Baby the stars shine bright...

Full story here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37167390

Earth-sized world 'around nearest star'


The nearest habitable world beyond our Solar System might be right on our doorstep - astronomically speaking.

Scientists say their investigations of the closest star, Proxima Centauri, show it to have an Earth-sized planet orbiting about it.

What is more, this rocky globe is moving in a zone that would make liquid water on its surface a possibility.

Proxima is 40 trillion km away and would take a spacecraft using current technology thousands of years to reach.

Asa said:

But where is Planet INFJ?

Click to expand...

I thought this was planet INFJ ? Am I in the wrong place again ? doh !!

Asa said:

Pretty sure Earth is not Planet INFJ.

Click to expand...

I meant this forum was 'planet infj' small but perfectly formed..

https://astronomynow.com/2016/08/28/juno-gets-its-closest-look-at-jupiter/


Nearly two months after NASA’s Juno spacecraft slipped into orbit around Jupiter, the solar-powered probe made a passage 4,200 kilometres (2,600 miles) over the giant planet’s colourful banded clouds on Saturday, the closest planned encounter during its 20-month exploration of the Solar System’s largest world.

Spinning on its axis once every 30 seconds, Juno swung by Jupiter at 2:44pm BST (1344 GMT), zoomed over its north pole, then raced north to south and crossed the planet’s equator at a blistering speed of 208,000 kilometres per hour (130,000 mph).

“Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Juno passed through this unexplored part of space hugging Jupiter’s cloud tops once before, when the probe fired its main engine to brake into orbit 4 July. But Saturday’s flyby was the first time Juno will collect science data so close to the massive planet.

“We are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It will take days for all the science data collected during the flyby to be downlinked and even more to begin to comprehend what Juno and Jupiter are trying to tell us.”

The mission’s prime objective is to study the history and evolution of Jupiter. Scientists want to know if the planet has a solid core and learn how Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field is generated. Named for the wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology, a figure who could see through the cloak of clouds kept by the chief deity, Juno will reveal the gaseous world’s poles in detail for the first time and peer beneath Jupiter’s clouds with a microwave radiometer. Earlier missions left open questions about the inner workings of Jupiter, and instead focused on taking pictures and surveying the planet’s many moons. Juno looped into a 53-day orbit 4 July, and the mission’s flight plan calls for the spacecraft to make two laps around Jupiter before another main engine burn 19 October steers it into a tighter 14-day orbit for regular science observations.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...pse-sun-moon-planets-constellations-starwatch

The September night sky
What to look out for during the month of the equinox, with a solar eclipse over Africa, followed by a lunar eclipse

The month of our autumnal equinox opens with an annular or “ring” solar eclipse on 1 September which is visible along a path that sweeps across Southern Central Africa from Gabon to Madagascar. The surrounding area, where a partial solar eclipse is seen, does not extend as far north as Europe.

A second eclipse occurs on the 16th when the Moon passes through the southern edge of the Earth’s shadow. The resulting penumbral lunar eclipse is already underway as the Harvest Moon rises in the E for western Europe on that evening.

The Moon first touches the shadow at 17:55 BST while still below Britain’s horizon and reaches greatest eclipse at 19:54, 30 minutes or so after moonrise. All but the southern 9% of the lunar disc then lies within the penumbra, but little darkening may be obvious except near its upper edge, closest to the shadow’s dark central umbra. The Moon exits the penumbra at 21:54.

Jupiter remains hidden in the Sun’s glare, but Venus is brilliant in the evening twilight, albeit only 6° high in the W at sunset at present, and no higher in the SW by month’s end.

Easier to spy is the triangle of Mars, Saturn and the star Antares in Scorpius which stands low in the SSW as darkness falls and after Venus sets.

Starwatch: Teapot in Sagittarius
Read more
Antares, the dimmest of the three, stands below Saturn while Mars, the brightest, lies to their E (left) and speeds 18° away during the month to approach the lid of the Teapot of Sagittarius, just setting in the SW at our map times. Mars dims from mag -0.3 to 0.1 while Saturn is mag 0.5.

The slender young Moon lies 3° above-left of Venus on the 3rd, and is close to first quarter when it stands a similar distance above-right of Saturn on the 8th and 7° above Mars on the 9th.

Mercury emerges from the Sun’s far side to begin its best morning apparition of 2016 late in the month. Between the 24th to 30th, it brightens from mag 0.5 to -0.6 and rises more than 95 minutes before the Sun to stand 8° or more above the E horizon forty minutes before sunrise. Catch it 1.9° to the left of the very slim earthlit Moon on the 29th.




