“Greetings Starfighter, you have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.  Get ready!  Prepare for blast off!”

The summer of 1984 was a banner year for Hollywood, with a bounty of A-list releases that included such iconic titles as “Ghostbusters,” “Gremlins,” “Star Trek III: The Search For Spock,” “Conan the Destroyer,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “The Karate Kid,” “Purple Rain,” “Red Dawn,” “The Company of Wolves.” “The Neverending Story,” and “Revenge of the Nerds.”

Want to visit an interesting exoplanet, or dip dangerously close to a black hole? It is not impossible – there’s no law of physics that forbids humans from traveling through space – but it’s just really, really hard.

Here are some potential ways we could travel amongst the stars, ranked from least to most likely.

Incredibly unlikely: Faster-than-light travel

You can never travel faster than the speed of light. At least, that’s what we understand through Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the revolutionary theory that united space and time can become interchangeable. And while it might be easy to say that a future understanding of physics might do away with that restriction, it could be much harder to put it into practice.

Special relativity is one of the most – if not the most – well-tested theories in all of physics. That’s because special relativity isn’t just a theory, it’s a meta-theory. It’s a set of instructions that help us build other theories of physics. Special relativity teaches us how space and time are connected in a fundamental way. The nature of this connection puts the speed of light as the ultimate speed limit. It’s not just about light or even movement, but about causality itself.

Special relativity lays out the fundamental groundwork for the relationship between past, present, and future. In other words, going faster than light allows for the possibility of going back in time, which does not appear to be allowed in our universe.

Since all other modern physics theories are built on relativity, every time we test one of those theories, we’re also testing relativity. While we could be wrong about the fundamental structure of spacetime, the speed limit of light is unlikely to be dethroned anytime soon.

Mostly unlikely: Wormholes

Related to the restriction of the speed of light is the seeming impossibility of wormholes. Wormholes are shortcuts in space that connect any two points in the universe. These strange objects are a natural prediction of general relativity, Einstein’s theory of how the force of gravity arises out of the bends and warps in spacetime.

General relativity allows for wormholes by bending spacetime in a very peculiar way. But there’s one small caveat: these objects are catastrophically unstable. The moment anything, even a single photon, tries to travel down the throat of the wormhole, it instantly tears itself apart. The only known way to stabilize a wormhole is by introducing a thread of exotic matter. This is matter that has negative mass, which, like time travel, does not appear to be allowed in the universe.

It could be that our future descendants discover an alternative way to stabilize wormholes and allow for interstellar travel. But the amount of time it might take to uncover the necessary breakthroughs in physics might be longer than simply going to the stars ourselves.

Highly unlikely: Generation ships

If we’re stuck without shortcuts or loopholes in physics, or other means to achieve FTL travel, then we’re going to have to take our time. While sending a spacecraft travelling towards another star is not an issue of physics, it does pose loads of engineering challenges. One fanciful idea to travel among the stars is to build generation ships – large, slow-moving vessels where most of the passengers would never live to see their destination, living generation after generation as a self-contained city-vessel that would eventually reach another star.

Technically, humanity is already an interstellar species. Years ago the Voyager 1 spacecraft traveled through the heliopause, the boundary of the solar system, and entered interstellar space. The good news is that it only took a few decades to achieve that feat. The bad news is that it’s just getting started. Even at the incredible speed at over 36,000 miles per hour (57,940 kilometers per hour), if Voyager 1 were headed in the direction of Proxima Centauri (which it is not), our nearest neighbor star at roughly 4.2 light-years away, it would take the spacecraft roughly 40,000 years to reach its destination.

That number of years predates the development of the first cities and the advent of agriculture. So a “generation ship” isn’t just a handful of generations, but hundreds of them, all needing to live self-sufficiently in the voids between stars, with no additional sources of water, fuel, food, or spare parts.

Not impossible, but also highly unlikely.

Mildly Unlikely: Really, really fast

To get to other stars faster, you can’t have a giant lumbering ship. You instead need to be as small as possible. Rockets or other propellants would then get to higher speeds, making the journey as short as possible. Plus, at high speeds the quirk of relativity helps out. Because of the constancy of the speed of light, movement through space is different than movement through time, and the faster an object advances in space, the slower it moves in time. As it approaches the speed of light, a year for the rest of the universe can shrink to months, days, or even minutes.

Unfortunately, these effects only really kick in once an object progresses to more than 90 percent the speed of light, which is something humanity hasn’t come close to achieving. But accelerating particles coming close to the speed of light is something that powerful events in the universe do on the regular, so it’s definitely not impossible.

But those are tiny particles, not comparatively massive spaceships. Pushing something like a human-sized craft to 90 percent the speed of light might require more energy than the Sun produces in a thousand years, but that is an engineering problem, not a physics one.

Likely: We don’t

In the far, far distant future, assuming that our current understanding of physics holds (at least as far as FTL travel and wormholes are concerned), humanity will likely send only a few scant missions to other stars and viable planets. But there’s plenty of room here in the solar system, with hundreds of moons and thousands of asteroids to call home. It’s a big enough place with plenty of mysteries to uncover.

It is home, and there’s no place like it.

Dark matter is curious stuff! As the name suggests, it’s dark making it notoriously difficult to study. Although it’s is invisible, it influences stars in a galaxy through gravity. Now, a team of astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to chart the movements of stars within the Draco dwarf galaxy to detect the subtle gravitational pull of its surrounding dark matter halo. This 3D map required studying nearly two decades of archival data from the Draco galaxy. They found that dark matter piles up more in the centre, as predicted by cosmological models.

Dark matter comprises approximately 27% of the all the mass and energy in the universe but interacts only gravitationally, emitting no light. The idea first – ahem, came to light to explain discrepancies in the rotation curves of galaxies and is detected through its gravitational effects on visible matter. Despite extensive research,  the nature of dark matter remains elusive. Understanding dark matter is crucial for comprehending the composition and evolution of the universe.

Dark matter has often been described as the invisible ‘glue’ that holds galaxies together. Although galaxies are mostly composed of dark matter, understanding its distribution within them provides an opportunity to understand its nature and relevance to the evolution of the galaxy. Computer simulations predict a dense concentration of dark matter at the core of the galaxy, forming a density cusp. However, numerous observations have shown that dark matter appears more uniformly spread throughout galaxies, contradicting these simulations. 

To study dark matter within galaxies, scientists can analyse the movements of stars, which are influenced primarily by the gravitational pull of dark matter. One common method involves using the Doppler Effect to measure the speed of objects in space—observing changes in the wavelength of light as stars move closer to or further from Earth. Along with moving toward or away from us, stars can also move across the sky. This proper motion, when combined with line of sight measurements allow for the creation of the movement of a star in 3D.

Astronomers have employed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study the dynamics of stars within the Draco dwarf galaxy, located about 250,000 light-years from Earth. The Draco galaxy was used because, as a dwarf galaxy, it is relatively small and is believed to have a higher proportion of dark matter than other types of galaxy.

Over 18 years of observational data from 2004 to 2022 were examined and they painstakingly mapped the precise three-dimensional motions of these stars, drawing from extensive archival data collected by Hubble. This effort has yielded the most accurate understanding to date of how stars move within this small galaxy. Understanding precisely how stars move in galaxies allows for precise maps of dark matter to be created. 

The technique the team have developed is not only of use for the Draco dwarf galaxy but for other galaxies too. The Sculptor dwarf galaxy is already being analysed using the same technique along with the Ursa Minor dwarf galaxy.

Source : NASA’s Hubble Traces Dark Matter in Dwarf Galaxy Using Stellar Motions

Science & Exploration

12/07/2024
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A duo of interacting galaxies known as Arp 142 commemorates the second science anniversary of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

Their ongoing interaction was set in motion between 25 and 75 million years ago, when the Penguin (individually catalogued as NGC 2936) and the Egg (NGC 2937) completed their first pass. They will go on to shimmy and sway, completing several additional loops before merging into a single galaxy hundreds of millions of years from now.

The James Webb Space Telescope takes constant observations, including images and highly detailed data known as spectra. Its operations have led to a ‘parade’ of discoveries by astronomers around the world. It has never felt more possible to explore every facet of the Universe.

