Watch: First Ever 360 Video of Earth From ISS

                                                           

In a new episode of RT’s ground-breaking 360° video documentary from the International Space Station, cosmonaut Andrey Borisenko demonstrates the first-ever panoramic view of Earth from the Cupola module which is attached on the Earth-facing side of the ISS.

The Cupola module was completed in 2010. From here the crew can best operate the robotic arm that is visible directly from it, together with the Russian segment of the station [often with a Soyuz craft attached] and the US and Japanese labs.

The view from the Cupola leaves the astronauts totally spellbound, as Borisenko said that once he is in the Cupola, he keeps staring back at Earth, marveling at the view.

He recently arrived at the station for his second six-month shift. “Though actually, there isn’t really that much free time here,” the astronaut added.

In the video, the astronaut shows the audience the inside of Cupola and the windows which show the magnificent view of Earth to the astronauts.

RT will be regularly uploading videos from the show with Andrey Borisenko as host and tour guide.

The special project Space 360 is available in six languages [Russian, English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic] as well as on a special RT360 mobile app.

With many thanks to Sputnik News

Supermoon To pass by Earth on 14 November

                                                        

THE last time a celestial event of this magnitude happened the Cold War was just beginning to warm up.

When it happens again next week, those of a superstitious nature will be hoping it doesn’t mark the beginning of another unsettling era.

So-called supermoons are the stuff of legend have been linked to everything from causing earthquakes to political catastrophe.

On Monday 14 November, the largest supermoon for almost 70 years will be visible in the night sky.

It’s so rare that more than 60,000 people in Sydney have indicated they will be heading down to the city’s beaches to watch the supermoon rise above the ocean.

Professor Miroslav Filipovic, an astronomer at Western Sydney University, told news.com.au supermoons were actually quite regular occurrences, but the coming one was something special.

“Supermoon is not actually not a scientific term, it’s been used by astrologers and we astronomers aren’t exactly a big fan of these guys,” Prof Filipovic said.

“In astronomy the word is ‘perigee’ and it means the closest point the moon is to Earth.”
Roughly every four weeks the moon circles the Earth. However, the orbit is not circular at all, but elliptical so once a month the moon will be at its closest point to Earth and once a month at its farthest.

Rarely, these rotations fling the satellite so close to the Earth it produces a supermoon. A particularly distant orbit is, naturally, a “micro moon”.

Three supermoons are due to occur in 2016. One happened last month and another is due in December.

But what makes Monday’s supermoon so special is it will be a full moon plus it will do its closest fly-by since 1948.

A super-dooper-moon, if you like.

What’s more, it won’t come as close again until 2034. In astronomical terms, the moon will get so close to the Earth it’s basically an interplanetary air kiss.

“During a micro moon, the moon is 400,000km from the earth but during this supermoon it will be only 360,000km away,” said Mr Filipovic.

“That’s 12 to 14 per cent closer or 40,000km, so that’s not a small distance.
“It will not be difficult to see with the naked eye, it will be both bigger and brighter,” he said.

Western Sydney University is one of the only Australian campuses to house its own observatory, the doors of which will be flung open for amateur star gazers to grab a look at the lunar landscape.

Meanwhile, supermoon parties are being held across Australia, including at Sydney’s Bronte Beach organised by Balmain schoolteacher and children’s author Gavin McCormack.

Currently some 50,000 people have decided to watch the supermoon rise out of the Pacific at Mr MCormack’s shindig, which he admitted to news.com.au he was a little surprised by.
“I invited a few friends around to watch the super moon and suddenly there’s 50,000 people going, it’s insane.”

The author of Are These Your Glasses?, the story of a bullied penguin, said the idea for the event came when he was researching a new kids book about a cow that becomes an astronaut and heads to the moon.

Now’s he’s had frantic calls from Bronte residents concerned at the dusk deluge of moon gazers, “but the council said it’s all good”.

Other events included a moon walk from Bondi Beach along the costal cliffs.

Mr McCormack said he remembered gathering around the TV to watch the moon landings and it was an “amazing spectacle”.

His lessons that feature the moon and space are the most popular with students.

“We’re studying space in my class at the moment and I think it’s the unknown, the intangible. When it dawns on them at that every star is a sun and planets go around the sun it’s mind boggling, they’re gripped.”

Dr Michael Brown, an astronomer at Monash University and a member of the Astronomical Society of Australia, said without professional photographic equipment, the best way to appreciate the supermoon was when it was rising and it could be compared to other objects.

“When the moon is close to the horizon and you can see it next to trees it does look bigger than when it’s up in the sky in isolation.”

Monday’s moonrise in Sydney will be at 7.07pm and 7.40pm in Melbourne. In Brisbane the moon will rise at 5.51pm and at 6.33pm in Perth. The supermoon should be visible from anywhere in Australia, cloud permitting.

“It’s nice to appreciate how the size of the moon — It’s like its own planet. The dark patches are basalt plains and if you have a telescope you can see the larger craters.”

Dr Brown said a mythology had grown up about the supposed powers of the moon, particularly the supermoon.

“There’s a long history of people claiming earthquakes follow the alignment of the planets and the position of the moon.

“My favourite is an author from New Zealand who talks about the supermoon’s power to cause earthquakes but he also wrote a book on cat palmistry so it’s pretty weird,” said Dr Brown.

However, Prof Filipovic said when the last moon of this size swept by the Earth — before the term supermoon had even been coined — its effect certainly had tongues wagging.

“I remember the stories from 1948, there were a number of events. It was the first fight between the Russians and American in the United Nations. It was a crazy year 1948, the beginning of the cold war.”

Nevertheless, neither said that had time for such tall tales.

“When anyone does statistical analysis (on natural disasters and the moon’s passing) there’s no correlation at all,” said Dr Brown.

That’s not to say the supermoon won’t have an effect, he said. The closeness of the satellite and the alignment of the Sun will lead to higher Spring perigean tides as the sea is pulled upwards towards the moon.

The coming of the supermoon would be a good opportunity for those intrigued by celestial beings to come face-to-face with a lunar rarity, said Dr Brown.

But for diehard astronomers, there were more interesting events to study, he said.

“We get excited about supernovas, comets and gravitational waves. Supermoons are nice but they don’t get us leaping out of bed.

“For us, they’re not particularly super.”

By Benedict Brook
With many thanks to News.Com

Bye, Bye Rosetta — We’ll Miss You!

                                                                    

                                                             

Rosetta awoke from a decade of deep-space hibernation in January 2014 and immediately got to work photographing, measuring and sampling comet 67P/C-G. On September 30 it will sleep again but this time for eternity. Mission controllers will direct the probe to impact the comet’s dusty-icy nucleus within 20 minutes of 10:40 Greenwich Time (6:40 a.m. EDT) that Friday morning. The high-resolution OSIRIS camera will be snapping pictures on the way down, but once impact occurs, it’s game over, lights out. Rosetta will power down and go silent.

Nearly three years have passed since Rosetta opened its eyes on 67P, this curious, bi-lobed rubber duck of a comet just 2.5 miles (4 km) across with landscapes ranging from dust dunes to craggy peaks to enigmatic ‘goosebumps’. The mission was the first to orbit a comet and dispatch a probe, Philae, to its surface. I think it’s safe to say we learned more about what makes comets tick during Rosetta’s sojourn than in any previous mission.

So why end it? One of the big reasons is power. As Rosetta races farther and farther from the Sun, less sunlight falls on its pair of 16-meter-long solar arrays. At mid-month, the probe was over 348 million miles (560 million km) from the Sun and 433 million miles (697 million km) from Earth or nearly as far as Jupiter. With Sun-to-Rosetta mileage increasing nearly 620,000 miles (1 million km) a day, weakening sunlight can’t provide the power needed to keep the instruments running.

Rosetta’s also showing signs of age after having been in the harsh environment of interplanetary space for more than 12 years, two of them next door to a dust-spitting comet. Both factors contributed to the decision to end the mission rather than put the probe back into an even longer hibernation until the comet’s next perihelion many years away.

