Table of contents for No. 126 in All About Space

WELCOME ©Alamy As I write this, we’re in the first few days of 2022. The James Webb Space Telescope has launched and unfolded, NASA is gearing up for the launch of its next Moon mission, Artemis 1, and Comet Leonard put on a final show before falling out of view for skywatchers – I hope you managed to catch it in December! While we’ve reached 2022 here on Earth, we head to some planets where the measure of time is very different: join us as we take a tour of exoplanets, worlds that are – in most instances – quite different to what we’re used to in the Solar System. From searingly hot Jupiters to beefed-up super-Earths, you’ll discover where we’re at in our plans to find Earth 2.0, the…

COMETS’ HEADS MAY BE GREEN, BUT NEVER THEIR TAILS Words by Samantha Mathewson Comets, composed of frozen gases, rock and dust, are the leftover remains from the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago. The icy bodies heat up very quickly as they approach the Sun in their orbits, causing the solid ice to turn directly into gas via a process called sublimation, which intensifies the bright-green glow. However, the green glow appears only around the head of some comets, but never in the tails trailing behind them. Now scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney in Australia think they know why. Using a vacuum chamber and lasers, the researchers were able to recreate the chemical reaction that occurs when ultraviolet radiation from the…

ROCKET SCIENTISTS AREN’T ANY SMARTER THAN THE REST OF US, SCIENCE SAYS Words by Rebecca Sohn “It’s not rocket science” is an expression used to describe tasks that aren’t complicated. But are rocket scientists smarter than everyone else? That was a question researchers sought to answer in a new study in medical journal BMJ; the study also applied the analysis to brain surgeons. The study was led by researchers at universities and hospitals in London and Bristol, as well as UK charity Brainbook, which is dedicated to neurosurgical communication and engagement. ©Getty Researchers gave the Great British Intelligence Test to aerospace engineers and neurosurgeons. The test evaluates areas of cognition like planning and reasoning, working memory, attention and emotional processing. The researchers compared the results of 300 aerospace engineers to…

Exoplanets FINDING AN EARTH-LIKE PLANET Is there a planet identical to ours somewhere in the Milky Way? It’s perhaps of little wonder that with our own planetary biases, much of our search for exoplanets has hinged on the search for worlds similar to Earth in both composition and location in the habitable zone of their main sequence stars. Another condition that would make a world similar to Earth would be a magnetic field, which can prevent an atmosphere from being stripped away and thus sustain life. Several of the planets in the exoplanet catalogue are similar to Earth in a range of ways, be it distance from their star, their mass or their radius. Below are 21 candidates for Earth-analogue worlds. But even if these worlds do fit the description…

THE ARTEMIS 1 FLIGHT PLAN Artemis 1 will take a highly detailed and complex loop around the Moon and then come back to Earth ©Adrtian Mann ©NASA “WE CAN PROGRAM MUCH MORE COMPLEX OPERATIONS NOW”PHILIPPE BERTHE 1 TRANS-LUNAR INJECTION BURN After entering Earth orbit, rockets will fire for 20 minutes to send the spacecraft towards the Moon. 2 INTERIM CRYOGENIC PROPULSION STAGE Once this has separated from the main spacecraft, there’s no turning back. 3 LUNAR ORBIT INSERTION Artemis 1 will use the Moon’s gravity to slingshot out to a distant lunar orbit. 4 HEADING HOME Artemis 1 will swing back down towards the lunar surface to help slingshot it home. 5 RETURN TRAJECTORY CORRECTION The spacecraft’s course will be tweaked through rocket burns to aim for Earth. 6 FINAL…

Rigel STAR PROFILE RIGEL Orion’s brightest star is a powerful blue supergiant Rigel – also known as Beta Orionis – is a rare blue supergiant and the brightest star in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter). Rigel is nearing the end of its life; having exhausted most of the hydrogen fuel in its core, the blazing-blue, hot star will one day end in a spectacular supernova, though this won’t be for another few million years. The dazzling beauty is part of a multi-star system with several companion stars. Rigel is a variable star that lies about 870 light years away from the Sun and is about 120,000 times as luminous. Rigel’s name is popular in science fiction. It’s in the name of a number of planets in the Star Trek…

GEOCENTRIC MODEL THE EARTH-CENTRED VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE WE EXPLORE WHY THE GEOCENTRIC MODEL WAS ACCEPTED FOR SO LONG Reported by Daisy Dobrijevic © Getty Once widely accepted, the geocentric model is now the debunked theory that the Earth is the centre of the universe, with the Sun and planets revolving around it – though nevertheless, some people still believe the universe revolves around them. In a 2012 survey conducted by the National Science Foundation of 2,200 people in the United States, when asked “does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around Earth?”, a quarter answered incorrectly. This antiquated view was once our only perspective of the cosmos. The ancient Greeks were the first to suggest a geocentric view of the universe. Eudoxus was the…

Big Bang THE BIG BANG THEORY IT’S OUR BEST MODEL OF HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS, BUT WHERE DID IT COME FROM? Reported by Andrew May ©Getty People have always sought out ‘big-picture’ theories that explain how the universe began, what it looks like on the largest scales and how it evolves over time. In the past, such theories were often based more on human imagination than anything else. But our present best contender, the Big Bang theory, is much better than that. It’s based on a mixture of observational evidence and a mathematical understanding of how space and matter behave on very large scales, and most astronomers believe it probably comes quite close to the truth. There are two reasons we no longer need to rely on pure imagination to…

GJ 367b Focus on NEW ROCKY EXOPLANET HAS A YEAR LESS THAN EIGHT HOURS LONG The iron-rich planet orbits very close to its host and exhibits scorching temperatures Reported by Mike Wall ©SPP 1992 (Patricia Klein) A newfound alien world could shed some light on one of the darkest and strangest corners of the exoplanet family tree. The planet, known as GJ 367b, circles a small, dim red dwarf star just 31 light years from the Sun. For perspective, our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years wide. GJ 367b is a rocky world about 70 per cent as large as Earth and 55 per cent as massive, making it one of the lightest known exoplanets. It completes one orbit every 7.7 hours and is therefore an ultra-short period…

THREE POTENTIAL EXPLANATIONS How did it form in such challenging conditions? PLANET FORMATION IS ROBUST These theories look to account for the intense amounts of radiation emitted by the huge main star in the system, since this creates an environment in which planets shouldn’t really be able to form. But maybe planets can form and flourish in such environments. Perhaps, as Janson says, planet formation is possible in “more diverse environments than we had imagined”. ©Getty FORMED CLOSE AND BOOTED OUT A standard theory for the formation of gas giants is core accretion. An icy core forms from collisions between planetesimals, then gas in the protoplanetary disc is attracted. This could have happened with b Centauri b, forming close to the binary star before being forced by gravitational interactions to…

STARGAZER WHAT’S IN THE SKY? Source: Wikipedia Commons ©Stuart Heggie Source: Wikipedia Commons ©Astronomical Institute of the Charles University ©NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team “THE MOON WILL PASS IN FRONT OF URANUS, CREATING A LUNAR OCCULTATION IN ARIES” RED-LIGHT FRIENDLY In order to preserve your night vision, you should read our observing guide under red light 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…

STARGAZER ASTROSHOTS OF THE MONTH Get featured in All About Space by sending your astrophotography images to space@spaceanswers.com “I ENJOY IMAGING THE SUN, AND HAVE BEEN DOING SO FOR A LITTLE OVER A YEAR” Soumyadeep Mukherjee Location: Kolkata, India “After 13 days during October 2021, from 4 to 16 October, the Sun’s active region came to an end. The resulting sunspot - known as AR 2882 - generated some solar flares, ejections of electromagnetic radiation from the solar atmosphere. I enjoy imaging the Sun, and have been doing so for a little over a year. The image on the right might look like there’s a solar prominence erupting from our nearest star, but it’s in fact an optical illusion caused by hot fumes coming from the airliner’s exhaust.” Jaspal Chadha…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE 27 DECEMBER 2021 A room with a view The appropriately named VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) enjoys a breathtaking view from its dome on Cerro Paranal in Chile’s Atacama Desert. VISTA is the world’s largest telescope designed to map the sky solely in infrared light. The telescope was developed by a consortium of 18 universities in the UK and spends most of its time carrying out six public surveys of the sky. The primary goal of VISTA is to shed light on brown dwarfs, variable stars and ancient quasars. Observing the sky in infrared helps astronomers detect cooler objects in the universe that shine brighter at these longer wavelengths. 4 JANUARY 2022 Interstellar wildfire The Flame Nebula burns bright…

