AstroNews (2024)

07/04/2022

NASA Receives 8 2022 Webby Award Nominations

JPL's virtual tour is among the nominees, as are two JPL-managed sites: NASA's Global Climate Change and NASA's Solar System Exploration. The polls are open to the public until April 22.

Since its inception in 1958, NASA has been mandated by law to disseminate information about its operations "to the greatest degree practical." NASA has successfully transitioned from typewritten press releases and analog photographs and video to social media and other internet communications. The firm even debuted its first interactive graphic book in 2022. NASA's vast reach across digital platforms has been acknowledged by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which this year nominated NASA for eight Webby Awards.

Read more about NASA Nominees, NASA Honorees at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-receives-8-2022-webby-award-nominations

Nominees include JPL’s virtual tour and two JPL-managed sites: NASA’s Global Climate Change and NASA’s Solar System Exploration. Public voting is open through April 22.

06/04/2022

🔳Pictures from space! Our image of the day🔳
🔳Tuesday, April 5, 2022: A camera looking for falling stars captured a jumble of satellite trails in one of its worst ever nights of satellite pollution.
The camera, located in North Oxfordshire, England, is operated by the UK Meteor Network. In the image, released on Twitter by the camera's owner, skywatcher and science communicator Mary McIntyre, star trails can be seen as curved lines and aircraft trails as dotted lines. The rest are streaks left behind by passing satellites. In the hodgepodge, one can find about 25 meteor streaks.
"Overnight on 2nd3rd April 2022 our southwest facing UK0006 based in North Oxfordshire had one of the worst nights we've ever seen for ," McIntyre said in the tweet. "Just horrendous 🙁"🔳
⬇️full article⬇️
https://www.space.com/34-image-day.html

See the latest photos from space missions, astronomy discoveries and more here!

18/10/2021

International Youth Math Challenge

The International Youth Math Challenge is one of the biggest online math competition for students from all around the world: Unleash your creativity, knowledge, and math skills to win awards and cash prizes worth over 700 USD - take this unique opportunity and participate today!

01/08/2021

29/07/2021

• Magnetic Fields Implicated in the Mysterious Midlife Crisis of Stars
28.7.2021
IMAGE: Magnetic fields are produced by a dynamo mechanism inside stars and emerge through the surface to the outer atmosphere, where they generate stellar magnetic storms, energetic radiation fluxes, and govern the strength of escaping plasma winds. Studying these magnetic fields can shed light on the stellar midlife crisis – a sudden switch to a low activity phase and the existence of inactive phases such as the Maunder Minimum when hardly any sunspots are observed on the Sun. NASA / GSFC / Solar Dynamics Observatory
• Middle-aged stars can experience their own kind of midlife crisis, experiencing dramatic breaks in their activity and rotation rates at about the same age as our Sun, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. The study provides a new theoretical underpinning for the unexplained breakdown of established techniques for measuring ages of stars past their middle age, and the transition of solar-like stars to a magnetically inactive future.
Astronomers have long known that stars experience a process known as ‘magnetic braking’: a steady stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind, escapes from the star over time, carrying away small amounts of the star’s angular momentum. This slow drain causes stars like our Sun to gradually slow down their rotation over billions of years.
In turn, the slower rotation leads to altered magnetic fields and less stellar activity - the numbers of sunspots, flares, outbursts, and similar phenomena in the atmospheres of stars, which are intrinsically linked to the strengths of their magnetic fields.
This decrease in activity and rotation rate over time is expected to be smooth and predictable because of the gradual loss of angular momentum. The idea gave birth to the tool known as ‘stellar gyrochronology’, which has been widely used over the past two decades to estimate the age of a star from its rotation period.
• Continue Reading: https://ras.ac.uk/.../magnetic-fields-implicated...
• Research PAPER: “Stellar Mid-life Crisis: Subcritical Magnetic Dynamos of Solar-like Stars and the Break-down of Gyrochronology”, B. Tripathi, D. Nandy, S. Banerjee, 2021: https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/506/1/L50/6324494

Source: https://www.facebook.com/astronomynation/posts/3951225214985900

25/07/2021

Astronomers spot 1st Moon-forming disk around an alien world

The disk has the potential to form numerous moons.
Astronomers have discovered the first disk surrounding a planet outside the solar system.

