Cool astronomy photos

[Anaxagoras]

Wow, has it been 7 years already?

Still going strong I see, if a little dirtier.

[Witness]

Can magnetic fields help tell us how spiral galaxies form and evolve? To find out, the HAWC+ instrument on NASA's airborne (747) SOFIA observatory observed nearby spiral galaxy M77. HAWC+ maps magnetism by observing polarized infrared light emitted by elongated dust grains rotating in alignment with the local magnetic field. The HAWC+ image shows that magnetic fields do appear to trace the spiral arms in the inner regions of M77, arms that likely highlight density waves in the inflowing gas, dust and stars caused by the gravity of the galaxy's oval shape. The featured picture superposes the HAWC+ image over diffuse X-ray emission mapped by NASA's NuSTAR satellite and visible light images taken by Hubble and the SDSS. M77 is located about 47 million light years away toward the constellation of the Sea Monster (Cetus).

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191216.html

[Bruce]

Magnetic fields boggle my mind on the molecular level. To see magnetic fields extend in loops over the surface of the sun that can fit several Jupiters is beyond what I can comprehend. And now to see magnetic field patterns extending across an entire galaxy.....

[robinson]

Electric Universe shit right there

[Witness]

Newest solar telescope produces first images

Preeminent telescope to play critical role in better understanding sun, space weather

The National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has released its first images. They reveal unprecedented detail of the sun's surface and preview the world-class products to come from this preeminent 4-meter solar telescope.

Details: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 131449.htm

[Witness]

Two comets (green, left: C/2017 O1; white, center: C2015 ER61) and the Pleiades:



Photo Damian Peach/Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year: https://www.sciencealert.com/we-are-com ... f-the-year

[Anaxagoras]

That is very cool. We're seeing the Milky Way there in the background too, if I'm not mistaken.

A green comet is cool. Anything green can't be a star. Stars come in red, orange, yellow, white and blue. But not green.

[Witness]

[Anaxagoras]

Photos are too big to embed here, so link to tweet:

Link: https://twitter.com/Astro_Jessica/status/1221564081229979650

The one on the right appears to be a reflection on a solar panel.

[Witness]

Very high resolution moon picture (color enhanced): https://i.redd.it/8v2xpu7hgif41.jpg

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comm ... esolution/

[Witness]

[Witness]

In other astro news:

NASA brings Voyager 2 fully back online, 11.5 billion miles from Earth

In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history. Voyager 2, currently some 11.5 billion miles from Earth, is back online and resuming its mission to collect scientific data on the solar system and the interstellar space beyond.

On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission.

"My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted.

Voyager 2 is sister craft to Voyager 1. Both have been traveling through the solar system — and now beyond it — for the last four decades. Together, they have transformed our understanding of our stellar neighborhood and are already revealing unprecedented information about the interstellar space beyond the Sun's sphere of influence.

https://www.inverse.com/science/nasa-br ... from-earth for the rest.

[Witness]

The barred spiral NGC1365 + 209 named galaxies in this field:



Full-size image to zoom in: https://i.redd.it/539efusrure41.jpg
Technical details: https://old.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comm ... night_sky/

[Witness]

Patagonia.

Big image: https://i.redd.it/679rloudf0g41.jpg

[robinson]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/im ... _hires.jpg

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/de ... d=PIA04213

[Witness]

NGC 7331 Close Up

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way. About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, NGC 7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier's famous 18th century catalog. Since the galaxy's disk is inclined to our line-of-sight, long telescopic exposures often result in an image that evokes a strong sense of depth. This Hubble Space Telescope close-up spans some 40,000 light-years. The galaxy's magnificent spiral arms feature dark obscuring dust lanes, bright bluish clusters of massive young stars, and the telltale reddish glow of active star forming regions. The bright yellowish central regions harbor populations of older, cooler stars. Like the Milky Way, a supermassive black hole lies at the core of spiral galaxy NGC 7331.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200207.html (full size picture)

[Anaxagoras]

The Kuiper belt object Arrokoth is a pristine remnant of planet formation in action

New Horizons spacecraft 'alters theory of planet formation'

Scientists say they have "decisively" overturned the prevailing theory for how planets in our Solar System formed.

The established view is that material violently crashed together to form ever larger clumps until they became worlds.

New results suggest the process was less catastrophic - with matter gently clumping together instead.

The study appears in Science journal and has been presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.

The study's lead researcher, Dr Alan Stern, said that the discovery was of "stupendous magnitude".

"There was the prevailing theory from the late 1960s of violent collisions and a more recent emerging theory of gentle accumulation. One is dust and the other is the only one standing. This rarely happens in planetary science, but today we have settled the matter," he told BBC News.

The claim arises from detailed study of an object in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Named Arrokoth, the object is more than six billion km from the Sun in a region called the Kuiper belt. It is a pristine remnant of planet formation in action as the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, with two bodies combining to form a larger one.

