Table of contents for No. 142 in All About Space

SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER It’s said that the very first supernova was recorded in 4500 BCE – give or take 1,000 years – by Indian astronomers. The stellar explosion, which has been dubbed HB9, would mark one of the very first events to cause humankind to look to the heavens, wondering – and then likely investigating – what lay beyond the confines of planet Earth. This issue, you’ll discover where we’re at in our understanding of supernovae. Our experts have details of what causes them, how they can give rise to life and what stellar candidates are next to end their lives in our corner of the universe. And that’s not all… we’ll reveal the pieces of information astrophysicists are just itching to find out. The summer…

This image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the arms of barred spiral galaxy NGC 1433 teeming with young stars that can be seen affecting the clouds of gas and dust around them. The snap was taken as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) collaboration, of which more than 100 researchers around the world are a part. One of Webb's first science programs is to image 19 spiral galaxies for PHANGS with its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), capable of seeing through gas and dust clouds that are impenetrable with other types of imaging. “The PHANGS team has spent years observing these galaxies at optical, radio and ultraviolet wavelengths using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array and the Very Large Telescope's Multi…

Two of Uranus’ moons may have active oceans that are pumping material into space. The realisation that there may be more happening in the Uranus system than previously thought came via the discovery of strange features in radiation data collected by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft as it passed the planet almost four decades ago. The new findings, concerning the moons Ariel and Miranda, also support the idea that Uranus’ five largest satellites could have subsurface oceans. The study team examined radiation and magnetic data collected by the spacecraft in 1986, long before it made its way out of the Solar System. The newly reported observations of Voyager 2 showed that one or two of the ice giant’s 27 known moons are adding plasma particles into the Uranus system. This detection…

13D printer The SpiderFab’s ability to print parts is crucial for saving space and weight during the launch of the device. 2 3D vision Cameras on each arm give the SpiderFab a full range of vision, enabling it to see exactly what it’s doing and reducing the chance of errors. 3 Spinneret This is the part of the machine where structural elements such as pipes and tubes are created before being cut to the correct size. 4 3D-printing tool Tiny pen-like systems on the ends of each arm are able to create joints from the printing material, further reducing the amount of products built back on Earth. 5 Arms SpiderFab’s arms perform the manual tasks of putting the constructions together, with submillimetre precision ensuring minute accuracy. 6 Gravity-free Another key…

One day there will be museums on the Moon and Mars, where visitors will be able to see the O probes, landers and rovers that explored them back in the 20th century. But today our own planet has many out-ofthis-world attractions. Just like the universe itself, the world is full of hidden astronomical wonders that deserve exploration. Catching some Sun on a beach is fine, and so is a shopping trip or visit to the theatre during a city break, but for a change, how about a day out where you can learn more about space, space exploration and astronomy? For anyone wanting to know more about the night sky, there are some wonderful planetariums. Most hold seasonal shows with special themes, and now their projection systems are so technologically…

Jupiter upiter is by far the largest planet in the Solar System, containing more than twice as much mass as the rest of the planets J put together. As such, its influence on the dynamics of the Solar System is second only to the Sun itself, and it’s often said that Jupiter is the planetary ‘protector’ of Earth. But is that true, and if so, how does it work? To start with, Jupiter isn’t really that close to us. The distance from Earth to the Sun is one astronomical unit (AU), while that between the Sun and Jupiter is much bigger at around 5.2 AU. This means that Jupiter never gets closer to us than 4.2 AU, and it’s often much further away than that. And as big as Jupiter…

1 Liquid water Enceladus has a large volume of liquid salty water beneath its crust, and it's only a few kilometres from the surface. Recently, scientists have discovered an ice variant called medium-density amorphous ice that's almost as dense as water – perhaps this makes up the ocean. 2 Creatingcurrents Enceladus is subjected to the strong gravity of Saturn, and it puts the moon's liquid water under pressure. Internal heating generates vertical convection currents and causes the water to fill cracks in the ice layer. 3 Tiger stripes There are four sub-parallel linear depressions on the moon. These are in the south polar region. They allow the icy particles to continue upwards and out. The surrounding ridges are covered in coarse-grained crystalline water ice. Finegrained water ice is found elsewhere…

