Rocket Lab has postponed the launch of an Electron booster it hopes to snatch out of the sky with a helicopter after liftoff to no earlier than Monday (May 2) due to weather.
Unfavorable weather conditions are the primary reason for the launch delay, Rocket Lab officials said in an update, but the company is taking the time to make final checks on its recovery system for the Electron rocket reusability test.
“After a busy week of capture testing, and while we wait for weather to improve, we’re taking an additional day for final helicopter and recovery system optimization ahead of our first mid-air capture attempt,” Rocket Lab representatives wrote in the Twitter update. Liftoff is now targeted for Monday during a nearly 2-hour window that opens at 6:35 p.m. EDT (2235 GMT).
Rocket Lab’s upcoming launch, called “There And Back Again,” will mark the company’s first attempt to recover an Electron booster’s first stage in flight as part of a plan to reuse the rockets and lower launch costs.
The plan calls for the Electron booster’s first stage to launch as normal, then fall back to Earth while optimizing its descent with “series of complex maneuvers designed to enable it to survive the extreme heat and forces of atmospheric reentry,” the company said in a mission description. A heat shield will protect the rocket’s nine Rutherford engines while a parachute will slow its fall so it can be captured by a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter.
Rocket Lab has recovered Electron boosters from the ocean before and practiced mid-air catches of dummy rockets, but has not yet attempted to catch an Electron returning from space after an actual launch.
“Unlike previous recovery missions, ‘There And Back Again’ is attempting to avoid an ocean splashdown as the helicopter will return to the stage back to land after catch,” Rocket Lab wrote in the description. “Upon success of this recovery, Electron will be one step closer to being the first reusable orbital small sat launcher.”
Despite its ambitious nature, the Electron recovery test is not the primary goal for the There And Back Again mission.
Rocket Lab will launch 34 satellites into orbit on the flight for a variety of customers, including three demonstration satellites for startup E-Space, two batches of picosatellites for an “Internet of Things constellation” on a flight arranged by Spaceflight, Inc., and the AuroraSat-1, a demonstration satellite to test space junk removal technologies built by the Finland-based company Aurora Propulsion Technologies.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
If Stephen Smartt gets lucky, he may one day receive a message that will give the astrophysicist an advance warning that one of the most extraordinary displays known to science is about to light up the night sky. Signals relayed by automated telescope arrays and underground detectors will reveal that a star in our galactic neighbourhood has just turned supernova.
A supernova occurs when a star destroys itself so completely it can outshine the combined light of an entire galaxy. In the last thousand years, only five have ever been visible to the naked eye. Ironically, all occurred before the invention of the telescope.
“We know about supernovae from their appearance in other galaxies and from remnants left behind in our own galaxy,” says Smartt, an astrophysicist based at Queen’s University Belfast. “But what we would love to do is see one that appears fairly near us so we can study it with modern telescopes and detectors.”
When a supernova erupts, it sprays the cosmos with heavy elements – so observing one nearby would provide precious information about the creation of matter in our galaxy.
“Most elements heavier than oxygen were created in a supernova before being hurled across space,” says Prof Mark Sullivan of the University of Southampton. “These atoms provide the galaxy with material essential to life. The calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood – as well as the gold in the ring on your finger – were all created in supernovae explosions.”
It is an image that continues to entrance writers and artists. In Jeanette Winterson’s words, astronomers have shown our first true parent was actually a star and that we are made of elements that are “the long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang”. Or, as Joni Mitchell put it, more simply: “We are stardust.”
The 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, from the 1879 Barcelona edition of La Ciencia y sus Hombres by Louis Figuier. Photograph: PhotoStock-Israel/Alamy
The most common type of supernova occurs when a very large star runs out of fuel, halting the nuclear fusion process that keeps it shining. The star’s outer layers fall inwards, and protons and electrons are crushed together to form neutrons that become packed into a superdense ball. Matter continues to rain down on this neutron ball before bouncing back, triggering a shock wave that destroys the star.
All that is left behind is a neutron sphere that is so dense a matchbox of it would weigh about 3bn tonnes. And if the original progenitor star that led to the supernova was particularly large, this neutron star will become so heavy it will form a black hole from which nothing can escape, not even light.
This is a core-collapse supernova and it can unleash more energy than our sun will release over its entire 10bn-year lifetime. If a star in our galaxy, too distant to be seen by the naked eye on Earth, becomes a supernova, it will suddenly shine so brilliantly it could be seen in daylight.
Scientists estimate that on average about 20 supernovae occur in a galaxy such as ours every thousand years. Yet only five have been observed in the last millennium. East Asian and Arabic records indicate there were supernovae in 1006, 1054 and 1181, while European documents recall ones that occurred in 1572 and 1604.
The first of this last pair flashed into sight in November 1572 and was observed by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. “Overhead, a certain strange star was suddenly seen, flashing its light with a radiant gleam,” he recalled. “I stood still, gazing … When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.”
But if supernovae are so brilliant, why have we only detected five in the past 1,000 years? Why have we not seen a number that is nearer the 20 suggested by observations of other galaxies? The answer is straightforward, says Sullivan. “Our galaxy is like a flat plate and our solar system is about two-thirds of the way towards its edge. A supernova that occurs on the other side of the plate will simply be obscured by all the dust and stars that lie at the centre of the galaxy.”
Astronomers have since observed supernovae in other galaxies and studied remnants of those that have occurred inside our galaxy. These include the glowing filaments of the Crab Nebula, the remains of the supernova that lit up night skies in 1054AD and which have since been spreading across space.
Galactic debris such as this reveals the enormous destruction that is unleashed by supernovae. Yet these stellar convulsions are also important engines of creation, scientists argue. Apart from spraying the cosmos with heavy elements on which life depends, they also play a key role in planet and star formation, says astrophysicist Cosimo Inserra of Cardiff University.
“A supernova sends shock waves across a galaxy and these strike clouds of gas and dust in space, compressing them so that proto-stars start to form at their centres. Eventually, nuclear fusion begins, igniting a star’s store of hydrogen and it starts to shine. Planets form and orbit the star. That is probably how our sun and solar system came into existence.”
Supernovae do pose threats, nevertheless. “If one occurred within 20 parsecs – roughly 60 light years – of the Earth, its intense cosmic rays could destroy our protective ozone layer, which would allow increased levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun to reach us,” says Sullivan. However, only one very close to Earth could have such an impact and at present there are no candidate stars near us that look ready to annihilate themselves this way, he adds.
On the other hand, it is also clear supernovae have exploded near Earth in the past. As evidence, scientists point to the discovery of a radioactive isotope of iron – known as iron-60 – that has been found in seabed deposits laid down 2.5m years ago and in other deposits created about 7m years ago. Iron-60 is produced by supernovae and these deposits suggest at least two must have erupted near Earth within the last 10m years, probably at a distance of about 100 parsecs, or 320 light years.
An image of the Crab Nebula made using the Hubble telescope. Photograph: Jeff Hester/AP Photo/Nasa/ESA
What impact that had on the planet is uncertain. “You might have had a rise in cosmic-ray activity and this might have affected cloud formation on Earth or reduced the amount of solar radiation reaching the ground,” says Prof John Ellis of King’s College London. “This could then have triggered a change in the climate, which in turn could have affected the course of human evolution.”
Apart from the rather startling prospect that the appearance of Homo sapiens might have been shaped by local supernovae, these discoveries also suggest there might have been enough of them to have had a real influence on life earlier in our planet’s history.
“If you find two that happened fairly near Earth within the past 10m years, that suggests hundreds must have appeared over the past billion years,” argues Ellis. “Some of them will have been quite distant … but a few would have been close, say 10 parsecs away. And we should be clear: if a supernova went off within 10 parsecs of our planet, it would very likely have caused a mass extinction.”
Earth has experienced at least five mass extinctions that have each eradicated thousands of species of animals, plants and sea creatures, and at least one of these was caused by an extraterrestrial agent: an asteroid that struck Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period 66m years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.
