Big boost for science in latest NASA budget

NASA got an unexpected gift from Congress to close out the 2015 holiday season: a significant increase in funding. The 2016 omnibus spending bill is the most generous in years. It allocates $19.3 billion to NASA. Previous versions of the bill included cuts for some programs, but those were almost completely reversed in the final version approved by the House and Senate. NASA’s Planetary Science program picked up a 13 percent increase to $1.63 billion, and the space agency’s overall science budget increased by 6.6 percent to $5.6 billion. Even Earth science saw an increase of 8.4 percent after much noise about cuts earlier in the year. The new budget includes $175 million for a mission to Europa and mandates the mission carry a lander as well, something NASA didn’t want on the current mission

Lightsaber star

THE FORCE AWAKENS. In the Orion B molecular cloud complex, a young star is still gathering the material that will one day make up its bulk. It shoots out jets of excess gas from its poles, forming a bright beam reminiscent of a Star Wars lightsaber. The jets collide with surrounding clouds of material, producing shock waves and forming a nebulous region called a Herbig-Haro (HH) object. This protostar has formed HH 24, and astronomers are studying it carefully to learn more about how stars form and grow.

WHATS A PARSEC

A parsec
corresponds to
exactly 648,000/
astronomical
units (AU; the
average Earth-
Sun distance).

A UNIT OF DISTANCE. Ignore Han Solo’s Kessel run. A parsec is an astronomical unit of distance based on geometry. Also equal to 3.26 light-years, it represents how far away an observer would be to observe the Earth and Sun separated by 1 arcsecond on the sky. By flipping the system around, astronomers can measure distances to stars by parallax, or how much they appear to move as the Earth travels around the Sun

Astrobabble From asterisms to Thorne-Żytkow objects, we turn gibberish into English

Yarkovsky effect

Cos·mo·drome
from the Greek drómos, or race track A Russian launch site, like the $13.9 billion Vostochny Cosmodrome being prepped for Soyuz spacecraft in that country’s far east. Vladimir Putin wants a new spaceport following disputes with Kazakhstan, the current launch host

Hex·a·hy·drite
A type of magnesium sulfate — like the soothing salts you drop in a hot bath — with six water molecules that forms flaky, fibrous layers and is now thought to explain the strange bright spots in Occator Crater on the asteroid Ceres.

Blue Strag·gler
The result of stellar cannibalism or a collision that turns two old red stars into one massive, hot blue star that looks like it’s lagged in its evolution. These brilliant stars confuse astronomers by finding the fountain of youth in otherwise ancient globular clusters.

Yar·kov·sky ef·fect
Caused when photons from the Sun hit a spinning rock (typically meteoroids and small asteroids) and are re-emitted as heat in a random direction, ever so slightly changing the space rock’s path

Did the positions of bright stars have anything to do with the layout of Washington, D. C.

Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, Benjamin Banneker, a self-taught astronomer and mathematician from Baltimore County, Maryland, helped survey the boundaries of our nation’s capital using the stars as guides. Over the years, a rash of books has flavored this episode in American history with sprinkles of the occult, including sacred alignments of key structures with bright stars. But critics have picked apart many of these claims like crows on roadkill.

Indeed, American historian Silvio Bedini, who wrote the definitive biography of Banneker, notes that “considerable confusion” exists among writers concerning Banneker’s role in the survey of our federal city. Nevertheless, we can still look to the stars this month and imagine something “capital” about them.

Banneker’s role
Banneker’s assignment was to assist Maj. Andrew Ellicott, whom President George Washington appointed as the head of a six-man team. First observations commenced February 11, 1791, and Banneker was the principal observer. Ellicott tasked him mainly with determining the starting point of the survey and maintaining a clock that could relate points on the ground to the positions of the stars at specified times.

Banneker made observations of “about a half-dozen different stars crossing the meridian at different times during the night, and the observations were repeated a number of times,” Bedini says

Exposure to inclement weather, especially the cold, took its toll on 60-year-old Banneker, who often would stay up all night, making observations — until he fell ill and returned home probably in late April 1791.

