compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan
-NYT
NASA Mission Springs a Small Leak After Touching an Asteroid The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft collected rock and dirt samples from Bennu, but it appears to be losing some of what it grabbed. NASA’s effort to grab a piece of an asteroid on Tuesday may have worked a little too well. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REX, grabbed so much rock and dirt that some of the material is now leaking back into space….more
-NYT
A Black Hole’s Lunch: Stellar Spaghetti Astronomers call it “spaghettification,” and it’s not a pretty idea: It’s what happens when you venture too close to a black hole and fall in. Tidal forces stretch you and break you like a noodle, then your shreds circle the black hole until they collide and knock each other in….more
-BBC
Sir Roger Penrose: The man who proved black holes weren’t ‘impossible’ If you ever struggled with maths at school, you were in good company. Sir Roger Penrose, who on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize for Physics, would also scratch his head in class. “I was always very slow. I was good at maths, yes, but I didn’t necessarily do very well in my tests,” the Colchester-born (1931) laureate recalled….more
-BBC
Planet Mars is at its ‘biggest and brightest’ Mars is at its biggest and brightest right now as the Red Planet lines up with Earth on the same side of the Sun. Every 26 months, the pair take up this arrangement, moving close together, before then diverging again on their separate orbits around our star…more
-BBC
Black hole breakthroughs win Nobel physics prize Three scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for work to understand black holes. Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were announced as this year’s winners at a news conference in Stockholm. David Haviland, chair of the physics prize committee, said this year’s award “celebrates one of the most exotic objects in the Universe”…more
-NYT
At the Edge of Time, a Litter of Galactic Puppies Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had discovered a giant black hole surrounded by a litter of young protogalaxies that date to the early universe — the beginning of time. The black hole, which powers a quasar known as SDSS J1030+0524, weighed in at a billion solar masses when the universe was only 900 million years old. It and its brood, the astronomers said…more
-NASA
Life on Earth: Why we may have the moon’s now defunct magnetic field to thank for it The habitability of a planet depends on many factors. One is the existence of a strong and long-lived magnetic field. These fields are generated thousands of kilometres below the planet’s surface in its liquid core and extend far into space – shielding the atmosphere from harmful solar radiation….more
-ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
Volcanoes fuel gaseous atmosphere on Jupiter’s moon Io What is creating the bubbling, gaseous atmosphere on Jupiter’s moon Io? Scientists think they finally have the answer: volcanoes. Io, the solar system’s most volcanically active world, is one of four Galilean moons — the four largest moons of Jupiter, which were discovered by Galileo in the 17th century — and one of 79 total known satellites around the planet…more
-Rodriguez et al
The first habitable-zone, Earth-sized planet discovered with exoplanet survey spacecraft TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was launched in 2018 with the goal of discovering small planets around the Sun’s nearest neighbors, stars bright enough to allow for follow-up characterizations of their planets’ masses and atmospheres. TESS has so far discovered seventeen small planets around eleven nearby stars that are M dwarfs….more
Water On The Moon Confirmed, And There May Be Much More Than We Thought NASA’s intriguing announcement last week that it would reveal an “exciting discovery about the Moon” led to a lot of speculation on what this big discovery might be. We can now all share in the excitement of the space agency: the Moon appears to have a lot of water, and this could make future exploration of our natural satellite much easier…more
-NASA
Water on the Moon could sustain a lunar base Having dropped tantalising hints days ago about an “exciting new discovery about the Moon“, the US space agency has revealed conclusive evidence of water on our only natural satellite. This “unambiguous detection of molecular water” will boost Nasa’s hopes of establishing a lunar base. The aim is to sustain that base by tapping into the Moon’s natural resources…more
-NASA
American astronaut casts vote in space for US elections Nasa astronaut Kate Rubins voted from the International Space Station last week for the US presidential elections. Rubins, the only American astronaut currently in space, is on a 6-month-long mission. Read on to know how an astronaut votes from space…more
Featured Speaker: Dr. Alexander R. Jones of NYU will give a talk on The Antikythera Mechanism and Ancient Greek Astronomy. The Antikythera Mechanism was a complex geared “tabletop” instrument that was lost in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera about 60 BC, and recovered in corroded fragments in 1901. It was recognized almost at once as having something to do with astronomy. After three major campaigns of research since 1958, we now know a great deal about its functions and can describe it as a device for displaying coordinated cycles of time and astronomical phenomena simulated at an accelerated rate of time. This talk will focus on how the Mechanism fits within and expands what we know about ancient Greek astronomy.
Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton 