There's a new comet in the sky: Here's how you can see it



If you're willing to get up early this week, you're in for a magnificent sight: an early morning comet.

Comet NEOWISE, named for the space telescope that discovered it on March 27, was at first visible only through powerful telescopes. But it has recently brightened enough to be seen through binoculars.

At the moment it's visible in the early morning. But the good news is, this won't be the case for long.

The comet formally known as C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) rises in the northeast around 3:30 a.m. local time and climbs until sunrise.

You can find it by looking northeast toward the constellation Auriga.

In a first, astronomers watch a black hole’s corona disappear, then reappear

It seems the universe has an odd sense of humor. While a crown-encrusted virus has run roughshod over the world, another entirely different corona about 100 million light years from Earth has mysteriously disappeared.

For the first time, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have watched as a supermassive black hole’s own corona, the ultrabright, billion-degree ring of high-energy particles that encircles a black hole’s event horizon, was abruptly destroyed.

The cause of this dramatic transformation is unclear, though the researchers guess that the source of the calamity may have been a star caught in the black hole’s gravitational pull. Like a pebble tossed into a gearbox, the star may have ricocheted through the black hole’s disk of swirling material, causing everything in the vicinity, including the corona’s high-energy particles, to suddenly plummet into the black hole.

The result, as the astronomers observed, was a precipitous and surprising drop in the black hole’s brightness, by a factor of 10,000, in under just one year.

“We expect that luminosity changes this big should vary on timescales of many thousands to millions of years,” says Erin Kara, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “But in this object, we saw it change by 10,000 over a year, and it even changed by a factor of 100 in eight hours, which is just totally unheard of and really mind-boggling.”

Following the corona’s disappearance, astronomers continued to watch as the black hole began to slowly pull together material from its outer edges to reform its swirling accretion disk, which in turn began to spin up high-energy X-rays close to the black hole’s event horizon. In this way, in just a few months, the black hole was able to generate a new corona, almost back to its original luminosity.

“This seems to be the first time we’ve ever seen a corona first of all disappear, but then also rebuild itself, and we’re watching this in real-time,” Kara says. “This will be really important to understanding how a black hole’s corona is heated and powered in the first place.”

Kara and her co-authors, including lead author Claudio Ricci of Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, have published their findings today in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Co-authors from MIT include Ron Remillard, and Dheeraj Pasham.

ESA/NASA's Solar Orbiter Returns First Data, Snaps Closest Pictures of the Sun

The first images from ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter are now available to the public, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun.

Solar Orbiter is an international collaboration between the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA, to study our closest star, the Sun. Launched on Feb. 9, 2020 (EST), the spacecraft completed its first close pass of the Sun in mid-June.

“These unprecedented pictures of the Sun are the closest we have ever obtained,” said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.”

“We didn’t expect such great results so early,” said Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist. “These images show that Solar Orbiter is off to an excellent start.”




Getting to this point was no simple feat. The novel coronavirus forced mission control at the European Space Operations Center, or ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany to close down completely for more than a week. During commissioning, the period when each instrument is extensively tested, ESOC staff were reduced to a skeleton crew. All but essential personnel worked from home.

“The pandemic required us to perform critical operations remotely – the first time we have ever done that,” said Russell Howard, principal investigator for one of Solar Orbiter's imagers.

But the team adapted, even readying for an unexpected encounter with comet ATLAS’s ion and dust tails on June 1 and 6, respectively. The spacecraft completed commissioning just in time for its first close solar pass on June

15. As it flew within 48 million miles of the Sun, all 10 instruments flicked on, and Solar Orbiter snapped the closest pictures of the Sun to date. (Other spacecraft have been closer, but none have carried Sun-facing imagers.)

Solar Orbiter carries six imaging instruments, each of which studies a different aspect of the Sun. Normally, the first images from a spacecraft confirm the instruments are working; scientists don’t expect new discoveries from them. But the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, or EUI, on Solar Orbiter returned data hinting at solar features never observed in such detail.

Principal investigator David Berghmans, an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, points out what he calls “campfires” dotting the Sun in EUI’s images.

“The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller,” Berghmans said. “When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.”

Telescope snaps photograph of 2 planets orbiting baby sun




For the first time, a telescope has captured a family portrait of another solar system with not just one, but two planets posing directly for the cameras while orbiting a star like our sun.

This baby sun and its two giant gas planets are fairly close by galactic standards at 300 light-years away.

The snapshot — released Wednesday — was taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert.

What makes this group shot so appealing is it's a "very young version of our own sun," said study leader Alexander Bohn of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Bohn said he was "extremely excited" about the discovery. "This is the first time astronomers were able to capture such a shot," he said in an email.

The observations can help scientists better understand the evolution of our own solar system.

AI Upscales Apollo Lunar Footage to 60 FPS

As exciting and thrilling as it is to watch all the historic footage from the Apollo Moon landings, you have to admit, the quality is sometimes not all that great. Even though NASA has worked on restoring and enhancing some of the most popular Apollo footage, some of it is still grainy or blurry — which is indicative of the video technology available in the 1960s.

But now, new developments in artificial intelligence have come to the rescue, providing viewers a nearly brand new experience in watching historic Apollo video.

A photo and film restoration specialist, who goes by the name of DutchSteamMachine, has worked some AI magic to enhance original Apollo film, creating strikingly clear and vivid video clips and images.

“I really wanted to provide an experience on this old footage that has not been seen before,” he told Universe Today.

Take a look at this enhanced footage from an Apollo 16 lunar rover traverse with Charlie Duke and John Young, where the footage that was originally shot with 12 frames per second (FPS) has been increased to 60 FPS:

Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'




Airbus-France will build the huge satellite that brings the first Martian rock samples back to Earth.

This material will be drilled on the Red Planet by the US space agency's next rover, Perseverance, before being blasted into orbit by a rocket.

It'll be the Airbus satellite's job to grab the packaged samples and then ship them home.

The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement.

But scientists say it's probably the best way to confirm whether life has ever existed on the Red Planet.

Any evidence is likely to be controversial and will need the powerful analytical tools only found in Earth laboratories to convince the doubters, the researchers argue.

NASA's next-generation Mars rover Perseverance blasts off



The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built — a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers — blasted off Thursday as part of an ambitious, long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life.

NASA's Perseverance rode a mighty Atlas V rocket into the morning sky in the world's third and final Mars launch of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions should reach the Red Planet in February after a journey of seven months and 480 million kilometres.

The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought home in about 2031 in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries. The overall cost: more than $8 billion US.