Table of contents for No. 128 in All About Space

This month we delve into the secrets of perhaps the most mysterious phenomena in the cosmos: black holes. Predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein, we’ve come a long way into understanding these high-gravity objects – especially since the advent of the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of radio dishes that sprang into action and captured the first direct image of a black hole in 2019. The composition of the supermassive object at the centre of elliptical galaxy Messier 87, which rests some 54 million light years away, excited the world and provided additional evidence for black holes’ existence. We’ve continued to build on our understanding of these fascinating objects since, as you’ll discover in our cover feature. Head over to page 14 for all of the details. Elsewhere in…

© NASA NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will continue observations during its first year of operations in a program called COSMOS-Webb. Founded in 2002, the Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS) originally utilised the Hubble Space Telescope to image an area of the sky equivalent to ten Moons wide. The program later grew to include groundbased observatories working across multiple wavelengths of light. “COSMOS has become the survey that a lot of extragalactic scientists go to in order to conduct their analyses because the data products are so widely available – and because it covers such a wide area of the sky,” said the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Jeyhan Kartaltepe, assistant professor of physics and coleader of the COSMOS-Webb program. Taking over 200 hours of observation time during its first year, Webb…

When it comes to protecting Earth from impacts, it’s crucial to know what asteroids are made of. NASA is working on a device to find out The Solar System is filled with small asteroids and comets, all whizzing around in varying orbits. They represent both a threat to our planet – as demonstrated by the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 – and an opportunity for in-space mining. But if we are to deflect or exploit these bodies, we need to know what they are made of, and ideally without having to go to the trouble of landing on them all. Fortunately, Dr Gary Hughes of California Polytechnic State University has a solution to this problem, and he has received funding from NASA to work on it. We can figure out the…

Mars interior A new study gives insight into how the Red Planet’s magnetic field faded away © NASA/JPL-Caltech Key changes deep in the core of Mars might have led to the planet losing its magnetic field early in its history, a new study suggests. Today Mars is a planet with a thin atmosphere that is unable to support substantial running water on the surface, but scientists have found evidence of ancient lakes, streams and perhaps oceans, suggesting that conditions used to be different. Scientists are eager to understand the presence (or absence) of water on Mars in its early history, particularly to inform assessments of the possibility of life on the Red Planet. In particular, researchers want to understand what might have caused the planet’s protective atmosphere to dramatically thin.…

RELATIVELY SAFE IN OUR PROTECTIVE BUBBLE, SOME FORCES COULD END LIFE ON EARTH FOREVER. IS THE COSMOS OUT TO GET US? While Earth isn’t free of destructive impulses – natural disasters, climate change, radioactive rocks and deadly viruses, to name but a few – it’s a relatively safe haven for humans among the stars, hence why humans have managed to evolve to live here so successfully. But leaving the confines of our planet’s protective atmosphere, the universe gets a lot deadlier. As it turns out, space isn’t the most welcoming place for us Earth dwellers, with many ways the universe could wipe us all out in just the blink of an eye. 1 A GAMMA-RAY BURST MELTS THE ATMOSPHERE Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most intense, high-energy radiation events in…

ASTROPHYSICS ASK space Our experts answer your questions © Getty Most black holes form when a massive star exhausts its fuel supply and collapses. But the origins of the largest black holes remain mysterious. There are two very different types of black holes in the universe: stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes. Stellarmass black holes are much more common, and usually weigh in at about 5 to 100 times the mass of the Sun. These form when a massive star fuses all of the material in its core into iron and can no longer provide additional energy to support its immense weight against gravity. The star then begins to collapse. Sometimes this triggers a supernova explosion that destroys the star, but if this explosion fails the collapse continues until…

MOON TOUR The lunar landscape down towards and around its south pole is wild, craggy and rugged; a raw, bare-rock wilderness of walled plains, huge craters and towering mountains all blasted out by a brutal asteroid bombardment many millennia ago. In the southern lunar highlands there are too many craters to count, as they overlap and overlay each other. The most ancient craters have smaller, younger craters inside them, and many of those smaller craters have even smaller, even younger craters inside them. Exploring this cluttered landscape through a telescope is both thrilling and bewildering – there’s so much to see! Naturally, the huge impact craters of Clavius, Maginus and Tycho draw the eye, but a little further to their north and east lies a much smaller crater with a…

