Space News & Blog Articles

It’s been just over a week since millions of people flocked to places across North America for a glimpse of moonshadow. The total solar eclipse of April 8th, 2024 was a spectacular sight for many on the ground. From space, however, it was even more impressive as Earth-observing satellites such as GOES-16 captured the sight of the shadow sweeping over Earth.

NASA even got a snap of the eclipse from the Moon, as taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). Unlike most Earth-based photographers, however, LROC’s view was a tricky one to get. The cameras are line scanners and their images get built up line-by-line. That process requires the spacecraft to slew to keep up with the action and build up a complete view. Amazingly, it took only 20 seconds to capture all the action.

NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory got an amazing view from Earth orbit, capturing the entire eclipse as it passed over the continent. That observatory “lives” out at LaGrange Point 1, which enabled it to get a full view of Earth and the Moon’s shadow.

For most viewers, the chase to see an eclipse meant driving (or flying) to somewhere along the path of totality to get the best view. That path stretched from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico up toward the northern Canadian provinces. That meant a wide swath of the U.S. experienced totality. Or course, the weather had to be good to see it all. In most places, that actually turned out reasonably well. Social media immediately came alive with images of the eclipse, people enjoying it, and others waiting vainly for a break in the clouds.

A composite of images taken during the total solar eclipse showing all the phases leading up to and after totality. NASA/Keegan Barber.

I’m really not sure what to call it but a ‘dusty sneeze’ is probably as good as anything. We have known for some years that stars surround themselves with a disk of gas and dust known as the protostellar disk. The star interacts with it, occasionally discharging gas and dust regularly. Studying the magnetic fields revealed that they are weaker than expected. A new proposal suggests that the discharge mechanism ‘sneezes’ some of the magnetic flux out into space. Using ALMA, the team are hoping to understand the discharges and how they influence stellar formation. 

In a fairly inconspicuous part of the Galaxy, a star slowly formed out of a cloud of gas and dust. This event took place around 4.6 billion years ago and soon, the hot young star began to clear the surrounding area of gas and dust. What remained was a disk surrounding the star known as a protostellar disk. Eventually the planets of our Solar System formed. It is not unique to our own system though as there have been disks like this found around many stars. A very well known example are the stars in the Trapezium cluster inside the Orion Nebula. 

A team in Japan, from the Kyushu University have been examining data from the ALMA radio telescope to learn more about stars in the earliest stages of development. To their surprise they discovered the disks around new stars seem to emit jets or plumes of dust and gas and even electromagnetic energy. The team dubbed them ‘sneezes’ and its this process that seems to slowly erode the magnetic flux of a young star system. 

One phenomenon of the disks is a powerful magnetic field which permeates through the region. It therefore carries a magnetic flux and herein lies the problem. The magnetic fields would be far stronger than those observed if the magnetic flux had been retained from day one. History shows us, they didn’t seem to retain them so the flux has been slowly eroded away in new star and planetary systems. 

One such proposal was that the field slowly decreased as the surrounding dust cloud collapsed into the core of the star. To explore the phenomenon the team studied MC 27, a system 450 light years away using ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre Array. In total, 66 radio telescopes pointed to the object from an altitude of 5,000 metres. They found that there were ‘spike like’ structures that seemed to extend out by a few astronomical units (average distance between Sun and Earth.)

The most recognizable feature on Pluto is its “heart,” a relatively bright valentine-shaped area known as Tombaugh Regio. How that heart got started is one of the dwarf planet’s deepest mysteries — but now researchers say they’ve come up with the most likely scenario, involving a primordial collision with a planetary body that was a little more than 400 miles wide.

The scientific term for what happened, according to a study published today in Nature Astronomy, is “splat.”

Astronomers from the University of Bern in Switzerland and the University of Arizona looked for computer simulations that produced dynamical results similar to what’s seen in data from NASA’s New Horizons probe. They found a set of simulations that made for a close match, but also ran counter to previous suggestions that Pluto harbors a deep subsurface ocean. They said their scenario doesn’t depend on the existence of a deep ocean — which could lead scientists to rewrite the history of Pluto’s geological evolution.

