Scientists have calculated the rotational speed of asteroid 2024 BX1, which exploded over Berlin earlier this year, by letting it trail in images of the sky. It turns out, 2024 BX1 was spinning faster than any other near-Earth object ever seen.
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The FAA announced May 10 that it will prepare an environmental impact statement for SpaceX's planned work with Starship at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Exoplanets are a fascinating astronomy topic, especially the so-called “Hot Jupiters”. They’re overheated massive worlds often found orbiting very close to their stars—hence the name. Extreme gravitational interactions can tug them right into their stars over millions of years. However, some hot Jupiters appear to be spiraling in faster than gravity can explain.
WASP-12b is a good example of one of these rapidly spiraling hot Jupiters. In about three million years, thanks to orbital decay, it will become one with its yellow dwarf host star. Both are part of a triple-star system containing two red dwarf stars. The hot Jupiter orbits the dwarf in just over one Earth day at a distance of about 3.5 million kilometers. That’s well within the orbit of Mercury around the Sun. Thanks to that orbit and gravitational influence, one side of the planet always faces the star. That heats only one side and puts the surface temperature at about 2,200 C. Eventually heat flows to the opposite side, which stirs up strong winds in the upper atmosphere. The planet doesn’t reflect much light, and astronomers have described it as a pitch-black world.
As if all that isn’t odd enough, the gravitational pull of the nearby star distorts this hot Jupiter into an egglike shape. It’s also stripping the planet’s atmosphere away. So, it’s no wonder astronomers described WASP-12b as a doomed planet.
Artist’s impression of WASP-12b, a Hot Jupiter deformed by its close orbit to its star. Credit: NASA
According to conventional theory, a hot Jupiter planet like WASP-12b should create strong gravitational tidal waves between themselves and their parent stars. Those waves transfer energy, which tugs at the planet. That pulls the planet right into the star. Such a fiery death is definitely in WASP-12b’s future. But, there’s just one problem: it’s getting sucked in faster than gravitational tidal waves can explain. What’s happening?
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are well known satellite galaxies of the Milky Way but there are more. It is surrounded by at least 61 within 1.4 million light years (for context the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away) but there are likely to be more. A team of astronomers have been hunting for more companions using the Subaru telescope and so far, have searched just 3% of the sky. To everyone’s surprise they have found nine previously undiscovered satellite galaxies, far more than expected.
Data from Gaia (the satellite collecting accurate position information of astronomical objects) suggests that most of the satellite galaxies orbiting our own are newcomers! Even the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are now known to be newcomers. Whether any of these will fall into orbit around the Milky Way is as yet unknown, largely because we do not have an accurate measure for the mass of our home Galaxy.
The recent search hopes to expand our understanding of this corner of the Universe with the first detailed search for companion dwarf galaxies. The paper from lead author Daisuke Homma and team from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan reports on the findings of their survey using the Subaru Telescope.
Based on Mauna Kea in Hawaii The Subaru Telescope is an 8.2m diameter telescope located at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. Until 2005 it was the largest single mirror telescope in the world with a gigantic 8.2 metre mirror. In all telescopes, larger mirrors collect more light bringing with it the ability to see fainter objects and finer levels of detail. A number of telescopes have now surpassed Subaru’s massive light collecting power but multi-mirror telescopes are becoming more popular.
As the cornerstone of the study is a drive to understand dark matter distribution. The concept of the Universe being dominated by cold dark matter nicely describes the large scale model of the cosmos. It struggles however, to describe the structure in the local Universe predicting hundreds of satellite galaxies to the Milky Way. Until recently, we only knew of a handful of satellite galaxies contradicting the model in a quandary known as the missing satellites problem. The team from Japan hopes their work will help provide clues to understand this problem.
The Starmus music and science festival heads to Bratislava, Slovakia for a multi-day event from May 12 to May 17. Here's what to expect.
The waxing Moon this week travels eastward from the horns of Taurus past the heads of Gemini, the Beehive in Cancer, then the forefoot of Leo on its way to occulting Beta Virginis.
The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, May 10 – 19 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image features salt flats and lakes in southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes Mountains.
The NOAA has bumped up its geomagnetic storm watch for May 11 to a "rare" level as solar activity continues at high levels and at least four coronal mass ejections propel toward Earth.
There’s something poetic about humanity’s attempt to detect other civilizations somewhere in the Milky Way’s expanse. There’s also something futile about it. But we’re not going to stop. There’s little doubt about that.
One group of scientists thinks that we may already have detected technosignatures from a technological civilization’s Dyson Spheres, but the detection is hidden in our vast troves of astronomical data.
A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical engineering project that only highly advanced civilizations could build. In this sense, ‘advance’ means the kind of almost unimaginable technological prowess that would allow a civilization to build a structure around an entire star. These Dyson Spheres would allow a civilization to harness all of a star’s energy.
A Civilization could only build something so massive and complex if they had reached Level II in the Kardashev Scale. Dyson Spheres could be a technosignature, and a team of researchers from Sweden, India, the UK, and the USA developed a way to search for Dyson Sphere technosignatures they’re calling Project Hephaistos. (Hephaistos was the Greek god of fire and metallurgy.)
They’re publishing their results in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Academy of Sciences. The research is titled “Project Hephaistos – II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE.” The lead author is Matías Suazo, a PhD student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University in Sweden. This is the second paper presenting Project Hephaistos. The first one is here.
A new visualization from NASA takes the viewer on a one-way journey into a black hole.
The post Video: Plunge into a Black Hole appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Astrobiology is the field of science that studies the origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the Universe. In practice, this means sending robotic missions beyond Earth to analyze the atmospheres, surfaces, and chemistry of extraterrestrial worlds. At present, all of our astrobiology missions are focused on Mars, as it is considered the most Earth-like environment beyond our planet. While several missions will be destined for the outer Solar System to investigate “Ocean Worlds” for evidence of life (Europa, Ganymede, Titan, and Enceladus), our efforts to find life beyond Earth will remain predominantly on Mars.
If and when these efforts succeed, it will have drastic implications for future missions to Mars. Not only will great care need to be taken to protect Martian life from contamination by Earth organisms, but precautions must be taken to prevent the same from happening to Earth (aka. Planetary Protection). In a recent study, a team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, recommends that legal or normative frameworks be adopted now to ensure that future missions do not threaten sites where evidence of life (past or present) might be found.
The study was led by Clare Fletcher, a Ph.D. student with the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA) and Earth and Sustainability Science Research Centre at UNSW. She was joined by Professor Martin Van Kranendonk, a researcher with the ACA and the head of the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University, and Professor Carol Oliver of the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences at UNSW. Their research paper, “Exogeoconservation of Mars,” appeared on April 21st in Space Policy.
The search for life on Mars can be traced to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Percival Lowell made extensive observations from his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Inspired by Schiaparelli’s illustrations of the Martian surface (which featured linear features he called “canali”), Lowell recorded what he also believed were canals and spent many years searching for other indications of infrastructure and an advanced civilization. During the ensuing decades, observatories worldwide observed Mars closely, looking for indications of life and similarities with Earth.
However, it was not until the Space Age that the first robotic probes flew past Mars, gathering data directly from its atmosphere and taking close-up images of the surface. These revealed a planet with a thin atmosphere composed predominantly of carbon dioxide and a frigid surface that did not appear hospitable to life. However, it was the Viking 1 and 2 missions, which landed on Mars in 1976, that forever dispelled the myth of a Martian civilization. But as Fletcher told Universe Today via email, the possibility of extant life has not been completely abandoned:
Sierra Space's first Dream Chaser space plane has finished rigorous environmental testing in Ohio and is being prepped for the journey to its Florida launch site.
Primordial black holes left over from the Big Bang and no wider than a dime could be a prime target for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope after it launches in 2026.
Lucasfilm Animation's second Star Wars anthology series often wows, but neither the tales chosen nor the structure feel like a good fit for the format.
Last week, the chief scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope, Jane Rigby, was awarded the 2024 Medal of Freedom.
A sunspot so big it rivals the gigantic sunspot responsible for the Carrington Event in 1859 has unleashed another X-class solar flare. Watch the eruption here and find out how to see the sunspot for yourself.
It's been four years since it was made, but if you could smell it, you'd find it still retains the whiff of a DoubleTree Cookie. The first food item baked in space is now at the Smithsonian.
China launched its first Long March 6C rocket, helping the nation further its goal of launching 100 orbital missions this year.