We have already learned so much from meteorite analysis. Meteorites bombard us every day, and we’ve collected thousands of meteorites on Earth. People spend time studying meteorites in every single detail in laboratories, and they’re available in a much larger amount – not just tiny specks, but large rocks of meteorites – so you’ve got a lot more material to study. If you want to look at things like water and organics, it’s better to have a lot more organic material to study, because they don’t really come in large amounts, so you usually need to concentrate on them to be able to study them. We have learnt so much about organics and water from meteorite studies in the past, but there is one problem – all meteorites are recovered…

It seems almost impossible to believe it was so long ago, but as this summer rolls around, it will be 54 years since the first humans walked on the Moon. Over half a century ago in July 1969, with the world watching and with their crewmate Michael Collins orbiting the Moon high above them, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin skilfully guided the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, Eagle, down to the surface of the Moon. After a tense few last moments of flying low over a boulder field in search of a safe landing site, they finally set their spindly looking spacecraft down near the southern ‘shore’ of one of the Moon’s mare, or seas, which are not seas like those we have here on Earth, but are vast plains of…

Born in Hanover, Germany, in 1738, in 1759 Herschel left Germany for England, where he taught music before becoming an organist. On 13 March 1781, Herschel noticed a small object that, over the course of several nights, was slowly moving across the sky. At first he thought he had discovered a comet, but further observations revealed that the object was a planet. Herschel lobbied to name the new body ‘Georgium Sidus’, after King George III, but it was eventually named Uranus after the Greek god of the sky. As a result of his discovery, the monarch knighted Herschel and appointed him to the position of court astronomer. The attached pension allowed him to conclude his musical career and focus his full attention on the skies. When Herschel was subsequently elected…

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found rocks imprinted with tiny ripples from an ancient lake. They’re the clearest evidence yet that water once existed on Mars. The ripple marks were discovered frozen in Martian rock on the slopes of Mount Sharp. Though Curiosity has traversed many rock deposits laid down in ancient lakes, scientists hadn’t seen such vivid marks in the rocks before. “This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. “We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this, and now we’ve found it in a place we expected to be dry.” Since last autumn the rover has been exploring a region of what scientists…

A fresh asteroid-strike study is generating controversy among scientists. A NASA-funded study A presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference suggests that big asteroids hit Earth more often than previously thought, based on satellite data. But not everyone agrees with the interpretation, according to the journal Science, which says more fieldwork is needed to confirm the data. The study was led by James Garvin, chief scientist of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and used high-resolution data from several Earth-observing satellites to examine three impact craters. Garvin’s team suggests that large rings are visible in the data, showing that the craters are tens of miles wider than previously measured. That size adjustment implies that the impacts were far more powerful than previously catalogued. “It would be in the…

A new study of red dwarf stars has revealed that even the quietest examples of this stellar class are more active and wild than the Sun. Red dwarfs, officially known as ‘M dwarfs’ by astronomers, are the most common stars in the Milky Way and can remain placid for long periods of time before erupting with huge superflares. These flares have previously been measured to be 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than similar flares from the Sun, with young red dwarfs being particularly tumultuous. These outbursts, as well as eruptions of scorching-hot plasma known as coronal mass ejections (CMES), can be incredibly destructive to planets orbiting red dwarfs, stripping their atmospheres and emitting enough radiation to boil away liquid water even in the so-called habitable zone around them –…

A stronomers have spotted not one but two dwarf galaxy black hole duos on separate collision courses, the first observational A evidence of such a cosmic clash. Just as the black holes are heading for a collision and merger that will leave a more massive black hole behind, the dwarf galaxies they sit in will also merge and form a larger galaxy. The findings could have important implications for our understanding of how these cosmic titans and the galaxies they inhabit grew in the early universe. Scientists examined the colliding black hole pairings using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and found that as the dwarf galaxies are racing towards each other, they are pulling in gas that is ‘feeding’ their inhabitant black holes, causing them to grow even before the merger.…

The effects of satellites on our view of the universe is getting worse. The findings may confirm the fears of astronomers who argue that satellite constellations such as SpaceX’s fleet of over 4,000 Starlink spacecraft stand to severely impact astronomy. These fears were initially confined to astronomers working with ground-based observatories, but as humanity’s exploitation of the space around our planet has burgeoned and plans for so-called ‘megaconstellations’ of satellites have progressed, those concerns have spread to colleagues working with space-based instruments. A team of researchers, including over 11,000 citizen scientists from the Hubble Asteroid Hunter project, scoured through images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2021. The team found that 2.7 per cent of Hubble’s images, with a typical exposure time of 11 minutes, were crossed…

