Astronomy, cosmology and space thread

[migrant]

Scientists Gain Unprecedented Look at Infernal ‘Hell World’ In Space

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axma9/ ... d-in-space

Hell off earth.

[pharvey]

Well I suppose it technically is a launch from British soil - despite the rocket being launched from a 747 1 hour into it's flight... Still, it is a historic milestone for the UK...

UK Space Launch: Historic Cornwall Rocket Mission Set to Blast Off

"The first ever orbital space launch from British soil is getting ready to blast off.

Monday's mission will see a repurposed 747 jumbo jet release a rocket over the Atlantic to take nine satellites high above the Earth.

Newquay Airport in Cornwall is the starting point for the operation, shortly before midnight GMT

If it succeeds, it will be a major milestone for UK space, marking the birth of a home-grown launch industry.

"What we've seen over the last eight years is this building of excitement towards something very aspirational and different for Cornwall, something that started off as a project that not a lot of people really believed was ever going to happen," said Melissa Thorpe, who heads up Spaceport Cornwall.

"What I think people have seen here in Cornwall is a small team that lives and breathes this county deliver something quite incredible.""

More @ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64190848

The launch can be viewed on Youtube shortly after 10pm UK time 09/01/22

https://www.youtube.com/@VirginOrbit/streams

[STEVE G]

I think it's been largely forgotten about but the UK did actually put a satellite into orbit on a Black Arrow rocket in 1971 but it was launched from a missile range in Australia.

[pharvey]

I think it's been largely forgotten about but the UK did actually put a satellite into orbit on a Black Arrow rocket in 1971 but it was launched from a missile range in Australia.

Had not realised that - I believed the UK's involvement in Space was largely limited to the ESA and of course Virgin/Richard Branson and it's launches from California.

[Dannie Boy]

Unfortunately, events haven’t gone to plan after “an anomaly” following its launch - more here,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-64215127

[pharvey]

Unfortunately, events haven’t gone to plan after “an anomaly” following its launch - more here,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-64215127

Yep - disappointing, but as they say, it's just a setback.....

[pharvey]

Hmmm......... They're here!!

Pentagon Releases its Long-awaited 2022 UFO Report

"The report suggests that the U.S. government appears to be taking UFOs seriously.

The Pentagon's long-awaited 2022 report on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, is finally here.

The unclassified "2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" was published by the Pentagon's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on Thursday (Jan. 12) after a months-long delay. The report was mandated by the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act and was created by ODNI's National Intelligence Manager for Aviation and the newly-established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Input was gathered from various intelligence community agencies and military intelligence offices, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Energy (DoE), and NASA.

In all, the report(opens in new tab) covers some 510 cataloged UAP reports gathered from agencies involved in the report and the branches of the United States military. The document notes that the majority of these were gathered from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force personnel who reported them through official channels. Ultimately, the unclassified report concludes that, while UAP "continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat," many of the reports "lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty.""

More @ https://www.space.com/pentagon-2022-ufo ... SmartBrief

[handdrummer]

I saw several of their crew in MV yesterday.

[lindosfan1]

Latest Webb telescope, picture, the icy origins of life.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64380397

[Dannie Boy]

Not sure if this is the most appropriate place to post this article regarding one of many mysteries surrounding the planet that we live on - fascinating!!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/64388435

[pharvey]

Not sure if this is the most appropriate place to post this article regarding one of many mysteries surrounding the planet that we live on - fascinating!!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/64388435

Certainly is a fascinating subject and one that has be mentioned to varying degrees for some time. Some reports/discussions of course bringing out the "doomsayers" - the Poles reversing, huge volcanic activity, the end of civilisation etc.... There's no question there is a basis to it all, but what does it really mean, how far will things go and over what period....

[Nereus]

Asteroid zooms past Earth in one of the closest-known passes

An asteroid the size of a delivery truck has whipped past Earth on Friday morning, one of the closest such encounters ever recorded.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-26/ ... /101897786

The newly discovered asteroid made its closest approach on Friday at 11:27am AEDT, zooming past about 3,600 kilometres above the southern tip of South America.

That is 10 times closer than the bevy of communication satellites circling above in a high Earth orbit.

"The key here is, this is closer than the satellites that supply our weather information [which are] 10 times further away than this object so this is why we say, we need to track these things," Australian National University astrophysicist Dr Brad Tucker said.

"They can come relatively out of nowhere and get awfully close to the Earth.

"You can't really get closer to the Earth unless you hit the Earth, which this one hasn't and will not."

Even if the space rock came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would have burnt up in the atmosphere, with some of the bigger pieces possibly falling as meteorites.

Dr Tucker said telescopes in Chile, closer to the approach, were monitoring the asteroid and broadcasting the images.

He said surrounding stars in images broadcast by The Virtual Telescope Project appeared like streaks because the asteroid was moving so fast.

more at link....................................

A NASA diagram shows the estimated trajectory of 2023 BU, in red, compared to the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, in green.(Supplied: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

asteroid.jpg (37.55 KiB) Viewed 1376 times

[Nereus]

Why do black holes twinkle? We studied 5,000 star-eating behemoths to find out

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-03/ ... /101923570

Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.

And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disc before their one-way trip into the hole, and these discs can shine more brightly than entire galaxies.

Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The brightness of the glowing discs can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why.

