February Skies

January Skies

A Super Blood Wolf Moon Will Glow Red In The Sky This January

The total lunar eclipse will be visible from coast to coast in the United States.

By Carol Kuruvilla 
 

Americans all over the country will have front row seats in January to a striking sight on the celestial stage: a “super blood wolf moon.”

After the sun sets on Jan. 20, Americans will be able to see an exceptionally big, bright, red moon glowing in the sky, an event that NASA calls “one of the sky’s most dazzling shows.”

There are three reasons why stargazers are calling this event a super blood wolf moon.

First, it’s a total lunar eclipse, which means the sun and moon will be perfectly aligned on opposite sides of the Earth. The moon will be completely covered by the Earth’s shadow and take on a reddish tint ― hence the nickname blood moon. NASA calculates there will be 85 total lunar eclipses this century.

The eclipse will also happen near the moon’s perigee, a point in its orbit when it is closest to the Earth. This means the moon will appear slightly brighter and bigger than usual, known as a supermoon.

Finally, January’s full moon is traditionally called a wolf moon in the United States, according to The Farmer’s Almanac. Other cultures have different names for the full moons that occur throughout the year.

Residents of the U.S. were unable to see the longest full blood moon of the 21st century in July. It was visible only over parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. A rare super blue blood moon, which occurs when a super blood moon is also the second full moon of the month, occurred in January 2018. In the United States, that celestial event was most visible to people on the West Coast, Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands.

In contrast, January’s super blood wolf moon will be visible from coast to coast in the U.S. mainland, depending on weather conditions. People in Hawaii may also be able to see the eclipse while the moon is rising.

The moment of greatest eclipse, the instant when the moon passes closest to the axis of Earth’s shadow, is predicted to occur about 12:12 a.m. EST on Jan. 21 (9:12 p.m. PST on Jan. 20).

The super blood wolf moon will also be visible to people in South America and in the western parts of Europe and Africa.

NASA predicts the next total lunar eclipse will happen on May 26, 2021.

NASA’s Close Encounter With Mysterious Space Object Will Make History On New Year’s Day

The New Horizons probe is hurtling toward an object nicknamed Ultima Thule in the mostly unexplored Kuiper Belt.

By Carol Kuruvilla 

As revelers on the East Coast celebrate the arrival of a new year, scientists will be crossing another kind of frontier ― 4 billion miles from the sun.

Early on Jan. 1, NASA’s New Horizons probe is scheduled to have a close encounter with the most distant planetary object that humans have ever studied.

The spacecraft, which zipped by Jupiter in 2007 and Pluto in 2015, is now making its way toward 2014 MU69 ― a mysterious chunk of rock and ice in an almost entirely unexplored region of space.

The object is nicknamed Ultima Thule — “most distant” in Latin combined with the ancient Greeks’ name for the world’s northernmost place. The New Horizons mission team said the nickname refers to “a place beyond the known world.” Ultima Thule is roughly the size of New York City and orbits the sun once every 297 years, according to National Geographic.

But it’s Ultima Thule’s location that makes it interesting to scientists. The object resides 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, in the Kuiper Belt. This region stretches around the sun and is home to millions of icy bodies. Scientists believe these bodies are leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago and have remained largely unchanged since then.

“It’s the oldest relic of the solar system we’ve ever studied,” New Horizons team member Marc Buie told National Geographic.

Alan Stern, the NASA mission’s principal investigator, said in a Facebook Live video that scientists aren’t sure what to expect from Ultima Thule. “When we fly past Ultima, we’re going to have a chance to see the way things were back at the beginning,” he said. “It’s completely unknown and unexplored.”

New Horizons launched into space in January 2006. Four years ago, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to pinpoint Kuiper Belt objects within the spacecraft’s reach and settled on Ultima Thule.

New Horizons is hurtling through space at 31,500 miles per hour (more than eight miles a second) to reach the object. As it passes Ultima Thule, it will take hundreds of photographs and other measurements to collect more information about the celestial body. The team hopes to map the object’s surface, figure out its temperature and determine if it has an atmosphere, moons or rings.