September Diary


1st 10h New moon and annular solar eclipse

2nd 18h Neptune at opposition

3rd 12h Moon 1.1° N of Venus

8th 22h Moon 4° N of Saturn

9th 13h First quarter

9th 15h Moon 8° N of Mars

13th 01h Mercury in inferior conjunction

16th 20h Full moon and penumbral lunar eclipse

22nd 00h Moon 0.2° N of Aldebaran; 15:21 Autumnal equinox

23rd 11h Last quarter

26th 08h Jupiter in conjunction with Sun

28th 20h Mercury furthest W of Sun (18°)

29th 12h Moon 0.7° S of Mercury

* Times are BST

The (astronimical) end of summer and the start of Autumn 2016 - The Autumnal Equinox

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...xplained-start-fall-spring-sun-earth-science/

The Autumn Equinox Is Almost Here—What You Need to Know

Find out what an equinox is and how the day is linked to the reason for the seasons.


By Andrew Fazekas


PUBLISHED September 20, 2016

As the midday sun begins to sink lower and nights get noticeably longer, it can only mean the reign of summer is coming to an end for the northern half of the world. The autumn equinox arrives at 10:21 a.m. ET (2:20 p.m. UTC) on September 22, officially marking the beginning of fall in the Northern Hemisphere and the start of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

The word “equinox” comes from Latin and means “equal night,” referring to the roughly 12-hour day and night that occurs only on the two equinox days of the year.


This tidy split in our 24-hour day is linked to the reason Earth has seasons in the first place. The planet spins on an axis that is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbital plane. That means as Earth travels along its 365-day orbit, different hemispheres tilt closer to or farther from our sun’s warming rays.

An equinox is a geometrical alignment between the sun and Earth in which the sun appears positioned right above our planet’s equator. On these days, both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres experience roughly equal amounts of sunshine. It’s also only on the spring and autumn equinoxes that the sun rises due east and sets due west.

As we head toward December, the Northern Hemisphere will tilt farther away from the sun and receive its rays at a steeper angle, creating longer shadows and cooler conditions indicative of winter. Eventually, the sun will reach its lowest point in the midday sky, marking the December solstice.

Cultures around the world have historically celebrated the dates that represent the changing of the seasons. One notable example is an ancient Maya step pyramid known as El Castillo at Chichén Itzá in Mexico. Exactly at sunset on the spring and autumn equinoxes, sunlight hits the building’s steep staircase at just the right angle to create an eerie snake-like shape that appears to slither along its length.

Other planets also have seasons and equinoxes, although on much more extreme scales. Mars has a very similar tilt to Earth’s and so experiences the same kinds of seasons, but its distance from the sun means that a Martian winter lasts a frigid 154 days.

However, the nightmare planet for anyone with seasonal affective disorder would have to be Uranus. Its axis is tipped nearly 90 degrees, meaning it essentially spins on its side during its 84-year orbit around the sun. This translates to mind-numbing winters that last a whopping 42 years.

For some planets, seasonal variations can even affect our views of these celestial objects. During a Saturn equinox, which rolls around every 15 Earth years, the sun shines edge-on to the planet’s famous rings, casting them in low shadows that can reveal their three-dimensional structure.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37511861 -click for full story

Rosetta probe set for comet collision



One of the most audacious space missions ever undertaken is about to come to an end.

The Rosetta probe that has been tracking a comet for the past two years is going to deliberately crash itself into the 4km-wide ball of ice and dust.

European Space Agency scientists say the satellite has come to the end of its useful life and they want to get some final, ultra-close measurements.

Rosetta is not expected to survive the impact with Comet 67P.

But even if some of its systems remain functional, pre-loaded software on board will ensure everything is shut down on contact.

Curious tilt of the Sun traced to undiscovered Planet Nine
https://astronomynow.com/2016/10/20/curious-tilt-of-the-sun-traced-to-undiscovered-planet-nine/



Planet Nine — the undiscovered planet at the edge of the solar system that was predicted by the work of Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in January 2016 — appears to be responsible for the unusual tilt of the Sun, according to a new study.

The large and distant planet may be adding a wobble to the solar system, giving the appearance that the Sun is tilted slightly.

“Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment,” says Elizabeth Bailey, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author of a study announcing the discovery.

