Table of contents for No. 93 in All About Space

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE X-ray map of the sky © NASA An image not instantly recognisable, but a powerful one nonetheless. The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) payload on the International Space Station (ISS) imaged the entire sky, and each concentration of brightness shows nearby cosmic powerhouses releasing copious amounts of energy in the form of X-rays. These arcs are the paths that energetic particles follow between each target, uncovering previously unknown sources.…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE Light of the night © ESO One of the world’s busiest observatories is the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla site. This popular astronomical observation site has a host of finely tuned telescopes sitting at an altitude of 2,400 metres (7,900 feet) in the dry Atacama Desert in Chile. La Silla is so popular because it has the best viewing conditions. The area exhibits very little cloud coverage, with around 300 clear nights out of the year, and has been seeing the most amazing cosmic sights since its official inauguration 50 years ago.…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE Voracious black holes could feed alien life on rogue worlds Words by Mara Johnson-Groh © ESA/NASA Black holes are engines of destruction on a cosmic scale, but they may also be the bringers of life. New research on supermassive black holes suggests that the radiation they emit during feeding frenzies can create biomolecular building blocks and even power photosynthesis. The upshot? Far more worlds roaming the Milky Way and beyond could be suitable for life, the researchers speculated. For their new study scientists created computer models to look at the radiating discs of gas and dust called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, that swirl around supermassive black holes. Some of the brightest objects in the universe, AGN form as a black hole's…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE Martian microbes could survive in Mars’ salty puddles © NASA In extraordinarily salty puddles of water resembling ones you might find on Mars, bacteria can survive getting completely dried out, suggesting that the Red Planet may be more habitable than previously thought, according to a new study. Just before dawn, evaporating frost on the Martian surface can drive humidity up to 100 per cent, said the study's senior author Mark Schneegurt, an astrobiologist at Wichita State University in Kansas. At its peak the humidity on Mars can resemble the drier parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile, the driest place on Earth aside from its poles, which nevertheless is home to life. In addition, a variety of salts often found on the…

The secrets of Apollo 11 Buzz Aldrin & the last crew members reveal the unpublished archives of the 1969 Moon landing © NASA/Getty Exactly 50 years ago, humankind achieved one of the greatest technical feats of all time. Less than nine years after President Kennedy had set the goal of landing a man on the surface of the Moon and returning him safely to Earth, NASA achieved that most astonishing aim on 20 July 1969. Those intervening years had been a white-knuckle ride. Beginning with Alan Shepard’s 15-minute suborbital Mercury flight in 1961, NASA progressed through a series of milestones in their mission to reach the Moon. There was the loss of a Mercury capsule and the near-drowning of its pilot Gus Grissom; John Glenn’s re-entry with a retrorocket still…

MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE WHERE DO BLACK HOLES LEAD? If you could journey through the cosmos' most monstrous objects, what tales – if any – would you be able to tell? Reported by David Crookes © Illustration by Tobias Roetsch So there you are, about to leap into a black hole. What could possibly await should – against all odds – you somehow survive? Where would you end up and what tantalising tales would you be able to regale if you managed to clamour your way back? The simple answer to all of these questions is, as Professor Richard Massey explains, “Who knows?” As Royal Society research fellow at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, he is fully aware that the mysteries of black holes run deep. “Falling…

Bluffer's guide to black holes Explaining the key jargon and concepts that are essential in understanding these high-gravity objects © Illustration by Nicholas Forder Quasars – bright cores at the centre of galaxies Quasars are the hottest and brightest cores of distant galaxies, emitting huge amounts of energy and appearing like stars in a telescope. They contain and produce their energy from supermassive black holes at their centre. Event horizon – point of no return Reach the event horizon of a black hole and you're standing at a boundary ablaze with energy, beyond which the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light will have a chance of an escape. Escape velocity – gathering speed You'd have to be travelling at some speed if you wanted to escape the…

Pluto catch-up Warming the heart of Pluto When New Horizons flew past ’ eyes Pluto to in the 2015 idea , it shattered this could perceptions be an active of world a dull . On , rocky its flyby ball and opened revealed astronomers a heart-shaped region in the northern hemisphere of the dwarf the planet spacecraft known as Tombaugh Regio ocean . After existing studying under data the on this layer region of nitrogen , astronomers ice. have found "This evidence could mean for a there subsurface are more oceans life in more the plausible universe , than " says previously Shunichi Kamata thought of , making the existence in of Japan extraterrestrial . This study suggests that there is a layer of gas hydrates – Hokkaido ice of…

Instant Expert Charting the stars The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram The diagram that’s embedded in every astronomer’s mind can tell us a lot about the different stars that exist in the cosmos ©ESO; ALMA “When the hydrogen fusion reactions end, the star’s position in the HRD moves away from the main sequence” In the early 1900s the astronomers Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Russell placed stars in a plot of a measure of a star’s luminosity – the amount of energy a star radiates in a fixed amount of time – against a measure of the star’s surface temperature. Such a plot is now called a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD). The HRD has stimulated astronomers in their understanding of the physical processes responsible for the observed structure and evolution of stars. Additionally, HRDs for…

Focus on Superflares OUR AGING SUN Should we worry about its supeflares? The mature Sun may still be prone to temper tantrums. A new study suggests that older stars like the Sun can produce superflares – huge bursts of energy visible across hundreds of light years. Superflares used to be thought of as a younger-star phenomenon, researchers said in a statement about the new study, but the new work suggests it can happen on the Sun at rare intervals, perhaps once every few thousand years. The Sun is hard to predict on even a daily basis, so it's difficult to say when a superflare would occur. However, the new work's lead scientist, Yuta Notsu, a visiting researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, said this possibility should inspire everyone to…

The Hubble Space Telescope Launched in 1990, Hubble has provided us with years of science © ESO, Illustration by Adrian Mann Light shield This prevents unwanted light from entering the telescope and messing with the images taken by the extremely sensitive instruments. Hubble mirrors Hubble uses a 2.4-metre (eight-foot) primary mirror, which was limited by the size of the rockets carrying it into space. Communications antennae This dish sends information from Hubble back to Earth and receives information from Earth too, via communication satellites that are also orbiting Earth. Solar panels Hubble is powered by an array of solar panels that convert the energy in light from the Sun into 5,680 watts of electricity. Fine guidance sensors These instruments help navigate Hubble on its orbit of the Earth, of which…

STARGAZER This month’s planets Saturn takes the spotlight, while Mercury, Venus and Mars are challenging targets because of their proximity to the Sun Planet of the month Saturn 20:00 BST on 15 August Constellation: Sagittarius Magnitude: 0.1 AM/PM: PM Saturn – known as the ‘Ringed Planet’ because of its system of gorgeous, bright rings – is visible low in the southeast as soon as the sky begins to darken after sunset. You’ll notice immediately how Saturn is much fainter and a warmer, more golden colour than Jupiter, which will be blazing some distance over to its right and slightly higher in the sky, but at magnitude 0.1 it will still be obvious to your naked eye. Unfortunately Saturn will not reach any great altitude this month, and will always be…

Hidden Figures Way unveiling © NASA On 12 June 2019, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, United States senator Ted Cruz, D.C. Council chairman Phil Mendelson and Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book Hidden Figures, unveiled the fabulous new ‘Hidden Figures Way’ street sign in a ceremony. This street sign is a great way to commemorate the African-American women that were essential to the early days of spaceflight. Cruz made an appropriate statement, saying it’s “not just a story of individuals but it’s also a story of, and acknowledges, the racism in this country and how we still struggle to deal with that and to overcome it”.…

Getting a taste for space © NASA/JPL-Caltech The Mars 2020 rover will soon jettison from Earth, travelling onward to the Red Planet. However, engineers have to be diligent in their testing in making sure the rover can survive this journey. This shows NASA’s Mars 2020 spacecraft assembled and placed in the acoustic and thermal vacuum (TVAC) testing chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, United States. This chamber is the best analogue engineers have in order to test the vibrations and temperatures endured in such a powerful liftoff without actually going to space.…

Two potentially Earth-like alien planets found around nearby star There are even more potentially habitable planets near Earth than we ever imagined. A research team discovered two Earth-like planets in our cosmic backyard, and they're located in the perfect zone for water to form on their presumably rocky surfaces. The planets orbit a sun known as ‘Teegarden's star’, which is only 12.5 light years from Earth – a light year is the distance that light travels in a year, or roughly 6 trillion miles or 10 trillion kilometres. The two planets look an awful lot like Earth and our neighbouring worlds, the researchers said. "The two planets resemble the inner planets of our Solar System," lead author Mathias Zechmeister, a research scientist at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University…

Exploring the past and future of Pluto Due to the enormous distance to Pluto, exploration has been minimal. For a long time any observations relied on Earth-based telescopes, particularly Hubble, which produced the highest resolution maps of the dwarf planet in 2002 to 2003. NASA, however, deemed this not quite good enough, choosing to send a space probe to Pluto and see what it was all about. New Horizons was the project chosen to do so and was launched on 19 January 2006, beginning its nine-year journey to Pluto. When it arrived in July of 2015, New Horizons flew as close as 12,500 kilometres (7,800 miles) to the planet and revealed an incredibly interesting surface. Upon closer inspection of the data the New Horizons team found potential evidence of a…