‘COSMIC MONSTER’ STAR SPITS ENERGY WITH THE FORCE OF A BILLION SUNS Words by Mindy Weisberger A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion Suns – and it happened in a fraction of a second. This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field, and magnetars often flare spectacularly and without warning. But even though magnetars can be thousands of times brighter than our Sun, their eruptions are so brief and unpredictable that they’re challenging for astrophysicists to find and study. However, researchers recently managed to catch one of these flares, calculating oscillations in the brightness of a magnetar as it erupted. The scientists found that the distant magnetar released as much energy as…

IMAGINARY NUMBERS COULD BE NEEDED TO DESCRIBE REALITY Words by Ben Turner Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number. When you add imaginary numbers and real numbers, the two form complex numbers, which enable physicists to write out quantum equations in simple terms. But whether quantum theory needs these mathematical chimeras or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial. Even the founders of quantum mechanics thought the implications of having complex numbers in their equations was disquieting. Erwin Schrödinger – the first person to introduce complex numbers into quantum theory – wrote, “What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of complex numbers.” Schrödinger did find ways to express his equation with…

Future tech Millionaire Moon tourism MILLIONAIRE MOON TOURISM Fancy a trip around the Moon? That’s what Space Adventures is offering to anyone able to afford the multimillion-dollar price tag ©Adrian Mann Multimillionaires and billionaires can book their future flight around the Moon using Space Adventures’ imaginative use of existing spacecraft and technology. An essential cornerstone of this project are Soyuz rockets – spacecraft that were originally designed to take cosmonauts to the Moon. They didn’t achieve that goal, but in the 1960s and 1970s they were easily adapted to ferry cosmonauts and astronauts into Earth orbit and to space stations. In the decades since the demise of the Space Shuttle, the Soyuz craft has become the world’s safest spacecraft, making many trips. Each trip to the Moon will carry two…

Alien flare Focus on ERUPTION SEEN ON ALIEN STAR FOR FIRST TIME The outburst is about ten times more powerful than anything similar seen from our Sun Reported by Charles Q. Choi © Getty Astronomers may have detected a Sun-like star erupting, spotting a giant outburst ten times larger than anything similar ever seen from our Sun. The new results may shed light on the effects such powerful outbursts may have had on the early Earth when life was born, and could have on modern Earth and society. Our Sun often unleashes flares that can each pack as much energy as millions of hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time. Solar flares are often accompanied by giant, bright tendrils of solar plasma known as filaments, which can unleash magnetic bubbles…

Focus on WHAT IS A LIGHT YEAR? How we measure vast distances across the universe Reported by Tim Childers and Jon Gordon © Getty “WHEN YOU OBSERVE SOMETHING A LIGHT YEAR AWAY, YOU SEE IT AS IT APPEARED EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO” A light year is a measurement of distance and not time, as the name might suggest. A light year is the distance a beam of light travels in a single Earth year, or around 9.7 trillion kilometres (6 trillion miles). On the scale of the universe, measuring distances in kilometres or miles just doesn’t cut it. In the same way that you may measure the distance to the supermarket in the time it takes to drive there, astronomers measure the distances of stars in the time it takes…

Big Bang OBSERVING THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND We can’t see the Big Bang itself, but the CMB is the next best thing COBE The first space mission designed to study the CMB was NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer, launched in 1989. It found the CMB is much more uniform across the sky than expected. WMAP A second NASA spacecraft, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, mapped the CMB between 2001 and 2010, confirming the astonishing uniformity. PLANCK Planck was the European Space Agency’s follow on to WMAP. Operating from 2009 to 2013, it remapped the CMB with higher sensitivity and resolution than its predecessor. ©ESA…

b Centauri b MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE THE PLANET THAT SHOULDN’T EXIST This two-star system with a mass six times that of our Sun emits extreme radiation, yet somehow a planet has still managed to form Reported by David Crookes ©Alamy You would think that a planet which is 11 times as massive as Jupiter – itself the largest planet in the Solar System – would be very easy to spot. But that’s not always the case. If the method of discovery isn’t quite good enough, then it’s always going to be much more difficult to find something, even if it’s hiding in plain sight. This can lead to theories that turn out to be incorrect, and that’s what recently came to light when an exoplanet suddenly popped into view…

