Mars shifting sands revealed by long-term observations – Astronomy Magazine

(Inside Science) -- Martian megaripples might sound like they are straight out of science fiction. But they are real and just as fantastic as they seem.

Megaripples are sandy landforms, or bedforms, that rise 1 or 2 meters off the surface. They have been spotted all over the surface of the red planet from the mottled floors of craters to the undulating plains of sand dunes. Not quite as large as sand dunes, but also not as small as what scientists call large ripples, megaripples are the middle child of bedforms on Mars. Unlike middle children, however, they are big and bright enough to be easily spotted by satellites.

Most Martian sand dunes are made up of a large range of grain sizes and large ripples are composed only of tiny, finer grains. Megaripples, on the other hand, are made of fine-grained sands at the bottom and coarse-grained sands at the top, making them less mobile by the weak Martian atmosphere. This has prompted scientists to assume that they are remnants of a past environment when the wind was stronger. But now, after a decade of observation, planetary scientists have used images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) to show that these megaripples are actively moving.

"We had the opportunity to see these megaripples moving because now we have more than 10 years of observations,"said lead author Simone Silvestro, a planetary scientist at the National Institute for Astrophysics Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples, Italy. As HiRISE continues to photograph the Martian surface, the repeated observations reveal processes that were once thought to be dormant.

"It isnt like Mark Watney getting blown away from the other astronauts in 'The Martian,'"said Matt Chojnacki, co-author and associate staff scientist at the University of Arizonas Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. "You wouldnt see a lot of dust devil movement or drifts of dust blowing through."Instead, the megaripples in the regions that the scientists studied, near the Nili Fossae and McLaughlin Crater, migrate at almost imperceptible rates, moving only about 1 meter every nine Earth years. Nevertheless, their activity is a pleasant surprise to the planetary science community.

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Mars shifting sands revealed by long-term observations - Astronomy Magazine

A&M-Commerce Planetarium & Observatory Offer the Universe to Students and Community – frontporchnewstexas.com

The Planetarium and the Observatory at Texas A&M University-Commerce offer an astronomical amount of knowledge to students and the community.

Located on the first floor of the McFarland Science Building, the Planetarium features a Digistar 5 all-digital projection system and 87 reclined seats within a 40-foot dome, surrounding viewers in a space environment filled with astonishing, stellar sights and sounds sure to amaze audiences of all ages.

As the only planetarium within 60 miles, the facility receives over 10,000 visitors annually. Although some A&M-Commerce classes and labs are held at the Planetarium, the facilitys major function is to support outreach efforts focused on instilling a love of astronomy and physics in the minds of young people.

Planetarium shows are specifically designed to meet critical learning criteria for school groups, and feature presentations target grade-level content that is appropriate for all ages. Teachers can select presentations from titles such asA Starry Night, Earth, Moon & Sun, Asteroid Mission Extreme, Astronaut,andKaluokahina: The Enchanted Reef. They can also get recommendations from staff.

Approximately 75% of guests are children visiting with public and private school groups, as well as homeschool groups. It is amazing to see the excitement for astronomy increase and grow through the eyes of our young visitors, stated Dr. Cheri Davis, Planetarium director.

The Planetarium is open to the public on Friday nights for shows at 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. The shows last approximately 50 minutes, beginning with a live, interactive presentation featuring constellations, stars and planets in the current night sky. Mid-week matinees are offered through June and July.

Additionally, the first Wednesday of each month is reserved for homeschool groups. The box office opens at 11 a.m. and the show begins at 11:30 a.m.

For more information about the A&M-Commerce Planetarium, visittamuc.edu/planetarium.

Five miles south of campus, the A&M-Commerce Observatory houses the universitys observing and research-grade telescopes, including a Planewave CDK 700 27-inch telescope and a Meade 16-inch LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.

The 27-inch telescope is the largest in Northeast Texas, giving our students access to a research-grade facility every clear night, said Dr. Matt Wood, professor of physics and astronomy.

Our students and faculty use the facility to obtain data for honors and masters theses in collaboration with astronomers from around the globe, Wood continued.

Students majoring in physics work closely with a faculty mentor on research projects as they search for exoplanets, track asteroid light curves and rotation periods, and investigate white dwarf stars.

The universitys membership in the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA) also provides students with remote access to three 1-m-class telescopes housed at premier astronomical observatories in Arizona, Chile and the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands.

In addition to research-grade telescopes, the facility features multiple smaller telescopes and binoculars for public viewing. The observatory is ideally positioned on open acreage, thus avoiding light pollution from the city. Red indoor lighting also helps to protect viewers night vision.

The observatory is open to the public during seasonally scheduled open house events and occasional astronomical events, such as lunar eclipses. Public viewing events can be found on the observatoryswebpage.

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This Is the Single Best Place To Stargaze on Earth – Popular Mechanics

More than 550 miles away from the South Pole, high atop a frozen plateau in Antarctica lies Dome A. At 13,000 feet above sea-level, the desolate shield of ice is the single best place to catch sight of the stars.

It is notoriously difficult to capture images of the stars that aren't warped by Earth's atmosphere. Astronomers have long searched for locations around the world from which to clearly view the night sky. While places like Hawaii's Mauna Kea Observatories and the telescope arrays in Chile's Atacama desert probe the skies on cloudless nights, their images are still dulled by atmospheric effects. Now scientists believe they've found the very best spot for stargazing, but it likely won't be a tourist attraction anytime soon.

"After a decade of indirect evidence and theoretical reasoning, we finally have direct observational proof of the extraordinarily good conditions at Dome A," astronomer Michael Ashley of the University of New South Wales Sydney in Australia said in a statement.

Ashley was part of an international team of researchers that constructed a small telescopecalled the KunLun Differential Image Motion Monitoratop a 26-foot tower on Dome A. To test their theory that Dome A might be the perfect spot from which to make astronomical observations, the team programmed the telescope to snap pictures once a minute between April 11 and August 4 in 2019the dead of winter in the southern hemisphere. The telescope ultimately captured 45,930 images of the cosmos.

It worked like a charm."The result is that the twinkling of the stars is greatly reduced, and the star images are much sharper and brighter," Ashley said. The team published their findings July 29 in the journal Nature. The results were so good, Science News reports, that astronomers were able to spot celestial objects approximately half the size of those seen from other Earth-bound telescopes.

The telescope atop Dome A rests just above the Planetary boundary layer in Earth's atmosphere. This layer of air, the lowest region of the troposphere, is filled with swirling pockets of warm air. Thanks to this turbulent air, light emitted from stars is distortedit's what gives stars their twinkling appearance. When escaping the effects of the boundary layer, location is key.

At a temperate site, the boundary layer is usually hundreds of metres high or higher, preventing one from reaching the free atmosphere, Zhaohui Shang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing told New Scientist. At Dome A, however, Earth's boundary layer is only 45.6 feet high.

