Astronomy

Follow the Dave’s Universe blog: www.Astronomy.com/davesuniverse Follow Dave Eicher on Twitter:@deicherstar Edwin Hubble was neither the most accomplished astronomer on Earth nor the most well-liked by his colleagues. Yet, in the fall of 1923, he discovered a special star that turned our understanding of the cosmos on its head. On the night of October ⅚, using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory outside Los Angeles, Hubble recorded a deep exposure of what was then called the Andromeda Nebula. He was intensely curious about so-called spiral nebulae: Were they clouds of gas and stars within our galaxy, or very distant, mysterious objects? Hubble was elated with his glass-plate negative. He believed he had found a nova, an exploding star, within the nebula, and he marked it with an N. Subsequent checking…

Rain and shine I’ve just read Stephen O’Meara’s April 2022 column, “The impropriety of rainbows.” I was intrigued by the fact that many cultures refer to rain while the Sun is in the sky as a monkey’s wedding (or some animal’s wedding). In Portuguese, there are also two popular sayings about rain and Sun relative to someone’s wedding. When it’s raining and the Sun comes back, we say: Chuva com sol, casamento de espanhol, meaning “Raining with Sun, Spanish wedding.” When it’s sunny and it starts raining, we say: Sol com chuva, casamento de viúva, meaning “Sun with rain, widow’s wedding.” —Lucca Vanoni Ruggiero, São Paulo, Brazil Reading the sky Raymond Shubinski brought back some fond memories with his “Check out these classic sky guides” piece (April 2022). My copies of Norton’s and…

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSE THIS MONTH At the risk of sounding like a broken record, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has broken another record. With the help of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, the aging observatory recently captured this image of the most distant star ever seen, nicknamed Earendel. “When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the universe was less than a billion years old,” said Victoria Strait, a postdoc at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, in a press release. “At that time, it was 4 billion light-years away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion light-years away.” Earendel shines millions of…

The repercussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the largest land war in Europe since World War II, still ongoing as of this writing — have extended not just beyond Ukraine’s borders but also above Earth’s atmosphere. When Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24, much of the world responded by levying economic sanctions on Russia and rushing aid and weapons to Ukraine. In response, the Russian space agency Roscosmos cut ties and canceled agreements with a string of spacefaring nations. The war has also forced the international scientific community to weigh the moral cost of collaborations with Russia, pushing relationships forged after the Cold War beyond the breaking point. In one of the highest-profile breaks, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced March 17 it would suspend work on the ExoMars rover, which it…

The pulsar J2030+4415 (J2030 for short) — a dense stellar remnant with a strong magnetic field and fast spin — is traveling through our galaxy at about 500,000 mph (800,000 km/h). This causes its winds, which contain both matter and antimatter, to trail behind it, while a bow shock of gas leads in front. But somehow, about 20 to 30 years ago, the bow shock slowed down and J2030 smashed into it, causing a particle leak. The result: a beam of matter and antimatter 40 trillion miles (64 trillion kilometers) long. This image, from research published March 25 in The Astrophysical Journal, suggests that pulsars could be partially responsible for the large swaths of positrons — the antimatter counterpart of the electron — that mysteriously dot the universe. X-RAY: NASA/CXC/STANFORD UNIV./M.…

SLS SLIPS AGAIN NASA called off a wet dress rehearsal for its new Moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), due to a series of issues including a leaking hydrogen supply line and a faulty valve. The rocket’s first uncrewed flight, Artemis 1, is now expected to launch no earlier than August. NOT-SO-STANDARD MODEL Scientists at Fermilab pinned the mass of the W boson, a fundamental force-carrying particle, to about 80 times the mass of a proton (with an unparalleled precision of 0.01 percent). This puts the measurement in tension with the Standard Model of physics. STEP ASIDE STARLINK On April 5, Amazon announced it had inked deals with three rocket companies for up to 83 launches over the next five years, which will deliver more than 3,200 satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide internet…