Astronomy May 2022

When I was a kid, a new series lit up the television: Star Trek. I was hooked on watching what is now called The Original Series, with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Uhura. In this month’s “An Observer’s Guide to Star Trek” (page 40), Contributing Editor Michael Bakich takes you on a tour of many of the star systems — from Alpha Centauri to Canopus to Wolf 359 to 61 Ursae Majoris — mentioned in various episodes of the show. While it lasted, the ability of Star Trek to swoop us off through the galaxy was priceless. Clearly many working scientists in today’s world were influenced and inspired by the series. As much as we may adore it, it’s important to remember that Star Trek is science fiction. Of course, this may…

We welcome your comments at Astronomy Letters, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187; or email to letters@astronomy.com. Please include your name, city, state, and country. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. The malleability of time I enjoyed Mr. Shubinski’s informative article, “Defining time” (December 2021), very much. It sparked a memory of 2019, when I was reading a special edition magazine about the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. It said that Neil Armstrong first walked on the Moon on July 21 — “What? Wait! Is that a typo?” Then a stray possibility flitted through my brain. I hunted at the front of the magazine … yup, U.K. Of course, they were correct — by Greenwich Mean Time. It appears that dates and times may still float on a sea…

Lit by the easternmost star in Orion’s Belt, NGC 2024 is also known as the Flame Nebula. The blazing emission nebula takes up the left side of this image, which combines radio observations taken with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment’s Supercam (inset rectangle with orange and red) with infrared data collected by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (exterior, black and blue), both in Chile. Also visible are the Horsehead Nebula at upper right and the bright, round reflection nebula NGC 2023 just right of center. The fiery colors in this image don’t reflect temperature. Instead, they show the velocity of the gas in these giant clouds as the entire collection — some 1,300 to 1,600 light-years away — moves away from Earth. Redder, more distant regions are receding faster…

HOME ON LAGRANGE On Jan. 24, nearly a month after its launch, a five-minute burn successfully settled NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into its final orbit at the L2 Lagrange point. PLAY BALL The European Characterising Exoplanets Satellite (CHEOPS) spotted a massive exoplanet whose tight orbit around its star raises tides that tug it into an oblong, football-like shape. SPACE SELFIE On New Year’s Day, China published a first-of-its-kind photo of the Tianwen 1 orbiter above Mars, snapped by a small camera released by the craft.…

Think about bubbles, and you may think of soap or gum. But for astronomers, a bubble is something else entirely. For example, the Sun lies within the Local Bubble — a hollowed-out region of space filled with thin, hot plasma inside a shell of cold gas and dust. For decades, the history and true size of the Local Bubble remained uncertain. Not anymore. In a paper published Jan. 12 in Nature, a team led by Catherine Zucker of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics outlined a kind of creation story of our stellar neighborhood: The Local Bubble is the result of a series of supernova shock waves, and on its expanding surface lie nearly all the star-forming regions near our solar system. In other words, the formation of the young stars in our…

Although it may not look like much, this frosty martian crater is 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across, occupying a space over half the size of Manhattan. Oxidized red soil sits in contrast to the blue-white water ice and black basalt on the crater rim. The ice is more prevalent on northfacing ridges, which receive less sunlight throughout the year than those that face south. This image was taken by the European Space Agency and Roscosmos’ ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) July 5, 2021, over Vastitas Borealis in Mars’ north polar region. Since arriving at the Red Planet in 2016, TGO has mapped the planet’s surface in search of underground ice and taken stock of its atmospheric gases. ESA/ROSCOSMOS/CASSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO…