Space news topic and space related news

[Toliman]

James Webb Space Telescope Launch Update
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/james-webb-space-telescope-launch-update

...However, due to adverse weather conditions at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, the flight VA256 to launch Webb – initially scheduled for Dec. 24 – is being postponed.
The new targeted launch date is Dec. 25, as early as possible...



Hmm, why I am not surprised? hrh

[Vawmataw]

James Cameron is behind this

The good news is, the rocket and the telescope are on the launch pad, and the date hasn't yet changed about 24 hours before the launch.

[Toliman]

Yeah

Yeah, that is good news.

[Toliman]

Finally launched

NASA's Webb Telescope Launches to See First Galaxies, Distant Worlds
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-webb-telescope-launches-to-see-first-galaxies-distant-worlds

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launched at 7:20 a.m. EST Saturday on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, South America.

[Toliman]

ESO telescopes help uncover largest group of rogue planets yet
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2120/

Rogue planets are elusive cosmic objects that have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own. Not many were known until now, but a team of astronomers, using data from several European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes and other facilities, have just discovered at least 70 new rogue planets in our galaxy. This is the largest group of rogue planets ever discovered, an important step towards understanding the origins and features of these mysterious galactic nomads.

"We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many," says Núria Miret-Roig, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France and the University of Vienna, Austria, and the first author of the new study published today in Nature Astronomy.

Rogue planets, lurking far away from any star illuminating them, would normally be impossible to image. However, Miret-Roig and her team took advantage of the fact that, in the few million years after their formation, these planets are still hot enough to glow, making them directly detectable by sensitive cameras on large telescopes. They found at least 70 new rogue planets with masses comparable to Jupiter's in a star-forming region close to our Sun, located within the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations [1].

To spot so many rogue planets, the team used data spanning about 20 years from a number of telescopes on the ground and in space. "We measured the tiny motions, the colours and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky," explains Miret-Roig. "These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets."

The team used observations from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope located in Chile, along with other facilities. "The vast majority of our data come from ESO observatories, which were absolutely critical for this study. Their wide field of view and unique sensitivity were keys to our success," explains Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and project leader of the new research. "We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corresponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data."

The team also used data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, marking a huge success for the collaboration of ground- and space-based telescopes in the exploration and understanding of our Universe.

The study suggests there could be many more of these elusive, starless planets that we have yet to discover. "There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star," Bouy explains.

By studying the newly found rogue planets, astronomers may find clues to how these mysterious objects form. Some scientists believe rogue planets can form from the collapse of a gas cloud that is too small to lead to the formation of a star, or that they could have been kicked out from their parent system. But which mechanism is more likely remains unknown.

Further advances in technology will be key to unlocking the mystery of these nomadic planets. The team hopes to continue to study them in greater detail with ESO's forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert and due to start observations later this decade. "These objects are extremely faint and little can be done to study them with current facilities," says Bouy. "The ELT will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found."

[Toliman]

Palomar Survey Instrument Analyzes Impact of Starlink Satellites
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/palomar-survey-instrument-analyzes-impact-of-starlink-satellites

[Toliman]

Astronomers Discover a Mysterious Star That Flashes Every 20 Minutes. But What is it?
https://www.universetoday.com/154287/astronomers-discover-a-mysterious-star-that-flashes-every-20-minutes-but-what-is-it/

Just 4,000 light-years from Earth is a strange, star-sized object. It's been observed by radio telescopes, but astronomers aren't sure what it is. They call it a long period transient.

Transients are objects in the sky that change over some period of time. Fast transients are things such as pulsars, which emit a bright flash over a period of seconds or milliseconds. Slow transients are objects such as supernovae, which grow to extreme brightness over days or months. This new object is transient three times an hour. About every 18 minutes, it becomes one of the brightest radio objects in the sky, with its flash lasting anywhere from half a second to nearly a minute. Its long period and extreme brightness are what makes it so unusual.

One idea is that the object is a hypothetical object known as an ultra-long period magnetar. Magnetars are neutron stars, the same as pulsars, but magnetars have much stronger magnetic fields. Most magnetars are thought to rotate as quickly as pulsars, but their strong magnetic fields could interact with surrounding ionized gas in a way that causes it to slow down significantly. This would turn it into a kind of slow rotating pulsar. The problem with this idea is that astronomers have thought ultra-long period magnetars wouldn't be nearly so bright. Another idea is that the object is a strange type of white dwarf, but it isn't clear how a white dwarf could become so radio bright.

Based on observations, we do know the object has an intense magnetic field. The radio light we see from the object is highly polarized. Charged particles emit highly polarized light when they interact with a strong magnetic field. We also know the transient can't simply be a standard pulsar effect. Pulsars emit regular flashes because their rotation sweeps a beam of intense radio light across the sky. We see a radio flash every time the beam sweeps our way, similar to the flash of a lighthouse. This object would flash about every 18 minutes, but these flashes would only happen over the course of a few hours. The team saw the object shift between active and quiet periods during their observation runs. So some strange happenings are going on.

Of course, the most exciting idea is that the transient object is something we don't expect. Perhaps a newly formed black hole, or a hypothetical quark star. With only one example, it's difficult to narrow down the possibilities. So the team is searching for similar objects in order to solve the mystery they never expected to find.