Scientists obtained high-resolution pictures of Arrokoth when Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft flew close to it just over a year ago. It gave scientists their first opportunity to test which of the two competing theories was correct: did its components crash together or was there gentle contact?

The analysis by Dr Stern and his team could find no evidence of violent impact. The researchers found no stress fractures, nor was there any flattening, indicating that the objects were squashed together gently.

"This is completely decisive," said Dr Stern. "In one fell swoop, the flyby of Arrokoth was able to decide between the two theories."

Well, they do seem to be generalizing from a sample of one.

[Doctor X]

Honk!

– J.D.

[Witness]

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, published over 100 years ago, predicted the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. And that's what gives these distant galaxies such a whimsical appearance, seen through the looking glass of X-ray and optical image data from the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes. Nicknamed the Cheshire Cat galaxy group, the group's two large elliptical galaxies are suggestively framed by arcs. The arcs are optical images of distant background galaxies lensed by the foreground group's total distribution of gravitational mass. Of course, that gravitational mass is dominated by dark matter. The two large elliptical "eye" galaxies represent the brightest members of their own galaxy groups which are merging. Their relative collisional speed of nearly 1,350 kilometers/second heats gas to millions of degrees producing the X-ray glow shown in purple hues. Curiouser about galaxy group mergers? The Cheshire Cat group grins in the constellation Ursa Major, some 4.6 billion light-years away.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191026.html

[Bruce]

Starting to wonder if I should change my entry in the Deadpool to Betelgeuse.

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/02/dimm ... mages-show

This has been in NASA news for the past year. Betelgeuse has been dimming, which is normal for a variable star, but it's been dimmer for a longer period since its variable phenomenon was first recorded. As of a few days ago, it started changing shape.

I would honestly like to see it go supernova. That would be super cool. It would almost be worth the Second Coming and other woo nonsense that would surely follow.

[Witness]

This orange blob shows the star Betelgeuse, as seen by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This is the first time that ALMA has ever observed the surface of a star and this first attempt has resulted in the highest-resolution image of Betelgeuse available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse

[Bruce]

https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart

The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for the DART demonstration. While the Didymos primary body is approximately 780 meters across, its secondary body (or “moonlet”) is about 160-meters in size, which is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth. The Didymos binary is being intensely observed using telescopes on Earth to precisely measure its properties before DART arrives.

The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact deflection by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6.6 km/s, with the aid of an onboard camera (named DRACO) and sophisticated autonomous navigation software. The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, but this will change the orbital period of the moonlet by several minutes - enough to be observed and measured using telescopes on Earth.

Unless....by some sick twist of fate that typically only exists in movies....the impact redirects the space rock directly toward earth.

Better start training those oil rig operators how to be astronauts right now, eh?

[Doctor X]

Liv Tyler could use the work.

– J.D.

[sparks]

Listy can help her with that.

[Witness]

No pictures (yet):

Astronomers to sweep entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life

Project is collaboration between privately-funded institute and New Mexico observatory



Astronomers will sweep the entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life for the first time, using 28 giant radio telescopes in an unprecedented hunt for alien civilisations.

The project is a collaboration between the privately-funded Seti Institute and the Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico, one of the world’s most powerful radio observatories. Gaining real-time access to all the data gathered by VLA is considered a major coup for scientists hunting extraterrestrial lifeforms and an indication that the field has “gone mainstream”.

Normal astronomy operations will continue at the VLA, which was featured in the 1997 film Contact, but under the new arrangement all data will be duplicated and fed through a dedicated supercomputer that will search for beeps, squawks or other signatures of distant technology.

“The VLA is being used for an all-sky survey and we kind of go along for the ride,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley Seti centre. “It allows us to in parallel conduct a Seti survey.

“Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and [our] telescopes can play a major role in answering it,” said Tony Beasley, director of The National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which runs the VLA.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... trial-life

[Bruce]

Starting to wonder if I should change my entry in the Deadpool to Betelgeuse.

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/02/dimm ... mages-show

This has been in NASA news for the past year. Betelgeuse has been dimming, which is normal for a variable star, but it's been dimmer for a longer period since its variable phenomenon was first recorded. As of a few days ago, it started changing shape.

I would honestly like to see it go supernova. That would be super cool. It would almost be worth the Second Coming and other woo nonsense that would surely follow.

Nope. False alarm.

https://www.universetoday.com/145114/be ... ing-again/

The latest observations of Betelgeuse show that the star is now beginning to slowly brighten. No supernova today! Nothing to see, better luck next time.

Despite some of the hype, this behavior is exactly what astronomers expected.

[Witness]

A 2.5 Hour Exposure of the Rho Ophiuchi Region From a Dark Sky Site

https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments ... hi_region/ for technical details.