The telescope’s specialisation in capturing infrared light – which is beyond what our own eyes can detect – shows these galaxies, collectively known as Arp 142, locked in a slow cosmic dance. Webb’s observations (which combine near- and mid-infrared light from Webb’s NIRCam [Near-InfraRed Camera] and MIRI [Mid-Infrared Instrument], respectively) clearly show that they are joined by a blue haze that is a mix of stars and gas, a result of their mingling.

Let’s dance

Before their first approach, the Penguin held the shape of a spiral. Today, its galactic centre gleams like an eye, its unwound arms now shaping a beak, head, backbone, and fanned-out tail.

Like all spiral galaxies, the Penguin is still very rich in gas and dust. The galaxies’ ‘dance’ pulled gravitationally on the Penguin’s thinner areas of gas and dust, causing them to crash in waves and form stars. Look for those areas in two places: what looks like a fish in its ‘beak’ and the ‘feathers’ in its ‘tail’.

Surrounding these newer stars is smoke-like material that includes carbon-containing molecules, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which Webb is exceptional at detecting. Dust, seen as fainter, deeper orange arcs also swoops from its beak to tail feathers.

In contrast, the Egg’s compact shape remains largely unchanged. As an elliptical galaxy, it is filled with ageing stars, and has a lot less gas and dust that can be pulled away to form new stars. If both were spiral galaxies, each would end the first ‘twist’ with new star formation and twirling curls, known as tidal tails.

Another reason for the Egg’s undisturbed appearance is that these galaxies have approximately the same mass, which is why the smaller-looking elliptical wasn’t consumed or distorted by the Penguin.

It is estimated that the Penguin and the Egg are about 100 000 light-years apart – quite close in astronomical terms. For context, the Milky Way galaxy and our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, are about 2.5 million light-years apart, about 30 times the distance. They too will interact, but not for about 4 billion years.

In the top right of the image is an edge-on galaxy, catalogued PGC 1237172, which resides 100 million light-years closer to Earth. It’s also quite young, teeming with new, blue stars. In Webb’s mid-infrared-only image, PGC 1237172 practically disappears. Mid-infrared light largely captures cooler, older stars and an incredible amount of dust. Since the galaxy’s stellar population is so young, it ‘vanishes’ in mid-infrared light.

Webb’s image is also overflowing with distant galaxies. Some have spiral and oval shapes, like those threaded throughout the Penguin’s ‘tail feathers’, while others scattered throughout are shapeless dots. This is a testament to the sensitivity and resolution of the telescope’s infrared instruments. (Compare Webb’s view to the 2013 image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.) Even though these observations only took a few hours, Webb revealed far more distant, redder, and dustier galaxies than previous telescopes – one more reason to expect Webb to continue to expand our understanding of everything in the Universe.

Arp 142 lies 326 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra.

Second year of science operations: in review

Over its second year of operations Webb has advanced its science goals with new discoveries about other worlds, the lifecycle of stars, the early Universe and galaxies over time. Astronomers have learned about what conditions rocky planets can form in and detected icy ingredients for worlds, found tellurium created in star mergers and studied the supernova remnants SN 1987A and the Crab Nebula.

Looking into the distant past, Webb has solved the mysteries of how the Universe was reionised and hydrogen emission from galaxy mergers, and seen the most distant black hole merger and galaxy ever observed. Observations with Webb have also confirmed the long-standing tension between measurements of the Hubble constant, deepening a different mystery around the Universe’s expansion rate.

Webb has continued to produce incredible images of the cosmos, from the detailed beauty of the Ring Nebula, to supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, to a team effort with the the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESA’s Euclid telescope looking at the iconic Horsehead Nebula. Webb imagery was also combined with visible light observations from Hubble to create one of the most comprehensive views of the Universe ever, an image of galaxy cluster MACS 0416.

 

More information

Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Under an international collaboration agreement, ESA provided the telescope’s launch service, using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Release on esawebb.org

Contact:
ESA Media relations
media@esa.int

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In the 25 years since Space.com first launched its space news mission on July 20, 1999, humanity has accomplished amazing feats in astronomical research and spaceflight. But what lies ahead in the next quarter century?

Join Space.com as we celebrate our 25th anniversary by looking to the future of humanity’s reach into the cosmos with the live virtual panel “The Next 25 Years of Space Exploration – To the Moon, Mars and Beyond” at 12 p.m. EDT on July 17 on this page and on the Space.com homepage.

Astronaut, adventurer and aviator extraordinaire Joe Henry Engle, who passed away on June 10 at 91, earned renown in his career as the first human to reach space three times. He was also the only person to manually fly a Space Shuttle mission through almost its entire reentry.

Engle was a retired Air Force general, with a penchant for American-flag ties and polished cowboy boots, that piloted 185 aircrafts, logged 15,400 hours of flight time and was the first person to fly to space in two different winged vehicles: the Shuttle and the X-15. He is one of few U.S. astronauts who commanded a crew on his first orbital mission.

Born on August 26, 1932 in the farming community of Chapman, in central Kansas, Engle was the son of a high school agriculture instructor father and teacher mother. Neither parent was an aviator, but regardless, Engle grew up with an urge to fly.

“My mom used to say…that she couldn’t remember me seriously wanting to do anything but fly airplanes,” he told NASA’s Oral History Project in 2004. “Of course, I went through the fireman and cowboy games, but my core desires and core toys were always airplanes and flying.” His sister even cut a toy airplane from an old fruit can, but the tin was sharp-edged, resulting in his mother forbidding him from playing with it.

He read airplane magazines, watched airplane movies at Chapman’s only cinema, then went home to dig a cockpit in the sand. “I would get a tree branch for the control stick,” Engle remembered, “and take old tin cans and push them in the front for instruments and just be a hero, shoot down Japanese Zeroes right and left.”

Chapman had no runway, but at one Labor Day event Engle watched an old Stearman biplane alight in a nearby alfalfa field. He bought a ride. “We went around town once in it and back and landed,” Engle said, “and that was my first exposure to flying.”

It was an exposure that lasted a lifetime. He soon entered the University of Kansas to pursue aeronautical engineering, earning his degree in 1955. Engle worked summers as a draftsman for Cessna Aircraft. His supervisor Henry Dittmer got him sweeping hangar floors in exchange for flying lessons in a two-seat Cessna 120 taildragger.

Engle entered the Air Force via the Reserve Officers Training Corps and after flight instruction, he completed gunnery school. He then trained as a fighter pilot at George Air Force Base. He flew the F-100 Super Sabre in air-to-air combat and dogfighting over California’s Death Valley and Stovepipe Wells. It was the Air Force’s first level-flight supersonic fighter—and the hottest jet in the sky.

In 1960, Engle was picked for the Aerospace Research Pilot School, graduating a year later and moving into flight test at Edwards Air Force Base. “It was like getting a master’s degree,” he said. “Very intense, academically and flying-wise.”

Hopes of joining NASA in 1963 went nowhere, for General Irving ‘Twig’ Branch of the Air Force Flight Test Center had other plans for Engle. That June, he joined a hotshot team of pilots flying the X-15 rocket-propelled aircraft to the edge of space.

“That just thrilled me to death, because it was a chance to get into space and to do it with a winged airplane, with a stick and rudder,” said Engle. Flying the X-15 was not something anyone applied for: it was a gift. “You just kinda sat back,” he added, “and hoped that somehow the gods would sprinkle that dookie dust on you that had X-15 on it.”

Awaiting his first flight, Engle rode his little Lambretta motor scooter daily across California’s back desert roads to simulator sessions. He flew the X-15 sixteen times over two years, including three missions in June, August and October of 1965 when the aircraft’s throttleable rocket engine—capable of 26,000 pounds (12,000 kilograms) of thrust—pushed him above an altitude of 50 miles (80 kilometers).

And since the Air Force accepted that as space’s lower limit, it awarded ‘astronaut wings’ to X-15 pilots who conquered it. “You could make sure you got into space by letting the engine run another second or two,” Engle said. “By the time the ground could see it on radar, it was too late to do anything about it.”

Engle became the first human to enter space (but not Earth orbit) on three occasions. The first and highest of these flights was achieved on June 29, 1965 by attaining a peak altitude of 280,600 feet—equivalent to 53.14 miles (85.5 kilometers). Proudly watching at Edwards base were his parents.

But keenly aware that military assignments were never open-ended, Engle reapplied for NASA and was picked as an astronaut in April 1966. It brought mixed emotions, leaving the best flying job in the world for a chance to travel to the Moon.

In August 1969, he was named backup Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) on Apollo 14, planned for January 1971. But when performance issues arose with the prime LMP, consideration was briefly given to giving the position to Engle. However, Engle was less knowledgeable on the LM’s quirky systems and the prime LMP kept his seat on the mission. 

It was a decision that Apollo 14 backup commander Gene Cernan came to regret.

Under NASA’s astronaut rotation policy, backups for a given mission tended to rotate into the prime crew slot three flights later, allowing Cernan, Engle and Command Module Pilot (CMP) Ron Evans to confidently consider Apollo 17 as theirs to fly. But when Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were scratched by budget cuts, the scientific community anxiously pressed for a geologist aboard Apollo 17.

NASA had just one geologist-astronaut, Jack Schmitt, and he was pointed at Apollo 18. With Apollo 18 now gone, in August 1971 NASA bowed to scientific pressure and put Cernan and Evans on Apollo 17 but deleted Engle in favor of Schmitt. Engle later said his toughest job was telling his children he would not be going to the Moon.

Yet he handled himself with gracious dignity. “You can do one of two things,” he told the Houston Post. “You can lay on the bed and cry about it, or you can get behind the mission and make it the best in the world.”

That attitude earned him great respect as he began working on the Shuttle. In late 1977, he and Dick Truly flew Shuttle Enterprise twice off the back of a Boeing 747 carrier aircraft and guided her to a smooth runway landing at Edwards base, part of a series of Approach and Landing Tests (ALTs) to evaluate the reusable spacecraft’s handling characteristics.

In November 1981, Engle and Truly flew Columbia on STS-2, the second Shuttle mission and the first-ever voyage of a reusable manned orbital spacecraft. A fuel cell failure cut their flight from five days to two, but the astronauts operated a package of Earth-viewing scientific instruments and tested the Shuttle’s Canadian-built robotic arm.

STS-2 returned home after 54 hours, Engle and Truly having worked through the night to get nearly 90 percent of their pre-flight tasks done. Homeward bound, they executed 29 maneuvers from Mach 24 to subsonic speeds, making Engle the only Shuttle commander to manually fly (almost) an entire reentry.

“We were very anxious to see how much margin the Shuttle in the way of stability and control authority, how much muscle the surfaces had at different Mach numbers and angles of attack,” he said. “Wind tunnels are very susceptible to a lot of variables, so you really want to know for sure what you have in the way of capabilities if you ever have to use them.”

In August 1985, he commanded STS-51I which launched three communications satellites and retrieved, repaired and deployed the crippled Syncom 4-3. Engle retired from NASA in November 1986, serving in several senior roles in the Kansas Air National Guard and was inducted into the National Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2001.

“I never met an airplane I didn’t like,” Engle said of his love affair with flight. “Some are less relaxing and less enjoyable and less fun to fly and some of them are a lot more work to fly than others. But they’ve got their own personality.”

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Earth has broken temperature records for 13 consecutive months — with every month registering temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial averages, according to a new report. 

Every month since June 2023 has been hotter than the one preceding it, making the global average temperature between July 2023 and June 2024 1.64 C (3 F) greater than it was before the Industrial Revolution, when humans started burning fossil fuels to release huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Friday, July 12
The Moon reaches apogee, the farthest point from Earth in its orbit, at 4:11 A.M. EDT. At that time, Luna will sit 251,259 miles (404,362 kilometers) away.  

Look east a few hours after sunset and you’ll find the cross-shaped constellation Cygnus the Swan already high above the horizon and still climbing. The longer “beam” of the cross is anchored at the northeastern end by Cygnus’ alpha star, Deneb, which also marks the tail of the Swan. At the southwestern end lies the Swan’s beta star, Albireo, at the bird’s head or beak.