End of the multiverse END OF THE MULTIVERSE THEORY? A posthumous paper by Stephen Hawking cuts cosmology’s controversial hypothesis down to size Reported by Andrew May © Tobias Roetsch The universe, by definition, contains everything we can see. That’s not just what we can see with our eyes, but everything within range of our telescopes and other scientific instruments. The universe is what astronomers study, but there’s one sub-branch of astronomy – cosmology – which specifically deals with the structure and evolution of the universe on the largest possible scales. The aim of cosmologists is to seek out the simplest theory which adequately explains everything we can see. But the subject took an unexpected turn during the 1980s when that ‘simplest theory’ began to look distinctly bizarre. It implied the…

Testing the multiverse theory How we'll use scientific instruments and results to detect signs of many universes © NASA; Alamy Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) This sprawling ground-based installation revolutionised astronomy in 2015 when it first detected gravitational waves, but it’s still not big enough to detect the primordial waves that could test the multiverse theory. Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) An ESA mission planned for the 2030s, this would be a giant gravitational wave detector made up of three spacecraft millions of kilometres apart. It will have a good chance of detecting primordial gravitational waves. Planck space telescope ESA’s follow-on to WMAP, Planck was operational from 2009 to 2013, remapping the CMB with higher sensitivity and resolution than its predecessor. It confirmed both the inflation-like uniformity and the anomalous…

Future tech Lunar landings THE FUTURE OF LUNAR LANDINGS NASA has funded a host of small businesses developing new technology that can make landing on the Moon safer and more reliable than ever © Adrian Mann NASA continues to actively seek out technologies that can make every aspect of lunar exploration easier, more accessible and more reliable. Recently the government agency awarded a grand total of $106 million (approximately £84 million) to 129 small businesses in the United States to develop their own exciting space exploration technologies, which will include self-landing spacecraft to foldout solar panels. The 142 accepted proposals will not only stimulate the United States' economy with small business involvement, but the world can witness the amazing technological advancements that have occurred over the last 50 years since…

Picture gallery: beyond deep space Looking out as far as we can, astronomers have found galaxies almost as old as the universe itself GN-z11 is a high-redshift galaxy found in the constellation Ursa Major. GN-z11 is currently the oldest and most distant known galaxy in the observable universe. © NASA/ESA When GRB 090423, seen here as an artist’s impression, was detected it was a signature of the explosion of the earliest, most distant known object in the universe. © ESO The CMB is electromagnetic radiation that has been left over from an early stage in the universe’s lifetime, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. © ESA The discovery of this cluster, called SPT2349-56, proved the evolution of galaxy clusters happens much more quickly than astronomers previously believed. © ESO…

Moon tour Pico and Plato’s Mountains The lunar peaks are worth exploring with a telescope on warm summer nights Summer is a great time to enjoy looking at the Moon. For one thing it doesn’t climb very high in the sky, so you don’t have to get a crick in your neck staring up at it. Also, the long, warm nights are perfect for Moon-gazing. If you have a pair of binoculars you can see a surprising amount of detail on the Moon. They will show you its largest craters – huge holes blown out of its surface by the impact of asteroids millions or even billions of years ago. They will also show you its highest mountain ranges, some of which rival Earth’s most beautiful. But the most striking…

Apollo landing sites OBSERVE THE APOLLO LANDING SITES TONIGHT! Turn your telescope, binoculars or unaided eye to the Moon and you’ll see where man, rovers and landers stepped onto another world Today there is a lot of excited talk about going to the Moon again. Shining brightly in our sky, it calls to us like a celestial siren, just as it always has done. NASA is still debating whether they should send astronauts straight to Mars, bypassing the Moon altogether, or only go to Mars after a number of successful precursor missions to Earth’s natural satellite. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is looking to the Moon as the potential site of a scientific outpost where different nations could work together in a ‘lunar village’, much like international scientists now…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE The red face of El Salvador © ESA Welcome to the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America – El Salvador. This false-colour image was captured by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 spacecraft. It's shown largely in red to give a better idea of the vegetation within the region. This image shows many recognisable areas of El Salvador, including Lake Güija (top left), the Cerro Verde National Park (lower left) and the volcano Izalco (below Cerro Verde). To the right of that is Coatepeque Caldera.…

