Tag: Astronomy

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Super-wide-angle sky survey celebrates ‘first light’

ZTF first light
The Zwicky Transient Facility captured this “first light” image on Nov. 1. The Orion Nebula is at lower right. Computers searching these images for quick-changing events are trained to recognize and ignore non-astronomical artifacts such as the vertical lines seen here. (Caltech Optical Observatories)

A sky survey that draws upon the data-crunching skills of researchers at the University of Washington has reached a milestone known as “first light” — and the view is awesome.

The Zwicky Transient Facility takes super-wide-angle pictures of the night sky, using a robotic camera hooked up to the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in the mountains near San Diego.

“First light” occurs when astronomers capture their first image with a new observing instrument. ZTF’s first-light image, taken on Nov. 1, shows a wide swath of the sky that includes the Orion Nebula.

Each ZTF exposure covers a sky area equal to 247 full moons, or 47 square degrees, resulting in an image that’s bigger than 24,000 by 24,000 pixels at full resolution. The camera can cover the entire northern sky in the course of three nights, and scan the visible plane of the Milky Way twice each night.

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Alien hunters track strange radio bursts

Green Bank Telescope
Intriguing signals have been picked up via West Virginia’s Green Bank Telescope. (NRAO Photo)

Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million initiative aimed at stepping up the search for alien signals, says it’s picked up an intriguing series of 15 fast radio bursts emanating from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away.

It’s way too early to claim that the signals from the galaxy, which hosts a radio source known as FRB 121102, constitute the kind of evidence sought for decades by researchers specializing in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

But Breakthrough Listen’s researchers say that possibility can’t yet be ruled out.

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Strange signals from space spark interest

Arecibo telescope
The 1,000-foot radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory played a role in “Contact.” (UPRA Photo)

The 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory will take a closer look at a red dwarf star known as Ross 128 after picking up what one astronomer said were “some very peculiar signals” during a 10-minute observing session in May.

“The signals consisted of broadband quasi-periodic non-polarized pulses with very strong dispersion-like features,” Abel Mendez, a planetary astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, said in an online advisory. Mendez is also director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory.

Mendez said the signal did not appear to be earthly interference, “since they are unique to Ross 128, and observations of other stars immediately before and after did not show anything similar.”

He said the most likely explanations for the signals are that they’re flare-type emissions from the star, or emissions from another object in the field of view, or a radio burst from a satellite in high orbit.

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Alaska Airlines will chase total solar eclipse

Total solar eclipse
The black disk of a total solar eclipse hangs over the clouds during an Alaska Airlines flight in 2016. Passengers on an August flight should see a similar sight. (Robert Stephens via YouTube)

Alaska Airlines has scheduled a flight from Portland to chase views of the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse over the clouds, but you can’t book a seat online.

The charter flight, due for a 7:30 a.m. PT takeoff on eclipse day, will be open by invitation only to astronomy enthusiasts and other VIPs. Except for two seats. Those seats will be given away in a social-media contest scheduled to begin on July 21, one month before the eclipse.

The Aug. 21 adventure follows up on a more impromptu eclipse-chasing trip on March 8, 2016, when Alaska changed the takeoff time for a previously scheduled Anchorage-to-Honolulu flight to let passengers see a total solar eclipse over the Pacific.

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DIRAC Institute plans big-data astronomy

LSST
Artwork shows the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope scanning the night sky in Chile. (LSST Illustration)

A new data analysis center for what’s expected to be torrents of astronomical imagery is taking shape at the University of Washington.

Thanks to contributions from software billionaire Charles Simonyi and other donors, researchers at the Astronomy Department’s DIRAC Institute are getting ready to crunch data from two wide-angle telescope surveys.

The first survey is the Palomar Observatory’s Zwicky Transient Facility, which is due to begin operations in August and will scan the entire accessible sky every night for supernovae and other cosmic outbursts.

The DIRAC Institute will also manage the development of analytical tools for the almost real-time processing of images from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a massive observatory that’s scheduled to start scanning the skies over Chile in 2019.

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‘Alien megastructure’ star caught in the act

Image: Comets and star
his illustration shows a star behind a shattered comet. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

Tabby’s Star – also known as KIC 8462852 or the “alien megastructure” star – is at it again. And this time the world is watching. The star in the constellation Cygnus has intrigued astronomers for a year and a half because they can’t quite explain why it periodically dims. One hypothesis is that aliens are building an energy-generating Dyson sphere around the star, but less way-out possibilities include cometary storms or blobs of circumstellar material. This week, a team on the Canary Islands detected unusual readings from Tabby’s Star, just in time to alert fellow astronomers around the world to turn their telescopes toward it.

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Astronomy Rewind revives ‘zombie’ pictures

Astronomy Rewind at work
A photo of the Orion Nebula from the June 1905 issue of Astronomical Journal, at left, can be matched up automatically with WorldWide Telescope’s sky atlas, at right. (AAS / NASA / SAO Astrophysics Data System / WorldWide Telescope)

A new project called Astronomy Rewind is recruiting citizen scientists to bring decades-old cosmic images back from the dead and restore them to their rightful place.

It’s the latest offering from Zooniverse, a crowdsourcing platform that got its start a decade ago with Galaxy Zoo and has since branched out into the search for Planet Nine, worlds around distant stars, exotic subatomic particles and much, much more.

Astronomy Rewind pulls together scanned images and maps from American Astronomical Society journals that go back to the 19th century, and invites volunteers to classify them by category.

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Amateurs create a video journey to Jupiter

Jupiter video
The Great Red Spot from the “Journey to Jupiter” video. (Peter Rosén et al. via YouTube)

While NASA’s Juno orbiter is giving Jupiter its close-up, a new video based on more than 1,000 images taken by 91 amateur astronomers provides the wide-angle view.

“A Journey to Jupiter” shows how bands of clouds, great red spots and pearl-colored storms whirl in different directions around the giant planet.

The images were captured between December 2014 and March 2015, then collated and remapped into cylindrical projections, then color-corrected and seamlessly stitched together, and then spiffed up with additional space imagery and a soothing soundtrack.

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X-ray probe to study black hole fingerprints

Black hole
An artist’s conception shows the accretion disk around an active black hole. (NASA Illustration)

NASA is committing $188 million to build and launch a space telescope to observe patterns in the X-ray radiation emanating from black holes, neutron stars and pulsars.

The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, was chosen from a field of three finalists in NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program, the space agency said today.

IXPE’s triple-telescope detector system is designed to check the polarization of cosmic X-rays. Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director for NASA Headquarters’ Science Mission Directorate, said the mission should “open a new window on the universe for astronomers to peer through.”

“We cannot directly image what’s going on near objects like black holes and neutron stars, but studying the polarization of X-rays emitted from their surrounding environments reveals the physics of these enigmatic objects,” Hertz said in a news release.

IXPE is due for launch in 2020.

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Gaia satellite charts a billion stars in Milky Way

Milky Way
This image shows stars in the Milky Way, plus neighboring galaxies. (Credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC)

The team behind the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has released its first catalog of more than a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but that’s just the start.

Eventually, the readings from Gaia’s all-sky survey of celestial objects will be assembled into the most detailed 3-D map ever made of our home galaxy.

“Gaia is at the forefront of astrometry, charting the sky at precisions that have never been achieved before,” Alvaro Gimenez, ESA’s director of science, said in an announcement accompanying the Sept. 14 data release.

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