© NASA, ESA 1 March 2022 Webb to target Orion’s bar The James Webb Space Telescope will zero in on a portion of the Orion Nebula, the closest region of mass star formation to Earth, to learn more about how massive young stars shape their environments. The Orion Nebula, 1,350 light years from Earth, is known as a stellar nursery. Dense clouds of gas and dust in this region collapse into stellar embryos that gradually grow bigger until the pressure and heat in their cores is enough to trigger nuclear fusion. Because of the amount of dust, the hearts of stellar nurseries are obscured from optical telescopes. But infrared light, in which Webb will observe the universe, can penetrate those clouds and reveal the secrets of star formation. © ESA 23…

© LOFAR / ASTRON Millions of new objects have just been catalogued in a vast new sky map that will lead to more investigations about our universe’s environment. A map of roughly one-quarter of the northern sky was generated using a pan-European set of telescopes called the Low-Frequency Array, or LOFAR. It detected objects that are, for the most part, billions of light years away and include objects ranging from galaxies to distant stars. The LOFAR scientists created an interactive animation of the huge sky map, as well as a vast database for the public to search for individual objects. “We anticipate [the survey] will lead to many more scientific breakthroughs in the future,” said Timothy Shimwell, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and Leiden University. Possible…

© Stockholm University / R. Hynes IN COOPERATION WITH A tilted black hole spinning around a misaligned axis has been discovered in our galaxy. The black hole and its companion star form a system called MAXI J1820+070, some 10,000 light years from Earth. The system was first spotted by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2018. But recent optical observations by the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands revealed the black hole behaves in ways that defy expectations. By studying the orientation of the jets of ionised matter emitted from the black hole’s poles, Juri Poutanen of the University of Turku in Finland found that the black hole spins around an axis that’s tilted by at least 40 degrees towards the plane in which the black hole orbits its companion…

Ryugu samples Pieces of rock from the asteroid Ryugu splashed down on Earth in 2020 Ryugu is a near-Earth asteroid that Japan visited with its Hayabusa2 spacecraft. The craft launched in 2014, arrived at the space rock in 2018 and in December 2020 dropped off a capsule carrying 5.4 grams of asteroid material to Earth. This has given scientists the ability to study the asteroid up close here on our home planet with a full range of technologies. In a new study, scientists reveal a detailed picture of the asteroid and what its surface and subsurface material is really like. As it turns out, Ryugu is covered in flat and elongated pieces. The team used an optical microscope to take images of grains of material from Ryugu. To get an…

Scientists spotted the supermassive black hole hiding inside thick cosmic dust © Getty Asupermassive black hole masked by a cloud of cosmic dust was found at the centre of an active galaxy in new images from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The galaxy, known as Messier 77 or NGC 1068, is a barred spiral galaxy located about 47 million light years from Earth in the constellation of Cetus. Taken by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in northern Chile, the observations shed new light on galaxies that have active galactic nuclei (AGN) at their core. These bright features are fuelled by all the gas and dust that falls into the galaxy’s central black hole, causing the area to outshine the rest of the galaxy. “Our results should lead to…

RED-LIGHT FRIENDLY In order to preserve your night vision, you should read our observing guide under red light 78 What’s in the sky? The nights might lighten, but there's still plenty to see from dusk until dawn 82 Month's planets A planetary parade is something spectacular to look out for in the dawn sky 84 Moon tour Finding the fascinating crater called Hell isn’t as hard as its name suggests 85 Naked eye and binocular targets The early spring sky offers bright stars 86 Deep sky challenge Spring has arrived, and with it a wealth of deep-sky objects in the heavens 88 The Northern Hemisphere Spring lets you look out of the plane of the Milky Way 90 Astroshots of the month The best of our readers’ astrophotography 92 Binocular…

Deep sky challenge Spring has arrived, and with it a wealth of deep-sky objects on which to turn your telescope x2 Images © NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, high overhead on spring nights can be found the constellations of Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs) and Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Both contain several bright, distant galaxies, along with many fainter ones and interesting nebulae. Possibly the most famous of all the double stars, which is in fact a multiple star system, lies in this region, too. There are some well-known galaxies that will be relatively easy targets for even small telescopes, but many will require a larger aperture and dark skies to see well. “Both contain several bright, distant galaxies, along…

YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE © NASA An April launch is no longer possible for NASA’s Artemis 1, which will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon using the huge Space Launch System (SLS). And May could be difficult to hit as well, according to agency officials. “We continue to evaluate the May window, but we’re also recognising that there’s a lot of work in front of us,” said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA headquarters in Washington. Some of that work will involve analysing data from the Artemis 1 ‘wet dress rehearsal’, a crucial test that will take the SLS-Orion stack through many of the milestones it will hit on launch day. Like the launch, the wet dress rehearsal will take place…

Atomic clock The device could help hunt dark matter or search for gravitational waves 1 Iridium NEXT satellite A demonstration unit of the Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC) was hosted on board an Iridium NEXT satellite, the second generation of satellites for the Iridium satellite phone system. 2 Small-scale A fraction of the size of its lab-based counterparts, the DSAC was just 0.0056 cubic metres (0.2 cubic feet) – smaller, lighter and more stable than any other atomic clock in space. 3 Signal comparison Ground stations around the world took measurements of the speed and position of the same GPS satellites and compared them to the DSAC. 4 Titanium vacuum case The DSAC was housed inside a vacuum case made of titanium; this provided a very strong and light enclosure…

Earth’s water Moon rocks suggest that the water might have been here all along Earth’s water may have been here since the planet formed, and not delivered later by collisions with icy comets. New research analysed Moon rocks brought to Earth by the Apollo program and sheds light on our planet’s earliest days. Although more than 70 per cent of Earth’s surface is covered in water, overall our planet is relatively poor in water and other volatile molecules compared with most other bodies in the Solar System, said Lars Borg, a planetary scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Scientists have long debated how Earth came to possess water. Two major scenarios prevail, and both involve ancient cosmic impacts, the most notorious of which saw the proto-Earth collide with…

Counting stars Looking up into the night sky, you might wonder just how many stars are in the universe. It’s challenging enough for an amateur astronomer to count the number of naked-eye stars that are visible, and with bigger telescopes, more stars come into view, making counting them a lengthy process. So how do astronomers figure out how many stars are in the universe? The first tricky part is trying to define what ‘universe’ means, says David Kornreich, a professor at Ithaca College in New York State. He was also the founder of the ‘Ask An Astronomer’ service at Cornell University. “I don’t know, because I don’t know if the universe is infinitely large or not,” he said. The observable universe appears to go back in time by about 13.8…

A planetary parade featuring Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn is something spectacular to look out for in the dawn sky PLANET OF THE MONTH Usually we take a close look at a single planet that’s particularly well-placed for observation, or is unusually bright, but this month we’re going to look forward to a parade of planets that will be visible in the sky. It’s not rare for a couple of planets to appear to meet in the sky. Groupings of more than two planets happen occasionally, but sometimes Earth and the other planets align in such a way that we can see a larger number of them spread out across the sky in a line. This is what will happen in the middle of April. As dawn approaches, Saturn, Mars,…

Astroshots Get featured in All About Space by sending your astrophotography images to space@spaceanswers.com Soumyadeep Mukherjee Location: West Bengal, India, and El Sauce Observatory, Chile Telescope: FSQ-106ED and Telescope Live “I’m an amateur photographer from India and have been imaging objects in the sky for the last 1.5 years. My first image shows the location near the bright star Rigel; IC 2118 is an extremely faint reflection nebula spanning almost 70 light years across. It’s popularly known as the Witch Head Nebula. My second image frames the heart of Carina Nebula, a gem of the Southern Hemisphere sky.” Jaspal Chadha Location: London, UK T elescope: Takahashi 130 “I have been imaging for around two-and-a-half years now after spending years looking through various telescopes and eyepieces, where I enjoyed learning all…