Monthly Archives: May 2024

After surveying 661 employees affiliated with astronomy and geophysics professions, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has stressed an "urgent" need to address bullying and harassment across the fields.

In short, 44% of respondents reported suffering in the workplace during the two years preceding the survey, and 65% of those respondents said reported concerns were either "ignored" or that their reports were unsatisfactorily handled. To be clear, the survey was conducted in 2020, and a soft-launch of the data was released in 2021. However, a full-fledged analysis of the results that includes recommendations for how to move forward from the glaring issues, dubbed the Bullying and Harassment Report 2023, was just published on May 17.

"The results presented in this report are bleak," Emma Bunch, the RAS president between 2020 and 2022, wrote in the report. "They form a powerful case for change."

Related: NASA Launches Anti-Harassment Campaign

For example, there's a response that states "one person who bullied me is on the committee in charge of upholding the code of conduct" and that's just a taste of several anonymous quotes that speckle the report in order to illustrate the breadth of worries found within. Others express how those in positions of power and influence are perceived as "invincible" and are not punished still another says supervisor relationships make reporting or whistleblowing difficult.

"The questions around reporting, and the awful cases where people report, aren't taken seriously," Sheila Kanani, the Education, Outreach and Diversity officer at the RAS and one of the report's authors, told Space.com about what she believes is the most worrying aspect of these results. "Then, the perpetrator goes on to have an exceptional career and the victim is forced out of the field. I hate feeling so helpless."

Arguably, the reinvigoration of this report comes during a weak point for astronomy professions as a whole in terms of bullying allegations. A lengthy late-2023 article published in Ars Technica, for instance, called on court cases, European Space Agency (ESA) documents and personal ESA employee accounts to reveal a troubling pattern of bullying at the agency. ESA, according to that article, denied the allegations, but physical and spoken sources cited by the author raise clear doubts.

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A little earlier, in 2020, Lund University in Sweden performed two independent investigations that revealed two top astronomers at the institution, Sofia Feltzing and Melvyn Davies, had bullied colleagues. The duo appeared to have victimized or discriminated against their peers as well, yet the university found that a solution wasn't identified quickly enough despite numerous complaints. In 2021 alone, former SpaceX employees publicly shared allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, as did a group of current (at the time) and former Blue Origin employees. And just this year, former SpaceX employee Michelle Dopak sued SpaceX for violations such as sexual discrimination and retaliation.

"It is a very male-dominated field, very competitive, and with little job security," Kanani suggested of why the problem appears to be recurring in astronomy professions specifically. "That makes people angrier and more difficult to work with. Maybe because it is an old field, where things like a good workplace environment weren't taken into account when things started out."

"Also," she added, "universities as a whole suffer from bullying and harassment, with difficult supervisor-student relationships and no training in things like how to be an effective manager."

It is thus unsurprising that the RAS has decided to reiterate this bullying survey, particularly while suggesting new recommendations for paths forward.

For a quick snippet, some of those recommendations include encouraging people to join unions, scheduling social lunches and keeping up with regular trainings as well as updating those trainings as needed. Updates are probably key, however, as one anonymous respondent had stated: "They try by doing all the recommended trainings and reporting systems. It fails still."

"The current issue with training is that senior management doesn't think they have to go to the training sessions, but actually it is them who we need to target!" Kanani said. "We should also use mandatory training as a way to be accepted into membership organizations like the RAS."

Other recommendations, however, would likely have more active results, such as making reporting procedures more transparent and implementing a hard timeline during which a report must be addressed.

For context, the 2020 RAS survey involved questions such as: "How often, if at all, have you been personally subjected to any type of bullying and harassment in your workplace in the last 12 months" and "if you have not been bullied or witnessed bullying, harassment or other unwanted behaviour, would you feel confident reporting it if you ever did?"

It was passed out by the RAS through email to "members, points of contact in universities, to space agencies and to industry," according to the report, which helps paint a picture of the sorts of professions represented. Per Kanani, some of the respondents also specifically said they worked for NASA or ESA.

"We also promoted the survey through the RAS website and social media accounts," RAS officials said.

To the former of those aforementioned questions, 56% of subjects responded they'd "never" personally been subjected to any type of bullying and harassment in the workplace during the preceding year. However, 41% responded that they'd been subjected to some type of bullying or harassment during this time period, 29% said they'd experienced it less often than once per month, 6% at least once per fortnight, 5% at least once per week and 1% said they were bullied or harassed every day at work.

A sole percent may not sound like a lot, but in a sample size of 661 people, that means about six people were bullied or harassed in their workplace every single day. It is for such reasons that RAS blatantly calls the report a "damning" one.

"The evidence in this report is a wake-up call to everyone in the world of astronomy and geophysics," RAS president Mike Lockwood said in a press release put out by the society. "The first step to solving any problem is to admit that there is one, and to gather evidence about the scale and nature of it. Now we have done that, it is clear the issue is both insidious and systemic."

Perhaps the worst aspect of the report relates to the demographics of those bullied.

Women and non-binary people in the field were 50% more likely than men to be harassed or bullied; 12% of bisexual astronomers reported being bullied at least once a week; 5% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer astronomers and geophysicists were bullied in the 24 months preceding the survey; and younger people in relatively "precarious" stages of their career were more likely to report being bullied and harassed. The latter group was dictated by whether a respondent was a student, on a temporary contract, or on a permanent contract.

Disabled, as well as Black and minority ethnic astronomers and geophysicists were also found to be 40% more likely to be bullied than their non-disabled and white counterparts.

With this in mind, it is also worth considering that 87% of respondents were white, 10% were Black, Asian and minority categories (including multiple ethnic and Black Caribbean), and 3% didn't disclose their ethnicity. 80% described their sexual orientation as heterosexual/straight, 7% as bisexual and 3% as gay/lesbian. Big picture-wise, not only does this exacerbate the findings to some degree, but it also depicts a severe lack of diversity in the surveyed professions that likely extrapolates to a severe lack of diversity in the general field.

This is unsurprising as well. A stark 2019 report released by the American Institute of Physics, for example, found that African Americans are incredibly underrepresented in the field of astronomy due to systemic issues and the 2021 Decadal Survey released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine emphasized that racial diversity in the astrophysical sciences is "abysmal." In 2020, Yale University astronomy students spoke out against institutional racism and a study surveying over 400 people has shown how women of color in astronomy experience disproportionately high amounts of discrimination.

In addition, the dynamics of the sample size are why the report includes a disclaimer that a total of 661 respondents is a strong-enough pool for robust statistical analysis, yet "we cannot be certain that it is representative of our community and therefore our findings are only indicative of wider issues."

"This response rate," the report says, "also means we cannot look at intersectional issues whilst preserving anonymity."

However, as the report states as well, the data is largely comparable to the results of the University College Union's 2013 report, which surveyed a staggering 14,667 participants working in higher education. In that report, 48% of respondents reported being subjected to bullying at work.

"Ultimately I dont think it is just a 'space sector' problem," Kanani said. "I think if we look, we will find it everywhere."

Seeing as the survey was originally dispersed in 2020, it also bears wondering whether anything has improved for astronomy workplaces during the last several years especially considering how striking the results were.

"Anecdotally, I do think things have changed for the positive already," Kanani said, pointing out how she believes bullying and harassment are now discussed more in the field, that bystander and allyship training seem to be entering the conversation and that reports are perhaps more likely to occur. Still, she emphasized, "we've not resurveyed yet, so I can't be sure."

"That said," she added, "since 2020, there has been a lot more work conducted online, so perhaps the focus has shifted to online trolls, and the like. The world is also more unstable, particularly for students and those on temporary contracts, and they are some of the people who disclosed a higher number of issues anyway."

A full version of the report and all associated statistics can be viewed here.

Originally posted here:

Astronomy has a bullying and harassment issue: 'Results presented in this report are bleak' - Space.com

Around a star in our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have discovered an extremely low-density planet that is as light as cotton candy. The new planet, named WASP-193b, appears to dwarf Jupiter in size, yet it is a fraction of its density. Credit: K. Ivanov/MIT.

An unusual old, hot Jupiter-like planet with a puffy atmosphere has been discovered in our galaxy, huddled around a distant Sun-like star. This gas giant, named WASP-193b, is now the second-lightest exoplanet ever found and the latest addition to a unique and mysterious group of exoplanets with Jupiter- and Neptune-like masses but volumes much greater, dubbed as super-puffs or puffy Jupiters.

WASP-193b orbits so close to its host star that a year on the planet (one complete orbit) lasts a fleeting 6.25 days. Astronomers normally expect planets at such short distances from their stars to be long stripped of their atmospheres, due to being drenched with intense stellar radiation. Yet, telescope observations show WASP-193b to be a whopping 50 percent larger than Jupiter and a little over a tenth as heavy. In fact, the exoplanets air is so inflated, it can be likened to cotton candy. Additionally, this oddball planet closely grazes its star, leaving astronomers baffled as to how its even managed to hold onto its atmosphere over the eons.

This planet should not be there, says Francisco Pozuelos, a senior researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andaluca in Spain, who was part of the discovery. Right now, we have no idea on how the supremely bloated world formed, he added.

These extraordinary features rank WASP-193b as the second-lightest planet ever found. The lightest known exoplanet is the Neptune-sized Kepler-51d, and was discovered in 2014. It is much smaller than Jupiter and 30 times less dense. Unlike Kepler-51d, which is just 500 million years old and takes over 100 days to orbit its host star, WASP-193b is nearly half as old as our universe itself. Its atypical size, ultra-light profile, and eons-long existence, make it an anomaly among the community of more than 5,000 exoplanets found to date, astronomers say.

Its definitely what I would call an extreme system, says Dakotah Tyler, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the discovery. The normal explanation for how you get a puffed-up hot Jupiter doesnt apply here its too puffed up.

None of the classical planetary evolution models are able to explain how WASP-193b formed, even under unrealistic assumptions such as a planet without a core, according to the new study published last week in Nature Astronomy. Astronomers hope upcoming observations of the planet reveal new clues about how such hot Jupiters coalesce and exist for billions of years within extreme environments.

Pozuelos and his colleagues first spotted hints of WASP-193b in telescope surveys between 2006 and 2008 by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) consortium. WASPs robotic telescopes had detected tell-tale dips in light from the host star WASP-193, lying 1,200 light-years from Earth. Although the periodically dimming starlight suggested a planet transiting the face of its host star every 6.25 days, its ultra-light profile made it a challenge for the researchers to conclusively measure the planets mass.

Typically, astronomers use a technique known as the radial-velocity method, where it measures the change of a stars normal light spectrum caused by a stars slight wobble due to the tugging of its orbiting planets. While the gravitational pull of a massive planet on its host star is quickly noticeable normally within a few nights WASP-193b hardly had any influence on its star. Pozuelos and his colleagues had to collect data for four long years before they could gather a vanishingly faint mass signal, which confirmed the planet was indeed extraordinarily light.

It was a bittersweet feeling, recalls Pozuelos. Wed discovered something that was an outlier and important, but at the same time we were thinking that maybe we were wrong.

Its not entirely uncommon for hot Jupiters like WASP-193b to host inflated atmospheres, which are primarily lightweight hydrogen and helium that easily expand when heated. Owing to the amount of stellar radiation WASP-193 is bathed in, conventional models predict planets like WASP-193b must be enveloped by a thinner atmosphere than that showed in observations. The discovery tells us that we are ignoring the important mechanisms that we have to include somehow, says Pozuelos. We still have to learn a lot about how planetary systems are formed.

Its really fun to find these extreme cases that make you question what you thought that you knew, says Tyler, noting that just one eccentric planet wouldnt upend existing theories about how planets form. But at the same time, you do have to come up with a way to explain it.

Pozuelos and his co-authors speculate that WASP-193b is constantly stretched and contracted by its stars gravitational tugs, known as tidal forces. These forces could supply additional heat from deep within the planet and contribute to its inflated atmosphere. But even that wouldnt really account for how puffy it actually is, says Tyler. The key here is just more data, more observations.

Pozuelos and his colleagues plan to soon request time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the WASP-193bs chemical makeup. Thanks to the planets ultra-light air, large amounts of starlight can pierce through the atmosphere which JWSTs powerful infrared eyes will easily be able to record.

WASP-193b will be a Rosetta Stone to try and resolve the mystery of puffy Jupiters, study coauthor Julien de Wit of MIT told CNN. If JWST finds WASP-193b hosting ice or elements heavier than helium (not typically expected in the interiors of a planetary system when located in an extreme environment), it would reveal that the planet moved away from the star and was pushed inward to its tight 6-day orbit by processes still being analyzed. This mechanism could also explain how Kepler-51d and its planetary siblings formed, data from the Hubble Space Telescope had previously suggested.

Pozuelos estimates his team would need just one observation by JWST to gather all the required data for WASP-193b.

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WASP-193b: The bizarro, fluffy exoplanet that comes as a surprise - Astronomy Magazine

When the Arecibo Observatory dish in Puerto Rico collapsed in 2020, astronomers lost a powerful radio telescope and a unique radar instrument to map the surfaces of asteroids and other planetary bodies. Fortunately, a new, next-generation radar system called ngRADAR is under development, to eventually be installed at the 100-meter (328 ft.) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia. It will be able to track and map asteroids, with the ability to observe 85% of the celestial sphere. It will also be able to study comets, moons and planets in our Solar System.

Right now, there is only one facility that can conduct high-power planetary radar, the 70-meter (230-foot) Goldstone antenna that is part of NASAs Deep Space network, said Patrick Taylor, the project director for ngRADAR and the radar division head for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. We had begun this process of developing a next generation radar system several years ago, but with the loss of Arecibo, this becomes even more important.

Planetary radar can reveal incredibly detailed information about the surfaces and makeup of asteroids, comets, planets, and moons. The ngRADAR system could provide unprecedented data on these objects. In fact, a recent test with a low-power prototype of ngRADAR at the GBT produced some of the highest resolution planetary radar images ever captured from Earth. But the hallmark of the new system will be seeking out near Earth asteroids and comets to evaluate any hazard they might present to our planet.

Radar is really powerful in determining the orbits of these asteroids and comets, Taylor told Universe Today in an interview, and the new system will deliver very precise data that will allow us to predict where these small bodies will be in the future. That will be one of the highest priority uses for the next generation radar system, where we can track and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets to evaluate any hazard they might present to Earth in the future.

Usually, radio telescopes collect weak light in the form of radio waves from distant stars, galaxies, and other energetic astronomical objects including black holes or cold, dark objects that emit no visible light. While radio telescopes dont take pictures in the same way visible-light telescopes do, the radio signals detected are amplified and converted into data that can be analyzed and used to create images.

But radio telescopes can also be used to transmit and reflect radio light off planetary bodies in our Solar System. This is called planetary radar or Solar System radar.

What is planetary radar and how does it work?

