent as the planet transitions from Evening Star to Morning Star. ...Venus currently shines about 25° east of the Sun and sets about 45 minutes after sundown. On August 13th the two bodies will be in conjunction and rise and set together. For about a week before and after that date, Venus will be difficult-to-impossible to see with the naked eye because of interference from solar glare but remain visible in a telescope if you know exactly where to look. The orbit of Venus is tipped 3.4° relative to the plane of the ecliptic [Earth's orbit plane]. At inferior conjunction, when the two planets are closest, Venus can pass up to 8.4° north or south of the Sun. If Venus lies at or close to either one of its  nodes  — the two points where it intersects

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-detects-water-vapor-in-rocky-planet-forming-zone By NASA.  Excerpt: Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. The star hosts both an inner disk and outer disk of gas and dust, separated by a 5 billion-mile-wide (8 billion kilometer) gap, and within that gap are two known gas-giant planets. New measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) have detected water vapor in the system’s inner disk, at distances of less than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the star – the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming. (The Earth orbits 93 million miles from our Sun.) This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or mo

https://eos.org/articles/magnetic-tangles-drive-solar-wind By  atthew R. Francis , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Though the  effects  of solar wind are well documented, what  causes  it has been a mystery for more than 50 years. Now, thanks to a solar close-up, some researchers think the energy behind the flow of particles comes from the Sun’s own magnetic fields snapping together. The process, known as reconnection, may illuminate not only solar wind but winds from other stars as well as the behavior of comets and planetary atmospheres. In part to solve the solar wind mystery—and perhaps learn ways to spot solar storms before they form—researchers developed NASA’s  Parker Solar Probe , which launched in 2018 and has been flying in ever-closer orbits to the Sun. ...Reconnection occurs in plasmas when magnetic fields pointing in opposite directions cancel out, rapidly dumping their energy into the surrounding electrons and ions. A simplified picture would be taking two bar magnets pointed in oppos

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/perseverance-finds-complex-organics-not-life-on-mars/ By Colin Stuart, Sky & Telescope Magazine.  Excerpt: Planetary scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Perseverance rover have found signs of organic molecules on Mars, hinting that the planet had a more complex geochemical cycle in the past than previously thought. If true, it shows that the building blocks of life have been present on the Red Planet for around billions of years. These new findings, published in  Nature , come from examining the floor of Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer- (28-mile-) wide impact basin just north of the Martian equator. NASA picked it as Perseverance’s landing site due to geological signs that an ancient river flooded into the crater some 2.5 billion years ago.... 

https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101893676/aomawa-shields-on-searching-for-life-in-space-and-at-home KQED podcast.  Excerpt: Does it matter if life exists on another planet? To UC Irvine astrobiologist Aomawa Shields it matters in the same way that a mountain matters and screams to be climbed: not knowing is unbearable. Shields has devoted her career to studying the climate and habitability of exoplanets to further the search for extraterrestrial life. She’s also one of very few Black women in a field dominated by white men and a classically trained actor. We talk to her about her journey as a scientist and an artist and her new book “Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe.”... See also TED Talk,  How we'll find life on other planets  

https://www.science.org/content/article/amateur-astronomer-may-worlds-top-supernova-hunter By Dennis Normile.  Excerpt: Amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki is one of the most prolific supernova hunters of all time. ...he drove to his private observatory in the hills above his home in Yamagata, Japan, 290 kilometers north of Tokyo. ...SN 2023ixf is his 172nd supernova, a total topped only by U.S.-based Tim Puckett, whose private observatory in Georgia has bagged at least 360 supernovae with the help of a worldwide network of volunteers who manually examine his images. Itagaki, by contrast, works alone. He “is one of the most prolific supernova observers in the world,” says Andrew Howell, an astronomer at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara.... 

https://www.fraknoi.com/astronomy/pahs-found-in-distant-galaxy/ By Andrew Fraknoi.  Excerpt: Astronomers working with the Webb Space Telescope have found a fortunate alignment in the sky that has enabled them to detect the faint signal of a complex building block of life just 1.5 billion years after the origin of the universe. The discovery of PAH’s (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) so soon after the Big Bang is another powerful demonstration that assembling the ingredients for the chemistry of life is a process that began in the vast clouds of raw material between the stars. And, it seems, it began quite quickly after the first generations of stars produced the required elements....