Astronomy

As someone who has just moved to Arizona during the summertime, I’m getting to know the Sun pretty well these days. Although storms bubble up during this so-called monsoon season, the usual day is starkly blue with a blazing star in the sky. Sunscreen has reemerged as a primary household item. In our hectic lives, many of us too easily forget that we live in a solar system of planets that orbit our star, and that our very existence is due to this nuclear reactor in the sky, a mere 93 million miles away. Our main-sequence star fuses 620 million tons of hydrogen in its core every second, releasing 400 trillion trillion watts of energy as heat and light with every tick of the clock. That’s an enormous amount of power,…

Lighting everywhere Regarding “Fighting the light” (July 2024), about 10 years ago my wife and I were on a cruise that went up the Amazon River to Manaus, Brazil. I was very surprised to see from the river many light domes. With over 2 million residents, I would not have been surprised at a light dome over Manaus, but the many other domes were unexpected. — Bill Murrell, Oklahoma City, OK What’s in a name? While I can appreciate Christopher Cokinos’ article “Fighting the light” tackling the problem of fighting light pollution, I was a bit dismayed to see my first name in large capital letters being used to convey something which is the bane of all astronomers, both amateur and professional. I always thought of my first name as being a rather friendly,…

Time flies when you’re having fun — and making cosmic discoveries. On the two-year anniversary of the start of its science operations, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed this infrared portrait of Arp 142, a pair of interacting galaxies also known as the Penguin (NGC 2936, at center) and the Egg (NGC 2937, at left). The shot combines near- and mid-infrared views from NIRCam and MIRI, respectively. The galaxies are currently just 100,000 light-years apart. Astronomers estimate the pair made an initial close pass some 25 million to 75 million years ago and will undergo several more before merging into a single galaxy. The interaction has distorted the Penguin — initially a spiral galaxy — into the shape we see today. Its bright nucleus forms the bird’s eye and head,…

DUCK AND COVER Astronauts aboard the International Space Station briefly sought shelter in return vehicles on June 26 when a defunct Russian satellite broke up, creating more than 100 pieces of trackable space debris. SIBLING SWAP JWST directly imaged the cold, massive exoplanet Epsilon (ε) Ind Ab while searching for a different planet around its star. The planet’s mass and orbit eliminate the possibility another large world is waiting to be found. OPEN QUESTION NASA’s Curiosity rover recently drove over and broke open a rock in its path, revealing pure elemental sulfur crystals — a first-of-its-kind find on the Red Planet. Scientists aren’t sure yet how they formed. ESA/WEBB, NASA, CSA, STSCI, E. MATTHEWS (MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR ASTRONOMY)…

The Moon’s surface presents an unforgivingly harsh environment. Without an atmosphere or magnetic field, it is vulnerable to deadly coronal mass ejections from the Sun, levels of hazardous radiation 150 times greater than on Earth, and a perpetual rain of impacting meteorites. Its temperature ranges from 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) in the daytime to –280 F (–173 C) during lunar night. For all these reasons, prospective lunar explorers are increasingly considering an alternative to living on the Moon’s surface: living beneath it, in subsurface caves. Over the past 15 years, satellite images have revealed hundreds of large pits lined with ledges that appear to overhang their floors. Researchers have hoped these could be openings to more cavernous underground spaces, like lava tubes — subsurface channels through which molten lava…

On July 24, 2024, the 3.4-meter secondary mirror of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile was installed — the first permanent piece of the telescope’s optical system to be put in place. The secondary had been shipped to Chile in 2018 from Rochester, New York, and stored there while the telescope’s mount was completed over the last few years. To install the mirror, a team used a cart to rotate it vertically and then lifted it onto the mount, taking care to not stress the glass. Following the telescope’s primary mirror installation, slated for August, will come the integration of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera. Once the system is complete, the decade-long LSST is set to start in 2025.…