Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 153 i All About Space

SCAN HERE TO GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER If you’ve always wanted an all you need to know guide to the Andromeda Galaxy, then this is the issue for you. We take a deep dive into our closest spiral galaxy, from its structure to its scheduled collision with the Milky Way. If you want to see it with your very own eyes tonight, it’s an excellent target for those with telescopes and binoculars this February. It will then become a prime target again in June – and if you’re fortunate enough to have access to very dark skies you’ll be able to spot it with the unaided eye. Elsewhere this issue, we catch up with Charles Duke, the youngest man to visit the surface of the Moon, about his experience during…

NASA has started the new year with a self-proclaimed ‘double bang’ – that is, an image of supernova remnant 30 Doradus B. Why is it a double? In creating this image, a team of astronomers studying the remnant discovered that it could not have been formed by a single supernova. Instead the researchers believe it was created by at least two. 30 Doradus B is a region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that sits some 160,000 light years away from us. It comprises dark clouds of gas, young stars, high-energy shocks and superheated gas. A team led by Wei-An Chen from National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, used more than 2 million seconds of observing time from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory to…

When plotting sites for crewed lunar landings, mission planners must account for many lunar parameters. The shape of the terrain could make or break a mission, and a possible high volume of buried water could make one spot much more tantalising than its drier counterpart. But geologists suggest it’s also important to keep moonquakes and lunar landslides in mind. Researchers examining the Moon’s south polar region – which sits near the planned landing side of Artemis III, set to touch down in 2026 – have identified fault lines whose slips triggered a major moonquake about 50 years ago. Certain Apollo missions carried seismometers. On 13 March 1973, a particularly strong moonquake rattled those seismometers from the general direction of the Moon’s south pole. Decades later, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter flew…

Astronomers have uncovered a huge haul of hidden stars, including some violently erupting newborn protostars and others that fall under an unexpected new category of ancient giant red stars. They dub the latter bodies ‘old smokers’. These old smokers lurk at the heart of the Milky Way, the team says, sitting quietly for decades and fading away until they eventually puff out vast clouds of smoke. The stars were discovered through a ten-year survey of the sky conducted with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA), located high in the Chilean Andes at Cerro Paranal Observatory. This effort managed to track almost 1 billion stars. The same investigation, known as VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV), also uncovered dozens of erupting protostars as the international team behind the study…

The EmDrive is the brainchild of microwave engineer Roger Shawyer, who after 40 years with aerospace giants Sperry, BAE Systems and Astrium set out to pursue a remarkable idea: a thruster that can produce a force without any exhaust. The problem with rockets is that they need a reactive mass – something to throw away – so if you’re going to Mars you have to take all the propellants you’re going to need for the whole flight with you. Shawyer’s design is controversial, but it all comes down to one point of contention. The thruster consists of a closed tapering box, and microwaves beamed into the box bounce back and forth between the ends, with every bounce producing a small force. The ends are also shaped so the microwaves are…

The Hubble Space Telescope has seen cyclones raging in the dynamic atmosphere of a hot Jupiter located 880 light years away thanks to observations and computer modelling that could one day be applied to characterise weather on smaller rocky exoplanets. The planet, dubbed WASP-121 b, has a mass about 1.16 times greater than our Solar System’s Jupiter and orbits its star at a distance of just 3.88 million kilometres (2.41 million miles). That’s just 2.6 per cent the distance between Earth and the Sun. Furthermore, WASP-121 b speeds around its star once in only 1.27 days – in other words, its year is just 1.27 Earth days long. Being so close to its star, WASP-121 b is also tidally locked, meaning it rotates on its axis in time with its…

It keeps us on the ground, creates tides and holds planets in their orbits around stars and satellites revolving around Earth – and I maybe it did or didn’t cause that apple to fall on Isaac Newton’s head. We’re talking about gravity, of course. But amazingly, while we understand how gravity works, exactly how it is produced is still a source of great debate. Our current best theory of gravity is Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which explains how mass bends space, and it’s these bends in space that we experience as gravity. It’s a bit like rolling down a hill; the steeper the slope, the faster we roll. So the more massive an object is, the more steeply it bends space. Another way to imagine it is if…

