Skytalk

There will be a total Solar Eclipse Tuesday July 2nd in Chile and Argentina. The Exploratorium in San Francisco will cover the eclipse live from Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile at Exploratorium.edu/eclipse. The next total eclipse in North America will take place in April, 2024.

Aphelion: Earth will reach its greatest distance from the sun this year on Independence Day July 4 at 4pm. 94,507,880 miles vs 91,403,180 miles on January 3 this year.

Last week, data from atmospheric sampling on Curiosity indicated a methane outgassing of biblical proportions on Mars, the largest ever detected; 21 parts per billion…three times larger than the last seen burp.

“The Apollo Chronicles” by regional producer Rotfeld Productions premieres at The Franklin Institute next week at Night Skies Observatory (Tuesday, June 11).

In anticipation of a return to the moon; three commercial services begin providing lunar lander services to NASA through The Commercial Lunar Services Program.

This Thursday makes the 16th year since solar system spacecraft Pioneer 10 left the solar system.

There is a new Constellation to see – and this one is artificial!

The first spacewalks were conducted 54 years ago: First by Soviet cosmonaut Alexi Leonov, (who celebrated his 85th birth anniversary this week) on March 18, 1965 and then three months later by American astronaut Ed White on June 3, 1965. Leonov’s birthday was celebrated with a commemorative spacewalk by two cosmonauts, Oleg Kononenko and Alexi Ovchinin, aboard ISS just three days ago.

Can a dead star be reborn? Astronomers working at the University of Bonn in Germany have discovered an extremely rare find a very active star that seems to be the result of the collision of two white dwarf stars. Normally white dwarf stars just cool to darkness and obscurity. But these two seem to have had enough mass that their merger has generated enough heat and pressure to cause nuclear fusion to re-start in the combined core. Its fate? Only to eventually explode as a supernova when it finally runs out of energy – again.

The moon has two distinct faces; gravity readings of the moon’s surface by a lunar orbiting satellite suggest that not long after formation of the original surface, another dwarf-planet-like object smacked into it causing the impacted side to be thrown upward and back to fold itself onto the back side of the moon.

Information from the European Space Agency Gaia satellite (providing precise distance and motion measurements for more than one billion stars) allows us to determine that at one time, our galaxy was making dozens of stars per year and that rate of production lasted for 5 billion years. Star production ebbed and flowed over the ensuing billions years bringing us to where we are now in production: just one solar-mass worth of stars per year. Yes, production will eventually end but not for billions of years.

This is the final week to see Mars in the evening – it will be gone into the glare of sunset next week.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing dress rehearsal flight Apollo 10.

Blue Moon’ is the latest entry into the lunar race. It’s a 7,000-lb., 14ft tall landing vehicle designed by engineers at Blue origin space group.

Mars is still hanging in the west sky at 9:00pm almost an hour after sunset. Jupiter rises now around midnight and Tuesday morning the moon and Jupiter rise together. Between 4:42am and 4:47am, International Space Station flies past the moon AND Jupiter. If the sky is clear, it will be a very cool sight! Stay up a few more minutes and see Saturn to the left of Jupiter.

Two researchers suggest a small amount of Earth’s heaviest elements were created in the collision of two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago. We probably have some of this in our bodies right now! Gold, platinum, uranium, even iodine might’ve come from such a collision, 100 million years before the formation of Earth and about 100 light years away from the gas clouds that formed our solar system.

Speaking of colliding neutron stars, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and the European VIRGO detector have identified two new neutron star collisions 500 million light years away and 1.2 billion light years away. In total, since making history with the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, the network has spotted evidence for two neutron star mergers, 13 black hole mergers, and one possible black hole-neutron star merger.

The first Planetarium opened in Chicago in 1930 on May 12th; The Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia was the second, opening in 1934.

Turning to highlights in the night sky this week: Mars can still be spotted in the evening, Jupiter rising around midnight.

The InSight Lander Seismometer Detects a likely Mars Quake – recorded early last month a 40-second long low rumble was detected by seismic sensors placed on the surface to determine if and to what degree Mars is seismically active. The duration wasn’t long enough to determine much about Martian tectonic activity, but still offered evidence that the interior of the red planet contimues to cool.

A giant asteroid smashed into Earth 66 million years ago off the coast of what’s now Mexico. Set off by the impact, an immense earthquake equivalent to a magnitude 10 or even 11.5 sent seismic waves pulsing through Earth’s crust, according to researchers reporting online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.At least 75 percent of species, including all nonbird dinosaurs, died out. Tiny traces of the Chixulub Meteor Impact Event appear to be preserved in a meter-thick layer of rock in southwestern North Dakota.

The site, found in the Hell Creek Formation and dubbed Tanis, represents a unique snapshot of what happened on land in the immediate aftermath of the impact, says paleontologist Robert DePalma of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. But it’s not the only plausible sequence of events that could have happened,” Whiteside says. And there may be no way to know for sure if the scenario is the right one, or exact timing of the seismic waves’ arrival, because there are so many unknowns about the lay of the land 66 million years ago.

The 2019 Philadelphia Science Festival comes to a conclusion today with a celebration along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway featuring more than 100 hands-on activities and demonstrations.

Turning to dark sky highlights: Mars is still visible in the west after sunset, Jupiter well up in the east by midnight; Venus, Saturn AND Jupiter can be seen in the pre-dawn sky between 5:00am and 5:45am.

The Philadelphia Science Festival encompasses nine days of more than 80 extraordinary, mostly free science events all around the city from the star party to the Carnival on May 4th on the Parkway. Sample informal and diverse science hands-on activities, lectures, debates and workshops. More information at fi.edu/psf.

Saturn’s moon Titan is more like Earth than previously thought. It’s small, it’s cold and it’s far, far away, but it has lakes of liquid methane and ethane(hydrocarbons) cold enough to be liquids rather than gases as they are here on Earth. Observations indicate some were so shallow that they evaporated during the transition from winter to spring on Titan and some may be 100 meters deep.

It looks like the moon’s subsoil has water-ice crystals bound into it, below the top eight inches.

Turning to night sky highlights this week:

NASA Astronaut Christina Koch’s maiden voyage in space will extend for almost double the scheduled duration. She is now set to stay on International Space Station for a total of 328 days.

The Kepler-47 Twin Star-Twin Planet Solar System now shows another planet; Kepler 4d is 7 times larger than Earth with a 187-day year. The two stars orbit their common center of gravity every 7.5 days.

Turning to the night sky highlights this week: Mars is visible in the west after sunset; the moon meets Jupiter Tuesday morning and Saturn Thursday morning one hour before sunrise. Venus and Mercury are low in the east at the same time.