In addition to escaping the effects of Earth's atmosphere, Dome A is shrouded in darkness longer than other astronomical observation sites on Earth, meaning the telescope can operate for longer periods of time.

This is critical for making observations about distant stars, for example, Ashley said, "the fact that you can observe them continuously means you can find planets around them much more effectively."

ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Armandroff

Astronomers have gone to great (and expensive) lengths to get around the issue of atmospheric turbulence. In 1923, German rocketeer Hermann Oberth first proposed sending telescopes into space to surpass the blur. Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer set the idea into motion several decades later.

NASA tested out the idea in the 1960s and sent up a series of telescopes through the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory Program. Finally, in 1990, the agency launched the famed Hubble Space Telescope. After an issue with one of the mirrors was fixed, the Earth-orbiting telescope returned stunning images with a clarity and sharpness not seen before.

While satellites like Hubble, Kepler and Spitzer send unbelievably crisp images to scientists back on Earth, they're extremely expensive, difficult to fix and take yearsand even decades, in some casesto construct. (Here's looking at you, James Webb.)

Astronomers like Ashley are making the case for the site at Dome A. "[A]nother advantage of making Earth-based observations is you can always add the latest technology to your telescope on the ground, he said. "Whereas in space, everything is delayed."

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Apple TV+ has Acquired the Rights to the Original Astronomy Documentary ‘Fireball’ – Patently Apple

(Click on image to Enlarge)

Apple has acquired the rights to Werner Herzogs astronomy documentary "Fireball" for its Apple Original film slate and will premiere the film on Apple TV Plus in more than 100 territories.

Herzog collaborated with British professor Clive Oppenheimer on the project. The duo teamed on the Academy Award-nominated Antarctic documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" and the Emmy-nominated "Into the Inferno."

Apple announced in their press release this afternoon that the original feature documentary "Fireball will join the Apple Original film slate and will premiere around the world, in over 100 countries, on Apple TV+.

The documentary "Fireball is a Werner Herzog Film production and hails from the Oscar nominated, nine-time Emmy-nominated, BAFTA, Emmy, Peabody, Grierson and RTS Award-winning production company Spring Films. The film is produced by Andr Singer and Lucki Stipeti, executive produced by Richard Melman, and made with the help and support of Sandbox Films."

Herzog is also a proven actor having played the villain in the movie Jack Reacher and in the recurring role of The Client in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. Herzog was interviewed by INT in 2013 about his role in Jack Reacher as presented below.

Archive:Apple TV News

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Apple TV+ has Acquired the Rights to the Original Astronomy Documentary 'Fireball' - Patently Apple

Hitting the reset button | Lifestyles – Enid News & Eagle

Hello again, everyone. It's been a week or two.

I apologize for not writing for the last several weeks; moving takes a lot out of you. Consequently, I wasn't able to see Comet C/2020 F3, aka NEOWISE. Hey, you win some, you lose some.

Either way, I appreciate you all hanging in there with me.

For those of you new to me or my column, I thought it would be appropriate for a bit of a reset. I just want to give everyone an impression of who I am and why I write.

My name is Joe, I'm 34, and I've worked at the Enid News & Eagle since June 2009. No, I am not originally from Enid, and while that makes me an outsider, I appreciate this city and its people, young and old, of all opinions.

I was raised in both Florida in Nebraska. In the former state, I lived so close to Cape Canaveral that I could literally watch space shuttle launches from my driveway. That was what launched (pardon the pun) my initial interest in astronomy. From then on, I read every piece of astronomy literature I could get my hands on. This continued through my teen years, when I became more interested in the UFOs/extraterrestrial life/other solar systems part of astronomy. And I would say that remains my main interest to this day.

Valparaiso University is my alma mater. That's where I got my bachelor's degree in journalism, along with a minor in physics. Between 2004 and 2008, I spent two summers conducting astronomy research at both Valparaiso University and Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. I studied protoplanetary nebulae, which is a sort of stage stars go through at the end of their lives.

In addition to all that, I've always been an avid amateur astronomer. I've never had the resources for a big telescope with fancy astrophotography abilities, and yet my curiosity and passion were nonstop as I scanned the night sky for every single star with my eyepiece.

And that's mainly what this column is about. You don't need a fancy telescope or any other special equipment to enjoy the night sky. In fact, sometimes the best tool is still the naked eye under dark skies. The sky shows us many things: objects both familiar and exotic; stellar birth and death, the life cycle of the universe from beginning to eventual end.

I have not gone anywhere; I will continue to share with all of you one of my most intense passions, the study of astronomy.

Coming from someone who thoroughly knows and has studied the field, trust me, there is always something to learn.

Joe Malan is presentation editor and astronomy writer for the Enid News & Eagle. He can be reached at jmalan@enidnews.com.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

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Astronomers Discover One of the Coolest Transiting Gas Giants | Astronomy – Sci-News.com

Using data from NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), astronomers have discovered a transiting Saturn-like exoplanet circling NGTS-11 (also known as TOI-1847 and 2MASS J01340514-1425090), a mid K-type star located 624 light-years away in the constellation of Cetus. Named NGTS-11b (TOI-1847b), the planet has an equilibrium temperature of just 162 degrees Celsius (324 degrees Fahrenheit), making it one of the coolest known transiting gas giants.

An artists impression of a Saturn-sized exoplanet. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

NGTS-11b has a radius of 0.82 times that of Jupiter and a mass of 0.34 Jupiter masses.

The planet orbits its host star every 35 days at a distance 5 times closer than the Earth is to the Sun.

NGTS-11b has a temperature of only 162 degrees Celsius cooler than Mercury and Venus, said lead author Dr. Samuel Gill, an astronomer in the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability and the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick.

Although this is still too hot to support life as we know it, it is closer to the Goldilocks zone than many previously discovered planets which typically have temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit).

This planet is out at a thirty-five days orbit, which is a much longer period than we usually find them. It is exciting to see the Goldilocks zone within our sights, added Dr. Daniel Bayliss, an astronomer in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick.

The researchers initially identified NGTS-11b from a single-transit event detected by the TESS spacecraft.

TESS uses the transit method to spot planets, scanning for the telltale dip in light from the star that indicates that an object has passed between the telescope and the star, they explained.

However, TESS only scans most sections of the sky for 27 days. This means many of the longer period planets only transit once in the TESS data. And without a second observation the planet is effectively lost.

The team followed up the system using NGTS telescopes in Chile and observed the host star for 79 nights, eventually catching the planet transiting for a second time nearly a year after the first detected transit.

By chasing that second transit down weve found a longer period planet. Its the first of hopefully many such finds pushing to longer periods, Dr. Gill said.

These discoveries are rare but important, since they allow us to find longer period planets than other astronomers are finding. Longer period planets are cooler, more like the planets in our own Solar System.

The original transit appeared just once in the TESS data, and it was our teams painstaking detective work that allowed us to find it again a year later with NGTS, said Professor Pete Wheatley, an astronomer in the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability and the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick.

The discovery is reported in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

_____

Samuel Gill et al. 2020. NGTS-11 b (TOI-1847 b): A Transiting Warm Saturn Recovered from a TESS Single-transit Event. ApJL 898, L11; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab9eb9

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Astronomers Discover One of the Coolest Transiting Gas Giants | Astronomy - Sci-News.com

A Faraway Solar System Is an Uncanny Reflection of Our Own – The Atlantic

This other solar system looks almost cozy, but these planets are a few hundred times farther from their star than Saturn and Jupiter are from our own. There might be rocky planets like Earth somewhere in this system, Kenworthy said, but they would be too small for even our most powerful telescopes to spot. As far as we can tell, this system is not like our home in the cosmos, and yet its landscape seems somehow familiar, like seeing a photograph of a famous skyline with a few skyscrapers missing. My first thought when I saw this image was, Huh, I wonder how things are going there. Maybe theyre having a better time of it than we are.

Read: The before times of a solar system

This is, I realize, an absurd thoughta knee-jerk projection of pandemic stress at a time when the fight against the coronavirus in the United States feels more frustrating and helpless each day. Our world seems particularly exhausting right now, and these kinds of astronomical observations provide a strange sense of comfort. They present a different version of something recognizable, and an opportunity to imagine a calmer existence, in which the pandemic isnt always on our minds.

Maddalena Reggiani, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, in Belgium, and one of the researchers in this study, gets a similar feelingnot my desperate wishful thinking about an alternate reality, but the sense that she is looking at a cosmic doppelgnger. This image, after all, resembles how our own solar system appears in textbooks and on classroom posters: as a ball of fire suspended in the darkness, with a few glassy marbles circling it.

To produce the image, Kenworthy and his colleagues compared multiple observations of the solar system. In the first set, the star is surrounded by several blobs of glowing gas, any one of which could be a planet. In the second set, taken some time later, some of the orbs have moved, while others have stayed put, as unmoving as the star itself. The objects that shifted turned out to be other stars, somewhere in the background, moving along on their own journey through space. The objects that stuck around, the researchers concluded, were planets.

Read: A breakthrough way to see distant planets

Astronomers seek out such cosmic doppelgngers to learn about our own history. By studying a baby version of the sun somewhere else, they can better understand how our own adult sunall the planets around itcame to be. Studying images of similar solar systems is like looking at a childhood photo album. We cant, during our lifetime, look at how a planetary system is born and how it evolves, Reggiani told me. All we can do is look at stars at different ages so we can guess a little bit at the history of our solar system.

Cosmic analogues can also help scientists understand the kinds of circumstances that can lead to a planet sprouting life, even if all they see is gas planets capable of producing only swirling cloud tops instead of squirming organisms. Spotting a couple of gas planets in another solar system is not the triumphant discovery that detecting an Earthlike atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet would be, but it is an important bread crumb in the search for life in the universe.

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Gamma-Ray Telescopes Can Measure the Diameters of Other Stars – Universe Today

In astronomy, the sharpness of your image depends upon the size of your telescope. When Galileo and others began to view the heavens with telescopes centuries ago, it changed our understanding of the cosmos. Objects such as planets, seen as points of light with the naked eye, could now be seen as orbs with surface features. But even under these early telescopes, stars still appeared as a point of light. While Galileo could see Jupiter or Saturns size, he had no way to know the size of a star.

That didnt change until 1995 when the Hubble Space Telescope made an image of Betelgeuse not as a point but as a blurry disk. It was the first time astronomers could determine the size of a star directly. Astronomers could finally compare the apparent size of a star to theoretical calculations based on mass, color, and brightness. Since then, both ground and space-based optical telescopes have imaged stars and even planets directly. But astronomy at other wavelengths posed new challenges.

In radio astronomy, the issue was with the wavelength of radio light. Optical telescopes use light with wavelengths on the order of a few hundred nanometers, the wavelengths used by radio telescopes are typically millimeters or centimeters. Since the resolution of telescope scales with the wavelength of light, a radio telescope would need to be nearly a million times larger to create a sharp image. It isnt feasible to create such a large radio antenna dish. So instead, radio astronomers use a technique known as interferometry.

With radio interferometry, an array of antenna dishes view the same object from widely separated positions. Waves of light from the object at slightly different times, depending on their location. By correlating the antenna signals, astronomers can create a virtual telescope the size of the array. This is what makes observatories such as the VLA and ALMA so powerful. With radio interferometry, astronomers can even create a virtual telescope the size of Earth, which they used to directly image a black hole.

But you dont need to make a high-resolution image of a star to measure its size directly. Recently a team measured the size of two stars, Beta Canis Majoris and Epsilon Orionis, and they did it an array of gamma-ray telescopes known as VERITAS.

While radio wavelengths are much longer than visible light, gamma rays have much shorter wavelengths. So short that gamma rays act almost like particles. When gamma rays strike Earths atmosphere, they can create flashes of optical light called Cherenkov light. VERITAS observes Cherenkov light to study gamma ray astronomy, which is not suited for the type of interferometry used by radio telescopes. So the team repurposed the detectors to use another type of interferometry known as intensity interferometry. With this method, multiple antennas only measure the intensity or brightness of a source, so it doesnt need to worry about the wave property of optical light.

Both Beta Canis Majoris and Epsilon Orionis are blue giant stars. The former is about 500 light-years away, while the latter is 2,000 light-years away. Their apparent sizes are less than a milliarcsecond, which is smaller than the Hubble Space Telescopes resolution. Using this method, the team measured the apparent size of these stars with an uncertainty of less than 5%.

The VERITAS array only contains four antennas, so this is just a first step. With more antennas, this method could be used to create extremely precise observations of distant stars.

Reference: Abeysekara, A. U., et al. Demonstration of stellar intensity interferometry with the four VERITAS telescopes. Nature Astronomy (2020): 1-6.

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Astronomers Capture the First Ever Photo of Two Planets Orbiting a Sun-Like Star – PetaPixel

The European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope (ESO VLT) has captured a worlds first: the first ever image of two giant exoplanets orbiting a young Sun-like star 300 light years away from our own. The photograph could provide important information about the formation of our own solar system.

The groundbreaking imagewhich is discussed in detail on the ESO websiteis described as a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our Solar System, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution.

As the ESO explains, direct observations of exoplanets are exceedingly rare but incredibly important in the search for planets like our own, which might support life. Imaging two exoplanets around the same star is even more remarkable, and capturing an image of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star is a unique accomplishmenta worlds first.

Here is the wide-angle image of the solar system in question:

And here is a closer crop:

The photograph was made possible by using the Very Large Telescopes SPHERE instrument, which uses a coronagraph to block bright light emitted by the star, allowing astronomers to detect and observe the much fainter planets surrounding them.

The image shows a star very much like our own Sun, only far younger, in the top left-hand corner. The two exoplanetsgas giants that are each several times larger than Jupiterare the two bright dots in the middle and bottom right of the image.

Notably, both planets are very far away from their star: one is orbiting at 160 times Earth-Sun distance, and the other at about 320 times Earth-Sun distance. But while this image doesnt show a system similar to ours in the present day, scientists hope that images like this one may shed some light on the early history of our solar system. For the rest of us, theyre just incredible to look at and at least try to fathom.

To learn more, check out the video explainer up top, head over to the ESO blog, or read the full research paper about this image in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

(via DPReview)

Image credits: All photos by ESO/Bohn et al.

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Thanks to astronomy, researchers in Texas figure out the time, date, and year of Vermeer’s "View of Delft" – Art Critique

Nothing if not technical, Vermeer is known for his expert handling of light and shadow, which has mesmerised many for centuries. However, even today, not a lot is known about the artists life and how he worked, which is how he earned the nickname The Sphinx of Delft and why many of his works remain mysterious. Thus, art historians and scholars have had to speculate their fair share when it comes to his works. A Texas State University physics professor alongside a team of researchers have offered a little more understanding for one of Vermeers paintings, View of Delft.

For decades, there have been relatively few details of the painting articulately depicting Delft, a city in the Netherlands where Vermeer was born, lived, and died. It has consistently been agreed upon that View of Delft was painted during the late spring or summer of 1660, but there has been less consensus on the time of day portrayed by the great painter. Thanks, though, to the work of David Olson, Texas State University astronomer, physics professor emeritus and Texas State University System Regents Professor, Russell Doescher, retired professor in the Department of Physics at Texas State, and students Charles Condos, Michael Snchez, and Tim Jenison, we now know more about the painting.

Vermeers extreme attention to detail when it comes to light and shadow assisted the research team, led by Olson whos been called the celestial sleuth. After more than a year of research, multiple trips to Delft, mapping out the citys features included in Vermeers work, and studying the angle of the sun, they were able to establish what they believe to be the exact time shown in Vermeers work: 8am on September 3rd, 1659 (or possibly 1658).

View of Delft was painted from the second-floor window of an inn where Vermeer stayed to create the work, which shows the octagonal tower of Nieuwe Kerk, or New Church. The tower has long been a point of debate amongst scholars as it was believed to have been increased in size by the Dutch artist, and it proved to be an integral piece to the puzzle for researchers.

Thats our key, Olson said in a press release referring to the octagonal tower. Thats the sensitive indicator of where the sun has to be to do that, to just skim the one projection and illuminate the other. The pattern of light and shadows was a sensitive indicator of the position of the sun.

Through precise measurements taken from high res photos from a similar vantage point to what Vermeer would have seen while painting the work, Olsons team established that the tower was in fact not exaggerated as previously asserted. A thin vertical sliver of light found on the tower allowed the researchers to figure out the exact angle of the sun, which then assisted astronomers in calculating a set of two possible dates: April 6-8 or September 3-4. But which was it? A simple analysis of the work held the answer as the trees, still full of leaves, allowed them to deduce that Vermeer was working during September on the painting.

Vermeer is known to have worked slowly. Completing all the details on the large canvas of his masterpiece may have taken weeks, months or even years, Olson added, recognising Vermeers extreme feat in executing the work. His remarkably accurate depiction of the distinctive and fleeting pattern of light and shadows on the Nieuwe Kerk suggests that at least this detail was inspired by direct observation of the sunlit tower rising above the wall and roofs of Delft.

Ultimately, the discovery offers one more bit of information to help us better understand the celebrated artist, although there is inevitably still much to learn.

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Thanks to astronomy, researchers in Texas figure out the time, date, and year of Vermeer's "View of Delft" - Art Critique

To Mars! Perseverance rover all set to launch on Thursday 30 July – SYFY WIRE

Tomorrow, NASA plans to launch the Perseverance rover (and its helicopter, Ingenuity) to Mars. The launch window opens at 11:50 UTC (07:50 Eastern US time) and is about two hours long.

First things first: If you want to watch it live, you can always rely on NASA's livestream, and/or their YouTube and Twitch channels. Also, The Planetary Society is hosting a virtual launch party starting at 11:30 UTC (07:30 ET) with guests and information; it's free but you need to register to join in.

The launch will be using an Atlas V rocket, which should put on a good show. It's a big rocket, and will give the mission a push hard enough to get it to arrive at Mars on 18 February 2021.

So what's this mission about? In a word: Life. In two words: Martian life. In slightly more words: Looking for direct evidence of ancient life of Mars, looking for conditions that could've supported life then or still possibly can now, as well as seeing if it's possible for humans to explore Mars.

In many ways Perseverance is like the previous rover Curiosity; they use the same chassis and overall architecture both in the rover as well as the landing system (remember the Seven Minutes of Terror?). But there are big differences. One main one is that Perseverance has a drill that will allow it to get core samples of interesting rocks, and then store the samples in containers that it will leave behind on the surface to be picked up later by a future mission (TBD).

Also, there's a helicopter. A helicopter! Ingenuity is mounted under Perseverance, and will be placed on the ground to do a series of short flights over the next 30 days. It has a mass of less than two kilos, but the twin counter-rotating rotors are over a meter across; the air on Mars is less than 1% as thick as on Earth at sea level, so it needs big props. It's basically a technology tester, to see if such flight is not only possible but also beneficial in exploring Mars.

I was surprised that it can fly only generating 350 Watts of power. Those blades will spin at 2000+ RPM! It's a marvel of engineering, and a standout in a mission that's already pretty exciting.

Perseverance is also equipped with two microphones, to literally listen to Mars. This is an idea that was first proposed long ago, but has run into many difficulties over time. One microphone will listen during descent and landing that should be very cool and the other will listen when the SuperCam instrument uses its laser to zap rocks in order to identify their constituent minerals. That should be very nifty as well.

Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater, an impact feature roughly 50 km across. It has evidence of having been a lake long ago, and has clay deposits that are not only evidence of water (clays get laid down by water) but also a good place to look for anything wee ancient beasties might have left behind.

Of course, there's a lot more going on with the rover; for a more complete rundown, as always I urge you to seek out The Planetary Society site which has quite a bit of info, and, of course, the NASA page for the mission.

If for some reason the launch tomorrow is delayed, there are many more opportunities to get it off the ground, with the overall launch opportunity closing on 15 August. The date range is due to the positions of Mars and Earth in their orbits, and the time each day is when the tilt and rotation of the Earth put the Florida launch site in the correct spot to maximize the force on the rocket (the Earth spinning acts like a centrifuge, adding extra velocity to the spacecraft).

Let's hope we get a nominal countdown and launch, and another pair of robots have a clean getaway from Earth and head for the Red Planet.