The impressive circumplanetary disk is about 500 times larger than Saturn's rings and encircles a Jupiter-like planet dubbed PDS 70c. Scientists have seen plenty of disks surrounding distant stars, and moon-forming disks around planets like this have been suspected before, but this is the first time such a system has been definitively identified, according to the researchers.

"In short, it is still unclear when, where, and how planets and moons form," Stefano Facchini, an astrophysics research fellow at ESO and co-author on the research said in the same statement. The latest observations of PDS 70b and PDS 70c are helping shed light on such formation processes.

The researchers hope to be able to revisit the pair using ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which is currently being built on Cerro Armazones, a peak in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

"The ELT will be key for this research since, with its much higher resolution, we will be able to map the system in great detail," Richard Teague, study co-author and a fellow at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and the Smithsonian.

Source: https://www.space.com/first-moon-forming-exoplanet-disc-found

21/07/2021

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has successfully travelled to the edge of space and returned safely in an 11-minute journey aboard the New Shepard rocket and capsule.
The world’s richest man was joined by his brother Mark, as well as an 82-year-old aviator and aerospace regulator Wally Funk and Dutch teen Oliver Daemen on this first crewed space flight by BLUE ORIGIN, his private rocket, and space tourism company.
Upon landing Bezos said it was the “best day ever”, and the flight was a step towards developing a fleet of reusable spacecraft to “build a road to space so that our kids and their kids can build a future”.
Here's the story: https://lnkd.in/gpUhXQC
Take a look at the gallery below.
Images: Getty, Twitter

21/07/2021

KIC 9832227 is a contact binary star system[4] in the constellation Cygnus, located about 1,940 ± 30 light-years away.[5] It is also identified as an eclipsing binary with an orbital period of almost 11 hours.[4] In 2017, the system was predicted to result in a merger in 2022.2 (± 0.6 years), producing a luminous red nova (LRN) reaching an apparent magnitude of 2.The LRN would remain visible to the naked eye for roughly a month.

02/07/2021

Our savior planet!!

29/06/2021

Epic Dyson sphere!!!🤯🤯🤯

28/06/2021

Real mind blown!!🤯🤯🤯🤯

27/06/2021

Did you know this amazing fact about brain!!!!
🤯🤯🤯🤯

26/06/2021

The known limits of our universe

16/06/2021

We confuse mass for weight so often that we decided to mention them and lighten up difference. 🙃
Mass is a measure of the amount of matter in the body and is expressed in kilograms.
Weight is a measure of the action of gravity on these masses, and is expressed in newtons.
It is difficult for us to imagine a situation where the same mass in different parts of the globe can have different weight! On Earth, the differences are slight, but what if we change the object and went to another planet?
Today we are going to weigh in on Mars 😊

Primary source : https://www.facebook.com/astrospots/

01/06/2021

Quantum Zero Effect Intro

22/05/2021

Ignore the mistake in the comparison image. It is not 'IC 1011', it is IC 1101.

21/05/2021

The Big RIP Theory

19/05/2021

All You are. Vibration Is a Thought 🤨

18/05/2021

All You are. Is a Thought 🤨

28/03/2021

Japanese amateur astronomer Yuji Nakamura has discovered a new 9.6-magnitude nova in the region of the constellation of Cassiopeia. It is not yet clear which star produced nova (dubbed V1405 Cas), but there is a strong candidate: the eclipsing variable (binary) star CzeV3217, at an approximate distance of 5,500 light-years from our Solar System.

