Skytalk

The Event Horizon Telescope team may reveal an image of a black hole event horizon on Wednesday. An array of eight radio telescopes around the world will synthesize their observations of the accretion disk and the edge of the event horizon of Sag A – a massive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, as well as the black hole at the core of M87. This would be the first time an event horizon has actually been seen. Would allow study of the general relativity of the strong field regime, accretion and outflows near the edge of the black hole, and studies of event horizons in general. The plan is to use radio data to silhouette the black hole against the background of radio illumination of the accretion disk.

Israel’s first Lunar Mission SpaceIL Beresheet, now in orbit around the moon, is due to land next Thursday on the near side in the Sea of Serenity. If successful, it’ll be the first privately funded spacecraft to reach the moon. Beresheet launched to the moon on Feb 21 at a cost of a mere $100 million.

The Franklin Institute Science Awards Program takes place next week, honoring seven science and one business achievement.

With clear dark skies, Mars and the moon are visible Monday evening in the west. Jupiter is now rising at midnight in the east, up with Saturn at 4:30 am.

Jupiter has seen quite a dramatic change since formation 4.5 billion years ago. Now the largest planet in the solar system, with a mass greater than that of all the other planets combined, computer models suggest Jupiter started out four times farther away than it is today and much smaller, more Earth-like in size, then grew in size and moved to its current position closer to the sun.

This new understanding was arrived at while researchers tried to figure our why Jupiter’s forward batch of asteroid ‘kling-ons’ (the Trojan asteroids) is so much larger than its aft batch of ‘kling-ons’.

Brilliant Jupiter is available to be seen in the pre-dawn sky around 5:00 a.m., along with Saturn and the moon. Venus is visable for just a few more days as it’s now dipping into the pre-dawn glare of the sun. Mars still lords it over the evening sky but it too is slipping in dominance. Leo the Lion takes over as the main constellation of the spring sky.

Next Friday, March 29th an historic spacewalk will take place; Anne McClain and Christina Koch will step outside International Space Station to replace a set of batteries on the solar panel array. It will be the first time in history a spacewalk is conducted entirely by women. For McClain, it will be her second spacewalk, but the first for Koch. The first woman to ever complete a spacewalk was Svetlana Savitskaya in July 1984, followed by American astronaut Kathryn Sullivan three months later.

107 years ago on this date, rocket engineer and Nazi Werner Von Braun was born in Virsisk, Poland.

Easter will arrive on April 21 rather than tomorrow; even though tomorrow is the first Sunday after the first full moon following the equinox. The challenge comes from trying to reconcile the Gregorian calendar which, when adopted in 1582, fixed the Vernal Equinox on March 21. The actual date of the vernal equinox wanders a bit because the Earth’s rotational period isn’t precisely 365 days. A proposal to fix the date of Easter has been widely discussed and the 1963 Second Vatican Council agreed to the second Sunday in April. The Vatican has never taken action on the proposal.

NASA’s 2020 budget request for $21 billion includes significant funding to build systems and infrastructure to return to the moon by 2028. Pending Congressional approval, this will allow NASA to support commercial development of a large lunar lander to carry cargo, and then astronauts to the moon, develop and build the ‘Gateway’ lunar orbital facility mini space station at the moon, and start dropping equipment on the lunar surface for astronauts to begin stays of two weeks. Since the last Apollo sojourn to the moon in 1972, it has been determined that ice exists at the lunar poles.

The Vernal Equinox Wednesday at 5:58 pm signals the official start of Spring! A full moon tonight is among the dark sky highlights – we’re starting to lose sight of Venus in the pre-dawn sky – in part because sunrises are coming earlier. You can catch sight of this and more as The Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers host their first star party of the season at Valley Forge National Historical Park Model Airplane Field – more info at dvaa.org.

The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most arid places on the planet – averaging less than one inch of rainfall per year! High altitude, almost constant clear sky, dry air, and lack of light pollution and radio interference due to its remote location make it a premier place to observe the heavens above. Additionally, the subsurface soil is somewhat similar to conditions on Mars. Robotic rovers deployed in the Atacama have found subsurface microbes that are highly resistant to salt. Using a rover-mounted robotic drill and sampling device, soil samples recovered from 80 cm(31 inches) contained unusual and highly specialized microbes that were distributed in patches, which researchers linked to the limited water availability, scarce nutrients and chemistry of the soil.