Just where the crossbeams meet (where the Swan’s wings extend from its body) is magnitude 2.2 Sadr (Gamma [γ] Cygni). It lies to the upper right of Deneb as Cygnus is rising in the sky tonight. Just 0.5° north of Sadr, easily within the field of view of either a telescope or binoculars, is the magnitude 7.5 open cluster NGC 6910.

Spanning about 8′, this smattering of some 70 young stars forms a rough Y shape and sits in the midst of IC 1318, a swath of hydrogen gas and dust sometimes called the Gamma Cygni Nebula because of its proximity to the star. The cluster and nebula both lie within the richly appointed star-forming region known as the Cygnus OB9 Association.

Sunrise: 5:42 A.M.
Sunset: 8:29 P.M.
Moonrise: 12:13 P.M.
Moonset: —
Moon Phase: Waxing crescent (38%)
*Times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset are given in local time from 40° N 90° W. The Moon’s illumination is given at 12 P.M. local time from the same location.

Saturday, July 13
Early risers this morning can catch Jupiter as it sits some 5° north of Aldebaran, the bright red eye of Taurus the Bull. Wait until about 4 A.M. local daylight time, when the V-shaped constellation has largely cleared the eastern horizon. At that time, Jupiter stands about 12° high and to the upper left of Aldebaran, just below the planet. Jupiter blazes at magnitude –2.1, outshining the red giant star, which is magnitude 0.9.

First Quarter Moon occurs at 6:49 P.M. EDT, with our satellite now in the constellation Virgo. Later this evening, the Moon passes 0.9° due north of the Maiden’s alpha star, magnitude 1 Spica, at 11 P.M. EDT — and depending on your location you may see the Moon pass in front of the star in an occultation visible across North and Central America.

The timing of the event is, as always, heavily location dependent. On the East Coast, it’s visible shortly before moonset, with the Moon covering Spica starting at 11:25 P.M. EDT from Newark, New Jersey, and at 10:10 P.M. CDT from Chicago. Because of Luna’s motion, the still-darkened western half will move over the star first, offering an interesting sight.

Spica reappears from behind the Moon roughly an hour and a half to an hour and 45 minutes later — again, the duration will depend significantly on your location. You can check the timing near you on the International Occultation Timing Association’s webpage for the event. Note that all times listed are in UTC on July 14 (early morning on the 14th in UTC is still late evening on the 13th in North America) and will need to be converted to local time.

Sunrise: 5:43 A.M.
Sunset: 8:28 A.M.
Moonrise: 1:13 P.M.
Moonset: 12:03 A.M.
Moon Phase: Waxing crescent (48%)

Sunday, July 14
Mercury is growing fainter in the evening sky but remains above the horizon for about 80 minutes after sunset. Located in far western Leo the Lion, the tiny planet is now magnitude 0.2 and some 3° high an hour after sunset, as the sky is growing dark. You’ll find it to the lower right of magnitude 1.4 Regulus, the heart of the Lion, which stands about three times as high above the western horizon at the same time. Through a telescope, Mercury appears 57 percent lit, with a disk spanning 7″.

To the upper right of Leo, closer to the North Celestial Pole, stands Ursa Major the Great Bear. This constellation contains one of the sky’s most famous asterisms: the Big Dipper. The star at the very end of the Dipper’s handle is magnitude 1.2 Alkaid. The next star along the handle, 2nd-magnitude Mizar, has a close companion, 4th-magnitude Alcor, just under 12′ (1/5°) away. Keen-eyed observers will likely be able to see both stars unaided once the sky grows dark enough. If you’re having trouble, though, the two are easily split by any optics, including both binoculars and telescopes.

Mizar itself became the first-known double star, consisting of two suns some 14″ apart. Its duality was discovered in 1650 by Italian astronomer G. B. Riccioli. These two stars are an easy pair to split in a telescope, offering a great target for beginning observers, according to the late stellar expert Jim Kaler.

Sunrise: 5:44 A.M.
Sunset: 8:28 P.M.
Moonrise: 2:14 P.M.
Moonset: 12:23 A.M.
Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous (57%)

Monday, July 15
Mars passes 0.6° south of Uranus at 5 A.M. EDT in a close conjunction that brings the outer and inner solar system together.

Visible in the few hours before sunrise, the pair is already 20° high around 3:45 A.M. local daylight time. They stand in the east in Taurus the Bull, to the upper right of bright Jupiter and just to the lower right of the famous Pleiades star cluster (M45).

Mars, at magnitude 0.9, is readily visible to the naked eye. Its partner Uranus, though, is magnitude 5.8 — just barely visible to naked-eye observers under ideal conditions and better seen with the aid of optics. So, simply swing up binoculars or any size telescope toward Mars, and your field of view will include distant Uranus directly to the Red Planet’s north.

The contrast between them is striking: Mars appears not as a fully lit disk but a gibbous some 90 percent illuminated. Its disk spans 6″ on the sky. Uranus, meanwhile, may be difficult to discern from the background stars — look for a “flatter,” blue-gray-colored star that appears more disklike than pointlike — that’s Uranus, which spans half of Mars’ width at 3″.

Consider, however, that in truth Mars is a rocky world about half the size of Earth and some one-tenth is mass; Uranus is an ice giant spanning four times Earth’s width and with 14.5 times its heft.

Sunrise: 5:45 A.M.
Sunset: 8:27 P.M.
Moonrise: 3:18 P.M.
Moonset: 12:46 A.M.
Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous (67%)

Tuesday, July 16
By the time the Sun sets, the waxing gibbous Moon is high in the south, approaching the pincers of Scorpius the Scorpion. Tomorrow, our satellite will pass close to the arachnid’s heart, but tonight Luna sits to the right of the red giant star.

Home in on the lunar northwest with your telescope to catch sunrise over the western rim of the Sea of Rains (Mare Imbrium). Use the map above to locate the small crater Delisle, which spans some 16 miles (25 km) and sits north of the slightly smaller crater Diophantus and northeast of the 19-mile-long (30 km) mountain ridge Mons Delisle.

Now, look just northwest of these craters. Do you see a shape that looks like a triangular rack of pool balls, just waiting for the break? This structure is in actuality a series of peaks left over after the huge impact that created Mare Imbrium; once lava welled up from below, the mountaintops were all that remained visible.

RELATED: 20 things to see on the Moon

Nearby, north of our pool balls, stands Mons Gruithuisen Gamma, a large lunar dome along Mare Imbrium’s edge. At this lunar phase, the region around the dome often reminds observers of an upturned bathtub or sink basin — what do you think?

Sunrise: 5:45 A.M.
Sunset: 8:27 P.M.
Moonrise: 4:24 P.M.
Moonset: 1:13 A.M.
Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous (76%)

Wednesday, July 17
The Moon passes 0.2° north of Antares at 4 P.M. EDT this afternoon; by evening, our satellite floats to the lower left of the bright star, above the curving tail of the Scorpion and to the right of the Teapot in Sagittarius.

Because the waxing gibbous Moon is so bright, let’s try to catch a little darkness on the other side of the sky. Turn and face north, where the W of Cassiopeia is now facing upright in the sky. Above Cassiopeia, the house-shaped constellation Cepheus is slowly rotating upside-down to stand on the star that marks the point of its “roof.”

Cepheus houses the Herschel’s Garnet Star, which is also cataloged as Mu (μ) Cephei. This 4th-magnitude gem lies on the opposite side of the constellation from its roof, just below the rough midpoint on a line connecting the two stars at the house’s base (Alpha [α] and Zeta [ζ] Cep). It lies about 5° southeast of Alpha Cep and will show up nicely in binoculars or any small scope.

Mu Cep is a ruby-red star that is also a variable; its brightness swings between magnitudes 3.4 and 5.1. The cycle lasts almost exactly two years (though the period itself is variable as well) and you’re in luck — it is currently at its brightest, shining around magnitude 3.4.

The Garnet Star’s eponymous color comes from its temperature — like Antares in Scorpius, Mu Cep is a cool red supergiant star.

