Table of contents for No. 108 in All About Space

LAUNCH PAD Milky Way lookalike found 12 billion light years away © ALMA Peering into the early universe, astronomers uncovered a surprise: a young galaxy that looks a lot like the Milky Way. The newfound galaxy is called SPT0418-47, and given its great distance from Earth, astronomers see the galaxy as it was when the universe was just 1.4 billion years old – roughly 12 billion years before today. The discovery held a big surprise for the researchers: stars were forming quickly, as expected, since there was abundant gas available when the universe was young. But despite the chaos, SPT0418-47 has a well-defined, rotating disc and galactic ‘bulge’ at the centre. That’s a similar structure to the Milky Way’s today. Analogies between SPT0418-47 and the Milky Way are not perfect,…

SpaceX’s next astronaut launch for NASA pushed to October © SpaceX SpaceX’s next astronaut mission faces another delay. The target launch date for SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission, its first fully operational crewed mission to space, has been pushed back to no earlier than 23 October. The mission, which is set to launch SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, won’t lift off until at least late October to accommodate spacecraft traffic for the upcoming Soyuz crew rotation and to best meet the needs of the International Space Station. Crew-1 will carry four astronauts to and from the space station – NASA astronauts commander Michael Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Shannon Walker and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut mission specialist Soichi Noguchi.…

Solar System’s black hole PLANET NINE CONTROVERSY THE SOLAR SYSTEM'S BLACK HOLE As the hunt for a mysterious world at our solar neighbourhood’s edge steps up, something more exotic might also fit the bill Reported by James Romero © Tobias Roetsch It’s been four years since Mike Brown, the astronomer who removed Pluto’s status as a planet, added a hypothetical one back in to explain strange orbits in the outer Solar System. In another two years the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will map those celestial backwaters to help find Brown’s Planet Nine. But what if this target can’t be seen? It’s a possibility that hit the headlines last year when Planet Nine was replaced, at least in excited media headlines, by an ancient black hole. Brown himself addressed the possibility,…

Solar System’s black hole A BREAKTHROUGH IN REACHING THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM How a mission to Alpha Centauri has inspired an approach to pinpoint our mysterious outer Solar System object © Adrian Mann 1 Light beam transportation In the 1960s it was suggested the newly invented laser could accelerate armies of ultralight sail-bound craft a substantial fraction of the speed of light, opening up interstellar travel – or a fast way to reach the outer Solar System. 2 Point your lasers to the sky Light propulsion requires enormous power. Current plans to reach our nearest star are based around a one-kilometre (0.6-mile) wide grid of lasers firing a gigawatt of laser energy into the sky. 3 A perfect mirror Each proposed lightsail is four metres (13 feet) across, but just…

SOME OF THE DUSTIEST PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE Lagoon Nebula (M8) Brand-new stars are slowly being formed as gravity pulls gas and dust together in this 100-light-year-wide nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius. © ESO Eagle Nebula (M16) One of the most famous dusty places in the universe thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, the ‘Pillars of Creation’ form part of the Eagle Nebula. © NASA/ESA & Hubble Crab Nebula (M1) The remnant of a supernova explosion first seen in the year 1054, last year Swedish astronomers found 92 dusty globules in this famous cloud. © NASA/ESA The Milky Way Look up from a dark site and you will see the Milky Way arching overhead. You can clearly see there’s lots of dust between the stars. © ESO The Pleiades…

Blanets DO EARTH-LIKE PLANETS ORBIT OUR GALAXY’S BLACK HOLE? ‘Blanets’ could form from the ice-covered dust particles that circle these cosmic colossi © Nicholas Forder Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are theorised to be present at the centres of galaxies across the universe. They are Herculean celestial objects that consume gas and dust via an accretion disc and burp out jets of X-ray radiation from their core – jets so powerful they can be spotted from billions of light years away. This doesn’t sound like a hospitable environment for planets, but recent research led by Dr Keiichi Wada, an astrophysicist at Kagoshima University in Japan, suggests it could be. Wada and his research team believe that there could be tens of thousands of these black hole planets, or ‘blanets’, at the…