NASA’s InSight Lander Mars temperature probe was to be hammered 16 feet into the Martian soil to check internal heat flow as a way to characterize the Martian interior structure, but it jammed last week when the probe encountered unanticipated rock.

Signs of Spring: The Vernal equinox is now less than two weeks away, and we spring ahead from Eastern Standard to Daylight Saving Time Sunday.

5:30am marks the start of the pre-dawn ‘golden hour’ for viewing Venus, Saturn and Jupiter in a line.

Beth Moses, Astronaut Trainer for Virgin Galactic, flew aboard its latest test flight as its first passenger. The VSS Unity flew into space last week piloted by David MacKay and Mike Masucci. Last week’s flight was the first to carry another person besides pilot and co-pilot and its principle objective was to test how the craft would handle during descent with its twin tails rotated upward relative to the fuselage. The altitude achieved, 55.8 miles, is high enough to earn all three crew members commercial astronaut wings from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The first woman to fly in space, Valentina Tereshkova, celebrates a birth anniversary this week on Wednesday. She was born in 1937. It was her expertise in skydiving that led to her selection. The then-26-year-old was selected from among a group of five women to fly on 16 June 1963. She completed 48 earth orbits over almost three days. Now honored as a hero in Russia, Tereshkova is the only woman to have flown in space on a solo mission.

Wanna get your hands dirty in astronomy? Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a newly revised version of a Zooniverse Citizen Scientist data-mining project for finding nearby failed stars and exoplanets created through a collaboration of a number of research agencies including NASA, NOAO, AMNH, STSci, ASU, UCSD, and others. The project, done by human searches through a new double-size data set, depends on the acuity of the human eye to discern differences between data and noise in digital images. There are enormous mountains of data to go through, far more data than can be examined by individual astronomers in any reasonable amount of time and significant discoveries can be made by amateur researchers.

So-called stellar streams are associations of stars; typically a globular cluster or a dwarf galaxy orbiting a galaxy that has been stretched out along its orbit and torn apart by tidal forces. There are 18 known streams in our Milky Way galaxy, one of which is a mere 330 light years from Earth.

LOFAR Survey reveals hundreds of thousands of previously unmapped galaxies Low frequency radio telescope array is spread across northern Netherlands and nearby countries have surveyed 25% of the sky and the first 10% of data is now available for study, revealing the existence of 100,000 galaxies that were previously unseen.

Night Sky highlights this week: Wednesday thru Saturday morning around 5:45 , a waning crescent moon slides past Jupiter, Saturn, then Venus in that order. Mars is quite high in the west, southwest and still stunningly bright!

Earlier this week, the Franklin Institute Night Sky Observatory program featured special guest Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, astrophysicist, inventor, and co-host of the Science Channel’s Outrageous Acts of Science to focus on some of the most perplexing paradoxes of the universe, the possibility of life on other planets, and why he believes his unlikely personal path can inspire the next generation of scientists.

Oluseyi was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. After his parents divorced when he was four years old, he and his mother lived in some of the country’s toughest neighborhoods including the 9th Ward of New Orleans; Watts, Los Angeles, California; Inglewood, California; South Park, Houston, Texas; and Third Ward, Houston, Texas before settling in rural Mississippi a month before Oluseyi turned 13 years old.

His best known scientific contributions are research on the transfer of mass and energy through the Sun’s atmosphere, the development of space-borne observatories for studying astrophysical plasmas and dark energy, and the development of transformative technologies in ultraviolet optics, detectors, computer chips, and ion propulsion.

Oluseyi appears as a commentator and scientific authority on Science Channel television shows including How the Universe Works, Outrageous Acts of Science, and Strip the Cosmos.

With favorable viewing conditions;

Astronomers at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have detected that our Milky Way galaxy, while shaped like a big disk that rotates, is actually warped at the outer edges.

Our Milky Way is one of some forty galaxies that comprise what is known as our “local group.”