Indice dei contenuti per May 2025 in Astronomy

Of the countless stars and planets that must exist in the cosmos, we know of life on only one — our Earth. But the emerging scientific knowledge of the last generation teaches is that life must be spread all over the universe. So, as the so-called Fermi Paradox states, if they’re out there, why haven’t we found them? The answers are many. Let’s start with the odds. We know of nearly 6,000 planets orbiting stars other than ours in the Milky Way. And we are in the early days of technologically discovering and cataloging planets so far away. We know the Milky Way contains several hundred billion stars — the exact number is hard to decipher because the most numerous stars, M dwarfs, are hard to detect over long distances…

THE FIELD OF ASTRONOMY was gripped by chaos and uncertainty in the weeks following Donald J. Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency on Jan. 20, as he and advisor Elon Musk launched a full-scale assault on federal spending, purged the civil services of diversity initiatives, and executed mass layoffs. The blitz included a flurry of executive orders and efforts by Musk and allies at the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), an organization under the presidential executive office. Affected agencies included NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which underwrite nearly all publicly funded astronomy in the U.S. Both agencies have halted key review and advisory processes. On Jan. 27, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo freezing all federal loans and grants, halting paychecks for NSF-funded researchers.…

THERE ARE TENS OF BILLIONS of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way, an immense tally that encourages the possibility that extraterrestrial life peppers the universe. Finding evidence for aliens — even microscopic ones — would confirm the widespread belief that life is not an unlikely event, constrained to a small number of planets and moons. It could be commonplace, a ubiquitous cosmic infection. This idea is not new. Since the time of the classical Greeks, many scholars have assumed that life was everywhere, even though they lacked the technical means to find it. By the 19th century, European novelists were writing stories about sophisticated inhabitants of our Moon, and a century later both scientists and the public were convinced that Mars was teeming with clever beings who had built massive irrigation…

COMETS ARE NOTORIOUSLY UNPREDICTABLE. Some of the most spectacular of these icy visitors pop up unexpectedly, careening toward the Sun and bursting out in spectacular fashion with little advance notice. Others are spotted over a year before they make their closest approach, but break apart and fizzle out. Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was the rare comet that arrived with a year and a half of fanfare and lived up to the hype, serving up naked-eye views for weeks. If it was not a Great Comet, it was at least a very, very good one. Formally known as C/2023 A3, this ice ball from the outer solar system was first discovered in images taken Jan. 9, 2023, by a telescope operated by Purple Mountain Observatory near Nanjing in China’s Jiangsu Province. A month…

Jupiter and Mars are on display during May evenings. It’s your last chance to grab a good view of Jupiter before it drops out of sight for midsummer. A gathering of planets in the morning sky offers some nice opportunities, and in the first week of May they’re joined by meteors from the annual Eta Aquariid shower. Let’s begin our tour with Jupiter, continuing its long goodbye as its elongation from the Sun diminishes from 40° to 18°. It sets just after 11 p.m. local daylight time on May 1st and around 9:30 p.m., or about an hour after sunset, on May 31. Your finest views occur in the first few days of the month, when the planet spans 34" and remains above 20° altitude an hour after sunset. Jupiter…

Women have long contributed meaningful scientific discoveries to the field of astronomy; however, men have primarily dominated the vocation. As of 2019, women earn about 40 percent of the Ph.D.s granted in the field of astronomy, but that has not always been the case. And there are many cases of women working in astronomy only to have their findings overshadowed or derided in some capacity. Until relatively recently, women typically had to be related or married to a prominent astronomer, take on remedial roles, do research in secret, or even forgo access to a public bathroom, all in the pursuit of knowledge of the stars. To highlight their accomplishments despite the challenges they faced, I have researched and devised a list of women that I found to be incredibly influential…

Open sky Sky View Tents Buena Vista, CO The new Sky View XL Stargazing Tent is for those who want coverage while seeking the stars. This 90-by-90-inch (228.6 by 228.6 centimeters) tent offers views of the sky from every angle with a bug mesh specifically crafted for high visibility. It offers enough room for three adults and weighs less than 12 pounds (5.4 kilograms). It is also equipped with a rainfly cover and a waterproof coating to protect from the elements. $349.00 info@skyviewtents.com https://skyviewtents.com Sun spotter Sky-Watcher Richmond, BC The Heliostar H-Alpha Solar Telescope is the latest offering for getting a closer look at the Sun. With a 76mm aperture, this scope can observe our star at a 656.3 nm wavelength. This means a detailed look at filaments, prominences, and…

SNAPSHOT BURSTING WITH STARBIRTH JWST’s colorful view shows a molecular cloud complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), N79 South is part of a vast 1,630-light-year-wide region filled with molecular clouds and burgeoning stars. In this image, JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals blue wisps made of ionized hydrogen gas and cooler dust. The spikes extending from the top-center portion of the image are an artifact that results from JWST’s 18 hexagonal mirrors. JWST found that N79 hosts a so-called super star cluster of forming suns just 100,000 years old. It is the second such cluster found in the LMC, matching the Milky Way’s own count. These clusters, abundant billions of years ago, offer glimpses of how stars formed in a younger universe. The MIRI…

In 1964, Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev published a paper in which he classified hypothetical alien civilizations by the amount of power they were capable of harnessing. His framework was later called the Kardashev Scale. Within it, Level I civilizations would be capable of utilizing a planet’s worth of power, which he claimed Earth was close to already. (A 2023 Nature paper estimates we’re at Kardashev Level 0.73 out of 3.) Level II civilizations would be able to harness the power of their star, which both he and later researchers took to mean use of a Dyson sphere or similar technology. Aliens with a Level III civilization would have access to power on a galactic scale, a feat that seems unimaginable until you consider that once aliens spread beyond a single…

