The thread for space cadets!

[Samson]

Yesterday, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of an ‘X-class’ solar flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, visible as a bright flash in the top right portion of the image. The flare’s shockwave can be seen rippling across the 1.4-million-kilometre-wide face of the Sun. The extreme ultraviolet light emitted by the hot material is coloured yellow to make it visible to human eyes. (NASA | 2 min read)

 

[Samson]

A new planets suite, of extra solar planets

The number of known planets beyond the Solar System has passed 5,000. This video from NASA charts their discovery over time — as each exoplanet is discovered, a circle appears at its position in the sky. The size of the circle represents the relative size of the planet’s orbit around its nearby star and the colour shows which method was used to discover it. The solid blue shape that appears on the left hand side shows the Kepler space telescope’s field of view. The music was composed by playing a note for each newly discovered world. Planets that take a long time to orbit their stars have low notes, whereas planets that orbit more quickly have higher notes.
​

 

[caketastydelish]

when will James Webb be fully operational to take photos?

 

[Samson]

Declassified Government Data Reveal Extra Solar visitor in 2014

It was a small meteor coming from somewhere in the thick disk of the Milky Way.

The first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in the Solar System by Pan-STARRS in 2017, allowing for a calibration of the abundance of interstellar objects of its size ∼ 100 m. One would expect a much higher abundance of smaller interstellar objects, with some of them colliding with Earth frequently enough to be noticeable. Based on the CNEOS catalog of bolide events, we identify the ∼ 0.45m meteor detected at 2014-01-08 17:05:34 UTC as originating from an unbound hyperbolic orbit with 99.999% confidence. We infer that the meteor had an asymptotic speed of v∞ ∼ 42.1±5.5 km s−1 outside of the solar system. Its origin is approximately towards R.A. 49.4±4.1◦ and declination 11.2 ± 1.8◦, implying that its initial velocity vector was 58 ± 6 km s−1 away from the velocity of the Local Standard of Rest (LSR). Its high LSR speed implies a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy. This discovery enables a new method for studying the composition of interstellar objects, based on spectroscopy of their gaseous debris as they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere
​

Paper Writeup

Spoiler NASA confirms it :

 

[r16]

naturally some people must cover up the allegations that Oumuamua "powered up" ... so , like it is no longer rare and there were meteors before it ...

 

[Kaitzilla]

when will James Webb be fully operational to take photos?

It is getting closer.

 

[Samson]

Sagittarius A* imaged for the first time

Radio astronomers have imaged the super massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. It is only the second-ever direct image of a black hole, after the same team unveiled a historic picture of a more distant black hole in 2019.

The long-awaited results, presented today by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, show an image reminiscent of the earlier one, with a ring of radiation surrounding a darker disk of precisely the size that was predicted from indirect observations and from Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity.

During five nights in April 2017, the EHT collaboration used eight different observatories across the world to collect data from both the Milky Way’s black hole — called Sagittarius A* after the constellation in which it is found — as well as the one at the centre of the galaxy M87, called M87*.

The observing locations ranged from Spain to the South Pole and from Chile to Hawaii, and added up to nearly four petabytes (4,000 terabytes) of data, which was too much to be sent over the Internet and had to be carried by aeroplane on hard disks.

The EHT researchers unveiled their image of M87* in 2019, showing the first direct evidence of an event horizon, the spherical surface that shrouds a black hole’s interior.
But the Sagittarius A* data were more challenging to analyse. The two black holes have roughly the same apparent size in the sky, because M87* is nearly 2,000 times farther away but also roughly 1,600 times larger. This also means that any blobs of matter that spiral around M87* are covering much larger distances — larger than the orbit of Pluto around the Sun — and the radiation they emit is essentially constant over short time scales. But Sagittarius A* can change quickly even over the few hours the EHT observes it every day. “In M87* we saw very little variation within a week,” says Heino Falcke, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands and a co-founder of the EHT collaboration. “Sagittarius A* varies on time scales of 5 to 15 minutes.”

Because of this variability, the EHT team generated not one image of Sagittarius A*, but thousands, and the image unveiled today is the result of a lot of processing. “By averaging them together we are able to emphasize common features,” said EHT member José Gómez of the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics in Granada, Spain. The next aim of the project is to generate a movie of the black hole to learn more about its physical properties, said Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
​

Spoiler In spatial context :

 

[warpus]

When we get a clearer image of that, is it going to be a giant galactic goatse?

