Table of contents for No. 144 in All About Space

ISSUE 144 SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER Everywhere you look, whether it’s on our sister website Space.com, recent copies of All About Space, or on social media and other news outlets, the search for extraterrestrial life is a hot topic of discussion. In fact, it has been since I started out as a journalist in 2010. The major difference is that we have advanced somewhat in our hunt for organisms. That’s something that has been echoed by one of my favourite comedians and physicist Ben Miller, famously known as one-half of comedy duo Armstrong and Miller, in this month’s interview. Turn to page 24 for a thought-provoking read. Also this month, we head over to the mysteriously known “Object X”, a star (or so we think!) in the…

A moon of Mars showed off its pockmarked face in an unprecedented close-up view. Deimos, one of the small moons of Mars, was imaged by the Hope Mars mission from as close as 100 kilometres (60 miles) – the closest look yet. “These images and observations represent a significant step forward in our knowledge of Deimos, its atmosphere, composition, origins and what this means for our understanding of Mars more broadly,” United Arab Emirates Space Agency officials said. For example, the spacecraft’s observations of the composition of Deimos suggest the moon came from Mars itself, which is another step forward in resolving a long-standing debate about its origins. Previous studies suggested the moons’ compositions could be similar to asteroids or dwarf planets, being made up of carbonaceous chondrites. Primitive meteorites…

Astronomers have spotted two super-Earth exoplanets orbiting within the habitable zone of a nearby star. Each of the newfound worlds is slightly larger than our planet, with both circling the same red dwarf. The exoplanets were spotted by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) as they crossed, or “transited”, the face of their parent star, TOI-2095, which lies around 137 light years from our Solar System. This transit caused dips in the light from the star, and analysing those dips revealed the presence, as well as some characteristics, of the two planets. As a red dwarf, TOI-2095 is part of the largest family of stars in the universe. Despite being cooler than the Sun, red dwarfs are known to experience violent outbursts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation in their youth.…

The shimmering northern lights, or aurora borealis, are a natural light show that occurs in a loop around the poles. The southern version is known as aurora australis. Aurorae occur when charged particles emanating from the Sun in the solar wind crash into the upper atmosphere. A mixture of electrons, protons and helium nuclei, they lose energy as they collide with atmospheric gas molecules. These molecules become ionised, meaning some of their electrons are pulled away, and the gases form a glowing plasma. The gas mix governs the colours we see. Red is generated by low concentrations of oxygen at high altitudes. This changes to green as oxygen density increases, with blue generated by nitrogen. Pink, yellow and orange have all been observed, presumably due to the layering of different…

Water covers 71 per cent of the surface of Earth, and most of it – some 96.5 per cent – is contained within our planet’s oceans. W The remaining 3.5 per cent is freshwater and therefore drinkable, but most of that – 68 per cent – is sealed within glaciers and ice. Such statistics are well known and equally well trodden, but they’re intriguing nonetheless. After all, Earth is something of an anomaly, given that it’s the only world in our Solar System with extensive, consistent and stable regions of liquid water at the surface – and no one knows exactly how this came to be. To understand the mystery of Earth’s water, you need to take into account the Solar System’s snow line – the distance from the Sun…

America had been working with the Russians during the Skylab missions [in the early Seventies] and they visited our control centre, so I knew we were working on a joint mission with the Soviets. It was kind of funny, having been a soldier of the Cold War to then be involved with Russia at that time in 1975 [the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project]. I can recall on May Day [1 May] standing beside Lenin’s tomb with Brezhnev watching the May Day Parade, and I thought, “Boy, how did we get here?’. But you know, working with the cosmonauts was great. We were the first ones to ever go to their launch site, and some pilots the world over became very good friends with some of the cosmonauts.…

17 JUNE Saturn enters retrograde motion, shining at magnitude +0.7 in Aquarius 18 JUNE Open cluster IC 4665 is well placed for observation in Ophiuchus 21 JUNE June solstice 22 JUNE The Moon and Mars make a close approach, passing within 3°34’ of each other in Leo 27JUNE The June Bootid meteor shower reaches its peak 30 JUNE Neptune enters retrograde motion, glowing at magnitude +7.9 in Pisces 30 JUNE The Moon passes in front of the star a (Dschubba), creating a lunar occultation 1 JULY Mars and Venus make a close approach, passing within 3°33’ of each other in Leo Red-light friendly In order to preserve your night vision, you should read our observing guide under red light 22 JUNE The Moon and Venus make a close approach, passing…

1 Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (Messier 13) Glowing at a magnitude of +5.8 and just about visible to the naked eye under excellent conditions, this stunning star cluster looks superb in binoculars with a magnitude of at least 10x50, where it appears more like a bright ball of unresolved stars. 2 Summer Beehive Cluster (IC 4665) Just visible to the naked eye from very dark sites, this open cluster can be found in Ophiuchus. If you’re looking to catch its member stars more closely, you’ll need binoculars with a magnification of at least 10x50. 3 Corona Borealis A small constellation with only a handful of stars visible to the naked eye, many astronomers have been inspired by the shape of Corona Borealis, which gives it the uncanny appearance of…

Reviewed by Gemma Lavender BINOCULAR ADVICE Magnification: 8x Objective lens diameter: 25mm Angular field of view: 6.2 degrees Eye relief: 15mm Weight: 260 grams ADDITIONAL KIT • Carrying case • Objective lens caps • Neck strap • Double eyepiece cover Stylish and versatile, the Olympus 8x25 WP II binocular is built with the outdoor explorer in mind, featuring a nitrogenfilled fogproof and waterproof design that promises to breeze through even the most inclement weather. It is also lightweight and comfortable to hold thanks to a rubbercoated finish and weight of just 260 grams (9.2 oz). For even more ease of use while travelling, the Olympus 8x25 WP II can be folded away and slotted into the carry case. A neck strap is included for those needing to achieve magnified views…

A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows in stunning detail the wreckage of a cataclysmic supernova explosion. The supernova remnant, known as Cassiopeia A (Cas A), formed about 340 years ago from our perspective here on Earth. This makes the ten-light-year-wide Cas A one of the youngest clouds of supernova wreckage we know of. With images like this, scientists can perform ‘cosmic forensics’ to better understand what happens when stars die. Material expelled by supernovae such as this goes on to disperse throughout galaxies and becomes the building blocks for the next generation of stars and planets. Around 4.6 billion years ago, such a process helped forge the Sun and the planets of our own Solar System and paved the way for living things, supplying elements like…

KEEP IN TOUCH /AllAboutSpaceMagazine @spaceanswers space@spaceanswers.com Astronomers have discovered 62 new moons orbiting the ringed planet Saturn. The satellite haul brings the planet’s total A number of moons to over 100 and also means the gas giant takes back the crown as the Solar System’s “moon king” from Jupiter. Prior to this discovery, Saturn had 83 moons recognised by the International Astronomical Union, so the new batch brings the total number to 145. The discovery marks another milestone for Saturn, with the planet becoming the first world in the cosmos known to be orbited by more than 100 moons. The new moons were discovered by a team led by Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who used a technique called “shift and…

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is targeting seven different space rocks with its mission to the main asteroid belt. The mission was announced in 2021, but now a poster presented in June at the Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conference in Arizona has revealed the specific targets for the mission. “The mission will launch in 2028 and visit seven main belt asteroids, including six high-speed flyby encounters en route to a rendezvous with the asteroid 269 Justitia,” according to the document, which details the design of the mission. The targets include flybys of 10253 Westerwald, 623 Chimaera, 13294 Rockox, 88055, 23871, 59980 and a rendezvous of 269 Justitia. After rendezvousing with 269 Justitia, the spacecraft will deploy a lander for an attempt to set down on the surface. Notably, only NASA’s OSIRIS-REx…

The director of the Pentagon’s new UFO office shot down hopes that the buzz over unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) supports claims of extraterrestrial visitation. Sean M Kirkpatrick, the first director of the Pentagon’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), testified before the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services on 19 April. The hearing had two portions, one closed to the public and one open. During the open portion, Kirkpatrick stated that out of the hundreds of UAP cases his office has reviewed, “AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” The AARO director acknowledged that this conclusion might be “unsatisfying” to those who believe they have witnessed incontrovertible evidence of physics-defying craft. As Kirkpatrick stressed,…

Scientists studying data from China’s Zhurong rover have for the first time found cracked layers on tiny Martian dunes, implying that S the Red Planet was a salt-rich watery world as recently as 400,000 years ago. Since landing in Mars’ northern hemisphere in May 2021, the rover has rolled close to four nearby crescent-shaped dunes in the Utopia Planitia region to investigate their surface composition. All four of the miniature, wind-formed geological features are coated with thin, ubiquitously fractured crusts and ridges that formed thanks to melting small pockets of ‘modern water’ sometime between 1.4 million years and 400,000 years ago. “This means a more recent time in Martian history,” Xiaoguang Qin, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said. Scientists have long thought that Mars harboured…

