3394 - SPACE - Year 2021 astronomy discoveries? Astronomers have turned the Earth into a giant telescope to view powerful jets from a blackhole. Solar system surveys have revealed new moons and massive comets previously lurking undetected. The sun has also been a main attraction for research.
--------------------- 3394 - SPACE - Year 2021 astronomy discoveries?
- Two researchers unexpectedly discovered the largest-known comet to date. Graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli was looking through “Dark Energy Survey” data to find objects that live beyond Neptune's orbit when he noticed an object significantly farther from the sun than the objects he planned to study.
-
- He had actually detected a comet that is much larger than any of the ones known so far to science: It may be 10 times wider and 1,000 times more massive than a typical comet. This comet has not swung around the sun since the hominid ancestor Lucy walked on the Earth approximately 3 million years ago.
-
- Astronomers will only have to wait a decade to see this comet approach the sun. Comets come from very far away, originating from one of the outermost regions of the solar system known as the “Oort Cloud“. Comets journey through our cosmic neighborhood in long elliptical orbits and can take thousands of years to complete one trip around the sun.
-
- Scientists should be able to get a more accurate reading of Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein's size and composition when the comet makes its closest to Earth in the year 2031, although it will still be beyond Saturn's average orbit when it swings nearby.
-
- A previously-unknown moon has been detected around the largest planet in the solar system. Jupiter is a giant, so it gravitationally attracts many objects into its vicinity. Earth has one major moon, Mars has two: but Jupiter has at least 79 moons, and there may be dozens or hundreds more of them that astronomers have yet to identify.
-
- The latest discovery called “EJc0061‘, belongs to the Carme group of Jovian moons. They orbit in the opposite direction of Jupiter's rotation at an extreme tilt relative to Jupiter's orbital plane.
-
- NASA will return to Venus this decade. Venus is swathed in a thick atmosphere that is difficult for scientists to peer through. In 2020, researchers detected traces of phosphine in Venus' atmosphere. It is a possible biosignature gas.
-
- In early June 2021, NASA announced it will launch two missions to Venus by 2030. One mission, “DAVINCI+” (short for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging, Plus) will descend through the planet's atmosphere to learn about how it has changed over time.
-
- The other mission, “VERITAS” (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) will attempt to map the planet's terrain from orbit like never before.
-
- A runaway greenhouse effect took hold of Venus around 700 million years ago and now the planet's surface is hot enough to melt lead.
-
- The Sun was experiencing a quiet time in its roughly decade-long son-spot cycle, but it is now exiting that phase. The sun has had very little activity in recent years, but the star's surface is now erupting in powerful events that spew out charged particles towards Earth. In early November a series of solar outbursts triggered a large geomagnetic storm on our planet.
-
- This eruption is known as a “coronal mass ejection“. It's essentially a billion-ton cloud of solar material with magnetic fields, and when this bubble pops, it blasts a stream of energetic particles out into the solar system.
-
- If this material heads in the direction of Earth, it interacts with our planet's own magnetic field and causes disturbances. These can include ethereal displays of auroras near Earth's poles, but can also include satellite disruptions and energy losses in our long power lines..
-
- The James Webb Space Telescope separates from its Ariane 5 rocket with the bright blue Earth in the background after its launch on Dec. 25, 2021. The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is a project more than three decades in the making. Space telescopes take a long time to plan and assemble.
-
- Hubble orbits a few hundred miles from Earth's surface, Webb is heading to an observational perch located about a million miles from our planet. The telescope began its journey towards this spot, called the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), on Dec. 25, 2021 when an Ariane 5 rocket launched the precious payload from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
-
- The telescope will help astronomers answer questions about the evolution of the universe and provide a deeper understanding about the objects found in our very own solar system.
-
- In July 2021, the novel project behind the world's first photo of a blackhole published an image of a powerful jet blasting off from one of these supermassive objects. The “Event Horizon Telescope” (EHT) is a global collaboration of eight observatories that work together to create one Earth-sized telescope. The end result is a resolution that is 16 times sharper and an image that is 10 times more accurate than what was possible before.
-
- Scientists used these incredible abilities to observe a powerful jet being ejected by the supermassive blackhole at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy, one of the brightest objects in the night sky. The galaxy's blackhole is so large that it has the mass of 55 million suns.
-
- Just 1,500 light-years from Earth lies the closest-known blackhole to Earth, now called "The Unicorn." Tiny blackholes are hard to spot, but scientists managed to find this one when they noticed strange behavior from its companion star, a red giant. Researchers observed its light shifting in intensity, which suggested to them that another object was tugging on the star.
-
- This blackhole is super-lightweight at just three solar masses. Its location in the constellation Monoceros ("the unicorn").
-
- An object dropped into Earth's orbit like a second moon, and this year, it made its final close approach of our planet. It is classified as a "minimoon," or temporary satellite. But it's no stray space rock, the object, 2020 SO, is a leftover fragment of a 1960s rocket booster from the American Surveyor moon missions.
-
- On February 2, 2021, “”2020 SO” reached 58% of the way between Earth and the moon, roughly 140,000 miles from our planet. It was the minimoon's final approach, but not its closest trip to Earth. It achieved its shortest distance to our planet a few months prior, on December 1, 2020. It has since drifted off into space and away from Earth's orbit, never to return.
-
- This year, 2022, NASA's sun-kissing spacecraft swam within a structure that's only visible during total solar eclipses and was able to measure exactly where the star's "point of no return" is located.
-
- The “Parker Solar Probe” has been zooming through the inner solar system to make close approaches to the sun for the past three years, and it is designed to help scientists learn about what creates the “solar wind“, a sea of charged particles that flow out of the sun and can affect Earth in many ways.
-
- The spacecraft stepped into the sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, during its eight solar flyby. The April 28 maneuver supplied the data that confirmed the exact location of the Alfvén critical surface, the point where the solar wind flows away from the sun, never to return.
-
- The probe managed to get as low as 15 solar radii, or 8.1 million miles from the sun's surface. It was there that it passed through a huge structure called a “pseudo streamer“, which can be seen from Earth when the moon blocks the light from the sun's disk during a solar eclipse.
-
- Perseverance begins studying rocks on Mars. This year, 2021, marked the arrival of NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars. The mission has been working to find traces of ancient Martian life since it reached the Red Planet on February 18, 2021. Engineers have equipped Perseverance with powerful cameras to help the mission team decide what rocks are worth investigating.
-
- "Harbor Seal Rock,"is a curiously-shaped feature that was probably carved out by the Martian wind over many years. Perseverance has also obtained several rock samples this year, which will be collected by the space agency for analysis at some point in the future.
-
- Perseverance is taking its observations from the 28-mile-wide Jezero Crater, which was home to a river delta and a deep lake billions of years ago. Fascinating! Here we are exploring it after all those years.
-
January 4, 2022 SPACE - Year 2021 astronomy discoveries? 3386
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
--- to: ------ jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
--------------------- --- Wednesday, January 5, 2022 ---------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment