Skytalk

Is the current volcanic activity in Hawaii possible elsewhere in the solar system?

China’s space plans include providing commercial satellite launch services for clients worldwide, as well as opening the door for private spacefarers.

Evening Planets visible this week: Venus in the west, Jupiter in the east by 8:15p; the two brightest planets visible in the sky. Jupiter is at opposition – earth has passed between the sun and Jupiter, up all night, rising at sunset, setting at sunrise.

Need your telescope fixed? A June 2nd workshop at The Franklin Institute will help you re-learn all you need to know to work your telescope. Learn more here.

Newly discovered? A purple planet! Actually, the color suggestion is just speculation based on the planet’s expected chemical composition. The planet, called WASP-104b, orbits 4 million km from its yellow dwarf parent star every 1.75 days. 104b most likely has a potassium and atomic sodium atmosphere which gives its most compelling characteristic – it’s DARK.

May Day is celebrated in many northern hemisphere cultures as the beginning of summer. This makes June 21 mid-summer and so matches the timelines for Shakepeare’s play, ‘A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream’. May 1 is a cross-quarter day between Spring and Summer. Sunrise is 6a and sunset is 7:55p for this latitude.

Saturday is the 57th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s historic suborbital flight, the first for a US astronaut. In answer to Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight three weeks earlier that same year, 1961.

Venus is the evening star now for sure. Saturn rises just after midnight with mars following an hour later. This places the three across the southern sky at 5a. this week – the moon slides through the group from tomorrow through Sunday morning.

Our sun, like so many others, was born as part of a cluster of stars. Sibling stars have the same chemical composition and can be discovered by analysis of each star’s stellar spectrum. The problem? Dynamics of galactic motion have pulled the sibling stars all throughout the galaxy, far from their original positions. A new survey has looked at 340,000 stars to better understand the evolution of our galaxy’s stars. The Galactic Archaeology Survey uses a spectrograph on a telescope in Australia and a specially designed computer code to study the spectra of 340,000 stars in our galaxy.

A new analysis of an asteroid fragment found in the Nubian Desert, Sudan in 2008 reveals inclusions inside tiny diamond crystals. The environment where the inclusions were formed could only be found at the core of either a very large asteroid or a planet somewhere around the size of Mercury or Mars.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope (TESS) was launched last week on a two-year mission to search for planets orbiting nearby stars. Kepler searched more distant regions and turned up more than 3,700 confirmed hits. TESS is expected to double that number. The method of discovery is transit – watching for regular periodic brightness changes in stars that might be attributed to orbiting planets.

Venus beautiful in the evening sky now; Jupiter up by midnight. Saturn and Mars hold down the pre-dawn sky but are losing to encroaching sunrise. Get up earlier to see them!

Scientists at the University of Washington have developed the tech to ‘see’ what could be a low-mass particle responsible for dark matter – the axion. They believe that incoming axions passing through a strong magnetic field could convert into radio waves. They are looking for particles with masses less than a billionth that of an electron. This years’ Franklin Awards Physics laureate, Helen Quinn, first suggested the idea of this new particle in 1977 with her colleague Roberto Peccei.

The premiere event of the Philadelphia Science Festival takes place this Friday evening.

Planets to be seen this week –

Astronomers have detected a galaxy that seems to be devoid of dark matter. That possibility has theorists re-evaluating gravity’s role in keeping a galaxy intact.

Move over Stonehenge – Philadelphia will feature its own version on Friday, April 6 at 7:30 p.m., when the sunset will align with Market Street. This phenomenon happens a few times a year.

A planet 75% the size of Jupiter has been discovered, orbiting a brown dwarf star 46 times the mass of our planet Jupiter. This is of interest because brown dwarfs are the most numerous type of stars: low fusion temperatures render them not very luminous and they are often overlooked as ‘stars.’ For them to have planets significantly increases the possible number of planets in a galaxy and provides more context for the stellar/planetary genesis story.

This is a great week to gaze aloft and spot the Spring Constellations – 10p – West: Taurus, Orion, Gemini; South: Leo in the Keystone, Big Dipper above; East: Orange Arcturus, Hercules

An acceptable range for the estimated number of galaxies in the universe is between 100 and 200 billion, according to astronomer Mario Livio.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s successor has suffered another 5-8 month delay. The Webb Space telescope has entered the final phases of testing, but delays caused by integration difficulties have pushed back the launch date. The complicated folding of the sunshield is the culprit, and there’s 8 billion dollars on the line.

The Dwarf planet Ceres is showing signs of cryoactivity and…water(ice)! Sodium carbonate, a mineral seen by the Dawn spacecraft in orbit around Ceres since 2015, shows up on Ceres as a hydrated variety, indicating that water is bound to the mineral. Images show the presence of slushy cryo-volcanic eruptions.

Jupiter’s Iconic ‘Great Red Spot’ is no more. Now it’s the ‘Great Orange Spot.’ Color changes have been noticed since the earliest close flybys of Jupiter in 1979.

Skywatching this week – Evening: Venus and Mercury – 7:30 – 8 p.m. every night Venus rises higher, Mercury sinks lower. Pre-dawn sky from 5:45 to 6:15 a.m., every day Mars creeps closer to Saturn; watch as Earth overtakes the two planets!

Textbooks typically describe the nearby Andromeda galaxy as being three to four times larger than our galaxy, the Milky Way. However, newer measurements indicate that the two are actually on par. The discrepancy? Andromeda has fewer stars than originally estimated but more “dark matter.”

The sunset this week comes after 7:00pm and we’re gaining about 2 minutes and 40 seconds of daylight every day through the end of April, when the rate begins to slow. Meanwhile, sunrises are coming earlier.

Birth Anniversaries this week:

Remember to advance your timepieces one hour before retiring Saturday night; Daylight Savings Time starts Sunday morning at 2:00 am.

Dr. Pitts has returned from a visit to Mt. Wilson and Carnegie offices in Pasadena, California. In the 1920s, Edmund Hubble collected spectroscopic data on galaxies there, showing that they were moving away from the Milky Way. As the distances to galaxies increased, the faster they seemed to be moving.

Hubble also figured out a rate of expansion, now called the Hubble Constant, that tells us about the early state of the universe.