Table of contents for No. 133 in All About Space

ISSUE 133 We’re heading into late summer, and that means many of you will be looking to dust off your observing equipment to embrace the longer, darker evenings. Some of you may be looking to buy a new telescope or accessories, and that’s where our guide to astronomy on a budget is here to help. From making sure you make the right choice on your next piece of kit – whether it’s picking binoculars or eyepieces – to our top picks of instruments under £500, we’ve got you covered. This month, we explore the space weather in our Solar System, including the angry outbursts from the Sun and the polar vortex swirling in the atmosphere of Saturn. If you’re looking to brush up on your knowledge of the cosmos (or…

Webb’s second image displays the Southern Ring Nebula. On top is the view from Webb’s NIRCam instrument, showing the nebula in near-infrared light. On the bottom is the view from the observatory’s MIRI instrument, which reveals mid-infrared light. That MIRI image is particularly special, said Karl Gordon, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute: “We knew this was a binary star, but we didn’t really see much of the actual star that produced the nebula.” MIRI’s view displays both stars at the nebula’s heart.…

Rapid bursts of radio waves that originate millions to billions of light years away from Earth could be used as probes to investigate halos of difficult-to-see diffuse gas surrounding nearby galaxies. New research shows that these pulses, called fast radio bursts (FRBs), slow as they pass through the gas enveloping the galaxies between their source and Earth. This also has the effect of dispersing their radio frequencies. Researchers from Caltech found twice as much material as previously believed in these envelopes that enshroud galaxies. This has implications for how these collections of stars and planets evolve over time. The astronomers looked at a sample of 474 distant FRBs with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) confirming that 24 FRBs intercepted by galactic halos were indeed slowed down compared to…

Now, this is really bad weather – adust storm that doesn’t just cover an area, or even a hemisphere, but the entire planet. During summer in the Red Planet’s southern hemisphere, when Mars is at its closest point to the Sun, solar heating can drive immense storms that blow up red dust and can obscure the surface for months. In 1971, when Mariner 9 arrived on Mars, it found the whole planet hidden under a veil of dust, with only the volcano Olympus Mons visible. More recently, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity would struggle to survive in dust storms as the Sun’s light was blocked and their solar panels covered by a coating of dust. On Earth, moisture arms swirling storms, but on Mars there is only dust.…

With a surface pressure almost one and a half times that of Earth’s, Titan’s atmosphere is slightly more massive than our planet’s overall, taking on an almost chokingly opaque haze of orange layers that block out any light that tries to penetrate the Saturnian moon’s thick cover. Titan is the only world, other than Earth, where liquid rains on a solid surface. However, rather than the water that we are used to falling from the skies above us, pooling into puddles and flowing as streams and rivers, this moon’s rains fall as liquid methane – liquid hydrocarbons that add more fluid to the many lakes and oceans that already cover the surface. It is thanks to the moon’s complex methane cycle, similar to the natural processes found on Earth, that…

The first description of a space station First started in 1986, the last module arrived appeared in a short story, The Brick Moon, in 1996, completing a seven module, 129- BIO written in 1869 by American author Edward tonne space station that was occupied for T Everett Hale. It is also thought to be the 4,592 days and visited by 104 people from first description of an artificial satellite, and satellite 12 nations, including Britain’s first spaceflight navigation, as a 61-metre (200-foot) wide brick participant, Helen Sharman. The end of the sphere is launched into orbit as a navigational aid. Soviet Union brought the American and However, Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Russian programmes together and the carried out the first scientific work on space stations Shuttle flew missions to Mir…

The first-ever 3D simulation of the formation of a black hole jet reveals why mysterious gamma-ray bursts appear to blink and suggests that these mysterious phenomena might be much rarer than astronomers suspected. Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest and most powerful flashes of light known to exist in the universe. First detected in 1967, these blinding light explosions are generated when massive stars collapse into black holes, launching jets of material that squirt into space at nearly the speed of light. Currently, satellites spot about one gamma-ray burst somewhere in the universe every day. But astronomers think that up to 500 may flash through the universe without us knowing every day. However, a new study suggests the actual number might be ten times lower. The study, by a team of…

T hey say that in space, nobody can hear you scream. But if you listen very carefully, you may be able to pick up signs of distant chatter from extraterrestrial civilisations. That appeared to have happened recently when astronomers at Beijing Normal University issued a statement in Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, which reported the possibility of having detected trace signals from aliens. Yet, just as researchers (and the general public) around the world were beginning to digest the news with interest, the statement was removed. A conspiratorial cover-up? Not quite. “The Chinese report of signals is – in my opinion – very likely to simply be radio frequency interference, from orbiting satellites most probably,” says Dr Seth Shostak, senior astronomer…

1 North America Nebula Lying just to the east of the bright star Deneb, this large region of ionised gas is just visible with binoculars from a dark-sky site. 2 Messier 39 Just north of the North America Nebula, Messier 39 is just visible to the naked eye and a superb target through decent binoculars. 3 Messier 15 Lying just on the edge of naked-eye visibility, this globular star cluster looks like a fuzzy ball of light in 10x50 binoculars. 4 Messier 2 Similar to Messier 15, this globular cluster is just on the limit of naked-eye visibility. It has some of the oldest stars in the universe. 5 Fomalhaut This is a bright star of the Southern Hemisphere that is visible in much of the north, but only for…

I talian astronomer, mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei was born on 15 February 1564 in Pisa, Italy. He is often referred to as the father of modern observational astronomy due to his pioneering telescopic work. Vilified for supporting heliocentrism, he is one of the most important figures in the history of astronomy. The eldest of seven children, Galileo was encouraged by his father, a musician and wool trader, to study medicine. Eventually, despite flirtations with becoming a monk – to which his father objected – he enrolled at the University of Pisa at the age of 17 to study medicine. At the age of 20, however, Galileo’s interest was piqued by physics. He observed the swinging of a lamp and noticed that each swing took the same amount of time.…

New James Webb image releases NASA released the very first science-quality image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on 11 July. The image, dubbed Webb’s First Deep Field, is the deepest infrared view of the universe to date, making use of both Webb’s powerful optics and the technique of gravitational lensing to see the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it looked 4.6 billion years ago. “It’s really gorgeous and it’s teeming with galaxies,” Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said of the deep-field image during the live event unveiling all the new images. “We can’t take a blank sky. Everywhere we look, there’s galaxies.” And although the Hubble Space Telescope took a similar image, that work required days and days of observations. “With Webb, we…

A leading Chinese university has begun constructing an array of more than 20 large radar antennas to track asteroids that have the potential to be hazardous to Earth. The project, named China Fuyan (or “compound eye”), is led by the Beijing Institute of Technology. The array aims to bounce signals off asteroids within 93 million miles (150 million kilometres) of Earth (about as distant as the Sun) to image and track objects and determine the possibility that they could impact our planet. So far, two antennas have been constructed at a site in Chongqing, in southern China. The pair is expected to be tested and become operational by September, according to the Chineselanguage outlet Science and Technology Daily, which first reported the development. The finished system will include more than…

Mars rovers may have to dig deeper to find signs of ancient life. New research shows that certain proteinbuilding amino acids that could be evidence of ancient life on Mars are more susceptible to radiation than scientists thought, meaning any amino acids left by life-forms might have only survived if they were buried deep beneath the planet’s surface. “Our results suggest that amino acids are destroyed by cosmic rays in the Martian surface rocks and regolith at much faster rates than previously thought,” Alexander Pavlov, a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said. “Current Mars rover missions drill down to about two inches (around five centimetres). At those depths, it would take only 20 million years to destroy amino acids completely.” l ong time, this…

We’ve all witnessed strong winds here on Earth, from gusts that turn your umbrella inside out to tornadoes that rip up everything in their path. You might think these winds are a force to be reckoned with, but unless you’ve had a day floating around the gaseous atmosphere of ice giant Neptune, you haven’t seen anything yet! You might think that Neptune’s distance from the Sun, which creates temperatures as low as -218 degrees Celsius (-360 degrees Fahrenheit), would mean a world frozen solid by the sub-zero climate with not much going on in terms of weather. However, you would be incorrect. The winds that race through its hydrogen, helium and ammonia-laden atmosphere can reach maximum speeds of around 2,400 kilometres per hour (1,500 miles per hour), making this dark…

THE SPECS Launch: 12 August 2005 Launch rocket: Atlas V 401 Target: Mars Operators: NASA and JPL Orbital inclination: 93 degrees Component: Multiple components Arrival at Mars: 10 March 2006 Mission ends: TBC Time spent in orbit: 16 years From the fascination it has provided the field of astronomy with for centuries, to the secrets it has yielded since the first Mars mission in 1960, the Red Planet remains an elusive and esoteric point in the night sky. Since the early 1960s, the collective space agencies of the world have launched over 50 missions to the distant world the Romans named after their deity of war. One of those missions – NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) – has just completed its tenth year of groundbreaking study above Mars. Through the…

Wormholes ormholes are so-called gateways that provide a shortcut through the fabric of space-time. They can be thought of as W tunnels with ends capped by an everhungry black and a white hole, the black hole’s time-reversed cousin that prefers to spit things out if anything comes too close to its event horizon. It’s true that a wormhole never looks out of place in science fiction – for example, lurking in the universe of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and employed by captain Benjamin Sisko and his crew of the Defiant. They use the hole to travel from the Alpha to the Gamma quadrant on the other side of the galaxy at unprecedented speed – certainly a thrilling prospect. However, we still don’t know for sure whether traversable wormholes like…

I would say the most likely fate for Earth as we know it will come from within. Whether it is a nuclear war, mutated virus, climate catastrophe or collapse of civilisation, you only need to look at history to see where the future may go. That’s part of my reason for believing humanity should establish a second biosphere to safeguard civilisation, culture and technology from our mistakes, sort of like seed banks. Those human-made collapses would still yield the most life-friendly planet in the Solar System. We have a long time until the Sun turns into a red giant and our oceans boil away. Hopefully we will be out of the Solar System by then. There is always the Jovian system, which might be more habitable as the Sun gets…

PLANET OF THE MONTH Mars might be a frozen dustball of a planet, but it’s warming up nicely for its Opposition at the end of the year, when it will be very close to Earth and very bright in our night sky, too. During the month ahead, the famous Red Planet – which is actually more of a mandarin orange colour when you see it in the sky – will be obvious to the naked eye, looking like a bright ‘star’ in the constellation of Taurus. You won’t have any trouble identifying it because, with a magnitude of 0.1, it will be brighter than any of the stars in that constellation, even Aldebaran, which is the brightest. At the start of our observing period, Mars will be rising in the…

1 TheVeil Nebula A stronomy is, very generally speaking, the study of stars and everything to do with them – how they are born, live and die; how they work; the objects that go around them and much more. The sky in August and September offers the nakedeye observer some of the most beautiful stars in the sky and the mottled band of the Milky Way, too, itself made out of countless billions of stars. But beyond the stars, through their misty veil, lie objects that are as fascinating as they are faint and as beautiful as they are subtle. Four of our six challenging deep-sky objects this month are nebulae, one is a distant glittering star cluster and the sixth is another galaxy altogether, an elegant Catherine wheel of…

Reviewed by Dave Stephenson A tjust £205.99 ($249), the Move Shoot Move star tracker is more or less the cheapest star tracker on the market. Weighing in at only 450 grams, it’s also one of the lightest, allowing fleet-footed astrophotographers to bring it with them even if weight is a consideration. But with other entry-level star trackers coming in at nearly double the price, the hunt for compromises is on: how does the Move Shoot Move stack up against the competition? The Move Shoot Move star tracker is a compact little thing, which forms a huge part of its appeal. Compare it to the likes of the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2 – pricier, but admittedly with a few more talents – and you’ll see what we mean. The Move Shoot…

New James Webb image releases The Carina Nebula is a massive cloud of dust and gas located about 7,500 light years away from Earth where stars are both forming and dying. And Webb’s view of the nebula, which combines near-infrared and mid-infrared light, offers a whole new look at its activity. “There’s so much going on here; it’s so beautiful,” Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, s aid. “Today, for the first time, w e’re seeing brand-new stars t hat were previously completely h idden from our view.”…

The “most comprehensive studies” of the Higgs boson conducted to date reveal that the particle behaves just as expected and could help unlock some of the greatest mysteries of physics, including the nature of dark matter, scientists say. Two new studies, based on 10,000 trillion proton-on-proton collisions conducted inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during its second run, which ended in 2018, analysed 8 million Higgs boson particles detected by the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS detectors. The studies were published on 4 July, the 10th anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery by the LHC, the world’s largest particle smasher. They show that the particle behaves just as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, the all-encompassing theory describing how the basic building blocks of the universe hold together. “Sketching…

OUR ANGRY, STORMY SUN We know our Sun as a brilliantly bright sphere that rises in the east and sets in the west each day. That’s a simple way to describe it; what really occurs on its surface is far from the impression it gives as it hangs, almost calmly, in the daytime sky While going near the Sun would be suicide, with the searing heat and penetrating radiation combining to fry you alive in your spacesuit, technology has revealed this star to be an angry, bubbling cauldron of solar activity. First up are solar flares – bursts of radiation from the sudden release of magnetic energy from active regions on the Sun’s surface, the photosphere. These regions are centred on sunspots, which are tangled knots of magnetic fields. The…

On the outside, Saturn almost looks like a calm, bland world, but once in a while, huge storms flare up on the ringed planet. From the short-lived Great White Spot of 1990 to the more recent storm of 2010, which grew into an atmospheric belt covering around 4 billion square kilometres (1.5 billion square miles), Saturn has proven to be a turbulent world. What’s more, the storms on Saturn are the second fastest in the Solar System, after ice giant Neptune, peaking at an impressive 1,800 kilometres per hour (1,120 miles per hour) and blowing in an easterly direction. Temperatures on Saturn are normally recorded at around -185 degrees Celsius (-300 degrees Fahrenheit), but near the giant swirling polar vortex – apersistent cyclone taking pride of place at the ringed…

It can be easy to forget that one of the best ways to view the greater universe is to peer far beyond visible light, into the gammaray end of the electromagnetic spectrum. With the ability to more efficiently see beyond our Solar System, gamma-ray astronomy is an important field for helping us understand the cosmos. The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) plans to take the gamma-ray approach one step further than traditional arrays. By looking into much higher energy ranges than ever before, astronomers will be able to observe nonthermal processes, enabling them to research some of the great mysteries of the universe. Non-thermal radiation is considered to be different from normal radiation occurring on the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s thought to be created when elementary particles decay, which are the fundamental…

1 Providing some context The MRO uses the Context Camera to determine where to point HiRISE. SHARAD is used if underground polar ice caps are also factored in. 2 Capturing the spectrum To capture the likeness of the surface, the MRO uses a spectrometer. CRISM lets the MRO map include mineralogy and composition data. 3 Global scale Before HiRISE is put into action, MARCI begins taking wide-angle shots. It can take up to 84 images a day, creating a vast map of the Martian surface. 4 Capture and return To capture high-resolution detail, NASA uses HiRISE. Pointed at a location based on data collected by CRISM and CTX, it beams photos back to NASA.…

W e’re just weeks away from the release of the first images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and while that occasion will be momentous, there is far more science to come. One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s early programmes is a study that plans to use Webb to observe the nearby stellar nursery NGC 1333. The international team of scientists will image the stellar nursery’s small, faint residents – primarily brown dwarfs and rogue planets – which have been difficult to see with less powerful telescopes. Brown dwarfs are considered failed stars. Though they begin their lives in the same way as true stars – in clouds of collapsing gas and dust – they do not gather enough mass to begin fusion. Thus, they are quite small…

W hen it comes to choosing and purchasing equipment to observe the night sky, there’s a lot to take in. Which telescope should you get? Which magnification is best for your first binocular? Do you need to buy extra eyepieces? These are just some of the questions that you may have found yourself puzzling over when choosing astronomy kit. It may be that the daunting task of selecting telescopes or binoculars has put you off pursuing a hobby in astronomy. Maybe you have bought a telescope that doesn’t meet your requirements and is too complicated for you to use. If you took the plunge before you were ready, it’s most likely left you feeling frustrated and disappointed, with nothing to show for your efforts other than a piece of equipment…

E ratosthenes is a 59-kilometre (37-mile) wide crater located at the western end of the majestic curved sweep of the lunar Apennine Mountains (Montes Apenninus) on the southern shore of Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains). This magnificent crater, set among a splendid mountain backdrop, is often overlooked by virtue of its proximity to the larger crater Copernicus, which is 93 kilometres (58 miles) wide and lies less than 300 kilometres (186 miles) to the southwest of Eratosthenes, so is often visible at the same time. However, Eratosthenes itself is such a spectacular feature when illuminated by a morning or evening Sun that its topography is delightful through mid to high magnifications. Eratosthenes is a typical mid-sized lunar impact crater, and its prominence is accentuated by its startling position at the…

As we head into late summer, the night sky is alive with a worthy selection of deep-sky objects, in particular galaxies and star clusters. Starburst galaxy Messier 82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy, spiral galaxy Messier 106 as well as neighbouring spiral Messier 94 all offer splendid views. Star clusters such as Messier 10, Messier 12 and Messier 14 are ideal for those who aren’t looking to stay up too late. But for those keen to stay up into the early hours of the morning, the galaxies of the constellations of Andromeda and Triangulum wheel into view, as well as a variety of open and globular star clusters which are visible in a range of instruments. Using the sky chart This chart is for use at 22:00 mid-month…

1 2 3 Space Shuttle Discovery Cost: £159.99 / $199.95 From: Lego 1If you’re a space fan, then there’s no denying that this Lego NASA Space Shuttle Discovery is one of the best Lego space sets you can get your hands on right now. It’s an authentic recreation of NASA’s real Discovery shuttle, featuring realistic elements such as an opening payload bay, retractable landing gear, and five seats for the crew. Unfortunately, you’ll have to use your imagination there since this set doesn’t come with minifigures, but it’s a small price to pay for something that’s otherwise so detailed. As an added bonus, it also includes a model of the Hubble Telescope, which can be handily stowed away inside the shuttle’s payload bay. Rocket Launch Center Cost: £124.99 / $149.99…