All of the planets orbit in a flat plane with respect to the Sun, roughly within a couple degrees of each other. That plane, however, rotates at a six-degree tilt with respect to the Sun — giving the appearance that the Sun itself is cocked off at an angle. Until now, no one had found a compelling explanation to produce such an effect. “It’s such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain that people just don’t talk about it,” says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy.

Brown and Batygin’s discovery of evidence that the Sun is orbited by an as-yet-unseen planet — that is about 10 times the size of Earth with an orbit that is about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than Neptune’s — changes the physics. Planet Nine, based on their calculations, appears to orbit at about 30 degrees off from the other planets’ orbital plane — in the process, influencing the orbit of a large population of objects in the Kuiper Belt, which is how Brown and Batygin came to suspect a planet existed there in the first place.

“It continues to amaze us; every time we look carefully we continue to find that Planet Nine explains something about the solar system that had long been a mystery,” says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science.

Their findings have been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, and will be presented this week at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences 48th annual meeting, held jointly in Pasadena, California, with the 11th European Planetary Science Congress.

The tilt of the solar system’s orbital plane has long befuddled astronomers because of the way the planets formed: as a spinning cloud slowly collapsing first into a disc and then into objects orbiting a central star.

Planet Nine’s angular momentum is having an outsized impact on the solar system based on its location and size. A planet’s angular momentum equals the mass of an object multiplied by its distance from the Sun and corresponds to the force that the planet exerts on the overall system’s spin. Because the other planets in the solar system all exist along a flat plane, their angular momentum works to keep the whole disc spinning smoothly.

Planet Nine’s unusual orbit, however, adds a multi-billion-year wobble to that system. Mathematically, given the hypothesised size and distance of Planet Nine, a six-degree tilt fits perfectly, Brown says.

The next question, then, is how did Planet Nine achieve its unusual orbit? Though that remains to be determined, Batygin suggests that the planet may have been ejected from the neighbourhood of the gas giants by Jupiter, or perhaps may have been influenced by the gravitational pull of other stellar bodies in the solar system’s extreme past.

For now, Brown and Batygin continue to work with colleagues throughout the world to search the night sky for signs of Planet Nine along the path they predicted in January. That search, Brown says, may take three years or more.

• angular momentum
• California Institute of Technology
• Caltech
• Elizabeth Bailey
• Konstantin Batygin
• Kuiper Belt
• Mike Brown
• Planet Nine
• Solar System
• Sun

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Click here for more details; http://sail.planetary.org/

Solar Sailing
Flight by Light
LightSail™ is a citizen-funded project by The Planetary Society, the world's largest non-profit space advocacy group. We’re sending a small spacecraft into Earth orbit carrying large, reflective sails measuring 32 square meters (344 square feet). We successfully completed a test flight in June 2015 that paved the way for a second, full-fledged solar sailing demonstration in 2017.

Solar sails use the sun’s energy as a method of propulsion—flight by light. Light is made of packets of energy called photons. While photons have no mass, a photon traveling as a packet of light has energy and momentum.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...november-full-moon-big-december-a7394211.html

Biggest supermoon in living memory to appear in the sky, as 2016 ends with three huge full moons in a row
The moon will be closer to Earth than it has been since 1948, and it won’t get as close again until 2034
The year is set to close with the biggest moon that most people alive will ever have seen.

The satellite is set to get closer – an so brighter and bigger – than it has for almost 70 years on 14 November.

A supermoon happens because of the strange, egg-shaped orbit of the moon. One part of the orbit known as the perigee, is about 30,000 miles closer to earth than the apogee, or the furthest part.


Supermoon Timelapse
And if the orbit of the moon lines up right with the sun and the Earth, it causes an effect called perigee-syzygy – meaning that the moon appears far bigger in the sky and gets called a supermoon.

Supermoons happen relatively often. But it’s very rare that they’re quite as big as the one coming this month.



Read more
Supermoon to collide with ‘hunter’s moon’ and produce stunning sight
The moon is closer than it will be until 2034. And it will appear bigger than ti has for almost 70 years – the last time it was so close was 1948.

Actually being able to tell the difference in the size is another thing, and mostly depends on the “moon illusion” rather than it actually expanding. When the moon is low-hanging, near the horizon, it can look extra big because of the trees or buildings in front of it – which is more of an optical illusion than a reflection of how big it really looks from Earth.

So Wednesday the summer solstice approaches, the longest day in the northern hemisphere.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.te...tice-longest-day-year-happens-stonehenge/amp/