Earth and the rest of our Solar System’s inner rocky planets are the products of a myriad of tiny planetesimals – glorified E pebbles of primordial cosmic dust – assembling themselves together more than 4 billion years ago. Now, a new analysis suggests that those planetesimals already contained water. Researchers tested samples from meteorites that they say are just as ancient as those planetesimals. In doing so, they found the fingerprints of chemical reactions known to occur in the presence of water. There is no water to be found in these samples today, but scientists can still trace water that they once held. Over time, if water is in the presence of other elements, the water molecules’ oxygen atoms will separate and join up with those very elements. Water and…

PLANET OF THE MONTH Jupiter is by far the largest planet in our Solar System. It’s a gas giant world so huge that it could easily swallow up Earth a thousand times over with room to spare. The planet has been gracing our evening skies for many months now, looking like a strikingly bright blue-white ‘star’ visible as soon as the Sun has set. But now Jupiter’s dominance of the evening sky is coming to an end. Its brightness is decreasing, and the length of time it’s visible in the sky each evening is decreasing too. It’s worth getting some views in while you can. At the start of our observing period Jupiter will still be a strikingly bright ‘evening star’ shining low in the southwest as the Sun sets,…

As winter turns to spring, the very nature of the night sky changes. Gone are winter’s bright stars, bold constellations and obvious deep-sky delights such as the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades and open cluster Messier 35. Replacing them are subtler constellations drawn with dimmer, less obvious stars, and a host of deepsky objects that are as distant as they are faint. Apart from the beautiful globular cluster Messier 53, which is always worth a look on a clear night, this month’s challenges are galaxies dozens of light years from Earth. They lie in two of the most overlooked constellations: Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices. All are lovely sights in large telescopes and deserve to be seen just as much as winter’s more famous ‘celebrity’ features, such as the Orion Nebula…

A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows the tiny galaxy UGC 5189A, located about 150 million light years away in the constellation of Leo, in stunning detail. The space telescope, which has been observing the universe since 1990, has been studying this galaxy since 2010, with scientists using this investigation to learn more about a supernova that occurred in this galaxy over 150 million years ago. Over just three years, this supernova, called SN 2010jl, emitted at least 2.5 billion times more visible energy than the Sun released over the same time frame across all wavelengths. SN 2010jl is a Type II supernova, meaning that it marks the death of a massive star that during its life would have had a mass of at least 40 to 50 times that…

During its 57th flyby of Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft came closer to the planet’s moon Io than any other mission has in the last two decades. Passing within around 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) of Io, the most volcanic body in the Solar System, on 30 December 2023, Juno was able to capture stunningly detailed images of the Jovian moon. The only time a spacecraft has come closer to Io was in 2001, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passed 181 kilometres (112 miles) above Io’s south pole.  Juno, which launched on 5 August 2011 and reached Jupiter and its system of moons on 4 July 2016 after a 2.8-billionkilometre (1.7-billion-mile) journey, captured six views of Io to cap off 2023 in style. Some are black and white, while others are in colour.…

NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a close flyby of Jupiter’s intriguing moon Europa in 2022, revealing potential hints of present-day surface activity. The spacecraft’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU), which is a star camera designed to assist Juno’s onboard attitude determination, was used to image Europa’s surface in high resolution while being lit up by sunlight scattered off Jupiter. The SRU image from the flyby is explored in an article published in the journal JGR Planets on 22 December 2023. The image shows an oddly shaped area of the icy surface, measuring 37 by 67 kilometres (23 by 42 miles) and resembling a platypus. In other words, it exhibits a body part in the north and a bill part in the south. Both areas – which are joined by a cracked neck-like…

