Astronomy

Saturn imaged on 22 August 2024, showing the narrow tilt of its splendid rings. Image: Luigi Morrone. Saturn is arguably the most popular planet, certainly with children and the public at large. Its wonderful system of rings, well seen through even a small telescope, makes it unique in the Solar System.  Unlike Mars and Jupiter, both of which are currently rising high in the Taurus/Gemini area, Saturn lies rather low in the sky from UK shores, among the stars of the largely Southern constellation of Aquarius. Despite this, Saturn still achieves a reasonable altitude of between 26° and 31° from UK shores when it culminates at about 1am in early September. Town and city dwellers just need to find a reasonably flat horizon from the south-west around to the south-east to view Saturn clear loc...

Extreme Climate Survey Science News is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet's changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? Since the dawn of the Space Age, when robotic probes first left the atmosphere, scientists have known that the solar wind — a stream of charged particles released from the sun’s atmosphere — accelerates as it blows out into the solar system (SN: 8/18/17). Theoretical calculations also indicate that the solar wind’s temperature should drop as it expands into space. This drop does occur, but measurements find that it happens slower than predicted. Observations from Earth have previously spotted Alfvén waves swaying near the sun. Such waves are oscillations in t...

NASA’s Cold Atom Lab leverages quantum technology to enhance space science, exploring gravitational variations, dark matter, and dark energy, and testing general relativity in a microgravity environment.. Credit: NASA NASA’s Cold Atom Lab on the International Space Station uses quantum technology for advanced space science, offering new insights into gravitational fields, dark matter, and dark energy, and testing aspects of general relativity in microgravity. Future space missions could use quantum technology to track water on Earth, explore the composition of moons and other planets, or probe mysterious cosmic phenomena. NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, a first-of-its-kind facility aboard the International Space Station (ISS), has taken another step toward revolutionizing how quantum science can be...

Multi-wavelength images of the SNR HB9, the H II region G159.2+3.3, and the surrounding area. Credit: Li et al., 2024. Chinese astronomers have performed multi-wavelength observations of a galactic supernova remnant known as HB9. Results of the observational campaign, published August 9 on the preprint server arXiv, shed more light on the remnant's properties and its possible physical connection with a nearby region of ionized atomic hydrogen (H II region). Supernova remnants (SNRs) are diffuse, expanding structures resulting from a supernova explosion. They contain ejected material expanding from the explosion and other interstellar material t...