Nature Hub

    From- Sky & Telescope     Edited by -  Amal Udawatta THESE ARE THE STAGES OF A TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE. THE PARTIAL PHASES LAST ABOUT AN HOUR . AND 20 MINUTES. The next total solar eclipse to visit North America will be April 8, 2024 . The duration of totality will be up to 4 minutes and 27 seconds, almost double that of The Great American Eclipse of August 21, 2017. The 2017 total solar eclipse was witnessed by about 20 million people from Oregon to South Carolina, and the upcoming 2024 Great American Eclipse is sure to be witnessed by many millions more. Because of what they saw — the exquisite beauty of the Sun’s corona hanging in the suddenly darkened sky — many millions more will know that a total solar eclipse is something truly worth seeing. In the US, totality will begin in Texas at 1:27 pm CDT and will end in Maine at 3:35 pm EDT on April 8, 2024.

 From- Sky &Telescope  By - Kit Gilchrist, Edited by  - Amal Udawatta This artist’s impression shows the record-breaking quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a supermassive black hole. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, this quasar has been found to be the most luminous object known in the universe to date. The supermassive black hole, seen here pulling in surrounding matter, has a mass 17 billion times that of the Sun and appears to be growing in mass by the equivalent of another Sun per day. ESO / M. Kornmesser   In a new study, astronomers have identified a quasar more luminous and voracious than any found to date. Quasars are among the most distant known celestial phenomena. They’re powerful enough to show up in our skies as star-like specks, but in fact each quasar is the luminous region surrounding a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. As the ravenous black hole gobbles up gas from the surrounding disk, the supe

  From - Sky  &  Telescope By Monica Young Edited by Amal Udawatta         In an ejection that would have caused its rotation to slow, a magnetar is depicted losing material into space in this artist’s concept. The magnetar’s strong, twisted magnetic field lines (shown in green) can influence the flow of electrically charged material from the object, which is a type of neutron star. NASA / JPL-Caltech A huge clue to understanding the mysterious, fleeting flashes of radio waves known as  fast radio bursts  (FRBs) came when one went off in our own galaxy. A highly magnetized neutron star, or  magnetar , dubbed SGR 1935+2154, emitted an FRB-like burst on April 28, 2020, and suddenly astronomers had an FRB to study in our own backyard. Since then, astronomers have been waiting for a repeat. In October 2022, they struck rich once again — and this time, they were ready. Until 2020, almost all known FRBs originated in faraway galaxies. Yet each one relayed more energy in a fraction of a s

             From- Sky & Telescope    By - Govert Schilling,   Edited by - Amal Udawatta The CHARA array took two false-color images of RW Cephei, one in December 2022 (left), when the star had dimmed, and one in July 2023 (right), when the star had recovered its usual brightness. The patchy appearance results from dust created by a huge ejection from the star. The star is huge but it is so far away that it appears about one million times smaller than the full Moon in the sky, resolvable only by an interfereometer. CHARA / Georgia State University Betelgeuse isn’t the only giant star to undergo a “Great Dimming.” Remember the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse? In late 2019, this red supergiant in Orion became 1.2 magnitudes fainter than normal. Detailed observations of the star with the European Very Large Telescope in Chile, enabled by Betelgeuse’s relatively short distance of 640 light-years, revealed that the southern hemisphere of the star’s disk had darkened. The light was temporari

  From - BBC News, By - Ben Fell, Edited by - Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, NASA Image caption, Who will be the next human to leave their footprint on the surface of the Moon? They were the pioneers of space exploration - the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s. Now, in 2024, the race to put people back on the lunar surface is set to heat up once again. On 8 January, United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur - one of the private competitors to Elon Musk's SpaceX -  launched on its maiden Moon mission , carrying Astrobotic's Peregrine 1. Peregrine aims to be the first US craft to make a soft lunar landing since the Apollo programme when it reaches the Moon in February. And, in November, Nasa hopes to launch Artemis 2, its first crewed lunar expedition in more than 50 years. It hopes the new programme will lead to  astronauts living on the Moon this decade . China is also hoping to have people on the lunar surface by 2030. T