Tag Archives: Sun

Science

Astronomers Just Confirmed The Most Distant Known Object in The Solar System

Leave a comment

The most distant known object in the Solar System is now confirmed. FarFarOut, a large chunk of rock found in 2018 at a whopping distance of around 132 astronomical units from the Sun, has been studied and characterised, and we now know a lot more about it, and its orbit.

 

It’s about 400 kilometres (250 miles) across, which is on the low end of the dwarf planet scale, and initial observations suggest it has an average orbital distance of 101 astronomical units – that’s 101 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Since Pluto has an average orbital distance of around 39 astronomical units, FarFarOut is very, well, far out indeed. It has been given the provisional designation 2018 AG37, and its proper name, in accordance with International Astronomical Union guidelines, is still pending.

That orbit, however, isn’t an even circle around the Sun, but a really lopsided oval. After careful observation, scientists have calculated its orbit; FarFarOut swings out as far as 175 astronomical units, and comes in as close as 27 astronomical units, inside the orbit of Neptune.

(Roberto Molar Candanosa, Scott S. Sheppard/CIS, and Brooks Bays/UH)

This means that the object could help us better understand the planets of the outer Solar System.

“FarFarOut was likely thrown into the outer Solar System by getting too close to Neptune in the distant past,” said astronomer Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University. “FarFarOut will likely interact with Neptune again in the future since their orbits still intersect.”

The object’s nickname evolved from the discovery of an earlier distant object in 2018.

Artist’s impression of FarFarOut. (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva)

 

Dwarf planet Farout has an average orbital distance of 124 astronomical units, and it was named after an exclamation made by astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science. When he and his team discovered an even farther object, the progression was obvious.

FarFarOut is still very mysterious, though. Because it’s so far away, it’s extremely faint, and has only been observed nine times over the course of two years. The team has inferred its size based on its brightness, but we don’t know much else; it could be a very large irregular Kuiper Belt object, or it could meet the criteria to be classified as a dwarf planet.

Discovery images of FarFarOut obtained in July 2018. (Scott S. Sheppard/Carnegie Institution for Science)

The astronomers are also not entirely sure of its orbit time. They think it could be could be just shy of 800 years (Pluto’s is 248), but there’s enough wiggle room for it to take more than twice that time, or possibly move at a much faster pace.

So a lot more observations will have to be made to understand it better.

 

“FarFarOut takes a millennium to go around the Sun once,” said astronomer David Tholen of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. “Because of this, it moves very slowly across the sky, requiring several years of observations to precisely determine its trajectory.”

Sheppard, Tholen and Trujillo are working on studying the outer Solar System in the hope of acquiring a glimpse of Planet Nine, a hypothetical object thought to be responsible for the strange movement of clusters of objects in the outer reaches beyond Pluto.

There are other explanations for these orbits, but the work is having an excellent side benefit. The team has discovered a number of objects we hadn’t known about. There’s Farout and FarFarOut, of course. There’s also a dwarf planet nicknamed The Goblin, discovered at a distance of 80 astronomical units.

There’s even an object, named 2014 FE72, whose orbit takes it out farther than 3,000 astronomical units, the only known object of its kind with an orbit entirely outside Neptune’s. (It’s currently a lot closer after its close approach to the Sun in 1965.)

 

It’s not just the outer Solar System, either. The researchers have discovered 12 previously unknown moons in orbit around Jupiter and 20 moons orbiting Saturn.

So if there is a Planet Nine out there, these appear likely to be the people who will find it. But in the process, they’re revealing a heck of a lot about the outer Solar System.

“The discovery of FarFarOut shows our increasing ability to map the outer Solar System and observe farther and farther towards the fringes of our Solar System,” Sheppard said.

“Only with the advancements in the last few years of large digital cameras on very large telescopes has it been possible to efficiently discover very distant objects like FarFarOut. Even though some of these distant objects are quite large – the size of dwarf planets – they are very faint because of their extreme distances from the Sun. FarFarOut is just the tip of the iceberg of objects in the very distant Solar System.”

 

Read original article here

Entertainment

Avril Lavigne & Mod Sun Do Dinner Amid Dating Rumors, New Collab

Leave a comment

Exclusive

TMZ.com

Avril Lavigne and Mod Sun grabbed dinner together in West Hollywood, and afterward, the whole scene looked very much like a night out in 2019 … plus face masks.

The musicians were leaving BOA Steakhouse Thursday night when they were swarmed by photogs and fans, just like the old days. Avril even signed some autographs and took selfies.

Again, everyone was wearing face coverings — but it was the first strong visual of L.A. reopening for outdoor dining after months of strict COVID shutdowns.

Mod and Avril being out together is also interesting because they just worked together on his new track, “Flames” — which he’s said came about “like magic” — and rumors are starting to circulate there might be some magic between them.

Watch the video and decide for yourself if that’s what’s going on. We did ask Mod, and his response was pretty coy.

They’ve both seemingly been single for a bit — Mod had a bitter breakup with Bella Thorne in 2019, and Avril divorced her rock star husband, Chad Kroeger, in 2015.

Read original article here

Science

Family Photo Snapped by Solar Orbiter Shows Venus, Earth And Mars Gleaming Like Stars

Leave a comment

Every now and again, we get a little glimpse of just how far human ingenuity has gone.

Quite literally: The above image was taken by a spacecraft travelling through the Solar System while it was at a distance of 251 million kilometres (156 million miles) from Earth – more than the distance between Earth and the Sun by nearly half again.

 

It was snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun, on 18 November 2020, while en route to its destination. It joins a burgeoning tradition of photos of Earth taken by instruments far beyond where humans ourselves can venture.

But it’s not just Earth in Solar Orbiter’s image; Venus and Mars make an appearance, too, 48 million and 332 million kilometres from the spacecraft, respectively. It’s a lovely family portrait when you think about it – three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so very different from each other – seen through a scientific instrument – the Heliospheric Imager – designed to study the heart of the Solar System.

(ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI)

The Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, and its flight was planned to make several Venus flybys to take advantage of the planet’s gravity for a speed boost, a manoeuvre known as a gravity assist. The image of the planets was taken as the Solar Orbiter was moving towards Venus for one of these flybys.

By the time Solar Orbiter arrives in position around the Sun to start operations in November 2021, it will be swooping far outside the planetary plane to glimpse the Sun’s polar regions. This will be tremendously exciting since, due to our vantage point on Earth, we’ve never directly imaged the Sun’s poles.

 

While it is in transit, the Solar Orbiter is making observations. This helps the Solar Orbiter team back here on Earth calibrate and test the instruments on board, but that data can be used for scientific analysis, too, of planets, of the solar wind, of space weather.

It gives us a little inspiring reminder, too, of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. Such photos always call to mind the words of Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, of a photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 on its way out of the Solar System.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives,” he wrote.

“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

 

Read original article here

Entertainment

Sun Records Sells Johnny Cash Recordings

Leave a comment

The deal also included the Sun Records trademark, which sources say is also a very profitable component, as well as the Sun Diner in Nashville and its merch business too. John Singleton — brother of the late Shelby Singleton who purchased the Sun label back in 1969 from founder and industry legend Sam Phillips — will stay on overseeing the Sun Records operation.

“We are extremely pleased to pass the Sun Records baton to Primary Wave and are confident that they will continue to reach new heights for the crown jewel of the music business created by Sam Phillips, which my brother, Shelby, and I have kept alive and relevant for the past 50 years” John Singleton, Sun Entertainment Corp. president, said in a statement.

Primary Wave will also provide additional resources to expand the Sun Records brand, which can now tap into the company’s marketing, branding, digital strategy and licensing and synch opportunities.

“Sun Records is the original home to some of the biggest legends in music,” said Larry Mestel, Primary Wave CEO & founder, in a statement. “Sam Phillips treated all of his artists with the utmost respect and provided a space of creativity [like] no other. His vision for Sun aligns perfectly with the creative ethos of Primary Wave, and I am overjoyed that this historic label is now a part of our family.”