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Thinking Outside the Classroom: Astronomical phenomena you can see during the day – Summit Daily News

At Keystone Science School, we highlight and celebrate the celestial events that happen in our ever-changing night sky to teach about Earth and space science. We dont just teach facts about the night sky but want you to experience it.

And did you know there are astronomical phenomena you can see during the day? Here are a few you very likely will see while you are basking in the Summit County summer sunshine.

Sundogs

Also called a mock sun, it is an optical phenomenon occurring in the atmosphere consisting of a subtly bright-colored spot or patch to one or both sides of the sun and are seen usually after sunrise and near sunset.

Sundogs are created when sunlight is refracted by horizontal ice crystals in the atmosphere.Think of the ice crystal having the shape of a dinner plate on a table.A sundogs patch is at the same altitude as the sun, and as the sun move closer to the horizon, the patches move closer to the sun.

The moon and planets

How many of you were unaware the full moon can be seen in the daytime sky?In general, the moon is always below the horizon while the sun is above the horizon on the date of a full moon. Yet when the conditions are just right, you might be able to see a full moon very close to the horizon and directly opposite the sun during daylight.For the rest of the month, the best time to see a daytime moon is when it is at a 90-degree angle with the sun, and the moon is in its first or last quarter phase.

Another factor that makes the moon visible during the day is its brightness. As the moon reflects sunlight back to Earth, it appears brighter against the scattered blue light background of the sky.This is why you can see the planets of Venus and Jupiter and even exceptionally bright stars during day. Look for them, too.

Glories

Glories are formed when sunlight is scattered back to the observer (backscattering) because small water droplets, mist or clouds in the atmosphere are acting similar to a prism resulting in an optical phenomenon of concentric colored circles.(Think of a saints halo.)

Glories are always opposite the sun (antisolar) and below the horizon, expect at sunrise and sunset.For glories to happen, the sun must be directly behind the observer and might appear as a shadow around the head of the individual, a halo.

Glories are frequently seen by airplane passengers looking down at the airplanes shadow below them.Here in Summit County, glories are most often seen standing at or near a mountains summit and on hillsides.Look for one during your next hike.

Circumzenithal arcs

This phenomenon is said to be a smile in the sky with an observers first impression being that of an upside-down rainbow.Similar to sundogs, the arc is formed by the same plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals acting as prisms and also when the sun is low near the horizon.When you see a sundog, its a safe bet there is a circumzenithal arc overhead.

To see the arc, youll want to look straight up to the point in the sky that is directly overhead.This point is called the zenith.The curved edge of the arc will be extending down toward the sun. When you find the arc, look to discriminate the variation in colors with violet on top and red at the bottom.Unlike rainbows, circumzenithal arc colors are purer with crisp definition because there is less overlap in their formation.

Anticrepuscular rays

These rays appear as parallel shafts of light and are also called antisolar rays because they seem to converge at the point opposite the sun toward a vanishing point just like a long, straight road appears to converge to the distance horizon.You will see these rays oftentimes just after sunrise or just before sunset.Be aware the cloud structure can influence whether the sunlight can be seen as beams.

Like glories, these anticrepuscular rays are caused by the same backscattering of light and are frequently seen during mountain hikes.The rays will appear triangular, no matter the shape of the mountain, with the peak of the mountain acting as the antisolar vanishing point.

Challenge yourself, your friends and family to find each of these daytime astronomical wonders while you while away the dog days of summer.So go outside, look up, be curious and wonder.

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Thinking Outside the Classroom: Astronomical phenomena you can see during the day - Summit Daily News

Astronomy news: Never before seen cosmic structures spotted in distant galaxy – Daily Express

A distant galaxy has thrown up some unexpected surprises to astronomers, including superbubbles, giant loops and X-shaped magnetic field structures. Astronomers have been observing a spiral galaxy known as NGC 4217, which is 67 million lightyears away, in order to understand more about our Milky Way. Spiral galaxies can have sprawling magnetic fields, but why has always remained a bit of a mystery.

However, new research used radio observations to help unravel the enigma.

NGC 4217 has several "remarkable" structures which made it the ideal candidate to look at.

Most spiral galaxies contain a flat, rotating disk packed full of stars, gas and dust, but NGC 4217 threw up some unexpected surprises.

Radio observations revealed some of the strange structures, which include an X-shaped magnetic field and "superbubbles" of gas and dust.

The team revealed these structures and the odd magnetic field are caused by star formations and explosions sending the particles of the galaxy skewiff.

Dr Rainer Beck from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn said: It is fascinating that we discover unexpected phenomena in every galaxy whenever we use radio polarisation measurements.

Here in NGC 4217, it is huge magnetic gas bubbles and a helix magnetic field that spirals upwards into the galaxys halo.

Dr Yelena Stein from Ruhr-Universitt Bochum, the Centre de Donnes astronomiques de Strasbourg and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, added: Galaxy NGC 4217 is of particular interest to us.

READ MORE:Black hole: Entire Universe will 'probably' not collapse into monster

This has never been observed before. We suspect that the structures are caused by star formation, because at these points matter is ejected outward.

Visualising the data was important to me. Because when you think about galaxies, magnetic fields is not the first thing that comes to mind, although they can be gigantic and display unique structures.

"The image is supposed to shift the magnetic fields more into focus.

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However, the team concede more observations are needed to better understand the strange magnetic field, which extends as much as 22,500 lightyears beyond the galaxy's disk.

A statement from the University of New Mexico said: "A leading explanation, called the dynamo theory, suggests that magnetic fields are generated by the motion of plasma within the galaxy's disk.

"Ideas about the cause of the kinds of large vertical extensions seen in this image are more speculative, and astronomers hope that further observations and more analysis will answer some of the outstanding questions."

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Astronomy news: Never before seen cosmic structures spotted in distant galaxy - Daily Express

Pinning down the suns birthplace just got more complicated – Science News

The sun could come from a large, loose-knit clan or a small family thats always fighting.

New computer simulations of young stars suggest two pathways to forming the solar system. The sun could have formed in a calm, large association of 10,000 stars or more, like NGC 2244 in the present-day Rosette Nebula, an idea thats consistent with previous research. Or the sun could be from a violent, compact cluster with about 1,000 stars, like the Pleiades, researchers report July 2 in the Astrophysical Journal.

Whether a star forms in a tight, rowdy cluster or a loose association can influence its future prospects. If a star is born surrounded by lots of massive siblings that explode as supernovas before a cluster spreads out, for example, that star will have more heavy elements to build planets with (SN: 8/9/19).

To nail down a stellar birthplace, astronomers have considered the solar systems chemistry, its shape and many other factors. Most astronomers who study the suns birthplace think the gentle, large association scenario is most likely, says astrophysicist Fred Adams of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the new work.

