Webb’s view of the molecular cloud Chameleon I
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By USH
This week a very strange sky phenomenon appeared over Turkey. It is said that the apparition was a massive lenticular cloud which appeared at sunrise and featured a large hole in the middle.
The object was spotted over the city of Bursa in Turkey on Thursday, surprising citizens who captured the rare phenomenon on their phones.
Despite official reports stating that the object was a lenticular cloud, many believe the flying saucer-like apparition was a massive UFO but disguised as a cloud.
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:01:27 The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission has experienced its second close encounter with the Sun. It is delivering more stunning data, and at higher resolution than ever before.
The moment of closest approach took place on 12 October at 19:12 UTC (21:12 CEST), when Solar Orbiter was just 29% of the Earth’s distance from the Sun. This movie comes from 13 October, when the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) returned the highest resolution movie of the quiet corona ever taken with any instrument.
Each pixel on this movie spans 105 km on the surface of the Sun. This means that if EUI were to look at the Earth from this distance, our entire planet would span just 120 pixels across. The movie itself contains 2048 across, meaning that 17 Earths would fit side by side across this image.
The corona is the Sun’s outer atmosphere. It is termed quiet when there is little appreciable solar activity such as flares or coronal mass ejections. This movie, and others taken during the encounter, show the dynamic nature of the Sun's million degree-hot corona. The electrically charged gas here, known as plasma, is in constant motion, guided and accelerated by changes of the Sun's magnetic field. The arches of bright plasma in the movie are being held in place by loops of magnetism that burst up into the corona from the Sun’s interior.
The Sun is currently ramping up for a peak in its activity levels, known as solar maximum, in 2025. So views of a quiet corona are likely to become rarer in the coming few years.
The Sun launches a solar wind of particles that streams out through the Solar System. It originates in the corona but the precise mechanism by which this happens is poorly understood. Investigating this phenomenon is a key focus for solar physicists, and one of Solar Orbiter’s main scientific objectives.
This particular encounter benefited from Solar Orbiter rapidly flying in the direction of Earth. This allowed much more data to be downlinked. It also allowed for coordinated observations of solar features to be made with Earth-based telescopes, from 21 October onwards.
“I am very much looking forward to data from all ten instruments being downloaded during the next few weeks, and then the world-wide science community will be very busy discovering new things using this unique data set,” says Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.
This movie was enhanced with Wavelet Optimized Whitening technique.
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:00:00 Last night at 23:14 UTC, NASA's DART spacecraft successfully struck asteroid Dimorphos, the 160-metre moonlet orbiting around the larger Didymos asteroid. About 38 seconds later, the time it took for the light to arrive at Earth, people all over the world saw the abrupt end of the live stream from the spacecraft, signalling that the impact had happened successfully – DART was no more.
Astronomers on a small slice of our planet’s surface, extending from southern and eastern Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula, could actually watch it live with their telescopes. Among those were a half dozen stations joined together for a dedicated observing campaign organised by ESA’s Planetary Defence Office and coordinated by the team of observers of the Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC). As usual, when such a timely astronomical event happens, not all stations were successful in their observations: clouds, technical problems and other issues always affect real-life observations.
However, a few of ESA’s collaborating stations could immediately report a successful direct confirmation of DART’s impact. Among them was the team of the Les Makes observatory, on the French island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The sequence of images they provided in real time was impressive: the asteroid immediately started brightening upon impact, and within a few seconds it was already noticeably brighter. Within less than a minute a cloud of ejected material became visible and could be followed while it drifted eastwards and slowly dissipated.
This video is from observations by the Les Makes Observatory in Le Reunion and shows in a few seconds what took place in under half an hour.
“Something like this has never been done before, and we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. It was an emotional moment for us as the footage came in,” explains Marco Micheli, Astronomer at ESA’s NEOCC.
Dora Föhring, another NEOCC Astronomer adds:
“This was the conclusion of weeks of discussions, meetings, accurate planning and observational design by our team, together with local observers and scientists at all our collaborating stations. This fantastic campaign has produced data that our astronomers, together with the whole DART collaboration, will now begin to analyse to extract valuable scientific information on the effects of the impact.”
As DART’s mission ends, the work begins for astronomers and scientists around the globe, and a new chapter opens for ESA’s Hera mission which now takes a leading role in studying up close the first-ever test of asteroid deflection.
“The results from DART will prepare us for Hera’s visit to the Didymos binary system to examine the aftermath of this impact a few years from now,” says Ian Carnelli, Hera Mission Manager.
“Hera will help us understand what happened to Dimorphos, the first celestial body to be measurably moved by humankind, and ultimately to protect ourselves from space rocks that could one day do the same.”
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