Mike

@centyone

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We could be in for a New Year's aurora treat with northern lights potentially visible deep into mid-latitudes tonight and tomorrow (Dec. 30 to Dec. 31). Due to an incoming solar storm, also known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center issued a G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm warning for Dec. 31. This is great news for those wishing to see the northern lights as the predicted geomagnetic storm could spark auroras as far south as Illinois and Oregon (around 50° latitude). The culprit? A CME — a vast plume of plasma and magnetic field — was hurled out into space by the sun on Dec. 29 and Earth is in the firing line. The CME isn't alone, several other eruptions over the last few days have also produced Earth-directed eruptions which are expected to trigger strong geomagnetic storm conditions on Dec. 31, according to Solar Astrophysicist Ryan French.

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December 2024 will see a rare "black moon," a term for the second new moon in a calendar month. The second new moon of December will occur at 5:27 p.m. ET (2227 GMT) on Dec. 30, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory, two days after the waning moon passes by Mercury in the predawn sky. A second new moon is sometimes called a "black moon," just as two full moons in a month is sometimes called a "blue moon" — though neither is a true astronomical term.

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Scientists are sounding alarm bells about the growing number of satellites burning up in Earth's upper atmosphere. When incinerated, the materials that make up satellites give rise to chemicals that are known to damage the ozone layer and affect Earth's climate. Does that mean that we should stop launching craft into space? Not necessarily. Here are four solutions that could help reduce the amount of potentially harmful satellite ash in the atmosphere.

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In the final hours of Christmas Day, the sun fired off four solar flares within less than three hours. The biggest flare of the series, recorded at a M7.3, erupted from sunspot region AR3938 on Dec. 25 at 10:15 p,m. EST (0315 GMT on Dec. 26). Solar flares are ranked and categorized by their power on a 4-level classification scale, with M-class the second strongest to the beastly X-class at the top. According to Spaceweather.com, this was part of a group of four different flares that happened within two and a half hours coinciding with three sunspot regions — AR3938, AR3933, and AR3936. In footage of the sun taken during time period, it looks like the lights twinkling on and off on a Christmas tree.

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Have you noticed Mars has been getting brighter and redder in the past few months? On Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025, Mars will make its closest approach to Earth since 2022 and enter its annual opposition shortly thereafter. In addition to providing the best opportunity to see Mars at its biggest and brightest, this will be the best time for sending spacecraft to the Red Planet.

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Everything in the universe is, quite literally, built upon particles, ranging from the fundamental particles that construct atoms that make up everything we see around us to the exotic ones that give rise to elusive phenomena like antimatter and dark matter. The former help us observe and manipulate our world while the latter help us understand it, hinting at profound mysteries surrounding the universe’s creation, evolution and structure. When it comes to particle physics, however, much of the action takes place in giant accelerators smashing particles together at the speed of light. These accelerators are sometimes humanmade and therefore live on Earth — other times, they're of the cosmic sort and exist in deep space. Indeed, over the past 12 months there has been a great deal of exciting particle action on Earth and in space — and we begin our round-up of 2024's particle physics stories with news that sounds more like science fiction.

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Scientists have received an unexpected Christmas gift this year: a potential solution to the mystery of JuMBOs, strange celestial objects that seem not to be planets or stars. Try putting a bow on that! This gift comes courtesy of a team of researchers who believe that mysterious JuMBOs (Jupiter-mass binary objects) are actually stellar cores that have been violently "unwrapped" by massive, powerful stars like kids excitedly unwrapping presents on X-mas day. This could potentially solve a mystery that arose in 2023. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered 42 pairs of these free-floating planetary-mass objects in the Orion Nebula Cluster. They were confused because they weren't associated with a star and had somehow managed to stay in binary pairs. This suggested that JuMBOs didn't form like planets or stars, creating quite the conundrum.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that the centaur called 2060 Chiron is an oddball. The object, which is a minor body that orbits the sun in the expanse between Jupiter and Neptune, has a mixture of ices and gases that make it stand out from other objects in the distant outer solar system. Around a thousand centaurs are currently known, but the 135-mile-wide (218-km-wide) Chiron was the first to be discovered in 1977. Centaurs are thought to have originated out in the frozen realm beyond Neptune, but later moved in-system after their orbits were perturbed by gravitational resonances with the ice giant. Because they move closer to the sun, solar heating can cause certain ices to sublimate, forming a gaseous halo or coma around the centaur, a bit like a comet.

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New research suggests that a troubling disparity in the rate of expansion of the universe, known as the Hubble constant, may arise from the fact Earth sits in a vast underdense region of the cosmos. The issue has come to be known as the "Hubble tension." It arises from the fact that there are two ways to calculate the Hubble constant at the universe's current age, but these methods do not agree. The team behind this research suggests that this issue arises from the fact that our galaxy, the Milky Way, sits in an underdense region or "supervoid." That would mean that space would appear to expand faster in this "Hubble bubble," officially known as the Keenan-Barger-Cowie (KBC) supervoid (also slightly unflatteringly referred to as "the local hole") thus skewing our observations.

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Missed the Geminid meteor shower earlier this month? Don't worry. We're in for a little pre-Christmas stargazing treat. The Ursid meteor shower — the final one of the year — is predicted to peak in the early morning hours of Sunday (Dec. 22). As far as meteor showers go, the Ursids aren't known to be particularly active. If viewing conditions are perfect, you might see upwards of 10 meteors per hour, according to In-the-Sky.org. But this year, the last quarter moon will interfere with the show, so it's best to keep expectations low — say, maybe five meteors per hour.

