Category Archives: Astronomy

Next time you are in Uttarakhand, look up Starscapes: Indias only chain of astronomical observatories that lets you have a date with the night sky.

Paul Savio, Co-Founder and CEO of the venture talks about the inception, offerings, and future plans of this unique endeavour.

Paul Savio: Starscapes was born out of a passion project that started in 2015. Ramashish Ray, who is the founder, had a cottage in Kausani, Uttarakhand, which had a telescope. Tourists and guests enjoyed the dark skies there. This led to us setting up a small observatory at Kausani with ticketed shows. Initially, none of those who came to the observatory came looking for an astro-tourist experience they just happened to discover it when in Kausani. But the responses of those who did visit us ranged from a wholesome delightful session to being quite overwhelmed by it all. This was the primary insight we gathered theres a huge base of tourists who delight in finding new experiences wherever they go, especially linked to nature. While theres plenty of avenues to discover wildlife, mountains and oceans, there isnt much for those who would enjoy exploring the skies. And more significantly, most people dont know that they would enjoy this experience till they go through it.

Our goal was to create a platform for such people, who can get to experience something new, and find a unique connect with nature, while satiating their curiosity about the cosmos.

Paul Savio: While the experience started in 2015, it became a business around 2017, known as Stargate Observatories (now called Starscapes). For the next three years, we experimented with various products, some of which became a staple offering. We conducted astro-tours to Spiti Valley and Narkanda, conducted astrophotography workshops at our observatory in Kausani and other remote dark sky locations like the Sandhan Valley in Maharashtra, and held multiple school and college workshops. During the annular solar eclipse in 2019, we conducted an online photography contest which saw participation from places like Sri Lanka and the Middle East. However, we had to cease operations in 2020 as tourism dropped to zero. Over the last two years, we focused on rebuilding the company base-up, with a focus on going to the customer with a value proposition comprising varied experiences related to astronomy. We rebranded as Starscapes Experiences in 2021, and opened up observatories in Bhimtal and Jaipur. (We have also partnered with Club Mahindra, currently at their property in Madikeri (Coorg).) In December 2021, we partnered with the Government of Uttarakhand in conducting an Astro Party at Benital Astro Village, a location designated to become Indias first astro-tourism spot.

Paul Savio: Starscapes has observatories in Kausani and Bhimtal in Uttarakhand. We have recently launched a mobile observatory in Jaipur.

By May 2022, we plan to launch observatories in Coorg and Ooty. By the end of the year, we plan to have operations at Munnar, Pondicherry, Shimla and Goa.

Our locations are all tourist spots, chosen based on light pollution (darkness of the sky), weather (number of cloudless days) and accessibility (how well connected the place is). Since our objective is to reach out to casual astronomy enthusiasts, we find it is critical to our business model to be present at locations which are a drive away from big towns. The locations we finalise have fairly dark skies, measuring four or lesser on the Bortle Scale (a measure of night-sky darkness, one being extreme remote locations and nine being inner cities). The locations are also importantly tourist spots, since novel experiences are sought out and best enjoyed by tourists.

Paul Savio: Our business is designed to reach out to people looking for new experiences, and not just those who seek out astronomy experiences. Thus, we aim to introduce many people to this field.

Our offerings have a particular inclination towards younger audiences. Rocket-building, modelling a sundial, and many other activities get children to experientially understand things that are normally taught theoretically in school. Our observatory shows too are structured as discussions, and not as lectures. And children dont hesitate in asking questions, without any fear of sounding inane. This always increases the entire groups engagement and enthusiasm.

Children lead the conversation today, and set the trend for tomorrow. Helping them experience the universe and the science that goes into exploring it, in a fun way, will help grow their interest in astronomy. Their friends, parents, and eventually the rest of society will follow.

Paul Savio: Ironically, the act of physically setting up the observatory is the easy part. Once the location is finalised based on light pollution (dust pollution is usually inconsequential in places where light pollution is low) and weather, we need to identify a spot that has maximum visibility of the sky.

The difficult part is getting in place the team that conducts the shows. Our observatories are not just places where one can come and look at certain objects in the sky. There are detailed shows at set timings. You buy a ticket for a 45 minute show, during which our expert StarGuide takes you on a journey across the night sky, blending science, history and mythology into a thrilling storytelling session. You will learn to identify stars and constellations, and various other celestial objects. And then you would get to look at some of them through a state-of-the-art telescope, which the StarGuide undergoes over a months worth of training to be able to effectively use.

We are particular about choosing StarGuides from the vicinity of the observatory, thus lending a local flavour to our shows. Also, our StarGuides are primary conversationalists, and most of them do not have a science background. Since our shows are structured to be discussive, the guests feel like theyre having a fireside chat with an equal, and not attending a lecture from someone who is an expert. All our StarGuides have learnt how to conduct shows during their month-long induction, and constantly get refresher-training sessions from our team of trainers. Our very first StarGuide was a teacher at an ashram for girls in Kausani. With absolutely no knowledge of astronomy, he picked up everything on the job and is today a trainer of others. He incidentally still teaches at the ashram.

Herein lies our biggest challenge identifying individuals living in the small towns or villages where our observatory is, selecting them for their skills in having conversations with guests and working with children, and training them on the subject about which they may possibly have no clue. By the end of the training, they will know how to operate telescopes, identify deep sky objects, read the sky with ease, conduct workshops for children, and click photos of celestial objects as well as any astrophotographer would. They are our biggest assets.