A new study has revealed that forms of oxygen created by living organisms can be found in space around our planet, hinting A at a potential new method for tracing life on other habitable planets in our galaxy. The discovery was made by NASA’s now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a flying telescope mounted on an adapted Boeing 747. A recently published study describes how researchers used the telescope, which is sensitive to warmthcarrying infrared wavelengths of light, to detect so-called heavy atomic oxygen in the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere – the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. Heavy oxygen is a form of oxygen that has ten neutrons in its nucleus, compared to the eight seen in the most widespread form of oxygen present in the air around our…

“Planet Nine makes us look much more like the rest of the galaxy” The Solar System has always seemed to be an oddball, and we haven’t found anything quite like it. What’s interesting is that we always say the most common type of planet in the entire galaxy is one somewhere between the mass of Earth and the mass of Neptune, but isn’t it strange that we don’t have anything like that in the Solar System? Now it looks like we do. Another thing is that most planets in the galaxy are on eccentric orbits, and all of our planets are on these circular orbits. Suddenly, Planet Nine makes us look much more like the rest of the galaxy. One of the big implications, for me, is that by finding…

When you venture on a spacewalk, you know that you’re doing the highest risk element of any mission in space, but probably the last thing you’d expect to happen is to drown. This actually nearly happened to my Italian classmate Luca Parmitano back in 2013. He was on his first spacewalk and he felt water coming into his helmet. Mission Control thought it must be coming from his drink bag, so they said “Luca, just drink it; the bag must be leaking,” which he did. The water feels very cold, and the drink bag’s now empty and there is still water coming in. They realised they had to get Luca back in a hurry, and by the time Luca got back to the airlock, the water had come completely over…

1 Denebola (Beta Leonis) Second-magnitude Denebola is 36 light years away and shines a bright white. Like Regulus, its rapid rotation flattens its poles. It’s a young star, perhaps just 400 million years old, and is surrounded by a disc of dust – asolar system in the making. 2 Messier 95 Spiral galaxy Messier 95 is 32 million light years away from us. At magnitude +9.7, it’s so faint you’ll need binoculars to see it as a small, round smudge. Long-exposure photographs show its beautiful curved spiral arms and central bar. It’s around 70,000 light years across. 3 Regulus (Alpha Leonis) Shining on the end of the ‘Sickle’ asterism, magnitude +1.4 Regulus is Leo’s brightest star, but only the 21st-brightest star in the sky. Over 70 light years away, it’s…

BINOCULAR ADVICE Cost: £209 / $189.95 Magnification: 8x Objective lens diameter: 42mm Angular field of view: 6.8 degrees Eye relief: 20mm Weight: 618 grams ADDITIONAL KIT • Carrying case • Objective lens caps • Neck strap • Double eyepiece cover Nikon’s Prostaff P7 8x42 is a lightweight and affordable alternative to its P3 binoculars. When asked for the perfect binoculars for stargazing, astronomers often cite those with a magnification of at least 10x50. This makes perfect sense – the 10x magnification and 50mm aperture is an ideal combination of power and lightgathering ability. Sometimes the insistence on 10x50s can blind would-be users to the ability of smaller 8x42 instruments: with an 8x magnification and 42mm aperture, this stargazing aid can present wide starstrewn fields. But does Nikon’s Prostaff P7 8x42…

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a dazzling new view of two tempestuous young stars in the nearby Orion Nebula. A bright variable star known as V 372 Orionis is the larger central star surrounded by hazy blue clouds in the recent Hubble photo, while its companion star can be seen to the upper left. These stars reside in the Orion Nebula, a region of stellar formation located around 1,450 light years away from Earth. “V 372 Orionis is a particular type of variable star known as an Orion variable. These young stars experience some tempestuous moods and growing pains, which are visible to astronomers as irregular variations in luminosity,” European Space Agency (ESA) officials said. "Orion variables are often associated with diffuse nebulae, and V 372 Orionis is no exception…

Global sea levels rose more slowly in 2022 than models predicted. But there’s no reason to celebrate, at least according to NASA. The minor deviation from a decades-long trend was caused by the cooling effects of the La Niña climate pattern, and we are no doubt set to see faster sea level rise again in the coming years. Between 2021 and 2022, global oceans absorbed the equivalent of a million Olympic-sized swimming pools of water, which added 0.27 centimetres (0.11 inches) to average global sea levels. This increase is 0.17 centimetres (0.05 inches) lower than the projected 0.44-centimetre (0.17-inch) rise that scientists expected last year. Despite such fluctuations, 30 years’ worth of satellite measurements reveal a trend of sea level rise acceleration that’s only expected to speed up. While in…

• THE TITANIC ERUPTIONS THAT GIVE RISE TO LIFE • OUR STELLAR NEIGHBOURS DUE TO EXPLODE “NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THIS EXPLOSION IS” Place your fingers on your wrist and check your pulse. You can feel the blood P pumping around your body, delivering oxygen from your head to your toes. That oxygen is ferried around by trillions of red blood cells, each just 0.008 millimetres across. The element iron plays an indispensable role in this oxygen delivery, but the universe would contain very little iron if it weren’t for a ferocious type of exploding dying star called a supernova. Without supernovae, you simply wouldn’t exist. We often think of the Sun as the quintessential star, but it’s not massive enough to go supernova when it dies. According to Dr…

A small radio telescope on the far side of the Moon could help scientists peer into the universe’s ancient past. The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) is a pathfinder being developed by the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. LuSEE-Night is scheduled to launch on a private lunar lander in late 2025. After it touches down on the Moon’s far side, it will attempt to gather first-of-theirkind measurements from the Dark Ages of the universe. This refers to a time in the early universe before stars and galaxies began to fully form. From the far side of the Moon, LuSEE-Night will use onboard antennae, radio receivers and a spectrometer to measure…

Saturn’s rings have become a graphic shorthand for planets, with logos to bed covers to stickers all featuring ringed planets. But Saturn is not alone in possessing a planetary ring system, with four planets and two dwarf planets in the Solar System alone also boasting rings. Planetary rings are made up of lumps of dust and ice orbiting their parent body like billions of tiny moons. It’s theorised that they’re made of debris left behind from the formation of the planet, from the collision and destruction of moons or from a moon that got too close to the planet and was pulled apart by tidal forces. Saturn’s rings are the most famous in the Solar System and were a source of great puzzlement when Galileo Galilei first trained a telescope…

Enceladus was once considered to be of little interest to astronomers. As one of 83 known moons of Saturn and just 500 E kilometres (310 miles) in diameter, this cold, tiny world orbiting its gas giant host every 33 hours was largely overlooked as time-pressured astronomers focused their attention on other celestial bodies. It’s hard to blame them for doing so. Enceladus, discovered by William Herschel in 1789, had been visited by the two Voyager spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, in 1980 and 1981. Those flybys got as close as 90,000 kilometres (56,000 miles) from the moon’s surface, but they didn’t appear to find anything remarkable. Instead it seemed as though Enceladus was simply frigid and inactive – asmall stark-white dot covered in water ice reflecting all of the…

I discovered Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard – also known to the world as Comet Leonard – on the morning of 3 January 2021. It was a serendipitous, or incidental, discovery in one of our standard survey fields, looking for near-Earth asteroids. We do occasionally stumble into unknown comets, and that's exactly what Comet Leonard was. I saw the object not as a point or star-like object, like most asteroids would appear to us. This one had the telltale fuzzy coma that comets have – the coma is that thin, tenuous atmosphere that forms around the nucleus of a comet when it gets close enough to the Sun to excite and sublimate, or boil off, the ices that the comet is made of. In addition to seeing that thin coma, or…

If wormholes exist, they could magnify the light of distant objects by up to 100,000 times, and that could be the key to finding them. Wormholes are theoretical funnelshaped portals through which matter – or perhaps spacecraft – could travel great distances. To imagine a wormhole, suppose all of the universe were a sheet of paper. If your starting point were a dot at the top of the sheet and your destination were a dot on the bottom of the sheet, the wormhole would appear if you folded that sheet of paper so that the two dots met. You could traverse the entire sheet in an instant, rather than travelling the entire length of the sheet. Wormholes have never been proven to exist, but physicists have nonetheless spent decades theorising…

Veenus is the brightest planet on view this month. There are some interesting things going on around it, but the other planets are all much more poorly placed and harder to see. Venus is known by many people as the ‘evening star’, but it can also shine before dawn. It’s often called ‘Earth’s twin’, but that’s a very inaccurate label: it is a hellish planet with crushing atmospheric pressures, lethal surface temperatures and a sky so thick with curdled carbon dioxide clouds that its rocky, fractured surface is never bathed in sunlight. It’s ironic that it’s named after the goddess of love because it shines so beautifully in our sky. At the start of our observing period Venus will be a beautiful ‘evening star’, visible as a silvery spark in…