Triple threat
A parade of bright stars crossed the south meridian during Banneker’s stay, including Regulus (Alpha [α] Leonis), Spica (Alpha Virginis), and Arcturus (Alpha Boötis). According to David Ovason, author of Lost Symbols? The Secrets of Washington DC, this seems “to reflect the central triangle in the plan of Washington, D.C.” (the Capitol Building, the White House, and the Washington Monument).

Alas, none of these stars passes directly over the city at any time, and not any of Ovason’s suggested celestial and terrestrial triangles match up upon projection. Still, people wonder if Banneker saw these three stars as fitting symbols of our nation’s capital. Could anything have fueled his imagination?

Capital triangle?
Nicolas Copernicus named Regulus (the Little King) from the belief that it “ruled the affairs of the heavens” — a fitting symbol, as our nation’s government has political authority to rule over the actions and affairs of the people. Regulus also leads Arcturus and Spica across the heavens. Arcturus (the Bear’s Guard) escorts the Great Bear around the North Celestial Pole. This might symbolize the flow of cosmic justice throughout the night, just as our government keeps watch over its flock and reigns supremely over any injustice. And finally, there’s Spica (Ear of Grain), a just symbol of our nation’s health (amber waves of grain).

Banneker’s attention could have been drawn to this trio of stars by Jupiter, which lay about midway along a line between Regulus and Spica in Virgo, whom we see in a classical dress holding an ear of grain. I mention the description of Virgo because the original design of the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol Building was a female in a classical dress holding an ear of wheat.

So rather than trying to force stars onto Earth, all one has to do this month is look east around 9 p.m. and see the three capital stars that Banneker must have seen (if not measured and identified) in his nightly transit surveys of our nation’s capital.

As always send all of your thoughts to sjomeara31@gmail. com.

MERCURY IN THE EVENING

SHY PLANET. Mercury has a reputation for being difficult to see because it typically hugs the horizon during twilight either after sunset or before sunrise. The chart plots the innermost planet’s positions 45 minutes after sunset for observers at both 35° north and south latitudes for the planet’s three evening elongations in 2016 (except for its April Southern Hemisphere appearance, when it appears less than 1° high). Note that Mercury’s peak altitude often doesn’t coincide with its greatest solar elongation (dates highlighted in white

When NASA takes off for Europa in 2022, humanity can thank this lifelong space enthusiast from the Houston suburbs

THE EUROPA MANDATE. U.S. Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) poses with members
of NASA’s Europa mission team. The congressman gets regular mission updates in
meetings with engineers and scientists

John Culberson got his first telescope at age 12. It was 1968, and humanity was headed to the Moon. Growing up in the Houston suburbs, he saw those Apollo astronauts as heroes. Flat feet and bad vision pushed him into a career in public service instead, but he never turned away from his love of astronomy.

Then, in 2014, Culberson finally got the job in Congress he’d wanted for more than a decade. He was selected chair of the Commerce, Science and Justice appropriations subcommittee, which controls the budget for, among other things, NASA and the National Science Foundation. His goal is to restore NASA to its Apollo glory days.

And he’s just getting started. Culberson wants NASA to go to Europa to find alien life. When they do, he says, it will be a catalyzing moment for humanity that will boost NASA budgets to the level necessary to begin planning for the next step: interstellar travel. Astronomy caught up with Culberson in early January after the omnibus spending bill passed.

Q: Why Europa? What’s driving your interest in these ocean worlds?

A: I believe the good Lord has seeded life all around us as far as the eye can see, and I am convinced that we will find life on another world for the first time in our own backyard. Odds are that will end up being in the oceans of Europa. That’s the consensus of the planetary science community — of the best minds in the space program. They all agree that the one place in our solar system where all the conditions are present for life to have evolved safely and securely, and in an environment that has all the right ingredients, is in the oceans of Europa.

Q: NASA didn’t want a lander on this mission, but would it be disappointing if we went there and didn’t look for life?