Paul Savio: Our offerings are primarily focused on getting you out of your home and becoming one with nature. Having said that, we do have some and soon will be ranging other services that can be accessible anytime anywhere. We conduct photography contests that can be participated in remotely. We will soon be bringing mobile observatories in towns, where we can put up a temporary setup at your condominium and conduct workshops and activities, along with a sky show through a telescope. And well soon launch an online community where astronomy enthusiasts can avail services such as setting up your own backyard observatories, buying telescopes, planning astronomy themed parties, and many more.

Paul Savio: Starscapes will regularly host a number of engaging sessions related to stargazing. Some of the activities include

Paul Savio: It is possibly the first memory of stargazing I have, as a child in primary school. I had already learned to identify stars before this moment. On this day we were at a village in Kerala, and it was a clear summer sky. Having lived in a city all along, seeing so many stars in the sky was a novel experience. The sky was absolutely cloudless, except for one wispy trail. I mentioned this to my father who was also there with me, and his response was thats not a cloud. Thats the Milky Way. Discovering in a flash that what I was staring at was not many droplets of water, but millions of stars, was a humbling experience like never before.

Paul Savio: The pandemic has certainly made people miss the outdoors. This has spurred travel in the interludes between the waves, and made people look for something new to do. Having said that, conversation around astronomy has been growing for the last 10 years. Space has been in the news for all the good reasons: ISRO has faced repeated successes and will soon be sending humans to space, NASA is going back to the Moon, and private players have entered space travel, bringing with them a fair amount of glamour. All these have piqued the interest of the rest of us into identifying and taking part in conversations related to astronomy.

Paul Savio: The star-studded skies over the Himalayan peaks at the Pangong Lake would definitely be among my favourite spots that I have visited. But if we would like to talk about accessible locations, Kausani (a small hill station 10 hours drive from Delhi) is a stellar location, in every sense of the word. Its altitude and remoteness yield clean air and dark skies, that make it a worthy location for idyllic stargazing. Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Madikeri in Coorg (just six hours from Bengaluru) has a brilliant night sky. In fact, it falls in the same Bortle Scale class as Kausani.

Paul Savio: Two events I am really looking forward to in the next couple of years are incidentally two that I have wanted to experience ever since I was a child. The first is to be at the beach at Sri Harikota, when Gaganyaan III lifts off with the first completely Indian space crew ever. It is expected to happen by August 2023. The second will be to visit the USA and experience first-hand the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. This will be the next total solar eclipse over easily accessible land (theres one in 2023 over Papua and a few other islands of Indonesia but getting there wont be easy). This is especially significant considering that from India, the next total solar eclipse visible wont be till March 2034 in Kashmir, and the one following that will be in June 2114!

Related: Check Out 9 Of The Best Hotels Around The World For Stargazing!

This story first appeared in Travel and Leisure India

Original post:

This start-up will inspire you to go stargazing in Uttarakhand - Prestige Online

MeerKATs radio view of the central regions of the Milky Way, highlighted by glowing red emissions surrounding the galaxys central black hole. Image: I. Heywood, SARAO.

Ever wonder what you might see if your eyes were sensitive to radio waves instead of visible light? Then check out the latest images from the 64-antenna MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, revealing the heart of the Milky Way as as it appears in radio emissions.

The stunning imagery shows previously known and newly-discovered features, including supernova remnants, huge magnetised radio filaments and the blazing inferno surrounding the 4-million-solar-mass black hole at the core of the galaxy.

The imagery is based on detailed analysis of a survey carried out during the telescopes commissioning, resulting in a mosaic of 20 observations captured during 200 hours of telescope time. The result is a 100-megapixel mosaic with a resolution of 4 arc seconds.

The images reveal never-before-seen supernova remnants, including a rare, almost perfectly spherical example, along with numerous stellar nurseries, cirrus-like emissions made up of many parallel radio filaments and a mesmerising view of the mouse, a runaway pulsar possibly ejected in a supernova blast.

At the heart of the mosaic is the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, shining like a giant red eye embedded in a vast cloud of less powerful emissions.

Ive spent a lot of time looking at this (mosaic) in the process of working on it, and I never get tired of it, says Ian Heywood from the University of Oxford, Rhodes University and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. Hes the lead author of a study in The Astrophysical Journal.

When I show this image to people who might be new to radio astronomy, or otherwise unfamiliar with it, I always try to emphasise that radio imaging hasnt always been this way, and what a leap forward MeerKAT really is in terms of its capabilities, he said. Its been a true privilege to work over the years with colleagues from SARAO who built this fantastic telescope.

Isabella Rammala, a Rhodes/SARAO doctoral student, assisted with imaging and data processing.

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MeerKAT paints a mesmerising portrait of the Milky Way Astronomy Now - Astronomy Now Online

Classification: Academic Level ASalary package: $76,271 - $95,732 per annum plus 17% superannuationTerm: Full time, Fixed Term (2 years)Position Description & Selection Criteria:PD and PEWER - Postdoctoral Fellow_updated.pdf

Closing Date: 21 February 2022

The Area

TheANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics(RSAA) operates Australias largest optical observatory and has access to the worlds largest optical telescopes.

Our staff and students have made major contributions to astronomy, mapping the structure and formation of the Milky Way, discovering planets orbiting other stars, measuring dark matter both within our Galaxy and in the wider Universe, and discovering the accelerating expansion of the Universe.

Our astronomers include winners of the Prime Ministers Prize for Science and the Nobel Prize.

At our administrative home at theMount Stromlo Observatorywe host theAdvanced Instrumentation and Technology Centrewhich is a national facility established to support the development of the next generation of instruments for astronomy and space science.

Our research telescopes are situated in the ANUSiding Spring Observatory, located in the Warrumbungle region of New South Wales. The observatory began as a field station for the Mount Stromlo Observatory and has since become Australias premier optical and infrared observatory, housing the state-of-artSkyMappertelescope.

The Position

The Postdoctoral Fellow will join the Astro-Machine-Learning group that specialises in the study of wide range topics (Galactic Archaeology, star formation and cosmology) in big-data astronomy through lens of statistics and machine learning.

The Person

To excel in this role you will have:

The Australian National University is a world-leading institution and provides a range of lifestyle, financial and non-financial rewards and programs to support staff in maintaining a healthy work/life balance whilst encouraging success in reaching their full career potential. For more information, please click here.

To see what the Science at ANU community is like, we invite you to follow us on social media at Instagram and Facebook.

For more information about the position please contact Associate Professor Yuan-Sen Ting on E: yuan-sen.ting@anu.edu.au.

ANU Values diversity and inclusion and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to those of all backgrounds and identities. People with a disability are encouraged to apply. For more information about staff equity at ANU, click here.

Application information

In order to apply for his role, please make sure that you upload the following documents:

Applications which do not address the selection criteria may not be considered for the position.

The successful candidate will be required to undergo a background check during the recruitment process. An offer of employment is conditional on satisfactory results.

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Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics job with AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY (ANU) | 278733 - Times Higher Education...

Looking back to 2021, there were many great space stories in the news, including two lunar eclipses back in May and November. By coincidence, two more total lunar eclipses will occur in May and November 2022. We were also entertained by three great meteor showers in January, August and December, but the moon ran major interference. The Northern Lights were prominent last month particularly in western Canada, painting the sky green.

The never-ending list of exoplanets continues to grow, with a total of 4,884 confirmed worlds and another 8,288 candidates. This search continues via ground and space-based telescopes. So, next time you look up at those twinkling points of light, you are looking at mini solar systems of at least one planet orbiting its parent star. After all, the sun is but one of 300 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

It was this time last year that the Japanese Hayabusa mission successfully return soil samples from the asteroid Itokawa. The samples show that water and organic matter which originate from the asteroid itself have evolved chemically through time. It has long been the thought ofastronomers and scientists that building blocks of organic compounds needed to create life began in the solar system and were delivered to the young earth via meteorites. Missions such as this have shed new light on this theory. Meteorites and comets contain small amounts of water. Impacts over millions of years have most likely delivered water to the earth.

Comparable to the list of exoplanets, 70 more rogue planets have been detected floating through space. These are outcasts from their solar system, cast away by some event such as the star exploding, thus launching it on a path to nowhere. Or some could have been overpowered by larger planets in their solar system and were slingshot out of it, far away from the light and (possible) warmth of their sun.

Until recently, the sun has been studied by earth-bound telescopes and orbiting satellites. The amount of information learned is outstanding but the missing key was a physical examination. Never before had a spacecraft touched the sun until the Solar Parker Probe launched in 2018. Over the years the craft made multiple manoeuvres as it gets closer to the sun. In December of 2021, the probe touched the upper atmosphere of the suns corona, which is only seen from Earth during a total solar eclipse when the moon blocks the blinding light. Over the next few years the probe will skim closer to our star and by the year 2025 is will be racing at an unheard ofspeed of 690,000 kilometres per hour, or 192 kilometres per second. Its 11.4-centimetre thick heat shield alloys it to operate at about 29 degrees Celsius and not fry the electronics.

The newest addition to the Martian fleet came with the deployment of the SUV-sized rover Perseverance and Ingenuity helicopter anchored under it. The two blades of the small helicopter spin in opposite directions to help give lift in the thin Martian atmosphere. To date, it has logged 30 minutes in a series of short flights. This is the first time such a vehicle has been used on the red planet.

Private companies have proved they have the right stuff to launch into space not just NASA. Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin allowed 90-year-old William Shatner and retired National Football League (NFL) star Michael Strahan to touch space by passing the 100 Karman Line. But Elon Musk has taken space travel one step further by transporting astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station via the SpaceXDragon cargo ship. It is the same Dragon capsule that was almost used as an emergency escape vehicle. The International Space Station was subjected to a dangerous debris field of a purposely blown-up satellite. The danger has all but passed, but there were some anxious moments.

Space is dangerous. Along with solar radiation from the sun and cosmic rays from the cosmos, more than 23,000 pieces of orbital debris larger than a softball are being tracked. Half a million pieces are the size of a marble or larger, with approximately 100 million pieces of debris-about one millimetre and a bit larger. All moving at 28,000 km/hr, or almost 8 km/sec.

In September of 2022, the DART mission will arrive at the 800-metre wide asteroid Didymos to deflect a small 160-metre wide moonlet Dimorphos. This is a test to see if a potential asteroid coming towards earth can be slightly deflected, thus changing course and missing our planet. Fear not this particular asteroid is only a test subject and is no way on a collision course with our home planet.

The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (successor to the Hubble Space Telescope) was launched on Christmas Day. It has a much larger mirror system and will study infant galaxies in the near-infrared, thus allowing us to see through the gas and dust of the earliest galaxies. The sun shield measures the size of a tennis court and will shade the telescope from the heat of the sun and block the light of the earth and moon. It will operate at a distance of 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth, where the temperature of space is -223 degrees Celsius. The JWST will be capable of looking back to the beginning of the universe, some 13.8 billion years ago. One of its many projects will be to see if black holes helped create the galaxies, or if they came afterwards. It will also look for signs of life in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.

Clear skies.

