Table of contents for No. 83 in All About Space

How to punch a hole in a galaxy © NASA Overlaid onto an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxy AM 0644-741 is X-ray data taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Viewing the region’s X-ray emissions has revealed a hidden ring of black holes and neutron stars, represented by purple smudges. Although this ring can’t rule them all, the darkness has bound them. Astronomers theorise that this ring of dense stellar objects rose from an ancient collision between AM 0644-741 and a fellow galaxy. The gravitational attraction endured the formation of extremely massive stars, from which these dense objects can be formed.…

Underwater robots benefitting deep-space missions © Ocean Exploration Trust/Nautilus Live NASA is known for training its astronauts in underwater conditions as it provides a environment similar to the restricted movement an astronaut would experience in space. Now NASA are taking to the deep Pacific Ocean in order to improve the search for life in deep-space missions. The Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog, or SUBSEA, project is a collaborative effort between NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Ocean Exploration Trust and more. This project will drop two robotic explorers off the coast of Hawaii to explore the deep-sea environment near a volcano, which scientists believe will be similar to ocean worlds such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus.…

Collaborative effort for CubeSats © ESA/NASA Now Bhutan, South Asia, can be added to the ever-growing list of countries to have a satellite in space, as the three miniature CubeSats were recently launched from the International Space Station (ISS). Along with Malaysia and the Philippines, this trio of satellites represents the benefits of international cooperation and the desire to explore the harshest frontier. Originally the ISS was built as a collaborative effort between the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia and numerous European countries. Now, 20 years since its launch, the ISS has furthered the effort by offering the chance for other less-fortunate countries to have a taste of space exploration and reap its benefits.…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE SpaceX selects billionaire for mission to the Moon A Japanese entrepreneur is set to become the first passenger on board Elon Musk’s history-making rocket © SpaceX SpaceX is set to send a Japanese billionaire and eight artists on a pioneering ‘private passenger’ trip around the Moon in 2023. The rocket company’s founder, Elon Musk, announced that a 42-year-old entrepreneur, Yusaku Maezawa, had paid for the places in the hope of completing a week-long voyage, although the exact sums involved have not been revealed. The history-making trip will be made on board SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) and it is likely to be the first time humans will have visited the Moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. That voyage was manned…

Top-five discoveries 1. Finding the most distant galaxy cluster The galaxy cluster COSMOS-AzTEC3 was discovered and characterised by an assortment of ground- and space-based telescopes, one of which was the Spitzer Space Telescope. This collection of galactic monsters is located approximately 12.6 billion light years away, with scientists looking at this cluster just one billion years after the universe’s formation. With light travelling from such a distant source, the optical light is stretched and shifted into the infrared section of the electromagnetic spectrum. By observing the galaxy cluster in infrared, scientists are able to uncover previously unnoticed information. These results will hopefully fill in the blanks of galactic evolution by observing these early stages. 2. Discovering cosmic ‘buckyballs’ ‘Buckyballs’ are football- (soccer-ball) shaped structures of carbon that were first observed…

Exploration of Venus Humanity has sent spacecraft all over the Solar System, and Venus is no exception. Although it hasn’t had the attention of Mars, Venus has still had its share of spies. The first came in 1962 when Venus had its first visitor in the form of NASA’s Mariner 2 space probe. This was the first successful spacecraft to another planet, beating the Soviet Union’s Venera and Zond projects. However, the Soviets' Venera 7 became the first spacecraft ever to transmit data from the surface of Venus – for a total of 23 minutes. Venera 7 revealed the planet’s scorching surface temperatures, crushing atmospheric pressures and a surface wind speed of 2.5 metres per second (nearly 5.6 miles per hour). Over ten years later, Venera 13 became the first…

Jupiter Jupiter’s ingredients There are several layers beneath the storm bands of the surface Jupiter’s core According to most theories, Jupiter has a solid core made up of rocks, metals and ices. Collectively, these are referred to as heavy elements. Hydrogen and helium layer Molecular hydrogen and helium form most of the outer layer of Jupiter – a swirl of gas and liquid. This will have been accreted over many millions of years after the planet became massive enough in the third stage. Great Red Spot There remains no definitive theory to explain how the Great Red Spot of Jupiter formed or even gained its colour, but we know that it’s a gigantic storm with winds of up to 680 kilometres (423 miles) per hour. Metallic hydrogen layer The new…

HarperCollins Discover HARPERCOLLINS ASTRONOMY BOOKS With observing season officially here, these guides will assist with your tours of the night sky - whether you’re a beginner or seasoned astronomer “Stargazing is packed full of useful information and guidance” Reference guide Stargazing: Beginners Guide to Astronomy Cost: £9.99 Offering complete advice from the ground up, Stargazing is the perfect manual for beginners to astronomy, introducing the world of telescopes, planets, stars, dark skies and celestial maps. Discover how to tackle light pollution, how to stargaze with just your eyes, and what equipment is best for beginners. Astronomy experts Radmila Topalovic and Tom Kerss explain the best ways to plan your stargazing experience and the key things to look out for on specific dates throughout the year. With seasonal star charts, constellation…

Planet of the month This month’s planets The turquoise ice giant dominates the evening sky this October, while other members of the Solar System make an evening appearance Rather bizarrely, it could be said that Uranus is ‘dominating’ the evening sky this month. How could that possibly be? After all, the planet’s low magnitude of 5.7 means that technically it is a naked-eye object, but in reality it is only visible with the assistance of a pair of binoculars or a telescope to observers with almost-perfect eyesight looking for it from a dark-sky location without any interference from the light pollution caused by artificial lights, or from the bright glow of the Moon. Even under those perfect conditions the planet’s low magnitude means that it does not stand out from…

How to… Observe the Andromeda Galaxy This month we will help you navigate your way across the starry sky to find the most distant object you can see with your naked eye – M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy © Kanwar Singh; Thomas Bresson However much you dress it up with technical terms and scrawled equations, astronomy is basically the study of things that are very far away. Even the closest objects astronomers study – shooting stars, noctilucent clouds and the northern lights – are tens of kilometres above our heads. The Moon is almost 385,000 kilometres (239,000 miles) away, the Sun 146 million kilometres (91 million miles) away and the closest star is so many kilometres away that its light – travelling at 300,000 kilometres (186,411 miles) every second –…

STARGAZER The Northern Hemisphere The clocks go back at the end of this month, offering a splendour of night-sky objects for astronomers © Wil Tirion; ESO; KuriousGeorge; Roberto Mura Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Sculptor are just some of the constellations offering a selection of targets for telescope- and binocular-wielding astronomers this month. With the Sun dipping below the horizon earlier in the evening, those wanting to catch new or favourite targets don’t have to wait long for dark skies to boast these treasures. Head over to Andromeda and you’ll be rewarded with not just its spiral galaxy, M31, but also its dwarf elliptical galaxies M32 and M110. While the parent galaxy is easy to spot, you’ll need at least a medium-sized telescope to spot Andromeda’s satellites. Star clusters are a joy…

STARGAZER In the shops The latest books, apps, software, tech and accessories for space and astronomy fans alike Book Planetarium Cost: £20.00 From: Templar Publishing Aimed at children between 9 and 11 years old, Planetarium is 112 pages of stunning galleries of galactic matter that have been beautifully curated to bring the experience of a fascinating exhibition from the comfort of your own home – through the artwork of Chris Wormell and informative prose from astronomer Professor Raman Prinja of University College London, where he specialises in massive stars, star formation and the evolution of galaxies. To ensure that no region of space is left unexplored, Planetarium – which has been made in collaboration with the Science Museum – expertly begins from our nearest star the Sun, out to our…

The Sun, Our Living Star © ESO The most massive object in our Solar System, the Sun, has its influence felt at the furthest reaches of the solar neighbourhood. On Earth, its influence is vital for creating and maintaining life as we know it, which is why ESO have announced a collection of free, high-quality planetarium material titled The Sun, Our Living Star. This unusual face of the Sun reveals the movement of highly energetic particles coursing around its outer atmosphere and violent expulsions of material, that are visible on the right of this image.…

Dune fields on Mars © NASA/JPL-Caltech The Martian surface is a curious one; many features on it are mirrored on Earth, allowing astronomers to draw conclusions about its history based on Earth-based observations. In this instance, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has pictured a region known as the Coprates Chasma and its dune fields. These regions are more specifically known as ‘wall dune fields’ as they are located along canyon wall slopes. They occur due to the downward transport of dune sediment from airflow erosion, amongst other processes. Dune fields such as these tell astronomers a lot about the planet's processes of which make short work of shaping these features.…

Drill hole was not made by crew members, says NASA The space agency hits out at Russian suggestion ISS crew could have been to blame for a breach in the Soyuz spacecraft © NASA A NASA astronaut has blasted a Russian official’s suggestion that crew members of Expedition 56 caused an air leak on the International Space Station. The expedition’s commander, Drew Feustal, spoke out after Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s federal space agency, said a hole found in the wall of the docked Soyuz spacecraft had been made by a drill. “I can unequivocally say that the crew had nothing do with this,” Feustel told ABC News following a Russian-led investigation. “I think it’s absolutely a shame and somewhat embarrassing that anybody is wasting any time talking about…

Venus Planet Profile Venus Earth’s sister planet is a harsh, deadly world, making it an interesting one to observe © ESA; Tobias Roetsch “It has been theorised that thunderstorms occur and sulphuric acid rain peppers Venus’ surface” 'Hell on Earth’ is a phrase used by many, but one planet actually matches this idea of a harsh and inhospitable environment; that accolade falls to Venus. The second planet from the Sun is similar in size and density to Earth, with it being only 638 kilometres (396 miles) smaller in diameter and 0.27 grams per cubic centimetre lower in density. These physical dimensions may paint a picture of a world similar to Earth, but that is far from the case. The truth is Venus underwent a different evolution, and its completely different…

Jupiter JUPITER DOES IT HAVE A GROWTH DISORDER? Astrophysicists think they know why the gas giant’s evolution was delayed for two million years Reported by David Crookes © NASA/JPL-Caltech What do we know about Jupiter? Rather a lot, as it happens. We know that it’s a giant ball made up of mostly hydrogen and helium, that it is the fifth planet from the Sun, that it’s over 11-times the diameter of Earth and that if you could mash all of the other seven planets into a big splodge Jupiter would still be 2.5-times more massive. After the Sun it’s the largest body in the Solar System, and it is also very old. But just how old has been the subject of a lot of research over the years, and only…

KEPLER’S BEST BITS How this planet-hunting telescope changed our view of the universe Written by Jonathan O'Callaghan Before the Kepler space telescope was launched in March 2009, astronomers weren’t sure how common planets were in our galaxy. Was our Solar System a rarity, or were there countless other worlds out there awaiting our discovery? The answer was a resounding ‘yes’ in favour of the latter with the help of Kepler. The telescope would go on to find more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets beyond the Solar System, with nearly 3,000 more awaiting confirmation as planets. These have ranged from large uninhabitable gas giants orbiting close to their stars, known as hot Jupiters, to exciting Earth-like worlds orbiting stars both similar and different to our own Sun, some of which could be…

Instant Expert Solar cycles This 11-year cycle turns the Sun from a quiet ball of gas to a raging bull permeating the Solar System. ALL ABOUT SPACE gets an expert to explain why © NASA/ESA; Nicholas Forder Cycle 23 minimum Around the year 1997 the Sun had reached the minimum activity for the 23rd cycle. At this point the magnetic fields are relatively settled, and this is shown visibly with a low number of sunspots present of the face of the Sun. The magnetic field will slowly become more tangled as the unequal surface rotation takes its toll. Cycle 23 maximum The maximum sunspot activity for cycle 23, around the year 2001, was far greater than its succeeding cycle, which is a strong indication that the field lines are at…

Ask All About Space™ SPACE EXPLORATION What telescope would we need to get high-resolution images of the planets? Exoplanets have already been directly imaged orbiting the stars Fomalhaut and Beta Pictoris, as well as three exoplanets orbiting HR 8799. These planets are large Jupiter-sized bodies orbiting far from their host star and are observed with special instruments called coronagraphs that are used to block the starlight while leaving the planets visible. In order to get a clear image of a possible habitable exoplanet, such as an Earth-analogue, the observation would need to be able to resolve the star from the planet and deal with the very large contrast in light between the two. To get a feel for these two difficult tasks, get a bright torch (flashlight) and a small…

Moon tour Eddington See the lava-flooded remains of a once-proud crater © NASA Understandably, the most famous and popular lunar features are those which are presented almost face-on to us. The ray-sploshed craters Copernicus and Kepler; the curved, bony spine of the Appennine Mountains and the great vertical crater chain of Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel are all very central on the Earth-facing side of the Moon and so are observed, photographed and sketched much more often than other craters and mountains closer to the limb of our planet’s natural satellite. However, if you can drag your eyes – and swing your telescope – away from the centre of the Moon you will be rewarded with some fascinating and intriguing sights as you gaze across features foreshortened by their proximity to…

How to… Photograph star trails Taking beautiful photos of the stars trailing across the sky is easy. All you need is the right camera, a tripod, and a clear sky… Today, motorised ‘star trackers’ are quite cheap and readily available. After being aligned on the Pole Star, they follow the stars as they circle around it, allowing astrophotographers to take long-exposure photos of the constellations, the Milky Way, galaxies and nebulae without them trailing. But sometimes you want that trailing; star trail photos can be just as attractive, especially if they include foreground objects such as trees, hills and even buildings. Star trail photos also show the colours of the stars more vividly than tracked shots. All you need to take a good star trail image is a DSLR camera…

Deep sky challenge Autumn’s fading galaxies Winter is coming, but some of autumn’s deep-sky treasures can still be enjoyed through your telescope © Hewholooks; Wikisky; Judy Schmidt As October slides into November it’s only natural to swing your telescope away from the subtle attractions of the autumn sky and use it to enjoy views of winter’s bigger, brighter and bolder deep-sky objects. But before you start diving headfirst into the swirling grey and green gas clouds of the Orion Nebula or squint at the Crab Nebula’s ghostly outline, why not postpone winter a little longer and give some of autumn’s delights one last look? If you view from a dark sky, your small telescope will show you the two small, faint satellite galaxies of M31, the famous Andromeda Galaxy. Owners…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE Another 'lunar' step closer for Orion © NASA Deep-space exploration to the Moon and beyond has taken a successful step forward as NASA engineers have completed the final tests of the Orion parachute system. Eight tests were conducted at the United States’ Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. There are a lot of happy NASA employees after these tests as they showed that the Orion module can deploy 11 parachutes within about ten minutes of falling through the Earth’s atmosphere. This brought the speed down from 480 kilometres (300 miles) per hour to a steady 32 kilometres (20 miles) per hour as it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE Snapping a galaxy in some spare time © ESO This spectacular image is of the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 which lies approximately 65 million light years away from Earth in the constellation of Crater, and it provided an excellent pastime for the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Very Large Telescope. One night in May 2018 in Chile, the weather proved unsuitable for scientific observations, but instead of sitting idle and doing nothing scientists captured this galactic beauty as part of ESO’s Cosmic Gem Programme. This outreach programme will benefit greatly from having this galactic snapshot which presents all the appealing characteristics a galaxy has to offer.…

Multi-wavelength Deep Field © ESA/Hubble & NASA Almost all astronomers will be aware of the Hubble Deep Field image from 1995 and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field images taken in 1995 and 2004 respectively. Hubble took enormous amounts of time collecting light from the deepest regions of the universe to reveal a truly remarkable spectacle. What is less commonly known is that Hubble was also part of The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) programme. This initiative utilised other space observatories such as NASA’s Spitzer and Chandra and ESA’s Herschel and XMM-Newton to provide this magnificent, multi-wavelength perspective of the expanding universe.…

The Solar System was rearranged earlier than thought Studies of the only large binary asteroids close to Jupiter indicate early planetary upheaval © W.M. Keck Observatory/Lynette Cookv An unusual pair of asteroids appear to indicate an early planetary shake-up in our Solar System, according to an American planetary scientist. David Nesvorny, the lead scientist of a new study at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, has been looking closely at the binary asteroid Patroclus-Menoetius, which is made up of two rocks that orbit around each other as they circle the Sun. Residing in a cluster of space rocks known as the Trojan asteroids – one of which orbits ahead of Jupiter and the other which orbits behind – Nesvorny says they were forced from their previous position in what became…

What exactly is gravity? It has a lot of effects that we may not even think about 1. It gives us weight Although your mass – the amount of ’stuff’ that you are made of – would remain the same wherever you are in the universe, your weight would vary considerably. Weight is a force determined by gravitational attraction. It’s the product of a large body’s ’acceleration due to gravity’ (g) and its mass. So, for example, if your mass – not weight – was 70kg and Earth’s g is 9.81m/s2, your weight would be 686.7 Newtons. 2. It causes objects to gravitate towards each other Bodies with significant mass can influence one another across thousands of astronomical units, or AU (one AU being the distance between Earth and the…

Focus on Spitzer Space Telescope 15 YEARS OF THE SPITZER SPACE TELESCOPE This year, one quarter of the Great Observatories has reached a truly outstanding milestone A mission originally planned for just two-and-a-half years in space is now celebrating its 15th anniversary; a remarkable achievement for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Launched on the 25 August 2003 into a solar orbit, this telescope has been using its infrared-sensitive equipment to reveal the hidden gems of the cosmos. This space telescope was the fourth and final instalment of NASA’s Great Observatories program, and it has been able to view the great beyond in a light that is unperceivable to the human eye, revealing marvellous details about our Solar System and beyond. In terms of numbers the spacecraft posts some amazing figures, given…