[Witness]

China’s Rover Finds Layers of Surprise Under Moon’s Far Side

The Chang’e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. ["peril"?]

China’s Yutu-2 rover on the moon’s surface. Ground-penetrating radar on the rover examined soil on the moon at depths of more than 100 feet.

China’s robotic Chang’e-4 spacecraft did something last year that had never been done before: It landed on the moon’s far side, and Yutu-2, a small rover it was carrying, began trundling through a crater there. One of the rover’s instruments, a ground-penetrating radar, is now revealing what lies beneath.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, a team of Chinese and Italian researchers showed that the top layer of the lunar soil on that part of the moon is considerably thicker than some expected — about 130 feet of what scientists call regolith.

“It’s a fine, dusty, sandy environment,” said Elena Pettinelli, a professor of mathematics and physics at Rome Tre University who was one of the authors of the paper.

Based on what NASA astronauts observed during the Apollo moon landings, other scientists said they would have expected one-quarter as much soil.

Arrows at lower right show the Chang’e 4 landing site in Von Karman crater on the moon.

Although Von Karman crater lies within what is known as the South Pole-Aitken basin, an ancient 1,100-mile-wide impact crater, it is too far north for there to be ice in the soil.

The radar waves passed through the top 40 feet or so almost effortlessly, indicating a porous granular material. Below that, there were boulders, perhaps a couple of feet to a couple of yards in size. A third slice of soil, even lower, appeared to consist of alternating layers of fine and coarse particles but without boulders.

One surprise was that the researchers saw no signs of the radar bouncing off basalt — solidified lava — that would have pooled at the bottom of a crater as the rocks melted by a meteor impact cooled. Yutu-2’s radar signals would have bounced off that rock if the rover had visited Von Karman crater soon after it formed.

But several billion years later, the basalt surface has been buried by regolith that was subsequently tossed up by later impacts. The top layer of fine particles may have also once contained boulders, but those may have been broken apart in eons of subsequent cosmic pummeling.

The Chang’e-4 lander, photographed by the Yutu-2 rover.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/scie ... -side.html

[Witness]

Saturn: Shadows of a Seasonal Sundial

Saturn's rings form one of the larger sundials known. This sundial, however, determines only the season of Saturn, not the time of day. In 2009, during Saturn's last equinox, Saturn's thin rings threw almost no shadows onto Saturn, since the ring plane pointed directly toward the Sun. As Saturn continued in its orbit around the Sun, however, the ring shadows become increasingly wider and cast further south. These shadows are not easily visible from the Earth because from our vantage point near the Sun, the rings always block the shadows. The above image was taken in August by the robotic Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn. The rings themselves appear as a vertical bar on the image right. The Sun, far to the upper right, shines through the rings and casts captivatingly complex shadows on south Saturn, on the image left. Cassini has been exploring Saturn, its rings, and its moons since 2004, and is expected to continue until at least the maximum elongation of Saturn's shadows occurs in 2017. [2011 October 12]

http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlnasa/re ... 11012.html

[Witness]

No picture, but an interesting result:

Hunting aurorae: Astronomers find an exoplanet using a new approach

If confirmed, the discovery points to how radio telescopes could help astronomers discover and study exoplanets by searching for their aurorae.

Astronomers have discovered a terrestrial-mass exoplanet orbiting a tiny red dwarf star less than 30 light-years from Earth. And although finding yet another exoplanet is nothing new, what’s unique is exactly how the researchers discovered the exotic world: They hunted for radio waves emitted by glowing aurorae.

The new observations — made with the Low Frequency Array radio telescope (LOFAR) in the Netherlands — indicate a planet less than about five times the mass of the Earth is in a quick orbit around a petite red dwarf named GJ 1151. And thanks to the stars’ magnetic field interacting with the close-in planet’s atmosphere, the researchers were able to detect the telltale radio signatures of aurorae.

...

In the case of the newfound world around GJ 1151, the researchers paint a picture of a planet magnetically connected to its star, producing aurorae as the two interact. According to Joseph Callingham, a Veni Fellow at Leiden Observatory at Leiden University, these exoplanetary aurorae are expected to look brighter and more intense than anything seen on Earth, sporting purple and yellow hues that only appear in Earth’s strongest light shows.

This sort of magnetic activity produces radio emissions, which radio astronomers have long hoped to use to find and study exoplanets. In 2018, for instance, astronomers discovered the impressive auroral activity of a rogue exoplanet called SIMP J01365663+0933473 (or simply SIMP). This marked the first detection of aurorae on a planet-sized object outside our own solar system. If confirmed, the recent observations of GJ 1151 will go on to serve as the first detection of star-exoplanet interaction at radio frequencies.