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Probing a distant galaxy like a "cosmic crime scene" with the Hubble Space Telescope after a "tip-off" from the Chandra X-ray telescope, NASA scientists have discovered a strange black hole that is tipped onto its side. The sideways black hole was discovered in the galaxy NGC 5084, a lenticular (lens-shaped) galaxy located around 80 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo. The black hole rotates in an unexpected direction in relation to its surrounding galaxy. The team was tipped off to the existence of this black hole when they discovered two plumes of plasma, one that extends above and below the plane of the galaxy and one that stretches through the galaxy, crossing each other and making an "X" shape. This galactic structure is something astronomers have never seen before.

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Planets can differ from the swirling envelopes of gas and dust from which they are born, astronomers have found. The revelation seems to indicate that the planet formation model favored by scientists may be overly simple. A team led by researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois made this discovery while observing a still-forming planet and the disk of natal material in which it sits. The exoplanet at the heart of this research is PDS 70b, a gas giant with around three times the mass and width of Jupiter located 369 light-years away from us. PDS 70b orbits its star at around 20 times the distance between Earth and the sun, taking 119.2 Earth years to complete an orbit. Just as we expect children to look like their parents, scientists have also expected planets to have similarities with the disks of matter around infant stars, called protoplanetary disks, from which they form and then sit within as they evolve.

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Napping after overfeeding on food is a dilemma many of us will be fortunate to face on Christmas Day. New research has shown that, billions of years ago, some early black holes also had to nap after overindulging. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers spotted a dormant supermassive black hole that existed just 800 million years after the Big Bang. This cosmic monster passed out after a particularly large meal of galactic gas and dust. The black hole is extraordinary for its monstrous size. With a mass around 400 million times that of the sun, it is the most massive black hole seen by the JWST in the early universe. The discovery, published on Wednesday (Dec. 18) in the journal Nature, further complicates the mystery of how supermassive black holes got so massive so quickly in the early universe.

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Astronomers have discovered the first binary stars orbiting a supermassive black hole. The stellar pairing in question orbits the cosmic titan at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. The binary stars, designated D9, were found in data collected by the Very Large Telescope (VLT), located atop Cerro Paranal, an 8,645-foot-tall (2,635-meter) mountain in Chile's Atacama Desert. By measuring their velocity, the team behind the discovery was surprised to find they were two stars, not one. The fact that these binary stars so near Sgr A* have survived the tremendous gravity of this black hole indicates that these environments may actually be stable enough to allow for the birth of planets, the scientists behind this discovery say. "Black holes are not as destructive as we thought," research lead author and University of Cologne scientist Florian Peißker said in a statement.

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Sunspots, which are temporarily darkened areas on the surface of the sun, are the result of intense magnetic fields generated through the movement of materials within the sun. In other words, they can tell us indirectly about what's happening within our home star. And importantly, these spots aren't unique to the sun — astronomers have observed this behaviour in a number of stellar bodies in our galactic vicinity. Those are more generally known as starspots, and can tell us about the interiors of their respective stars, too. Starspots in general can last from days to months, and can migrate across the surface of their star. Tracking the behaviour of sunspots on the sun is important because increased sunspot activity is associated with the increased emission of charged particles from the sun — and this activity can have drastic consequences for our technology on Earth.

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Of all the planets in our solar system, Saturn is by far the mooniest. And that's saying a lot. Sure, we're here in our corner with our single friend, The Moon™, but Neptune wanders the universe with 16 known companions, Uranus boasts 28 of its own, and there are a whopping 95 moons in the Jovian neighborhood. But Saturn? It's in a different league. This ringed world has 146 of these natural satellites. Yet, you may be surprised to know that even with such a lovely Saturnian selection, scientists are mostly pining over just one.

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The Geminid meteor shower, one of the most prolific meteor showers of the year peaks tonight, Dec. 13. Famed for its bright, vividly colored meteors, the Geminids promise a spectacle as Earth passes through the debris left behind by asteroid 3200 Phaethon. Under optimal conditions, the Geminids can produce up to 120 meteors per hour, but this year's near full-moon will likely wash out fainter meteors, reducing visibility. Still, if you have clear skies, it's worth braving the chill for a glimpse of this celestial treat.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has spent more than thirty years providing some of the most incredible images of the known universe, but it's only for the last ten that scientists have pointed its gaze at our solar system's outer planets to observe them like never before. For the past decade, NASA's Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program (OPAL) has been obtaining detailed views of the long-term changes in the skies of the four closest giants to Earth: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, each home to a unique set of atmospheric variables. OPAL data has allowed astronomers to observe weather patterns and seasons of these outer planets to better understand their dynamics and changes over time.

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Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) gave an update on the downed Ingenuity Mars helicopter on Wednesday (Dec. 11) during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, D.C. After traveling to Mars attached to the Perseverance rover, Ingenuity began a test flight campaign to prove that powered flight in the thin Martian atmosphere was possible. After almost three years of operating on the Red Planet, Ingenuity crashed during its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, suffering rotor damage that rendered it incapable of ever flying again.

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The chance of liquid oceans hiding beneath the surface of moons orbiting Uranus has enticed NASA to begin planning a new mission that will send a spacecraft to the ice giant. The mission is still in the conceptual planning stage. If the mission moves forward, it would be only the second in history to visit Uranus, after Voyager 2 flew by in 1986. And if it finds liquid water oceans inside Uranus's moons, we might have the answer to a profound question to aid our search for life among the stars. Doug Hemingway, a planetary scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) who has developed an ocean-finding computer model for the Uranus mission, says finding liquid water oceans in Uranus's moons could mean that there are more worlds across our galaxy that hold a key ingredient for life than we know. "Discovering liquid water oceans inside the moons of Uranus would transform our thinking about the range of possibilities for where life could exist," Hemingway said in a statement.

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