Earth-based catastrophes – such as large-scale volcanism – have been blamed for the other mass extinctions. However, scientists now suspect that in one other case, an otherworldly event was to blame. They point to rocks that formed at the end of the Devonian period 360m years ago when there was another mass extinction that wiped out ammonites, trilobites and other early forms of life.
These rocks contain hundreds of thousands of generations of plant spores that appear to be sunburnt by ultraviolet light – evidence of a long-lasting ozone-depletion event, says astronomer Brian Fields at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We propose that one or more supernova explosions, about 65 light years from Earth, could have been responsible for the protracted loss of ozone,” he argues.
This blast would have first bathed Earth with powerful X-rays and gamma rays before debris from the blast slammed into the planet, stripping it of its protective ozone layer. This astronomical double whammy would have exposed the planet’s surface to deadly radiation for up to 100,000 years and led to a mass extinction.
Further proof for this idea is now being sought by scientists. They have discounted looking for iron-60 atoms because these decay too quickly to have survived the 360m years since the late Devonian mass extinction. Instead, they plan to seek out atoms of the isotope plutonium-244, which is also produced by supernovae and could survive for a few hundred million years. That research is now under way.
In the meantime, scientists are preparing themselves to react as speedily as possible to the first signs that a nearby supernova has begun. Crucially, these first signals will not come flashes of light but will emerge from underground detectors designed to spot the universe’s most insignificant entity, the neutrino.
The main spectrometer of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (Katrin). The experiment, currently running in Germany, is designed to measure the mass of the electron neutrino. Photograph: Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe
“Neutrinos are the first thing that will emerge from a supernova,” says Smartt. “They are so insubstantial, they are very difficult to detect and instruments have to be put in places where they do not pick up spurious signals from other sources.
“However, if enough are detected, then an automated alert will be sent out and the arrays of telescopes that we use to study the night sky will be turned towards the sources of those neutrinos. Then we will be ready to study the first bursts of radiation and light emerging from the supernova and to watch how it unfolds.”
While scientists are confident a supernova will occur in 2022, whether it occurs in our galaxy is a different matter. In any given year, it is an unlikely prospect. On the other hand, one day it may just happen in our galactic neighbourhood. If it does, astronomers say they will be ready.
The surface of Saturn’s moon Titan looks a bit like Earth and a new study finally explains why.
Saturn’s largest moon Titan features some very Earth-like landscapes: lakes and rivers, labyrinthine canyons, and soft sand dunes. However, these geological formations on Titan are made of entirely different materials. Instead of water, it’s liquid methane that flows through rivers, and instead of sand, it’s hydrocarbons that blow into dunes.
For years, scientists have been stumped by how these landscapes came to be, given their un-Earth-like composition. But now they’ve determined a very plausible theory.
Because Titan’s sediments are theorized to be made from solid organic compounds, they should be far more fragile than the silicate-based sediments found on Earth. Thus nitrogen wind and liquid methane should wear Titan’s sediments down to fine dust, which wouldn’t be able to support such varied structures.
Related: Dazzling views show Saturn moon Titan’s surface like never before
A team led by Mathieu Lapôtre, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford University, has come up with a potential solution: a combination of sintering, wind, and seasonal change may be able to do the trick on Titan
The researchers studied a type of sediments called the ooids, which can be found on Earth, and which have a similar composition to Titan.
Ooids can be found in tropical waters where they form very fine grains. These grains simultaneously accrete material via chemical precipitation and erode in the sea. As a result, they maintain a consistent size.
The researchers think that something similar might be happening on Titan.
“We hypothesized that sintering — which involves neighboring grains fusing together into one piece — could counterbalance abrasion when winds transport the grains,” Lapôtre said in a statement.
The team then analyzed atmospheric data from Titan as recorded during the Cassini mission to determine how those sediments could have formed such vastly different geological features observed around the planet.
The researchers discovered that winds were more common around the moon’s equator, which created optimal conditions for the development of dunes. Elsewhere, however, the team suspects that lower winds allowed coarser grains to form, and, in turn, more solid sedimentary rock to form. From there, wind could erode the harder rock down into finer sediments, just as what happens on Earth.
Furthermore, because Titan is known to be the only celestial body in our solar system besides Earth to have a seasonal liquid transport cycle, Lapôtre’s team then hypothesized that the movement of liquid methane likely contributes to erosion and sediment development, too.
“We’re showing that on Titan — just like on Earth and what used to be the case on Mars — we have an active sedimentary cycle that can explain the latitudinal distribution of landscapes through episodic abrasion and sintering driven by Titan’s seasons,” Lapôtre said. “It’s pretty fascinating to think about how there’s this alternative world so far out there, where things are so different, yet so similar.”
The hypothesis was published in Geophysical Research Letters on April 1.
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An unusual rock type spotted by two Mars rovers may indicate that the Martian landscape was shaped by extremely violent volcanic eruptions.
The Nili Fossae region of Mars, which includes the Jezero Crater that NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently exploring, is filled with bedrock laden with the volcanic mineral olivine. That same olivine-rich bedrock was also found at the Gusev Crater, where NASA’s Spirit rover roamed until its demise in 2010. But the connection between the regions wasn’t made until now, by a team led by planetary geologist Steve Ruff of Arizona State University. The researchers examined data from multiple Mars rovers to confirm the geologic similarities, which indicates the local rocks might have formed by similar processes. Then the scientists compared Spirit’s images of the Gusev Crater rock with images of Earth rocks.
“That was a eureka moment,” Ruff said in a statement. “I was seeing the same kind of textures in the rocks of Gusev crater as those in a very specific kind of volcanic rock found here on Earth.”
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s 1st year on Mars
That rock is ignimbrite, which is created from the ash, pumice and pyroclastic flows of powerful volcanic eruptions. “No one had previously suggested ignimbrites as an explanation for olivine-rich bedrock on Mars,” Ruff said. “And it’s possible that this is the kind of rock that the Perseverance rover has been driving around on and sampling for the past year.”
Although researchers have long theorized that volcanism was responsible for producing the Nili Fossae — olivine is, after all, a volcanic mineral — the identification of ignimbrite, if proven accurate, would indicate that the eruptions were more cataclysmic than previously thought.
“Imagine a ground-hugging cloud of hot gasses and nearly molten ash and pumice flowing through the landscape for dozens of miles and piling up in layers up to hundreds of feet thick in just a few days,” Ruff said about eruptions that have produced this type of rock on Earth.
To confirm the presence of ignimbrite on Mars, the scientists say they will have to study the rocks in a terrestrial lab another argument for the planned Mars Sample Return mission to ferry Perseverance’s samples back to Earth.
The results of this study will be published in a paper in the journal Icarus in July.
Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek.Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has beamed back to Earth eerie yet incredible images of the NASA Perseverance rover wreckage that helped bring it to the Red Planet last year.
As reported by CBS News, Ingenuity, which was the first helicopter to fly on another planet, took these 10 aerial color photos of Perseverance’s debris and NASA believes the images have “the potential to help ensure safer landings for future spacecraft.”
NASA Ingenuity Images of the Debris of Perseverance
The photos feature Perseverance’s backshell and supersonic parachute that helped the rover land and safely make it through Mars’ atmosphere. While the landing was a huge success, these parts took some expected damage on the descent.
“Perseverance had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown,” said JPL’s Ian Clark, former Perseverance systems engineer and now Mars Sample Return ascent phase lead. “But Ingenuity’s images offer a different vantage point. If they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide even one dataset of engineering information we can use for Mars Sample Return planning, it will be amazing. And if not, the pictures are still phenomenal and inspiring.”
The parachute itself contained a secret message that was decoded last year, and it was discovered to feature the secret message “dare mighty things,” the motto used by the Perseverance team.
Perseverance was launched on July 30, 2020, and it successfully landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. It’s mission is to seek signs of habitable conditions for life and search for signs of past microbial life as well.
Blogroll Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
SpaceX just set a new record for its fastest Dragon astronaut trip yet.
Elon Musk’s spaceflight company launched four Crew-4 astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in less than 16 hours on Wednesday (April 27), the shortest flight time since SpaceX began crewed flights in 2020.
