Category Archives: Astronomy

MAUNAKEA, Hawaii The sun pointed to a little before noon when a chorus of conch shells and bamboo flutes trumpeted into the sharp mountainside breezes. The noise marked the start of a religious ceremony and a demonstration against construction of a massive telescope on what some consider sacred land. The participants saluted east, toward the distant ocean; then south, toward the volcanic shell of a past eruption; then west; then north, toward the summit where a dozen telescopes loomed far out of sight.

Many of the people taking part in that ceremony, halfway up the mountain of Maunakea at the heart of Hawaii's Big Island, were native Hawaiians who call themselves kia'i (pronounced kee AH ee), or protectors. By that, they mean protectors of the mountain itself, from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at its summit, where the facility would join venerable observatories like the twin Keck domes and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility.

I visited the kia'i encampment on the last day of 2019 and the 172nd day of the continuing vigil against construction. Nearby was an octagonal road sign edited to read "Kia'i STOP TMT." Less than two weeks before, with the mountain's harsh winter looming, law enforcement had left the spot. The retreat marked an acknowledgement of a stalemate that began nearly a decade ago and stretches from the ocean to the stars, but is expected to shift once again as spring returns.

(Outside events have already prompted a shift in the situation. In response to the spread of the novel coronavirus that is causing the serious respiratory disease COVID-19, the kia'i have asked visitors to stay away from their previously welcoming encampment, according to a statement released on March 14.)

For the kia'i, the 160-foot-tall TMT (49 meters) would be one telescope too many at a site they see as stolen, sacred, delicate and consistently mismanaged. "It's too big, too massive, and it's in the wrong place," E. Kalani Flores, a professor of Hawaiian studies at Hawaii Community College and one of the lead plaintiffs in court cases surrounding the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, told Space.com. "There's a certain tipping point and the TMT would exceed that tipping point."

That's why a subset of native Hawaiians have said no to TMT, in words and actions, for years. Some are calling the current situation an existential crisis for astronomy and for Hawaii. It's certainly a crisis of communication for astronomers who support the project. And while some of the tension reflects Hawaii's history of colonization and oppression, some of the main sticking points display remarkable irony given the telescope's priorities.

Related: Controversy over giant telescope roils astronomy conference in HawaiiMore: Thirty Meter Telescope: Hawaii's giant space eye in pictures

The saga of the TMT began in 2003, when a nonprofit partnership formed between two universities in California and counterparts in Japan, China, India and Canada. Now called TMT International Observatory, the group set out to design a telescope with such a massive observing mirror that it would change science forever. Its findings could tackle some of astronomy's signature existential questions, Gordon Squires, TMT's vice president for external relations and an astronomer by profession, told Space.com: Are we alone? How did the universe wake up? What is dark matter?

Squires said he believes that the process of answering those questions, and the answers themselves, could change humanity forever; that's why he became an astronomer in the first place. "If the world saw the universe the way I do, or the way we do, the world would be a fundamentally different place," he said. "I still believe that."

In 2009, the TMT set its sights on the summit of Maunakea; since then, it has worked to negotiate access and construction with the state, which owns the land, and the University of Hawaii, which manages the astronomy precinct.

It has not gone smoothly.

Flores and other native Hawaiians have filed multiple court cases over the permits required for construction. When the TMT tried to break ground in 2014, the kia'i interrupted the ceremony. Tensions came to a head in July 2019, when the TMT announced it was ready to try building again and the kia'i mobilized, blocking construction trucks from the road that climbs to the summit. They settled in with tents and Porta-Potties, a kitchen and a makeshift university offering lessons in native history and culture.

(By then, the TMT had spent $500 million in 2014 dollars worldwide on the project; current estimates suggest it will total about $2.4 billion in today's dollars, although that number will change based on where and when construction finally begins, a TMT representative said.)

Related: The biggest telescopes on Earth

Each morning, the kia'i greet the sun; three times a day, they conduct a ceremony called the 'aha, or the protocol, a series of chants and dances representing their beliefs about the mountain and lasting an hour or longer. It's that protocol the kia'i began by greeting the cardinal directions, barefoot and clad in street clothes. Early in the ceremony, they called on their ancestors. "Grant us insight, grant us power," one chant reads in a translation posted to the kia'i's website.

For centuries, kia'i told me, those ancestors have come to the mountain and, more frequently, worshipped it from afar. The tenuous atmosphere at the summit, 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level, leaves little oxygen to feed a human brain. For native Hawaiians, that shortage is a sign that the summit is the realm of deities and that humans should visit only for specific purposes.

That's why Noelani Goodyear-Kaopua, a native Hawaiian and a political scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has only ever been to the summit once, 10 years ago. Ever since, she has remembered what breathing the thin atmosphere felt like, she told Space.com. "The line between living and dead, or here and the next realm or the realm of the ancestors or however you want to think about that, was much more porous because you are so much out of the realm of where humans are normally supposed to be."

But devotion at a distance has complicated matters for the Hawaiians who wish to see the mountain protected: Because a key piece of their religious practice lies in leaving the summit alone, they've struggled to convince authorities that the land is important to them or that they should have a say in what happens to it.

That said, the kia'i can point to a ring of hundreds of shrines about 1,000 feet below the summit, which they say mark the edge of the most sacred zone. These shrines are nothing dramatic, Flores said: standing stones a foot or two tall, reaching the height of a kneecap, some toppled by time. But TMT construction would run right through that ring, he said, and that shouldn't be acceptable.

(Squires contends that TMT selected its location in consultation with native Hawaiians to avoid areas of concern. "It's on a site that has no historically significant or cultural practice areas on it," he said, citing the nearest cultural site as being a mile away.)

Related: World's largest reflecting telescopes explained (infographic)

In a controversy that is often framed as a conflict between science and religion, despite native Hawaiians pointing to their long history of studying the stars, the shrines point to the first key irony underlying the TMT controversy. Many of the standing stones mark points on the horizon where particularly meaningful stars rose, set or reached their zenith, according to Flores.

"There's hundreds of shrines around, and some of these shrines are interconnected together and then they build a star grid," Flores said. "What you see in the heavens is what you see on Earth."

Hawaii's rich tradition of skywatching is hardly the extent of Maunakea's sacredness, however. Down the slope, as the noontime ceremony continues, the kia'i sing of the creation of what they call Mauna a Wakea, from the union of Wakea the Skyfather and Papa the Earthmother. Native Hawaiians tie their own origin story to that of the mountain.

"We have always revered Maunakea as our sacred mauna," Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, a leader of the kia'i, told Space.com. "In fact, it is part of our cosmology, the very beginning of Earth from which man descends, so for us it's a very spiritual matter."

That's the second irony of the controversy surrounding the TMT, which is tailored to elucidate astronomy's own vision of cosmology.

"Astronomers oftentimes think that an interest in the universe and our origins in the universe is what unites all cultures," Sara Kahanamoku, a native Hawaiian and a doctoral student in marine ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com. "But [they] maybe don't realize that some cultures don't necessarily need to explore the universe to know where we come from."

Kahanamoku is the lead author of one of a collection of native-led white papers exploring the ways astronomy in Hawaii affects non-astronomers. The group submitted the papers as public comments to the government's decadal survey of astrophysics, which sets scientific priorities for the field. She and her co-authors offer a collection of recommendations for dealing with situations like the TMT, including establishing a system paralleling the institutional review boards that oversee research done on humans.

"We really believe that good science also means that you also need to be good to the people that you're working among," Kahanamoku said.

Related: Hawaii night sky revealed in stunning new video

Of course, some Hawaiian residents and native Hawaiians alike support the TMT, seeing the telescopes atop Maunakea as modern successors to the islanders' pre-contact expertise at navigating by the stars, as a vital segment of the local economy, and as a pathway to educational and employment opportunities for their children.

(A TMT representative said that it's too early to estimate how much would be spent in Hawaii if the project goes through, but that once the facility is observing, the organization expects to spend about $50 million each year on operations and employ 140 people.)

Tyler Trent, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Arizona, is one of those native Hawaiians, although he said he wrestled with the decision. "Whether I'm for it or against it, if that gets built, people are going to be hurt by it," he told Space.com.

Trent concluded that TMT and its counterparts deserve a place on the sacred summit. "I don't see them as like another shopping center or another hotel," he said. "These are special things that are illuminating secrets of the universe." He worries that continuing opposition to the TMT is painting his culture as backward and anti-science, despite the loud objections of kia'i that they are no such thing, and he's disappointed that some astronomers unaffiliated with the project have started speaking out against construction on Maunakea.

"Maybe astronomers taking too neutral of a stance or even supporting the kia'i because that's what they believe being respectful to native Hawaiian culture is I'm starting to think that maybe that's not the right way to go about it," he said. "I think at the end of the day, it's people from the outside picking which native Hawaiian culture they want to support or they want to agree with. I think that if outsiders want to pick one, I truly think that they should support the side that is trying to integrate the two, that is trying to build bridges between the two."

Trent added that he thought he would feel the same way if the site were on his own island, Oahu, which holds Honolulu. But it can't be. For scientists hoping to build the TMT, the summit of Maunakea is simply the best possible site. They want a Northern Hemisphere location to better facilitate partnerships with telescopes in the south, including the equally massive Giant Magellan Telescope already under construction in Chile.

Then, it's a matter of atmospheres. It's here that Maunakea really shines, although you wouldn't know that halfway to the summit, where the kia'i camp amid gusts of wind and transitory bursts of showers and sun.

It's a different story at the summit itself, which picky astronomers consider among the best places on Earth for ground-based astronomy. That's in part because of, ironically, one of the same reasons native Hawaiians consider the peak sacred: the barely-there oxygen. Like so many telescopes around the world, TMT has gravitated to a mountaintop site that would carry its optical equipment through some of the lower layers of Earth's atmosphere, which can blur telescope images.

Even the summit's view, however, leaves astronomers dissatisfied. That's why TMT would be armed with an adaptive optics system, which measures and automatically subtracts blurriness caused by the atmosphere. TMT's version would be equipped with lasers that create artificial stars for the system to judge, which lets astronomers observe fainter objects.

But such technology doesn't negate astronomers' desire to remain perched at high elevations, TMT project scientist Christophe Dumas told Space.com. For a project as ambitious as TMT, he said, siting is crucial to an instrument's output, despite opposition. The TMT has its eye on a site in the Canary Islands as a back-up location, which would slightly reduce the project's price tag, a representative said. But that site is still a clear second choice for astronomers and would require some adjustments to the facility, he said.

For the kia'i, their opposition is not just about Maunakea, it's about the way astronomy and science in general operates, particularly given that mountaintops are nearly always sacred to someone. One leader of the kia'i emphasized that the solution was not merely for the TMT to move, as some astronomers have begun to call for, but to find a location where people truly welcome it.

