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flurry of bright fireballs lit up the skies of North America. "Our SENTINEL all-sky camera picked up 25 bright meteors in
a shower that began at 0620 UT and lasted approximately 4 hours,"
reports NASA astronomer Bill Cooke of the Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This video "frame-stack"
shows the outburst at a glance:
https://spaceweather.com/
"Most appear to have a radiant near Perseus (3.3h,
+43o), leading us to hypothesize an outburst of the September
Perseids," says Cooke. The September Perseids come from an
unknown comet and typically produce no more than a handful of dim
meteors per hour when the shower peaks on Sept. 8th and 9th. This
is the first time they have been caught bursting in this fashion.
Most of the meteors recorded by the NASA camera were magnitude -2
or brighter, i.e., as bright as Jupiter or Venus.
Ongoing analyses of this outburst may reveal the orbit of the meteoroids,
the location of the parent comet (if a comet is indeed the parent),
and whether more outbursts are in the offing. Stay tuned for updates.
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AURORA OUTLOOK: Earth
is exiting one solar wind stream and heading for another. The old
stream sparked bright
Northern Lights on Sept. 3rd-6th. The new one could re-energize
the display when it arrives on or about Sept. 13th.
Sky watchers
from Alaska to Scandinavia should be
alert for auroras this weekend.
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From www.universetoday.com latest news.
Artists depiction of what the TW Hydrae system might have looked like. Credit: Max Planck Institute
You gotta love this about science; someone is always checking your
work. Early this year a new exoplanet discovery was announced: TW
Hydrae b, a huge planet about ten times as massive as Jupiter.
Astronomers thought the planet was in a super-tight orbit around its
host star (TW Hydrae), circling in only 3.56 days at a distance of
about 6 million kilometers, which is about 4 percent of the distance
from the Sun to the Earth.
However, another group of astronomers decided to analyze some new
optical and infrared data to confirm the radial velocity signal of the
planet. Something didn't seem right, so they ran a few more tests and
computer models and determined what they were seeing wasn't a planet.
It was a big sunspot. "Our model shows that a cold spot covering 7% of
the stellar surface and located at a latitude of 54 deg can reproduce
the reported RV variations," the astronomers reported in their paper.
The rest of the astronomical world must agree with the new
determination, as TW Hydrae b has now been dropped from the Planet Quest New Worlds Atlas (a
fun site to peruse.) But nature doesn't like a void, — and astronomers
have been working hard in the planet-search department, — so, three new
extra solar planets have been discovered and added to the atlas, for a
current planet count of 309.
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THIS IS kind of scary, because when this equipment comes back to Earth...what is it bringing with??
Clumps of material have adhered to the legs of the Phoenix Mars Lander, and the clumps continue to change and grow. The science team
has discussed various possible explanations for these clumps.
One
suggestion is that they may have started from a splash of mud if
Phoenix's descent engines melted icy soil during the landing.
Another
is that specks of salt may have landed on the strut and began
attracting atmospheric moisture that freezes and accumulates. The
clumps are concentrated on the north side of the strut, usually in the
shade, so their accumulation could be a consequence of the fact that
condensation favors colder surfaces. Below, compare images taken on
September 1, 2008, or the 97th Martian Day or sol, since landing with
another image taken about three months earlier, on Sol 8.
Click to continue…
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Back in April, UT published an article about using a device called a 'laser comb' to search for Earth-like
planets. But astronomers also hope to use the device to search for dark
energy in an ambitious project that would measure the velocities of
distant galaxies and quasars over a 20-year period. This would let
astronomers test Einstein's theory of general relativity and the nature
of the mysterious dark energy. The device uses femto-second (one
millionth of one billionth of a second) pulses of laser light coupled
with an atomic clock to provide a precise standard for measuring
wavelengths of light. Also known as an “astro-comb,” these devices
should give astronomers the ability to use the Doppler shift method
with incredible precision to measure spectral lines of starlight up to
60 times greater than any current high-tech method. Astronomers have
been testing the device, and hope to use one in conjunction with the
new Extremely Large Telescope which is being designed by ESO, the European Southern Observatory.
Click to continue…
https://www.universetoday.com/