University of Arizona astronomer Adeene Denton, one of the study’s co-authors, said the formation of the heart “provides a critical window into the earliest periods of Pluto’s history.”

“By expanding our investigation to include more unusual formation scenarios, we’ve learned some totally new possibilities for Pluto’s evolution,” Denton said in a news release. Similar scenarios could apply to other objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy worlds on the edge of our solar system.

Look through the names and origins of the constellations and you will soon realise that many cultures had a hand in their conceptualisation. Among them are the Egyptians who were fantastic astronomers. The movement of the sky played a vital role in ancient Egypt including the development of the 365 day year and the 24 hour day. Like many other cultures they say the Sun, Moon and planets as gods. Surprisingly though, the bright Milky Way seems not to have played a vital role. Some new research suggests that this may not be the case and it may have been a manifestation of the sky goddess Nut! 

It’s a fairly well accepted theory that the pyramids of Egypt were constructed in some way as a representation of or tribute to the sky. The Sun god Ra was often depicted sailing the Sun across the sky in a boat but the Milky Way was never seemed to be a big part, other than perhaps some consideration that the river Nile could represent it. 

Back in the days of ancient Egypt, light pollution really wasn’t a thing. The Milky Way would have been far more prominent than for many stargazers today. A recent study by astrophysicists at the University of Portsmouth suggest that a lesser heard god by the name of Nut had something to do with it. 

Hunt through Egyptian artwork and you will often see a star-filled woman arched over another person. The woman is Nut, the goddess of the sky and the other figure represents her brother, the god of Earth, Geb. Nut has a very specific job though, she protects the Earth from being flooded from waters of the void! Presumably this would be the void of space but of course back then we didn’t have such a great understanding of the cosmos. She also swallowed the Sun as it sets, giving birth to it again in the morning. 

Thankfully the Egyptians were fabulous at recording things and so there have been plenty of Egyptian texts to refer to. Running simulations from the evidence in the documents, the team (led by Dr Or Graur Associate Professor in Astrophysics) suggest that the Milky Way represented Nut’s outstretched arms in the winter and her backbone in the summer. This suggestion aligns with the broad patterns in the Milky Way. 

In 2011, astronomers with the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) consortium detected a gas giant orbiting very close to a Sun-like (G-type) star about 700 light-years away. This planet is known as WASP-39b (aka. “Bocaprins”), one of many “hot Jupiters” discovered in recent decades that orbits its star at a distance of less than 5% the distance between the Earth and the Sun (0.05 AU). In 2022, shortly after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) it became the first exoplanet to have carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide detected in its atmosphere.

Alas, researchers have not constrained all of WASP-39b’s crucial details (particularly its size) based on the planet’s light curves, as observed by Webb. which is holding up more precise data analyses. In a new study led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), an international team has shown a way to overcome this obstacle. They argue that considering a parent star’s magnetic field, the true size of an exoplanet in orbit can be determined. These findings are likely to significantly impact the rapidly expanding field of exoplanet study and characterization.

The study was led by Dr. Nadiia M. Kostogryz and her fellow researchers from the MPS. They were joined by astronomers and astrophysicists from the Center for Astronomy (Heidelberg University), the Astrophysics Group at Keele University, the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The paper describing their research, “Magnetic origin of the discrepancy between stellar limb-darkening models and observations,” was recently published in Nature Astronomy.

The “hot Jupiter” exoplanet WASP-69b orbits its star so closely that its atmosphere is being blown into space. Credit: Adam Makarenko/W. M. Keck Observatory

A light curve is the measurement of a star’s brightness over longer periods. Using the Transit Method (Transit Photometry), astronomers monitor stars for periodic dips in brightness, which can result from an exoplanet passing (transiting) in front of their face relative to the observer. In addition to being the most widely used method for detecting exoplanets, precise observations of light curves allow astronomers to estimate the size and orbital period of the exoplanets.