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Astronomical News

Betelgeuse hasn't quite run out of geuse just yet. ...
This astronomer posts regular updates about Betelgeuse. The star is slightly brighter than it was, and may be returning to normal. But this chap says it has remained constantly bright when viewed in the infra-red. That probably means this recent 'fainting' is due to dust. ...

Ongoing data analysis indicated we needed to revise our last estimates of Betelgeuse's distance, size, and probable time left before it goes supernova.
Betelgeuse Is Neither as Far Nor as Large as We Thought, And It's a Total Bummer

In the wake of recent fluctuations in Betelgeuse's brightness, astronomers have rigorously examined the star's vital statistics, and come up with a bit of a surprise.

According to the team led by researchers at Australian National University (ANU), the results change a few important things about our favourite red giant.

"The actual physical size of Betelgeuse has been a bit of a mystery – earlier studies suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter," says astronomer László Molnár from the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary.

"Our results say Betelgeuse only extends out to two thirds of that, with a radius 750 times the radius of the Sun." ...

Betelgeuse has always been somewhat difficult to map with much accuracy. ...

In 1920, interference patterns among its light waves were used to come up with an angular diameter – the width of Betelgeuse's starlight as it hangs in our sky – of close to 47 milliarcseconds.

Based on an assumed distance of around 180 light years, the red star was initially thought to have a diameter equivalent to around two and a half times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Since then there have been many more attempts to drag a metaphorical measuring tape around Betelgeuse's butt. ...

Revisions of its location in the past few years pushed it further back to a distance of 724 light years away, where those 47 milliarcseconds represented something more like 1,300 times the diameter of the Sun; a diameter that would see Betelgeuse swallow up planets roughly in Jupiter's orbit. ...

Using information collected with the space-based Solar Mass Ejection Imager prior to Betelgeuse's recent drop in luminosity, the research team developed models of the star's activity to come up with a better sense of just how close to retirement it really was.

"It's burning helium in its core at the moment, which means it's nowhere near exploding" ...

"We could be looking at around 100,000 years before an explosion happens."

The results also allowed the researchers to deduce the giant's radius, shaving a third off its previous girth. Based on this new figure, Betelgeuse can't be more than 700 light years away, either.

"Our results show it's a mere 530 light years from us – 25 per cent closer than previous thought," says Molnár. ...

Now that we know Betelgeuse is even closer to us than we thought, it's sure to be one heck of a display when it does eventually collapse. If you're at all concerned about the new seating arrangements, at 530 light years we still won't be close enough to feel the heat of its radiation either. ...

FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-wer...-and-now-its-imminent-death-is-super-unlikely

PUBLISHED RESEARCH (Bibliographic data & abstract):
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/abb8db
 
It turns out that our solar system is flying through a supernova right now.
Might this be the true underlying cause of our global climate change?
 
Sad news about the Arecibo Radio Telescope
US to shut down famed huge Arecibo space telescope in Puerto Rico jungle
The observatory has played a key part in space exploration – and a few movies – but two accidents have rendered the 305m-wide instrument unsafe
Reuters
Fri 20 Nov 2020 01.16 GMTLast modified on Fri 20 Nov 2020 17.43 GMT


A huge US space telescope nestled deep in the Puerto Rican jungle will be shut down after suffering two destructive mishaps in recent months, ending 57 years of astronomical discoveries.
etc

https://www.theguardian.com/science...arecibo-space-telescope-in-puerto-rico-jungle
 
Scientists Detect Hints of Strange New Physics in The Universe's Background Radiation

Source: sciencealert.com
Date: 27 November, 2020

Throughout all known space, between the stars and the galaxies, an extremely faint glow suffuses, a relic left over from the dawn of the Universe. This is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the first light that could travel through the Universe when it cooled enough around 380,000 years after the Big Bang for ions and electrons to combine into atoms.

But now scientists have discovered something peculiar about the CMB. A new measurement technique has revealed hints of a twist in the light - something that could be a sign of a violation of parity symmetry, hinting at physics outside the Standard Model.

According to the Standard Model of physics, if we were to flip the Universe as though it were a mirror reflection of itself, the laws of physics should hold firm. Subatomic interactions should occur in exactly the same way in the mirror as they do in the real Universe. This is called parity symmetry.

As far as we have been able to measure so far, there's only one fundamental interaction that breaks parity symmetry; that's the weak interaction between subatomic particles that is responsible for radioactive decay. But finding another place where parity symmetry breaks down could potentially lead us to new physics beyond the Standard Model.

And two physicists - Yuto Minami of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Japan; and Eiichiro Komatsu of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany and Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan - believe they have found hints of it in the polarisation angle of the CMB.

[...]

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-twis...adiation-of-the-universe-hints-at-new-physics
 
Not since 1623 Jupiter and Saturn will be next to each other on December 21st, the first day of winter.

Is this a good sign or a bad sign?
 
The case of the missing dark matter: new suspect found in galactic mystery

Source: phys.org
Date: 27 November, 2020

A faraway galaxy with almost no dark matter has threatened to break our theory of galaxy formation. New evidence suggests the galaxy isn't an anomaly—but a victim of theft.

Dark matter—an invisible substance as enigmatic as its name suggests—is a key ingredient in helping galaxies form and stay alive.

It creates the strong gravity needed to spark galaxy formation and keep existing galaxies structurally intact.

But astronomers have been puzzled since last year's discovery of 'NGC1052-DF4', a stable and long-lived galaxy with almost no dark matter. How can the galaxy exist without this important ingredient? Are our theories about galaxy formation wrong?

Today, an international study led by UNSW Sydney suggests the dark matter was there to begin with—it's just been stolen by a greedy neighbour.

"The dark matter isn't there because it's already been removed," says Dr. Mireia Montes, lead author of the study and astronomical researcher at UNSW Science and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

"We found that the gravitational pull from the nearby massive galaxy NGC1035 is removing its stars—and dark matter."

The research, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, provides an explanation for why so much dark matter is missing from the galaxy without contradicting our existing understanding of galaxy formation.

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-case-dark-galactic-mystery.html
 
Our Solar System Is Going to Totally Disintegrate Sooner Than We Thought

Source: sciencealert.com
Date: 29 November, 2020

Although the ground beneath our feet feels solid and reassuring (most of the time), nothing in this Universe lasts forever.

One day, our Sun will die, ejecting a large proportion of its mass before its core shrinks down into a white dwarf, gradually leaking heat until it's nothing more than a cold, dark, dead lump of rock, a thousand trillion years later.

But the rest of the Solar System will be long gone by then. According to new simulations, it will take just 100 billion years for any remaining planets to skedaddle off across the galaxy, leaving the dying Sun far behind.

Astronomers and physicists have been trying to puzzle out the ultimate fate of the Solar System for at least hundreds of years.

"Understanding the long-term dynamical stability of the solar system constitutes one of the oldest pursuits of astrophysics, tracing back to Newton himself, who speculated that mutual interactions between planets would eventually drive the system unstable," wrote astronomers Jon Zink of the University of California, Los Angeles, Konstantin Batygin of Caltech and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan in their new paper.

[...]

https://www.sciencealert.com/our-so...o-totally-disintegrate-sooner-than-we-thought
 
OK, this is not my field, but when scientists claim that dark matter makes up 95% of our universe how can that be?

Dark matter has never been seen, or proven, or measured, so I think this is “ fake news “ .

I personally think the universe is a living entity.
 
Astronomers Just Mapped 1 Million Previously Unknown Galaxies, And You Can Take a Tour

Source: sciencealert.com

AIDAN HOTAN, THE CONVERSATION
1 DECEMBER 2020

Astronomers have mapped about a million previously undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way, in the most detailed survey of the southern sky ever carried out using radio waves.

The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (or RACS) has placed the CSIRO's Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope (ASKAP) firmly on the international astronomy map.

