Skytalk

February 6th is the 46th anniversary of the first space sport. On this day in 1971, golf enthusiast-turned-astronaut Alan Shepard hit a golf ball on the moon! It’s unknown just how far the ball traveled but the best estimates are between 400 yards and a little over a mile.

Dr. Derrick Pitts and Dave Heller recap some important dates in space exploration this week.

How is it that the Milky Way’s 11 most distant stars are 300,000 light years from Earth, well beyond the spiral arms of the Milky Way? Astronomers now have a better understanding of how streams of stars connect giant galaxies to nearby dwarf galaxies. Researchers at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have created computer models that suggest our Milky Way has pulled the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy apart as it has looped around our galaxy.

Six lunar explorers left after last week’s passing of Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon. Altogether 24 people have flown beyond Earth, 15 are still with us to tell their stories.

NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity are 13 years old on Mars this week! Landed in January 2004, Opportunity is still chugging along, while Spirit has been silent since 2010 when it got trapped in a sand pit and unable to re-orient its solar panels. Spirit did 4.8 miles, Opportunity has covered 27.1 miles and despite some problems is still working well!

Larry Molnar, an astronomy professor at Calvin College, announced last week that he and his students are following a one-in-a-million opportunity astronomy event. They predict that a binary star in the constellation Cygnus is showing behaviors that suggest the two will collide and explode, possibly between 2021 and 2023.

They are a contact binary, meaning that the two are so close they share an atmosphere and spin around a common point – now within the contact region – once every 11 hours.  I can get this okay for maybe two small planetary moons but two stars, one of which is about 20 times the size of our sun, it’s harder to imagine! Molnar’s students will use an array of large telescopes to monitor how the binary system changes over the next several years.

There has been some research indicating that our solar system had its share of rogue planet activity in its early history. Some studies suggest that rogue worlds outnumber normal planets but that they ultimately end up more like a ‘rebel without a cause’ and so move on – after causing great havoc.

Dave Heller and Dr. Pitts start by discussing some amazing exoplanet discoveries. In 2017, we can look forward to NASA launching TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). This satellite was designed to search for exoplanets on its two-year mission. Commercial Space test flights continue – Blue Origin says it will conduct crewed flights this year. They have completed 5 flights up to space and back.

Join us as we recap the top astronomy-related stories of 2016.

1. A potentially habitable planet was discovered orbiting the closest star to Earth.

2. First direct detection of gravitational waves – Einstein first identified the link between space and time. Gravity can stretch and compress space and time. Gravity waves actually pass through the fabric of space-time.

3. The estimated number of galaxies in the universe is now at 1 trillion.

Mark your 2017 calendar for August 21st – a total solar eclipse will cross the continental United States.

December 25 marks Christmas Day and December mini-moon day! The moon was at apogee, or the greatest distance from Earth (for the month).

The Winter Solstice arrives on Wednesday at 5:44 am. It marks the northern hemisphere’s greatest axial tilt away from the sun, producing the fewest number of hours of daylight. We gain 3 minutes at sunset this week but that’s offset by the 3 minutes we lose with later sunrises. So all in all, Wednesday is officially the shortest day with just 9h 20m 2s of daylight; beating out Tuesday by 1 second!

The end of the year brings several Solstice celebrations. Hannukah, Saturnalia, Christmas, Kwanzaa: All use candles as part of ceremonies to encourage the return of sunlight at this darkest portion of the year for northern cultures.

Venus and Mars are still bright in the southwest at dusk. Venus is almost exactly 100 times brighter than Mars. The Moon, Jupiter and the bright star Spica line up in the pre-dawn sky at 6 a.m. Thursday morning.

Astronomers at Yale University and University of Toronto have identified something very new over in the Coma Cluster of galaxies 300 light years away – a surprising number of galaxies with masses comparable to Milky Way-type galaxies (large spirals loaded with stars) but with just 1% the number of stars.

Space exploration is fraught with danger, as evidenced in the National Geographic series MARS. Reinforcing that message, the recent ESA/Russian mission to Mars, Schiaparelli, crash-landed on the Red Planet last month.