A black hole with a boarding pass and seat on a plane, (window seat?) a place where you’ll
have two shadows, and bad news for Orion the constellation – these are some of the freshest
space facts we only recently discovered!
One more planet, potentially bigger than Earth, is out there far beyond Neptune’s orbit.
We know which direction to point our telescopes at, but the area is so big it makes the search
long and difficult. Potentially any day can bring the discovery!
In April 2020, a green comet will fly near the Sun and become visible in the night sky
– a little to the right and up from the Big Dipper.
The Gaia Mission has been working on making a 3D model of our galaxy and getting a more
accurate count of the number of stars in it. They thought it was 1 billion, but that estimate
could be up to 400 or even 700 billion stars. Think of that massive number this way: a stack
of 500 billion pennies would reach the Moon and back!
Freshly discovered planet Kepler-16b spins around two suns, so your shadow will always
have a companion!
Jupiter is bigger than all the other planets of the Solar System combined, and you’ve
probably heard that its Great Red Spot can fit 3 Earths across it. Well, the massive
storm is getting smaller faster than we thought – it would now fit only 1 Earth. Astronomers
have no idea why it’s shrunk to less than half the size it was a century ago.
NASA’s Artemis Program plans to send a crewed mission to the Moon in 2024. Only this time,
they want to build the first human base! Once we set up camp on our satellite, we’ll be
that much closer to launching to Mars – that’s why the curved line in the program’s logo
is red!
The largest optical telescope ever is currently being built in Chile. The ELT - Extremely
Large Telescope. It’ll be twice the size of the Roman Colosseum, with optics more powerful
and clearer than all the other massive telescopes on this planet combined. The coolest part:
it’ll help us find (possibly Earth-like) planets orbiting other stars!
FAST is the biggest single-dish radio telescope in the world that became fully operational
2 years ago. This humungous dish could fit Grand Central Station on it! Thanks to its
size, it can pick up the faintest whispers from the cosmos. Like those coming from spinning
neutron stars light-years away!
An unusual flying telescope SOFIA tells us a lot about the planets orbiting other stars…
and it’s on a Boeing 747! This aerial observatory can even be tracked on FlightRadar!
The launch of the James Webb space telescope has seen delay after delay for over a decade
now, but set your calendar for 2021! If all goes according to plan, we’ll potentially
find light from the very first stars and galaxies that formed! NASA says it’ll be the largest
telescope in space and 100 times more powerful than Hubble.
Fast Radio Bursts are big (yet still unexplained) bada-booms somewhere in space that we pick
up only long after they occur. (Because sound takes a while to get to us when it comes from
light-years away!) Within milliseconds, a star spills more energy than our Sun does
in a million years. Later, we pick up the radio signals from such events, and we caught
a repeating one for the first time in 2019!
A space probe called “Parker” was launched towards our own star in 2018. It recently
broke the record for the closest approach of a human-made object to the Sun, and it’ll
keep breaking its own record as it continues its journey to study our star up close! The
probe is named after Eugene Newman Parker, the scientist who contributed so much to our
knowledge about solar wind.
Yes, our Sun produces a massive stream of charged particles that moves at 180 to 750
miles a second. It takes a mere 8 minutes for the Sun’s light to get to us, but light
travels a thousand times faster!
BepiColombo’s mission to Mercury will hopefully arrive in 2025. It’ll study the Solar System’s
first planet and its interaction with solar winds. Launched in October 2018, the satellite
was planned to make 1 flyby near Earth, 2 near Venus, and 6 near Mercury!
The part “Bepi” in the mission’s name commemorates an Italian scientist who came
up with the idea of gravitational assist – using something big in space to move faster or slower.
The next Mars rover – Perseverance – recently got its wheels and brakes mounted. And NASA’s
Curiosity rover celebrated its 8th birthday on Mars. Or would it be “birthsol” since
a day is called a “sol” on Mars? Anyway, after a long 253-day interplanetary journey,
Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in 2012 and is still moving around and studying the
conditions.
A Kuiper Belt object called Arrokoth became the farthest-visited object in the Solar System.
A rendezvous with New Horizons happened 4 billion miles from Earth! That’s 43 times
the distance between our planet and the Sun. The same probe discovered mountains on Pluto
and made us suspect that Mercury is still geologically active.
A spacecraft launched 43 years ago, Voyager-2 has finally left the heliosphere. That’s
the bubble of magnetic fields and particles created by our Sun. Leaving it means the probe
has entered interstellar space, being only the second spacecraft to do so. Voyager 2
started off before Voyager 1 because it aims for a much longer journey.
A billion light-years away sits a supermassive black hole first detected in 2015. It gave
us the evidence of gravitational waves, something Einstein theorized about a century ago back
in 1916. These waves are like ripples on a pond’s surface, only that pond is space-time!
In scientific news that broke the Internet, we FINALLY got an image of a black hole in
2019! But the picture we all saw isn’t a photograph – it’s a colorized image of
the black hole’s silhouette. The data was taken by radio telescopes on all continents
(including Antarctica!) over a 7-year period. The amount of data received was so massive,
the hard drives had to be physically moved, versus being sent over the web. Jumbo jets
did the job, so, turns out, a black hole was riding on an airplane! Did he have to go through
security?
Last year we discovered the biggest black hole we know for now: a neutron star with
an estimated mass of 40 billion Suns. That’s the weight of 1 penny compared with 2 Titanics!
The fastest-moving star record was broken! Our Sun moves around the center of the galaxy
at a speed of 143 miles per second, but one special star was clocked going 745! Apparently,
it was twirling around with another star when that one exploded into a supernova. Left without
this “tether,” this speedy star went sling-shotting through the galaxy. It’s actually going
fast enough to leave the Milky Way and head into intergalactic space! Buh-bye!
We also registered the fastest planet traveling around its star. Imagine a world where 1 year
lasts only 18 hours! Yeah, that two-week vacation of yours would equal just 40 Earth minutes!
Count me out…
The first interstellar comet was discovered in 2019. Comet Borisov entered our solar system,
flew past our sun, and is currently making its exit. Its trajectory took it between the
orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Just popping in to say “hi” to the inner 4 terrestrial
planets! See ya!
Our very first interstellar guest – asteroid Oumuamua – was also seen recently in 2017.
We thought it was an icy comet at first. Turns out, it’s more like a huge piece of rock.
The only astronomical event you can witness with your bare eye is Betelguese changing
its brightness. When it got pretty dim in 2019, astronomers knew what was coming: the
star will soon explode into a supernova, and the Orion constellation will lose a shoulder!
The show will be visible from earth and shine like the moon at night for at least 3 months!
Could happen any day now… in the next 100,000 years! You should pack a big lunch.