While past surveys have taken years to complete, ASKAP's RACS survey was conducted in less than two weeks - smashing previous records for speed. Data gathered have produced images five times more sensitive and twice as detailed as previous ones.

Modern astronomy is a multi-wavelength enterprise. What do we mean by this?

Well, most objects in the Universe (including humans) emit radiation over a broad spectrum, called the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes both visible and invisible light such as X-rays, ultraviolet light, infrared light and radio waves.

To understand the Universe, we need to observe the entire electromagnetic spectrum as each wavelength carries different information.

Radio waves have the longest wavelength of all forms of light. They allow us to study some of the most extreme environments in the Universe, from cold clouds of gas to supermassive black holes.

Long wavelengths pass through clouds, dust and the atmosphere with ease, but need to be received with large antennas. Australia's wide open (but relatively low-altitude) spaces are the perfect place to build large radio telescopes.

We have some of the most spectacular views of the centre of the Milky Way from our position in the Southern Hemisphere. Indigenous astronomers have appreciated this benefit for millennia.

Radio astronomy is a relatively new field of research, dating back to the 1930s.

The first detailed 30cm radio map of the southern sky - which includes everything a telescope can see from its location in the Southern Hemisphere - was Sydney University's Molonglo Sky Survey. Completed in 2006, this survey took almost a decade to observe 25 percent of the entire sky and produce final data products.

Our team at CSIRO's Astronomy and Space Science division has smashed this record by surveying 83 percent of the sky in just ten days.

[...]

https://www.sciencealert.com/take-a-virtual-tour-of-a-million-previously-undiscovered-galaxies
 
How many mars bars, galaxy bars & packs of starbursts shall I order for this trip?
If I might also suggest the following...

Screenshot_20201201_170806_resize_21.jpg



Beware though, there are look-alikes...

IMG_20201201_170825_resize_57.jpg
 
Not since 1623 Jupiter and Saturn will be next to each other on December 21st, the first day of winter.

Is this a good sign or a bad sign?
It's most certainly a sign of the times and some detail in the following article.

We're About to Witness a Super-Rare Planetary Alignment Not Seen in 800 Years

Source: sciencealert.com
Dare: 1 December, 2020

Star-gazers are in for a treat over Christmas, as Jupiter and Saturn will get closer to each other in Earth's night sky than they have been for nearly 800 years. Set up your telescope, hope for a clear night, and get ready.

The celestial synchronisation has been in the works since summer as Jupiter and Saturn have been moving closer together in the night sky, and between 16-25 December they'll be separated by only 1/5th the diameter of a full moon.

While the planets won't physically be close to each other at all, of course, they'll look like a single point of bright light to anyone looking up at the night sky.

"Alignments between these two planets are rather rare, occurring once every 20 years or so, but this conjunction is exceptionally rare because of how close the planets will appear to one another," says astronomer Patrick Hartigan from Rice University.

[...]

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-pl...k-for-a-rare-spectacle-not-seen-in-800-years/
 
Well this is intriguing and certainly a somewhat oblique facet of astronomy.

Perhaps more deserving in another thread, or indeed one of its own!?

An Astronomer Has Searched The Universe For a Potential Message From Its Creator

Source: sciencealert.com
Date: 2 December, 2020

The Universe is a mysterious place. We don't know why it exists, and there are a lot of unanswered questions as to the how. But what if it was created, on purpose, by an intelligent entity? Is there some way we could find out?

In 2005, a pair of physicists proposed that if there was a Creator, they could have encoded a message in the background radiation of the Universe, left over from when light was first unleashed to flow freely through space. This light is called the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Now, astrophysicist Michael Hippke of Sonneberg Observatory in Germany and Breakthrough Listen has gone looking for this message, translating temperature variations in the CMB into a binary bitstream.

What he recovered appears to be utterly meaningless.

Hippke's paper describing his methods and findings has been uploaded to pre-print server arXiv, (and is thus yet to be peer-reviewed); the work includes the extracted bitstream so other interested parties can study it for themselves.