MARTIAN MASK 25 July 1976 When NASA scientists were inspecting photos beamed back by Viking 1 and 2 in the 1970s, the last thing they expected to see was a stony face staring back at them. This twokilometre (1.2-mile) wide feature watched its observers from a region of Mars called Cydonia. Taking into account the low camera quality available in the 1970s, the face was quickly dismissed as a trick of the light by Viking project scientist Gerry Soffen and his colleagues. More recent visits by advanced spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed the mask-like structure to be a mesa, a flat-topped area of elevation which is common in the Cydonia region of Mars. Since the first ancient humans turned their gaze to the skies above, civilisations began…

1Neutron star After black holes, neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe – a single teaspoon can weigh billions of tons. 2Stellar black hole Many black holes are part of binary systems, closely orbiting another star and hurtling towards an eventual collision. 3 Shredding As the star is stretched, it starts to come apart, creating a vast smear. 4 Spaghettification The front edge of the star is closer to the centre of the black hole, and the gravitational pull is stronger, stretching it out into a wide arc as it spirals inwards. 5 Entering the disc As the dismantled star grows nearer to the event horizon, it starts to merge with the accretion disc. 6 Immense friction The particles in the disc rub against one another, releasing energy…

For hundreds of millions of years, many meteorites, asteroids and comets bombarded Earth. Life would not have formed in these early times because our planet was too hot and it would have been very dry, so there would have been no possibility. At around the same time that the rocks stopped falling, Earth started to cool down and the first signs of an ocean started to appear. We even have fossils that show evidence of life within a few hundred billions of years – that’s about the same time that life could have possibly occurred here. How life came to evolve on our planet is strong evidence that life can evolve elsewhere in the universe. Intelligent life – that’s us – has only really turned up quite recently. We ourselves…

Venus takes part in a striking conjunction this summer Venus is our planet of the month again because this is the last month when it will be dominating the sky. It’s been a striking sight in the evening sky for the past few months, but now it is edging back towards the Sun and will soon be lost from view, so it only seems fair to focus on it one last time before another planet takes its place here at the top of the page. At its best, Venus shines brighter than any other planet in the sky. It is Earth’s closest planetary neighbour, and because it is very similar in size to our own world it is often called ‘Earth’s Twin’. However, that is a very inaccurate comparison, because…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has turned its sharp eyes on a distant patch of sky made famous by its predecessor. A newly released Webb photo captures the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), a faraway region in the southern constellation Fornax (the Furnace). The HUDF has long been an extremely fertile hunting ground for astronomers, as it contains at least 10,000 galaxies dating back to just 800 million years after the Big Bang, providing a glimpse into how the very first galaxies may have formed. When NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed this pocket of the universe in late 2003, it clicked the first images of galaxies at the farthest distances ever known. At the time, Hubble’s representatives said this record was “unlikely to be surpassed” until Webb comes onto the…

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to stare through the dusty clouds of a distant star-forming galaxy to investigate its structure. They discovered the galaxy is in the midst of a starburst, an explosive surge in star formation possibly caused by a collision with another galaxy. Located around 12 billion light years away, the galaxy GN20 is one of the earliest active star-forming galaxies studied in detail thus far by astronomers. GN20 is located in a region of space called a galaxy overdensity or a protocluster. In these regions, galaxies will eventually group together to form a massive collection called a galactic cluster. The early galaxy, which was seen as it was when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was about 1.8 billion years old, is forming stars at…

We are used to the idea of hopping between planets or even star systems in fiction, but the real distances, even within our own Solar System, are difficult to comprehend. If we are to truly explore and settle in space we need a new form of propulsion, and a New Jersey-based company, Princeton Satellite Systems, has just received a NASA contract to work on the design of one: the Direct Fusion Drive (DFD). New Horizons was one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched, yet it took over nine years to reach Pluto. It pushed the limits of our capability and delivered its extraordinary data from a 400-kilogram (880-pound) craft with just 200 watts of power – that’s lighter than a grand piano and using less energy than a couple of light…