That could require a new way of approaching such projects, several native Hawaiians said. In particular, scientists looking to start a new project would be wise to incorporate local communities in discussions long before any opposition begins long before it's even a project, in fact.

'Imiloa Astronomy Center, which operates under the aegis of the University of Hawaii at Hilo and seeks to tell all the various stories of Maunakea, is working to foster these conversations at Maunakea and elsewhere. Such dialogues should begin earlier and without such tense motivation, Ka'iu Kimura, a native Hawaiian and 'Imiloa's director, told Space.com. "Not because there's conflict, but because it's just the right thing to do," she said.

The astronomy precinct at Maunakea and the TMT specifically are far, far past that point. Construction on the first modern telescope at the site began in 1964, and over the intervening decades, plenty of hard feelings have built up.

TMT isn't the first Maunakea project to meet opposition, but supporters and kia'i alike told me that things seem to be different this time. "I think a lot of people are saying, we have stood by long enough," Goodyear-Kaopua said. "The narrative that's been put forward is, well, why can't Hawaiians just share? We have been sharing for a long time, not always at our consent." She wants to see more native Hawaiians involved in making decisions about the summit.

One of the most significant decisions about the summit was made in the fall of 2018, when a state Supreme Court ruling allowed the project to continue. Four justices agreed with the state land management board's argument that astronomy had already changed the summit so much that one more observatory couldn't really make a difference. One dissented, arguing that this so-called degradation principle set a dangerous precedent.

For the kia'i, who see the mountain as a relative as much as a resource, "one more can't hurt" is not an acceptable philosophy. Many of the native Hawaiians I spoke with pointed to the degradation principle to voice their concerns about how decisions are made not just at Maunakea, but around the world. Some referenced climate change, others focused on land use, but many expressed concern about how humans have exploited and continue to exploit the planet.

Related: European scientists are taking a mock moon mission in Hawaii right now

Toward the end of the protocol, the ceremony leader explained that the next dance was a new addition to the daily ceremony. It traced water on its journey throughout the island and the water cycle, they said: from ocean to clouds to rain to waterfalls to ponds to rivers to cultivated fields to estuaries to ocean, with plenty of stops in between.

It's that same connected water that the kia'i mentioned again and again in their concerns about the TMT. It's another irony in the controversy: Among other discoveries, the TMT could help astronomers identify planets with water in their atmospheres, a first step toward finding a habitable world. But the kia'i already know of one very habitable planet with that precious liquid in its atmosphere, and they consider it their responsibility to protect that water and the mountain that anchors it to the Big Island.

(It was while watching this dance that I was struck by how closely the protocol seemed to parallel the kia'i concerns about the telescope; I've structured this story to follow the protocol as a mark of gratitude for the ceremony leader's work to make that connection.)

"Water is a sacred thing for all of humanity," Kealoha Pisciotta, a native Hawaiian who was a technician at two telescopes on Maunakea before deciding she couldn't condone the way the observatories treat the summit, told Space.com. "We use it ceremonially as well; the snow, ice and water from Maunakea is collected for ceremony."

One of Pisciotta's concerns about astronomy at Maunakea has been the observatories' treatment of the water. She said that during her time working on the summit, she saw spills of hazardous substances from bug spray to mercury, and that she has seen evidence of only one existing observatory addressing those issues.

It's one of the most common concerns I heard about TMT as well, that it could contaminate water across the island. The TMT's response is that those concerns are completely unfounded. There's no evidence the observatory could affect the water, the TMT says; the nearest wells are about 12 miles away; the observatory won't rely on mercury, the worst of the chemicals used to clean telescope mirrors; the facility has a system to transport wastewater from science operations and human staff support alike off the mountain.

But still, the kia'i say, they worry about the water. The summit is a particularly sensitive place in the eyes of native Hawaiians because it's where water first touches land. "It's in its purest form, unaltered by humans, unaltered by any other aspects," Flores said of the rain, snow and fog at the summit, which makes interfering with it particularly dire. "You disrupt, disturb, desecrate the water in its highest forms, and [the elders] tell us the water is the basic form of life for all of us on this planet."

And while the kia'i agree that the hydrology models of Hawaii to date show that TMT shouldn't contaminate anything, that isn't a satisfactory response for them. "I think regardless of that, because the models are not clear, there's still a possibility that there could be infiltration because it's very complex," Rosie Alegado, a native Hawaiian and an oceanographer at University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Space.com. "The models that we have are definitely incomplete."

For Stephanie Malin, an environmental sociologist at Colorado State University, that situation is not surprising. Development projects typically rely on technocratic assessment of potential risks, she said, while indigenous groups tend to exercise a precautionary principle that delays development until there is certainty that there are no risks which isn't always possible.

"I don't necessarily think that the two groups are talking the same language, even," Malin told Space.com.

Related: How space exploration can teach us to preserve all life on Earth

Near the end of the noontime ceremony, the gathered kia'i completed a series of dances open to all, regardless of their knowledge of hula. The only requirement, the ceremony leader explained, was that participants dance with the intention of stopping TMT from being constructed on Maunakea. And so the kia'i hold space at the mountain and dance three times a day, to protect the mountain that tells them their place in the universe. Later, they progressed toward the summit, taking one step at a time, dodging the tents around the dance space.

It's not clear what the TMT's steps forward might be. If the TMT decides the Maunakea site is no longer worth the pain, as the kia'i hope, they will take their plans to the Canary Islands. It's unclear how much longer they are willing to wait to begin construction which is scheduled to last 10 years in earnest.

A sharper deadline is also looming over Maunakea: the master lease agreement between the state and the University of Hawaii, which governs every observatory's sublease, will expire in 2033. What negotiations might look like is still unclear, but chances are they won't resemble the process that led to the original agreement decades ago. The master lease worries all the observatories on the summit, but particularly TMT, which dreads reaching first light just in time for site access to fall apart entirely.

Even the most strident opponents of TMT aren't calling for all the telescopes to be removed. They do, however, want the observatories to be better neighbors, more responsive to local concerns and more respectful of the land from which they study the stars.

No one thinks that will be straightforward. For the astronomers affiliated with the TMT project, the conversations of the past decade have already challenged their perceptions of their own values. "We never thought we were the bad people, and some people think authentically that we are," Squires said.

The kia'i I spoke with never phrased their feelings quite like that. Many insisted they aren't trying to stop science: Instead, they're trying to improve it.

"Science that doesn't empower humanity for a better Earth is maybe not the science we need to be doing," Pisciotta, the former telescope technician who once dreamed of studying cosmology and who described her family as traditional star people, said. That's perhaps especially true of astronomy, she added, since astronomers cannot escape the way distance acts as a time machine across the universe.

"Everything in astronomy is looking back in time," she said. "It has to find its modern relevancy. Yes, it's noble, but we can make it more noble together, though."

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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The Thirty Meter Telescope: How a volcano in Hawaii became a battleground for astronomy - Space.com

Friday, March 20Its officially spring in the Northern Hemisphere. To celebrate, Mars and Jupiter meet up in the morning sky in the first of two planetary conjunctions this month. Look for the glittering stars of Sagittarius the Archer in the southeast in the two hours or so before sunrise. There, magnitude 0.9 Mars is a mere 0.7 south of magnitude 2.1 Jupiter.

About 7 east of Jupiter, magnitude 0.7 Saturn waits its turn for a close-up with the Red Planet. Mars will soon tango with the ringed world, coming closest on March 31.

Saturday, March 21Today is the perfect day to seek out our solar systems speediest planet. The Moon passes 4 south of Mercury at 2 P.M. EDT, but youll want to catch the pair in the morning before sunrise. At that time, the two will stand 5 apart, with Mercury glowing at magnitude 0.2 in the east-southeast 30 minutes before the Sun crosses the horizon.

Saturday is also Galactic Tick Day. The holiday is celebrated every 633.7 days (1.7361 years) to mark one galactic tick, which represents 1/100 of an arcseconds worth of the orbit our Sun and solar system make around the Milky Way. (It takes 225 million years to complete a full orbit.) You can learn more about the origins of this quirky and humbling holiday on the Galactic Tick Day homepage.

In honor of our journey through the galaxy, step outside from a dark site to see if you can spot the Milky Way running overhead. The plane of our galaxy runs through Cygnus the Swan, setting in the northwest as the sky grows darker after sunset. In the east, Orion the Hunter rises with the Milky Way at his right shoulder, which is marked by the bright red star Betelgeuse.

Sunday, March 22The fast-fading Moon is just 3 percent lit and rises shortly before the Sun, making tonight an excellent night to search out some of the skys fainter objects. Consider trying for M81 and M82, also known as Bodes Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy, respectively. Both in the constellation of Ursa Major, these two galaxies appear only 37' apart on the sky and are easy to catch in the same field of view through binoculars or a telescope at low magnification. M81 has an active supermassive black hole in its center, while M82 is undergoing a massive burst of star formation hence its classification as a starburst galaxy. Astronomers believe this flurry of activity was actually caused by gravitational interactions with M81. Through a scope, M82 appears long and thin like a cigar while M81 has a rounder shape.

Monday, March 23Mercury reaches greatest western elongation (28) at 10 P.M. EDT, several hours before it rises ahead of the Sun. At sunrise, the tiny magnitude 0.3 planet is 10 above the horizon in the east-southeast, and its 7"-wide disk is just over half lit.

Today also marks the 180th anniversary of the first photograph ever taken of the Full Moon. John Draper captured the daguerreotype on this date from his observatory in New York after several previous attempts.

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The Sky This Week from March 20 to 27 - Astronomy Magazine

Slooh astronomers will livestream a free astronomy lesson for K-12 students who are homebound during the coronavirus pandemic.

On Thursday (March 19), Slooh will livestream a free, 1-hour astronomy lesson and live telescope views from around the world. The webcast, which is geared toward K-12 students, will begin at 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT). You can watch it live on Slooh's YouTube channel, or stream it here on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh.

"Slooh is committed to bringing out the very best in students and all people," Russell Glenn, director of education for Slooh, said in an emailed statement. "We believe that space education is crucial in understanding and gaining perspective on the world around us."

Related: Free space projects for kids (and adults) stuck at home during the coronavirus outbreak

During the webcast, Glenn and Slooh astronomer Paul Cox will walk viewers through one of Slooh's starter quests, called Cosmic Explorer, which introduces students to the Slooh interface and offers a basic lesson on the sun, moon, galaxies, and the birth and death of stars. This livestream will also provide views of objects that are visible in the night sky.

"We want to help people to share in the wonder of space together as a community so that we can recognize our shared humanity," Glenn said. "We will be bringing as much content as possible during this challenging time. We see this great challenge as a great opportunity for students to own their learning and get excited about space."