The cosmic microwave background is an incredibly useful relic of the early Universe. It dates back to around 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Prior to this, the Universe was completely dark and opaque, so hot and dense that atoms couldn't form; protons and electrons were flying around in the form of ionised plasma.

As the Universe cooled and expanded, those protons and electrons could combine to form neutral hydrogen atoms in what we call the epoch of recombination. Space became clear, and light could move freely through it for the first time.

This first light is still detectable today, albeit very faintly, suffusing all known space. That's the CMB. Since the early Universe was not uniform, density variations at the epoch of recombination manifest today in very slight fluctuations in the temperature of the CMB.

Because of this ubiquity, theoretical physicists Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon and Anthony Zee of the University of California, Santa Barbara argued - entirely theoretically - that the CMB would make the perfect billboard on which to leave a message that would be visible to all technological civilisations in the Universe.

"Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever," they wrote in their 2006 paper, "but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message."

They proposed that a binary message could be encoded in the temperature variations in the CMB. This is what Hippke has attempted to find - first by addressing the claims made by Hsu and Zee, and then by using the data to try and find a message.

[...]

https://www.sciencealert.com/is-the...-s-creator-in-the-cosmic-microwave-background
 
Astronomers Just Mapped 1 Million Previously Unknown Galaxies, And You Can Take a Tour

Source: sciencealert.com

AIDAN HOTAN, THE CONVERSATION
1 DECEMBER 2020

Astronomers have mapped about a million previously undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way, in the most detailed survey of the southern sky ever carried out using radio waves.

The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (or RACS) has placed the CSIRO's Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope (ASKAP) firmly on the international astronomy map.

While past surveys have taken years to complete, ASKAP's RACS survey was conducted in less than two weeks - smashing previous records for speed. Data gathered have produced images five times more sensitive and twice as detailed as previous ones.

Modern astronomy is a multi-wavelength enterprise. What do we mean by this?

Well, most objects in the Universe (including humans) emit radiation over a broad spectrum, called the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes both visible and invisible light such as X-rays, ultraviolet light, infrared light and radio waves.

To understand the Universe, we need to observe the entire electromagnetic spectrum as each wavelength carries different information.

Radio waves have the longest wavelength of all forms of light. They allow us to study some of the most extreme environments in the Universe, from cold clouds of gas to supermassive black holes.

Long wavelengths pass through clouds, dust and the atmosphere with ease, but need to be received with large antennas. Australia's wide open (but relatively low-altitude) spaces are the perfect place to build large radio telescopes.

We have some of the most spectacular views of the centre of the Milky Way from our position in the Southern Hemisphere. Indigenous astronomers have appreciated this benefit for millennia.

Radio astronomy is a relatively new field of research, dating back to the 1930s.

The first detailed 30cm radio map of the southern sky - which includes everything a telescope can see from its location in the Southern Hemisphere - was Sydney University's Molonglo Sky Survey. Completed in 2006, this survey took almost a decade to observe 25 percent of the entire sky and produce final data products.

Our team at CSIRO's Astronomy and Space Science division has smashed this record by surveying 83 percent of the sky in just ten days.

[...]

https://www.sciencealert.com/take-a-virtual-tour-of-a-million-previously-undiscovered-galaxies
That's wicked! :D
 
Arecibo has completely collapsed.
Drone catches Arecibo Observatory's last moments

Source: livescience.com
Date: 3 December, 2020

The exact moment of Arecibo Observatory's final collapse — when the cables supporting its instrument platform broke — was caught on video by a drone doing a routine inspection flyby, according to a new video released by the observatory Thursday (Dec. 3).

The footage, taken just before 8 a.m. local time in Puerto Rico on Dec. 1, shows what at first appears to be a peaceful, blue-sky morning. Then, one of the main cables holding up the suspended platform over the radio dish gives way, and the entire platform swings downward, breaking apart as it twists toward the ground.

The footage may help scientists understand what went wrong at the famous alien-searching observatory, known not just to astronomers and science enthusiasts but also to moviegoers who watched the 1995 James Bond hit "GoldenEye" and the 1997 film "Contact," based on Carl Sagan's novel.

[...]

https://www.livescience.com/drone-footage-arecibo-observarory.html
 
Ghostly circles in the sky can't be explained. And astronomers are excited.

Source: livescience.com
Date: 3 December, 2020

Are they 'throats' of wormholes?

In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she’d found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn’t fit easily to any known type of object.

Among them, labeled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna’s.

Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, made with CSIRO’s revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

EMU plans to boldly probe parts of the Universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because ASKAP can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

I predicted a couple of years ago this exploration of the unknown would probably make unexpected discoveries, which I called WTFs. But none of us expected to discover something so unexpected, so quickly. Because of the enormous data volumes, I expected the discoveries would be made using machine learning. But these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing.

Our team searched the rest of the data by eye, and we found a few more of the mysterious round blobs. We dubbed them ORCs, which stands for “odd radio circles”. But the big question, of course, is: “what are they?”

[...]

https://www.livescience.com/ghostly-circles-puzzle-astronomers.html
 
Most accurate map of our galaxy pinpoints 1.8 billion cosmic objects

Source: livescience.com
Date: 5 December, 2020

Astronomers were hit Thursday (Dec. 3) with a huge wave of data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory.

Those researchers can now explore the best-yet map of the Milky Way, with detailed information on the positions, distances and motion of 1.8 billion cosmic objects, to help us better understand our place in the universe.

"Gaia data is like a tsunami rolling through astrophysics," said Martin Barstow, head of the physics and astronomy department at the University of Leicester, who is part of Gaia's data processing team. He was speaking at a virtual news conference held Thursday, at which another Gaia researcher, Giorgia Busso of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, also told reporters that this data has produced "a revolution" in many fields of astrophysics, from the study of galactic dynamics like stellar evolution to the study of nearby objects like asteroids in the solar system.

Gaia launched in December 2013 to map the galaxy in unprecedented detail. The $1 billion spacecraft orbits the Lagrange-2, or L2, point, a spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth, where the gravitational forces between our planet and the sun are balanced and the view of the sky is unobstructed. Gaia can measure about 100,000 stars each minute, or 850 million objects each day, and can scan the whole sky about once every two months.

The latest trove of data improves upon the precision and scope of the two previous Gaia data sets, which were released in 2016 and 2018. For example, compared to the 2018 data, which included measurements for 1.7 billion objects, the 2020 data improves by a factor of two the accuracy of the data points for proper motion, or the apparent change in the position of a star as viewed from our solar system.

"It really gives us an insight into how the Milky Way lives," Nicholas Walton, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge who is part of Gaia's science team, said at the same science and news conference. "We're talking about billions of stars, which really gives us the ability to probe at a meaningful level the whole population of the Milky Way, similar to what you'd want to do with studying people."

Walton said the cosmic census would be like having trackers on every person in the U.K. to map their location and monitor their health. "If everyone's got a tracker, we could tell you if they're sweating or not. It's a bit like that with the stars here: We can tell you which ones are sweating, which ones are active, which ones are dormant, which ones are going to die, which ones are going to explode."

Data from Gaia has already been used across a wide range of applications over the past four years. The mission has helped researchers find the corpse of a galaxy that the Milky Way cannibalized 10 billion years ago, spot 20 hypervelocity stars unexpectedly zooming toward the galactic center, and identify about 1,000 nearby stars where hypothetical extraterrestrials would be able to see signs of life on Earth.

[...]

https://www.livescience.com/gaia-data-release-best-milky-way-galaxy-map.html
 
In regard to Numb's post above about searching for a message from the creator, Roger Penrose claims to have found circles in the CMB. He claims these could be imprints from black holes from a previous universe before the Big Bang.
Having read Contact, other options also sprung to mind.
 
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