A: Absolutely. You cannot answer the question “Is there life on other worlds?” without landing on the surface and testing and tasting the ice and the plumes that are undoubtedly there. There’s no other way to know if there’s organic molecules there

— if there’s life in that ocean — unless you land on the surface. That’s the consensus of the scientific community. I’m convinced they’re right. And you know, since NASA’s a big bureaucracy, it’s difficult to get them to move or do things, so it was necessary for me to write it into law. In fact, this Europa mission with a lander is the only mission that it is illegal for NASA not to fly. And I made certain of that.

Q: What would finding life there do for humanity?

A: When that happens — when life is discovered on another world — that will be remembered forever as a transformational moment in human history. And it will galvanize the human race and the people of the United States to support our space program to the extent that’s necessary to take NASA to the next level. That will allow us to develop for the longer term the first interstellar rocket propulsion to take the first mission to Alpha Centauri. I want to lay the groundwork to see that happen. I want to see us be able to make it safe for humans to do very deepspace long-range flights that protect the health of our astronauts and allow them to do great science. That’s going to require a massive investment in new technology to shield the astronauts from coronal mass ejections and the constant threat of cosmic radiation. And that can be done, but NASA’s not making those investments.

ZOOMING IN ON PLUTO

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft continues to send data back from its Pluto flyby last July. At year’s end, more than half the data remained on the spacecraft, waiting to be sent back to the eager eyes of scientists and the public. The highest-resolution data reveal complicated geology and mysterious terrain, and Pluto’s active ice surface is still delivering surprises. — K. H.

PLUTO’S PITS.
Across Pluto’s heartshaped region known as Tombaugh Regio, new high-resolution images (this region is 50-by-50 miles or 80-by-80 kilometers) reveal a complicated system of pits. Ice fracturing and evaporation is probably responsible for the many tiny indentations. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

NOW IN COLOR.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft caught its sharpest views of Pluto from a distance of only 10,000 miles (17,000 kilometers), yielding black and white views with a scale of only 280 feet (85 meters) per pixel, with the colorimage overlays less resolved, roughly 2,000 feet (630m) per pixel. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

STEPPING ACROSS
The zigzag images here are due to New Horizons’ imaging camera acting in “ridealong” mode with its spectrometer. The pair of instruments sampled terrain from the far west of New Horizons’ view of Pluto to the daynight line known as the terminator, skirting the dark Cthulhu Regio along the way. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Puckish brilliance

The scene is the Huntsville, Alabama, airport, circa 1978. Two astronomers are talking, waiting for their plane. They were at a meeting of the recently formed Space Telescope Science Working Group, hashing out details of what will one day be called Hubble. As conversation goes from topic to topic, they wonder what you could do if you pointed an orbiting 2.4-meter telescope down instead of up.

Both are future winners of MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.” One is Jim Gunn, a brilliant cosmologist known for his contributions to our understanding of the early universe, and for his penchant for rebuilding instruments during the day while observing at night.

The other man is the recently named principal investigator of the space telescope’s premier instrument, the Wide Field/ Planetary Camera (WF/PC). Widely regarded a genius at instrumentation, Jim Westphal was among the first to put a bolometer on a telescope to look at the infrared sky. More recently, he put a new kind of detector, a CCD, into a vacuum flask made from a spaghetti pot and put it at prime focus on the 200-inch Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain.

A full professor at the California Institute of Technology, Westphal seems an obvious choice to hold the future of astronomy in his hands. Obvious, that is, were it not for the fact that by formal training he is a petroleum geophysicist with only a bachelor’s in physics from the University of Tulsa. With his flattop haircut, beard, and flannel shirt, he might look more at home in an oil field, and the skillful ways he turns the air blue would make any roughneck proud.

The two Jims go to work on the back of a napkin. They calculate a down-looking telescope’s resolution, consider data rates, decide how best to use existing imaging technology, estimate the rate of ground coverage, and on down the line. The questions aren’t hard, but they are undeniably fun.

Fast-forward several weeks. Westphal is in Palo Alto, California, when a high-ranking Lockheed executive invites him to lunch. Sitting in the executive dining room, Westphal’s host suddenly becomes serious. “Westphal, you are too smart for your own damned good! And watch what you say when you are sitting in airports!”

It seems the earlier conversation was overheard and was creating a stir among people worried about security leaks. It troubled them that a couple of civilians could deduce the existence of the Keyhole KH-11 spy satellite and correctly describe its capabilities, all during a few minutes of casual conversation.

I met Westphal some years later when he hired me to work with the WF/PC team. Jim was a storyteller, and the time he got the spies worried was a story he loved to retell. It said a lot about who he was.

Jim reveled in the very idea of physics. You can’t hide physics, and you certainly can’t hide from it. In a debate between physics and politics, physics wins. Every single time. I think it confused him that anyone could ever forget such an obvious and fundamental fact. But he knew it when they did! The man could smell manure a mile away

Whether sitting at a telescope or lowering a camera into Old Faithful (yes, really), Westphal took an almost childlike joy in the world. His highest praise was to call something “really neat.” He heralded good news by exclaiming, “Science and engineering triumphing over ignorance and superstition!” That enthusiasm was contagious.

I recall a night in Hawaii when he led the entire WF/PC science team out onto recently cooled lava — “Look at the red glow coming from the crack under your feet!” — to watch molten rock pour into the ocean. He knew it was against the rules, but since the rangers left at sundown, he also knew that no one would stop us.

Ask Westphal for advice, and nine times out of 10 he would say, “If you aren’t having fun, you aren’t doing it right!” Jim didn’t care much about hierarchy. He did care about competence, and he earned the fierce devotion of the people who worked with and for him. I recall someone asking him how he assembled such a talented group and coaxed them into doing such remarkable things. Managers could learn a lot from his answer: “You find really clever people. You provide them with resources. You protect them from nonsense. And then you get the hell out of their way!”

I owe Jim Westphal my career. More than that, I owe him my understanding of what intellectual integrity looks like.

Jim didn’t live to see Hubble’s 25th anniversary. He died in September 2004. I don’t know that I heard his name mentioned during any of last year’s official Hubble commemorations.

But those of us who were there know that he is a huge part of Hubble’s soul

Jellyfish Nebula’s inky injection created a pulsar

STELLAR SHOCK.
Every star eventually exhausts its fuel, but only large stars implode after using up their thermonuclear supply. Then their outer layers collapse on the newly formed neutron star and shoot back out as a supernova explosion. Sometime within the past 30,000 years, this process created the Jellyfish Nebula and what scientists think is a rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, at its southern edge known as J0617. This composite image (inset) combines new Chandra X-ray Observatory data (shown in blue), with Sloan Digital Sky Survey imagery (all other colors) to show that a circular structure (faint blue) surrounds the pulsar, which also shoots out a large jetlike feature. Scientists say the ring could be a sign that highspeed winds were shot out and then slowed abruptly; or the ring might be like a shock wave sprinting out ahead.

Rocky discoveries on Mount Sharp are puzzling

As NASA’s Curiosity rover ascends Mount Sharp — the 3-mile-high (5 kilometers) pile of layered sedimentary rock inside Mars’ Gale Crater
— it continues to surprise scientists.
In mid-December, Curiosity’s science team announced the probe’s discovery of huge concentrations of silica, a rock-forming mineral made of silicon and oxygen that on Earth often appears as quartz. Some rocks contain up to 90 percent silica, dwarfing the levels seen on the mountain’s lower slopes.

“These high-silica compositions are a puzzle,” says team member Albert Yen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “You can boost the concentration of silica either by leaching away other ingredients while leaving the silica behind, or by bringing in silica from somewhere else. [Both] of those processes involve water.” The findings were such a surprise that scientists sent Curiosity back to the area to study it in greater detail.

ROCK ON. NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered silica-rich rocks in the Marias Pass region of Mars’ Mount Sharp. In this view of the
pass, the lighter area at center is an older section that abuts an overlying layer of sandstone. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

Unraveling the silica mystery will forge a better understanding of Gale Crater’s history. Does the mineral’s presence signify a flow of acidic water, which would carry away other compounds and leave silica behind? Or is it a marker for neutral or alkaline water, which could transport the dissolved mineral into the area and then deposit it?

