Next week’s night sky:
On Thursday, the Northern Taurids meteor shower peaks! Look at the sky just after midnight to catch a glimpse of up to 15 meteorites per hour!
Sunday is the new moon. This is a great time to stargaze, as the moon will not block any of the dimmer stars. If you have a telescope, consider looking at mars on Sunday. It will stay in almost the same place the whole night, making it easy to find!
Mountains on Mars
How did Olympus Mons grow so big? Time.
Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, which means it oozes huge amounts of lava, rather than simply blowing its top in a catastrophic eruption. Earth’s biggest volcanoes are also shield volcanoes. This lets them grow slowly over time.
However, Earth’s plate tectonics also spread magma out, which keeps terrestrial volcanoes from indefinitely growing taller. Mars, on the other hand, is too small for plate tectonics.
Olympus Mons is some 3.5 billion years old, which means the volcano formed early on in Mars’ history. Astronomers suspect Olympus Mons could have stayed volcanically active for hundreds of millions of years. That’s far longer than any volcano on Earth could remain active.
Researchers are studying a family of meteorites called nakhlites. These were all flung from Mars when an asteroid struck a volcano on the Red Planet some 11 million years ago.
They found that Mars’ volcanoes were growing incredibly slow. The volcano that formed the nakhlites grew 1,000 times slower than volcanoes do on Earth. The finding implies that Mars’ volcanoes last longer than scientists previously expected.
By studying Olympus Mons and other volcanoes on Mars, researchers can begin to understand Mars’s climate history. The meteorites born from the volcano actually show signs of minerals that form as water passes through rock, which suggests water was flowing on Mars as recently as 1.3 billion years ago. This implies that Mars’s era of running rivers and flowing lava might not have only been confined to the extremely distant past.
New Gravitational wave signals
LIGO/Virgo announced 39 new signals, quadrupling the number of known gravitational-wave events in just six months!
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo collaborations first detected gravitational waves in 2015. Ever since, they have continued to unveil new and exciting results as more gravitational-wave events are spotted. And on October 28, the observatories announced a surge of new gravitational wave detections from their third observing run.
There are two main causes for the abundance of signals during the most recent observing run. First, the LIGO/Virgo instruments received significant improvements, which the team estimates resulted in a 60 percent improvement in the detectors’ sensitivity. On top of that, the observatories were able to operate longer without interruption, increasing the chances of picking up a signal.
With so many new signals — 50 in total, counting previous detections — astronomers have a multitude of data to tackle when it comes to black holes and neutron stars. With so many questions still left unanswered about these exotic objects, researchers suspect even more discoveries are on the horizon.
And LIGO/Virgo won’t be finished reporting new gravitational wave signals anytime soon. Results from the second half of the third run are currently being analyzed, and a fourth run is planned to begin in mid-2022. That run will also include the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan.
Fast Radio Burst Signal Confirmed
In July, a fast radio burst was detected.
Now, astronomers at multiple institutions have pinpointed the FRB spotted in the Milky Way and conclude it most likely was generated by a magnetar, a super-magnetized neutron star with many times the mass of the Sun. The magnetic field generated by a magnetar can be a thousand times more intense than that of a typical neutron star.
The X-ray component of the outburst was detected by several satellites while the radio counterpart was discovered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME.
The magnetar in question is known as SGR 1935+2154, or SGR 1935 for short, located in the constellation Vulpecula. It is thought to be between 14,000 and 41,000 light-years away. If near the lower end of that range, the X-rays from the outburst represented the energy generated by the Sun in a month.
To learn more, go here: A bright millisecond-duration radio burst from a Galactic magnetar
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!