Essentially we have a flashlight that works in radio waves, Taylor explained. Our narrow flashlight beam does not look at the whole sky, but we point it in a very precise location the surface of an asteroid or moon. We know very well what our flashlights properties are, so we know exactly what we send out. When we receive the echo back from wherever we pointed our flashlight, we analyze that signal and see how it changed compared to what we transmitted.

Thats what makes planetary radar so powerful and different from any other type of astronomy.

When astronomers are studying light that is being made by a star, or galaxy, theyre trying to figure out its properties, Taylor said. But with radar, we already know what the properties of the signals are, and we leverage that to figure out the properties of whatever we bounced the signals off of. That allows us to characterize planetary bodies like their shape, speed, and trajectory. Thats especially important for hazardous objects that might stray too close to Earth.

In the past, planetary radar has been used to image asteroids, but also precisely measure the position and motion of the planets, allowing us to land spacecraft on Mars and to explore the outer Solar System. The technique has also made surprising discoveries, such as the finding the presence of water ice on Mercury.

Because radio waves are much longer than visible light waves, radio astronomy requires large antennas. The 70-meter Goldstone antenna located in Californias Mojave Desert, is primarily used to communicate with spacecraft as part of NASAs Deep Space network. But it is also frequently used for planetary radar to study near Earth asteroids, and as previously mentioned is the only facility currently available to perform high-power planetary radar. (There are, however, are smaller facilities that can perform planetary radar, including smaller telescopes at the Goldstone site and a few in Australia, but they do not have the same scale of transmitter power as the Goldstone 70-meter dish.) Previously, the workhorse for planetary radar was the 1,000-foot-diameter (305 meters) Arecibo Observatory, which was about 20 times more sensitive and could detect asteroids about twice as far away than the Goldstone 70 meter.

However, because Arecibos dish was stationary and built inside a round sinkhole, it was fixed to the Earth and could only view whatever part of the sky happened to be straight overhead. That meant Arecibos dish could only see about one-third of the sky. Goldstone is fully steerable, can see about 80 percent of the sky, can track objects several times longer per day, and can image asteroids at finer spatial resolution.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is the worlds largest fully steerable radio telescope. The maneuverability of its large 100-meter dish allows it to quickly track objects across its field of view, and see 85% of the sky.

The GBTs new radar system will introduce a high-resolution tool that will be a vast upgrade, collecting data at higher resolutions and at wavelengths not previously available. Scientists at GBT and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) are also developing advanced data reduction and analysis tools that have not been available before, providing astronomers with unprecedented planetary radar capabilities.

To test out the proof of concept, Taylor and his team worked with the company Raytheon a long-time developer of radar systems for both the military and science applications to build a small version of the transmitter, with a lot less power.

Our friends at Raytheon built a transmitter that could output 700 watts, so about half the power of a microwave oven, Taylor said. Ultimately, we want to build a system with 500 kilowatts, so up by a factor of a thousand. But even with 700 watts, we were able to do some really impressive observations.

GBTs planetary radar was aimed at the Moon, specifically at the Apollo 15 landing site in Hadley Rille, and at the giant Tycho Craters surface, and radar echoes were received with NRAOs ten 25-meter VLBA antennas. At Tycho, the crater was captured with 5-meter resolution, showing unprecedented detail of the Moons surface from Earth. Taylor said the resolution with the ngRADAR prototype approached the optical resolution on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, taking images with its high-resolution cameras from orbit around the Moon.

The images of the crater floor were actually breathtaking, Taylor said. Its pretty amazing what weve been able to capture so far, using less power than a common household appliance.

Additionally, the prototype radar also detected a potentially hazardous asteroid named (231937) 2001 FO32, which happened to be flying past Earth at about six times more distant than the Moon during their radar pings. The asteroid is considered potentially hazardous because of its size, approximately 1 kilometer in diameter, along with how close it can get to Earth, at just over 2 million kilometers away during the observations in 2021. The asteroids detection appeared as a spike in their data.

Just from the spike in our data, we can now figure out how fast this object is moving, determine its orbit, and figure out its trajectory in the future, Taylor explained. We can determine its impact risk and assess how much of a hazard it is, and even constrain its spin state, its size, its composition, its scattering properties, and so on. So, even though the data spike doesnt look like much, that one little detection can tell you a lot of information about the asteroid.

Radar signals transmitted by the GBT will reflect off astronomical objects, and those reflected signals will be received by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of ten observing stations located across the United States.

The idea is for GBT is to do the transmitting almost constantly and the VLBA either all ten of those or any subset of those telescopes doing the receiving, Taylor said. This new system will allow us to characterize the surfaces of many different objects in a different frequency or wavelength that hasnt been used before.

Next: Part 2 of this series will look at the details of ngRADAR, the history of planetary radar, and take you up close to the GBT.

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Next-Generation Radar Will Map Threatening Asteroids - Universe Today

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The UArizona-managed Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham is the only one of its kind, with two 27-foot mirrors mounted side by side. A powerful adaptive optics system compensates for blurring introduced by atmospheric turbulence, making it one of the most powerful Earth-based observatories in the world.

Credit: NASA

New images of Jupiter's volcano-studded moon Io, taken by the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona, offer the highest resolution of Io ever achieved with an Earth-based instrument. The observations were made possible by a new high-contrast optical imaging instrument, dubbed SHARK-VIS, and the telescope's adaptive optics system, which compensates for the blurring induced by atmospheric turbulence.

The images, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reveal surface features as small as 50 miles across, a spatial resolution that until now had been achievable only with spacecraft sent to Jupiter. This is equivalent to taking a picture of a dime-sized object from 100 miles away, according to the research team. SHARK-VIS allowed the researchers to identify a major resurfacing event around Pele, one of Io's most prominent volcanoes.According to the paper's first author,Al Conrad, the eruptions on Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system, dwarf their contemporaries on Earth.

"Io, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to learn about the mighty eruptions that helped shape the surfaces of the Earth and the moon in their distant pasts," said Conrad, associate staff scientist at theLarge Binocular Telescope Observatory. The Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, is part ofMount Graham International Observatory, a division of the University of ArizonaSteward Observatory.

Conrad added that studies like this one will help researchers understand why some worlds in the solar system are volcanic but not others. They also may someday shed light on volcanic worlds in exoplanet systems around nearby stars.

Slightly larger than Earth's moon, Io is the innermost of Jupiter's Galilean moons, which in addition to Io include Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Locked in a gravitational "tug of war" among Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede, Io is constantly being squeezed, leading to frictional heat buildup in its interior believed to be the cause for its sustained and widespread volcanic activity.

Jupiter moon Io, imaged by SHARK-VIS on Jan. 10, 2024. This is the highest resolution image of Io ever obtained by an Earth-based telescope. The image combines three spectral bands infrared, red and yellow to highlight the reddish ring around the volcano Pele (below and to the right of the moon's center) and the white ring around Pillan Patera, to the right of Pele.

By monitoring the eruptions on Io's surface, scientists hope to gain insights into the heat-driven movement of material underneath the moon's surface, its internal structure and ultimately, on the tidal heating mechanism responsible for Io's intense volcanism.

Io's volcanic activity was first discovered in 1979, when Linda Morabito, an engineer on NASA's Voyager mission, spotted an eruption plume in one of the images taken by the spacecraft during its famous "Grand Tour" of the outer planets. Since then, countless observations have been made that document Io's restless nature, from both space and Earth-based telescopes.

Study co-author Ashley Davies, a principal scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the new image taken by SHARK-VISis so rich in detail that it has allowed the team to identify a major resurfacing event in which the plume deposit around a prominent volcano known as Pele, located in Io's southern hemisphere close to the equator, is being covered by eruption deposits from Pillan Patera, a neighboring volcano.A similar eruption sequence was observed by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which explored the Jupiter system between 1995 and 2003.