“This is the fastest launch to dock that we’ve done,” Steve Stitch, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, told reporters after the launch early Wednesday. “It’s about the same time it takes to go from New York to Singapore, so it’s kind of interesting.”
SpaceX launched the Crew-4 astronauts on a new Crew Dragon capsule called Freedom and Falcon 9 rocket at 3:52 a.m. EDT (0752 GMT) from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts arrived at the space station later that night, docking at 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT). Total flight time: 15 hours and 45 minutes.
Related: Amazing launch photos of SpaceX’s Crew-4 astronauts
For comparison, SpaceX’s first crewed flight for NASA, the Demo-2 mission in May 2020, took about 19 hours to reach the station, while its latest Crew-3 flight for NASA took nearly a full day.
“I’d say it’s sort of a little bit of luck as to how we would up in this,” said Jessica Jensen, SpaceX’s vice president of customer operations and integration, adding that any delay could have changed the flight time. “You can vary by 10 to 20 hours of phasing just you know in a day or two. It’s not really that we changed anything, it’s just the orbital mechanics of where the ISS is and where it’s coming over Florida.”
The Crew-4 mission launched three NASA astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut to the space station to kick off a six-month mission. Aboard the Crew Dragon, called Freedom, were Crew-4 mission commander Kjell Lindgren; pilot Bob Hines; mission specialist Jessica Watkins (all of NASA); and mission specialist Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency.
The shorter SpaceX flight came just ahead of a spacewalk (an Extravehicular Activity or EVA in NASA parlance) by two Russian cosmonauts outside the space station on Thursday, so getting the Dragon crew docked and settled in swiftly was a bonus, NASA officials said.
“This short rendezvous was pretty favorable for us,” Stitch said. “We can get to station a little quicker and we can do the preparations we need once we dock to get dragon ready for the EVA.”
While Crew-4 Dragon flight was SpaceX’s fastest flight to the station, it wasn’t the fastest crewed flight ever. That title is still held by Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, which holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to the station with a 3-hour, 3-minute trip in October 2020.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
Skywatchers across parts of the Southern Hemisphere were treated to the first partial eclipse of the year today.
The partial solar eclipse of April 30, one of two happening in 2022, swept over parts of South America, Antarctica, and the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The solar eclipse began at 2:45 p.m. EDT (1845 GMT) in the far southeastern Pacific near the coast of Antarctica. It lasted just under four hours, ending at 6:37 p.m. EDT (2237 GMT) over the south Atlantic Ocean, according to TimeandDate.com, although for many observers, the sun set while still partially eclipsed.
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between Earth and the sun. Today’s celestial event was a partial eclipse, meaning only part of the sun was obscured by the moon, depending on the viewer’s location. The maximum eclipse occurred at 4:41 p.m. EDT (2041 GMT) today, when the moon blocked about 64% of the sun’s disk for viewers just south of the southern tip of South America.
Related: Amazing solar eclipse pictures from around the world
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The partial solar eclipse of April 30, 2022, as seen from Viña del Mar, Chile by eclipse scientist Jay Pasachoff and his research team.. (Image credit: Jay Pasachoff)
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The partial solar eclipse of April 30, 2022, as seen from Viña del Mar, Chile by eclipse scientist Jay Pasachoff and his research team.. (Image credit: Jay Pasachoff)
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The partial solar eclipse of April 30, 2022, as seen from Viña del Mar, Chile by eclipse scientist Jay Pasachoff and his research team.. (Image credit: Jay Pasachoff)
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The partial solar eclipse of April 30, 2022, as seen from Viña del Mar, Chile by eclipse scientist Jay Pasachoff and his research team.. (Image credit: Jay Pasachoff)
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The partial solar eclipse of April 30, 2022, as seen from Viña del Mar, Chile by eclipse scientist Jay Pasachoff and his research team.. (Image credit: Jay Pasachoff)
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A view of the early stages of a partial solar eclipse on April 30, 2022, as seen from El Colorado outside of Santiago, Chile. (Image credit: TimeandDate.com)
Unfortunately for skywatchers, today’s eclipse took place over largely unpopulated regions in the southeastern Pacific Ocean and the Antarctic, as well as over some South American countries, including Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru.
