The Draconid meteor shower is one of the least active and is only visible in the northern hemisphere. With the moon in its last quarter and the sky being clear and dark, you may see approximately 10 meteors per hour!

Understand meteor showers

Meteors can be understood as bursts of light caused by space debris colliding with our atmosphere.

When the Earth passes through clouds of debris left by comets, meteor showers occur in the sky.

Tiny grains of debris penetrate our atmosphere at such high speed that the friction between them and the air heats up and produces a flash of light across the sky.

Comet 21P, also known as Giacobini-Zinner, orbits the sun every 6.5 years and last passed by the Earth in 2018. This comet’s debris causes The Draconids, also known as the Giacobinids.

These are also named after the Draco constellation from which they emanate.

How to watch the Draconid Meteor Shower?

As with any other meteor shower, these meteors will be seen in the sky.

The optimal conditions for viewing are a cloudless twilight away from urban areas. After midnight is the optimal time to observe precipitation.

Plan a pleasant outing with your loved ones and wait for the shower to arrive. If meteors traverse the sky in front of you, you will observe them.

Want to watch the constellation Draco?

The Summer Triangle can be used to locate the source of the Draconid meteor shower in the constellation Draco.

Three brilliant stars comprise the triangle: Altair, Deneb, and Vega. It is visible in the east once the sun has set.

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Draw a line from Altair, the closest star in the triangle to the horizon, to Vega, the star in the upper right, and you will reach Draco in short order.

Alternatively, Draco can be located by using the constellation Ursa Major, specifically the Plough or the Big Dipper.

Follow the line created by uniting the two outer stars of the Big Dipper’s bowl to Polaris, the north star. Once you reach Polaris, draw a line perpendicular and to the left; this will lead you to Draco.

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Washington, [United States], January 21 (ANI): Antarctica is a difficult area to operate due to its extreme temperature, isolation, and wildness. However, it is one of the best locations in the world for meteorite hunting. This is partially due to the fact that Antarctica is a desert and its dry climate restricts the amount of weathering meteorites undergo. In addition to the dry circumstances, the terrain is ideal for meteorite searching, as the meteorites show out against the white plains. Even when meteorites descend under the ice, the churning motion of the glaciers against the rock below helps to re-expose them near the surface of the continent’s blue ice fields.

A team of international scientists who have just returned from Antarctica can witness to the continent’s friendliness to meteorite hunters: they brought back five new meteorites, including one that weighs 16.7 pounds (7.6 kg).

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Maria Valdes, a research scientist at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, estimates that, among the approximately 45,000 meteorites recovered from Antarctica in the past century, just a few hundred are of this size or greater. “Size does not necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even microscopic micrometeorites can be immensely scientifically significant,” adds Valdes. “However, the discovery of a large meteorite like this one is quite rare and very exciting.”

Valdes was one of four scientists on the trip, which was led by Vinciane Debaille of the Université libre de Bruxelles (FNRS-ULB); Maria Schonbachler (ETH-Zurich) and Ryoga Maeda rounded out the study team (VUB-ULB). The researchers were the first to investigate potential new meteorite locations mapped by ULB glaciology graduate student Veronica Tollenaar using satellite images.

Scientists have found meteorites from the depths of Antarctica Blue Ice, an area with strong winds where the glaciers get ablated, with one of them weighing 7.6 kg. Read more here#Antartica #Meteorite #CelestialObjects https://t.co/hqnpg1R2Xv

— The Telegraph (@ttindia) January 19, 2023

“Exploring unfamiliar regions is a thrilling adventure,” says Debaille, “but we had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is considerably more challenging than the beauty of satellite photographs.” Despite planning their journey for Antarctica’s summer in late December, the average temperature was 14 degrees Fahrenheit (-10 degrees Celsius). Valdes writes that on several days of their tour, Chicago was colder than Antarctica. However, spending days riding snowmobiles, trudging across ice fields, and sleeping in a tent made the Antarctic weather seem more harsh.

The five meteorites collected by the team will be investigated at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences; in the meantime, micrometeorite-containing silt was divided among the researchers for examination at their respective universities.

Valdes is excited to see the results of the meteorite analyses because “studying meteorites helps us better comprehend our role in the universe. When we have a larger sample size of meteorites, we can better comprehend our Solar System and ourselves.

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The joint NASA-JAXA Geotail spacecraft has been in orbit for 30 years, but its mission operations have ended because its last data recorder broke.

Since its launch on July 24, 1992, Geotail has been in orbit around Earth, gathering a huge amount of information about the structure and behaviour of the magnetosphere, the protective magnetic bubble around Earth. Geotail was supposed to run for four years, but the mission was extended several times because the data it sent back was so good that it was used in more than a thousand scientific papers.

After 30 years, it’s time for the Geotail mission to retire.

Launched in 1992 to study Earth's magnetosphere, Geotail – the 1st joint NASA/JAXA mission – has long outlived its planned 4-year lifetime, contributing to over 1,000 science publications. More: https://t.co/O3u0ezNzmY pic.twitter.com/gCR4f4JFfG

— NASA Sun & Space (@NASASun) January 18, 2023

One of Geotail’s two data recorders broke in 2012, but the other one kept working until June 28, 2022, when something strange happened. After a failed attempt to fix the recorder remotely, the mission stopped running on November 28, 2022.

“Geotail has been a very useful satellite, and it was the first joint NASA-JAXA mission,” said Don Fairfield, emeritus space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and NASA’s first project scientist for Geotail until he retired in 2008. “The mission helped us learn a lot about how the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field work together to make magnetic storms and auroras.”

With a long orbit, Geotail sailed through the invisible edges of the magnetosphere. It studied the physical processes at work there to learn more about how energy and particles from the Sun reach Earth. Scientists learned a lot from Geotail. For example, it helped them figure out how quickly material from the Sun gets into the magnetosphere, what physical processes are going on at the edge of the magnetosphere, and where oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminium are in the lunar atmosphere.

The mission also helped figure out where a process called “magnetic reconnection” happens. Magnetic reconnection is a major way that material and energy from the Sun get into the magnetosphere, and it is one of the things that causes the aurora. This discovery paved the way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, which started in 2015.

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Over the years, Geotail worked with many of NASA’s other space missions, such as MMS, Van Allen Probes, the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission, Cluster, and Wind. With an orbit that took it as far as 120,000 miles from Earth at times, Geotail helped scientists get a full picture of how events in one area affect other areas by giving them data from faraway parts of the magnetosphere. Geotail was also combined with observations made on the ground to confirm where and how auroras form.

Even though Geotail is done gathering new data, scientists are still making new discoveries. In the coming years, scientists will keep looking at Geotail’s data.

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A galaxy buried deep in space sent out a radio signal about 8.8 billion years ago, when the universe was only 4.9 billion years old and still pretty young. The signal came from atomic hydrogen and gave hints about how stars were made. It waited for an eternity for someone to feel its presence. Researchers were able to find it with the help of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in Pune.

Astronomers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru and Canada’s McGill University recently used data from the GMRT to find this signal coming from a faraway galaxy.

IISc says that this is especially interesting because it is the first time that a signal like this has been picked up from such a long way away in space. This is also the first time that strong lensing of 21 cm emission from a galaxy has been found and confirmed.

So you don’t get too confused by all the astronomy terms, we’ll explain things in more detail below.

Atomic hydrogen is used as fuel when stars are being made. When hot, ionised gas from the space around the galaxy falls onto it, it cools and turns into atomic hydrogen, which then turns into molecular hydrogen, which leads to the formation of stars.

This atomic hydrogen sends out radio waves with a wavelength of 21 cm. Low-frequency radio telescopes like the GMRT can easily pick up these waves. So, 21 cm emission is a direct way to find out how much atomic gas is in both close and far galaxies.

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But the radio signals coming from galaxies so far away are so weak that it is almost impossible to find them or study star formation in those galaxies with the telescopes we have now.This is where gravitational lensing, a natural process, helps the scientists out.

“Gravitational lensing makes the signal from a faraway object bigger, which lets us look back into the early universe. In this case, the signal is bent because there is another galaxy between the target and the observer, which is a big body. This effectively makes the signal 30 times stronger, so the telescope can pick it up,” said Nirupama Roy, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at IISc.

Great graph on the Ionosphere #HamRadio #RadioWaves #Ionosphere pic.twitter.com/2WnzzP7SvP

— Ham Radio Basics (@HamRadioBasics) January 17, 2023

Thanks to gravitational lensing, the data from the GMRT shows that it is possible to see galaxies far away. Even with the low-frequency radio telescopes we have now, it opens the door to many new and exciting ways to look at how galaxies and stars change over time.

The results have been written up in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices.

The post Indian Astronomers Detect 8.8 Billion-Year-Old Radio Signal—the Farthest One Ever!—Using Pune-Based Telescope appeared first on Republic Aeon.

The moment a star gets torn apart by a black hole and transformed into a doughnut shape has been captured on film. The researchers involved in the discovery have remarked that it is teaching them a great deal about black holes and that it is “exactly at the interface of the known and the unknown.”

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The gravity of a black hole is so strong that not even light can flee from it.

Their presence can be inferred from the way they affect other stuff, like stars, even though they cannot be directly observed using telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

Astronomers using @NASAHubble have recorded a star’s final moments as it gets gobbled up by a black hole. Stellar shredding like this happens only a few times in every 100,000 years in any given galaxy with a supermassive black hole center: https://t.co/ZhZK4MRK1n #AAS241 pic.twitter.com/GWuL4wJVmF

— NASA (@NASA) January 13, 2023

Even with all the new information we have on black holes, we still have a lot to learn about them. However, the finding of a black hole whirling a star into a doughnut shape has helped us understand them better. Hubble Space Telescope observations revealed the star’s demise at the hands of a black hole about 300 Myr away.

The post Astronomers discover a black hole 300 million light years distant that is bending a star into a doughnut shape. appeared first on Republic Aeon.

Don’t freak out if you look up at the night sky in the next month and see a tiny green light. Aliens haven’t landed. NASA and astronomers say that a rare green comet will pass by Earth this week. It will be visible in the night sky for almost a month.

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was found in March of last year. At that time, it was already inside Jupiter’s orbit. It stands out because it glows green.
NASA scientists said that the comet will be at its closest point to the sun, called perihelion, on January 12. This means that people in the Northern Hemisphere will be able to see it. In February, people in the Southern Hemisphere should be able to see the comet.

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NASA wrote on its “What’s Up” blog earlier this month, “Comets are notoriously hard to predict, but if this one keeps getting brighter, it’ll be easy to spot with binoculars, and it’s just possible that it could become visible to the naked eye under dark skies.”

A rare green comet is expected to pass by Earth this week and will be visible in the night sky for nearly a month, according to NASA and astronomers. https://t.co/kQBl0l23Fy

— ABC News (@ABC) January 11, 2023

NASA says that the comet will move to the northwest on the horizon during the month of January, and it will come closest to Earth between February 1 and February 2. Astronomers say that during that time, the comet will be 26 million miles from Earth.

Astronomy charts show that the comet will be close to Mars in about a week.

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