Spitzer’s infrared illustration © NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA has recently announced that it will permanently shut down the Spitzer Space Telescope on 30 January 2020. After roughly 16 years of service, the telescope will no longer offer its unique view of the cosmos with its infrared capabilities, with an excellent example shown in this image. Spitzer captured this large mosaic of the Cepheus C and Cepheus B regions. These regions are filled with cosmic gas and dust that fuels the creation of stars, and the green and orange patches are where this material is illuminated by stars already formed. The patterns within it are carved out by radiation after the formation of many stars.…

‘Atlas of Space’ smashes textbook view of the Solar System In most maps of the Solar System you can expect to see the eight canonical planets, and often Pluto, trailing the fiery orange Sun like polite little ducklings in a row. In biologist Eleanor Lutz's new map of the Solar System, which shows the precise orbital paths of more than 18,000 near celestial objects, you'll be lucky if you can even find Mars. Lutz is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington who spends her evenings turning public datasets into hyperdetailed works of art. In her new project, called the Atlas of Space, she's borrowed more than a decade of data compiled by the likes of NASA, the US Geological Survey and other science organisations to create some of…

Star Trek on Mars NASA SPACECRAFT SPOTS STAR TREK LOGO ON MARS Science-fiction fans will recognise the logo shaped by dunes, lava and wind Reported by Elizabeth Howell © NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona; CBS Photo Archive / Getty It looks like Starfleet is embedded on the planet next door: a dune in the shape of the famous logo from Star Trek appears prominently in a new picture from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Even Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, weighed in. Don't expect to find Spock, Jean-Luc Picard or Michael Burnham squatting nearby, however. Just like the famous ‘face on Mars’, this Starfleet logo was produced by random chance as wind, lava and other forces sculpted the Martian landscape. "Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like…

What is the multiverse? According to the theory, our universe is just one of many © Moonru nner Design LTD A limited multiverse? The new Hawking-Hertog theory suggests that the number – and variety – of universes is much smaller than previously thought. Inflationary background Most of the multiverse is a featureless continuum in a perpetual state of headlong expansion, or ‘inflation’. Four-dimensional space-time The multiverse exists in three spatial dimensions – two are shown here – plus one time dimension, running vertically in this visualisation. A young universe New universes can pop up at any time, so some are smaller and younger than ours. Our own universe Although much slower than inflation, the continuing expansion of our universe makes it look like a funnel in space-time. Closed universes Some…

Focus on Alien salt TABLE SALT FOUND ON EUROPA For the last 20 years, astronomers had no idea that something quite familiar was present on the face of Jupiter’s moon “Sodium chloride may indicate the ocean floor is hydrothermally active”Samantha Trumbo Europa, one of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, has held the attention of astronomers since its up-close inspection by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. Since that flyby analysis of the moon has painted the picture that beneath the icy crust is a salty, subsurface ocean – possibly similar to Earth’s oceans. Now astronomers at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, United States, have found sodium chloride – more commonly known as table salt – resting on the surface. This could have positive implications for Europa’s oceans,…

BEYOND DEEP SPACE How technology is helping us peer to the edges of the observable universe Reported by Abigail Beall © NASA, ESA From neutrinos produced just seconds after the Big Bang to the most distant superclusters of galaxies we know of, studying the edge of our universe is an exciting task for astronomers around the world. And thanks to advancements in technology, we know more than ever about what lies at the boundaries of our cosmos. When you look at something, you are looking back in time. This holds true for anything you see, it’s just the distances involved are mostly so small and light moves so quickly, you will never notice the time it takes to reach you. When you begin to look into space, the time difference…

How the James Webb can Expected to launch in 2021, the next-generation telescope will look at galaxies as they first formed © NASA; Illustration by Adrian Mann A better mirror  The JWST’s 18-segment primary mirror will be over six-times bigger in area than Hubble's and around 100-times more powerful. Infrared vision  The JWST will study the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum to peer back at galaxies over 13.5 billion years old. A million miles away  The JWST will orbit the Sun, 1.5 million kilometres (1 million miles) from Earth, meaning its vantage point will be completely different to any before. A collaboration Over 1,200 skilled scientists, engineers and technicians from 14 countries have been involved with building the telescope. Unprecedented sensitivity  The sensitivity of the instruments will allow astronomers…

STARGAZER Meade Polaris 114 EQ A breeze to set up and sturdy enough to withstand slightly breezy conditions, this reflector allows for pleasing observations of a wide variety of targets Meade has provided a telescope that boasts a superior build over other instruments within its price range. Finished off to a high standard, the manufacturer of the Polaris 114 EQ has provided a very good selection of eyepieces as well as a 2x Barlow lens for low, medium and high magnification that not only saves a dent in the bank balance, saving the observer from having to buy countless accessories, but also ensures that the amateur astronomer has everything they need for an ev ening under the night sky. Similar to the telescope itself, the accessories are well-made with no…