COMPARING CHARACTERISTICS 1 The top of the list of comparative characteristics is the size of the planet, with the coloured region representing the diameter of the world, and the inner circles comparing their size to Earth and Mars. This gives a good sense of scale and also reveals how these planets aren't so far off the size of Earth. 2 The creators of this app have used the term ‘illumination’, however, I believe the more appropriate term would be ‘temperature’, as the narration speaks more about whether the planet is hotter or colder in relation to its relative illumination indication. 3 The density of a planet is a strong indication of whether astronomers are looking at rocky planets or a gas planet. Rocky planets have a much higher density measurement,…

How Jupiter was made Its strange growth pattern was affected by 'baby planets' and pebbles © NASA/JPL-Caltech ; Tobias Roetsch; Planetesimals begin to heat Planetesimals, larger, kilometre-sized rocks become excited by Jupiter’s growth – that is, they gain extra energy. Jupiter reaches its pebble isolation mass Jupiter becomes sufficiently large to push away incoming pebbles, thanks to a pressure bump in the surrounding gas. This is known as the pebble isolation mass. Accreting gas The planetesimal collisions prevent rapid gas accretion, but after 3 Myr Jupiter becomes massive enough to collect hydrogen and helium gas in substantially large amounts. Jupiter gathers pebbles Tiny, centimetre-sized pieces of rocky material – otherwise known as pebbles – are attracted to Jupiter’s core under the influence of gravity, enabling it to grow in mass.…

Sci-fi tech WELCOME TO THE FUTURE All About Space looks at the science fiction technologies that have become a reality, and how they have revolutionised our exploration of the universe Written by Lee Cavendish STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES Release date: 1966 Created by: Gene Roddenberry “Mobile phones have become a necessity in modern life with a plethora of features” The mobile phone Something that everyone has in their pocket, mobile phones have become a necessity in modern life with a plethora of features. It’s unbelievable to think how far they have come since their initial invention in 1973. The first mobile phone was a bulky, hefty phone that weighed 1.1 kilograms (2.4 pounds) and had a talk time of about 35 minutes. This was the Motorola DynaTAC, and at…

Great Square of Pegasus 1 Silver Sliver Galaxy (NGC 891) Small telescopes show this galaxy of magnitude 9.96 as a faint needle of light, but larger telescopes reveal it is an edge-on structure with a bright central bulge and a dark dust lane running across its equator. 2 The Blue Snowball Nebula (NGC 7662) Although this 8th magnitude planetary nebula can be seen through small telescopes, its blue colour is only visible through instruments 6-inches and larger. 3 Gamma Andromedae Almach can be split with a small telescope, but larger instruments will highlight the beautiful contrast in colour between its bright pink-white component and its fainter, steely blue component. 4 Messier 110 If it wasn’t so close to bright M31, M110 would be a popular object in its own right,…

Getting Messier 31 in your sights Make sure you're equipped for the very best views If your eyes refuse to show you M31, just centre Mirach in your binoculars and pan upwards very, very slowly. M31 will be there, a misty oval of grey light. If you have a small telescope it will show you M31 in even more detail. If the night is very dark you should be able to see hints of dark dust lanes in the galaxy, which will probably overflow your eyepiece’s field of view. 1 Get dark adapted! It’s important to let your eyes adapt properly. M31's light is spread over a wide area and any light pollution or moonlight will hide it from view. 2 Find Cassiopeia First, find Cassiopeia, a W-shaped constellation high…

STARGAZER Omegon Advanced X N 203/1200 dobsonian A telescope that is an all-rounder when it comes to observing the Solar System and deep-sky targets, this reflector is suitable for all levels of astronomer on a tight budget Dobsonian telescopes are considered the ultimate all-rounder instruments for beginners, however, on trying out the Omegon Advanced X N 203/1200, we soon realised that this instrument’s simplicity not only lends itself to anyone starting out in the hobby of astronomy, it’s also a great telescope for the veteran of the night sky. The reflector arrived in parts, which meant that some construction was required – a process that took roughly 30 minutes. While most of the tools were supplied in assembly, such as the screws and allen keys, you’ll need to supply a…