Known as The Backyard Astronomer, Gary Boyle is an astronomy educator, guest speaker and monthly columnist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, as well as past president of the Ottawa Centre of the RASC. He has been interviewed on more than 50 Canadian radio stations as well as television across Canada and the United States. In recognition of his public outreach in astronomy, the International Astronomical Union has honoured him with the naming of Asteroid (22406) Garyboyle. Follow him on Twitter: @astroeducator, Facebook and his website: http://www.wondersofastronomy.com

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2021 Astronomy Year In Review - The Review Newspaper

The field of extrasolar planet studies continues to reveal some truly amazing things about our Universe. After decades of having just a handful of exoplanets available for study, astronomers are now working with a total of 4,884 confirmed exoplanets and another 8,288 awaiting confirmation. This number is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years as next-generation missions like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Euclid, PLATO, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST) reveal tens of thousands more.

In addition to learning a great deal about the types of exoplanets that are out there and what kind of stars are known to give rise to them, astronomers have also made another startling discovery. There is no shortage of exoplanets in our galaxy that dont have a parent star. Using telescopes from around the world, a team of astronomers recently discovered 70 additional free-floating planets (FFPs), the largest sample of Rogue Planets discovered to date, and nearly doubling the number of FFPs available for study.

The research team responsible for the discovery was led by Nuria Miret-Roig, a postdoctoral researcher with the Laboratoire dAstrophysique de Bordeaux (LAB) and the University of Vienna. She was joined by multiple researchers from the LAB, the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) in Kyoto, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, and the Centro de Astrobiologa (CAB) and Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial (DIA) in Spain. The study that describes their findings was recently published in Nature Astronomy.

To break it down, astronomers have speculated about the existence of FFPs (also known as Rogue Planets) for decades, and numerical simulations have indicated that they may be entirely common. In fact, some research has shown that there may be billions of these planets floating around in interstellar space potentially outnumbering stars in the Milky Way! The exact mechanisms for how planets go rogue remain a mystery, but several theories exist.

Among them, astronomers have conjectured that planets regularly form in interstellar space, that they are pulled away by gravitational interactions with passing stars, that supernovae kick them out, or that they free float into space after their sun dies. As Roig and her colleagues indicated in their study, previous research has identified FFPs in young stellar clusters and within the Galactic Field. Still, the samples were always small or heterogeneous in age and origin.

Moreover, rogue planets are usually impossible to image in visible light, much like trying to discern exoplanets that orbit stars several thousand times brighter. To do this, astronomers need to have access to very sensitive telescopes and instruments. Second, they also need to identify planetary-mass members within an overwhelming multitude of field stars and background galaxies. This is equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack, but where the needle is the least-shiny object.

To overcome this, Roig and her team combined the proper motions of objects in the night sky with multi-wavelength photometry obtained by multiple observatories over 20 years. These included the Isaac Newton Group (ING) on the island of La Palma (off the coast of Spain), the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Manua Kea, Hawaii, and the ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT), Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope, all of which are located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

They also relied on astrometric observations by the European Space Agencys (ESA) space-based Gaia Observatory. As Herv Bouy the project leader of the new research said in a recent ING press release.

The vast majority of our data come from ESO observatories, which were absolutely critical for this study. Their wide field of view and unique sensitivity were keys to our success. We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corresponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data.

Lastly, the team took advantage of how younger rogue planets are still warm from formation, allowing direct detection by sensitive telescopes and cameras. This is where the new deep wide-field observations by infrared and optical telescopes came into play, which provided the team with over 80,000 wide-field images (100 terabytes of data). From this, the team found at least 70-170 new FFPs comparable in mass to Jupiter and located in the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations, the closest star-forming region to our Solar System.

As Miret-Roig said in a recent ESO press release, this was the largest single-sample of FFPs ever discovered:

We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many. We measured the tiny motions, the colors and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky. These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets.

This discovery also means that astronomers will have nearly twice the data set they previously had, which will come in handy when follow-up observations happen in the near future. This large sample is already helping astronomers refine their theories about the nature and origin of rogue planets. Basically, the number of FFPs observed in the Upper Scorpius association exceeds what astronomers would expect if they only formed as stars do in the interstellar medium.

This suggests that there could be many more mechanisms at play and that previous estimates that suggested there could be billions of FFPs in our galaxies are correct. Assuming the fraction of FFPs that they observed in Upper Scorpius is similar to that of other star-forming regions, said Bouy, there would be several billion Jupiter-mass planets roaming the galaxy and even more Earth-mass planets many of which have been observed in the Milky Way:

There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star. These objects are extremely faint and little can be done to study them with current facilities. The ELT will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found.

The ESOs Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is currently under construction in the Atacama Desert and is expected to gather its first light by 2027. With its 39-meter (128-foot) primary mirror and advanced suite of spectrometers, coronographs, and adaptive optics, the ELT will be able to directly image exoplanets, rogue planets, and characterize their atmospheres. That same year, NASAs Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will also launch for space and begin conducting exoplanet surveys that could include FFPs as small as Mars.

The FFPs we identified are also excellent targets for follow-up studies. In particular, they will be essential to study planetary atmospheres in the absence of a blinding host star, making the observation far easier and more detailed, Bouy added. The comparison with atmospheres of planets orbiting stars will provide key details about their formation and properties. Additionally, studying the presence of gas and dust around these objects, what we call circumplanetary discs, will shed more light on their formation process.

Another implication of this study is what it could mean for models of planet formation and evolution, which are key to understanding the origin of habitable planets and life. Said Miret-Roig:

The discovery of this large population of young FFPs has important implications for the formation and early evolution of planetary systems and, specifically, on the timescale of the processes involved. Our observations suggest that giant-planet systems must form and become dynamically unstable within the observed lifetime (3-10 million years) of the region to contribute to the population of FFPs. Current studies suggest that dynamical instability among the giant planets in our Solar System may also have occurred at early times, although it was much less violent than the instability needed to eject planets as massive as the ones we have found.

Theres also the exciting possibility that FFPs could host life, possibly tucked away in subterranean pockets where the slow decay of radioactive elements or convection provides the necessary heat. Another possibility is that FFPs could have moons that possess thick atmospheres and water on their surface, raising the possibility of life again. Could any of these possibilities be real? With hundreds or thousands of FFPs available for study in the coming years, well find out one way or another.

Further Reading: ESO, Isaac Newton Group, Nature Astronomy

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Astronomers Find 70 Planets Without Stars Floating Free in the Milky Way - Universe Today

Looking back on 2021, there were many great space stories in the news, including two lunar eclipses back in May and November.

By coincidence, two more total lunar eclipses will occur in May and November of 2022.

We were also entertained by three great meteor showers in January, August, and December, but the bright moon ran major interference.

Speaking of bright things in the sky, the Northern Lights were prominent last month, particularly in Western Canada, painting the sky green.

The never-ending list of exoplanets continues to grow, with a total of 4,884 confirmed worlds and another 8,288 candidates. This search continues via ground- and space-based telescopes. So, next time you look up at those twinkling points of light, remember that you are looking at mini solar systems, with at least one planet orbiting its parent star.

After all, our sun is but one of 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

It was this time last year that the Japanese Hayabusa mission successfully returned soil samples from the asteroid 25143 Itokawa. The sample shows thatwaterandorganic matterthat originate from the asteroid itself have evolved chemically through time.

It has long been the thought by astronomers and scientists that the building blocks of organic compounds needed to create life began in the solar system and were delivered to the young Earth via meteorites. Missions such as this have shed new light on this theory. Meteorites and comets contain small amounts of water, and impacts over millions of years have most likely delivered water to the Earth.

Comparable to the list of exoplanets, 70 more rogue planets have been detected floating through space. These are outcasts from their solar systems by some event such as the star exploding, thus launching a planet or planets on a path to nowhere. Or some of them could have been overpowered by the gravity of larger planets and slingshot out of their systems, far away from the light and (possible) warmth of their suns.

Until now, the sun has been studied by Earth-bound telescopes and orbiting satellites. The amount of information that has been learned is outstanding, but the missing key has always been a physical examination. Never before has a spacecraft touched the sununtil the Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018.

Over the years, the craft made multiple manoeuvres as it got closer to the sun. In December of this year, the probe touched the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona, which is only seen from Earth during a total solar eclipse, when the moon blocks the sun's blinding light.

Over the next few years, it will skim closer to our star, and by the year 2025 it will be racing along at an unheard-of speed of 690,000 kilometres per hour, or 192 kilometres per second. Its 11.4-centimetre-thick heat shield allows it to operate at about 29C and not fry the electronics.

The newest addition to the Martian fleet came with the deployment of the SUV-sized rover Perseverance and theIngenuityhelicopter anchored under it. The two blades of the small helicopter spin in opposite directions to help give lift in the thin Martian atmosphere. To date, it has logged 30 minutes in a series of short flights. This is the first time such a vehicle has been used on the Red Planet.

Private companies, not just NASA, have proved that they have the right stuff to launch into space. Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin allowed 90-year-old William Shatner and retired NFL player Michael Strahan to touch space by rocketing past the so-called Karman line, 100 kiolometres above the Earth's surface.

But Elon Musk has taken space travel one step further by transporting astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station via the SpaceX Dragoncargo ship. It is the same Dragon capsule that almost had to be used as an emergency escape vehicle when the International Space Station was subjected to a dangerous debris field from a purposely blown-up satellite. The danger has all but passed, but there were some anxious moments.

Space is dangerous, with hazardous solar radiation and cosmic rays. As well, more than 23,000 pieces of orbital debris larger than a softball are being tracked, and there are a half-million pieces the size of a marble or larger, with approximately 100 million pieces of debris being about one millimetre and a bit larger. All are moving at 28,000 kilo,metres per hour, or almost eight kilometres per second.

In September of 2022, the DART(Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission will arrive at the 800-metre-wide asteroid 65803 Didymos to deflect a small (160 metres wide) moonlet, Dimorphos. This is a test to see if a potentially dangerous asteroid coming toward Earth can be slightly deflected, thus changing its course and missing our planet. This particular asteroid isin no way on a collision course with our home planet.

Finally, the long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, successor to the Hubble Space Telescope) was launched on Christmas Day. It has a much larger mirror system than does the venerable Hubble and will study infant galaxies in the near-infrared, thus allowing us to see through the gas and dust of the earliest galaxies.

The telescope's sun shield is the size of a tennis court and will both shade the telescope from the heat of the sun and block the light of the Earth and moon. It will operate at a distance of 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth, where the temperature of space is -223C. The JWST will be able to look back to the beginning of the universe, some 13.8 billion years ago.

One of its many projects will be to see if black holes helped create the galaxies or if they came afterwards. It will also look for signs of life in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.

Clear skies.

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The Backyard Astronomer: The astronomy year in review - The Georgia Straight

Do not let the image and the name of the depicted cosmic object fool you! What you see in this picture is not a wildfire, but the Flame Nebula and its surroundings captured in radio waves.The Flame Nebula is the large feature on the left half of the central, yellow rectangle. The smaller feature on the right is the reflection nebula NGC 2023. To the top right of NGC 2023, the iconic Horsehead Nebula seems to emerge heroically from the flames. The three objects are part of the Orion cloud, a giant gas structure located between 1300 and 1600 light-years away.The different colors indicate the velocity of the gas. The Flame Nebula and its surroundings are moving away from us, with the red clouds in the background receding faster than the yellow ones in the foreground.The image in the rectangle is based on observations conducted with the SuperCam instrument on the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) on Chiles Chajnantor Plateau. The background image was taken in infrared light with ESOs Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.Credit: ESO/Th. Stanke & ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

Orion offers you a spectacular firework display to celebrate the holiday season and the new year in this new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). But no need to worry, this iconic constellation is neither exploding nor burning. The fire you see in this holiday postcard is Orions Flame Nebula and its surroundings captured in radio waves an image that undoubtedly does justice to the nebulas name! It was taken with the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), located on the cold Chajnantor Plateau in Chiles Atacama Desert.

The newly processed image of the Flame Nebula, in which smaller nebulae like the Horsehead Nebula also make an appearance, is based on observations conducted by former ESO astronomer Thomas Stanke and his team a few years ago. Excited to try out the then recently installed SuperCam instrument at APEX, they pointed it towards the constellation Orion. As astronomers like to say, whenever there is a new telescope or instrument around, observe Orion: there will always be something new and interesting to discover! says Stanke. A few years and many observations later, Stanke and his team have now had their results accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

This image shows the Flame Nebula and its surroundings captured in radio waves. The image is based on observations conducted with the SuperCam instrument on the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) on Chiles Chajnantor Plateau.The Flame Nebula is the large feature on the left. The smaller feature on the right is the reflection nebula NGC 2023. To the top right of NGC 2023, the iconic Horsehead Nebula seems to emerge heroically from the flames. The three objects are part of the Orion cloud, a giant gas structure located between 1300 and 1600 light-years away.The different colors indicate the velocity of the gas. The Flame Nebula and its surroundings are moving away from us, with the red clouds in the background receding faster than the yellow ones in the foreground.Credit: ESO/Th. Stanke

One of the most famous regions in the sky, Orion is home to the giant molecular clouds closest to the Sun vast cosmic objects made up mainly of hydrogen, where new stars and planets form. These clouds are located between 1300 and 1600 light-years away and feature the most active stellar nursery in the Solar Systems neighborhood, as well as the Flame Nebula depicted in this image. This emission nebula harbors a cluster of young stars at its center that emit high-energy radiation, making the surrounding gases shine.

With such an exciting target, the team was unlikely to be disappointed. In addition to the Flame Nebula and its surroundings, Stanke and his collaborators were able to admire a wide range of other spectacular objects. Some examples include the reflection nebulae Messier 78 and NGC 2071 clouds of interstellar gas and dust believed to reflect the light of nearby stars. The team even discovered one new nebula, a small object, remarkable in its almost perfectly circular appearance, which they named the Cow Nebula.

The Flame Nebula, captured in radio waves in this image, is the large feature on the left half of the central, yellow rectangle. The smaller feature on the right is the reflection nebula NGC 2023. To the top right of NGC 2023, the iconic Horsehead Nebula seems to emerge heroically from the flames. The three objects are part of the Orions cloud, a giant gas structure located between 1300 and 1600 light-years away.The different colors indicate the velocity of the gas. The Flame Nebula and its surroundings are moving away from us, with the red clouds in the background receding faster than the yellow ones in the foreground.The image in the rectangle is based on observations conducted with the SuperCam instrument on the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) on Chiles Chajnantor Plateau. The background image was created from photographs in optical light forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2.Credit: ESO/Th. Stanke & ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin

The observations were conducted as part of the APEX Large CO Heterodyne Orion Legacy Survey (ALCOHOLS), which looked at the radio waves emitted by carbon monoxide (CO) in the Orion clouds. Using this molecule to probe wide areas of the sky is the primary goal of SuperCam, as it allows astronomers to map large gas clouds that give birth to new stars. Unlike what the fire of this image might suggest, these clouds are actually cold, with temperatures typically just a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

Given the many secrets it can tell, this region of the sky has been scanned many times in the past at different wavelengths, each wavelength range unveiling different, unique features of Orions molecular clouds. One example is the infrared observations performed with ESOs Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile that make up the peaceful background of this image of the Flame Nebula and its surroundings. Unlike visible light, infrared waves pass through the thick clouds of interstellar dust, allowing astronomers to spot stars and other objects which would otherwise remain hidden.

So, this holiday season, bring in the new year with this spectacular multiwavelength firework show put on by the Orions Flame Nebula, presented by ESO!

Reference: The APEX Large CO Heterodyne Orion Legacy Survey (ALCOHOLS). I. Survey overview by Thomas Stanke, H. G. Arce, J. Bally, P. Bergman, J. Carpenter, C. J. Davis, W. Dent, J. Di Francesco, J. Eislffel, D. Froebrich, A. Ginsburg, M. Heyer, D. Johnstone, D. Mardones, M. J. McCaughrean, S. T. Megeath, F. Nakamura, M. D. Smith, A. Stutz, K. Tatematsu, C. Walker, J. P. Williams, H. Zinnecker, B. J. Swift, C. Kulesa, B. Peters, B. Duffy, J. Kloosterman, U. A. Yildiz, J. L. Pineda, C. De Breuck and Th. Klein, Accepted, Astronomy & Astrophysics.arXiv:2201.00463The observations mentioned in this press release are presented in a paper accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The team is composed of Th. Stanke (European Southern Observatory, Garching bei Mnchen, Germany [ESO]), H. G. Arce (Department of Astronomy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA), J. Bally (CASA, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA), P. Bergman (Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, Onsala, Sweden), J. Carpenter (Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago, Chile [ALMA]), C. J. Davis (National Science Foundation, Alexandria, VA, USA), W. Dent (ALMA), J. Di Francesco (NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics, Victoria, BC, Canada [HAA] and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria, BC, Canada [UVic]), J. Eislffel (Thuringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany), D. Froebrich (School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK), A. Ginsburg (Department of Astronomy, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA), M. Heyer (Department of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA), D. Johnstone (HAA and UVic), D. Mardones (Departamento de Astronoma, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile), M. J. McCaughrean (European Space Agency, ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands), S. T. Megeath (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Toledo, OH, USA), F. Nakamura (National Astronomical Observatory, Tokyo, Japan), M. D. Smith (Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK), A. Stutz (Departmento de Astronoma, Facultad de Ciencias Fsicas y Matemticas, Universidad de Concepcin, Chile), K. Tatematsu (Nobeyama Radio Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Nagano, Japan), C. Walker (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, US [SO]), J. P. Williams (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI, USA), H. Zinnecker (Universidad Autonoma de Chile, Santiago, Chile), B. J. Swift (SO), C. Kulesa (SO), B. Peters (SO), B. Duffy (SO), J. Kloosterman (University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, IN, USA), U. A. Yildiz (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA [JPL]), J. L. Pineda (JPL), C. De Breuck (ESO), and Th. Klein (European Southern Observatory, Santiago, Chile).

APEX is a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) and ESO. Operation of APEX at Chajnantor is entrusted to ESO.

SuperCAM is a project by the Steward Observatory Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of Arizona, US.

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Orion's Fireplace: Incredible New Image of the Flame Nebula - SciTechDaily

Looking back to 2021, there were many great space stories in the news including two lunar eclipses back in May and November. By coincidence, two more total lunar eclipses will occur in May and November 2022. We were also entertained by three great meteor showers in January, August and December but the moon ran major interference. The Northern Lights were prominent last month particularly in western Canada painting the sky green.

The never-ending list of exoplanets continues to grow with a total of 4,884 confirmed worlds and another 8,288 candidates. This search continues via ground and space-based telescopes. So, next time you look up at those twinkling points of light, you are looking at mini solar systems of at least one planet orbiting its parent star. After all the sun is but one of 300 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

It was this time last year that the Japanese Hayabusa mission successfully return soil samples from the asteroid Itokawa. The sample shows thatwaterandorganic matterthat originate from the asteroid itself have evolved chemically through time. It has long been the thought of astronomers and scientists that building blocks of organic compounds needed to create life began in the solar system and was delivered to the young earth via meteorites. Missions such as this have shed new light on this theory. Meteorites and comets contain small amounts of water. Impacts over millions of years have most likely delivered water to the earth.

Comparable to the list of exoplanets, 70 more rogue planets have been detected floating through space. These are outcasts from their solar system by some event such as the star exploding thus launching it on a path to nowhere. Or some could have been overpowered by larger planets in their solar system and slingshot out of their system, from the light and (possible) warmth of their sun.

Until now, the sun has been studied by earth-bound telescopes and orbiting satellites. The amount of information learned is outstanding but the missing key was a physical examination. Never before has a spacecraft touched the sun until the Solar Parker Probe launched in 2018. Over the years the craft made multiple manoeuvres as it gets closer to the sun. In December of this year, the probe has touched the upper atmosphere of the suns corona which is only seen from Earth during a total solar eclipse when the moon blocks the blinding light. Over the next few years it will skim closer to our star and by the year 2025 is will be racing at an unheard of speed of 690,000 kilometres per hour or 192 kilometres per second. Its 11.4-centimetre thick heat shield alloys it to operate at about 29 degrees Celsius and not fry the electronics.

The newest addition to the Martian fleet came with the deployment of the SUV-sized rover Perseverance and Ingenuity helicopter anchored under it. The two blades of the small helicopter spin in opposite directions to help give lift in the thin Martian atmosphere. To date, it has logged 30 minutes in a series of short flights. This is the first time such a vehicle has been used on the red planet.

Private companies have proved they have the right stuff to launch into space, not just NASA. Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin allowed 90-year-old William Shatner and retired NFL Michael Strahan to touch space by past the 100 Karman Line. But Elon Musk has taken space travel one step further by transporting astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station via the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship. It is the same Dragon capsule that was almost used as an emergency escape vehicle. The International Space Station was subjected to a dangerous debris field of a purposely blown-up satellite. The danger has all but passed but there were some anxious moments.

Space is dangerous. Along with solar radiation from the sun and cosmic rays from the cosmos, more than 23,000 pieces of orbital debris larger than a softball are being tracked. Half a million pieces are the size of a marble or larger with approximately 100 million pieces of debris-about one millimetre and a bit larger. All moving at 28,000 km/hr or almost 8 km/sec.

In September of 2022, the DART mission will arrive at the 800-metre wide asteroid Didymos to deflect a small 160-metre wide moonlet Dimorphos. This is a test to see if a potential asteroid coming towards earth can be slightly deflected thus changing course and missing our planet. This particular asteroid is only a test subject and is no way on a collision course with our home planet.

The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (successor to the Hubble Space Telescope) was launched on Christmas Day. It has a much larger mirror system and will study infant galaxies in the near-infrared thus allowing us to see through the gas and dust of the earliest galaxies. The sun shield measures the size of a tennis court and will shade the telescope from the heat of the sun and block the light of the earth and moon. It will operate at a distance of 1.5 million kilometres from the earth where the temperature of space is -223 degrees Celsius. The JWST will be capable to look back to the beginning of the universe, some 13.8 billion years ago. One of its many projects will be to see if black holes helped create the galaxies or if they came afterwards. It will also look for signs of like in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.

Known as The Backyard Astronomer, Gary Boyle is an astronomy educator, guest speaker and monthly columnist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. He has been interviewed on more than 50 Canadian radio stations and local Ottawa TV. In recognition of his public outreach in astronomy, the International Astronomical Union has honoured him with the naming of Asteroid (22406) Garyboyle. Follow him on Twitter: @astroeducator or his website: http://www.wondersofastronomy.com

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2021 Astronomy Year In Review Wawa-news.com - Wawa-news.com

A team of Spanish researchers recently published a file study In the journal Nature they claimed to have recorded in detail a barely noticeable eruption of a magnetic star 3.5 milliseconds It released the same amount of energy as the sun over 100,000 years.

