A spacecraft has finally gotten close enough to the sun to gather clues about some lingering questions. //

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s actually harder to reach the sun than it is to leave the solar system altogether. //

“To get to Mars, you only need to increase slightly your orbital speed. If you need to get to the sun, you basically have to completely slow down your current momentum,” //

No existing rocket technology is powerful enough to cancel out the Earth’s motion like that, so the Parker probe is getting an assist from other planets. The spacecraft has been flying way out to Venus and looping around, trimming its orbit each time to shed some of the Earth’s momentum and bring itself closer to the center of the solar system.

Starlink has had its fair share of critics in the last few months. The ambitious SpaceX project to launch up to 42,000 satellites and provide worldwide internet access has the International Astronomical Union, scientists, and stargazers nervous about

Universe in 40 jumps, powers of ten

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope photo reveals a cosmic kaleidoscope of a remote galaxy, which has been split into multiple images by an effect called gravitational lensing.

Gravitational lensing means that the foreground galaxy cluster is so massive that its gravity distorts the fabric of space-time, bending and magnifying the light from the more distant galaxy behind it. This “funhouse mirror” effect not only stretches the background galaxy image, but also creates multiple images of the same galaxy.

Scientists analyzing data from a defunct satellite say we should all consider that our universe might be round, rather than flat. The consequences, they explain in a new paper, could be crisis-inducing. //

The universe might come in one of three shapes: open, closed, or flat. Parallel lines in an open universe will always move farther apart; parallel lines in a closed universe will eventually meet (and single lines will eventually meet up with themselves); and parallel lines in a flat universe will stay parallel forever. //

Scientists already knew from Planck satellite data that mass in the universe was warping the the cosmic microwave background radiation, the farthest radiation our telescopes can see, more than the standard theory of cosmology predicted. Perhaps this is a statistical fluctuation or something wrong with the way scientists are interpreting the data—but it would be an incredibly unlikely statistical fluctuation, with less than 1 percent odds. Instead, the team led by Eleonora Di Valentino at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom posited that the observation could be explained simply by a closed universe. This change, however, would put plenty of other measurements out of agreement with Planck’s data. //

This new paper “would be a really big deal if true,” Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory told Gizmodo in an email. But he wasn’t completely swayed. “Overall, my view is that in order to convince me of something that is this surprising, one would have to present some very compelling evidence. At this time, the evidence that is available doesn’t reach this high standard.”

Others highlighted the fact that it may be too early to toss out what many scientists consider to be a core fact of the universe. “There are still things we don’t understand in the systematics,” meaning potential sources of error from the act of making the measurement, said Renée Hložek, professor at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. She told Gizmodo that physicists need to be much surer about whether the issue arises from systematic errors or not before she’ll be convinced. //

On the morning of September 1, 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington ascended into the private observatory attached to his country estate outside of London. After cranking open the dome’s shutter to reveal the clear blue sky, he pointed his brass telescope toward the sun and began to sketch a cluster of enormous dark spots that freckled its surface. Suddenly, Carrington spotted what he described as “two patches of intensely bright and white light” erupting from the sunspots. Five minutes later the fireballs vanished, but within hours their impact would be felt across the globe. //

That night, telegraph communications around the world began to fail; there were reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze. All over the planet, colorful auroras illuminated the nighttime skies, glowing so brightly that birds began to chirp and laborers started their daily chores, believing the sun had begun rising. Some thought the end of the world was at hand, but Carrington’s naked eyes had spotted the true cause for the bizarre happenings: a massive solar flare with the energy of 10 billion atomic bombs. The flare spewed electrified gas and subatomic particles toward Earth, and the resulting geomagnetic storm—dubbed the “Carrington Event”—was the largest on record to have struck the planet.

#Q:
Many photos of Milky-way show it in nice colors instead of just the black of sky and white of the stars. Is the key to having those colors in the capturing of the image or in the post processing, or both? Or am I just doing it in a wrong time of year when the visible part of Milky-way is simply not showing color? //

#A:
The vast majority of night sky photos have been boosted in post to achieve their brightness. This is more true for cameras with smaller sensors than for cameras with larger sensors, but in general, even if you shoot the night sky at ISO 3200, you are going to need to boost exposure to get one of those nice, bright single-frame Milky Way shots.

There are a few things you can do to increase the brightness of your night sky shots.