When 2,500 onlookers began to gather in Cornwall one calm Monday evening in January, nobody really expected the night to W end in failure. UK politicians were heralding the start of a new space era for Britain; those working at Spaceport Cornwall said it was transforming access to space across the world; and Dan Hart, CEO at Virgin Orbit, believed it would “soon establish the UK as the first nation with the capability to launch to orbit from western Europe.” But then the worst happened. The Start Me Up mission launched by Virgin Orbit from Spaceport Cornwall on 9 January 2023 initially appeared to have been successful. A modified Boeing 747 plane called Cosmic Girl took off horizontally with a LauncherOne rocket attached to its wing shortly after 10pm and…

Moonquakes may be smoothing out the surfaces of moons orbiting gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, new research M has revealed. The findings could solve a long-standing mystery regarding why many of these icy moons have such smooth terrain. Scientists have known for some time that some of the moons that orbit the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, the largest and second-largest planet in the Solar System respectively, are geologically active. This is the result of the massive gravitational influence of these planets that stretches and squeezes the moons orbiting them, triggering moonquakes that crack the moon’s crusts and icy surfaces. This new research implies these moonquakes can also trigger landslides that help create smooth terrains. The link between moonquakes and landslides indicates how the surfaces of these moons evolve.…

In the past few decades, we’ve grown used to the idea of exoplanets – distant worlds orbiting stars in alien solar systems. Some I of these planets are very different from our own – scorched gas giants skimming the surfaces of their stars or frozen balls of ice larger than Earth. But perhaps the strangest exoplanets are those that drift alone through the darkness of interstellar space, far from the heat and light of any star. Only a handful of these objects are known, but many billions of them could be scattered across our galaxy – estimates vary from at least a couple for each of the Milky Way’s 200-billionplus stars, up to an astonishing 100,000. Astronomers call these mysterious worlds interstellar or ‘rogue’ planets, but in order to understand…

As an astronaut, you get trained to do all kinds of things: learn to fly in a high-performance aeroplane, learn the systems of the Space Shuttle and the Space Station, and learn how to work as a team in simulations. You’re practising, practising and practising. My primary job on my missions was that I worked the [Canadarm] robot arms a little bit. However, my number one job in space ended up being the spacewalker. To do that, you piece together different experiences, including stuff in virtual reality, and we had lessons where we had to learn about the spacesuit and the techniques [we’d be employing in space] and so on. It all seemed to come together in our big pool, the neutral buoyancy laboratory. It’s 100 feet [30 metres] wide,…

The Moon has many ‘celebrity’ craters, like Copernicus, Tycho and Eratosthenes, which are big and bright enough to be obvious to the naked eye. However, these celebrities owe their fame to a stroke of good fortune: the bodies that blasted them out of the lunar surface millennia ago struck the face of the Moon pointing right at Earth. There are other craters that are just as big and interesting as Copernicus, but they are reduced to B- or C-list status because they were blasted out of areas not so well-placed for observation. Instead, we see them at an angle, foreshortened by the curve of the Moon’s limb. Langrenus is one such crater. A 137-kilometre (85-mile) wide, sixkilometre (3.7-mile) deep hole, punched into the Moon by a massive asteroid impact millennia…

There’s an impressive array of targets suitable for observers armed with binoculars, telescopes or for those who are just content with gazing upon the night T sky with the unaided eye. Galaxies and star clusters are abundant, but it’s the nebulae within constellations such as Cygnus and Lyra that are the objects to look to this month. The Ring Nebula (Messier 57), the Pelican Nebula (IC 5070 and IC 5067), planetary nebula NGC 7027, reflection nebula NGC 6914 and the “Blinking Planetary” NGC 6826 are particularly impressive, providing observing and imaging opportunities. Using the sky chart This chart is for use at 22:00 mid-month and is set for 52 degrees latitude. 1 Holdthe chart above your head with the bottom of the page in front of you. 2 Facesouth and…

Hansen was born on 27 January 1976, and grew up in two towns near London, Ontario, a city west of Toronto. His work in aerospace began at the tender age of 12 when he joined the 614 Royal Canadian Air Cadet Squadron of London. Hansen earned his Air Cadet glider wings at age 16 and then a year later, at age 17 in 1992, received his private pilot licence and was accepted to the Royal Military College Saint-Jean in Quebec. By 1994, thanks to “the discipline and self-confidence” Air Cadets gave Hansen, he was accepted for officer training in the Canadian Armed Forces. After completing basic training, Hansen began a four-year bachelor’s degree in space science at the Royal Military College. He completed CF-18 fighter pilot training in 2003. Hansen…