Sunrise: 5:46 A.M.
Sunset: 8:26 P.M.
Moonrise: 5:31 P.M.
Moonset: 1:46 A.M.
Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous (84%)

Thursday, July 18
Asteroid 2 Pallas stands stationary against the background stars of Serpens at 5 P.M. EDT. For those wanting to spot the second-known asteroid in the main belt, you can find it high in the south after sunset, beneath the upturned U shape of Corona Borealis.

Pallas is now magnitude 9.8, requiring optical magnification to identify. A small or medium scope should do it; look about 3.7° south of magnitude 4.6 Delta (δ) Coronae Borealis, which lies in the eastern portion of the Northern Crown’s curve. Pallas is currently some 2.62 astronomical units from Earth — 1 astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-Sun distance, which puts Pallas roughly 243.5 million miles (392 million km) away.

Previously moving westward, or retrograde, against the background stars, Pallas will now begin to make a slow swing eastward toward Hercules, which it will enter in mid-August.

Sunrise: 5:47 A.M.
Sunset: 8:25 P.M.
Moonrise: 6:37 P.M.
Moonset: 2:27 A.M.
Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous (91%)

Friday, July 19
Saturn’s two-faced moon Iapetus is now brightening as it moves toward western elongation later in the month. One side of Iapetus is dark and the other is light; at its eastern elongation, that dark side faces us, dimming the moon to around 12th magnitude. At western elongation, the brighter side is turned earthward, so the moon shines nearly two magnitudes brighter.

Around 4 A.M. local daylight time, Saturn stands high in the south in the constellation Aquarius. At magnitude 0.8, it’s brighter than the Water-bearer’s stars, making it easy to identify. Zoom in on the ringed planet with a telescope and you’ll spot its brightest moon, 8th-magnitude Titan, almost 3′ to Saturn’s west. But Iapetus now lies a little over twice that, some 7.5′ west of the planet, nearing 10th magnitude. By the morning of the 27th, the date Iapetus reaches its western elongation, the moon will stand more than 9′ from the planet.

This morning you might also spot the 10th-magnitude moons Tethys, Rhea, and Dione, similarly lining up with their brethren on either side of Saturn. Tethys and Rhea lie east of Saturn, with the former closer to the planet. Dione is west of the planet, about one-third of the way from the tip of the rings to Titan’s position.

Sunrise: 5:48 A.M.
Sunset: 8:25 P.M.
Moonrise: 7:37 P.M.
Moonset: 3:21 A.M.
Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous (96%)

Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron.

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11/07/2024
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If there had been an astronaut aboard the historic first launch of Europe’s Ariane 6 launcher, this is what they would have seen: images and videos from key phases of the flight were captured by the YPSat payload, a project led and undertaken by ESA Young Professionals in their own time.

Attached to the launcher’s upper stage, YPSat served as a crucial witness throughout the test flight. The payload then transmitted its stored images and data back to Earth, providing invaluable insights into Ariane 6’s performance.

Key flight phases that were imaged include Ariane 6’s fairing separation, the deployment of its CubeSats and in-orbit views of Earth and space.

The compact payload combined optical cameras with an innovative quantum-based sensor to record variations in Earth’s magnetic field along the direction of flight as well as an amateur radio experiment allowing ham radio enthusiasts to get in touch with YPSat.

YPSat also included systems to wake it up before launch and transmit its data to waiting ground stations.

Most satellites only need to wake up once in orbit, but as YPSat recorded the separation of the fairing it needed the recorder needed to be switched on before, the novel vibration-sensing system worked perfectly and switched the device on moments after liftoff.

From dream to reality

The YPSat project represents the culmination of about two and a half years of dedication and hard work core team of about 30 Young Professionals from various ESA Establishments, Directorates and disciplines. Sacrificing their spare time, they shouldered the entire responsibility of designing, building and testing the payload before finally witnessing its successful launch.

Dietmar Pilz, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality comments: “The success of YPSat is a testament to the immense potential and talents we have within ESA. It paves the way for future generations to play a leading role in shaping Europe’s space endeavours.”

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