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Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky -- Month of November 2024
Welcome to the night sky report for November 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. This month, hunt for the fainter constellations of fall, including Pisces, Aries, and Triangulum. They will guide you to several galaxies, including the spiral galaxies M74 (NGC 628, the Phantom Galaxy) and M33 (NGC 598, the Triangulum Galaxy). Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter can be observed during the month. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.
NASA’s Europa Clipper Sets Sail for Jupiter’s Ocean Moon
NASA’s Europa Clipper has embarked on its long voyage to Jupiter, where it will investigate Europa, a moon with an enormous subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life. The spacecraft launched on October 14, 2024 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft is the largest that NASA has ever built for a mission headed to another planet. Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth. The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) on a trajectory that will leverage the power of gravity assists, first to Mars in four months and then back to Earth for another gravity assist flyby in 2026. After it begins orbiting Jupiter in April 2030, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times.
“Can't you smell that smell?” -- Missing Mars Atmosphere Could Be Hiding In Plain Sight
Mars wasn’t always the cold desert we see today. There’s increasing evidence that water once flowed on the Red Planet’s surface billions of years ago. And if there was water, there must also have been a thick atmosphere to keep that water from freezing. But sometime around 3.5 billion years ago, the water dried up and the air, once heavy with carbon dioxide, dramatically thinned leaving only the wisp of an atmosphere that clings to the planet today. Where exactly did the Martian atmosphere go? This question has been a central mystery of the planet’s 4.6 billion year history. For two MIT geologists, the answer may lie in the planet’s clay. They propose that much of the missing atmosphere could be locked up in the planet’s clay surface as methane — a form of carbon that could be stored undisturbed for eons.
Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky -- Month of October 2024
Welcome to the night sky report for October 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. The highlight of this October is a potentially bright comet (C/2023 A3 aka Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) that will appear around mid-month. In addition, Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter can be observed along with the Moon. The crisp, clear October nights are also full of celestial showpieces for the deep sky observer. For example, find Pegasus the flying horse of Greek mythology to pinpoint nice dense globular clusters and galaxies. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.
Fritz Zwicky’s Largely Ignored “Tired Light” Proposal of 1929 May Actually Be Right After All
Fritz Zwicky was not a shy person – He called them like he saw them. And he was very outspoken about his views. He, for example, was the first astrophysicist to come up with the concept of Dark Matter in 1933. He also had very strong views about redshift. Zwicky's contention was that the redshift observed from Earth was not because the galaxies were moving faster and faster away from us, but because the light photons were being shifted toward the red side of the spectrum as they lost energy while traveling long distances through space. Zwicky proposed that the longer the light traveled, the more energy it lost, leading to an illusion that galaxies that were more distant from Earth were also moving faster. His “Tired Light Theory” was largely ignored and neglected at the time (and even today), as astronomers adopted the more popular Big Bang Theory as the consensus model of the Universe. Now, new peer-reviewed research from Kansas State University shows that Fritz Zwicky may actually have been right, putting the whole narrative supporting the Big Bang Theory into question.
Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky -- Month of September 2024
Welcome to the night sky report for September 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. During the month you will have an opportunity to view five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), as well as a supermoon eclipse and a NASA solar sail satellite. In September, Pegasus becomes increasingly prominent in the southeastern sky, allowing skywatchers to locate globular clusters M2 (NGC 7089), M30 (NGC 7099), as well as a nearby double star, Alpha Capricorni, which is an optical double (but not a binary pair). Also, if you have access to dark skies away from urban light pollution, you might be able to get a glimpse of the faint, glowing pillar of the zodiacal light, which is sunlight reflecting off of an interplanetary dust cloud between Earth and the inner fringes of the main asteroid belt, just past Mars. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.
Tracking a Speed Demon Star Dashing Across the Milky Way
It may seem like the Sun is stationary while the orbiting planets are moving, but actually the Sun is also orbiting around the Milky Way Galaxy at an impressive rate of about 220 kilometers per second — almost half a million miles per hour. As swift as that may seem, when a faint red star was discovered moving even faster across the sky, clocking in at a speed of about 1.3 million miles per hour (600 kilometers per second), scientists took notice. Located just 400 light-years from Earth, this rare stellar speedster is the first “hypervelocity” very low mass star found. More remarkably, this star may be on an unusual trajectory that could cause it to leave the Milky Way Galaxy altogether based on research led by University of California (UC) San Diego Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Adam Burgasser. This hypervelocity star was found thanks to the efforts of citizen-scientists and a team of astronomers from around the country using several telescopes, including two in Hawaii – W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii Island and the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS on the peak of Haleakala in Maui. So how did the volunteer citizen-scientists contribute? This project capitalized on the keen ability of humans, who are evolutionarily programmed to look for patterns and spot anomalies in a way that is unmatched by computer technology. Volunteers tagged what they perceived to be moving objects in the large data files and when enough volunteers tagged the same object, astronomers investigated and eventually made the discovery.
