Dobson-Fest 2024Saturday, September 14, 2024 4:00 to 9:00 pm Coles Creek at Carlyle Lake, IllinoisHosted by the River Bend Astronomy Club Information packet available for download HERE
Join us for a weekend in the Ozarks in the darkest skies of Missouri. Event Schedule (Preliminary)Dark Sky Festival taking place October 25-26, 2024 Friday Afternoon – 5:00 pm: Meet and greet with light snacks/ …
An animation depicting the trajectory of asteroid 2012 DA14 as it travels within the Earth-moon system on February 15, 2013.
*2012 DA14 is a near-Earth asteroid with an estimated diameter of about 45 meters (148 ft) and an estimated mass of about 130,000 metric tons. It was discovered on February 23, 2012, by the OAM Observatory, La Sagra in Spain seven days after passing 0.0174 AU (2,600,000 km; 1,620,000 mi) from Earth on February 16. Calculations show that on February 15, 2013, the distance between the asteroid and Earth will be 0.000228 AU (34,100 km; 21,200 mi). The 2013 passage of 2012 DA14 by Earth is a record close approach for a known object of this size.
The further away you look, the further back in time you see. Astronomers use this fact to study the evolution of the Universe by looking at nearby and more distant galaxies and comparing their features. Hubble is particularly well suited for this type of work because of its extremely high resolution and its position above the blurring effects of the earth’s atmosphere. This has allowed it to detect many of the most distant galaxies known, as well as making detailed images of faraway objects.
Comparing galaxies in the distant past with those around us today, astronomers have noticed that the nearby galaxies are far quieter and calmer than their distant brethren, seen earlier in their lives. Nearby galaxies (although not the Milky Way) are often large, elliptical galaxies with little or no ongoing star formation, and their stars tend to be elderly and red in color. These galaxies, in astronomers’ language, are “red and dead.”
This is not so for galaxies further away, which typically show more vigorous star birth.
The reason for this appears to be that as the Universe has aged, galaxies have often collided and merged together, and these events disrupt gas clouds within them. A merger will usually be a trigger for such intense star formation that the supply of gas is used up, and no more star formation occurs afterwards. The merged elliptical galaxy then creeps into old age, getting redder as its stars get older. This is expected to happen to the Milky Way when it merges with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, some four billion years from now.
The galaxy in this image, catalogued as 2MASX J09442693+0429569, marks a transitional phase in this process as young, star-forming galaxies settle to become massive, red and dead galaxies.
The galaxy has tail-like features extending from it, typical of a galaxy that has recently undergone a merger. Studying the properties of the light from this galaxy, astronomers see no sign of ongoing star formation; in other words, the merger triggered an event which has used up all the gas. However, the observations suggest that star formation was strong until the very recent past, and has ceased only within the last billion years. This image therefore shows a snapshot of the moment star formation stopped forever in a galaxy.
A version of this image was entered into the Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Nick Rose.
Solar scientists have long known that at the heart of the great explosions of solar material that shoot off the sun — known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs – lies a twisted kink of magnetic fields known as a flux rope. But no one has known when or where they form. Now, for the first time, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory as captured a flux rope in the very act of formation. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center › Download hi-res video
On July 18, 2012, a fairly small explosion of light burst off the lower right limb of the sun. Such flares often come with an associated eruption of solar material, known as a coronal mass ejection or CME – but this one did not. Something interesting did happen, however. Magnetic field lines in this area of the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, began to twist and kink, generating the hottest solar material – a charged gas called plasma – to trace out the newly-formed slinky shape. The plasma glowed brightly in extreme ultraviolet images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and scientists were able to watch for the first time the very formation of something they had long theorized was at the heart of many eruptive events on the sun: a flux rope.
Eight hours later, on July 19, the same region flared again. This time the flux rope’s connection to the sun was severed, and the magnetic fields escaped into space, dragging billions of tons of solar material along for the ride — a classic CME.
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The image on the left shows a series of magnetic loops on the sun, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on July 18, 2012. The image on the right has been processed to highlight the edges of each loop and make the structure more clear. A series of loops such as this is known as a flux rope, and these lie at the heart of eruptions on the sun known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs.) This is the first time scientists were able to discern the timing of a flux rope’s formation. Credit: NASA/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center
“Seeing this structure was amazing,” says Angelos Vourlidas, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “It looks exactly like the cartoon sketches theorists have been drawing of flux ropes since the 1970s. It was a series of figure eights lined up to look like a giant slinky on the sun.”
More than just gorgeous to see, such direct observation offers one case study on how this crucial kernel at the heart of a CME forms. Such flux ropes have been seen in images of CMEs as they fly away from the sun, but it’s never been known – indeed, has been strongly debated – whether the flux rope formed before or in conjunction with a CME’s launch. This case shows a clear-cut example of the flux rope forming ahead of time. Vourlidas is a co-author, along with Spiro Patsourakos and Guillermo Stenborg, of a paper on these results published in the Astrophysical Journal on Jan. 31, 2013.
Spotting such a foreshadowing of a CME could help scientists develop ways to predict them, says Dean Pesnell, the project scientist for SDO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “By telling us when and where flux ropes will erupt,” Pesnell says. “SDO helps us predict a major source of space weather.”
Scientific research is always a dance between hypothesis and experimental confirmation, and the history of the flux rope is no exception. Plasma physicists suggested that such coils of magnetic field lines were at the heart of flares in the 1970s and spacecraft near Earth provided in-situ measurements that occasionally traced out helical structures inside CMEs. Later, the flux ropes were spotted in images of CMEs captured by the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) – which launched in 1995 – using the mission’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), a telescope that blocks out the bright light of the solar disk in order to better see the tenuous corona around it. They are now a regular appearance on coronagraph and heliospheric imaging observations.
When it came to watching them form in a CME, however, the task was much harder. Since CMEs can form quite suddenly – known as impulsive CMEs – the associated flux ropes are smaller and closer to the surface, making it difficult to spot them amongst the many structures in the corona.
In the absence of direct observational evidence, theorists have produced two theories based on general physics of plasmas and magnetic fields of how and when the flux rope might form. In one, the magnetic structure of the rope exists before the CME, and as it evolves over time it twists and kinks becoming increasingly unstable. Eventually it erupts from the sun, releasing enormous amounts of energy and solar plasma. In the second version, the CME erupts when looping magnetic field lines are severed from the sun’s surface. While the great blob of solar material streams off the sun, the fields reconnect with each other to form a classic flux rope shape.
