Pic of the Week: Dead Comet From Halloween Past

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Asteroid 2015 TB145 as captured by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on October 30, 2015. (NAIC-Arecibo/NSF)

This spooky image of a dead comet was captured 10 years ago, but it still serves this purpose this time of year. It passed the Earth on Halloween evening that year at a distance of about 302,000 miles.

Here is more from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

Scientists observing asteroid 2015 TB145 with NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun.

The belated comet has also been observed by optical and radar observatories around the world, providing even more data, including our first close-up views of its surface…

The first radar images of the dead comet were generated by the National Science Foundation’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The radar images from Arecibo indicate the object is spherical in shape and approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter and completes a rotation about once every five hours.

“The IRTF data may indicate that the object might be a dead comet, but in the Arecibo images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby,” said Kelly Fast, IRTF program scientist at NASA Headquarters and acting program manager for NASA’s NEO Observations Program.

Pic of the Week: The Sculptor Galaxy

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Sculptor Galaxy. (ESO/VLT)

This week’s image is from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile. It shows the Sculptor Galaxy, which is about 11 million light-years away.

Here is a description of what you are seeing:

This image shows a detailed, thousand-colour image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Regions of pink light are spread throughout this whole galactic snapshot, which come from ionised hydrogen in star-forming regions. These areas have been overlaid on a map of already formed stars in Sculptor to create the mix of pinks and blues seen here...

To create this map of the Sculptor Galaxy, which is 11 million light-years away and is also known as NGC 253, the researchers observed it for over 50 hours with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s VLT. The team had to stitch together over 100 exposures to cover an area of the galaxy about 65 000 light-years wide.

According to co-author Kathryn Kreckel from Heidelberg University, Germany, this makes the map a potent tool: “We can zoom in to study individual regions where stars form at nearly the scale of individual stars, but we can also zoom out to study the galaxy as a whole.”

Russia Has One Less Space Asset

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Earlier photo of the RT-70 radio telescope. (PickPic)

The Urania newspaper Euromaiden Press recently noted the success of its navy in taking out Russian assets, including:

  • the Utios-T radar system;
  • the RT-70 radio telescope;
  • the GLONASS satellite navigation system in its dome;
  • the coastal radar station MR-10M1 “Mys” M1; and
  • the 96L6-AP radar of the S-400 missile system.

One of those items is not like the others, that being the Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope.

This Soviet-era radio telescope was one of the largest in the world, assisted with the study of Mars and Venus, and was used for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, also known as METI.

Now it is rubble due to the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia (the destroyed radio telescope is located in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory).

We saw World War II introduce the power of rocket technology that sent us around the solar system, and now we are watching another war show how all that we have built can quickly crumble.

Space Stories: New Canadian Radio Telescope, Our Empty Corner of the Universe, and Fortunate Collisions with Earth

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Image (Credit): The Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector. (National Research Council of Canada)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—McGill University: “CHORD Will Be a Huge Leap Forward for Canadian Radio Astronomy“

Construction is underway of CHORD, the most ambitious radio telescope project ever built on Canadian soil. Short for the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector, CHORD will give astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to explore some of the most exciting and mysterious questions in astrophysics and cosmology, from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and dark energy to the measurements of fundamental particles, and beyond.

—BBC Sky at Night Magazine: “Earth Could Be Sitting in the Centre of a Giant Cosmic Void, According to Astronomers“

It’s human to feel alarmed by the sheer emptiness of space. Now, astronomers from the University of Portsmouth in the UK suggest this unsettling vastness may be worse than we thought. They reckon Earth, our entire Solar System and even our entire Milky Way sits inside a mysterious giant hole. This void, they believe, may cause the cosmos to expand more quickly in our local environment than in other parts of the Universe.

—University of Bern: “No Collision, No Life: Earth Probably Needed Supplies from Space“

After the formation of the Solar System, it took a maximum of three million years for the chemical composition of the Earth’s precursor to be completed. This is shown by a new study by the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern. At this time, however, there were hardly any elements necessary for life such as water or carbon compounds on the young planet. Only a later planetary collision probably brought water to Earth, paving the way for life.

A Day in Astronomy: The Discovery of Phobos

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Image (Credit): Mar’s moon Phobos. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona)

On this day in 1877, American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the Martian moon Phobos while at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. He had discovered Mar’s other moon Deimos six days earlier.

Oddly enough, the idea of two moons orbiting Mars was first proposed in 1726 by Jonathan Swift in his tale Gulliver’s Travels. In the book, astronomers on the flying island of Laputia were noted to have

… discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half.

All Professor Hall had to do was confirm the work of the Laputian astronomers.