My wife is Irish, and in 2015 we bought a small old stone cottage a couple of miles from Baltimore in South West Cork, about as SW as you can get in Ireland. Walking back from the pub one November night, I was SHOCKED by the sheer blackness of the night sky and the dazzling array of stars. Constellations were not even recognizable, drowned out in the sea of stars. My interest in astronomy suddenly resurfaced.

Round 1 – a Horrid Mess

Fast-forward to a summer night a while later, once the cottage had been made habitable. Looking up, I was aware of a streak of pale cloud slightly spoiling the dark sky. Of course, this was the Milky Way, which I hadn’t seen for donkey’s years! Disappointment turned to awe. Out there, the Milky Way is easily visible to the naked eye even straight after leaving a bright room. I thought “I wonder if I can photograph that?”. Being a keen photographer, I reckoned I ‘knew a bit’ about photography – it turned out “you know nothing, Jon Snow”.

Nonetheless I quickly retrieved my camera, attached my fastest wide zoom lens, plonked it onto a tripod and pointed it up. Only then did I think: “Er, what settings to use?”. Obviously the widest aperture and its widest angle (24mm f/2.8) and ISO 3200 (because it seemed "about right"). I chose 30 seconds exposure, but was aware that stars might streak, as the earth rotates noticeably over even as little as a half-minute.

The result, from early August 2016, is here, my first Milky Way image, looking up SSW at around 1am.

click for bigger image

It’s a horrid mess of a picture. Yes, you can see the Milky Way, but that’s about it: out of focus, no other context, no colour, heavily streaked stars, noisy, boosted to buggery in Photoshop. Funnily enough, for a while I was quite impressed, though I didn’t really solicit opinions. If you've never photographed a night sky before, you too may be impressed, but this is really not very good.

Round 2 – 8.5/10 for Composition, 3/10 for Execution

Five months later, Christmas 2016, I had another go. It's obviously a slightly different shot, but it was taken from the same patio as above. My intention was to get the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy visible in a recognizably local setting.

This compendium is divided into four major segments, available as one unit or in parts:

Part 1: Fine-Tuning for Life in the Universe — lists 140 features of the cosmos as a whole (including the laws of physics) that must fall within certain narrow ranges to allow for the possibility of physical life's existence.

Part 2: Fine-Tuning for Intelligent Physical Life—describes 402 quantifiable characteristics of a planetary system and its galaxy that must fall within narrow ranges to allow for the possibility of advanced life's existence. This list includes comment on how a slight increase or decrease in the value of each characteristic would impact that possibility.

Part 3: Probability Estimates for Features Required by Various Life Forms—identifies 922 characteristics of a galaxy and of a planetary system physical life depends on and offers conservative estimates of the probability that any galaxy or planetary system would manifest such characteristics. This list is divided into three parts, based on differing requirements for various life-forms and their duration.

Precise facts and figures at work in the cosmos permit the existence of life
by Hugh Ross
Posted 8/24/19, 12:18 pm

You’ve may have heard that the materialist idea of everything arising from time plus chance is about as likely as a hurricane sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. I like the analogies Hugh Ross provides in The Creator and the Cosmos even better. He writes that the universe’s “fine-tuning is 10 to the 43rd times more exquisite than someone blindfolded, with just one try, randomly picking out a single marked proton from all the protons existing within the entire extent of the observable universe.” Or try this: “a billion pencils all simultaneously positioned upright on their sharpened points on a smooth glass surface with no surface supports.”

Ross’ appendix below, courtesy of Reasons to Believe Press, particularly impressed me. He shows how “more than a hundred different parameters for the universe must have values falling within narrowly defined ranges for physical life of any conceivable kind to exist.” The long list includes gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear forces; electron to proton mass ratios; initial uniformity of cosmic radiation; and on it goes in area after area.

—Marvin Olasky

A few years of this and we'll understand the afterlife of dead stars.

M87 EHT Black Hole with Spitzer I/R image

Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black hole. Giant of the Virgo galaxy cluster about 55 million light-years away, M87 is the large galaxy rendered in blue hues in this infrared image from the Spitzer Space telescope. Though M87 appears mostly featureless and cloud-like, the Spitzer image does record details of relativistic jets blasting from the galaxy's central region. Shown in the inset at top right, the jets themselves span thousands of light-years. The brighter jet seen on the right is approaching and close to our line of sight. Opposite, the shock created by the otherwise unseen receding jet lights up a fainter arc of material. Inset at bottom right, the historic black hole image is shown in context, at the center of giant galaxy and relativistic jets. Completely unresolved in the Spitzer image, the supermassive black hole surrounded by infalling material is the source of the enormous energy driving the relativistic jets from the center of active galaxy M87.

