Tag: Space

For Science!

Cosmos Magazine has changed its online presence, while still providing the informational and neat articles they’re known for. Here are a couple for this week.

Extinct Arctic rhino found in Canada 

October 29, 2025 Evrim Yazgin Content Sub Type: Focus Topics:

Animals Palaeontology

A near complete fossil rhinoceros has been found on an Arctic Canadian island, making it the most northerly rhino species ever.

Epiatheracerium itjilik [eet-jee-look] is described for the first time in a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The “Arctic rhino” lived about 23 million years ago during the early Miocene epoch.

The new species was found in fossil-rich lake deposits in Haughton Crater on Devon Island which is part of the northern-most Canadian territory of Nunavut. Devon Island lies at a latitude of about 75°N, well within the Arctic Circle. It is also the largest uninhabited island in the world. (snip-MORE)

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Milestone image maps the Milky Way as it’s never been seen before

October 30, 2025 Imma Perfetto Content Sub Type: Focus Topics: Space

The largest low-frequency radio image of the Milky Way ever assembled has captured an unprecedented view of the galaxy, enabling astronomers to study the life stages of stars in new ways.

The data was captured by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.

“This low-frequency image allows us to unveil large astrophysical structures in our Galaxy that are difficult to image at higher frequencies,” says Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). “No low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane has been published before, making this an exciting milestone in astronomy.”

Hurley-Walker is principal investigator of one of the extensive surveys used to construct the image, the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) survey. (snip-MORE, and it’s interesting)

ISS Meets Saturn

Image Credit & Copyright: A.J. Smadi

2025 July 18

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Explanation: This month, bright planet Saturn rises in evening skies, its rings oriented nearly edge-on when viewed from planet Earth. And in the early morning hours on July 6, it posed very briefly with the International Space Station when viewed from a location in Federal Way, Washington, USA. This well-planned image, a stack of video frames, captures their momentary conjunction in the same telescopic field of view. With the ISS in low Earth orbit, space station and gas giant planet were separated by almost 1.4 billion kilometers. Their apparent sizes are comparable but the ISS was much brighter than Saturn and the ringed planet’s brightness has been increased for visibility in the stacked image. Precise timing and an exact location were needed to capture the ISS/Saturn conjunction.

Tomorrow’s picture: light-weekend

Earth will have new “mini moon”, length of a bus, for 2 months

September 16, 2024 Evrim Yazgin Cosmos science journalist

An asteroid is approaching, but it won’t crash into Earth. Instead, it’ll be our planet’s little companion for 2 months before continuing on its merry way.

Asteroid approaching earth, computer artwork
Asteroid approaching Earth, computer artwork. Credit: SCIEPRO / Science Photo Library / Getty Images Plus.

2024 PT5 is about 11m wide. The asteroid was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in South Africa on 7 August.

In a study published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS, a pair of asteroid dynamics researchers calculated the asteroid’s size, speed and path. The researchers determined the asteroid would complete a single orbit around Earth over 53 days before being flung back into outer space.

The asteroid will start its orbit of Earth on 29 September. The bus-sized “mini moon” is scheduled to depart on 25 November.

Many asteroids follow a similar journey, falling into partial or full elliptical orbits around our planet as they pass by. One such “quasi-moon” is an asteroid discovered last year which astronomers believe has been orbiting Earth for more than 2,000 years.

Other quasi-moons make much briefer visits, like the 5m 2006 RH120 which orbited Earth for about a year and 2020 CD3 which was a mini companion of our planet for several years before leaving us in May 2020.

The researchers also believe they know from where 2024 PT5 is joining us based on its trajectory.

“Such orbital elements are consistent with those of the Arjunas, a sparsely resonant population of small NEOs [near-Earth objects] in a secondary asteroid belt found surrounding the path followed by the Earth–Moon system,” they write.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/mini-moon-asteroid-2-months/

Peace & Justice History for 8/14

It’s a busy date, but 3 cheers for Social Security!