Since August 9, Rosetta has been swinging past the comet in a series of ever-tightening loops, providing excellent opportunities for close-up science observations. On September 5, Rosetta swooped within 1.2 miles (1.9 km) of 67P/C-G’s surface. It was hoped the spacecraft would descend as low as a kilometer during one of the later orbits as scientists worked to glean as much as possible before the show ends.

The final of 15 close flyovers will be completed today (Sept. 24) after which Rosetta will be maneuvered from its current elliptical orbit onto a trajectory that will eventually take it down to the comet’s surface on Sept. 30.

The beginning of the end unfolds on the evening of the 29th when Rosetta spends 14 hours free-falling slowly towards the comet from an altitude of 12.4 miles (20 km) — about 4 miles higher than a typical commercial jet — all the while collecting measurements and photos that will be returned to Earth before impact. The last eye-popping images will be taken from a distance of just tens to a hundred meters away.

The landing will be a soft one, with the spacecraft touching down at walking speed. Like Philae before it, it will probably bounce around before settling into place. Mission control expects parts of the probe to break upon impact.

Taking into account the additional 40 minute signal travel time between Rosetta and Earth on the 30th, confirmation of impact is expected at ESA’s mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, within 20 minutes of 11:20 GMT (7:20 a.m. EDT). The times will be updated as the trajectory is refined. You can watch live coverage of Rosetta’s final hours on ESA TV .

“It’s hard to believe that Rosetta’s incredible 12.5 year odyssey is almost over, and we’re planning the final set of science operations, but we are certainly looking forward to focusing on analyzing the reams of data for many decades to come,” said Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.

Plans call for the spacecraft to impact the comet somewhere within an ellipse about 1,300 x 2,000 feet (600 x 400 meters) long on 67P’s smaller lobe in the region known as Ma’at. It’s home to several active pits more than 328 feet (100 meters) in diameter and 160-200 feet (50-60 meters) deep, where a number of the comet’s dust jets originate. The walls of the pits are lined with fascinating meter-sized lumpy structures called ‘goosebumps’, which scientists believe could be early ‘cometesimals’, the icy snowballs that stuck together to create the comet in the early days of our Solar System’s formation.

During free-fall, the spacecraft will target a point adjacent to a 425-foot (130 m) wide, well-defined pit that the mission team has informally named Deir el-Medina, after a structure with a similar appearance in an ancient Egyptian town of the same name. High resolution images should give us a spectacular view of these enigmatic bumps.

While we hate to see Rosetta’s mission end, it’s been a blast going for a 2-year-plus comet ride-along.

By Bob King

With many thanks to Universe Today

Galaxy Torn Apart By Rival Black Holes

                                                               

Every kid knows that stars twinkle. Now scientists who have ­discovered an entire galaxy flickering say they could be witnessing the muzzle flashes of two supermassive black holes at war. 

An Australian-led study has found that the galaxy Markarian 1018, which astronomers were forced to reclassify when it suddenly brightened in the 1980s, has darkened again. While space ­gazers have detected other galaxies changing intensity, few have done so twice or so ­dramatically.

The team says the huge black hole at the centre of the galaxy, more than a million times as massive as our sun, could be ­running out of stars and gas to feed on. But University of Sydney PhD student Rebecca McElroy, who discovered the latest change, said the data suggested something else was afoot. One possib­ility is another black hole has crashed the feast, disrupting the fuel supply and throwing the entire galaxy into cosmic mayhem.

Astronomers believe that within the last billion years — which is recent, in astronomical terms — Mrk 1018 merged with a neighbouring galaxy.

“When galaxies get close to one another they begin to orbit together and eventually coal­esce,” Ms McElroy said. “Most galaxies have supermassive black holes, and if you throw two galaxies at each other there are going to be two black holes that will eventually sink to the centre.”

By John Ross
With many thanks to The Australian

Jupiter Photos: 'Like Nothing We Have Seen Or Imagined Before'

                                                                      

                                                                         
Highly anticipated data from Juno's first flyby of Jupiter has arrived and the data is shattering expectations.

After careening through space for five years, NASA's Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter on July 4 of this year. With all systems go, the orbiter completed its first of 36 orbital flybys on Aug. 27. The craft's first six-hour-long sweep from Jupiter's north pole to south pole has yielded some startling results, including storms "unlike anything previously seen on any of our solar system’s gas-giant planets," a peculiar hexagon at the north pole, the first-ever glimpse of the planet's southern aurora, and "ghostly-sounding transmissions emanating from above the planet."

"First glimpse of Jupiter's north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in a NASA press release. "It's bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to – this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We're seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features."

Scientists are particularly intrigued by the appearance of a hexagon on the north pole. NASA's Voyager and Cassini missions have spotted a similar hexagonal cloud pattern at Saturn’s north pole, but nothing quite like it had every been spotted on any other world, Space.com reported in 2015. 

Saturn's hexagon turned out to be 60-mile-wide churning storm that is hemmed in by winds below the cloud level. It will be a while yet before scientists are able to determine what is going on inside Jupiter’s hexagon.

The first-ever view of Jupiter's southern aurora comes courtesy of Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), supplied by the Italian Space Agency. JIRAM offers infrared views that reveal temperature differentials throughout the planet.

"JIRAM is getting under Jupiter's skin, giving us our first infrared close-ups of the planet," said Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator from Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome, in the release. "These first infrared views of Jupiter's north and south poles are revealing warm and hot spots that have never been seen before. And while we knew that the first-ever infrared views of Jupiter's south pole could reveal
the planet's southern aurora, we were amazed to see it for the first time. No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora. 

Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well-structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora's morphology and dynamics."
The capture of eerie radio transmissions may be the least surprising finding, as scientists have known about them since the 1950s, but the dataset collected by the Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (Waves) is sure to enchant astronomy hobbyists.

"Jupiter is talking to us in a way only gas-giant worlds can," said Bill Kurth, co-investigator for the Waves instrument from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. "Waves detected the signature emissions of the energetic particles that generate the massive auroras which encircle Jupiter’s north pole. These emissions are the strongest in the solar system. Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them."

With nearly three dozen more flybys to go, scientists are anticipating a great deal more of Juno's bounty in the next year as the craft sends more data to Earth.

By Noelle Swan
With many thanks to CSM

Elon Musk's SpaceX Lands Another Rocket On A Drone Ship In The Atlantic

                                                                                

                                                                       

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk , has landed another rocket on its drone ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. 

The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the early hours of Sunday morning, lifting a Japanese communications satellite called JCSAT-16 into geostationary orbit.

Around nine minutes later, after depositing the satellite, the Falcon 9 became the sixth rocket to land safely on SpaceX's converted barge in the Atlantic. 

The landing is significant because it means SpaceX has now landed more rockets than it has crashed.

Overall the company has attempted to land 11 rockets, with five of them failing.
Prior to the launch, SpaceX had warned that this landing would be difficult, because JCSAT-16 had to be carried into a highly elliptical orbit some 22,300 miles above the Earth's equator.

"The first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging," it said.

While safely landing rockets is an important step in the development of space travel, SpaceX is yet to attempt reusing one of these rockets.
However, this may not be far off, as Elon Musk said in June that one of the Falcon 9s would be reused for the first time in "September/October".

Musk has previously expressed his desire for SpaceX to be the first private company to land on Mars - with plans to to send his Dragon spacecraft to the Red Planet by 2018. 

He has also said that reusable rockets could eventually make it possible for humans to colonise Mars , and has suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on the planet , to heat up the atmosphere and make is more suitable for human habitation. 

"I think it really quite dramatically improves my confidence that a city on Mars is possible," he said, following the first successful Falcon 9 landing. "That's what all this is about."

SpaceX is not the only company pursuing reusable rocket technology. Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, launched and landed a reusable rocket booster for the third time in April. 

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket launched into suborbital space from the company's West Texas test site, then descended gracefully back to Earth and landed vertically - on the same launchpad it had lifted off from only minutes earlier.

As well as space tourism, suborbital spaceflight opens the door to a range of scientific research and technological development - from biotech and materials science to fluid physics and engineering.

By Sophie Curtis
With many thanks to the Mirror UK

Jupiter’s Spot Gives It A Hot Flush

                                                                    

It is the biggest storm in the solar system. Now scientists have found it acts as an underfoot heater for a mysterious hotspot high above our sun’s biggest planet.

US astronomers have discovered that Jupiter’s “great red spot”, a swirling morass of shifting colours up to three times as wide as Earth, is teleporting heat to the sparse air 800km above it.

The discovery, reported this morning in the journal Nature, explains why Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is ferociously hot despite being so far from the sun. The findings suggest a previously unknown form of energy transmission may be lighting up some of the coldest places in the cosmos.

Scientists have long wondered why the upper atmospheres of the gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — are hundreds of degrees hotter than models say they should be. Lead author James O’Donoghue, of Boston University, told The Australian that temperatures above Jupiter exceeded 600C — roughly on par with Earth’s outer atmosphere, even though Jupiter is about five times as far from the sun and receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight.

The mystery, which astronomers have termed the “energy crisis”, has baffled them for more than 40 years. The Boston team tackled it by sampling temperatures in different zones of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, compiling nine hours of infra-red readings from a telescope on a Hawaiian mountain.

“We could see almost immediately that our maximum temperatures at high altitudes were above the great red spot,” Dr O’Donoghue said.

Discovered in the 17th century, the spot is a massive hurricane thought to have been raging for more than 300 years. It spins at up to 360kmh, with no land to stop it, although its size and colour have varied over the centuries.

The team believes sound waves above the giant storm are radiating upwards and heating the atmosphere far above. A similar phenomenon has been observed above thunderstorms in the Andes Mountains, it says.

Dr O’Donoghue said the acoustic waves appeared to be teaming up with “gravity waves” in a combination never previously observed.

 Gravity waves, which are distinct from Einstein’s gravitational waves, are oscillations caused by gravity’s effects in atmospheres and oceans.
He said the densities of the upper atmospheres of any planet were incredibly low, making very high temperatures “easily achievable”. “You wouldn’t burn your hand in these atmospheres because not enough gas would be in contact with you,” he noted.

By John Ross
With many thanks to The Australian

Michael Goh: Communing With The Milky Way

                                                                      

By day, Michael Goh is a bank manager who dispenses loans and advice to business clients of Bankwest. Come sunset, his head's turned to the heavens. Here he is on a sand dune at Nambung National Park, a three-hour drive north of his home in Perth, looking up towards the centre of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. "It's my version of a selfie," laughs the 45-year-old, a father of two teenage girls. 

Amazing to think those photons of light from the galactic centre spent 25,000 years streaking across interstellar space at 300,000km per second before smacking into his camera's sensor during this 25-second exposure. 

Goh is a first-generation Aussie - his Malaysian parents migrated in the '60s to escape ethnic strife in their homeland - and he was a science fiction fan from a young age, growing up with Star Wars and Star Trek. These days, it's science fact that tickles his imagination. For the past six years he's been photographing the night sky.

                                                                  

It's a hobby that expands his horizons: one of his shots recently won a big award and the prize was a visit this month to Chile for a tour of the VLT, the European Southern Observatory's flagship facility. (VLT, btw, stands for Very Large Telescope; lame name or what?) At a spot like Nambung National Park, far from urban light pollution, Goh can see several thousand stars with the naked eye on a clear winter's night, but that's only a tiny fraction of the 100 billion or so stars in the Milky Way. 

And the Milky Way itself is only one of at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's a "humbling and awe-inspiring" thing to contemplate, Goh says; it puts all the problems of the Earth - its wars and woes, its never-ending political crises - into a kind of perspective. 


Let's give the last word to Monty Python's Galaxy Song, sung by that great pub philosopher Eric Idle: So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure / How amazingly unlikely is your birth / And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space /'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

                                                                   

By Ross Bilton
With many thanks to The Australian

Juno Set For Date With Jupiter After Five Years And 2.8bn Km

                                                                  

                                                                      

A solar-powered spacecraft is spinning towards ­Jupiter for the closest encounter with the biggest planet in our solar system.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is ­expected to fire its main rocket ­engine at 1.18pm today (AEST) to slow itself down from a speed of 250,000km/h and slip into orbit around Jupiter.
With Juno on autopilot, the delicately choreographed move comes without any help from ground controllers.

Juno is travelling through a hostile radiation environment, “but it should be able to withstand it”, said Kenny Starnes, program manager for Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft.

Juno’s camera and other ­instruments were switched off for the arrival so there won’t be any pictures at the moment the spacecraft reaches its destination.

Scientists have promised close-up views of Jupiter when Juno skims the cloud tops during the 20-month, $US1.1 billion ($1.5bn) mission. The fifth rock from the sun and the heftiest planet in the solar ­system, Jupiter is what’s known as a gas giant — a ball of hydrogen and helium — unlike rocky Earth and Mars.

With its billowy clouds and colourful stripes, Jupiter is an extreme world that likely formed first, shortly after the sun. Unlocking its history may hold clues to understanding how Earth and the rest of the solar system developed.

Named after Jupiter’s cloud-piercing wife, Juno is only the second mission designed to spend time at Jupiter.

Galileo, launched in 1989, circled Jupiter for 14 years, beaming back splendid views of the planet and its numerous moons. It uncovered signs of an ocean beneath the icy surface of Europa, considered a top target in the search for life outside Earth.

Juno’s mission is to peer through Jupiter’s cloud-socked ­atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. Among the lingering questions: How much water exists? Is there a solid core? Why are Jupiter’s southern and northern lights the brightest in the solar system?

There’s also the mystery of its Great Red Spot. Recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the centuries-old monster storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere is shrinking.

The trek to Jupiter, spanning nearly five years and 2.8 billion kilometres, took Juno on a tour of the inner solar system followed by a swing past Earth that catapulted it beyond the asteroid belt ­between Mars and Jupiter.

Along the way, Juno became the first spacecraft to cruise this far out powered by the sun, beating Europe’s comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft. A trio of massive solar wings sticks out from Juno like blades from a windmill, generating 500 watts of power to run its nine instruments. Plans called for Juno to swoop within 5000km of Jupiter’s clouds — closer than previous missions — to map the planet’s gravity and magnetic fields.

Juno is an armoured spacecraft — its computer and electronics are locked in a titanium vault to shield them from harmful radiation.

Even so, Juno is expected to get blasted with radiation equal to more than 100 million dental X-rays during the mission. Like Galileo before it, Juno meets its demise in 2018 when it dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere and disintegrates — a necessary sacrifice to prevent any chance of accidentally crashing into the planet’s ­potentially habitable moons.

With many thanks to The Australian

Hubble Spots Dramatic Auroras On Jupiter

                                                                       

                                                             

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of glowing auroras over Jupiter just days before NASA's new Juno spaceship arrives to orbit the gas giant.

"These auroras are very dramatic and among the most active I have ever seen," said Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester, UK, and principal investigator of the study. 

 

"It almost seems as if Jupiter is throwing a fireworks party for the imminent arrival of Juno," Nichols said in press release.

 

The new Hubble images show bluish lights that appear to dance over Jupiter's poles. NASA says the observations of the auroras were supported by measurements made by Juno, which starts orbiting Jupiter on Monday, July 4.

 

The auroras were photographed by Hubble during a series of observations of Jupiter made in far ultraviolet-light. The full-color disk of Jupiter used in the image was photographed separately by Hubble at an earlier time.

 

Unlike auroras on Earth, NASA says the ones on Jupiter never cease. They are huge and "hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth," the agency said.

 

The new observations and measurements from Hubble and Juno will help scientists understand how the sun and other sources influence auroras on Jupiter. Hubble will continue to monitor Jupiter's auroras for the duration of the Juno mission.

 

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. The planet is a giant ball of gas 11 times wider than Earth and 300 times more massive than our home world. It's easy to see in the night sky -- appearing as a bright, unblinking star. 

 

It's best known for its Great Red Spot and colorful storm bands. If you have a telescope, you can see four of Jupiter's largest moons.

 

By Amanda Barnett

With many thanks to CNN

 

The Universe Is Expanding Way Faster Than We Thought, Researchers Say

                                                                        

The Universe is expanding. In the standard model of cosmology the rate of that expansion is given by the Hubble parameter, which is a measure of the dark energy that drives cosmic expansion. New observations of distant galaxies yield a higher than expected Hubble value. That may mean the Universe is expanding faster than we thought, but there’s no need to start rewriting textbooks just yet.

Since the Hubble parameter measures the rate of cosmic expansion, one way to determine it is to compare the redshift of light from distant galaxies with their distance. The cosmological redshift of a galaxy is easy to measure, and is due to the fact that cosmic expansion stretches the wavelength of light as it travels across millions or billions of light years, making it appear more red. By comparing the redshifts for galaxies of different distances we can determine just how fast the Universe is expanding.

Unfortunately distance is difficult to determine. It relies upon a range of methods that vary depending on distance, known as the cosmic distance ladder. For close stars we can use parallax, which is an apparent shift of stars relative to more distant objects due to the Earth’s motion around the Sun. The greater a star’s distance the smaller its parallax, so the method is only good to about 1,600 light years. For larger distances we can look at variable stars such as Cepheid variables. We know the distance to some Cepheid variables from their parallax, so we can determine their actual brightness (absolute magnitude). From this we’ve found that the rate at which a Cepheid variable changes in brightness correlates with its overall brightness. This relation means we can determine the absolute brightness of Cepheid variables greater than 1,600 light years away. 

If we compare that to their apparent brightness we can calculate their distance. By observing Cepheids in various galaxies we can determine galactic distances. We can observe Cepheids out to about 50 million light years, at which point they’re simply too faint to currently observe.

The achilles heel of the cosmological distance ladder is that it relies upon a chain of data. The distance for supernovas depends upon the calculated distance of Cepheid variables, which in turn depend upon parallax distance measurements. With ever increasing distance comes greater uncertainty in the results.

So you want your uncertainties at each step to be as small as possible, which is where this new work comes in. Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3, a team TISI +% measured about 2,400 Cepheid variables in 11 galaxies where a Type Ia supernova had also occurred. This allowed them to reduce the uncertainty of supernova distance measurements. They then compared the distances and redshifts for 300 supernovae to get a measure of the Hubble parameter accurate to within 2.4%.

That by itself is good work, but the result was surprising. 

The value for the Hubble parameter they got was about 73 km/s per megaparsec, which is higher than the “accepted” value of 69.3. The difference is large enough that it falls outside the uncertainty range of the accepted value. If the result is right, then it means the Universe is expanding at a faster rate than we thought. It could also point to an additional dark energy component in the early Universe, meaning that dark energy is very different than we’ve supposed.

But we shouldn’t consider this result definitive just yet. 

The use of supernovae to measure the Hubble parameter isn’t the only method we have. We can also look at the way galaxies cluster on large scales, and fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Each of these gives a slightly different value for the Hubble parameter, and the “accepted” value is a kind of weighted average of all measurements. 

The variation of values from different methods is known as tension in the cosmological model, and any new claim about dark energy and cosmic expansion will need to address this tension. If the supernova method is right and the Universe really is expanding faster than we thought, why do other methods yield a value significantly smaller than the true value?

It could be that there is some bias in one or both of the methods that we haven’t accounted for. Planck, for example, has to account for gas and dust between us and the cosmic background, and that may be skewing the results. It could be that the supernovae we use as standard candles to measure galactic distance aren’t as standard as we think. It could also be that our cosmological model isn’t quite right. 

The current model presumes that the universe is flat, and that cosmic expansion is driven by a cosmological constant. We have measurements to support those assumptions, but if they are slightly wrong that could account for the differences as well.

This new result does raise interesting questions, and it confirms that the discrepancy between different methods is very real. Whether that leads to a new understanding of cosmic expansion and dark energy is yet to be seen.

Paper: Adam G. Riess, et al. A 2.4% Determination of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant. arXiv:1604.01424 [astro-ph.CO] (2016)

By Brian Koberlein who is an astrophysicist, professor and author. You can find more of his writing at One Universe at a Time.

With many thanks to Forbes