SLS boosters Focus on NASA ORDERS MORE MEGABOOSTERS FOR MOON MISSIONS The new contract will support Space Launch System (SLS) missions through Artemis 9 Reported by Elizabeth Howell “MORE DESIGN CHANGES TO THE PROGRAM ARE ALREADY UNDERWAY, TO START FLYING DURING THE NINTH MISSION OF THE SLS” NASA just awarded a contract worth $3.19 billion (£2.36 billion) to build rocket boosters for Artemis missions through 2031. The new award builds on a previous 2020 contract authorising Northrop Grumman to prepare for production and building of twin boosters for the next six SLS megarocket flights following Artemis 3, which will bring the program through Artemis 9. The SLS - which will make its first uncrewed flight in 2022 - is tasked with sending crews across the Solar System, starting with missions…

Planets STARGAZER THIS MONTH’S PLANETS Observe before dawn and you’ll be able to catch dazzling Venus, Mercury and Mars in all their glory PLANET OF THE MONTH Venus is our planet of the month, not just because it will be so strikingly bright – and therefore easy to see – in the sky before dawn, but because it will have lots of company in the sky during our observing period. Having played ‘second fiddle’ to Mars for many years, Venus is now well and truly in the scientific spotlight. Various space agencies and private companies are planning on sending missions there to study and map its surface and even look for signs of life in its atmosphere. We already know, thanks to previous missions, that Venus is roughly the same…

STARGAZER DEEP SKY CHALLENGE THE KING’S JEWELS One of the least famous constellations offers keen-eyed observers some fascinating and beautiful sights ©NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team It’s an unspoken truth that while some constellations are gorgeous and are blessed with spectacular telescopic treats, others can be just a little boring. With no bright stars, they are dull to the naked eye, and they have no big, bright deep-sky objects that cry out to admired through a low-power eyepiece. One such constellation is Cepheus, the King. To the naked eye its faint stars make the shape of a child’s crude drawing of a house, and that’s it. However, if you swing a medium or large-aperture telescope towards it, you’ll be rewarded with views of some genuinely fascinating and attractive objects. The…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE James Webb Space Telescope has enough fuel for more than ten years of science Words by Meghan Bartels NASA’s newest flagship space observatory should have enough fuel to more than double its minimum mission life peering into the history of the universe. The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration with the Canadian and European space agencies led by NASA, launched into space on 25 December 2021 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. Often billed as the successor to the agency’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope, Webb – also known as the JWST – is designed to focus on infrared light, giving astronomers a look at the earliest days of the universe. Despite an ambitious science agenda, the mission was designed with just a…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE WHITE HOUSE DIRECTS NASA TO EXTEND INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION OPERATIONS THROUGH 2030 Words by Robert Z. Pearlman ©NASA NASA administrator Bill Nelson has been directed to work with NASA’s partners, including the European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Russia’s Roscosmos, to enable the ISS’ use throughout the rest of this decade. “I’m pleased that the Biden-Harris administration has committed to continuing station operations through 2030,” said Nelson. “The ISS is a beacon of peaceful international scientific collaboration and for more than 20 years has returned enormous scientific, educational and technological developments to benefit humanity.” NASA has been seeking ways to hand over its day-to-day operations of the space station to commercial entities in order to…

Exoplanets COMPLETE GUIDE TO EXOPLANETS OUR KNOWLEDGE OF WORLDS BEYOND THE SOLAR SYSTEM HAS EXPLODED IN THE LAST THREE DECADES Reported by Robert Lea © Tobias Roetsch Ever since humans first discovered that the stars in the night sky were bodies similar to our Sun, we’ve dreamed and speculated about the worlds that could orbit these stars. Would they be rocky terrestrial planets like Earth? Could they possess liquid water? Could the presence of this vital life-sustaining element on other worlds mean that we are not alone in the universe? “For millennia, humans have been asking the question of whether we are alone. And tied to that question, are other planets anywhere else?” Nikku Madhusudhan, a professor of astrophysics and exoplanetary science at the Institute of Astronomy of the University…

Artemis GOING BACK TO THE MOON THIS YEAR, NASA WILL TAKE THE FIRST STEP IN RETURNING ASTRONAUTS TO THE LUNAR SURFACE Reported by Colin Stuart It’s been a long time since a human voice bellowed from the lunar surface. This year marks half a century since Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan left the last footprints on the Moon in 1972, and a lot has changed since then. That year the first scientific handheld calculator was released; today we carry more computing power in our pocket than that which safely guided the Apollo astronauts to the Moon and back. Now, at long last, humanity is about to leave low-Earth orbit (LEO) once again. Only two dozen astronauts have achieved that feat so far, all of them white men. Soon the first female…

