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 From - Sky & Telescope By- Javer Barbuzano Edited by Amal Udawatta The newly discovered giant volcano on Mars is located just south of the planet’s equator, in eastern Noctis Labyrinthus, west of the Valles Marineris canyone system. The volcano sits on the eastern edge of a broad regional topographic rise called Tharsis, home to three other well-known giant volcanoes: Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons. Although more eroded and lower than these giants, the newly discovered volcano rivals the others in diameter (red dashed circle). Background: NASA / USGS; interpretation and annotations by Pascal Lee and Sourabh Shubham It's not every day that a giant volcano is discovered hiding in plain sight. By reviewing satellite imagery from many missions, scientists have spotted the remains of a colossal volcano on Mars. The volcano, provisionally named “Noctis Mons,” had been imaged repeatedly since the early 1970s, but extensive erosion had concealed it from view. Researchers

      From - Knowable Magazine       By -  By    Theo Nicltopoulos       Edited by - Amal Udawatta The first interstellar interloper detected passing through the Solar System, 1l/‘Oumuamua, came within 24 million miles of the Sun in 2017. It’s difficult to know exactly what ‘Oumuamua looked like, but it was probably oddly shaped and elongated, as depicted in this illustration. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, JOSEPH OL MSTED (STSCI), FRANK SUMMERS (STSCI) On October 17 and 18, 2017, an unusual object sped across the field of view of a large telescope perched near the summit of a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The Pan-STARRS1 telescope was designed to survey the sky for transient events, like asteroid or comet flybys. But this was different: The object was not gravitationally bound to the Sun, or to any other celestial body. It had arrived from somewhere else. The mysterious object was the first visitor from interstellar space observed passing through the solar system. Astronomers named it 1

 From -  Sky & Telescope  By - Fred Espenak  Edited by - Amal Udawatta This clay cuneiform tablet records lunar eclipses between 609 and 447 BC. The Babylonians also recorded solar eclipses. © The Trustees of the British Museum Before the advent of computers or even a working theory of the solar system, the ancients predicted solar eclipses. How did they do it? Today's astronomers use electronic computers and mathematical models to calculate the motions of the Sun and the Moon. This information can then be used to predict when solar (and lunar) eclipses take place. But the ability to predict eclipses goes back more than 25 centuries ago. This is long before the advent of computers or even Copernicus's heliocentric theory needed to understand the motions of the Sun and the Moon. So how could ancient civilizations foresee the occurrence of eclipses? They used a clever idea called the Saros cycle. In a previous post “ How Rare is a Total Solar Eclipse? ”, I described the two c

From - Sky & Telescope By - Monica Young Edited by  - Amal Udawatta The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed galaxies in the early universe, hidden star formation, and sniffed the atmospheres of exoplanets. But it's also exploring closer to home, imaging each of the giant planets in detail. The telescope can see aspects of the planets' compositions in ways that passing satellites typically can't, both thanks to its sensitivity and its spectral resolution. At the same time, homing in on the planets has tested Webb's capabilities for tracking objects that are not only quite bright compared to distant galaxies, but also extended, rotating, and moving quickly across the plane of the sky. The planets are so bright that they can quickly saturate the detectors. Imaging also requires multiple exposures that are later combined into mosaics. To make full use of Webb's technological advances, Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester, UK) and colleagues are conducting the

    From - Sky & Telescope,    By - Monica  Young,   Edited by  - Amal Udawatta Artist's impression of the Tasmanian Devil, an explosive flare that keeps on flaring, so far more than a dozen times. Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC) A brilliant flash of blue light briefly outshined its host galaxy before fading away — but then it exploded again, and again. On September 7, 2022, an automatic telescope picked up a blazing dot of blue light some 1,000 times brighter than a typical supernova. The brilliant blue flare lasted only days before it faded away, but not before an automated system had put astronomers on alert. The system designated the event AT2022tsd, but it some came to be called the “Tasmanian Devil.” It joined the short list of a special class of objects discovered in 2018 known as  luminous fast blue optical transients  (LFBOTs). Astronomers think these explosive flares are a special kind of supernova, but they could also be stars ripped apart in the intense gravitational field

  From - Sky & Telescope, By - Emily Lakdawalla, Edited by Amal Udawatta UPDATE: (November 8, 2023):  The Lucy mission surprises again! While the probe caught a view of the Dinkinesh's small satellite in the one of the first images of the flyby, the mission turned as it flew by and captured another view from a different angle. That new perspective revealed that the little asteroidal moon is actually a  contact binary , meaning it's made of two objects in contact with one another. This is the first contact binary asteroid moon discovered. Read more details on  NASA's website . This image shows the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft departed the system. This image was taken at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 UTC) Nov. 1, 2023, about 6 minutes after closest approach, from a range of approximately 1,010 miles (1,630 km). From this perspective, the satellite is revealed to be a contact binary, the fi

  From Sky & Telescope By - Govert Schilling, Edited by - Amal Udawatta The region shown here covers 100×100 arcseconds around the newly discovered galaxy dubbed Nube. The color image is a composite of light collected through the g, r, and i filters. The black-on-white background, imaged in the g and r bands, is shown in reverse color to highlight the galaxy's faint outskirts. Montes et al. / arXiv 2023 Astronomers have discovered a large but very dim ghost-like galaxy. Its origins are unknown, and its very existence challenges our notions of dark matter. Astronomers have discovered a ghost-like galaxy about half as large as our own Milky Way but no more massive than the puny Small Magellanic Cloud, our galaxy’s dwarf satellite. Since the new galaxy’s stars are spread out over a huge volume, it’s invisible to most telescopes, like a Halloween specter. The origin of Nube (Spanish for “cloud”), as astronomers are calling the new find, may challenge popular ideas about the nature