Over One Billion Galaxies Blaze Bright in Colossal Map of the Sky
The Universe is teeming with galaxies, each brimming with billions of stars. Though all galaxies shine brightly, many are cloaked in dust while others are so distant that to observers on Earth they appear as little more than faint smudges. By creating comprehensive maps of even the dimmest and most-distant galaxies, astronomers are better able to study the structure of the Universe. The largest such map to date has just grown even larger, with the tenth data release from the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey. The DESI Legacy Imaging Survey expands on the data included in two earlier companion surveys: the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Legacy Survey and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey. Jointly these three surveys imaged 14,000 square degrees of the sky visible from the northern hemisphere. This ambitious six-year effort involved three telescopes, one petabyte (1000 trillion bytes) of data, and 100 million CPU hours on one of the world’s most powerful computers at the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky -- Month of August 2024
Welcome to the night sky report for August 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. Provided you have clear skies, viewing conditions for the Perseid meteors will be favorable this year. In mid-August there will be a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Mars. Also, in August, a number of star-studded figures soar overhead. Look for the constellation Lyra, shaped as a small parallelogram, which points to Epsilon Lyrae and the Ring Nebula (M57, NGC 6720). You can also spot three bright summer stars: Vega, Deneb, and Altair, which form the Summer Triangle. Keep observing around the group of stars commonly known as the Teapot and you’ll be looking toward the center of the Milky Way. In that direction, you can see the Lagoon Nebula (M8, NGC 6523), August is also a great month to learn an easy-to-spot constellation – Cygnus the swan. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase, so get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.
Apollo 11 Moon Landing – 55 Years Ago Today
55 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon in the lunar module “Eagle.” “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” -- Phrases that recall humanity’s first landing on the lunar surface. On that day, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, as a team, completed humanity’s first landing on the Moon and they fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s national goal, set in May 1962, to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. For many of us, that adventure is as fresh in our memories today, 55 years later, as if it happened just yesterday.
He’s Up… He’s Down… He’s Up… He’s Down – Has MOND Finally Delivered a Knockout Blow to Dark Matter
The vociferous debate between the dark matter community and the MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics or Modified Gravity) community continues. Like two sluggers in the middle of the ring delivering blows to each other in a boxing match, this fight has raged on for years. Now, in a breakthrough discovery that challenges the conventional understanding of cosmology, scientists at Case Western Reserve University have unearthed new evidence that could reshape our perception of dark matter. According to standard Newtonian gravity, stars on the outer edges of a galaxy should be slower due to diminished gravitational pull. This has never been observed, leading to the inference decades ago of an invented concept called dark matter, which has yet to be proven to exist. But even if it did exist, dark matter halos should come to an end at some point, so rotation curves should not remain flat indefinitely. This new analysis at Case Western Reserve defies this expectation, providing a startling revelation: The influence of what we call dark matter extends far beyond previous estimates, stretching at least a million light-years from the galactic center. Surprisingly, rotation curves of galaxies remain flat for millions of light years with no end in sight. Such a long range effect may indicate that the concept of dark matter—as we understand it—might not exist at all.
Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky -- Month of July 2024
Welcome to the night sky report for July 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. All month in July, as in June, the planetary action is in the morning sky. Saturn rises around midnight and climbs high into the south by sunrise. Mars rises a couple of hours later, with Jupiter trailing behind it, and shifting higher in the sky each day. July is a prime time to view the Milky Way in all its glory. Find the constellation Scorpius to identify the reddish supergiant star Antares, which will lead you to the globular star cluster M4 (NGC 6121). M22 (NGC 6656) in the constellation Sagitarius is one of the brightest globular clusters in the sky and is visible to the naked eye.. Keep observing around the group of stars commonly known as the Teapot and you’ll be looking toward the center of the Milky Way. In that direction, you can see the Lagoon Nebula (M8, NGC 6523), the Omega Nebula (M17, NGC 6618), and the Trifid Nebula (M20, NGC 6514). Two open star clusters, the Butterfly Cluster (M6, NGC 6405) and the Ptolemy Cluster (M7, NGC 6475), can be found on the end of the constellation Scorpius, just above the stinger. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.
Mysterious Bright Flash Was a Supermassive Black Hole Jet Pointing Straight Toward Earth
In 2022, astronomers were keeping tabs on data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, an all-sky survey based at the Palomar Observatory in California, when they detected an extraordinary flash in a part of the sky where no such light had been observed the night before. From a rough calculation, the flash appeared to give off more light than 1000 trillion suns. Now, the MIT astronomers, along with their collaborators, have determined a likely source for the signal -- a relativistic jet of matter streaking out from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. They believe the jet is the product of a black hole that suddenly began devouring a nearby star, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process. Astronomers have observed other such “Tidal Disruption Events” (or TDEs) in which a passing star is torn apart by a black hole’s tidal forces, but this one is the brightest TDE discovered to date and also the furthest away, at some 8.5 billion light years away — more than halfway across the Universe. How could such a distant event appear so bright in our sky? The team says the black hole’s jet is likely pointing directly toward Earth.
The Supermassive Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy is Venting Hot Gasses Through a Perpendicular “Chimney”
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have located an exhaust vent attached to a “chimney” of hot gas blowing away from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Eruptions from the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, may have created this chimney and exhaust vent. The chimney begins at the center of the galaxy and stands perpendicular to the Milky Way’s spiral disk. Astronomers had previously identified the chimney using X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission. Radio emissions detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope show the effect of magnetic fields enclosing the gas in the chimney. Researchers think the walls of the chimney tunnel, shaped like a cylinder, help funnel hot gas upwards and away from the galactic center. The newly discovered vent is located near the top of the chimney about 700 light-years from the center of the galaxy.
Astronomers Solve the 60-year Old Mystery of Quasars – The Most Powerful Objects in the Universe
First discovered 60 years ago, quasars are the brightest, most powerful objects in the Universe and can shine as brightly as a trillion stars packed into a volume the size of our Solar System. In the decades since they were first observed, it has remained a mystery as to what could trigger such powerful activity. Scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire in the UK have now unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars by discovering that they are ignited by galaxies crashing together.