Focus on Leo I BLACK HOLE IN MILKY WAY’S SATELLITE DEFIES EXPLANATION Dwarf galaxy Leo I’s giant central area seems too big for such a small host Reported by Tereza Pultarova ©ESA ©Getty Atiny galaxy orbiting at the outskirts of the Milky Way appears to have a giant black hole at its centre, comparable to that of the much larger Milky Way itself, and scientists don’t know why. The Leo I dwarf galaxy, some 820,000 light years from Earth, is only about 2,000 light years across. Until now, astronomers thought the galaxy’s mass was about 15 to 30 million times the mass of our Sun. That’s tiny compared to the Milky Way, which is estimated to weigh as much as 1.5 trillion Suns and whose disc is over 100,000 light…

Dark matter Instant expert WHAT IS DARK MATTER MADE OF? The phenomena may have come from quantum bags that got squished together in the early universe ©Alamy Dark matter – the mysterious, invisible substance that exerts gravity but doesn’t interact with light – might be made of tiny black holes permeating the universe. And according to a new theory, those black holes might have been made from Fermi balls, quantum ‘bags’ of subatomic particles known as fermions that got smooshed together in dense pockets during the universe’s infancy. This theory could explain why dark matter came to dominate the universe. Scientists Ke-Pan Xie and collaborator Kiyoharu Kawana, from the Center for Theoretical Physics at Seoul National University in South Korea have devised a new scenario to explain how dark matter…

Focus on GENERAL RELATIVITY PASSES ITS TOUGHEST TEST YET The theory, which Albert Einstein published in 1915, remains undefeated Reported by Mike Wall © Getty General relativity has withstood perhaps its toughest challenge to date. The theory, which Albert Einstein published in 1915, revolutionised our understanding of physics and the cosmos. It explains gravity as a consequence of space-time’s flexibility: massive objects warp space-time, creating depressions around which other bodies orbit. Scientists have put general relativity to the test repeatedly over the past 106 years, trying to find situations or circumstances in which it comes up short. They haven’t yet found one. In a new study, researchers report the results of one of the most ambitious and involved challenges to general relativity ever undertaken. They analysed observations of a double-pulsar…

EXPANSION vs EXPLOSION The universe didn’t start with a giant explosion – the reality is much subtler Although the Big Bang is often described as an explosion, that’s a misleading image. In an explosion, fragments are flung out from a central point into a pre-existing space. If you were at the central point, you’d see all the fragments moving away from you with roughly the same speed. But the Big Bang wasn’t like that. It was an expansion of space itself – a concept that comes out of Einstein’s equations of general relativity but has no counterpart in the classical physics of everyday life. It means that all the distances in the universe are stretching out at the same rate. Any two galaxies separated by distance X are receding from…

IMAGING A PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN GIANT PLANET How b Centauri b was directly observed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope 1 THE NEWLY DISCOVERED PLANET The planet can be seen here as a bright dot. While it’s pictured small, it’s actually 11 times as massive as Jupiter, which is itself 2.5 times more massive than all the other planets in the Solar System combined. 2 BACKGROUND STAR It’s not easy spotting planets, especially when there are background stars to filter out. Here the background star looks similar to the planet, but when astronomers take multiple images at different times, the planet’s movement makes it stand out. 3 THE BINARY STAR SYSTEM Just as the Sun is 11 times wider than Jupiter, the b Centauri two-star system is more prominent…

STARGAZER IN THE SHOPS The latest books, apps, software, tech and accessories for space and astronomy fans alike For fun APOLLO: A GAME INSPIRED BY NASA MOON MISSIONS Cost: £29.99 / $33.95 From: diceanddecks.com 1 Do you think you have what it takes to complete a successful trip to the Moon? Apollo invites groups of two to five players to pretend they are working on a Gemini or Apollo mission to space. The objective is to collectively complete the trip. You can either play as Mission Control or as an astronaut, tackling issues as they arise in this dice and card game. The manufacturer, Buffalo Games, says the average playtime is 30 to 60 minutes. The game contains 200 cards with over 400 questions, a timer to regulate turns and…