But most previous studies didnt include stars motions over time. So astrophysicists Susanne Pfalzner and Kirsten Vincke, both of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, ran thousands of computer simulations to see how often different kinds of young stellar families produce solar systems like ours.

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The main solar system feature that the pair looked for was the distance to the farthest planet from the star. Planet-forming disks can extend to hundreds of astronomical units, or AU, the distance between the Earth and the sun (SN: 7/16/19). Theoretically, planets should be able to form all the way to the edge. But the suns planetary material is mostly packed within the orbit of Neptune.

You have a steep drop at 30 AU, where Neptune is, Pfalzner says. And this is not what you expect from a disk.

In 2018, Pfalzner and her colleagues showed that a passing star could have truncated and warped the solar systems outer edge long ago. If thats what happened, it could help point to the suns birth environment, Pfalzner reasoned. The key was to simulate groupings dense enough that stellar flybys happen regularly, but not so dense that the encounters happen too often and destroy disks before planets can grow up.

We were hoping wed get one answer, Pfalzner says. It turned out there are two possibilities. And they are wildly different from each other.

Large associations have more stars, but the stars are more spread out and generally leave each other alone. Those associations can stay together for up to 100 million years. Compact clusters, on the other hand, see more violent encounters between young stars and dont last as long. The stars shove each other away within a few million years.

This paper opens up another channel for what the suns birth environment looked like, Adams says, referring to the violent cluster notion.

The new study doesnt cover every aspect of how a tight cluster could have affected the nascent solar system. The findings dont account for how radiation from other stars in the cluster could erode planet-forming disks, for example, which could have shrunk the suns disk or even prevented the solar system from forming. The study also doesnt explain certain heavy elements found in meteorites, which are thought to come from a nearby supernova and so could require the sun come from a long-lived stellar family.

I think [the research] is an interesting addition to the debate, Adams says. It remains to be seen how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

Pfalzner thinks that the star cluster would break apart before radiation made a big difference, and there are other explanations for the heavy elements apart from a single supernova. She hopes future studies will be able to use that sort of cosmic chemistry to narrow the suns birthplace down even further.

For us humans, this is an important question, Pfalzner says. Its part of our history.

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Pinning down the suns birthplace just got more complicated - Science News

Astronomers Do the Math to Figure Out Exactly When Johannes Vermeer Painted this, More than 350 Years Ago – Universe Today

Most of us will be forgotten only a generation or two after we pass. But some few of us will be remembered: great scientists, leaders, or generals, for example. But we can add historys great artists to that list, and one in particular: Johannes Vermeer.

Vermeer was largely ignored during the two centures that followed his death, and died as other painters often did: penniless. But as more time has passed, the Dutch Baroque painter has grown in reputation, as historians increasingly recognize him as a master.

Though its not Vermeers best-known work, View of Delft has become recognized as a masterpiece in more modern times. Theres a long-standing mystery around Vermeers masterpiece: when exactly was it painted?

Historians have thought for a long time that he painted it sometime during late spring or early summer of 1660. But Vermeer is considered a master of light and shadow in his work. Many scholars have tried to figure out the lighting in the painting, and at what time of day the scene is based on.

Now a team of researchers might have figured it out. The team is led by Texas State University astronomer, and physics professor emeritus Donald Olson. Their work was published in the September 2020 issue of the magazine Sky and Telescope. Its titled Dating Vermeers View of Delft.

Some say that in the painting the light was coming from the west. Others say the Sun was directly overhead in the scene. After looking over maps of Delft, Olson and his students realized that the view is looking North. After figuring that out, it was clear that the light was coming from the southeast, making this a morning scene. This lines up with what some previous authors have concluded.

In a press release from Texas State University, Professor Olson said The students and I worked for about a year on this project. We spent a lot of time studying the topography of the town, using maps from the 17th and 19th centuries and Google Earth. We planned out exactly what we should do. On this research trip, it was the students who told us where to go to find Vermeers viewpoint and when to be there.

The team would not have figured this out without Google Earth, or at least not as easily. It helped the studentsCharles Condos and Michael Snchez from Texas State, and Tim Jenison of San Antoniomap out the landmarks in the painting. Then they determined the angles of view that were closest to what Vermeer would have seen centuries ago.

The team also concluded that Vermeers vantage point was the second floor of an inn overlooking Delft.

Google Earth is spectacularly accurate when it comes to distances and angles, so we used it as our measuring stick, Snchez said. Google Earth is basically another tool in our arsenal of techniques.

Id known about Dr. Olsons work for quite some time, and its always fascinated me, Sanchez said. Combining my appreciation for art and love of astronomy appealed to me. When he approached me about this project, I was excited.

One key to the work was the presence of a landmark in the painting called Nieuwe Kerk (New Church). Its an octagonal tower, and its a feature in Delft now as it was in Vermeers time. Some historians have said that Vermeer enlarged the tower in his painting, and the team wanted to test that claim as part of their work.

The painting itself is at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. Olson and the others visited the museum and took detailed measurements of the work. Then they compared their measurements with high-res photographs of the tower from a similar vantage point. After also taking measurements of the tower itself, they found that Vermeer in fact had not exagerrated the tower.

Understanding that Vermeer painted the tower as it was, was key to the teams overall work. The octagonal tower has stone columns that project from the corners. In Vermeers painting, the center column almost, but not quite, shades the column to the left. A thin vertical sliver of light just grazes past the center column and lights up the left column. The presence of that detail allowed the astronomers to calculate the angle of the sun with great precision.

Vermeer is known to have worked slowly. Completing all the details on the large canvas of his masterpiece may have taken weeks, months or even years.

Vermeer is a master of light and shadow, and that little detailed sliver of light was the critical clue in solving this mystery.

Thats our key. Thats the sensitive indicator of where the sun has to be to do that, to just skim the one projection and illuminate the other, Olson said. The pattern of light and shadows was a sensitive indicator of the position of the sun.

Once the team had a solid understanding of the time of day that Vermeer painted Delft at, a bunch of other details fell into place. One of those details was the clock on the facade of a building. People have placed the hands at just past 7 oclock. But the team wasnt sure.

The team of researchers had reviewed other paintings from the same time period, and noticed that in all other paintings with clocks, both hands were lined up as well. After more research, they discovered that clocks didnt have minute hands until late 19th century. As it turns out, clocks in Vermeers time only had one handthe hour hand.

With that knowledge in hand, the team realized that the clock in View of Delft had only one hand, pointing to a time near 8 AM.

Another clue was present in Nieuwe Kerk too. In Vermeers painting, the belfry openings are clear, whereas the present-day building has bells in the openings. The team consulted historical records, which showed that the carillon and bells were installed starting in April 1660 and was completed by September of the same year. So Vermeer had to have painted the city prior to that.

The team of researchers wasnt finished yet, and as astronomers, they had more tools at their disposal than most art historians do.