Curiosity drilled into one rock that adds an intriguing piece to the puzzle. The rock contained tridymite, a type of silica rare on Earth that had never been seen before on Mars. On our planet, tridymite forms at high temperatures and often in explosive volcanic eruptions, raising the possibility that Gale Crater experienced volcanic activity in addition to flowing water

ALMA spots monstrous infant galaxies

GALACTIC COCOON. Astronomers using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile have uncovered a “nest” of huge
infant galaxies born within a weblike structure shown in this visualization, some 11.5 billion light-years away

Astronomers using the world’s most sensitive radio telescope have discovered a “nest” of infant galaxies lying some 11.5 billion light-years away. Lots of very young and very distant galaxies are known; what makes these special is that they’re clustered within a web of dark matter, wrapped within a junction of giant filaments. Moreover, they are monstrous galaxies with star formation rates hundreds or thousands of times greater than the galaxies we observe closer to us in the present-day universe.

us in the present-day universe. Ideas about the formation of galaxies in the early universe suggest that such galaxies should form in special environments where dark matter is concentrated. Without the incredible power of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, however, the search for these kinds of young galaxies was incredibly difficult. Now astronomers using this high-altitude radio telescope in Chile have peered through obscuring dust to reveal them.

The research team led by Hideki Umehata, Yoichi Tamura, and Kotaro Kohno of the European Southern Observatory and University of Tokyo observed a tiny part of the sky in the constellation Aquarius, uncovering these galaxies in a region designated SSA22.

The data from ALMA allowed the researchers to pinpoint the locations of nine monstrous galaxies within a small group tucked inside a “great wall” of dark matter filaments. The discovery will shed light on galaxy formation, and opens up the possibility of finding other, similar groups of powerful, infant galaxies

How cosmic surprises keep blowing our minds

Some areas of science advance in increments. We see slow evolutionary improvements in aeronautical engineering and medical discoveries. But astronomy is different. Here, the universe often leaps out and goes boo! So let’s use April Fool’s Day as our excuse to review the top 20 “pranks” the cosmos has sprung on us

Start with Galileo. Since no one had pointed a telescope at the sky before, he was bound to get surprises. Nobody had foreseen lunar craters or moons going around other planets like Jupiter, as he observed. But when he looked at Saturn, he entered the Twilight Zone. On Earth, there’s no example of a ball surrounded by unattached rings. This was beyond human experience. No wonder it took two centuries for anyone to deduce that they’re neither solid nor gaseous, but made of separate moonlets. So our first April Fool’s prank? Saturn’s glorious rings.

Fast forward to 1781. That’s when William Herschel first peered at a bizarre green ball. No one had discovered any planets beyond the five bright ones since prehistory. No great thinker, no holy book, no philosopher had done more than idly speculate about more planets out there in our solar system. Herschel’s spotting of Uranus was the most unexpected and amazing discovery of all time.

Surprise No. 3 stays with Herschel. Nineteen years after finding Uranus, he discovered the first-ever invisible light. Light we cannot see? It astonished the world. The bulk of the Sun’s emissions are invisible “calorific rays.” Late that century, people started calling it infrared.

We have to credit Albert Einstein with several mindblowers. First, that space and time both shrink or grow depending on the observer’s conditions. This means the universe does not have a fixed size. And a million years elapse in one place while a single second is experienced by someone else — at the same time. Did anyone see that coming? Do most people grasp this even today? As if that wasn’t enough mind twisting, he showed that solid objects and energy are two faces of the same entity

Jump ahead to 1920. That’s when Arthur Eddington figured out what makes the stars shine. Imagine: a new type of “burning.” An alchemic change of one element to another. This nuclear fusion process is so efficient that each second the Sun emits the energy of 96 billion 1-megaton H-bombs. Sure, physicists knew the Sun couldn’t create light and heat by burning in the usual way. But this?

A few years later, Edwin Hubble announced that all those spiral nebulae were separate “island universes.” Granted, this had been suspected by half of all astronomers for decades. It was not a sudden April Fool’s. Still, bam, the universe officially became unspeakably larger than it was before. That’s gotta count as a boo! event.

Then the quantum gang rode into town. Their revelations were astonishing. Empty space seethes with energy. A bit of matter can know what another is doing and react instantaneously across the universe as if no space exists between them. An observer’s presence influences the experiment.

In 1930 came the prediction for a new tiny entity, the neutrino. It’s the universe’s most common particle. Five trillion zoom through your tongue every second. The 1936 discovery of the subatomic muon was equally unexpected. It famously made Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi say, “Who ordered that?”

The 1967 discovery of the first neutron star revealed a sun smaller than Hawaii, whose material is so dense that each speck equals a cruise ship crushed down to the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. And that was a double whammy because it was also the first pulsar. Did any genius foresee that some stars could spin hundreds of times a second?

The surprises haven’t let up. A microwave background energy filling all space? A solid Pluto-size ball in the middle of our planet, spinning faster than the rest of Earth? And what about the enormous hexagon at Saturn’s north pole? Or the fact that cosmic “rays” are overwhelmingly protons?

1998 brought astronomers another stunner. When the universe was half its present age, all its galaxy clusters simultaneously started moving faster. It’s as if stupendous rocket engines fired simultaneously everywhere in the cosmos. We don’t know anything about this antigravity force — but we now call it dark energy

Then in 2010, the Fermi gamma ray telescope found two ultra high-energy spheres, each 25,000 light-years across, occupying half of our southern sky. The entities meet tangentially at our galaxy’s core like an hourglass. They’re violent and utterly baffling.

and utterly baffling. We’re out of room, but the universe never is. For the cosmos — and we who explore it — it’s always April Fool’s.

Musings on the nearest star

If you or I had a spare 75,000 years and a few trillion dollars set aside, we could try journeying to the closest star beyond the Sun, Alpha Centauri. Some 4.3 lightyears away, this triple star system is more representative of stars in the galaxy than our loner Sun. Alpha Centauri consists of a bright double star, Alpha A and Alpha B, and a distantly orbiting red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, which is a shade closer to us at 4.2 light-years.

Alpha Centauri is one of the most brilliant stars in the southern sky, shining at magnitude 0. It is prominently visible to the naked eye as the luminary of Centaurus, nestled near the bright constellation Crux the Southern Cross.

Of the double star components, Alpha Cen A is a sunlike star that is slightly larger and more luminous than our star. Alpha Cen B is slightly smaller and dimmer than the Sun and also slightly more orange in hue. Proxima is a small, reddish star with only one-tenth the mass of the Sun, or 129 times the mass of Jupiter. Proxima orbits its two larger companions once every half-million years.

If you observe from the southern sky or get a chance to travel there, make sure you look at this trio of suns. They are a reminder of both the relative closeness of objects in the universe and its incredibly large distance scale

Whither the astronomy hobby

For years, astronomy enthusiasts have noticed the graying of our hobby. As with other serious fields, amateur astronomy meetings and star parties over the past decade have trended toward an older crowd, with largely the same faces showing up at the same events.

Where are the young people? This question echoes throughout the chambers of astronomy clubs and star party organizers across the United States and the world. On p. 61, two enthusiastic

amateur astronomers — Kevin Ritschel and Maria Grusauskas, one veteran and one youngster — ask, “Where is amateur astronomy going?” Their commentary will no doubt provide you with some intriguing thoughts.

The amateur astronomy hobby hasn’t necessarily gone anywhere, but like other areas of interest, it’s in the midst of dramatic, whirlwind change. The print circulation of Astronomy has held relatively steady at about 100,000, keeping it the most-read astronomy magazine in the world — a title it has held since 1981. Our website attracts about 400,000 unique visitors per month. On Twitter, we have 65,000 followers. Our Facebook following has grown to 1.16 million. So altogether we have the largest audience of astronomy enthusiasts on Earth.

The notion about young people disappearing from amateur astronomy is a false one. It’s true that far fewer people in their teens, 20s, and 30s are going to astronomy club meetings or even to star parties compared with a generation ago, when I was young. But that’s not to say they aren’t sampling and involving astronomy, space, and the cosmos in their lives. Most are doing it in very different ways.

It’s become harder for most people to access a dark sky. Many in society now look through the viewfinder of a smartphone rather than pulling a book off a shelf and reading it. So for many people, the depth of interest has dramatically changed. For lots of folks, it’s enough to hear a bit about their favorite subject on TV for a halfhour or maybe more every week. End of story.

But astronomy, cosmology, and planetary science are in the midst of a modern renaissance. The past generation has witnessed an explosion of knowledge about the biggest cosmic questions humans have posed for millennia.

The astronomy hobby is no fad. It offers a deep and abiding way to know the meaning of it all around you, and perhaps even why you’re here on this planet in an ordinary solar system inside one of 100 billion galaxies we know about.

The way amateur astronomy gets practiced, and the way people participate in it, is in rapid change. But human understanding and appreciation of the universe is not going anywhere. Not just yet.

The Falcon has landed

After multiple tries since 2013 and a total launch failure last June that temporarily grounded the private company, SpaceX succeeded in landing its Falcon 9 rocket after launch on December 21. This is the first successful example of a fully reusable rocket system that can deliver cargo to low-Earth orbit.

This particular rocket will likely be retired as a museum treasure, but it survived its journey intact, delivered 11 satellites to orbit, and passed subsequent ground tests. Rival company Blue Orbital achieved its own rocket landing only a month earlier, but for a suborbital flight, which substantially eases the requirements compared with SpaceX’s low-Earth orbit achievement. Both companies hope that reusable rockets will make commercial space flight cheaper and more viable.

VLA HELPS UNWRAP SOLAR FLARE QUESTIONS

Scientists used the Very Large Array (VLA) to study bursts of radio waves that accompanied a solar flare in 2012. Solar flares are bright bursts of energy sometimes accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are eruptions of charged material from the Sun’s surface. Scientists had theories about how flares could accelerate the material from a CME, but supporting evidence was scarce. The VLA revealed that the location of radio bursts matches a predicted shock region where electrons are whipped into speeds high enough to cause the powerful energy release of a CME, matching computer simulations.

NEW SOLAR SYSTEM PLANET RUMORS WAX AND WANE

Astronomers from Sweden and Mexico made waves December 8 when they submitted a paper claiming the existence of an object that might be a super-Earth in the outer solar system. Their conclusion was based on two observations showing a source zooming across the sky. Only close objects move so quickly. But reanalysis discredited one of their two observations, leaving them with only a single snapshot and no knowledge of any change with time, therefore calling the source’s proximity into question as well. The team withdrew their paper for now, but their remaining observation is strong, so they continue investigating their mysterious find.

SUPERNOVA PREDICTION LEADS TO IMAGE

WE GOT ONE! Hubble spotted these four projections
of the same supernova whose light is warped
by a galaxy cluster. In December, a fifth appeared

On December 11, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to image for the first time a supernova at the place and time they predicted it would appear.

The project began after the Grism Lens Amplified Survey from Space and Hubble’s Frontier Fields program captured the distant galaxy cluster MACS J1149+2223, creating multiple images of a supernova around a large elliptical galaxy. Astronomers refer to this process as gravitational lensing. The cluster lies some 5 billion light-years from Earth, and the supernova is roughly twice as far away

“It really threw me for a loop when I spotted the four images surrounding the galaxy — it was a complete surprise,” said Patrick Kelly of the University of California, Berkeley, lead author on the supernova discovery paper.

The real surprise came when the astronomers predicted — and then captured — a fifth image of the supernova. This was possible because the matter within the galaxy cluster has an uneven distribution, so the supernova’s light can take different paths to our instruments.

“We used seven different models of the cluster to calculate when and where the supernova was going to appear in the future,” explains Tommaso Treu, lead author of the modeling comparison paper, from the University of California at Los Angeles, “and remarkably all predicted approximately the same time frame for when the exploding star would appear.”

After the predictions were in hand, the team used Hubble starting at the end of October to monitor the galaxy cluster periodically. And on December 11, the supernova reappeared as a fifth gravitationally lensed image.

The astronomers have nicknamed the supernova “Refsdal” in honor of Norwegian astrophysicist Sjur Refsdal, who did pioneering work on how gravitational lensing could help scientists study the universe’s expansion.