Table of contents for No. 151 in All About Space

SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLET TER We’re now on the other side of Christmas, and I’m keen to hear if any of you received a telescope – or any other observing kit – during the holiday season. But whether you did or not, I hope you’ll make attending a star party a 2024 resolution as we head into a sparkling new year, and make sure to share your tips and tricks in getting the very best views of the night sky with other keen skywatchers. If you didn’t get the chance to make the most of our Christmas offer on a subscription to the magazine, then we have extended the deadline so you have another opportunity to save on getting All About Space delivered directly to your door…

Behold a region of intense star formation, partially hidden by thick dust, just 300 light years from the supermassive black hole sitting at the centre of our galaxy. The scene was imaged in all its spectacular glory by none other than the James Webb Space Telescope. This star-forming region, known as Sagittarius C, exhibits 500,000 stars strewn like glitter across a blueish glowing backdrop. This star-spattered sight owes itself to the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and involves members of a dense cluster of baby stars, or protostars, visible just left of centre. Within this cluster also lies a burgeoning star that has already assembled a mass 30 times greater than our Sun’s, yet is still growing. For this star, it will be a short life. In…

Chinese scientists have constructed a numerical model to simulate the Martian atmosphere and assist the country’s plans to collect rock samples from the Red Planet. The model replicates the cycles of dust, water and carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere. It will be used to simulate meteorological conditions for landing spacecraft, including surface temperature, wind and dust. China plans to launch its Tianwen-3 Mars sample-return mission between 2028 and 2030. A lander will collect up to 500 grams of Martian material using a drill and a robotic arm. An ascent vehicle will then blast the precious cargo back into Mars orbit to meet up with an awaiting orbiter for the long journey home. The new atmospheric model “can simulate the temperatures of the landing zone, and scientists can use this data…

The deeper we look into space, the further back in time we see. Light emanating from some of the younger galaxies in our universe has to travel for billions of years to reach us, getting picked up by our instruments rich with information from the cosmic dawn. And not only can this light tell us where we have come from, but where we might be headed. To understand the evolution of several of these early universe ‘teenage’ galaxies, a Northwestern Universityled team of astrophysicists have inspected data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which gazed back to realms that formed just 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The observations have thrown up some intriguing surprises. Specifically, the team analysed results from the Chemical Evolution Constrained using Ionized…

For quite a while, an asteroid named Phaethon has presented astronomers with something of F a conundrum. When it passes close to the Sun during its orbit, a long tail of material can be seen leaving the rock. However, if Phaethon’s tail is the stuff of usual comets – ice and carbon dioxide – then it should be visible when the comet is as far away as Jupiter, too. But it’s not. Scientists have therefore had some theories about what Phaethon might be composed of, which could explain what trails behind when the asteroid passes by the Sun. In new research, astronomers have compared the infrared emissions of Phaethon analysed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to emissions of meteorites in laboratories, ultimately finding that Phaethon likely belongs to a rare…

1 Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris) Also known as the ‘Pole Star’, Polaris is the star everything else in the northern sky appears to wheel around as the Earth turns. With a magnitude of +1.97, it’s fainter than many people think, but it stands out because there are few other bright stars close to it in the sky. 2 Bode’s Galaxy (Messier 81) Messier 81 is a beautiful spiral galaxy more than 12 million light years away from us. At magnitude +6.9 it’s too faint for the eye to see, but can be seen as a tiny, misty oval through good binoculars on a dark night. 3 Merak (Beta Ursae Majoris) and Dubhe (Alpha Ursae Majoris) This close pair of bright, blue-white stars in the bowl of the Big Dipper is…

The Hubble Space Telescope snapped a new view of a hazy spiral galaxy that once hosted a supernova explosion. The galaxy, formally known as NGC 941, lies about 55 million light years from Earth. Its spiral arms are bright but not very well defined, swirling outwards from a bright core into a faint halo of dimmer gas. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) observed the remnants of a stellar explosion within the galaxy. When some stars reach the end of their lives, they explode in a brilliant burst called a supernova, which can briefly outshine the entire galaxy in which it sits. This particular supernova, known as SN 2005ad, has since faded, leaving behind seeds for future star formation. Hubble’s view captures the galaxy face-on, showcasing the realm’s spiral structure…

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUpiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is heading back to Earth – for the time being, anyway. The spacecraft launched from French Guiana on 23 April 2023 and is ultimately bound for Jupiter to study the planet and three of its icy moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. But in order to get there, it needs to perform a series of gravity assists, flying past the planets of the inner Solar System and using their gravitational tides to slingshot itself towards its target – a technique that saves overall fuel. A 43-minute burn was performed on 17 November as one of two necessary to put JUICE on the right trajectory for the Earth-Moon gravity assist – the first in the series of assists, which will occur in…

A few years ago, astronomers saw for the first time a patch of cosmic darkness long thought to be unseeable – a black hole, a powerful, elusive beast so dense that not even light can escape its gravity. Black holes are known to gobble up anything and everything that ventures close to them – gas, stars, planets and even fellow black holes. But this fuzzy, doughnut-like black hole in the galaxy Messier 87 is slowly breaking black hole stereotypes. For one, it appears to be giving back to the universe by losing energy. Two months ago, this particular supermassive black hole, roughly 55 million light years from Earth, known as Messier 87*, was studied using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which combines data from multiple radio telescopes worldwide to make…

A fresh analysis of Moon rocks brought home during the Apollo missions has revealed the presence of hydrogen. This finding suggests future astronauts could someday use water available right on the Moon for life support and rocket fuel. Researchers with the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), to whom NASA provided the lunar samples for a research study, announced last week that they discovered hydrogen in lunar soil sample 79221. The detected hydrogen is thought to have been brought into existence by incessant showers of solar wind, and even comet strikes, on the Moon. “Hydrogen has the potential to be a resource that can be used directly on the lunar surface when there are more regular or permanent installations there,” study lead author Katherine Burgess, a geologist at NRL, said. “Locating…

Some star systems believed to host two stellar bodies may actually have a hidden third – a traitorous star that could help S push one of its sparkling companions towards the other as the latter feasts on its victim like a vampire. Such is a discovery made by University of Leeds scientists analysing data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission, which pinpoints the positions of a billion stars throughout the Milky Way. The revelation could transform our understanding of how the most massive stars in the cosmos evolve. These so-called vampire stars, more officially known as ‘Be’ stars, are characteristically surrounded by rings of superheated gas. They’re a subcategory of B stars, which are extremely bright and between 2 and 16 times more massive than the Sun. Yet…

Over the years, scientists have unveiled the existence of quite a few intriguing particles, pushing O the entire field of physics forward with each discovery. There’s the ‘God particle’, for instance – the Higgs boson that grants all other particles their masses. There’s also the so-called ‘Oh-My-God’ particle, an unimaginably energetic cosmic ray. But now we have a new particle. It’s named the Amaterasu particle, and is fittingly extraordinary. This particle has an energy level a million times greater than what can be generated in even humanity’s most powerful particle accelerators. It appears to have fallen to Earth in a shower of other, less energetic particles. Like the ‘Oh-My-God’ particle, these bits come from faraway regions of space and are known as cosmic rays. The particle has been dubbed ‘Amaterasu’…

Supermassive black holes range from hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our S Sun, and they’re thought to be at the centre of almost every large galaxy in the universe. But while scientists know plenty about them despite having only confirmed a handful, quite how they were formed remains something of a mystery. They puzzle astronomers because some of them are known to have formed very early in the universe’s life. While most black holes are created out of the remnants of a large star dying in a supernova explosion when it reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity, this doesn’t explain how supermassive black holes emerged less than 700 million years after the Big Bang – and how they became…

What would it be like to fall through the clouds of our Solar System’s ice giants, Uranus or Neptune? No one truly knows – but we W might be close to finding out. We have landed on, crashed into or descended into the clouds of all of the planets in the Solar System except for two: Uranus and Neptune. The farthest planets from the Sun, these worlds are still shrouded in a certain degree of mystery. This may soon change, however. Both NASA, in the 2023 to 2032 Planetary Sciences Decadal Survey, and the European Space Agency (ESA), in the Voyage 2050 program, have stated that a visit to these outer planets is a high priority. To that end, simulated probes can help us understand what descending into the clouds…

A very surprising number of skywatchers, even experienced amateur astronomers, have never seen Mercury. But why?With a maximum magnitude of -1.9, it’s far brighter than the brightest star in the sky, so it should be really obvious to the naked eye. The problem is its proximity to the Sun.Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, so close that it takes only 88 days to whip once around it, which means it never strays far from the Sun in the sky. Because of its tight orbit, we never see Mercury in a dark sky like we do with Venus and every other planet. We can only see Mercury low in the sky just before sunrise or just after sunset, when the sky isn’t properly dark. We only ever see Mercury…

This stunning spiral isn’t a gateway to the abyss. It’s the galaxy Messier 83 as seen through the eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. More specifically, the observatory captured this image by tapping into one of its powerful infrared devices, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Also known as NGC 5236, Messier 83 is a barredspiral galaxy located about 15 million light years from us. It’s of particular interest to astronomers trying to learn more about star formation. The James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI is astronomers’ current tool of choice in that quest because, as its name suggests, it observes the universe through infrared wavelengths between 5,000 and 28,000 nanometers. By comparison, visible light, or the light human eyes are built to see, has wavelengths between 380 and 750 nanometers. In…