However, viewers in the U.S. and other areas outside the eclipse path were able to watch the event live, thanks to online broadcasts from Timeanddate.com, which offered views from Santiago, Chile and parts of Argentina, and the India-based YouTube channel Gyaan ki gareebi Live, which showcased views from Cerro Shenolsh in the Tierra del Fuego province of Argentina.
Today’s eclipse also happened to coincide with the second new moon of the month, known as a Black Moon. Typically, a new moon occurs only once a month, when the Earth-facing side is fully cloaked in shadow. However, April started with a new moon on April 1 and ended with a second today.
Related: The 8 Most Famous Solar Eclipses in History
The next partial solar eclipse will take place on Oct. 25, when the moon will block a portion of the sun for viewers in Europe, western Asia and northeast Africa. After that, we won’t see another solar eclipse until 2023. However, a total lunar eclipse is just around the corner, beginning on May 15.
If you’re looking to prepare for the next eclipse and want to learn how to photograph a solar eclipse, check out our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography to make sure you’re ready.
Editor’s Note: If you snapped an amazing solar eclipse photo and would like to share it with Space.com’s readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.
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Sometimes it takes an animation on Twitter to truly comprehend – or at least begin to comprehend – the amazing diversity of worlds making up our Solar System.
Enter planetary astronomer James O’Donoghue from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He tweeted out a brief animation that starts off with the Ceres dwarf planet, and moves up through Solar System objects by size (including Earth), before closing by zooming out to take in the Sun.
There’s a slightly higher-quality version of the same clip over at YouTube.
Even if you know the relative size of everything in the Solar System, it’s still quite a moment when Jupiter and the Sun swing into view – and you might never have realized quite how fast Jupiter spins relative to Earth either.
We’d recommend setting aside a bit of time to watch these spinning orbs. The video clip is only 45 seconds long, but it’s mesmerizing enough that you’re going to be watching it several times over – as we write this it’s been viewed some 8 million times.
The sizes, tilts, and rotations are all to scale in this clip, though of course the positioning has been changed – all of the planets and stars you see have been pushed closer together so they’ll fit inside the same video clip.
If you want to know some of the numbers behind the animation, our own planet is 12,742 kilometers or 7,918 miles wide. Jupiter, in contrast, has a diameter of 139,820 kilometers or 86,880 miles – that’s more than 10 times larger in diameter.
The diameter of the Sun is around 1.39 million kilometers (863,706 miles), so that’s around 10 times bigger in terms of distance than Jupiter, and more than 100 times bigger than Earth. To put it another way, about a million Earths could fit into the Sun.
James O’Donoghue has previous form for this too – he’s put together plenty of other videos showing the jaw-dropping scale of the Solar System, and we’re very grateful to have them.
There is some intriguing analysis that has just been released about a massive swarm of earthquakes that occurred in Antarctica in 2020.
A ‘swarm’ of 85,000 earthquakes in Antarctica that lasted about six months in 2020 was triggered by magma from an underwater volcano, a new study says.
The swarm occurred at Orca Seamount, a deep-sea volcano near King George Island in Antarctica, in the Bransfield Strait, which has been inactive for ‘a long time’.
Researchers have used seismometers and remote sensing techniques to determine how long the swarm lasted, and what caused it.
Swarm quakes mainly occur in volcanically active regions, so the movement of magma in the Earth’s crust is therefore suspected as the cause.
During the swarm, ground on neighbouring King George Island moved 4.3 inches (11cm) – suggesting a ‘finger’ of magma almost reached the surface, the scientists report in their new study.
The international team of researchers said the swarm was the most intense earthquake activity ever recorded in the region.
“There have been similar intrusions in other places on Earth, but this is the first time we have observed it there,” study co-author Simone Cesca, a seismologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, told Live Science.
“Normally, these processes occur over geologic time scales,” as opposed to over the course of a few months, Cesca said. “So in a way, we are lucky to see this.”