 

[red_elk]

Veritasium made a good popular description of what we see there:

 

[Kaitzilla]

How come we can see the black hole in the middle?

I thought our black hole at the center of the milky way would have an accretion disc that we would view from the side?

Thus obscuring the center?

**Edit**
Ah, @16:00 the disc is very thin and the light folds around.

 

[Samson]

TIL that Saturn's moon Iapetus is blatantly two halves of a planet stuck together, with two sides very different colours (one albedo 0.03–0.05, the other albedo 0.5–0.6) and a ridge running around the equator. No wonder there are theories that it is artificial.

Spoiler Pictures :

 

[MrCynical]

The best working theory I've seen for the weird ridge round Iapetus is that it once had a moon of its own. Iapetus is one of the very few moons in the solar system where such a "moon-of-a-moon" could potentially be stable for an astronomically relevant amount of time. This theory assumes though that it wasn't completely stable, resulting in the sub-moon getting torn apart into a ring of debris, which then impacted as a colossal heap of rubble all around the moon's equator.

Doesn't explain the different colours of the two halves very well though. And we need a better word for a "moon-of-a-moon". All the ones offered so far sound rather clunky.

 

[r16]

uh , whatever . But hey , some Star Trek spinoff first encountered the Klingons around Jupiter with a Klingon ship "sinking" into the gas giant . And here be the proof , because the Klingon head thing and Klingons' dark hair and comparatively lighter skin colour ! Yeah , a certain amount of trolling at people not at CFC , because with the site name ı was expecting something like scientific ...

 

[Samson]

The lunar eclipse from the ISS


Also a couple of graphics about the next trip to the moon

Spoiler Moon trip infographics :

 

[Samson]

They found the door to the next level on Mars!!!!


The image was captured on May 7 by the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam while it ascended Mount Sharp. While the grainy black-and-white image may have conspiracy theorists over the moon, it almost definitely doesn’t show the entrance to an underground alien society. “It’s just the space between two fractures in a rock,” says NASA geophysicist Ashwin Vasavada “We’ve been traversing through an area that has formed from ancient sand dunes,” he said. These sand dunes were cemented together over time, creating the sandstone outcrops Curiosity is passing by.

Vasavada told us that the fracture is only about a foot tall and that, once these sand dunes were compacted together, they were buried and unburied over time as the sand on Mars’ surface shifted. During this process, the sandstone was under varying pressure, causing it to buckle and fracture in different places. “The fractures we see in this area are generally vertical,” he explained. This particular doorway-shaped fracture likely formed in one of two ways.

“I think what we have here [is] either two vertical fractures, where the middle piece has been removed, or one vertical fracture, and the blocks have moved apart a little bit,” Vasavada said.

 

[r16]

should people be convinced ? Yeah , the lair of Space Smurfs !

 

[red_elk]

I remember this place.

 

[Samson]

 

[Samson]

Upcoming meteor shower could become a major 'meteor storm' or fizzle out

The month of May could come to an end with a spectacular sky show — or a dud.

That's what astronomy experts are saying about a fairly new meteor shower known as Tau Herculids, which is expected to be visible during the late-night hours on Monday, May 30, into the early-morning hours on Tuesday, May 31, 2022.

Experts say this meteor shower is not one of the reliable ones that appears every year during the same general time frame, but it is forecast to come into view from our planet at the tail end of Memorial Day night. And some believe the Tau Herculids shower has the potential to become a rare "meteor storm," potentially producing hundreds of meteors — maybe as many as 1,000 per hour — for a short time.

Unlike normal meteor showers, Bakley said the Tau Herculids shower is expected to have a short viewing window because its peak will be short-lived.

"For us here in New Jersey, that peak will be from 12:30 a.m. (on Monday, May 30) to 1:45 a.m. (on Tuesday, May 31)," Bakley said.

"If the (meteor) storm doesn't happen during that time, I still recommend staying out under the stars a little longer in case predictions were slightly wrong," he added. "The radiant point will be high in the sky, so the meteors could happen anywhere. But for this event, you really need to venture into the darkest skies to view it perfectly."​

 

[stfoskey12]

It looks like the Boeing Starliner launch was successful.