KEEP IN TOUCH /AllAboutSpaceMagazine @spaceanswers space@spaceanswers.com Microscopic metallic spheres recovered from the Pacific Ocean are likely the result of humanmade industrial pollution, rather M than pieces of an interstellar meteor. Last summer, Harvard astrophysicist and extraterrestrial hunter Avi Loeb declared that several tiny, metallic balls dredged up from the bottom of the ocean were likely remnants from an interstellar meteorite, and could even contain signatures of alien technology. Now, independent analysis suggests the spheres have a much less distant origin – they are more likely a byproduct of burning coal on Earth. Loeb and his colleagues found the micrometre-sized spherules during an expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea in search of fragments of a meteor that streaked through the atmosphere in 2014. Based on the meteor’s recorded speed,…

Venus has recently become a serious consideration for a potential manned mission – since it’s the closest planet, the journey would take less time, and there are more orbital windows of opportunity to go there. It has 81.5 per cent of Earth’s mass – versus 10.7 per cent for Mars – and its atmosphere would provide as much protection against radiation as Earth’s. But that atmosphere is also the reason no one has thought about going to Venus in a long time. Venus’ atmosphere is 96 per cent carbon dioxide (CO2 ), and because CO2 traps heat from the Sun like a greenhouse, Venus’ surface has an average temperature of 464 degrees Celsius (867.2 degrees Fahrenheit), which is hot enough to melt lead. Also, because CO2 is much denser…

If we could somehow glance down at the entire Milky Way, our home galaxy would look like a spinning pinwheel. In it, some 100 I billion stars are sprinkled across 100,000 light years, accompanied by unfathomable amounts of gas and dust. Together, these galactic components swirl around in a stellar disc, spilling into four giant spiral arms emanating from the galaxy’s blinding centre, the home of a supermassive black hole. We’ve come to really identify our galaxy with its spiral structure, although its exact number of galactic arms is still being debated. Yet astronomers have long puzzled over why spiral galaxies such as ours appear to be strikingly scarce in our crowded pocket of the universe. The pancake-like supergalactic plane in which the Milky Way is embedded, spanning 1.4 billion…

If we only relied on our eyes, we would be blind to most of what the universe has to offer. There would be so much that we I would completely miss, from the explosive nature of gamma-ray bursts to the dusty skeletons of galaxies and even the radiation left behind by the Big Bang. This is because the universe emits light that goes well and truly beyond what our eyes alone can see. Visible light, which is the light that we see making up our everyday surroundings, is just one small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This runs all the way from low-energy radio waves through to astonishingly high-energy gamma rays. Human eyes are unable to see anything that’s outside of the visible part of the spectrum, so you might…

The more we learn about our climate, the better equipped we become in addressing the factors harming it. In July 2022, T NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) instrument was launched to map ten key minerals in some of the world’s most arid regions and how lofted dust in those areas affects our climate. However, in brand-new research, data from the instrument has been used to identify over 750 point-source emissions of greenhouse gases, including sources of methane from landfills, agricultural sites and oil and gas facilities. While the detection of greenhouse gases like methane was not part of EMIT’s primary mission, the imaging spectrometer on board the International Space Station (ISS) has proven to have such capacity. “We were a little cautious at first about what we…

Astronomy can be a very lonely and antisocial hobby. Even if you’re a stargazer from a town or a city with an astronomical society and regularly attend meetings and observing nights, you’ll still spend a lot of time on your own, standing in the dark, looking at the night sky with just a radio or the cows in the next field for company. Some people like it that way. In fact, they prefer being a solo astronomer to being in a group. For them, a huge part of the appeal of the hobby is the opportunity to have precious time on their own, far away from the noise and hubbub of everyday life. They relish their special nights out in the dark, with no one and nothing to disturb them,…

TOP TIP! As with all features on the Moon, your best views of Schiller will be on evenings when it is close to the terminator and illuminated from a low angle. Ask someone to draw a picture of the Moon with craters, and those craters will likely be round. That’s also how we see the Moon’s largest craters through binoculars and telescopes – round holes blasted out of its rocky surface millions or even billions of years ago by chunks of space rock. An internet search for ‘lunar craters’ will quickly fill your screen with stunning photos of the Moon’s rugged surface pockmarked and scattershot with round craters. But dig a little deeper, straying from the well-trodden tourist path that takes in all the famous craters, and you’ll find a…

Winter offers a selection of targets not just for the beginner to whet their stargazing appetite, but for seasoned skywatchers to get truly stuck into a tour of the heavens. W Mid-January through to February offers a selection of star clusters, galaxies and nebulae for those armed with or without an optical aid. These views compliment the readily available planets, which observers will see make their grand appearances at dusk and dawn throughout the coming weeks. A selection of galaxies, including the Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82) bursting with star formation in the constellation of Ursa Major, as well as Messier 106, Messier 94 and Messier 63 in Canes Venatici, and the star clusters of Gemini, Orion and Perseus, are also viewing delights. Using the sky chart This chart is for…