Next week’s night sky:
Friday is the new moon. This means that the stars will be extra bright Friday evening, giving stargazers a great chance to look at the stars. This is also a great time to take photos of the stars because the moon will not ruin your photos.
On Saturday, there is a rare double shadow transit of Jupiter, with the great red spot visible! A shadow transit happens when the shadows of moons cross a planet’s surface. The transit starts at 5:25 EDT and ends at 7:25 EDT.
The Mystery of the Tunguska Explosion
A massive explosion flattened entire forests in a remote region of Eastern Siberia along the Tunguska River in 1908. Curiously, the explosion left no crater, creating a mystery that has puzzled researchers ever since — what could have caused such a huge blast without leaving any remnants of itself?
New research suggests an asteroid that grazed the Earth caused the explosions, entering the atmosphere at a shallow angle and then passing out again into space.
But this theory does not fit some of the other evidence. There were just a handful of eyewitness reports of the event. These describe how “the sky split in two,” a huge explosion and widespread fire. But together, they provide evidence that the impactor traveled some 435 miles (700 km) through the atmosphere before the explosion that morning.
A different scenario fits the facts. The explosion must have been caused by an iron meteorite about the size of a football stadium. This must have passed through the upper atmosphere, heated rapidly, and then passed out into the Solar System again. The shock wave from this trajectory was what flattened trees.
A direct impact with a 656 foot-wide (200 meter-wide) asteroid would have devastated Siberia, leaving a crater 2 miles (3 kilometers) wide. It would also have had catastrophic effects on the biosphere, perhaps ending modern civilization.
Saturn-size exoplanet
After a year and a half of making careful observations of a cool dwarf star 35 light-years from Earth, coupled with previous observations dating back to 2010, researchers using the continent-sized Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope managed to tease out the presence of an unseen Saturn-size exoplanet.
Extensive analysis of the data indicates the star, known as TVLM 513–46546, is orbited every 221 days by a planet with roughly the mass of Saturn. The planet orbits closer to its star than Mercury to the Sun.
Researchers believe that this method can reveal many similar planets.
New images of the Carina Nebula
Want a glimpse of what the James Webb Space Telescope will provide once launched late next year? Check out this ultra-sharp view of the western wall of the Carina Nebula captured by the 8.1-meter Gemini South telescope using a near-infrared adaptive optics system.
The image represents a 10-fold increase in the telescope’s resolution, revealing a wealth of detail in the well-defined edge of the vast nebula, a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud that is 500 times larger than the Orion Nebula in the northern sky.
The new image reveals a “wall” of gas and dust glowing in ultraviolet light generated by massive nearby stars. A long sequence of parallel ridges can be seen that may be the result of magnetic fields. Researchers could see a jet emerging from a recently born star along with an area where segments of the cloud appear to be shearing away in strong stellar winds.
It is possible that the Sun formed in such an environment.
To learn more, go here: A JWST Preview: Adaptive-optics Images of H2, Br-γ, and K-continuum in Carina’s Western Wall
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!