Comets HUNTING FOR CLUES: MISSIONS TO A COMET By getting up close and personal with these dirty snowballs, we’ve learned more about their role 1 Stardust This audacious NASA mission was sent to return a sample of Comet Wild 2 to Earth. Launched in February 1999 and rendezvousing with its quarry in 2004, it successfully returned the sample home in 2006. Initial analysis found it contained the amino acid glycine, although some researchers had suggested the analysis might have contaminated the sample, even though the clean room used for the experiment was 100-times cleaner than a hospital operating room. 2 Giotto This ESA mission was sent to study the famous Halley’s Comet up close in 1986. The comet orbits the Sun roughly once every 76 years, and so…

FREE DIGITAL POSTER TOP 24 TARGETS FOR BEGINNERS JARGON BUSTER Right ascension (RA) Right ascension is to the sky what longitude is to the surface of Earth, corresponding to east and west directions. It’s measured in hours, minutes and seconds since as Earth rotates we see different parts of the sky through the night. Declination (Dec) This tells you how high your object will rise in the sky. Like Earth’s latitude, declination measures north and south. Its units are degrees, arcminutes and arcseconds. There are 60 arcminutes in a degree and 60 arcseconds in an arcminute. Bortle scale The Bortle scale measures the brightness of a night-sky location, quantifying the observability of an astronomical object and the interference caused by light pollution. Scale 1 represents excellent dark skies. Sky quality…

TOP THREE NAKED-EYE TARGETS Orion Nebula (M42) Right ascension: 05h 35m 17s Declination: -05° 23' 28″ Best seen: Winter Constellation: Orion Magnitude: +4.0 Glancing below the three stars of Orion’s belt, you should be able to make out the Orion Nebula as a smudge in a dark, light-pollution free sky. The Great Nebula in Orion is a huge cloud of gas that is forming new stars about 1,344 light years away from our Solar System and is also visible from suburban areas. Source: Wikipedia commons© Rawastrodata The Pleiades (M45) Right ascension: 03h 47m 24s Declination: +24° 07' 00” Best seen: Winter Constellation: Taurus Magnitude: +1.6 You can’t miss the Pleiades star cluster during the nights of winter and spring. You should be able to see six or seven stars in…

MAGNIFYING YOUR EXPERIENCE A pair of binoculars or a telescope can bring out the very best features of the night sky © Getty Naked-eye astronomy is a rewarding experience, but to really see as far into the universe as possible, you need an optical aid. Binoculars are always good to begin with, and just being in possession of a pair of 10x50s immediately opens up the opportunity to grab sights of night-sky targets that your eyes can’t make out alone. Not only that, but simply increasing the magnification can provide even better views of objects that you can already see with the naked eye. You should still give your eyes time to adapt to the darkness. Given that targets will be more difficult to find and that they can’t be…

STARGAZER This month’s planets Dusk to dawn belongs to the ice giants this month, as Jupiter offers a spectacular view before dipping out of sight Planet of the month Uranus marks a turning point in our exploration of the Solar System, discovered by William Herschel in 1781 from the city of Bath. Uranus is tipped on its side by 98 degrees – it appears to roll around the Sun, and currently its north pole is facing us at an angle of 50 degrees. Scientists are not sure why Uranus is on its side, but suspect a giant impact long ago may have knocked it over. Uranus is an ice giant, which is a mysterious kind of gaseous world that also contains lots of ices – water, methane, nitrogen and so…

Scientist calculates the ‘sad, lonely’ end of the universe © NASA/ESA Stars will continue to explode long after the universe is cold and ‘dead’, one scientist determined after diving down the rabbit hole to find the last supernova that will ever happen. The universe’s end is “known as ‘heat death,’ where the universe will be mostly black holes and burned-out stars,” said Matt Caplan, an assistant professor of physics at Illinois State University. “I became a physicist for one reason. I wanted to think about the big questions – why is the universe here, and how will it end?” Caplan looked to the future of stellar explosions. Massive stars explode in supernovae when iron builds up in their cores, accumulating and triggering the star’s collapse. But smaller stars such as…

Scientists probe weird alien water inside Uranus and Neptune Scientists have devised a theoretical computer model and used it to peer inside the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. With this tool a team studied the thermal and electrical conductivity of the unusual water inside these planets. In simulating these physical processes on a tiny atomic scale, the researchers hope that this new model will reveal information about the icy bodies’ internal structure, magnetic fields, how they evolved and exactly how old they are. © NASA/ JPL- Caltech In studying Uranus and Neptune with this model, the researchers, who stem from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, and the University of California at Los Angeles, estimated that the two planets are likely primarily composed of water in…

Solar System’s black hole FINDING THE PHANTOM PHOTOBOMBERS By monitoring a billion stars, we are finding the fingerprints of rogue planets, stars and possibly black holes 1 Like a converging lens When an object of mass passes in front of a distant star, it can actually make the star brighter. While some stellar radiation will be blocked, more light rays become bent towards Earth by the foreground object’s gravity. 2 Setting stars aflicker A number of objects are capable of producing the microlensing effect. These include rogue planets, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars and possibly PBHs. 3 A mysterious gravitational fingerprint One set of gravitational anomalies observed by OGLE has defied interpretation. Six ultrashort microlensing events with crossing times of 0.1 to 0.3 days have been identified by Tokyo…

Solar System’s black hole THE VERA C. RUBIN OBSERVATORY: HOW IT WILL HELP FIND PLANET NINE In 2021 the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will come online, spending ten years searching the entire southern sky for objects of all types beyond Neptune © ISST Project 1 Mirror in motion The observatory’s 8.4-metre (27.5-foot) mirror can track across to survey the entire Southern Hemisphere sky twice a week. This will come in handy for locating Planet Nine or our mystery black hole. 2 A camera the size of a car Images will be recorded by a 3.2-gigapixel camera, the largest ever constructed. It will take a 15-second exposure every 20 seconds to help detect and map 40,000 objects beyond Neptune. © ISST Project 3 Onsite maintenance To maximise imaging time for characterising…

Cosmic dust COSMIC DUST WHAT DOES IT REVEAL ABOUT THE UNIVERSE? Scientists are starting to find cosmic dust all over Earth, with important consequences © Getty When you think about space, your mind is drawn to the very big – planets, stars and galaxies. But many of the universe’s secrets are hidden away in the stuff you can barely see: cosmic dust. Take our own Solar System. The gaps between the planets are peppered with tiny dust grains less than a tenth of a millimetre across. There’s enough of them that if you gathered up all the dust between the Sun and Jupiter you could fashion a sphere 25 kilometres (15.53 miles) across. On a clear night, far from city lights, you can even see sunlight reflecting off these…

Comets DID LIFE COME FROM COMETS? They race in and out of our Solar System, and according to evidence, they could have brought life with them Reported by Colin Stuart © Tobias Roetsch In the void between planets, huge snowballs tumble across the Solar System. These comets – relics from an age before large worlds circled the Sun – have been patrolling our local neighbourhood for 4.6 billion years. Hidden away in their icy layers are clues to what our Solar System was like all that time ago, along with teasers as to how our family of planets formed. But their real bounty could be knowledge of how one of the Solar System’s stand-out features came to pass: life. Could comets have played a role in delivering biology to Earth?…

Universe’s missing link OUR UNIVERSE’S MISSING LINK Our model of the cosmos needs revision, but not without astronomers first assembling the pieces of a new cosmological puzzle Reported by Lee Cavendish © Getty Observation and theory make up the two pillars of scientific research. Without observations, there is just a theory with no substance, and without theory there is just a series of measurements with nothing to extrapolate from them. But what happens when one does not satisfy the other? Recent research about the expansion of the universe and the model that astronomers use to predict its history has caused tension between these two pillars. It appears as though recent measurements of galactic distances over a hundred million light years away and their respective recession speeds have contributed to a…

ASK Space Our experts answer your questions ASTROPHYSICS What happens to gas as it falls into a black hole? © NASA/JPL-Caltech One of the biggest misconceptions about black holes is that they indiscriminately suck up everything around them. A black hole is incredibly small, and so gas on a collision course with a black hole would need to have incredibly precise aim in order to directly hit the black hole. Instead gas starts orbiting around the black hole, eventually creating what we call an ‘accretion disc’. As gas funnels closer and closer to the black hole, the gravitational potential energy that the gas had is released. This then dissipates in the form of heat, radiation, massive outflows and sometimes jets of particles moving at close to the speed of light.…

DARK-SKY DESTINATIONS Go to the world’s best night skies for a stargazing experience like no other 1 Natural Bridges National Monument Bortle sky class: 1 to 3 Sky quality meter reading: 21.75 or above Location: Utah, US 2 Chaco Culture National Historical Park Bortle sky class: 1 to 3 Sky quality meter reading: 21.75 or above Location: New Mexico, US 3 NamibRand Nature Reserve Bortle sky class: 1 to 3 Sky quality meter reading: 21.75 or above Location: Namibia, Africa 4 Death Valley National Park Bortle sky class: 1 to 3 Sky quality meter reading: 21.75 or above Location: California and Nevada, US 5 Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve Bortle sky class: 1 to 3 Sky quality meter reading: 21.75 or above Location: South…

HOW TO STAR HOP 1 Go old school The simple solution to finding a celestial object is to use ‘GoTo’ systems on a modern telescope. These orientate a telescope to a desired object with almost no user input. If not available, you must star hop: navigate through the night sky by jumping from one known celestial object to another. When using small, mobile scopes, this is often an essential skill. 2 Get chart friendly To star hop there are a few things you need, and a star chart is a must-have – one that shows stars and other objects clearly. While you can probably see the chart’s contents clearly when you buy it in the middle of the day, at night it will be – hopefully – pitch black at…

STARGAZER Moon tour Rupes Recta (Straight Wall) How to find the most dramatic cliff on the face of the Moon If you have a small telescope, or a powerful pair of binoculars, and look to the lower left of the great triple-crater chain of Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel you will see – depending on the time of the month – either a short, dark line or a short, bright line. Moon atlases and phone apps identify it as ‘Rupes Recta’, and to be honest it doesn’t look like much at first glance, nothing more than a dark pencil line or a white chalk scratch drawn on the Moon’s round, grey face. But Rupes Recta has another name, and it is one of the most famous and beloved features on the…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE Mars’ double Green Crater © ESA The European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s Roscosmos jointly operate the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which is currently circling the Red Planet and snapping images of its terrain with high clarity and resolution. The subject of this picture, taken on 27 April 2020, is a crater inside a larger impact, known as Green Crater. Both of these craters are located in Argyre quadrangle region of the Mars’ southern hemisphere. The ExoMars team are currently studying this image to investigate how seasonal ice – shown here as bright, white patches – relates to the presence of gullies on the surface. Saturn gets a check-up © NASA/ESA On 4 July 2020 Saturn had its regular check-up with the…

Betelgeuse’s bizarre dimming caused by eruption © NASA/ESA In the autumn of 2019, red giant Betelgeuse began dimming significantly, losing about two-thirds of its brightness by February. This dramatic dip spurred speculation that the star’s demise may have been imminent – perhaps just weeks away, from our perspective, anyway. Betelgeuse lies about 500 light years from Earth, so everything we’re seeing with the star today happened centuries ago. But the dramatic sky show didn’t happen: Betelgeuse powered through the dimming episode and returned to its normal brightness by May of this year. The recovery sparked a new round of speculation, this time about the dimming’s cause. Some scientists attributed the doldrums to a light-blocking dust cloud, whereas others said big starspots on Betelgeuse’s surface were likely to blame. The dust…

Future tech Space fishing FISHING ON OTHER WORLDS Could space fishing be the answer to a low-cost sample-and-return mission? © Adrian Chesterman Despite a raft of probes and landers reaching the surface of far-off planets, moons, asteroids and comets, nothing quite beats having extraterrestrial samples in your hands to analyse. However, the high cost this entails has been extremely prohibitive up until now. Scientists have had to be able to find a spot to land, touch down gently on the surface, collect samples and finally have enough fuel left to escape the gravity of their landing site. This takes time, precision and money, so the quest to find a practical way to collect samples cheaply has been a high priority for a long time. Enter Professor Robert Winglee and his…

SETTING UP HOME AROUND SATURN It may have similarities with Earth, but what would it really be like to live on Titan? © Adrian Mann 1 What a view From some areas of Titan, around a third of the view will be taken up by Saturn. 2 Red giant Residents on Titan would see the Sun as a huge, vivid red ball. 3 A lovely atmosphere The thick atmosphere is 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) high, compared to 100 kilometres (62 miles) on Earth, making deliveries easy. 4 Indoor life People living on Titan would live indoors where the environment can be better regulated. 5 Lots of lakes Lakes on Titan could be used for transport and, by using dams and gates, power generation. 6 Suiting up A spacesuit is only…

WHERE YOU CAN SEE COSMIC DUST ON EARTH Antarctica Cosmic dust landing in Antarctica becomes trapped in the ice and lies undisturbed for millions of years. This creates a historical record of past events. © NASA City rooftops Amateur Norwegian scientist Jon Larsen found cosmic dust in 300 kilograms of material rescued from rooftop gutters in multiple cities, including Paris and Oslo. © Alamy Ocean floor Supernovae explosions can rocket dust into the Solar System and through the atmosphere to land on the ocean floor, where scientists have collected it. © Michael Schulreich/Berlin Institute of Technology Zodiacal light While the dust itself is not on Earth, you can still see this interplanetary dust on a dark evening because it is scattering sunlight around the Solar System. © ESO…

THE MAKING OF LIFE ON EARTH Comets played a part in making our world a living planet 1 Giant molecular cloud An interstellar gas cloud collapses under its own gravity to form a group of new stars, one of which is the Sun. 2 Protoplanetary disc A dusty disc of material forms around the new star. Gravity slowly pulls this material together – a process that will eventually form the planets. 3 Comets form Far from the Sun, beyond a point known as the ‘ice line’, smaller, icy objects – comets – coalesce. 4 Ultraviolet radiation UV light from the young Sun could have helped form ribose on some comets, although it has yet to be confirmed with a comet sample. 5 Comet impacts With…

Universe’s missing link HOW DO WE CALCULATE THE HUBBLE CONSTANT? The problem causing the discrepancy could lie somewhere in these methods 1 Parallax Parallax is an ancient method for measuring the distance to relatively nearby stars up to approximately 65 light years away using Earth-based measurements – or 326 light years if having used the ESA’s Hipparcos mission. This method uses trigonometry to measure the displacement of a star’s background, having observed it from the opposite side of the Sun. This method is commonly used as the first step on the ‘cosmic distance ladder’ which astronomers use to calibrate other results. © NASA, ESA 2 Cepheids Cepheids are unstable stars that are coming to the end of their lives. During this period of imbalance, there is a periodic…

STARGAZER ESSENTIAL GUIDES AND ADVICE FOR AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS What’s in the sky? Source: Wikipedia Commons © Adam Evans Jargon buster Conjunction A conjunction is an alignment of objects at the same celestial longitude. The conjunction of the Moon and the planets is determined with reference to the Sun. A planet is in conjunction with the Sun when it and Earth are aligned on opposite sides of the Sun. Right Ascension (RA) Right Ascension is to the sky what longitude is to the surface of the Earth, corresponding to east and west directions. It is measured in hours, minutes and seconds since, as the Earth rotates on its axis, we see different parts of the sky throughout the night. Declination (Dec) This tells you how high an object will rise in the…

STARGAZER Deep sky challenge Treasures of Perseus and Cassiopeia A ghostly nebula and a rose-shaped star cluster are among your observing challenges this month Source: Wikipedia Commons ©Remidone We’ve got some real observing challenges for our readers this month, with faint gems hidden among the bright, familiar stars of the much loved constellations of Perseus and Cassiopeia. However, with the sky staying bright until the very small hours at this time of year you’ll need to stay up late or get up early to see them. NGC 7789 is a loose cluster popularly known as ‘Caroline’s Rose’. Discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783, its many loops of stars and the dark gaps between them give it – some observers claim – a strong resemblance to a white rose. See what…

STARGAZER The Northern Hemisphere The skies have darkened as we head into autumn, with some favourites returning ource: Wikipedia Commons © Chuck Ayoub Source: Wikipedia Commons © KeithSteffens © NASA/ESA Cassiopeia (the Queen) and Cepheus (the King) lie in the dusty path of the Milky Way, offering not just a rich star field, but impressive deep-sky objects too. The Owl Cluster (NGC 457) is particularly easy to pick out with decent binoculars, its 75 to 100 bright stars forming the shape of an owl with spread wings, while the bright double star Phi Cassiopeiae forms the celestial bird’s eyes. Double star Alpha Cassiopeiae is easy to split, resolving a bright, yellow primary and faint, blue secondary and providing delightful views. Use the constellations of Pegasus, Aquarius and Pisces and you’ll…