Event Horizon Telescope, M87

What does a black hole look like? To find out, radio telescopes from around the Earth coordinated observations of black holes with the largest known event horizons on the sky. Alone, black holes are just black, but these monster attractors are known to be surrounded by glowing gas. The first image was released yesterday and resolved the area around the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 on a scale below that expected for its event horizon. Pictured, the dark central region is not the event horizon, but rather the black hole's shadow -- the central region of emitting gas darkened by the central black hole's gravity. The size and shape of the shadow is determined by bright gas near the event horizon, by strong gravitational lensing deflections, and by the black hole's spin. In resolving this black hole's shadow, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) bolstered evidence that Einstein's gravity works even in extreme regions, and gave clear evidence that M87 has a central spinning black hole of about 6 billion solar masses. The EHT is not done -- future observations will be geared toward even higher resolution, better tracking of variability, and exploring the immediate vicinity of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.

It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.

Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

"What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said.

"It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."

The image shows an intensely bright "ring of fire", as Prof Falcke describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole. The light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined - which is why it can be seen at such distance from Earth.

The edge of the dark circle at the centre is the point at which the gas enters the black hole, which is an object that has such a large gravitational pull, not even light can escape.

The image matches what theoretical physicists and indeed, Hollywood directors, imagined black holes would look like, according to Dr Ziri Younsi, of University College London - who is part of the collaboration.

"Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence," he said.

"It is remarkable that the image we observe is so similar to that which we obtain from our theoretical calculations. So far, it looks like Einstein is correct once again."

Prof Falcke had the idea for the project when he was a PhD student in 1993. At the time, no-one thought it was possible. But he was the first to realise that a certain type of radio emission would be generated close to and all around the black hole, which would be powerful enough to be detected by telescopes on Earth.

He also recalled reading a scientific paper from 1973 that suggested that because of their enormous gravity, black holes appear 2.5 times larger than they actually are.
These two previously unknown factors suddenly made the seemingly impossible, possible. After arguing his case for 20 years, Prof Falcke persuaded the European Research Council to fund the project. The National Science Foundation and agencies in East Asia then joined in to bankroll the project to the tune of more than £40m. No single telescope is powerful enough to image the black hole. So, in the biggest experiment of its kind, Prof Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, led a project to set up a network of eight linked telescopes. Together, they form the Event Horizon Telescope and can be thought of as a planet-sized array of dishes.

A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards M87 and scanned its heart over a period of 10 days.

The information they gathered was too much to be sent across the internet. Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to a central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to assemble the information. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as "an extraordinary scientific feat".

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," he said.

Suspended from the ceiling of the living room of a beautiful canal house in Franeker, is the oldest still working planetarium in the world. This accurately moving model of the solar system was built between 1774 and 1781 by the Frisian wool comber, Eise Eisinga.

Dutch amateur astronomer Eise Eisinga might have left school at 12 years old, but he built an inch-perfect model of the solar system in his living room.

here was a beat of silence as the room’s atmosphere shifted from inward reflection to jittery disbelief. “How is that even possible?” said one visitor, waving a pointed finger at the living-room ceiling. “Is it still accurate?” asked another. “Why have I never heard of this before?” came the outburst from her companion. Craning my neck, I too could hardly believe it.

On the timber roof above our heads was a scale model of the universe, painted in sparkling gold and shimmering royal blue. There was the Earth, a golden orb dangling by a near-invisible, hand-wound wire. Next to it, the sun, presented as a flaming star, glinting like a Christmas bauble. Then Mercury, Venus, Mars, and their moons in succession, hung from a series of elliptical curves sawn into the ceiling. All were gilded on one side to represent the sun’s illumination, while beyond, on the outer rim, were the most-outlying of the planets, Jupiter and Saturn. Lunar dials, used to derive the position of the zodiac, completed the equation.
The medieval science behind the Royal Eise Eisinga Planetarium is staggering, no matter how one views it.

It's creative, beautiful, and mind-blowing.