Mike

@centyone

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Astronomers have spotted the largest twin jets ever seen erupting from a black hole. The jets stretch for around 23 million light-years, well beyond the limits of their host galaxy and stretching as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies lined up from end to end. The jets are erupting from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy located around 7.5 billion light-years away, meaning they are seen as they were when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just 6.3 billion years old, around half its current age. The jets that blast out from above and below the black hole put out trillions of times more energy per second than our sun does.

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Better late than never. Rolling in about 6 hours later than predicted, a huge plume of plasma and magnetic field from the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth, triggering a severe geomagnetic storm. The CME hit around 7:41 p.m. EDT (2341 GMT) on Sept. 16, triggering a dazzling northern lights display visible as far south as the Texas Panhandle.

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A combination of powerful solar events has prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) to issue a geomagnetic storm warning for today (Sept. 16). This is great news for those wishing to see the northern lights the predicted geomagnetic storm could spark auroras deep into mid-latitudes (around 50°) and as far south as California, Missouri and Oregon. This culprit? In this case, there are actually two.

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Cosmic dust may have helped to kick-start life on Earth, new research suggests. The findings challenge a widely held assumption that this was not a plausible explanation. The origin of life on Earth has long remained a mystery. Many theories suggest that life emerged from "prebiotic chemistry," in which organic compounds formed and repeatedly self-organized until life as we know it developed. However, scientists have noted that the rocks that make up Earth's surface are relatively deficient in reactive and soluble forms of the essential elements needed for this prebiotic process, such as phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen and carbon.

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New research suggests that this current generation of gravitational wave detectors could "hear" the most energetic core-collapse supernovas at distances thousands of times greater than currently possible, as far as 65 million light-years away, beyond the Milky Way and as distant as the Virgo cluster. If possible, this could help scientists determine if the massive dying star that launches the detected supernova leaves a black hole or a neutron star in its wake. Since the first detection of tiny ripples in spacetime called "gravitational waves" from collisions and mergers of black holes and neutron stars, the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Italy's Virgo and Japan's Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) have opened up an entirely new window on the cosmos and have created a powerful new form of astronomy that allows scientists to "hear" some of the cosmos' most violent events.

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A parade of solar activity continues to flow from the sun this week, opening up more chances to spot the aurora across the United States this weekend. On Thursday morning (Sept. 12), a sunspot region that has not been numbered yet made its presence known blasting off a X1.3 class solar flare. X-class solar flares are the most powerful of their kind, and are typically followed by a full or partial loss of high frequency (HF) radio signals for sunlit locations on our planet. The energetic eruption, which peaked at 5:43 AM EDT (943 UTC), brought impacts earlier this morning with communication bands across Africa, Europe, and parts of Asia. Forecasters at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center will continue to analyze the data to confirm how many more CMEs could reach Earth's magnetic field both from the X-class flare and also a group of M-class flares (the second strongest in class) also generated early Thursday by two previous sunspots, or Active Regions (AR), designated AR 3811 and AR 3814.

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Today, Mars has two tiny moons. But early in its history, the Red Planet may have had a much larger moon, which might be responsible for Mars' weird shape and extreme terrain, Michael Efroimsky, an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., proposes in a paper that has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets and is available as a preprint via arXiv. Mars hosts some of the most extreme terrain in the solar system, including the largest canyon, the tallest mountain and the greatest highland region. This highland region, known as the Tharsis bulge or Tharsis rise, dominates Mars' western hemisphere near its equator. The Tharsis region is about 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) wide and rises up to 4.4 miles 7 (km) high, excluding its massive shield volcanoes, which rise even higher. Almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet from Tharsis sits Terra Sabaea and Syrtis Major, another highland region and massive shield volcano, respectively.

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SpaceX's Starship megarocket will start flying Mars missions just two years from now, if all goes according to plan. "These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via X on Saturday evening (Sept. 7), in a post that announced the bold new target timelines. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions once every 26 months.) "Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years," Musk added in the same post. "Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet."

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Seasonal changes can have a dramatic effect on how quickly Mars loses its water to space, a joint study between the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission has shown. Over three billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, with large bodies of water on its surface and a thicker atmosphere. Today, however, Mars is desolate, cold and dry. So, what happened to all the water? "There's only two places water can go," John Clarke of the University of Boston said in a statement. "It can freeze into the ground, or the water molecules can break into atoms, and the atoms can escape from the top of the atmosphere into space."

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A small asteroid on a collision course with Earth today burned up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere. The European Space Agency (ESA) says a 3-foot (1-meter) asteroid struck the atmosphere and burned up harmlessly on Wednesday (Sept. 4) around 12:46 p.m. ET (1646 GMT) above the western Pacific Ocean near Luzon Island in the Philippines. The asteroid, known as 2024 RW1, was discovered today by research technologist Jacqueline Fazekas with the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded observatory near Tucson, Arizona dedicated to tracking and cataloging near-Earth objects. It was only the ninth asteroid that has been spotted prior to impact, ESA wrote in a post on X .

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A nearby galaxy is shining with star formation in a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The spiral galaxy Messier 33 (M33), also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, after the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and our own Milky Way. Measuring only 60,000 light-years across, M33 is about half the size of the Milky Way. Located nearly 3 million light years from Earth, the Triangulum Galaxy is regarded as a "hotbed of starbirth," forming stars at a rate 10 times higher than the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, according to a statement from NASA.

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This striking deep-sky image details a cosmic cacophony of nebulas, stars and a periodic comet with an orbital period of 85 years. The rare encounter was captured in exquisite detail by astrophotographer Miguel Claro. A deep-sky portrait captured in different wavelengths between Ha, OIII and RGB light, features a large reddish cloud of glowing hydrogen gas from the Sh2-129, known as the Flying Bat nebula. The nebula, with a physical diameter of 271 light-years, seems to have embedded a blueish giant Squid Nebula which spans across the center 50 light-years long. Discovered in 2011 by French astrophotographer Nicolas Outters and located in the constellation Cepheus, the very faint bipolar shape of this planetary nebula (stars like our sun transform themselves into white dwarfs by casting off their outer gaseous) is distinguished here by the blue-green emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms (atoms of oxygen that have lost two electrons).

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We are now coming down the home stretch regarding comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. First sighted at China's Purple Mountain Observatory on Jan. 9, 2023 and independently on Feb. 22 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), this object has been the subject of considerable speculation as to whether it will develop into a spectacular naked-eye sight this fall or whether this potential sizzler might ultimately turn out to be a fizzler. Back in early July, news spread quickly on social media that the comet was doomed. Dr. Zdeněk Sekanina, a Czech-American astronomer and comet expert, published a paper indicating that the comet was in "an advanced stage of fragmentation," even going so far as referring to the comet's eventual fate in the title of his paper as an "Inevitable Endgame." And yet, nearly two months later, the comet still appears quite healthy.

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Mike pfp

This year's aurora season promises to be particularly exciting due to the heightened solar activity associated with the current solar cycle. As auroras are triggered by energetic particles from the sun, their occurrence, simply put, is dependent on solar activity. The more active the sun, the higher the chance of vibrant aurora shows — which is exactly what we can expect over the next few years.

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Mike pfp

A coronal mass ejection (CME) struck Earth last night. At first, it appeared weak and failed to trigger an immediate magnetic storm. But like they say in the iconic fable "The Hare and the Tortoise," slow and steady really does win the race in this case. The persistent solar wind eventually sparked an aurora substorm and created dazzling northern lights displays down to mid-latitudes. But how? "Sometimes slow and steady wins the race! Despite having very low solar winds speeds, sustained -Bz for 8+ hours has allowed for aurora to build and faintly make an appearance down to mid-latitudes," Space weather forecaster and meteorologist Sara Housseal wrote in a post on X.

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A galaxy's outstretched arms form a nearly perfect circle around its central disk in a striking new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The barred spiral galaxy, formally known as MCG+07-07-072, is located in the Perseus Cluster about 320 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy has thin, loosely wound arms emerging from the ends of its barred core, creating a rather unusual shape, according to a statement from NASA. "Rings in galaxies come in quite a few forms, from merely uncommon, to rare and scientifically important!," NASA officials said in the statement.

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The weather on Mars is not a welcoming factor for future expeditions. Yes, it's a harsh, chilly, foreboding planet. The place is no paradise. To make matters worse on Mars, astronauts will be more exposed to space radiation than stay-at-home Earthlings. Why so? Mars lacks a protective magnetosphere and is cocooned in thin air that is roughly one-percent of the thickness of Earth's atmosphere. This ambiance of nastiness lets in high-energy radiation, such as protons, ions, neutrons and gamma rays. The sun does its part by churning out intense bursts of radiation called solar energetic particles, or SEPs. Researchers at NASA and at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado are working on strategies for round-trip Mars expeditions to deal with sun-spitting solar storms.

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Mike pfp

The high-resolution science camera on the JUICE probe, which is ultimately headed to Jupiter, was busy snapping images of craters on the moon and clouds in Earth's atmosphere as the spacecraft flew past our planet to use our world's gravity and re-route itself toward the next stop on its eight-year voyage to the Jovian system. JUICE, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, is a European Space Agency mission to the gas planet that launched in April of 2023. The spacecraft's route to Jupiter is a circuitous one, however, with visits first to Earth and Venus. Those visits are meant to allow for gravitational assists that help JUICE build up enough velocity to expel itself from the inner solar system with minimal fuel and toward a rendezvous with Jupiter in July 2031.

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Mike pfp

Scientists have found a key process required for superconductivity occurring at higher temperatures than previously thought. It could be a small but significant step in the search for one of the "holy grails" of physics, a superconductor that operates at room temperature. The discovery, made inside the unlikely material of an electrical insulator, reveals electrons pairing up at temperatures of up to minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius) — one of the secret ingredients to the near-lossless flow of electricity in extremely cold superconducting materials. So far, the physicists are baffled by why this is happening. But understanding it could help them find room-temperature superconductors. The researchers published their findings Aug. 15 in the journal Science.

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Our visual knowledge of the current North Star (because of Earth's axial wobble, the title passes to different stars over the eons) runs deep. Artists, old and new, have depicted Polaris shining in their paintings, astrophotographers have imaged it from their backyards and scientists have pointed their instruments at it for decades. But what's special about these new Polaris views, courtesy of the CHARA Array on Mount Wilson in California, has to do with resolution. The special thing about CHARA is, as touched on, its telescopes work in tandem with one another. Their light data is combined in a central facility to provide one whole, clear picture of a source. It's as though the sextet of worker telescopes forms one ultimate telescope with a diameter of 330 meters (1,083 feet). And because of this, the project's image resolution — specifically, angular resolution — is excellent.

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