The webcast will also provide views of space from Slooh's 10 online telescopes, including those situated at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, which makes daytime astronomy possible for students in the United States, Slooh officials said in a statement.

In addition to this free astronomy lesson, Slooh offers several paid membership options for students, teachers and parents to learn about space while they are homebound. Slooh community members can control Slooh's telescopes online, schedule missions, and select and work on different educational activities, called quests.

"When their mission is active, they can be observing and capturing images in real time," Glenn said in the email to Space.com. "Additionally, students can observe other missions planned by other members of the Slooh community and capture images of the objects that they are viewing."

Slooh also offers astronomy clubs for educators to engage students and citizens from home and explore space together via a network of online telescopes. This includes remote learning activities and support from Slooh's astronomy educators.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Slooh will livestream astronomy lesson for K-12 students during coronavirus outbreak - Space.com

Is this what the heliosphere looks like? New research suggests so. The size and shape of the ... [+] magnetic "force field" that protects our solar system from deadly cosmic rays has long been debated by astrophysicists.

Physicistshave revealed a refined new model of the heliospherethe vast region around the Sun extending more than twice as far as Plutothat depicts it as a crescent-shaped magnetic force-field resembling a freshly baked croissant.

Its the region of space that the Sun commands; its sphere of influence. Its the extent of the solar windcharged particles spewed-out by the Sunthat extends far past the orbits of the planets, creating a bubble around the Sun that accompanies it in its journey through interstellar space. At the edges of the heliosphere is where the solar wind meets the interstellar wind. It casts a magnetic force field around all the planets, deflecting charged particles that would otherwise get into the solar system ... and destroy DNA.

Thats controversial. Until recently, the consensus was that the shape of the heliosphere is comet-like. Its long been thought that the heliosphere stretches behind the solar system, creating a comet-like shapewith a round nose on one side and a long tail extending in the opposite direction. However, its also been described as a beachball-shape. However, according to Merav Opher, professor of astronomy and researcher at Boston UniversitysCenter for Space Physics, and her coauthor James Drake of the University of Maryland, the helio-sphere should really now be called the helio-crescent.

This graphic shows the position of NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, outside of the ... [+] heliosphere, a protective bubble created by the Sun that extends well past the orbit of Pluto.

Opher and Drakes original paper in 2015 used data from NASAs Voyager 1 spacecraft, which crossed the boundary from heliosphere to interstellar space in May 2012. They identified two giant jets of material shooting backwards over the north and south poles of the Sun that curve around in two relatively short tails toward the back; a heliosphere that looks a lot more like a crescent moon than a comet.

A new simulation of the heliosphere the magnetic bubble surrounding the sun shows it to have two ... [+] relatively short jets streaming away from the nose.

Opher and Drakes research was controversial. It was very contentious, she says. I was getting bashed at every conference! But I stuck to my guns. However, in 2017 another model was proposed by scientists working on NASAs Cassini mission at Saturn. It stated that the heliosphere is much more compact and rounded than previously thoughtsomething like a beach ball.

Many other stars show tails that trail behind them like a comets tail, supporting the idea that our ... [+] solar system has one too. However, new evidence from NASAs Cassini, Voyager and Interstellar Boundary Explorer missions suggest that the trailing end of our solar system may not be stretched out in a long tail. From top left and going counter clockwise, the stars shown are LLOrionis, BZ Cam and Mira.

Its Opher and Drakes refined theory, with colleagues Avi Loeb of Harvard University and Gabor Toth of the University of Michiganoutlined in a new paper published in Nature Astronomythat two jets extend downstream from the nose rather than a single fade-away tail. Their new 3D model of the heliospheredeveloped on NASAs Pleiades supercomputer and supported by NASA and by the Breakthrough Prize Foundationreconciles their croissant model with the beach ball model. It does so by distinguishing between the solar wind and incoming neutral particles that drift into the solar system; the latter get much hotter so have an outsized influence on the shape of the heliosphere. However, there is still uncertainty; it depends on exactly how you define the edge of the heliosphere.

This artists impression shows the view from the surface of one of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 ... [+] system.

The solar wind and the heliosphere could be key ingredients in the recipe for life in the Milky Way and beyond. "If we want to understand our environment we'd better understand all the way through this heliosphere," says Loeb, Opher's collaborator. Researchers studying exoplanets are keen to compare the Suns heliosphere with those around other stars. Theres also the DNA-shredding interstellar particles, which actually could have helped drive the genetic mutations that led to life like us, says Loeb. "At the right amount, they introduce changes, mutations that allow an organism to evolve and become more complex," he says. "There is always a delicate balance when dealing with life as we know it. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing," says Loeb.

Starting in the early 2030s, the Interstellar Probe would exit the solar system.

We need to explore the sea of space between our Sun and other potentially habitable systems. For now, all we have are the fading 40 year old science instruments on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Cue plans for the Interstellar Probe, a spacecraft that could launch in the 2030s and go farther and faster than any spacecraft before it to help us understand our home in the galaxy. It would start exploring the edge of the heliosphere 10 or 15 years after that. With the Interstellar Probe we hope to solve at least some of the innumerous mysteries that Voyagers started uncovering, says Opher.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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We All Live In A Croissant-Shaped Giant Bubble, Say Astronomers - Forbes

Different photon paths create layers of light.

The supermassive black hole in M87 has a mass of more than 6 billion Suns. It is so large that its event horizon could easily swallow our entire system. It is also 53 million light-years away, which makes it rather difficult to observe. Its apparent size is similar to that of a baseball placed on the surface of the Moon.

To observe such a distant and faint object, it took an international team of radio astronomers. They tied together observatories from all over the world through a process known as interferometry, and created a virtual telescope nearly the size of Earth. Months of gathered data then had to be shipped to computational facilities where the data was processed to create the first direct image of a black hole.

The first image of a supermassive black hole.

While this was a monumental achievement, the image itself seemed rather unimpressive to some. That's it? All this work for a blurry image with a dark center? What does that tell us about a black hole? Like most radio images, looks can be deceiving. While the black hole image is great for a bit of press, it's just how we represent the radio data in a visually appealing way.

Even this processed image isn't an image of the black hole itself. Black holes don't emit light, so they are effectively invisible. What this image represents is light that has been gravitationally focused in our direction, kind of like the headlight of a car. The black hole is bathed in a glow of radio light, and when some of the light passes close to the black hole the direction changes radically. The only light we see is the light deflected along our line of sight. The dark region is the shadow cast by the black hole within the radio glow.

From this first data astronomers were able to pin down some of the black hole properties, such as its mass and rotation. Of course, astronomers would like to learn even more, which is a challenge given that even this blurry image pushed the limits of our technology. But a new paper published in *Science Advances* shows how it might be done.

When a black hole is surrounded by hot gas, light can be focused by gravity to create a shadow of ... [+] the black hole.

The key is to understand how light is deflected near a black hole. While a black hole deflects light like a lens, it does so in rather odd ways when the light gets really close. The most common deflection is for the path of light to simply change direction. This is most of the light we see in the black hole image. But get a little closer, and the light can orbit the black hole once before being sent on its way. A bit closer, and it can orbit two times, or three times.

Light taking an ever-closer approach can reach a point where light orbits the black hole indefinitely. Photons can orbit a black hole similar to the way planets orbit a star. This orbit region for light is known as the photon sphere. It marks the limit of a stable orbit around a black hole. General relativity makes strong predictions about the size and shape of the photon shell. If we can observe it, we could test relativity in new ways.

This new research shows how all these different paths are contained in the radio data we gather, and how these layers create distinct signatures within interferometry. In other words, to observe the photon sphere, we don't need to create ever-sharper images of a black hole. Instead, we can look for these signatures to pull out the data of each layer.

At the moment this technique is beyond the ability of the current Event Horizon Telescope, but it does show how further advances in radio astronomy could lead to a much greater understanding of black holes.

Reference: Johnson, Michael D., et al. "Universal Interferometric Signatures of a Black Hole's Photon Ring." Science Advances Vol. 6, no. 12, (2020).

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How Astronomers Could Sharpen The Image Of A Black Hole - Forbes

Astrophysicists using NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory have looked for signs of an as-yet undetected particle predicted by string theory, a set of models intended to tie together all known forces, particles, and interactions.

Reynolds et al used Chandra to look for extraordinarily low-mass axion-like particles in the Perseus galaxy cluster, a group of galaxies located 240 million light-years away from Earth. The observation lasting over five days showed no evidence for certain axion-like particles, which some theorists think can explain dark matter. The lack of detection in these Chandra observations helps rule out some versions of string theory, a set of models intended to tie together all known forces, interactions, and particles. Image credit: NASA / CXC / University of Cambridge / Reynolds et al.

Until recently I had no idea just how much X-ray astronomers bring to the table when it comes to string theory, but we could play a major role. If these particles are eventually detected it would change physics forever, said studys lead author Dr. Christopher Reynolds, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

The particle that Dr. Reynolds and colleagues were searching for is called an axion.

This as-yet-undetected particle should have extraordinarily low mass. Theoretical physicists do not know the precise mass range, but many theories feature axion masses ranging from about a millionth of the mass of an electron down to zero mass.

Some scientists think that axions could explain the mystery of dark matter, which accounts for the vast majority of matter in the universe.

One unusual property of this ultra-low-mass particle would be that it might sometimes convert into photons (that is, packets of light) as they pass through magnetic fields. The opposite may also hold true: photons may also be converted into axions under certain conditions.

How often this switch occurs depends on how easily they make this conversion, in other words on their convertibility.

Some scientists have proposed the existence of a broader class of ultra-low-mass particles with similar properties to axions.

Axions would have a single convertibility value at each mass, but axion-like particles would have a range of convertibility at the same mass.

While it may sound like a long shot to look for tiny particles like axions in gigantic structures like galaxy clusters, they are actually great places to look, said studys co-author Dr. David Marsh, a researcher at Stockholm University.

Galaxy clusters contain magnetic fields over giant distances, and they also often contain bright X-ray sources. Together these properties enhance the chances that conversion of axion-like particles would be detectable.

To look for signs of conversion by axion-like particles, the astrophysicists examined over five days of Chandra observations of X-rays from material falling towards the supermassive black hole in the center of NGC 1275, the central galaxy of the Perseus galaxy cluster.

They studied the Chandra spectrum, or the amount of X-ray emission observed at different energies, of this source.

The long observation and the bright X-ray source gave a spectrum with enough sensitivity to have shown distortions that scientists expected if axion-like particles were present.

The lack of detection of such distortions allowed the researchers to rule out the presence of most types of axion-like particles in the mass range their observations were sensitive to, below about a millionth of a billionth of an electrons mass.