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS owes its name to two observatories that discovered it independently. The first, Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO), was founded in 1934 and is considered China’s first modern astronomical observatory. The name Tsuchinshan — traditionally used for comets discovered by PMO — is an older transliteration of Zijinshan, which is Chinese for “purple mountain.” The observatory’s historic location is atop a mountain in the heart of Nanjing, a city of nearly 10 million people. The Minor Planet Center’s code for the observatory is Nanking — the historic transliteration of Nanjing. But the bulk of PMO’s research is now conducted at several satellite observatories at more remote sites. The telescope that first detected Comet C/2023 A3 is a 1.2-meter Schmidt located in Xuyi County, roughly 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of…

HOW TO USE THIS MAP This map portrays the sky as seen near 35° north latitude. Located inside the border are the cardinal directions and their intermediate points. To find stars, hold the map overhead and orient it so one of the labels matches the direction you’re facing. The stars above the map’s horizon now match what’s in the sky. The all-sky map shows how the sky looks at: midnight May 1 11 P.M. May 15 10 P.M. May 31 Planets are shown at midmonth BEGINNERS: WATCH A VIDEO ABOUT HOW TO READ A STAR CHART AT www.Astronomy.com/starchart.…

SEND YOUR IMAGES TO: readergallery@astronomy.com. Please include the date and location of the image, your mailing address, and complete photo data: telescope, camera, filters, and exposures.…

On Jan. 14, at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland, astronomers revisited some recent mysteries. Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Maine, spoke about the “little red dots” (LRDs) found by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These are the same as the “universe-breaking” galaxies first reported roughly two years ago, so called because they are larger than scientists can explain at so early a point in cosmic time — less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Scientists simply don’t understand how so many stars and so much material could accumulate in so little time. When the news first broke, there were six of these objects. Now, JWST has revealed 341 of them. Kocevski’s update to the LRD investigation has been accepted…

AMONG THE MENAGERIE of galaxies, astronomers have found an example of an unusual breed: a quasar with spiral arms. Quasars are galaxies whose central black holes produce jets that shine brighter than the rest of the galaxy itself. Typically, these galaxies are old and elliptical, having lost their spiral structure through mergers with other galaxies. But when astronomer and U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Olivia Achenbach analyzed Hubble Space Telescope data of the quasar J0742+2704, she saw clear spiral arms — suggesting it hasn’t experienced a major merger. A check of archival data revealed the jets have turned on within the past 20 years. This doesn’t jibe with the dominant theory that black holes begin feeding and launching jets when their host galaxies merge, which causes stars, gas, and dust to fall…

Just a few decades ago, when we glanced skyward, we didn’t know for certain whether any star visible to the naked eye hosts planets like our own. Now, NASA scientists estimate that, on average, there may be at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way. That’s billions of extrasolar planets in our island universe alone — not to mention the billions of stars in the trillions of other galaxies in the cosmos. Of the more than 5,000 exoplanets that have been confirmed so far and many more thousands of candidates, most orbit stars the mass of the Sun or lower. The spring night sky, however, offers us several examples of bright stars larger than the Sun thought to host planets. Let’s look at a few and use…

Scientists in large part agree that the prospects are rich for life in the universe. Perhaps less intuitively, they’ve noted that given the billions of years the universe has existed, even the slowest space-faring society could still spread galaxy-wide in a few million years — the cosmic blink of an eye. So why aren’t they visiting us on the regular? This line of questioning is called Fermi’s Paradox, named for Enrico Fermi, a Nobel laureate and architect of the atomic bomb who also pondered the existence of alien life along exactly these lines. While many a thought has been given to possible answers, whether while stargazing, writing a scientific paper, or staring at one’s ceiling too late at night, a few theories commonly recur: The Great Filter. While the prospects…

THE EUCLID SPACE OBSERVATORY launched July 1, 2023, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Researchers tasked it with creating a 3D map of more than a third of the sky and surveying billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away. In October of last year, scientists revealed the first page in its cosmic atlas, a mosaic comprising 208 gigapixels of data revealing billions of galaxies in awesome detail. A project of the European Space Agency, Euclid scans the cosmos in visible and near-infrared light with a telescope aperture of 1.2 meters. Instruments include an infrared spectrometer, which allows it to measure the composition and motions of targets in detail and reveal galaxies at a great distance, when the universe was in its childhood. Euclid is meant to answer major cosmological questions about…

ASTRONOMY’S EDITOR HERE. Last October, I ventured out on a weeklong trip to a very special place. I departed from Tucson, Arizona, and traveled to Santiago, Chile, where I met about 20 enthusiastic people who were charged up to see the annular eclipse on Oct. 2. Before heading for the considerably long flight to Easter Island, our group enjoyed some sights and sounds of Chile. In the city of Santiago, we took a city tour and walked around the Plaza de Armas, the city’s main square, soaking in the extraordinary history and architecture of the region. We explored the Metropolitan Cathedral, and the city’s northeastern sector, loaded with fancy restaurants and shops, and the picturesque area of San Cristobal Hill. And then, we made a 5½-hour flight westward from the…

The universe is full of extreme phenomena. Perhaps this is what draws some people to astronomy — it has some of the most extreme physics out there. And supernovae are some of the most extraordinary objects that also have the benefit of being visible to astronomers here on Earth, even long after the explosive event itself. An incredible amount of energy is involved in a supernova explosion. When I was preparing a talk on how all the elements are made for the 2018 Texas Star Party, I came across a figure for how much energy is output from a single supernova: 1044 Joules (J). A 1 followed by 44 zeroes is an enormous number — 100 million trillion trillion trillion. I wanted to translate that to a somewhat more comprehensible…