“All previous methods of detecting exoplanets around main-sequence stars use optical telescopes,” says Benjamin Pope, a NASA Sagan Fellow at New York University who was involved with the research. “By opening the radio window, we don’t necessarily know what we will find!”

And because most red dwarf stars — which are thought to account for roughly 75 percent of the stars in the universe — have exceptionally strong magnetic fields, this new method of detecting exoplanets based on their auroral activity could be particularly revealing.

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/03/hunt ... w-approach

[Anaxagoras]

We're sending another rover to Mars soon:

America's next Mars rover will be called Perseverance



More about the mission:

Nasa 2020 robot rover to target Jezero 'lake' crater

Basically it's like the Curiosity Rover, but with some upgraded kit. The platform is the same, so they didn't try to reinvent the wheel by designing a whole new rover from scratch.

[Witness]

Technical details: ISS Transit of the Sun in Hα.

[Witness]

Jupiter's moon Io in true colors:

[Witness]

Lunar south pole:



Source & details: https://prabhuastrophotography.com/upda ... south-pole

[Witness]

LUVOIR Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor


Mission

LUVOIR (Large UV Optical Infrared telescope) is a concept for a large multi-wavelength, serviceable observatory following the heritage of the Hubble Space Telescope. In scope with its ambitious planned design, its science goals would enable transformative advances across a broad range of astrophysics. With a proposed launch date in mid 2030s, this observatory includes upgradeable state-of-the-art instruments and would reside at Earth-Sun L2 point. LUVOIR's broad range of capabilities, including its wide UV-NIR wavelength range, will allow it to study yet-to-be-discovered phenomena and answer yet-to-be dreamed of questions we do not yet know to ask. A large fraction of LUVOIR's schedule would be open to the community through a general observing program. The LUVOIR study team is considering two architectures, one with a 15-m mirror (Architecture A), and another with an 8-m mirror (Architecture B). Architecture A is designed for launch on NASA's planned Space Launch System (SLS), while Architecture B is being designed to launch on a heavy-lift vehicle with a 5-m diameter fairing, similar to those in use today.

Telescope

LUVOIR Architecture A (LUVOIR-A) features a 15-m diameter primary telescope aperture and four serviceable instruments, while Architecture B (LUVOIR-B) has an 8-m telescope aperture and 3 instruments. The primary mirror for LUVOIR-A is an on-axis three-mirror anastigmat system (TMA). The advantages of this system include high optical quality across a wide field-of-view. LUVOIR-B is an off-axis TMA, chosen to improve perfomance for high-contrast observations of exoplanets. Both designs include a fine steering mirror located at the real exit pupil of the optical telescope element, to achieve ultra-fine pointing stability for all of the instruments.

Just a concept. Even LUVOIR-B would be too expensive for NASA. Details: https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/

But holy crap, the things we could see with a 15 m telescope in orbit. Tax the cockroaches!

[sparks]

If it will elevate our knowledge of the Cosmos in which we find ourselves, then count on it: It won't get funded.

Sky Daddy and all that shit you see.

[Anaxagoras]

Maybe if the James Webb telescope actually works, but it's been so plagued with delays and cost overruns, that I think they might be shy about starting to build another space telescope in the near future.

[Witness]

Maybe if the James Webb telescope actually works, but it's been so plagued with delays and cost overruns, that I think they might be shy about starting to build another space telescope in the near future.

Indeed. And it's a pity.

“Now estimated to cost $9.7 billion, the project’s costs have increased by 95 percent and its launch date has been delayed by over 6.5 years since its cost and schedule baselines were established in 2009.”
– GAO Report: James Webb Space Telescope

From this article on the subject: https://www.universetoday.com/144804/it ... july-2021/

[Witness]

Signals that baffled astronomers for 17 years traced to observatory's microwave oven

For 17 years, astronomers at a well-known Australian radio telescope known as "The Dish" had not been able to figure out the source of a strange, vexing interference.

Simon Johnston, head of astrophysics at the CSIRO, the national science agency, told the Guardian that a couple of times a year signals known as perytons were detected "within five kilometers" of the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales. The first theory was that the perytons were caused by local lightning strikes.

On New Year's Day, the observatory installed a new receiver to monitor the interference, and it detected strong signals at 2.4 GHz.

Two point four gigahertz is the signature of a microwave oven.

When scientists tested the facility's lunchroom microwave, no perytons were found — at least not at first.

But when the door of the microwave was opened while food was heating — as one might do to check on a reheated dish — bingo! Perytons spilled out like microwaved popcorn.

Complicating matters was that the Dish only registered the perytons when it was pointed at the microwave.

Astronomers generally operate the telescope remotely, but several maintenance workers are on the site during daytime hours. Little did they know that reheating their coffee created an enigma that would remain unsolved for almost two decades.

https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/ ... 249454.php


Sorry, no picture of the offending kitchen appliance.

[sparks]

Fucking idiots.