The scientists used a variety of methods to track the swarm and its geophysical effects, including analyzing data from seismic stations in the region and satellites orbiting the Earth.
This data shed light on the potential causes of the huge swarm. According to the researchers, the movement of magma into the crust could explain the seismic activity.
The human contributions to “climate change” are dwarfed by volcanoes. The scale of the Antarctic volcanoes is not fully known, given the challenges of studying at that latitude. However, there is a strong possibility that a super-volcano could be under the massive ice sheets.
It’s not easy to see what’s going on below Antarctica’s ice sheet.
On average the ice is 2.6km thick. At its deepest, it is 4.7km down.
So NASA has taken all we know — from satellite and airborne observations through to every piece of applicable physics they could think of — and bundled it all together in a new simulation.
The end product of the calculations which reproduced the processes of friction, heat transport and liquid water behaviour revealed there has to be another source of energy down there.
A mantle plume fits the bill.
This mantle plume — some of which are known as supervolcanos — pumps out some 200 milliwatts of energy per square meter.
The background heating from beneath the Earth in non-geologically active areas is about 40 to 60 milliwatts.
The one under Antarctica appears to be roughly in the same league, at up to 150 milliwatts.
Any hotter and the simulations show the ice sheet melting too much to fit observations — except for one spot near the Ross Sea.
Intense flows of water have been seen here. The simulations needed up to 180 milliwatts of energy to produce similar results.
And those worried about climate extinction might like to reflect on the fact that the last time a super-volcano erupted, it almost wiped-out our species.
Professor Danisik and colleagues have studied Lake Toba in Sumatra, an apparently idyllic body of water that actually occupies the caldera of a supervolcano, measuring about 100km by 30km (62 by 19 miles) across.
This supervolcano is believed to have erupted roughly 74,000 years ago, and some researchers believe the eruption released six billion tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, leading global temperatures to plummet by 15C (59F) for three years afterwards.
While this scientific analysis of the impact of the eruption is disputed, scientists have suggested that the eruption caused a genetic bottleneck in human evolution.
The hypothesis is that between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations rapidly shrunk to just 3,000-10,000 individuals, a claim for which there is some genetic evidence.
Given the rock-hard science behind volcanic impact on the Earth’s climate, I find I cannot get worked-up about SUVs and cow farts.
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It’s the moment skywatchers have been waiting for: The year’s first solar eclipse has begun.
The partial solar eclipse of April 30 began at about 2:45 p.m. EDT (1845 GMT), according to Timeanddate.com, which is livestreaming views from Argentina and Chile. However, the eclipse was first visible over the Southern Ocean off the coast of Antarctica, where few skywatchers could enjoy the solar eclipse.
The moon’s shadow took about an hour to reach the southern tip of South America and become more accessible to skywatchers. Timeanddate.com’s broadcast from El Colorado, Chile, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) away from Santiago, showed the first views of the sun with the characteristic missing “bite” clearly visible a little after 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT). You can watch the eclipse live on Space.com, courtesy of Timeanddate.com.
Related: How to watch the April 2022 solar eclipse online
Solar Eclipse Photography Guide:
The moon’s shadow, and in turn the partial eclipse, will continue traveling on a northeasterly path until fading into the sunset over South America, ending at 6:37 p.m. EDT (2237 GMT).
Before that moment comes, however, the eclipse has some more beautiful views to offer. The moment of greatest eclipse will occur at 4:41 p.m. EDT (2041 GMT) over the Southern Ocean. In addition to the feed from El Colorado, Timeanddate.com is also offering views from Santa Eufemia, Argentina, during the ongoing broadcast.
A view of the early stages of a partial solar eclipse on April 30, 2022, as seen from El Colorado outside of Santiago, Chile. (Image credit: TimeandDate.com)
If you miss today’s eclipse or just want more skywatching in your life, the next eclipse will be a total lunar eclipse that begins on May 15; the next solar eclipse will occur on Oct. 25.
You can prepare for the next solar eclipse with our guide on how to photograph a solar eclipse safely. Our guides on the best cameras for astrophotography and the best lenses for astrophotography can help you find the camera gear you need to capture your own snapshots.
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
