European Space Agency's Euclid telescope launches from Florida, US

An artist's impression of Euclid. Image: ESA.
Yesterday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope aboard, launched at 11:12 AM EDT (1512 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida, US. Euclid was to study dark matter, dark energy, and the expansion of the universe. Costing 1.4 billion, Euclid was to spend about a month traveling around 1,500,000 kilometers (932,057 mi) to the Lagrange point L2 between the Earth and the Sun, the area of the James Webb Space Telescope. There, it would observe about a third of the sky beyond the Milky Way for six years. NASA designed and built Euclid's Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, with a tentative launch date of May 2027, was to provide more refined data scientists could use to correct Euclid's. IPAC senior research scientist Yun Wang stated Euclid and Roman would "add up to much more than the sum of their parts [...] Combining their observations will give astronomers a better sense of what's actually going on in the universe." Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Euclid was scheduled for launch from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz rocket in March 2023. Source: https://en.wikinews.org, available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
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Hubble captures the start of a new 'spoke' season of Saturn: NASA

FEB 14, 2023 In a latest image of Saturn captured by National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Hubble Space Telescope, the appearance of spokes on the planet's rings heralded the start of a new 'spoke' season, according to a statement by NASA. Scientists will be looking for clues to explain the cause and nature of the spokes, the statement said. The suspected culprit for the spokes is the planet's variable magnetic field, the statement said. Planetary magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, creating an electrically charged environment. On Earth, when those charged particles hit the atmosphere this is visible in the northern hemisphere as the aurora borealis, or northern lights, NASA said. Scientists think that the smallest, dust-sized icy ring particles can become charged as well, which temporarily levitates those particles above the rest of the larger icy particles and boulders in the rings, NASA said. Like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and therefore has four seasons, though because of Saturn's much larger orbit, each season lasts approximately seven Earth years, the space agency said. Equinox occurs when the rings are tilted edge-on to the Sun. The spokes disappear when it is near summer or winter solstice on Saturn, which is when the Sun appears to reach either its highest or lowest latitude, respectively, in the northern or southern hemisphere of a planet, the space agency said. As the autumnal equinox of Saturn's northern hemisphere on May 6, 2025, draws near, the spokes are expected to become increasingly prominent and observable, the statement said. The latest image captured by Hubble is heralded the start of Saturn's "spoke season" with the appearance of two smudgy spokes in the B ring, one of the rings, of Saturn, the statement said. The ephemeral features don't last long, but as the planet's autumnal equinox approaches, more will appear, the statement said. The ring spokes were first observed by NASA's Voyager mission in the early 1980s. The transient, mysterious features can appear dark or light depending on the illumination and viewing angles, the statement said. NASA senior planetary scientist Amy Simon, head of the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program said, "Thanks to Hubble's OPAL program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn's spokes this season than ever before." NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observation time devoted to Saturn each year, thanks to the OPAL program, and the dynamic gas giant planet always showed something new, said the space agency. Saturn's last equinox occurred in 2009, while NASA's Cassini spacecraft was orbiting the gas giant planet for close-up reconnaissance, the agency said in the statement. With Cassini's mission completed in 2017, and the Voyager spacecrafts long gone, Hubble is continuing the work of long-term monitoring of changes on Saturn and the other outer planets, the space agency said. "Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season," Simon said. While our solar system's other three gas giant planets also have ring systems, nothing compares to Saturn's prominent rings, making them a laboratory for studying spoke phenomena, the statement said. Whether spokes could or do occur at other ringed planets is currently unknown, NASA said. "It's a fascinating magic trick of nature we only see on Saturn for now at least," Simon said. Hubble's OPAL program will add both visual and spectroscopic data, in wavelengths of light from ultraviolet to near-infrared, to the archive of Cassini observations, NASA said. Scientists are anticipating putting these pieces together to get a more complete picture of the spoke phenomenon, and what it reveals about ring physics in general, the statement said.Copyright © Jammu Links News, Source: Jammu Links News
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Baffling radio signal coming from inside Milky Way Galaxy

Astronomers detect mysterious bursts of radio signals from distant galaxy; Photo: cbsnews

A mysterious intense blast of radio energy has been detected inside our own galaxy, astronomers have said in a new study published in the journal Nature.

The Independent reported that the detected signals are Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) that last only a small fraction of a second, however, it can possess more than the sun itself. Despite the intensity of FRBs, their causal origin remains largely unknown.

In the new study, however, astronomers observed a fast radio burst in our own Milky Way Galaxy for the first time – which is closer than any FRBs that was previously detected and might help astronomers understand their origin.

Scientists have long struggled to uncover the origin of these intense blasts because they are so short, unpredictable and originate far away. But the consensus is they are formed within some of the most extreme conditions possible in our universe — with potential explanations ranging from dying stars to alien technology. 

The bursts of radio energy appear to have come from a magnetar, or a star with a very powerful magnetic field, the scientists who discovered the new FRBs said. 

“This great mystery as to what would produce these great outbursts of energy, which until now we’ve seen coming from halfway across the universe,” said Kiyoshi Masui, assistant professor of physics at MIT, who led the team’s analysis of the FRB’s brightness, adding: “This is the first time we’ve been able to tie one of these exotic fast radio bursts to a single astrophysical object.”

The detection began on 27 April when researchers using two space telescopes – multiple X-ray and gamma-ray emissions – coming from a magnetar at the other end of our galaxy. The next day, researchers used two North American telescopes to observe that patch of sky and picked up the blast that came to be known as FRB 200428.

Pragya Chawla, one of the co-authors on the study and a senior Ph.D. student in the Physics Department at McGill, said they calculated such an intense burst coming from another galaxy which would be indistinguishable from some fast radio bursts. “This really gives weight to the theory suggesting that magnetars could be behind at least some FRBs,” he added.FRBs were first discovered in 2007, immediately gave speculation on what could be able to cause such intense blasts of energy. The new study is the first to provide evidence linking the FRBs with magnetars. At the very least, that could be a valuable clue to the origin of at least some of those FRBs. Source: https://www.daily-bangladesh.com/
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