Our research doesnt rule out the existence of these particles, but it definitely doesnt help their case, said studys co-author Dr. Helen Russell, a researcher at the University of Nottingham.

These constraints dig into the range of properties suggested by string theory, and may help string theorists weed their theories.

The results appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

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Christopher S. Reynolds et al. 2020. Astrophysical Limits on Very Light Axion-like Particles from Chandra Grating Spectroscopy of NGC 1275. ApJ 890, 59; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab6a0c

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Astrophysicists Perform Test of String Theory | Astronomy - Sci-News.com

Astronomers have discovered a bizarre exoplanet that rains iron at night. The daytime side of this world, dubbed WASP-76 b, isnt any less hellish, either. Temperatures can reach up to 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius) hot enough to vaporize metal.

One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron, University of Geneva astronomer David Ehrenreich, who led the new study, said in a press release.

WASP-76 b is slightly smaller than Jupiter and sits some 640 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces. Its horrifying weather is caused by its truly extreme orbit. Gas giant worlds like WASP-76 b are called hot Jupiters because they orbit uncomfortably close to their home stars in this case, nearly 10 times closer than Mercury is to our Sun.

That proximity leaves WASP-76 b tidally locked to its star, with one side permanently baking in light and the other stuck in eternal darkness.

WASP-76 bs daytime side gets hit with thousands of times more radiation than Earth receives from the Sun. And this scorching radiation vaporizes iron on the dayside. Winds driven by extreme temperature differences then push the metal around the planet to the nighttime hemisphere. There, drastically cooler temperatures let the iron condense into drops and fall as a strange rain.

Surprisingly, however, we dont see iron vapor on the other side of the planet in the morning, University of Geneva researcher Christophe Lovis said in a media release. The conclusion is that the iron has condensed during the night. In other words, it rains iron on the night side of this extreme exoplanet.

Its the first time astronomers have detected this kind of day-to-night chemical difference on a hot Jupiter like WASP-76 b.

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Astronomers find an exoplanet where iron rains from the sky - Astronomy Magazine

The four fundamental forces

Physics textbooks teach that there are four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

Were quite familiar with the first two forces. Gravity pins us to Earth and pulls us around the sun, while electromagnetism keeps the lights on. The other two forces are less obvious to us because they govern interactions at the tiniest scales. The strong force binds matter together, while the weak nuclear force describes the radioactive decay of atoms.

Each of these forces is carried by a kind of subatomic particle that physicists call a boson. For example, photons are the force particle in electromagnetism. Gluons carry the strong nuclear force. W and Z bosons are responsible for the weak nuclear force. Theres even a hypothetical boson for gravity called the graviton, though scientists havent proven its existence.

However, if you ask many theoretical physicists, theyll probably tell you we havent discovered all the forces of nature yet. Others are likely out there, just waiting to be discovered.For example, some suspect that discovering dark matter may reveal a weak new force.

And thats where the Hungarian group comes in. Without getting too lost in the details, the group shot protons at a thin sample of lithium-7, which then radioactively decayed into beryllium-8. As expected, this created pairs of positrons and electrons. However, the detectors also picked up excess decay signals that suggested the existence of a potential new and extremely weak particle. If it exists, the particle would weigh in at about 1/50 the mass of a proton. And because of its properties, it would be a boson a force-carrying particle.

But history is littered with reasons to be skeptical of new additions. In recent decades, other groups have also claimed to have found a fifth force, only to have their claims quietly fade away. Around the year 2000, one group proposed a new force, called quintessence, to explain the then-recent discovery of dark energy. In the 1980s, a group of physicists at MIT said theyd found a fifth force, dubbed hypercharge, that served as a kind of anti-gravity. Yet here we are with textbooks still teaching the same four fundamental forces we had decades ago.

That means the most likely explanation for the unexplained new signal is that theres something off with the Hungarian detectors setup. However, no one is disputing the data. The findings were peer-reviewed and published in the journal Physical Review Letters the same journal that published the discovery of gravitational waves. Even ideas in prestigious journals can sometimes be explained away as systematic error, but thats the way science works.

People are paying attention to see whether this is really a nuclear physics effect or whether its something systematic, Alves says. Its important to repeat those experiments ... to be able to test whether this is real or if its an artifact of the way theyre doing the experiment.

Quest to confirm

And thats precisely what her group hopes to do. Together with a small team, shes proposing to repeat the Hungarian experiment using equipment that already exists at Los Alamos. The national lab has been a leader in nuclear physics since the creation of the atomic bomb. And today, thousands of top physicists still work there on problems ranging from safeguarding and studying our nations nuclear arsenal, to pioneering quantum computers and observing pulsars.

As it turns out, they also have a detector nearly identical to the one used by the Hungarian team.

When you add all that together, Alves believes Los Alamos has exactly the right combination of facilities and expertise to repeat the experiment. Thats why her group quietly worked on their proposal for the last six months, and recently submitted a funding request for review. To gain approval, it will have to win out in an annual competition alongside other projects at the national lab.

In recent years, several other groups likewise have suggested theyll look for this force. But at the moment, Alves believes they're the main group in the U.S. working to confirm or refute the finding. If they cant gain approval, it may be years before a university or other group can secure both the funds and expertise to repeat the experiment with the same sort of parameters the Hungarians used.

As with all extraordinary claims, this potentially paradigm-shifting discovery will require extraordinary evidence before people accept it. So we may have to wait a while before we know whether the X17 particle and its potential fifth force will revolutionize physics, or take its place atop the dustbin of debunked and discarded discoveries.