We piggy-backed on NASA's asteroid defence effort to watch more than 5,000 of the fastest-growing black holes in the sky for five years, in an attempt to understand why this twinkling occurs. In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, we report our answer: a kind of turbulence driven by friction and intense gravitational and magnetic fields.

Gigantic star-eaters

We study supermassive black holes, the kind that sit at the centres of galaxies and are as massive as millions or billions of Suns.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has one of these giants at its centre, with a mass of about four million Suns. For the most part, the 200 billion or so stars that make up the rest of the galaxy (including our Sun) happily orbit around the black hole at the centre.

However, things are not so peaceful in all galaxies. When pairs of galaxies pull on each other via gravity, many stars may end up tugged too close to their galaxy's black hole. This ends badly for the stars: they are torn apart and devoured.

We are confident this must have happened in galaxies with black holes that weigh as much as a billion suns, because we can't imagine how else they could have grown so large. It may also have happened in the Milky Way in the past.

Black holes can also feed in a slower, more gentle way: by sucking in clouds of gas blown out by geriatric stars known as red giants.

Feeding time

In our new study, we looked closely at the feeding process among the 5,000 fastest-growing black holes in the Universe.

In earlier studies, we discovered the black holes with the most voracious appetite. Last year, we found a black hole that eats an Earth's-worth of stuff every second. In 2018, we found one that eats a whole Sun every 48 hours.

But we have lots of questions about their actual feeding behaviour. We know material on its way into the hole spirals into a glowing "accretion disc" that can be bright enough to outshine entire galaxies. These visibly feeding black holes are called quasars.

Most of these black holes are a long, long way away — much too far for us to see any detail of the disc. We have some images of accretion discs around nearby black holes, but they are merely breathing in some cosmic gas rather than feasting on stars.

Five years of flickering black holes

In our new work, we used data from NASA's ATLAS telescope in Hawaii. It scans the entire sky every night (weather permitting), monitoring for asteroids approaching Earth from the outer darkness.

These whole-sky scans also happen to provide a nightly record of the glow of hungry black holes, deep in the background. Our team put together a five-year movie of each of those black holes, showing the day-to-day changes in brightness caused by the bubbling and boiling glowing maelstrom of the accretion disc.

The twinkling of these black holes can tell us something about accretion discs.

In 1998, astrophysicists Steven Balbus and John Hawley proposed a theory of "magneto-rotational instabilities" that describes how magnetic fields can cause turbulence in the discs. If that is the right idea, then the discs should sizzle in regular patterns. They would twinkle in random patterns that unfold as the discs orbit. Larger discs orbit more slowly with a slow twinkle, while tighter and faster orbits in smaller discs twinkle more rapidly.

But would the discs in the real world prove this simple, without any further complexities? (Whether "simple" is the right word for turbulence in an ultra-dense, out-of-control environment embedded in intense gravitational and magnetic fields where space itself is bent to breaking point is perhaps a separate question.)

Using statistical methods we measured how much the light emitted from our 5,000 discs flickered over time. The pattern of flickering in each one looked somewhat different.

But when we sorted them by size, brightness and colour, we began to see intriguing patterns. We were able to determine the orbital speed of each disc — and once you set your clock to run at the disc's speed, all the flickering patterns started to look the same.

This universal behaviour is indeed predicted by the theory of "magneto-rotational instabilities".

That was comforting! It means these mind-boggling maelstroms are "simple" after all.

And it opens new possibilities. We think the remaining subtle differences between accretion discs occur because we are looking at them from different orientations.

The next step is to examine these subtle differences more closely and see whether they hold clues to discern a black hole's orientation. Eventually, our future measurements of black holes could be even more accurate.

Christian Wolf is an Associate Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the Australian National University. This piece first appeared on The Conversation.

black hole .jpg (66.38 KiB) Viewed 1351 times

[pharvey]

Yes, I keep on.... Sorry.

For me the whole thing is fascinating - to many (well most) these days, nothing of interest. But come on, just have a look at the link and the video(s) included. Hell's Teeth, these guy's have "Upped NASA" (with all due respect - and believe me, I'm a huge fan).

"SpaceX's Crew-6 astronaut mission arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) early Friday morning (March 3), but not without a little drama.

Crew-6's Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, docked with the ISS's Harmony module at 1:40 a.m. EST (0640 GMT) on Friday, while the two spacecraft were flying off the coast of Somalia at an altitude of 261 miles (420 kilometers).

Crew-6 was positioned to dock about an hour earlier than that, but Endeavour stood down while SpaceX troubleshot a faulty sensor with one of the 12 hooks that helps the capsule connect to the ISS. Eventually, ground teams beamed up a software override that fixed the sensor problem, and Endeavour pulled off a successful rendezvous."

https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-6-dra ... ce-station

[pharvey]

This is an interesting online App from NASA: -

"Eyes on Asteroids is an online app that offers up a 3D view of the solar system with real-time tracking of asteroids and comets. You'll spot some famous space objects, like Didymos (target of NASA's DART mission) and Bennu (visited by the Osiris-Rex mission). The app also gives the locations of spacecraft like DART and Lucy.

Besides giving us an overview of our space neighborhood, the app lets you dial into details on orbital paths and close approaches to Earth. So if you click on asteroid Apophis, for example, you'll find out it will pass less than 23,618 miles (38,008 kilometers) from our planet in 2029. That will be exciting."

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/asteroids/#/asteroids