Evidence of ancient lake sediments at the base of Mars’ Jezero crater offers new hope for finding traces of life in samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover. Perseverance touched down on 18 February 2021 inside the crater, which is believed to have once hosted a large lake and river delta. The rover has been scouring the crater in search of signs of past life and collecting and caching dozens of samples along the way for a possible future return to Earth. Using the rover’s Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX), researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Oslo revealed new clues about how sediment layers formed over time on the crater floor. “From orbit we can see a bunch of different deposits, but…

The delays in NASA’s Artemis program are making Congress nervous. NASA has announced that it’s now targeting T September 2025 for its Artemis II mission, which will send four astronauts around the Moon, and September 2026 for Artemis III, which will put boots on Earth’s nearest neighbour for the first time in more than half a century. These new Artemis launch dates represent delays of about a year for each flight. The rightward push was spurred by the need to conduct more studies of key Artemis hardware, such as the heatshield of NASA’s Orion crew capsule, which didn’t perform quite as expected during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in late 2022. The US House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a hearing about the new Artemis plan,…

The giant craters on the Moon are named after the giants of astronomy and science. Blasted out of the Moon’s crust by violent impacts, thousands of gaping pits with steep walls and mountains in their centres bear the names of legends such as Copernicus, Tycho and Kepler. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you flick down any list of names at the back of a book detailing the history of astronomy and pick any stargazer who contributed to the increase of our astronomical knowledge and our understanding of our place in the universe, you’ll find that they have been immortalised on the surface of the Moon with a crater named in their honour. Ismaël Bullialdus was one of the most famous astronomers of the 17th century. Living and working…

NASA Jigsaw Puzzle Cost: €18.99 (approx. £16.30 / $20.45) From: sunnygeeks.com 1 Create your very own window into the universe with this 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that features stunning imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. With three awe-inspiring images to choose from, this jigsaw will definitely keep you busy! Suitable for ages 14 and over, this jigsaw is the perfect gift for the space lover in your life. Or why not treat yourself instead? After all, we all need something to do on a cold and cloudy winter’s night. Once assembled it’ll make for a great decorative piece, too. Moon Landing TV Lunch Box Cost: £17.99 (approx. $22.60) From: 2Be suck.uk.com 2 Be the talk of the lunch table with this fun lunch box, designed to resemble a retro television set,…

The bizarre wisp of green light dubbed the Green Monster, first seen last year snaking through the glowing remnants of an exploded star, belongs to a blast wave bordering the debris field, a new study reveals. Last April, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope photographed the unusual wall of emission in front of Cassiopeia A, or Cas A, an expanding shell of hot gas roughly 11,000 light years from Earth whose light first reached us 340 years ago. For the past year, astronomers have been trying to explain its origin and presence in the wellstudied supernova remnant. The new image, unveiled at the American Astronomical Society conference, combines the observing powers of Webb, as well as NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, to feature Cas A in unprecedented detail. The…

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that the atmosphere of a relatively small planet outside the Solar System is rich with water vapour. But don’t plan a vacation to this destination just yet. The planet’s surface is hot enough to melt lead, meaning it’s a steamy world inhospitable to life as we know it. More specifically, the team behind this finding says the exoplanet, GJ 9872 d, exhibits Venus-like temperatures of 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit). But that doesn’t make this discovery any less exciting. Though scientists have found water vapour in the atmospheres of many extrasolar planets before, the Hubble Space Telescope’s observations of this hot and steamy world represent the smallest exoplanet around which this vital element for life has been found thus far. “The…

In the summer of 1989, from a remote expanse of our Solar System where sunlight is merely I a tepid glow, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft radioed to Earth humankind’s very first images of Neptune. The pictures revealed the Sun’s outermost planet was a stunning deep-blue orb. In contrast, Uranus – Neptune’s planetary neighbour and the first to be discovered with a telescope – appeared noticeably paler. Both seemingly twin worlds have a lot in common. They’re roughly the same size, almost equally massive and are both enveloped with deep atmospheres made of similar materials. So why were the two orbs different shades of blue? This is a question that has puzzled scientists for decades. Now a fresh analysis of Voyager 2’s images shows both ice giants are in fact a…

The cosmological principle is based on the assumption that the universe is isotropic T and homogeneous. In other words, the universe looks the same in all directions regardless of where it is being observed from, allowing astronomers to extrapolate from what is visible. Abiding by the principle, astronomers would say that matter is evenly spread. No structure should be able to exceed 1.2 billion light years in diameter either, as when you take into account the timescales involved in forming large objects through the process of gravitational instability, there simply has not been sufficient time in the 13.8-billionyear history of the universe for anything larger. But as PhD student Alexia Lopez from the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) has noted – not once, but twice…

Many small galaxies that existed early in the universe’s history are elongated in a surfboard-like shape, pointing to the M influence of the cosmic web of matter and constant mergers with other small galaxies. New research using the James Webb Space Telescope found that dwarf galaxies in the early universe often look flat, either prolate or very narrow oblate ovals shaped like a surfboard, whereas others have a more frisbee-like oblate appearance. These galactic frisbees seem to grow more abundant as the universe ages, as do the compact spheroidal-shaped galaxies. “Roughly 50 to 80 per cent of the galaxies we studied appear to be flattened in two dimensions,” said Viraj Pandya, a Columbia University astronomer and lead author of a new paper describing the research. “[They] seem to be very…

In this issue... 80 What’s in the sky? With the spring equinox fast approaching, make the most of the lingering darkness 82 Planetarium Where you can find the planets this month and the phases of the Moon 84 Month’s planets The king of the Solar System takes pride of place, dazzling as the king of the evening sky 86 Moon tour Find a crater named after one of the greatest astronomers of the 17th century 87 Naked eye and binocular targets Spring nights are perfect for exploring the wonders of Leo and Cancer 88 Deep sky challenge Spring is finally here, so now’s the time to go hunting in Coma Berenices and Canes Venatici 90 The Northern Hemisphere Turn your binoculars, telescopes and unaided eyes to the March skies, where…

1 Denebola (Beta Leonis) At magnitude +2.1, Denebola is the secondbrightest star in Leo and the 61st-brightest star in the whole sky. Just 36 light years away from Earth, it’s very young in stellar terms at just 400 million years old – less than a tenth the age of our Sun. 2Beehive Cluster (Messier 44) This third-magnitude open cluster is big and bright enough to be seen easily with the naked eye and is a striking sight in binoculars. It’s only 23 light years away from Earth, making it one of the closest star clusters to us. 3Messier 67 You’ll need a binocular to see this seventh-magnitude open star cluster, which lies 2,600 light years away from Earth. It’s also one of the most ancient star clusters known at around…

DETAILS Cost: £349.99 / $469.95 From: Celestron Type: Refractor Aperture: 4” Focal length: 25” The mounting of the DX 102 is completely manual, with flexible rods to allow what are T called slow motions providing a finer control over the movement than simply pulling and pushing the instrument. The extra ingredient over a standard manual mounting is the attachment for a smartphone, directly fixed to the central assembly. This is not to be confused with smartphone attachments that simply enable you to take photos of bright objects through the eyepiece, as found on some other beginners’ instruments. This is an achromatic refractor with a 102mm doublet lens composed of two different types of glass. It has a focal ratio of f/6.5, which means that it has a comparatively short tube…

The existence of a planet beyond Neptune had been predicted by prominent American astrologer Percival Lowell in 1905, but it was never proven in his lifetime. He had aimed a 40-inch reflector at what he believed to be the right section of the sky, but he died in 1916 with his dream of discovering his so-called Planet X sadly unrealised. It was his biggest disappointment, yet it was the catalyst for a continued search. And for amateur astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, Lowell’s hunch would yield great results. Lowell’s legacy was the observatory that bore his name, which had been built in 1894 for the purpose of studying Mars. It had come to be looked after by his nephew, Roger Lowell Putnam, who in a twist of fate had been approached by…