"We interpret the changes as dark lava deposits and white sulfur dioxide deposits originating from an eruption at Pillan Patera, which partially cover Pele's red, sulfur-rich plume deposit," Davies said. "Before SHARK-VIS, such resurfacing events were impossible to observe from Earth."

While telescope images in the infrared can detect hot spots caused by ongoing volcanic eruptions, they are not sharp enough to reveal surface details and unambiguously identify the locations of the eruptions, explained co-author Imke de Pater, professor emerita of astronomy at the University of California Berkeley.

"Sharper images at visible wavelengths like those provided by SHARK-VIS and LBT are essential to identify both locations of eruptions and surface changes not detectable in the infrared, such as new plume deposits," de Pater said, adding that visible light observations provide researchers with vital context for the interpretation of infrared observations, including those from spacecraft such as Juno, which is currently orbiting Jupiter.

SHARK-VIS was built by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics at the Rome Astronomical Observatory and is managed by a team led by principal investigator Fernando Pedichini, assisted by project manager Roberto Piazzesi. In 2023, it was installed, together with its complementary near-infrared instrument SHARK-NIR, at the LBT to fully take advantage of the telescope's outstanding adaptive optics system.The instrument houses a fast, ultra-low-noise camera that allows it to observe the sky in "fast imaging" mode, capturing slow-motion footage that freezes the optical distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence, and to post-process data to an unprecedented sharpness.

Gianluca Li Causi, data processing manager for SHARK-VIS at theItalian National Institute for Astrophysics, explained how it works: "We process our data on the computer to remove any trace of the sensor's electronic footprint. We then select the best frames and combine them using a highly efficient software package called Kraken, developed by our colleagues Douglas Hope and Stuart Jefferies from Georgia State University. Kraken allows us to remove atmospheric effects, revealing Io in incredible sharpness."

SHARK-VIS instrument scientist Simone Antoniucci said he anticipates new observations to be made of objects throughout the solar system.

"The keen vision of SHARK-VIS is particularly suited to observing the surfaces of many solar system bodies, not only the moons of giant planets but also asteroids," he said. "We have already observed some of those, with the data currently being analyzed, and are planning to observe more."

Geophysical Research Letters

Observational study

Not applicable

Observation of Ios Resurfacing via Plume Deposition Using Ground-based Adaptive Optics at Visible Wavelengths with LBT SHARK-VIS

4-Jun-2024

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Glimpses of a volcanic world: New telescope images of Jupiter's moon Io rival those from spacecraft - EurekAlert

The 2020s have already seen many lunar landing attempts, although several of them have crashed or toppled over. With all the excitement surrounding the prospect of humans returning to the Moon, both commercial interests and scientists stand to gain.

The Moon is uniquely suitable for researchers to build telescopes they cant put on Earth because it doesnt have as much satellite interference as Earth, nor a magnetic field blocking out radio waves. But only recently have astronomers like me started thinking about potential conflicts between the desire to expand knowledge of the universe on one side and geopolitical rivalries and commercial gain on the other, and how to balance those interests.

As an astronomer and the co-chair of the International Astronomical Unions working group Astronomy from the Moon, Im on the hook to investigate this question.

By 2035 just 10 or so years away American and Chinese rockets could be carrying humans to long-term lunar bases.

Both bases are planned for the same small areas near the south pole because of the near-constant solar power available in this region and the rich source of water that scientists believe could be found in the Moons darkest regions nearby.

Unlike the Earth, the Moon is not tilted relative to its path around the Sun. As a result, the Sun circles the horizon near the poles, almost never setting on some crater rims. There, the never-setting Sun casts long shadows over nearby craters, hiding their floors from direct sunlight for the past 4 billion years, 90% of the age of the solar system.

These craters are basically pits of eternal darkness. And its not just dark down there, its also cold: below -418 degrees Fahrenheit (-250 degrees Celsius). Its so cold that scientists predict that water in the form of ice at the bottom of these craters likely brought by ancient asteroids colliding with the Moons surface will not melt or evaporate away for a very long time.

Surveys from lunar orbit suggest that these craters, called permanently shadowed regions, could hold half a billion tons of water.

The constant sunlight for solar power and proximity to frozen water makes the Moons poles attractive for human bases. The bases will also need water to drink, wash up and grow crops to feed hungry astronauts. It is hopelessly expensive to bring long-term water supplies from Earth, so a local watering hole is a big deal.

For decades, astronomers had ignored the Moon as a potential site for telescopes because it was simply infeasible to build them there. But human bases open up new opportunities.

The radio-sheltered far side of the Moon, the part we never see from Earth, makes recording very low frequency radio waves accessible. These signals are likely to contain signatures of the universes Dark Ages, a time before any stars or galaxies formed.

Astronomers could also put gravitational wave detectors at the poles, since these detectors are extraordinarily sensitive, and the Moons polar regions dont have earthquakes to disturb them as they do on Earth.

A lunar gravitational wave detector could let scientists collect data from pairs of black holes orbiting each other very closely right before they merge. Predicting where and when they will merge tells astronomers where and when to look for a flash of light that they would otherwise miss. With those extra clues, scientists could learn how these black holes are born and how they evolve.

The cold at the lunar poles also makes infrared telescopes vastly more sensitive by shifting the telescopes black body radiation to longer wavelengths. These telescopes could give astronomers new tools to look for life on Earth-like planets beyond the solar system.

And more ideas keep coming. The first radio antennae are scheduled to land on the far side next year.

But the rush to build bases on the Moon could interfere with the very conditions that make the Moon so attractive for research in the first place. Although the Moons surface area is greater than Africas, human explorers and astronomers want to visit the same few kilometer-sized locations.

But activities that will help sustain a human presence on the Moon, such as mining for water, will create vibrations that could ruin a gravitational wave telescope.

Also, many elements found on the Moon are extremely valuable back on Earth. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen make precious rocket propellant, and helium-3 is a rare substance used to improve quantum computers.

But one of the few places rich in helium-3 on the Moon is found in one of the most likely places to put a far-side, Dark Ages radio telescope.

Finally, there are at least two internet and GPS satellite constellations planned to orbit the Moon a few years from now. Unintentional radio emissions from these satellites could render a Dark Ages telescope useless.

But compromise isnt out of the question. There might be a few alternative spots to place each telescope.

In 2024, the International Astronomical Union put together the working group Astronomy from the Moon to start defining which sites astronomers want to preserve for their work. This entails ranking the sites by their importance for each type of telescope and beginning to talk with a key United Nations committee. These steps may help astronomers, astronauts from multiple countries and private interests share the Moon.

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The rush to return humans to the Moon and build lunar bases could threaten opportunities for astronomy - The Conversation

June opens with Jupiter and Mercury mingling in the morning sky. The smaller planet quickly disappears from view within days. Uranus and Neptune cannot be seen with the naked eye. Credit: Astronomy: Roen Kelly

Friday, May 31 Although the Leo Trio of galaxies gets quite a lot of fame, these arent the only deep-sky objects to chase down within the Lion. With no Moon in the sky after sunset tonight, consider hunting down another of this constellations galactic gems: NGC 2903. In fact, many skywatchers wonder how Messier could have missed this gorgeous spiral, whose brightness is on par with other galaxies the Frenchman did spot in Leo.

NGC 2903 sits just below the big cats chin. To find it, first look west an hour after sunset, where Leo is slowly making its way down toward the horizon, now 50 high. Youll easily spot the constellations alpha star, magnitude 1.4 Regulus, as one of the brighter suns in this region of sky.

From Regulus, see if you can find the rest of the Sickle asterism, which looks like a backwards question mark in the sky. The Sickles blade ends at 3rd-magnitude Epsilon () Leonis; from this star, scan 3.3 west to land on 4th-magnitude Lambda () Leo. And from there, simply drop 1.5 south to view magnitude 8.9 NGC 2903.

This spiral galaxy is roughly twice as long as it is wide, stretching about 12.6 on its long axis. It is considered one of the finest NGC objects, and a medium-sized telescope (4 inches or so) will begin to resolve its brighter nucleus and fainter halo into distinct regions.

Sunrise: 5:34 A.M. Sunset: 8:22 P.M. Moonrise: 2:06 A.M. Moonset: 1:52 P.M. Moon Phase: Waning crescent (39%) *Times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset are given in local time from 40 N 90 W. The Moons illumination is given at 12 P.M. local time from the same location.

Saturday, June 1June opens with a gorgeous dark evening sky that might allow you to catch a glimpse of noctilucent clouds floating high above the northern horizon. These stunning, reflective clouds are unique in that they are composed of ice crystals that condense largely on high-up dust particles left behind as meteorites streak into the atmosphere.

Noctilucent clouds form in the mesosphere, some 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the ground. Because they are so high up, they can remain in sunlight long after the Sun has gone down for those on the ground, thanks to the curvature of Earth. Thus, these clouds can appear to shine high in the sky even in the dark of night, while lower, normal clouds are dark blots without illumination.

Theres no special equipment needed to view noctilucent clouds, just a little luck and some patience. Step outside an hour or two after darkness falls and turn your gaze north. Note that even though theyre high in the atmosphere, these clouds may be low on your northern horizon depending on your latitude, so try to get to a viewing site where that direction is clear of both obstacles and artificial lights. Look for wispy, silvery clouds that appear lit up rather than dark or dusty. Like the aurora, noctilucent clouds can come and go, and displays may ramp up slowly but hopefully the mild weather and moonless skies will allow for some additional stargazing even if no night-shining clouds appear!

Sunrise: 5:33 A.M. Sunset: 8:23 P.M. Moonrise: 2:30 A.M. Moonset: 3:05 P.M. Moon Phase: Waning crescent (28%)

Sunday, June 2 The Moon reaches perigee, the closest point to Earth in its orbit, at 3:16 A.M. EDT. At that time, our satellite will be 228,728 miles (368,102 km) away.

The Moon then passes 2 north of Mars at 8 P.M. EDT. Both are visible in the morning as part of the line of planets now shining in the pre-dawn sky. So, step outside early this morning about an hour before sunrise to find Mars and the Moon both in Pisces, standing 15 high at that time in the east.

The waning Moon lies west of Mars early this morning, sitting to the Red Planets upper right in the sky. By tomorrow morning at the same time, the Moon will be an even thinner crescent to the east of Mars, having moved to its lower left.

An hour before dawn, three planets in the six-world lineup are already visible. Mars and Saturn are both 1st magnitude, with Saturn far to Mars upper right (west) in Aquarius, nearly 30 high at this time. Neptune lies between them in Pisces, about 5.5 below magnitude 4.5 Lambda Piscium. The distant ice giant is magnitude 7.8 and requires binoculars or a telescope to spot.

Wait 30 more minutes, and Uranus (magnitude 5.8 again, requiring optical aid) and Mercury (magnitude 1) have risen, with Uranus some 4.5 high and Mercury just 1.5 high. Magnitude 2 Jupiter is just rising at that time, and will need a bit longer to climb above the horizon. See if you can catch it just before sunrise, though be careful to look away and stop using binoculars or a telescope several minutes before the Sun rises from your location, which may differ from the time given below.

This lineup of planets will feature throughout the week, especially as the Moon passes through the line and Mercury and Jupiter meet in a close conjunction in just two days. Stay tuned!

Sunrise: 5:33 A.M. Sunset: 8:24 P.M. Moonrise: 2:54 A.M. Moonset: 4:18 P.M. Moon Phase: Waning crescent (18%)

Monday, June 3 Asteroid 2 Pallas is currently moving through Corona Borealis, now within the constellations southeastern border. Tonight, the 9th-magnitude asteroid sits just 20 from a magnitude 6.5 field star, but theres actually a much easier way to find it.

Because of its location and the rotation of Earth, you can let nature do the work for you. Center your telescope on magnitude 4.1 Epsilon Coronae Borealis and simply lock it in place without tracking, so the sky appears to drift past. Within 20 minutes, Pallas will be in the center of the field!

Corona Borealis has been recently making headlines for a different star: T CrB, a star just 1 southeast of Epsilon. Normally magnitude 10 and requiring the aid of binoculars or a telescope to see, T CrB is expected to suddenly and briefly flare sometime in the next few months, reaching a naked-eye magnitude of roughly 2. Tonight, Pallas is nearly 3.5 east-northeast of T CrB; it will close in on the variable over the next few weeks and pass within of the star later this month.

Sunrise: 5:33 A.M. Sunset: 8:24 P.M. Moonrise: 3:21 A.M. Moonset: 5:34 P.M. Moon Phase: Waning crescent (10%)

Tuesday, June 4 Lets hop back to that parade of planets early this morning to check out a close conjunction as Mercury passes 0.1 south of Jupiter at 6 A.M. EDT.

At that time, sunrise has already reached the East Coast, while the two planets are just rising in the Midwest. Mercury lies just to the lower right of Jupiter and binoculars or a telescope will show both within the same field of view. No matter your time zone, you can catch the pair about 20 minutes before local sunrise, when they are some 2 to 3 high. Its definitely a challenging view, but a rewarding one. Note that Mercury will continue sliding east over time, so those in time zones farther west may see Mercury directly below or even to the lower left of Jupiter in the sky.

Theyre a stunning contrast the solar systems smallest and largest planet, together in one view! Mercury spans some 5 and appears nearly 90 percent lit. Nearby, Jupiter is more than six times as wide at 33 and is fully illuminated by the Sun. Its four Galilean moons are on display, though they will be hard to make out in the growing twilight. In the eastern half of the U.S., Europa is just finishing a transit across the disk, slipping off just 10 minutes before sunrise in the Midwest, so take care if youre trying to follow the event. After that, Europa lies closest to the planet to the west, with Callisto farther west. Io lies closest to Jupiter on the east, and Ganymede sits farther east.

Moving down the line of planets, the Moon passes 4 north of Uranus at 9 P.M. EDT tonight.

And earlier in the day, Venus reaches superior conjunction at noon EDT, which is why its currently invisible in the bright glare of our star.

Sunrise: 5:32 A.M. Sunset: 8:25 P.M. Moonrise: 3:51 A.M. Moonset: 6:50 P.M. Moon Phase: Waning crescent (4%)

Wednesday, June 5 The Moon now passes 5 north of Jupiter at 10 A.M. EDT. The slim crescent will be a real challenge to observe, although according to longtime Astronomy contributor Stephen James OMeara, there are some unique and beautiful effects to be seen if you can manage it.

See if you can catch the nearly New Moon in the sky shortly before dawn. If you do, you might experience the lunar blackdrop effect, which can cast dark stripes on the last illuminated bits of the lunar crescent. These stripes arent real, but are instead an illusion caused by both the diffraction of sunlight and the turbulence of our atmosphere, through which we are viewing the Moon (and all other celestial objects). In fact, you might notice these stripes dance, waver, or disappear and reappear if youre able to follow the slim crescent over time. The more turbulent the atmosphere and the poorer your local seeing the more likely you are to see the stripes.

Particularly intrepid observers can try to catch this effect again tomorrow morning, just hours before the Moon finally reaches its New phase.

Sunrise: 5:32 A.M. Sunset: 8:26 P.M. Moonrise: 4:26 A.M. Moonset: 8:05 P.M. Moon Phase: Waning crescent (1%)

Thursday, June 6 New Moon occurs at 8:38 A.M. EDT this morning, leaving our sky dark, moonless, and perfect for deep-sky observers.

Longtime observers know that although the images of galaxies and nebulae we see are often stunningly multicolored, most objects dont show off vivid hues through the eyepiece when visually observing. But some do, and one of these is NGC 7662, also called the Blue Snowball and the brightest planetary nebula in the constellation Andromeda.

Youll want to catch this object in the early-morning sky, after around 3:30 A.M. local daylight time, when Andromeda has risen well above the eastern horizon. The Blue Snowball is located in the western portion of the constellation, just under 2.5 west-southwest of magnitude 4.3 Iota () Andromedae. The nebula itself is magnitude 8.3 and roughly 30 across; its easy to capture in most instruments. Smaller scopes will show a small, grayish smudge. But youll want a larger scope to pull out its deep blue color something in the 8- to 10-inch or larger range is a good start, but bigger is better! Make sure to use high magnification as well for the best chances at a glimpse of its beautiful blue hue.

Sunrise: 5:32 A.M. Sunset: 8:26 P.M. Moonrise: 5:11 A.M. Moonset: 9:15 P.M. Moon Phase: New

Friday, June 7 Tonight offers the first of several chances in the coming days to catch Comet 13P/Olbers near NGC 2281, a 5th-magnitude open cluster in Auriga the Charioteer.

Youll need to be quick, though, as the constellation is setting in the west just behind the Sun. An hour to an hour and a half after sunset, youll want your telescope trained on eastern Auriga, just to the lower right of the bright stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Tonight, Olbers lies some 5.7 north-northwest of magnitude 3.6 Theta () Geminorum and just 2.2 southwest of NGC 2281. The comet is currently around 8th magnitude, so a few magnitudes fainter than the open cluster but still bright enough to pick up in relatively small scopes as long as the atmosphere is clear and calm. An observing site that is slightly elevated above its surroundings and with a clear western horizon will help, too.

Discovered by William Herschel in 1788, NGC 2281 is a loose collection of young stars spanning about . Astronomers estimate the cluster is some 435 million years old. It is among many open clusters in Auriga, including the three Messier objects M36, M37, and M38. Of these, M37 is believed to be closest to NGC 2281 in age, based on the clusters rotational rates.

Sunrise: 5:31 A.M. Sunset: 827 P.M. Moonrise: 6:04 A.M. Moonset: 10:15 P.M. Moon Phase: Waxing crescent (2%)

Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron.

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The Sky This Week from May 31 to June 7: A Jupiter-Mercury conjunction - Astronomy Magazine

Consumer-grade AI is finding its way into peoples daily lives with its ability to generate text and images and automate tasks. But astronomers need much more powerful, specialized AI. The vast amounts of observational data generated by modern telescopes and observatories defies astronomers efforts to extract all of its meaning.

A team of scientists is developing a new AI for astronomical data called AstroPT. Theyve presented it in a new paper titled AstroPT: Scaling Large Observation Models for Astronomy. The paper is available at arxiv.org, and the lead author is Michael J. Smith, a data scientist and astronomer from Aspia Space.

Astronomers are facing a growing deluge of data, which will expand enormously when the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) comes online in 2025. The VRO has the worlds largest camera, and each of its images could fill 1500 large-screen TVs. During its ten-year mission, the VRO will generate about 0.5 exabytes of data, which is about 50,000 times more data than is contained in the USAs Library of Congress.

Other telescopes with enormous mirrors are also approaching first light. The Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and the European Extremely Large Telescope combined will generate an overwhelming amount of data.

Having data that cant be processed is the same as not having the data at all. Its basically inert and has no meaning until its processed somehow. When you have too much data, and you dont have the technology to process it, its like having no data, said Cecilia Garraffo, a computational astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This is where AstroPT comes in.

AstroPT stands for Astro Pretrained Transformer, where a transformer is a particular type of AI. Transformers can change or transform an input sequence into an output sequence. AI needs to be trained, and AstroPT has been trained on 8.6 million 512 x 512-pixel images from the DESI Legacy Survey Data Release 8. DESI is the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. DESI studies the effect of Dark Energy by capturing the optical spectra from tens of millions of galaxies and quasars.

AstroPT and similar AI deal with tokens. Tokens are visual elements in a larger image that contain meaning. By breaking images down into tokens, an AI can understand the larger meaning of an image. AstroPT can transform individual tokens into coherent output.

AstroPT has been trained on visual tokens. The idea is to teach the AI to predict the next token. The more thoroughly its been trained to do that, the better it will perform.

We demonstrated that simple generative autoregressive models can learn scientifically useful information when pre-trained on the surrogate task of predicting the next 16 16 pixel patch in a sequence of galaxy image patches, the authors write. In this scheme, each image patch is a token.

One of the obstacles to training AI like AstroPT concerns what AI scientists call the token crisis. To be effective, AI needs to be trained on a large number of quality tokens. In a 2023 paper, a separate team of researchers explained that a lack of tokens can limit the effectiveness of some AI, such as LLMs or Large Language Models. State-of-the-art LLMs require vast amounts of internet-scale text data for pre-training, the wrote. Unfortunately, the growth rate of high-quality text data on the internet is much slower than the growth rate of data required by LLMs.

AstroPT faces the same problem: a dearth of quality tokens to train on. Like other AI, it uses LOMs or Large Observation Models. The team says their results so far suggest that AstroPT can solve the token crisis by using data from observations. This is a promising result that suggests that data taken from the observational sciences would complement data from other domains when used to pre-train a single multimodal LOM, and so points towards the use of observational data as one solution to the token crisis.

AI developers are eager to find solutions to the token crisis and other AI challenges.

Without better AI, a data processing bottleneck will prevent astronomers and astrophysicists from making discoveries from the vast quantities of data that will soon arrive. Can AstroPT help?

The authors are hoping that it can, but it needs much more development. They say theyre open to collaborating with others to strengthen AstroPT. To aid that, they followed current leading community models as closely as possible. They call it an open to all project.

We took these decisions in the belief that collaborative community development paves the fastest route towards realising an open source web-scale large observation model, they write.

We warmly invite potential collaborators to join us, they conclude.

Itll be interesting to see how AI developers will keep up with the vast amount of astronomical data coming our way.

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Astronomy Generates Mountains of Data. That's Perfect for AI - Universe Today

A NASA image of Pluto shows its "heart-shaped" portion at bottom right. Credit: NASA.

Astronomy.com: We were going to write something new about Pluto here. But Astronomy Magazine editor Dave Eicher has already done the heavy lifting. Before we get to the experts heres how Dave described the discovery and death of Pluto as a planet in a December 2023 column:

In 1930 a young astronomer from Kansas, employed as an observer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, discovered Pluto. It was the first planet in the solar system to have been discovered since 1846, when astronomers in Germany detected Neptune. Clyde Tombaugh, just 24 at the time, was hailed as a hero, Disney named a cartoon dog after the new planet, and for 76 years the solar system was a happy place.

And then, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) reconsidered Plutos status. In a controversial vote, astronomers not planetary scientists demoted Pluto to the status of being classified as a dwarf planet, taking away one major planet and reducing the number in our solar system to eight. Astronomers suddenly took sides, seeing various sides in the logic, and schoolchildren all around the world were heartbroken, having been enamored with the story of the most distant and mysterious planet that was discovered by a young, self-educated researcher, and having that status heartlessly yanked away.