Among neutron stars (objects that can contain half a million times the mass of Earth and have a diameter of only 20 kilometers) stand out a small group with the most intense magnetic fields known: magnetism.

So far, only 30 of these strange cosmic objects have been discovered, which are characterized by violent volcanic eruptions about which very little is known due to their unexpected nature and short duration.

However, astronomers from the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics (IAA) were able to measure various oscillations (or pulsations) that occurred during the moments of maximum energy for the magnetar. These oscillations are a critical component in understanding the giant bursts of energy from so-called magnetism.

Even in idle state, magnetic stars can be 100,000 times brighter than our sun to explain Alberto Castro Tirado, IAA researcher and lead author of the study. In the case of the flash we studied, GRB200415, which occurred on April 15, 2020 and lasted only about a tenth of a second, the energy released is equivalent to the energy radiated by our Sun. 100,000 yearshe added.

Observations of the phenomenon, detected by the ASIM instrument aboard the International Space Station, made it possible to estimate that the magnitude of the glow was similar to or greater than the size of the neutron star itself.

It is not known for certain what causes these extreme cosmic events, but researchers believe that they may be due to instability in the magnetosphere of magnetic trains or earthquakesIt is produced in its bark.

This volcanic eruption has provided a critical component for understanding how magnetic stresses are produced in and around a neutron star, Castro Tirado noted, concluding that continuous observation of magnetic stars in nearby galaxies will help understand this phenomenon and also pave the way to learn more about fast radio waves. , until today One of the most mysterious phenomena in astronomy.

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Astronomers discover a magnetar that releases in less than a second the same amount of energy as the Sun in 100,000 years - SmallCapNews.co.uk

Discovery image of the nebula. For this image, 120 individual exposures had to be combined to obtain a total exposure time of 20 hours. The images were taken over several months from Brazil. Credit: Maicon Germiniani

An international team of astronomers led by Stefan Kimeswenger from the Department of Astro and Particle Physics, together with scientific amateurs, has identified a new class of galactic nebulae. This provides an important building block in the understanding of stellar evolution and shows the importance of international collaboration between university research and community science.

For the first time, scientists, starting from a discovery by scientific amateurs, have succeeded in providing evidence for a fully developed shell of a common-envelope-system (CE) the phase of the common envelope of a binary star system. Toward the end of their lives, normal stars inflate into red giant stars. Since a very large fraction of stars are in binary stars, this affects the evolution at the end of their lives. In close binary systems, the inflating outer part of a star merges as a common envelope around both stars. However, inside this gas envelope the cores of the two stars are practically undisturbed and follow their evolution like independent single stars, explains astrophysicist Stefan Kimeswenger. The researchers have now published their results in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Many stellar systems being known to be remnants of such an evolution. Their chemical and physical properties serve as a fingerprint. Also stellar systems which are just about to develop a common envelope had already been discovered due to their specific and high brightness. However, the fully developed envelope of a CE and its ejection into interstellar space had not been observed in this form so far.

These envelopes are of great importance for our understanding of the evolution of stars in their final phase. Moreover, they help us to understand how they enrich the interstellar space with heavy elements, which are then in turn important for the evolution of planetary systems, such as our own, explains Kimeswenger the importance of the newly discovered galactic nebulae and adds an explanation for why the probability of their discovery is low: They are too large for the field of view of modern telescopes and at the same time they are very faint. Moreover, their lifetime is rather short, at least when considered in cosmic time scales. It is only a few hundred thousand years.

The starting point for this unique discovery is a group of German-French amateur astronomers: With painstaking work they searched historical celestial images for unknown objects in the now digitized archives and finally found a fragment of a nebula on photographic plates from the 1980s.

With their finding, the group contacted international scientific experts, including the Department for Astro and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, which is very experienced in this field. By compiling and combining observations from the past 20 years, stemming from public archives of various telescopes and with data from four different space satellites, the researchers in Innsbruck were able to rule out their first assumption, namely the discovery of a planetary nebula caused by the remnants of dying stars. The enormous extent of the nebula finally became apparent with the help of measurements taken by telescopes in Chile. Scientists in the USA finally completed these observations with spectrographs: The diameter of the main cloud is 15.6 light-years across, almost 1 million times larger than the distance of the earth to the sun and much larger than the distance of our sun to its nearest neighboring star. Moreover, fragments as large as 39 light-years apart have also been found. Since the object lies slightly above the Milky Way, the nebula was able to develop largely undisturbed by other clouds in the surrounding gas, Kimeswenger describes the discovery.

By combining all this information, the researchers have succeeded in creating a model of the object: It consists of a close binary system of a 66,500-degree white dwarf star and a normal star with a mass slightly below that of the Sun. Both orbit each other in only 8 hours and 2 minutes and at a distance of only 2.2 solar radii. Due to the small distance, the companion star with a temperature of only about 4,700 degrees is strongly heated at the side facing the white dwarf, which leads to extreme phenomena in the spectrum of the star and to very regular variations in brightness. Around both stars there is a gigantic envelope consisting of the outer material of the white dwarf. At just over one solar mass, this material is heavier than the white dwarf and its companion star and was ejected into space some 500,000 years ago.

Another part of the puzzle related to the discovery of the new class of galactic nebulae has not yet been solved, Stefan Kimeswenger says: It is even possible that this system is related to a nova observation made by Korean and Chinese astronomers in 1086. In any case, the positions of the historical observations match very well with those of our object described here.

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Astronomers Discover New Class of Galactic Nebulae - SciTechDaily