26/03/2021

• Astronomers Image Magnetic Fields at the Edge of M87’s Black Hole
24.3.2021
IMAGE: The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole released in 2019, has today a new view of the massive object at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy: how it looks in polarized light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarization, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole.
This image shows the polarized view of the black hole in M87. The lines mark the orientation of polarization, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole. Credit: EHT Collaboration
• The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole, has today revealed a new view of the massive object at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy: how it looks in polarized light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarization, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole. The observations are key to explaining how the M87 galaxy, located 55 million light-years away, is able to launch energetic jets from its core.
“We are now seeing the next crucial piece of evidence to understand how magnetic fields behave around black holes, and how activity in this very compact region of space can drive powerful jets that extend far beyond the galaxy,” says Monika Mościbrodzka, Coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and Assistant Professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
On 10 April 2019, scientists released the first ever image of a black hole, revealing a bright ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow. Since then, the EHT collaboration has delved deeper into the data on the supermassive object at the heart of the M87 galaxy collected in 2017. They have discovered that a significant fraction of the light around the M87 black hole is polarized.
“This work is a major milestone: the polarization of light carries information that allows us to better understand the physics behind the image we saw in April 2019, which was not possible before,” explains Iván Martí-Vidal, also Coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and GenT Distinguished Researcher at the University of Valencia, Spain. He adds that “unveiling this new polarized-light image required years of work due to the complex techniques involved in obtaining and analyzing the data.”
• Continue Reading: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2105/?lang
• Research PAPER: All papers available in above link
• Credit: EHT Collaboration

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole, has today revealed a new view of the massive object at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy: how it looks in polarised light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarisa...

15/03/2021

ISRO Launches Sounding Rocket RH-560 to Study Attitudinal Variations in the Neutral Winds and Plasma Dynamics

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched the sounding rocket (RH-560) to study attitudinal variations in the neutral winds and plasma dynamics carried out on Friday at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota Range (SHAR).

09/03/2021

Gum 15 • A Stellar Birthplace Shaped and Destroyed by Energetic Offspring
8.3.2021
• The little-known cloud of cosmic gas and dust called Gum 15 is the birthplace and home of hot young stars. Beautiful and deadly, these stars mould the appearance of the nebula from which they formed and, as they progress into adulthood, will eventually also destroy it.
This image was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. It shows Gum 15, located in the constellation of Vela (The Sails), some 3000 light-years from Earth. This glowing cloud is a striking example of an HII region. Such clouds form some of the most spectacular astronomical objects we can see; for example the Eagle Nebula (which includes the feature nicknamed “The Pillars of Creation”), the great Orion Nebula, and this less famous example, Gum 15.
Hydrogen (H) is the most common element in the Universe, and can be found in virtually every environment investigated by astronomers. HII regions are different because they contain substantial amounts of ionised hydrogen — hydrogen atoms that have been stripped of their electrons through high energy interactions with ultraviolet photons — particles of light. As the ionised hydrogen nuclei recapture electrons they release light at different characteristic wavelengths. It is one of these that gives nebulae such as Gum 15 their reddish glow — a glow which astronomers call hydrogen alpha (Hα).
In HII regions the ionising photons come from the young hot stars within the region, and Gum 15 is no exception. At the centre of this image you can see one of the culprits: the star HD 74804, the brightest member of a cluster of stars known as Collinder 197.
The clumpy, irregular appearance that enhances this nebula’s beauty is not unusual for a HII region and is again a result of the stars within. HII regions have diverse shapes because the distribution of stars and gas inside them is so irregular. Adding to Gum 15’s interesting shape are the forked dark patch of obscuring dust visible in the centre of this image and some dim blue reflection structures crossing it. This dust feature makes the nebula resemble a larger and fainter version of the better known Trifid Nebula (Messier 20), although in this case the name Bifid Nebula might be more apposite.
• Source & Credit: ESO