They used astronomical software to calculate when the Sun would have been in the right position to cast the shadows on the towers in the painting. There were two answers, but only two. It was either April 6th to 8th, or September 3rd to 4th. But the trees are covered in leaves, which was the final clue. In Delfts climate, the trees would not have burst into full leaf in early April, whereas they would be fully leafed in early September.

The team had their answer. Vermeer painted View of Delft as it appeared on September 3rd-4th, 1659. Or at a similar date on some year just prior to that.

Vermeer is known to have worked slowly. Completing all the details on the large canvas of his masterpiece may have taken weeks, months or even years, Olson said. His remarkably accurate depiction of the distinctive and fleeting pattern of light and shadows on the Nieuwe Kerk suggests that at least this detail was inspired by direct observation of the sunlit tower rising above the wall and roofs of Delft.

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Astronomers Do the Math to Figure Out Exactly When Johannes Vermeer Painted this, More than 350 Years Ago - Universe Today

Spectacular stars in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist – New Atlas

The Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year is one of the worlds top astrophotography competitions, and the 2020 shortlist offers a sublime selection of this years best entries, from some mind-bending close-ups of the suns surface to a series of magnificent Milky Way skyscapes.

The contest is run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, an iconic scientific institution founded nearly 400 years ago. There are eight key categories in the contest, spanning a broad spectrum of astrophotography styles, from skyscapes incorporating land perspectives, to more focused categories looking at galaxies and aurorae.

BEN BUSH

As with previous years, the contest illustrates the incredible skill and determination these photographers display to create these images. UK photographer Ben Bushs shot of an aurora over Icelands famous Vestrahorn is a great example. To get the perfect shot of the aurora reflecting over the water, Bush waded out into the freezing North Atlantic ocean in the middle of night.

Mathew Browne

Other shortlisted images highlight the patience and timing needed to compose the ideal frame. Matthew Browns shot of the Moon passing behind Londons Shard skyscraper is an example of a fleeting moment in time that took the photographer days to catch.

Kirsty Paton

The winning photographs will be revealed later in the year, sharing 10,000 in prize money.

Take a look through our gallery at more shortlisted images from this years contest.

Source: RMG

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Spectacular stars in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist - New Atlas

Apollo-Soyuz Mission: When the Space Race Ended – Astronomy Magazine

A handshake in space

To some politicians, the ultimate symbol of dtente would be docking a Soviet capsule with an American one in low-Earth orbit for a handshake in space. Scientists and engineers saw benefits to such a joint mission, too. America had talented space pilots and advanced long-distance space technology. Meanwhile, the Soviets had focused on automation and had pioneered long-term spaceflights. Both had something the other was interested in learning about.

An American delegation traveled to Moscow in 1970 to lay the framework for the mission, and within two years, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was officially born.

But not everyone liked the idea. Each side worried the other could steal its technology. Some defense hawks, and even a New York Times editorial board opinion, noted that Apollo-Soyuz offered a technical and scientific bonanza for the Soviet Union's lagging astronautical program. Meanwhile, the Soviets continued insulting American spacecraft.

Finally, three years after the final Apollo moon flight, the two superpowers overcame the political and engineering hurdles to make the rendezvous happen, including the design and development of an American-funded docking module that could mate the two crafts.

On July 15, 1975, a Soyuz capsule and an Apollo capsule leftover from a canceled moon flight launched within hours of each other from opposite sides of the planet. Then, two days later, they met up 140 miles over Earths surface.

Soyuz and Apollo are shaking hands now, Soyuz commander Alexei Leonov said as the two spacecraft gently docked. And as the door opened between the ships, the astronauts inside exchanged their own handshakes and posed for pictures.

Over the next two days, the men learned to work together as they toured the other countrys spacecraft and carried out five joint scientific experiments. At first, though, they struggled to even communicate. Each wanted to speak their own language, but they eventually realized that they all understood things better when they attempted to speak the others language.

We [the Americans] thought they [the Soviets] were pretty aggressive people and ... they probably thought we were monsters, Brand said. So we very quickly broke through that, because when you deal with people that are in the same line of work as you are, and you're around them for a short time, why, you discover that, well, they're human beings."

Together, the crew helped their space agencies gather new technical and scientific insights. One experiment tested the effects of low-gravity on the development of fish eggs. Another created an artificial solar eclipse using the Apollo capsule to block the sun while cosmonauts took pictures of the solar corona.

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UNM astronomers on team revealing the magnetic field of a spiral galaxy – UNM Newsroom

Galaxies not only contain stars, gas, dust, and the mysterious Dark Matter, they are also magnetized. The magnetic fields are many orders of magnitude weaker than the Earth's field or a typical bar magnet, yet scientists can measure them with radio telescopes such as National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) right here in New Mexico.

A new image released by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) shows the huge extent of a spiral galaxy's magnetic field. The galaxy, NGC 4217, is a star-forming, spiral galaxy, similar to Earths own Milky Way, 67 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. The galaxy is seen edge-on in a visible-light image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the magnetic field lines, shown in green, are revealed by the VLA.

Most spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotatingdiskcontainingstars,gas and dust, and a central concentration of stars known as thebulge. These are often surrounded by fainterhaloof stars, many of which reside inglobular clusters. Spiral galaxies are named after their spiral structure that is a feature of the disk. You can see the spiral structure when the galaxy is viewed face-on, but when viewed edge-on, you see just the disk that it resides in.

University of New Mexico graduate student Tim Braun and Professor Richard Rand from the Department of Physics and Astronomy are members of an international team of approximately 50 scientists who are part of a project called theContinuumHAlos inNearbyGalaxies anEVLASurvey (CHANG-ES), that is revealing new secrets about these magnetic fields.

Rand provided the optical image of the ionized hydrogen that was first published in 1996. It is seen in the reddish colors in the disk of the galaxy. That observation used exposures of more than three hours. The goal was to understand the occurrence and properties of ionized gas halos in edge-on galaxies in order to study vertical flows of gas in galaxies. Here, scientists are using the image mainly to show where star formation is currently occurring in the disk, although the absorption of light by interstellar dust grains in NGC 4271 limits scientists view somewhat.

The magnetic field lines extend as much as 22,500 light-years beyond the galaxy's disk. Scientists know that magnetic fields play an important role in many processes, such as star formation, within galaxies. However, it is not fully understood how such huge magnetic fields are generated and maintained. Magnetic fields area major component in the interstellar medium (ISM) of spiral, barred, irregular and dwarfgalaxies. They contribute significantly to the total pressure which balances the ISM against gravity. They may affect the gas flows in spiral arms, around bars and ingalaxyhalos

A leading explanation, called the dynamo theory, suggests that magnetic fields are generated by the motion of plasma within the galaxy's disk. Ideas about the cause of the kinds of large vertical extensions seen in this image are more speculative, and astronomers hope that further observations and more analysis will answer some of the outstanding questions.

The galactic dynamo theory is a way of explaining how large-scale, coherent magnetic fields can exist in galaxies, said Rand. They need to be continually regenerated because they are expected to be destroyed in a time much less than the age of a galaxy. The dynamo is a theory by which small-scale magnetic fields are turned into large-scale magnetic fields via motions in the galaxy. But the details are uncertain and more observations of the geometry and strength of magnetic fields in galaxies, like this one from the CHANG-ES project, are needed.

Understanding the magnetic field geometries of the CHANG-ES galaxies is just one goal of the project. Braun and Rands interest is in understanding the dynamical forces at play in galaxy halos and how they affect the motion of the gas that is ejected from the disk into the halo. Even for the magnetic field geometries, there is much more to do.

We are continuing to analyze the CHANG-ES data for magnetic field configurations in other galaxies, said Rand. Deeper observations of some of these galaxies could reveal more widespread magnetic geometries.

Last November, scientists as part of the CHANG-ES collaboration released an image of the Whale Galaxy, which reveals hair-like filaments of the galaxy's magnetic field protruding above and below the galaxy's disk.

TheNational Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

IMAGE CREDIT: Composite image by Yelena Stein of the Centre de Donnes astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) with the support of Jayanne English (University of Manitoba). VLA radio data from Yelena Stein and Ralf-Juergen Dettmar (Ruhr University Bochum). The observations are part of the project Continuum HAlos in Nearby Galaxies an EVLA Survey (CHANG-ES) led by Judith Irwin (Queens University, Canada). The optical data are from theSloan Digital Sky Survey. The ionized hydrogen data (red) are from the 0.9m telescope of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, collected by Richard J. Rand of The University of New Mexico. The software code for tracing the magnetic field lines was adapted by Y. Stein from Linear Integral Convolution code provided by Arpad Miskolczi of Ruhr University Bochum.

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Asteroid discovered by UH telescope will make close pass Monday – UH System Current News

Asteroid 2020 OO1 detected near Earth, projected to make close approach

An asteroid discovered on July 20 by the University of Hawaiis Pan-STARRS1 telescope atop Haleakal will make a close pass of Earth on Monday, July 27. At its closest point, the asteroid will be only about 1.7 times the distance of the Moon. A short time after the July 20 discovery, the Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at NASA issued a notification that it would likely come close to Earth. Several telescopes around the world, including the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Maunakea, assisted with rapid follow-up observations to verify the asteroids orbit and determine if it was possibly hazardous.

Pan-STARRS1 is the world leader in finding large Near-Earth Objects (NEO), and this recent discovery is the latest example of the fundamental role Hawaii astronomy plays in the nations planetary defense system.

The NEO has been given the temporary name 2020 OO1, and has a diameter of approximately 65 feet (20 meters)the length of about two school buses. It is similar in size to the asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Russia in 2013 that sent a shock wave that blew out the windows of 7,200 buildings across six Russian cities.

Finding these objects is the bread-and-butter work of Pan-STARRS, said UH Institute for Astronomy (IfA) Astronomer Richard Wainscoat, who leads the NEO project with STARRS. Our mission is to find potentially hazardous asteroids together with the larger telescopes on Maunakea, the LCO (Las Cumbres Observatory) global telescope network, and our ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) project.

After Pan-STARRS identifies an object that might be passing very close, telescopes on Maunakea and elsewhere will stop what they are working on and track the object to determine if it is a possible threat to Earth. In this case, with all of the additional observations, including some taken by Hawaii high school students, astronomers have pinned down the orbit of 2020 OO1. The object has a tiny probability of hitting Earth in 2087. Astronomers will continue to observe this object as it approaches in order to refine their projections. These new observations will likely rule out future impacts.

The search for NEOs is funded by NASAs Planetary Defense Coordination Office through its Near-Earth Object Observations Program.

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Asteroid discovered by UH telescope will make close pass Monday - UH System Current News

The astronomical rise of esports – The Chronicle – Duke Chronicle

If youre bored during quarantine and looking for a fun, popular and lucrative way to pass the time, consider putting down that baking pan or pausing that Netflix show and picking up a controller to join the world of esports, a hot trend in the media and entertainment industry. Esports is a competitive video game sport that has grown to incorporate organized tournaments with professional players. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, these tournaments were almost always in-person events, complete with live audiences and referees who monitored potential cheating.

If this is your first time hearing about esports, youre behind the curve esports is one of the fastest growing industries in the world.Last year, the esports industry had an estimated audience of 453 million, up from 293 million in 2016. By 2021, that number is expected to reach 557 million. And its not just your stereotypical G Fuel-drinking, Doritos-loving high school guys pushing this growth: Universities across the nation have begun investing in this industry. According to the National Association of Collegiate Esports, more than 170 U.S. colleges have varsity esports programs and are offering around $16 million per year in scholarships. College esports tournaments have attracted over 1,350 schools and 40,000 players.

Even the most traditional Wall Street bankers are taking notice of this industrys potential to make big money. Most esport viewers are in their teens or early twenties, a much-coveted demographic for advertisers, and 43% of esports fans have an annual household income of $75,000. For brands who want to acquire new, young, high-spending customers, esports is especially attractive. Louis Vuitton, for example, is collaborating with video game developer Riot Games to design virtual items in League of Legends (such as prestige skins) that players can buy using real money. The fashion brand also spent 900 hours creating an extravagant custom trophy case that combines Louis Vuittons bougie flair with League of Legends medieval style. Meanwhile, some companies have profited from esports without even trying. In 2018, professional gamer Ninja crashed the website of MeUndies just by mentioning the underwear brand on a livestream.

Why has esports experienced this meteoric rise in popularity and significance? From a social standpoint, esports is far more inclusive than other sports. Men and women of nearly all ages and from various social groups and demographics can play on the same teams and easy translation in the virtual format tears down the language barrier. Unlike in real sports, where genetics may greatly affect your potential to succeed, in esports, anyone with enough practice can become a competent gamer and everyone has the potential to compete with the best.

From a technological standpoint, video games with increasingly life-like visuals have enhanced the viewing experience. Games now frequently run on a smooth 60 frames per second with 4K resolution, resulting in extremely realistic animations and an immersive experience. The rise of esports can also be traced to the rise of video games among youth. According to Pew Research, 90% of teens aged 13-17 played video games in 2018. The percentage is 97% among boys of that age. With a high number of youth playing games, its not hard to imagine that a few would get interested in esports and start the trend among their peers.

The viewership of esports will only grow, especially as famous names in other industries, such as Jennifer Lopez and Travis Scott, associate themselves with leading esports tournaments. The growth of advertising in esports means that brands will now interface directly with previously hard-to-reach audiences, generating previously unthinkable ways to advertise and making space for unlimited creative potential. So, if you want to curb your bread-making addiction during quarantine and spend this extra time getting ahead of the game (pun absolutely intended), consider esports.

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