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The fifth force: Is there another fundamental force of nature? - Astronomy Magazine

Friday, March 6A waxing Moon hangs out in Cancer the Crab all night. About 18 to its west is yellowish Pollux in Gemini, and nearly 4 farther is the whiter-hued Castor. The latter appears to the naked eye as a magnitude 1.6 star, but it is actually a six-star system. The two brightest stars, Castor A and B, can be separated with a small telescope.A third component, the dimmer Castor C, lies about 1.2' away.

Saturday, March 7Night owls can take a gander at one of the best globular clusters visible in the Northern Hemisphere. Messier 13, also known as the Hercules Cluster, rises above the horizon with its namesake constellation about 9 P.M. local time but is well poised for clearer viewing by midnight and into the early hours of the morning. This cluster of ancient stars circling our galaxy contains more than 100,000 members that combine to create its magnitude 5.8 glow.

Sunday, March 8Venus and Uranus lie just over 2 apart in the evening sky. You can use Venus to easily find the ice giant by using binoculars or a telescope to locate a pair of 7th-magnitude stars about 1.2 to the lower left of Venus. Travel twice that distance in the same direction to reach brighter Uranus, glowing at magnitude 5.9.

Neptune is in conjunction with the Sun at 8 A.M. EDT. However, its position means it is lost from view in the bright glare of our star. It will make its way back to visibility by the end of next month.

For most of the United States and Canada, daylight saving time begins at 2 A.M. local time this morning. Set your clocks ahead one hour.

Monday, March 9Venus passes 2 north of Uranus this morning at 11 A.M. EDT. The inferior planet will continue to move noticeably through Aries as March progresses, while the more distant ice giant moves only about 1 eastward during the month.

Mercury is stationary at 4 A.M. EDT. From here, it will move toward its greatest western elongation, which it will reach on the 23rd.

The Full Moon occurs at 1:48 P.M. EDT. This evening, our satellite rises in Virgo as the Sun is setting and will set in the morning around dawn. Full Moon is an excellent time to easily observe Luna with or without additional optical assistance; keep in mind that the Moon will appear especially bright through binoculars or a telescope. The Full Moon also washes out much of the sky, making this time best for observing planets and brighter stars, but poor for deep-sky objects such as galaxies and nebulae.

Tuesday, March 10The Moon reaches perigee, its closest point to Earth in its orbit, at 2:30 A.M. EDT. At that time, it will sit 221,905 miles (357,121 kilometers) from our planet.

When the Full Moon occurs at perigee, it is sometimes called a supermoon by the media. Although this is an evocative name, the Full Moon will only appear about 7 percent larger than average, which is difficult if not impossible for observers to discern.

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The Sky This Week from March 6 to 13 - Astronomy Magazine

Hold on, a quick aside. When you say the word billion on the show, I feel like you think for a moment before you pronounce it. Were you careful in how you said the word billion, not to sound too much like Carl Sagan?

[laughs] You know, you can't step into a Sagan slot and not be conscious of the number billion. There were a couple of times I would punch it up a notch, almost as an homage, but otherwise not. I do remember a couple of times when I didn't think the editors would use those cuts where I went high on the intonation scale.

Sorry, back to our conversation. Many people who think about the future of humanity imagine us someday merging with computers. Does that seem credible to you?

No, not really. And I know I'm an outlier here. It doesn't feel credible because, you know, I have in my palm access to the internet. So you're saying, "Oh, now I'm going to wire that with a USB connection into my brainstem." How fast access am I going to want? Is it not fast enough to pull this phone out of my pocket? For me, the fact that it is right with me every day I leave the house, that doesn't leave me wanting this thing to be surgically connectedto get silicon surgically connected to my physiology.You dont crave more speed, more connection to information?

Heres a related analogy. Air transportation, in its early decades, was about how fast can you fly to your destination, how to minimize the time you're on an airplane. So planes got faster and faster. We got to jets instead of propellers, and then we got the supersonic transport. Then things started pulling back. Why? Well we had the 747. Planes got larger, they had better food, they had more leg room. The seats were more comfortable. Today we have the internet on your flight, we have any movie you'd ever want to watch, we have music.

The idea that speed was so important that we would want it at all costs gave way to a different idea: I am comfortable in this environment, and in fact I can even catch up on things. I can binge on shows I didn't have time to watch at home. You can come off the plane in a better place than you were before you entered it. And so no one is trying to make planes faster today. In fact, they're slower than before. The typical speeds are 500 to 550 miles per hour, whereas when I was growing up, the speeds were 600 to 650 miles per hour.

So to say we're going to become one with artificial intelligence because we want the speed, I just don't see that happening.

A lot of people also dream that computer technology will bring us immortality. Thats a possible world they long for: We will upload our brains, and then we'll never die.

Well, I would ask, if you upload your brain, how do you know that's still you? I don't think we understand consciousness enough to assert that. We can say that's your knowledge. That thing, that entity has all the same knowledge that you have, but is that you? I don't know.

We know that an identical twin has identical DNA to you yet they are not you. You don't have their thoughts and they don't have your thoughts. So this notion of uploading your consciousnessI'm not going to pay close attention to it until we have a secure understanding of what consciousness is in the first place.

That's a whole other mysterious world, the mental world that is still barely being explored.

Right. Its a frontier perhaps as vast as the universe itself.

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Get ready to explore the "Cosmos" with Neil deGrasse Tyson - Astronomy Magazine