Astronomy.com: OK, the scene is set. Were working in a shared document and Alison will go first. Alison, is Pluto a planet?

Alison Klesman, senior editor, Astronomy: To me, Pluto is not a planet and thats a sign of progress. Classification and nomenclature in science is admittedly often arbitrary, but the idea is to at least group like with like so we can better understand how the universe works. By grouping like with like and separating things that are dissimilar, we can get an idea of how a certain group of, say, objects (moons or dwarf planets or centaurs or major planets) formed and evolved that sets them apart from the others. Sometimes those differences are big, and sometimes not. But every little clue helps, and to me, thats where creating those separate categories becomes most important.

I often try to think of the demotion of Pluto like this: Say you are studying four-legged animals. All youve come across so far are mammals (though you dont know that yet): cats, dogs, deer, badgers, raccoons. Then you come across something strange. Its cold-blooded, not warm-blooded. It doesnt have fur but it has scales. It lays eggs instead of birthing live young. But its got four legs and a tail and breathes oxygen and does all the other things the animals youve seen so far do. So, you classify it exactly the same as the rest of them, thinking its just a weird outlier.

But then you keep searching, and you find more animals like this weird one. You find more and more until you realize its not a strange subset of mammal, its actually something else entirely, lets call it a reptile! They are similar, but not the same, and the first one you found, that seemed like such a weird outlier, fits nicely under the reptile umbrella when you make it a separate group.

Admittedly, I am not a biologist, so maybe this metaphor is a bit off, but hopefully you can see where Im going with it! Thats why Im OK calling Pluto something other than a planet. What we call Pluto doesnt affect what it is, only how we understand it within the larger context of the solar system. We now know that Pluto is not an outlier among the other planets, but fits squarely into a different group of objects Kuiper Belt objects, among other things that reveals a very different and hopefully more accurate story than we had when we were trying to make it fit in a group that just wasnt quite right.

Astronomy.com: Thats a wise answer and we do see where you are going with that metaphor. This part gets right to the heart of the question, too: What we call Pluto doesnt affect what it is, only how we understand it within the larger context of the solar system.

Mark, what do you think?

Mark Zastrow, senior editor, Astronomy: The cop-out real answer is that it depends on who you ask. And thats OK! Its totally fine for different scientific communities to use words differently. The word evolution means one thing to a biologist studying, say, the heritability of genetic traits and a very different thing to an astronomer studying how galaxies merge and grow. Pluto can be a planet to people who study planets and a not-planet to people who study not-planets, or who study planets in a different way.

Im generalizing here, but the debate around Plutos planethood can roughly be split into two camps people who study how solar system bodies move, and people who study solar system bodies geology.

To make an even more sweeping generalization, how something moves through the sky tends to fall into the domain of what wed call astronomy, while studying the geology of those bodies is planetary science.

This may seem like a trivial distinction, and in many ways, it is science is interdisciplinary. But the field of professional astronomy does break itself down along these lines in certain institutional ways. Whether you identify as an astronomer or a planetary scientist will likely determine whether you join, say, the American Astronomical Society or the American Geophysical Union, and perhaps whether you are faculty in an astronomy department or a geology department.

Im not saying that all astronomers agree with the IAUs definition, or that all planetary scientists disagree. (Many scientists simply dont care.) But the point Im trying to make is that the International Astronomical Union is the body of authority for astronomers, but not necessarily planetary scientists. And what constitutes progress for one group of scientists may make less sense for another.

The IAU definition that was passed in 2006 says a planet has to meet three criteria:

Its the last criterion that Pluto fails, as it is part of the Kuiper belt of icy objects and is not even the largest body in it. From the standpoint of someone who studies the dynamics of the solar system, excluding Pluto from the ranks of planethood makes sense, and could certainly be considered a more logical classification scheme.

But to people who study these objects as geological worlds, it also makes perfect sense to think of Pluto as a planet. In fact, since Plutos demotion, weve learned that Pluto is even more like the other planets than we thought back when it was formally considered a planet! The flyby of NASAs New Horizons mission in 2015 showed us that Pluto has an atmosphere and is geologically active, with mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers. If youre trying to group like with like, from a geophysical standpoint, Pluto is very much like the other planets, and is an active, living world unto itself.

Of course, you could argue, so are many of the solar systems moons! So if youre going to ignore the dynamics, wouldnt you have to call those planets, too? Well, historically, large moons were called planets, as a team of planetary scientists pointed out in Icarus in 2021.

Which gets to my last point maybe the IAU shouldnt have even tried to define the word planet in the first place. That was the opinion of the person who headed the IAUs planet-definition committee, Harvard astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich. In a 2014 debate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Gingerich argued that planet is a culturally defined word that has changed its meaning over and over again and over the ages. And, he added: My feeling is that in retrospect, the IAU should not have attempted to define the word planet.

Instead, Gingerich said, the IAU should have stuck to defining technical classes classical planets, dwarf planets, minor planets, exoplanets, and so on and let everyone, scientists and non-scientists alike, decide how to use the word planet on their own. Which, despite the IAUs resolution, is pretty much where were at, anyway.

Astronomy.com: Again, you guys are making a lot of sense. Dave Eicher bats clean-up on this question. Dave, youre up.

Dave Eicher, editor in chief, Astronomy: First, let me say as someone who knew Clyde Tombaugh, that it is a little embarrassing how the astronomy community has handled this issue. But Plutos heritage aside, lets look at the facts. In 2006, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, astronomers voted to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status. These were astronomers at the meeting, not planetary scientists a significant distinction. Three criteria were cited for this decision. A planet needs to be independently orbiting the Sun, large enough to be spherical, and has to clear its orbit of smaller bodies. The first two were clearly met by Pluto, but not the last. However, substantial amounts of ink have been spilled since, pointing out the unstable basis for the conclusion. First, if Earth were 40 AU from the Sun, as is Pluto, it would not clear its orbit of smaller bodies. But I think we all agree that Earth is a planet. Should the definition of a planet be dependent on where it exists physically? A house is a house whether its in the city or the countryside. Ah well.

Further, since Plutos demotion, two asteroids have been discovered that share Earths orbit exactly what disqualified Pluto. They are 2010 TK and 2020 XL5. They are Trojans orbiting ahead and behind Earth, in our orbit. So does that disqualify Earth as a planet? The whole business is a bit silly. In the end, dwarf planets are planets too. Part of what drove this was the fear that discovering lots of larger bodies in the outer solar system the Kuiper belt would force the solar system to add lots of planets. So why not get rid of the largest Kuiper belt object, Pluto?

So I would say its fine to consider Pluto a planet, or not. Whatever makes you happy. The distinction in nomenclature wont upset Pluto in the least. Itll be just fine, as it always has been.

What do you think? Email us at astronomyeditorial@astronomy.com

Read more:

Is Pluto a planet? The experts break it down. - Astronomy Magazine

Astronomy has a bright future.

The universe is being revealed in exquisite detail with the current generation of large optical telescopes, reaching back close to the big bang. Theres hope that the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy will be solved. Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, and astronomers may be closing in on the first detection of life beyond Earth.

However, observations into the cosmic frontier involve extremely faint targets and astronomers are always hungry for more light. In order to keep peering farther into unknown reaches of the universe, the next generation of giant telescopes on the ground and in orbit will each cost billions of dollars. That price tag is leading to a collision between scientific aspirations and fiscal realities.

Related: The 10 biggest telescopes on Earth

For most of the history of astronomy until 1980, there was an approximate scaling of telescope cost with mirror diameter, where cost was equal to the telescope's diameter multiplied to the 2.8 power. That meant if the size doubled, the cost went up by a factor of seven and if the size tripled, the cost went up by a factor of twenty-two. Many people doubted that a telescope larger than the Palomar 5-meter would ever be built.

In the past four decades, however, telescope costs have gone up at a shallower rate with size, breaking the previous cost curve. The innovations that led to this change were thinner and lighter mirrors, the practice of making a large collecting area from a mosaic of smaller mirrors, using fast optics to enable more compact telescope designs, and shrinking the sizes of telescope enclosures. Thanks to these innovations, sixteen telescopes with diameters between 6 meters and 12 meters were built between 1993 and 2006.

The next generation of extremely large telescopes will have 100 times the light-gathering power and 10 times the image quality of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, theyre running into serious funding problems. There are two American-led projects with international partners. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project uses a design with 492 mirror segments. It faces headwinds from the opposition of native Hawaiians to construction of another large telescope on Mauna Kea, which they consider to be a sacred site. Another project, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), is combining seven 8.4-meter mirrors to make an effective 25-meter aperture.

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

The TMT project is stalled as it negotiates a way to begin construction in Hawaii. The GMT and another large telescope being built in Chile, the Rubin Observatory, are facing escalating costs. The pandemic, inflation, and supply chain problems are to blame. TMT and GMT will each cost around $3 billion. Both have philanthropic support, but they also rely on federal funding. For a while, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supported both projects. But recently, the National Science Board set a cap of $1.6 billion on federal support for large telescopes and gave the NSF until May to decide which project to support. One large telescope will be left out in the cold.

Meanwhile, the Europeans are sitting pretty. The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is a third gigantic telescope, currently under construction in Chile. The ELT doesnt face financial hurdles since its being built by the European Southern Observatory, which is funded by an intergovernmental treaty. At 39-meters in diameter, the ELT is the largest of the three telescopes, and it will be completed first, in 2028.

Space telescopes cost a thousand times more per kilogram than ground-based telescopes, but they're worth their high price. These telescopes gain the benefit of the total darkness of a space environment, and many forms of radiation that these telescopes can observe such as gamma rays, ultraviolet light, and infrared radiation cannot penetrate the Earths atmosphere to reach ground-based telescopes.

One such instrument, the Hubble Space Telescope has run up a total cost of $16 billion since the U.S. Congress approved its mission in 1977. Another, NASAs James Webb Telescope, faced delays and technical challenges, and its budget ballooned to $5 billion. Its price tag helped it earn the nickname the telescope that ate astronomy and that was in 2010. By the time of its launch in 2021, the price tag had doubled to $10 billion.

NASA has other exciting missions in the pipeline. The Roman Space Telescope, with a 2.4-meter mirror but a hundred times Hubbles field of view, is likely to cost over $3 billion, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed to sniff the atmospheres of Earth-like planets for traces of biology, will come in around $11 billion.

These space telescope missions take a big bite out of a NASA budget that has been declining for twenty years. Just as is the case with the NSF's budget caps, big capital projects leave less money to spend on other forms of research. But the private sector may come to the rescue. SpaceX's Starship could be used to launch a 6.5-meter mirror in one piece, avoiding the complicated and expensive folding mirrors used by JSWT. The same innovations used with ground-based telescopes could cut the cost of telescopes in space.

As they face the costs of viewing the distant universe and returning rocks from a nearby planet, astronomers and planetary scientists are being brought back down to Earth with a bump. While it seems to be a golden age for astronomy, the glitter is dimmed by the cost of all that gold and the hard trade-offs that must be made in a time of fiscal austerity.

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The future is bright for astronomy, and very expensive (op-ed) - Space.com

Venus, the star Regulus, the Moon, Mars, and Mercury seen over the Badlands in South Dakota on Sept. 18, 2017. Credit: Gregg Alliss.

When we look up at the night sky, the dance of the planets is a constant, mesmerizing ballet. And occasionally, this dance creates patterns that spark both wonder and curiosity, as is the case when the planets align.

For centuries, the sight of multiple planets appearing close together in the night sky has fueled myths, legends, and prophecies. But what does it truly mean, astronomically speaking, when the planets align? And when can we expect to see the planets align next?

First, lets clear up a common misconception. When we talk about planetary alignment, were not suggesting that the planets line up in a perfect straight line in space. Rather, we are usually referring to a celestial event wherein multiple planets appear close together in the sky from our perspective on Earth. This phenomenon is known as a conjunction.

The alignments we see from Earth are based on our line of sight. For instance, even if Mars and Venus appear close in the sky, they might still be separated by millions of miles in space. Its like standing on a hill and seeing two distant trees appear close together, even if theyre far apart on the landscape.

The planets orbit the Sun at different speeds and distances. This means theyre frequently moving relative to each other in our night sky. Occasionally, their paths will seem to cross, leading to an alignment, or conjunction.

For example, Jupiter takes about 12 years to orbit the Sun, while Mars takes about two years. This difference in orbital periods means that every so often, Mars and Jupiter are positioned in a way that they appear right next to each other in our sky, creating a temporary alignment.

However, because the solar systems planets dont all perfectly orbit the Sun in the same plane, its relatively rare for more than two planets to align at once although it does happen.

Planetary conjunctions arent just beautiful events for stargazers. They have practical implications too. For instance, conjunctions can serve as key reference points for calibrating astronomical instruments.

And when planets do truly align in 3D space, exploration missions, particularly those that involve flybys or gravitational assists, might also leverage their positions.

For example, NASAs Voyager 2 mission took advantage of a rare planetary alignment of the four outer planets during the late 1970s and 1980s. Such an alignment, which only occurs about every 175 years, allowed the mission to fuel-efficiently explore the outer reaches of the solar system.

Although conjunctions between two planets are relatively common, given the different orbital periods of each planet, full alignments (where many planets all seem close together at once) are rather rare.

One of the most awaited alignments will occur in the 2040s. This event will showcase Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which will all be visible within a small segment of the sky next to a thin crescent Moon.

Historically, planetary alignments have held immense significance for a variety of civilizations. Ancient cultures often associated these celestial events with prophecies, omens, or significant earthly occurrences. While today we understand the scientific reasons behind these alignments, looking back provides a fascinating perspective on human culture and our intrinsic connection with the cosmos.

The Mayans, for instance, were keen astronomers. They meticulously tracked the movements of the planets, and their calendar system intricately interwove planetary cycles. Eclipses and alignments were deemed powerful enough to influence terrestrial events, warranting careful observation and record-keeping.

Similarly, the Babylonians, known for their detailed astronomical diaries, documented conjunctions. These records provide modern scientists with a treasure trove of historical astronomical data, including a cuneiform description of a massing of planets in BC 185. On March 25 of that year, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all shared a small portion of the sky.

In Renaissance Europe, meanwhile the appearance of multiple planets in the night sky was often seen through a dual lens: scientific curiosity and divine interpretation. Great minds like Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler observed and studied these phenomena, meticulously tracking the planets positions to help better understand their motion.

By recognizing our ancestral fascination with the cosmos, we not only gain insight into our past, but also foster a deeper appreciation for the astronomical events that continue to captivate us.

Planetary alignments and conjunctions serve as beautiful reminders of the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of our solar system. They bridge the gap between ancient observers, who gazed upward in wonder, and todays technologically-empowered astronomers, who seek to gain a glimpse into the mysteries of the universe.

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What it means for planets to align | Astronomy.com - Astronomy Magazine