Space History

Astronomers have discovered a rare type of supernova Icn

Scientists have studied the supernova SN 2022ann, which belongs to a rare type of Icn. This is only the fifth such object known to people. Studies show that before the explosion, the flash “inflated” its shell.

Scientists from different countries have studied the supernova SN 2022ann in the visible and infrared spectrum. It is located in the galaxy SDSS J101729.72-022535, 710 million light-years away from us.

Supernovae are giant explosions that occur due to a sufficiently large number of reasons. They are usually divided into two main types. Type I does not have bright hydrogen lines in the spectrum, but type II does. Icn is a variant of the first variant, which does not have not only signs of hydrogen, but also helium, however, oxygen and carbon lines are present.

According to scientists, Icn-type supernovae are formed due to the gravitational collapse of stars, which before that lose their outer shells. SN 2022ann is only the fifth case of observation of this phenomenon.

Infrared image of Saturn and Titan

The infrared image of Saturn and Titan, which was obtained on May 7, 2009 by the Gemini North Observatory team using the Altair adaptive optics system with a near—infrared imaging device (NIRI), is a complete aesthetic delight.
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Along the perimeter of the massive ring, the outer ring F is faintly visible, which was first detected in images taken by NASA’s Pioneer 11 spacecraft in 1979, and usually remains invisible in images obtained with ground-based telescopes. Several tiny Saturn moons are also visible, which in the image look like brighter dots on the ring system.

Astronomers have found a giant star preparing to devour its planet

Astronomers have discovered a new warm Jupiter HD 167768b around an old evolved giant star. It is expected that in the next 150 million years, the expanding luminary will absorb the exoplanet.

HD 167768 is 5.3 billion years old. The star belongs to the spectral class G8 III and has a mass of 1.08 solar masses, and is ten times the size of our star. Its effective temperature is 4851 kelvin.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that the star continues its evolution, therefore it will move further along the branch of the red giants and expand. In the near future, this will lead to the death of an exoplanet.

By 2030, NASA plans to create a base on the Moon as part of the Artemis program

This means that in this decade we will be able to send people to the moon, where they can not only live, but also fully engage in science!

It is assumed that the base will be built in the Shackleton crater and will include a main residential module, a habitable mobile platform and a lunar rover.

Astronomers used a machine learning algorithm to Classify 1,000 supernovae

The algorithm was applied to data obtained using the Zwicky Transient Facility, a sky survey instrument based at the Palomar Observatory of the California Institute of Technology.

“We needed help, and we knew that as soon as we taught our computers to do this work, they would take a lot of load off us,” the scientists say – “SNI has classified its first supernova in April 2021, and a year and a half later we reached a good milestone of 1000 supernovae.”

ZTF scans the night sky every night in search of changes, which are called transitional events. This concept includes everything from moving asteroids to exploding stars known as supernovae. ZTF sends out hundreds of thousands of alerts per night to astronomers around the world, notifying them of these events. Astronomers then use other telescopes to track and investigate the nature of the changing objects.

Aging stars can create beautiful patterns in the sky

Aging stars can create beautiful patterns in the sky that sometimes look like flowers or insects. A striking example is NGC 6302.

The dying central star of the nebula has become exceptionally hot, the temperature on its surface exceeds 200 thousand. °C, it shines brightly in the visible and ultraviolet ranges, but is hidden from the observer by a dense torus of dust.

The emission of oxygen is shown in blue, hydrogen in green, and nitrogen in red. NGC 6302 is located at a distance of 3,500 st. years in the constellation of Scorpio. Planetary nebulae are formed from the outer atmospheres of stars similar to our Sun, and usually exist no more than 20 thousand years.

“James Webb” revealed the composition of the atmosphere of a red-hot exoplanet

The telescope has compiled a molecular and chemical portrait of the atmosphere of the “hot Saturn” WASP-39b in unprecedented detail, revealing water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium and potassium in it.

The exoplanet lives seven hundred light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Virgo and is located eight times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun.

The presence of such a complete list of chemical ingredients in the shell of the exoplanet WASP-39b gives an idea of the abundance of various elements in relation to each other, which allows us to make assumptions about how it formed in the disk of gas and dust surrounding the parent star in its young years.

NIRSpec “Webb” tool reveals the mysteries of the Universe

Astronomy asks questions about how the first stars and galaxies began to form, and what ultimately led to our existence.

However, even the largest space telescope is only as good as its instruments are, and here the NIRSpec spectrograph comes on the scene.

Its task is to divide the infrared light collected by Webb into its constituent wavelengths and form a spectrum. By measuring how the brightness of an object changes in space at different wavelengths, astronomers can extract a huge amount of information about its physical characteristics and chemical composition.

The first NIRSpec images and data are coming back to Earth. As soon as the painstaking analysis is completed, we will receive new answers to the questions so important for understanding our own existence.

Hubble photographed a strange galaxy with a giant ring

The Hubble mission support team has published a picture of a very unusual-looking galaxy known under the designation Arp-Madore 417-391. It was formed as a result of a “space accident”.

Arp-Madore 417-391 is located at a distance of 670 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation Eridanus. It consists of two spiral galaxies in the process of merging. Gravitational interactions have already distorted the original shape of the galaxies and ripped out a significant part of the matter from them, which formed a giant ring structure. It is dotted with a lot of blue lights. These are clusters of newborn stars. At the same time, the Hubble image demonstrates that the galactic nuclei have not yet merged into a single whole.

Canadian startup develops lunar rover for energy delivery

On November 21, Toronto-based STELLS unveiled its plans to develop a Mobile Power Rover, a rover that will generate energy from its solar panels and can transmit it wirelessly to other vehicles on the moon’s surface. Its MSL-1 rover is scheduled to launch by 2025 as a payload on the Intuitive Machines lander to the southern polar regions of the Moon.

The rover will transmit energy using wireless technology, moving to the customer’s vehicle. Another approach is to leave a wireless charger in the crater, and then force the rover to come out of the crater into sunlight, which will allow it to generate energy and transmit it via cable to this charger, to which other vehicles will move.