Sun Records is currently distributed by the label itself through direct digital licensing deals and by licensing the masters to well-known established re-issue labels like Charly Records and Bear Family Records.

 

Read original article here

Science

The Moon Could Be Getting Water Thanks to ‘Wind’ From Earth’s Magnetosphere

Leave a comment

Evidence of water in the shadows of craters or locked up in glassy beads like microscopic snow-globes has recently revealed the Moon’s surface is far less desiccated than we ever imagined.

 

Just where this veneer of ice water came from is a mystery astronomers are currently trying to solve. One surprising possibility emerging is an elemental rain from our own atmosphere, delivered by Earth’s magnetic field.

Water isn’t exactly a rare substance in space. Given suitable places to hide, it can be sloshing around inside asteroids, coating comets, and even clinging precariously to the darkness of Mercury’s craters.

It makes sense at least some of it will splash onto the Moon every now and then. But with the Sun’s scorching heat and lacking protection from the vacuum of space, it’s not expected to last very long.

To account for the surprising amount of moisture being found on the lunar surface, researchers have proposed a more dynamic form of production – a constant ‘rain’ of protons driven by the solar wind. These hydrogen ions smack into mineral oxides in the Moon’s dust and rocks, ripping apart chemical bonds and forming a loose, temporary alliance with the oxygen.

It’s a solid hypothesis, one that would be given a boost by observations of the more exposed (and more loosely bound) water molecules quickly succumbing to the vacuum of space whenever the Moon is sheltered from solar wind.

 

Our own planet happens to be pretty well protected from the constant breeze of ions blown from the Sun, thanks to a bubble of magnetism surrounding it. This force field not only surrounds us, it is blown into a tear-drop shape by the solar onslaught.

For a few days each month, the Moon passes through this magnetosphere, receiving a brief respite from the Sun’s proton downpour.

An international team of researchers recently used plasma and magnetic field instruments on the Japanese Kaguya orbiter to pinpoint this precise timing in the Moon’s orbit. Spectral data from Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) were then used to map the distribution of water across the Moon’s surface at its highest latitudes.

The results weren’t quite what anybody expected.

In short, nothing happened. The time-series of the Moon’s watery signature revealed no appreciable difference in the three to five days spent hidden from the Sun’s wind.

These results could mean a few things. One is that the whole solar wind hypothesis is a bust, and other reservoirs are responsible for replenishing the Moon’s surface water.

 

But another intriguing possibility that doesn’t require us to ditch the solar wind idea is that Earth’s magnetic field simply picks up where the Sun leaves off.

Past research has suggested the sheet of plasma associated with our planet’s magnetosphere could deliver about the same amount of hydrogen ions as the solar wind, especially towards the lunar poles.

It’s not all delivered with quite the same amount of punch, admittedly, but the researchers hypothesise even the occasional heavy-hitting hydrogen ion could potentially create more than its fair share of water. And lower-energy protons might be more easily held in place, therefore less likely to fall apart in the moments after they’re formed.

There’s also every possibility that oxygen from the upper reaches of the atmosphere above our poles is carried across the vast stretch of emptiness to collide with the Moon, especially during periods of enhanced geomagnetic activity.

If this all sounds rather speculative, that’s because it is. Right now, we only have a rather surprising map of water that doesn’t quite align with favoured models.

But it points in some exciting new directions for the emerging field of Moon hydrodynamics. Since the researchers only mapped the water distribution at higher latitudes, it’ll be worth looking closer to the equator for the predicted losses in the future.

On a practical front, we might need to rely heavily on a replenishing supply of lunar frost for fuel and life support one day, should the Moon become a stepping stone for space exploration.

If nothing else, we’re slowly piecing together an understanding of a water cycle in space that helps us better understand the connections between our planet and its only natural satellite.

This research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

 

Read original article here

Science

A string of planets in our solar system sparkles in photos from 3 different sun probes

Leave a comment

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spotted six different planets on June 7, 2020, with the sun out of frame to the left. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher)

Turns out sungazing is not the only thing NASA’s solar spacecraft do.

Three missions that focus on the activities of our nearest star — Parker Solar Probe, the Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and Solar Orbiter (a partnership with the European Space Agency) — have captured some incredible images showing several worlds in our solar system.