August 14, 1935
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, creating unemployment compensation, old-age benefits and aid to dependent children.“We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.”
President Roosevelt signing Social Security Act of 1935 in the Cabinet Room of the White House.
Library of Congress photo
A comprehensive history: https://www.ssa.gov/history/
August 14, 1941
In the German Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, a group of prisoners had been chosen by the camp’s commander for death by starvation. Roman Catholic Fr. Maximilian Maria Kolbe offered himself for death instead of one of the condemned because the man had a family he needed to be alive to support. Fr. Kolbe was put to death on this day by lethal injection following two weeks of starvation.
Pope John Paul II declared him a Saint in 1982.
August 14, 1945
President Harry Truman announced that Japan, one week following the atomic bomb attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.
August 14, 1959
The U.S.-launched Explorer VI satellite recorded the first photograph of Earth taken from space, at an altitude of 17,000 miles (27,400 km)
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Read more: https://www.spaceanswers.com/solar-system/the-earth-from-afar-ten-incredible-images-of-our-planet-from-space/
August 14, 1966
Twenty people were arrested for trying to attend services at the white First Baptist Church in Grenada, Mississippi. They were charged with “disturbing divine worship.” Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) field staff member Jim Bulloch was arrested and his car fire-bombed while he was in jail.
August 14, 1968
400 anti-apartheid students occupied the university in Cape Town, South Africa, to protest its refusal to hire a black professor.
August 14, 1976
Majella O’Hare, a young Catholic girl, was shot dead by British soldiers while walking with other children to confession near her home in Ballymoyer, Whitecross, County Armagh.The soldiers, initially denying they had fired any weapons, claimed that the patrol had been fired upon by an unidentified gunman. But there were serious doubts about the army’s claim. Eyewitness reports failed to confirm it and, unofficially, police investigating the case referred to the army’s “phantom gunman.”
The same day 10,000 Northern Irish gathered at a demonstration in Andersontown, organized by the Women’s Peace Movement (later known as Peace People).Majella O’Hare
How it happened from people who were there: https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/other/1976/murray76.htm
August 14, 1980

After months of labor turmoil, more than 16,000 Polish workers seized control of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk. They helped form Solidarnos´c´ (Solidarity), the first independent labor union anywhere in the Soviet bloc, as the Warsaw Pact nations were known. Under the leadership of Lech Valensa [lek va wen´suh] and others, it helped unite the broad political, social and religious opposition to the Communist government. Long-range look at Solidarity: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/21746

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august141935

For Science!

New feature spotted in brightest gamma-ray burst of all time

July 28, 2024 Evrim Yazgin

NASA’s Fermi Telescope has revealed new details about the brightest of all time gamma-ray burst which may help explain these extreme and mysterious cosmic events.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) usually last less than a second. They originate from the dense remains of a dead giant star’s core, called a neutron star. But what causes neutron stars to release huge amounts of energy in the form of gamma radiation is still a mystery.

A jet of particles moving at nearly light speed emerges from a massive star
A jet of particles moving at nearly light speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

In October 2022, astronomers detected the largest gamma-ray burst ever seen – GRB 221009A. It came from a supernova about 2.4 billion light years away. The event had an intensity at least 10 times greater than any other GRB detected. It was dubbed the BOAT, for brightest of all time.

Now, analysis of the data from that event has revealed the first emission line which can be confidently identified in 50 years of studying GRBs.

The new analysis is published in Science.

Emission lines are created when matter interacts with light. Energy from the light is absorbed and reemitted in ways characteristic to the chemical make up of the matter which is interacting with it.

When the light reaches Earth and is spread out like a rainbow in a spectrum, the absorption and emission lines appear. Emission lines appear as dimmer or even black lines in the spectrum, whereas emission lines are brighter features.

At higher energies, these features in the spectrum can reveal processes between subatomic particles such as matter and anti-matter annihilation which can produces gamma rays.

“While some previous studies have reported possible evidence for absorption and emission features in other GRBs, subsequent scrutiny revealed that all of these could just be statistical fluctuations,” says coauthor Om Sharan Salafia at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics Brera Observatory in Milan. “What we see in the BOAT is different.”

The emission line appeared almost 5 minutes after the burst was detected. It lasted about 40 seconds.

It peaked at 12 million electron volts of energy – millions of times more energetic than light in the visible spectrum.

The astronomers believe the emission line was caused by the annihilation of electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, positrons. If their interpretation is correct, it means the particles would have to have been moving toward Earth at 99.9% the speed of light.

“After decades of studying these incredible cosmic explosions, we still don’t understand the details of how these jets work,” says Elizabeth Hays, Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the US. “Finding clues like this remarkable emission line will help scientists investigate this extreme environment more deeply.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/brightest-gamma-ray-burst-new-details/