[Toliman]

Glowing Helicopters on Mars
https://www.universetoday.com/154356/glowing-helicopters-on-mars/

[Toliman]

Planetary bodies observed in habitable zone of dead star
https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/planetary_bodies_observed

[Toliman]

Cracking the Mystery of Jupiter's High-Energy 'Northern Lights'
https://news.columbia.edu/jupiters-high-energy-northern-lights

[Toliman]

Massive bubbles at center of Milky Way caused by supermassive black hole
https://news.umich.edu/massive-bubbles-at-center-of-milky-way-caused-by-supermassive-black-hole/

[Toliman]

Gamma light from a nova
With the H.E.S.S. observatory and the Fermi satellite, researchers track the eruption of RS Ophiuchi
https://www.mpg.de/18414085/gamma-light-from-a-nova?c=2249

[Toliman]

NASA's Webb Reaches Alignment Milestone, Optics Working Successfully
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-webb-reaches-alignment-milestone-optics-working-successfully/

[Toliman]

Scientists develop the largest, most detailed model of the early universe to date
https://news.mit.edu/2022/early-universe-model-0324

[Toliman]

New Radio Images of Bizarre "Odd Radio Circles" Which are Vastly Bigger Than the Milky Way
https://www.universetoday.com/155143/new-radio-images-of-bizarre-odd-radio-circles-which-are-vastly-bigger-than-the-milky-way/

[Toliman]

Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/record-broken-hubble-spots-farthest-star-ever-seen

[Toliman]

Laboratory experiments replicate volatile plasma at the center of galaxy clusters
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=304841&org=NSF&from=news

[Toliman]

ESO telescope captures surprising changes in Neptune's temperatures
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2206/

An international team of astronomers have used ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), to track Neptune's atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period. They found a surprising drop in Neptune's global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole.

"This change was unexpected," says Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and lead author of the study published today in The Planetary Science Journal. "Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we expected temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder."

Like Earth, Neptune experiences seasons as it orbits the Sun. However, a Neptune season lasts around 40 years, with one Neptune year lasting 165 Earth years. It has been summertime in Neptune's southern hemisphere since 2005, and the astronomers were eager to see how temperatures were changing following the southern summer solstice.

Astronomers looked at nearly 100 thermal-infrared images of Neptune, captured over a 17-year period, to piece together overall trends in the planet's temperature in greater detail than ever before.

These data showed that, despite the onset of southern summer, most of the planet had gradually cooled over the last two decades. The globally averaged temperature of Neptune dropped by 8 °C between 2003 and 2018.

The astronomers were then surprised to discover a dramatic warming of Neptune's south pole during the last two years of their observations, when temperatures rapidly rose 11 °C between 2018 and 2020. Although Neptune's warm polar vortex has been known for many years, such rapid polar warming has never been previously observed on the planet.

"Our data cover less than half of a Neptune season, so no one was expecting to see large and rapid changes," says co-author Glenn Orton, senior research scientist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the US.

The astronomers measured Neptune's temperature using thermal cameras that work by measuring the infrared light emitted from astronomical objects. For their analysis the team combined all existing images of Neptune gathered over the last two decades by ground-based telescopes. They investigated infrared light emitted from a layer of Neptune's atmosphere called the stratosphere. This allowed the team to build up a picture of Neptune's temperature and its variations during part of its southern summer.

Because Neptune is roughly 4.5 billion kilometres away and is very cold, the planet's average temperature reaching around –220°C, measuring its temperature from Earth is no easy task. "This type of study is only possible with sensitive infrared images from large telescopes like the VLT that can observe Neptune clearly, and these have only been available for the past 20 years or so," says co-author Leigh Fletcher, a professor at the University of Leicester.

Around one third of all the images taken came from the VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-InfraRed (VISIR) instrument on ESO's VLT in Chile's Atacama Desert. Because of the telescope's mirror size and altitude, it has a very high resolution and data quality, offering the clearest images of Neptune. The team also used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and images taken with the Gemini South telescope in Chile, as well as with the Subaru Telescope, the Keck Telescope, and the Gemini North telescope, all in Hawai'i.

Because Neptune's temperature variations were so unexpected, the astronomers do not know yet what could have caused them. They could be due to changes in Neptune's stratospheric chemistry, or random weather patterns, or even the solar cycle. More observations will be needed over the coming years to explore the reasons for these fluctuations. Future ground-based telescopes like ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) could observe temperature changes like these in greater detail, while the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will provide unprecedented new maps of the chemistry and temperature in Neptune's atmosphere.

"I think Neptune is itself very intriguing to many of us because we still know so little about it," says Roman. "This all points towards a more complicated picture of Neptune's atmosphere and how it changes with time."

[Toliman]

A Fleet of Space Telescopes Flying in Formation Could Reveal Details on Exoplanets
https://www.universetoday.com/155445/a-fleet-of-space-telescopes-flying-in-formation-could-reveal-details-on-exoplanets/

[Toliman]

Webb Telescope's Coldest Instrument Reaches Operating Temperature
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/webb-telescope-s-coldest-instrument-reaches-operating-temperature