These spacecraft are flying in different areas of our neighborhood on a quest to understand solar phenomena such as the extreme heat of the sun’s outer atmosphere, the distribution of dust in our solar system or the production of the solar wind — the constant stream of particles coming from our sun. But each spacecraft caught amazing views of planets that NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland shared in a recent press release. 

Solar Orbiter 

This joint mission with ESA will eventually leave the plane of the solar system to study the sun’s poles. The spacecraft first transmitted test images in July 2020, about five months after its launch. 

On Nov. 18 came a particularly stunning image, when Solar Orbiter captured three planets in the same view. From left to right, you can see Venus (which appears exceedingly bright as the sun bounces off the planet’s clouds), Uranus, Earth and Mars. The sun is just out of the image view on the right-hand side of the frame. 

Solar Orbiter was roughly 155.7 million miles (250.6 million kilometers) away from Earth when the data was transmitted, which is a little less than twice the distance from the sun to Earth, or two astronomical units (AU). A single AU is roughly 93 million miles (150 million km). 

Parker Solar Probe 

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will fly closer to the sun than any other spacecraft to date as it tries to capture the “origin story” of the solar wind. In this incredible wide-field image of June 7, 2020 (days before a close approach to the sun), it imaged six of our solar system’s planets. 

From left to right, they are Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Earth and Mercury. The spacecraft was roughly one AU from Earth at imaging time, at 98.3 million miles (158 million kilometers).

STEREO 

NASA’s STEREO spacecraft spotted six planets on June 7, 2020. (Image credit: NASA/STEREO/HI)

The single operational STEREO spacecraft — one of a pair that circled the sun behind and ahead of Earth in our planet’s approximate orbit starting in 2014 — also gazed at the planets on June 7, 2020. In this image you can see the same six planets as Parker on the same date, but from a different vantage point in the solar system. 

From left to right appear Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Saturn and Jupiter. The dark columns in the image are due to the detector being saturated, which is a combination of the long exposure time with the relative brightness of the planets compared to the background stars, according to NASA. 

STEREO’s normal mission is to study the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, along with the solar wind, to improve solar weather predictions.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 



Read original article here

Science

Sweet View From Deep Space Shows Earth, Venus, and Mars in a Single Frame

Leave a comment

Video created from a series of still images taken by Solar Orbiter. The brightest objects, from left to right, are Venus, Earth, and Mars.
Gif: ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI/Gizmodo

Well, here’s something you don’t see every day.

On November 18, 2020, the Solar Orbiter managed to capture three of our solar system’s eight planets in a single frame, according to a European Space Agency statement. The resulting four-second movie was stitched together from a series of still images taken across 22 hours.

Venus is the largest and brightest of the objects, followed by Earth and then Mars to the lower right of the frame. What’s particularly cool about this vantage point is that the probe is peering back into the solar system as it heads away from the Sun and towards Venus.

Venus, Earth, and Mars, as spotted by the Solar Orbiter.
Image: ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI

When the photos were taken, Solar Orbiter was 30 million miles (48 million km) from Venus, 156 million miles (251 million km) from Earth, and 206 million miles (332 million km ) from Mars. The Sun is out of frame to the lower right, but its glow is clearly visible.

The spacecraft, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, was en route to Venus for a gravitational assist when the images were taken using its Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) camera. Solar Orbiter eventually flew past Venus on December 27. A steady diet of flybys with Earth and Venus will bring the probe closer to the Sun and also tilt its axis of orbit such that it can observe the Sun from different angles.

G/O Media may get a commission

Launched in February 2020 and equipped with 10 different instruments, Solar Orbiter is a mission to study the Sun from up-close. The closest images ever taken of the Sun, made last July, showed previously unknown “campfires” on the surface of our star, uncovering stellar processes only dreamed about in theory.

The probe is also studying conditions in its immediate vicinity, namely the solar wind, or charged particles, pouring out from the Sun into space. The resulting data will help scientists to predict inclement space weather that can harm communications and technology on Earth.

Read original article here