Eclipse Newsletter
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ECLIPSE NEWSLETTER The Eclipse Newsletter is dedicated to increasing the knowledge of Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology and related subjects. VOLUMN 3 - NUMBER 3 MAY – JUNE 2019 All previous copies of the ECLIPSE are on the mountcuba.org Wed site. PLEASE SEND ALL PHOTOS, QUESTIONS AND REQUST FOR ARTICLES TO [email protected] 1 CONTENTS: CONSTELLATION - VIRGO WHAT ARE THE MESSIER OBJECTS? MESSIER OBJECT NUMBER 44 BEHIVE CLUSTER WHAT IS THE LIFECYCLE OF A STAR? PART 3. BLACK HOLE SPITS OUT HIGH-ENERGY JETS AT NEAR LIGHT SPEED. HUGE “GOD OF CHAOS” ASTEROID TO PASS NEAR EARTH IN 2029. TYPES OF GALAXIES. If you see text in green, my hope is you will do some research. I will continue to use hyperlinks. Just swipe, right click, open hyperlink. Hyperlinks are in Blue. 2 CONSTELLATION - VIRGO The bright star indicated here is Spica, the fifteenth brightest star in the night star. Virgo is the second largest constellation and is visible in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In the Northern hemisphere Virgo can be seen from March to July. Lying between Leo and Libra, Virgo is the only zodiacal constellation representing a woman. Virgo is the second largest constellation. The key to Virgos location is not just following the curve in the big dippers handle but the location the star Spica. Instead of me attempting to telling the readers how to find Virgo, I suggest you view the following. On YouTube – find Virgo Constellation. I recommend Virgo the Maiden. Happy viewing. WHAT ARE THE MESSIER OBJECTS? The Messier objects are a set of over 100 astronomical objects first listed by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771.[1] Messier was a comet hunter, and was frustrated by objects which resembled but were not comets, so he compiled a list of them,[2] in collaboration with his assistant Pierre Méchain, to avoid wasting time on them. The number of objects in the lists he published reached 103, but a few more thought to have been observed by Messier have been added by other astronomers over the years. 3 For a list of Messier objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List of Messier objects MESSIER OBJECT NUMBER 44 – BEHIVE CLUSTER ALSO KNOWN AS PRAESEPE Only 600 light-years away, M44 is one of the closest star clusters to our solar system. Also known as the Praesepe or the Beehive cluster its stars are young though, about 600 million years old compared to our Sun's 4.5 billion years. Based on similar ages and motion through space, M44 and the even closer Hyades star cluster in Taurus are thought to have been born together in the same large molecular cloud. An open cluster spanning some 15 light-years, M44 holds 1,000 stars or so and covers about 3 full moons (1.5 degrees) on the sky in the constellation Cancer. Visible to the unaided eye, M44 has been recognized since antiquity. Described as a faint cloud or celestial mist long before being included as the 44th entry in Charles Messier's 18th century catalog, the cluster was not resolved into its individual stars until telescopes were available. A popular target for modern, binocular- equiped sky gazers, the cluster's few yellowish tinted, cool, red giants are scattered through the field of its brighter hot blue main sequence stars in this colorful stellar group snapshot. 4 WHAT IS THE LIFECYCLE OF A STAR? PART 3. In the March – April edition, I left off with a supernova which is the largest explosion that takes place in space. As you can see from the picture above, there is another object a Red Giant can become. A White Dwarf. That is our destiny. Today, our Sun is a healthy yellow dwarf star. If you want to be precise, it is a “G V star”. This yellow dwarf will happily burn 600 million tons of hydrogen per second in its core for 10 billion years, generating the light that is required to make our planet habitable. The Sun is approximately half-way through this hydrogen burning phase, so its OK, things aren’t going to change (for the Sun at least) for a long time yet. But what happens when the supply of hydrogen runs out in about 4-5 billion years? Although our Sun isn’t massive enough to go out as a supernova, it will still go through an exciting, yet terrifying death. After evolving through the hydrogen-burning phase, the Sun will puff up into a huge red giant star as the hydrogen fuel becomes scarce, expanding 200 5 times the size it is now, probably swallowing the Earth. Helium, and then progressively heavier elements will be fused in and around the core. The Sun will never fuse carbon however, instead it will shed its outer layers forming a planetary nebula. In time, things calm down, a small sparkling star called a white dwarf star will remain. This tiny remnant will have a mass of around half that of our present Sun, but will be the size of the Earth. In the end, we are left with an old Solar System, where little is left of the inner planets. It is likely that anything within the orbit of the Earth will have been swallowed by the Sun as it expanded through the red giant phase. Although the future white dwarf Solar System will seem very alien to present day, some things won’t change. Jupiter’s orbit might have receded with the drop in solar mass, it will remain a planetary heavyweight, causing disruption in asteroid orbits. Using known asteroid data, the motion of these chunks of rocks are allowed to evolve, and over millions of years, they may get thrown out of the Solar System, or more interestingly, pushed closer to the white dwarf. Once the whole system has settled down, resonances in the asteroid belt will become amplified; Kirkwood Gaps (caused by gravitational resonance with Jupiter) will widen, and according to Deus simulations, the edges of these gaps will become perturbed even more, making more asteroids available to be tidally disrupted and shredded to dust. In the next issue of the Eclipse, I will review what causes a Supernova and let the readers in on the final results. I shall call it - Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. HUGE “GOD OF CHAOS” ASTEROID TO PASS NEAR EARTH IN 2029. NASA has ruled out a collision with earth during another flyby near earth in 2036. A 1,110-foot-wide asteroid named for the Egyptian god of chaos will fly past earth in 2029 within the distance of some orbiting spacecraft, according to reports. The asteroid, 99942 Apophis, will come within 19,000 miles of earth on April 13, a decade from now, but scientists at the Planetary Defense Conference are already preparing for the encounter, Newsweek reported. They plan to discuss the asteroid’s effects on earth’s gravity, potential research opportunities and even how to deflect an incoming asteroid in a theoretical scenario. 6 Scientists say most asteroids that pass near earth aren’t more than 30 feet wide, making Apophis, named for an Egyptian god of chaos, a rare opportunity for research. The asteroid will be visible to the naked eye and will look like a moving star point of light, according to NASA. It will pass over the United States in the early evening. BLACK HOLE SPITS OUT HIGH-ENERGY JETS AT NEAR LIGHT SPEED. Above. A NASA image shows the M87 galaxy, in the middle of which is the black hole that was imaged for the first time earlier this month (bottom-most box). The top zoomed-in box shows the shockwaves caused by jets of plasma spewed out from the black hole. A stunning new image reveals two jets of high-energy material being spewed at nearly light-speed from the first-ever photographed black hole. The supermassive black hole, M87 — dubbed Pōwehi — lives 55 million light-years away from Earth in a galaxy called Messier 87. The new image of M87 was released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Supermassive black holes gobble up everything around them. But some particles don't fall into the black hole and instead — for reasons still unknown to scientists — are propelled out of the hole at a high speed, in opposite directions. All Your Questions About the New Black Hole Image Answered 7 When the particles in these high-speed jets interact with gas in the vast, empty space around a black hole, the particles slow down and create shockwaves. Those shockwaves give off radiation that our devices can detect. This photo of M87 shows those shockwaves created by the jets flying out of Pōwehi's grasp — one aiming almost straight toward our planet and the other flying away from Earth, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The high-speed jet that's racing toward Earth is visible on the right of the zoomed-in photo. The straight part of the line reveals the high-speed jet itself; where the line begins to curve — because the particles are slowing down — is where the shockwave begins. The brightness of the jet is amplified because it's traveling at high speed in our direction, according to the statement. But the jet traveling in the opposite direction (on the left-hand side of the image) is moving so quickly away from us that it's invisible. The shockwave it creates, however, is visible and resembles the letter "C." NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope measured the infrared light emanating from this galaxy. That’s in contrast to the radio waves that were stitched together to produce the first-ever photo of a black hole, which was released earlier this month.