According to a schedule released by the New Horizons team, the spacecraft will fly by Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time on Jan. 1. It will travel within 2,200 miles of the body, less than one-third the distance of its closest approach to Pluto.

There’s still some uncertainty, though; New Horizons’ images could come back blurred if Ultima Thule is rotating rapidly, National Geographic reports. And there’s also a chance that the spacecraft’s camera could miss it completely.

“We might get it, and we might not,” Stern said on Facebook Live. “And if we get it, it’s going to be spectacular.”

The New Horizons team will be counting down to the spacecraft’s closest approach to Ultima Thule early on New Year’s Day. Some results from the encounter will be shared in the following days, but it will take the spacecraft until 2020 to send all the data from the encounter back to Earth.

Michael Buckley, the New Horizons team’s media spokesperson, told HuffPost that the partial government shutdown that started Saturday will have no effect on the project’s mission or science operations.

In case the shutdown remains in effect on Jan. 1, the team has partnered with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to provide live coverage of the flyby.

Coverage will be streamed on the laboratory’s YouTube channel and the New Horizons mission website.

How To See ‘Christmas Comet’ 46P/Wirtanen With The Naked Eye

The bright green comet has arrived just in time for the holidays.

By Ed Mazza 

It may not be the star of Bethlehem, but there’s a bright green comet passing Earth by just in time for Christmas.

On a clear night, you might even be able to spot it with the naked eye ― if you know where to look. 

Comet 46P/Wirtanen, a.k.a. “The Christmas Comet,” passed within 7.1 million miles of Earth on Sunday, its closest approach. But it should be easily visible for much of the coming week and even beyond.

“This could be one of the brightest comets in years,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release.

The approach gives astronomers “an important opportunity to study a comet up close with ground-based telescopes, both optical and radar,” Chodas stated.

According to NASA, the comet will be in the constellation Taurus near the Pleiades. Look for a blur in a Christmas shade of green, which will slowly move across the sky:

If you can’t find the Pleiades cluster, stargazing apps can help you locate it. Of course, darker skies and clearer nights will also help.

The University of Maryland has posted some charts and more tips to help spot the comet, and an observer at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles has compiled a chart that will assist West Coast skywatchers:

EarthSky and Sky and Telescope also have some pointers for spotting the comet, which was named for astronomer Carl Wirtanen, who first observed it in 1948 at the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California.

The comet should be visible for between two and eight hours per night over the coming year, NASA said. The best time to see it with the naked eye will be this week. After that, you’ll need binoculars or a telescope.

Scientists finally confirm the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole

By Chelsea Gohd  |  Published: Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Using the ESO’s sensitive GRAVITY instrument, researchers have confirmed that the enormous object at the heart of our galaxy is — as scientists have assumed for many years — a supermassive black hole.

ESO/Gravity Consortium/L. Calçada

Scientists have finally confirmed that the massive object at the heart of our galaxy is, in fact, a supermassive black hole.

Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s sensitive GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe infrared radiation flares coming from the accretion disc around Sagittarius A* — the massive object at the center of our galaxy. Scientists think that most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but they’d never before had the data and observations to prove it.

To measure the effects of gravity near to a black hole, scientists needed to observe an object actually traveling close to it. They found their mark in a small star called S2 whose orbit takes it deep within Sagittarius A*’s gravity well every 16 years. As they watched, they saw three bright flares traveling around the black hole’s event horizon at about 30 percent of the speed of light — around 216 million miles per hour.

It’s exactly what Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts would occur when a hot spot (like S2) passes close to a black hole weighing as much as 4 million suns, and the observation helps to confirm that it’s really there.

“We were closely monitoring S2, and of course we always keep an eye on Sagittarius A*. During our observations, we were lucky enough to notice three bright flares from around the black hole — it was a lucky coincidence!” Oliver Pfuhl, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, said in a statement.

Correct Assumptions

This is the first time ever that scientists have observed material orbiting this close to a black hole’s physical point of no return. These are also the most detailed observations ever made of material orbiting so near to a black hole.

“It’s mind-boggling to actually witness material orbiting a massive black hole at 30% of the speed of light. GRAVITY’s tremendous sensitivity has allowed us to observe the accretion processes in real time in unprecedented detail,” Pfuhl said in the statement.

For a long time, scientists have assumed that a supermassive black hole exists at the heart of our galaxy and most other galaxies. But these observations mark the first time scientists can confirm their long-held theory.

“This always was one of our dream projects but we did not dare to hope that it would become possible so soon … the result is a resounding confirmation of the massive black hole paradigm,” Reinhard Genzel, of the MPE, who led the study, said in the statement.

Spooky Skull-Like ‘Death Comet’ Asteroid To Zip Past Earth Just After Halloween

It’s also been called “The Great Pumpkin” asteroid.

By Ed Mazza 

There’s a different kind of Halloween sequel in the works, and it’s coming soon to the skies near Earth.

A skull-like asteroid that passed Earth in October 2015 is coming back for another visit in early November. Officially named 2015 TB145, the asteroid has been called The Great Pumpkin by NASA because of its Halloween flyby three years ago.

2015 TB145 has also been described as a “death comet” because it’s believed to be a dead comet and because of its skull shape, which was picked up on radar images from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico:

“We found that the object reflects about 6 percent of the light it receives from the sun,” Vishnu Reddy, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, said in a 2015 news release. “That is similar to fresh asphalt, and while here on Earth we think that is pretty dark, it is brighter than a typical comet which reflects only 3 to 5 percent of the light. That suggests it could be cometary in origin ― but as there is no coma evident, the conclusion is it is a dead comet.”

Despite the spooky appearance and nicknames, 2015 TB145 will pose no threat to life on Earth. After flying within 310,000 miles of the planet three years ago, the closest the comet will come this time around is 24 million miles on Nov. 11, Mother Nature Network reported. 

November Skies

Moon Rocks Expected To Fetch Up To $1 Million In Auction

The lunar rocks, recovered by the USSR in the ‘70s, are the only known documented samples in private hands, according to Sotheby’s.

By Nina Golgowski 

For only the second time in history, someone will be able to purchase pieces of the moon ― legally that is.

Three tiny rocks, the only known documented pieces of the moon in private hands, are hitting the auction block next month. The out-of-this-world soil is expected to fetch $700,000 to $1 million, according to auction house Sotheby’s.

An unmanned Soviet spacecraft brought the lunar samples back to Earth in 1970. After that, the USSR presented them to the widow of former Soviet space program director Sergei Pavlovich Korolev as a gift.

Korolev was a rocket engineer; aircraft and spacecraft designer; and mastermind of the Soviet space program in the 1950s and ’60s. He died unexpectedly before the samples could be gifted to him.

The rocks, which will headline Sotheby’s Space Exploration auction scheduled for Nov. 29, fetched $442,500 when they were first sold in 1993, according to CNN.

“It was the first time a piece of another world had ever been offered for sale to the public,” Sotheby’s said of that sale. “It remains to this day, the only known legal sale of moon rocks to have ever occurred. We look forward to once again offering this tremendously rare and historic artifact to the public.”

Lunar material is typically not available for purchase, at least legally. (In one case in 2011, a woman tried to sell a moon rock for $1.7 million, but the buyer was an undercover agent.)

The U.S. government considers lunar material from the Apollo missions to be government property, though a few pieces have been given as gifts to foreign governments. But this is a Soviet sample, and according to Sotheby’s, the rock “is the only known, documented lunar sample to have been gifted to a private individual.”

Hawaii’s Supreme Court Approves Giant Telescope On Sacred Mountain

The court upheld a building permit for the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, a mountain considered sacred by many Native Hawaiians.

By Dominique Mosbergen 

Following a protracted legal battle and yearslong protests that left a state deeply divided, the Hawaii Supreme Court has cleared the final legal hurdle for a $1.4 billion telescope project to resume construction atop the Big Island’s Mauna Kea, a mountain considered sacred by many Native Hawaiians.

In a 4-1 ruling on Tuesday, the court upheld a 2017 decision by the state’s Board of Land and Natural Resources to grant a construction permit on Mauna Kea for the Thirty-Meter Telescope, better known as TMT.

The court said it had carefully considered the arguments put forth by the project’s opponents who’ve described the telescope’s construction as an attack on indigenous culture and a desecration of sacred land. But, per the ruling, it had ultimately determined that “astronomy and Native Hawaiian uses on Mauna Kea have co-existed for many years and the TMT Project will not curtail or restrict Native Hawaiian uses.”

The ruling also noted the telescope’s potential to “answer some of the most fundamental questions regarding our universe” ― a benefit that won’t just be enjoyed by Native Hawaiians but all of humankind.

Coveted by scientists for the dry and clean air at its summit and its distance from light pollution, Mauna Kea ― considered the world’s tallest mountain ― is already home to the largest astronomical observatory on Earth, with 13 working telescopes operated by astronomers from 11 different countries. 

The TMT project will be considerably larger than any of these existing structures, however. The telescope is projected to be 18 stories tall with structures spanning 1.44 acres.  

TMT’s backers, which include Canada’s National Research Council and the University of California, have said the project will open doors to unparalleled scientific opportunities. Astronomers will be able to see 13 billion light-years away with the advanced instrument and observe “forming galaxies at the very edge of the observable Universe, near the beginning of time,” the project’s builders have said..

Supporters of the telescope have said the project will also provide jobs and other opportunities for Hawaiian workers and students. But opponents of the project have stressed that these upsides are beside the point.

“We are not anti-science or astronomy,” Lanakila Manguil, an activist who’s been protesting against the TMT project for years, told HuffPost in 2017. “It’s about construction, development and industrial-sized work happening in conservation lands and particularly very sacred lands to our people.”

Many Native Hawaiians believe Mauna Kea is the origination point of the Hawaiian islands. The mountain, which measures about 32,000 feet from seafloor to summit, is home to burial sites and is where Native Hawaiians have been known to bury their umbilical cords as a way of connecting to the sacred land.

Plans for the TMT project date back to 2009 ― and the project has been mired in controversy since then. Protests broke out in 2011 after an initial construction permit was granted by the state’s land board. Three years later, activists blocked groundbreaking attempts at Mauna Kea’s summit and in 2015, thousands of protesters rose up across the Hawaiian islands to denounce the project and more than 30 people were arrested for protesting on the mountain.

Later that year, the Hawaiian Supreme Court invalidated the 2011 permit, ruling that the land board’s approval process had been flawed. The project’s builders were forced to apply for a new permit, which was granted by the board in 2017 and later appealed by opponents.
  

Following the state’s Supreme Court decision this week to uphold the permit, Hawaii’s attorney general Russell Suzuki told AP that further legal action could still be possible. A request could be sent to the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision, he said. 

Activists, however, have expressed doubt as to whether further legal pursuit would actually be helpful. It may be time, some have suggested, to ditch the courts and “take to the streets.”

“The court is the last bastion in democracy,” Kealoha Pisciotta, one of the leaders of the opposition movement, told AP. “If we lose the integrity of the court, then you’re losing normal law and order, and the only other option is people have to rise up.”

There is still strong opposition to the telescope’s construction across Hawaii, but recent opinion polls have shown that the number of Hawaiians who approve of the project has increased. A March newspaper poll found that 72 percent of Native Hawaiians supported TMT’s construction on Mauna Kea, compared to just 39 percent in 2016. Overall, 77 percent of Hawaii residents said they approved of the telescope.

Reacting to the court’s decision, Henry Yang, chair of TMT’s board, said the project was “grateful” for the ruling and vowed to be “good stewards” on Mauna Kea.

“We thank all of the community members who contributed their thoughtful views during this entire process,” Yang said in a statement. “We remain committed to being good stewards on the mountain and inclusive of the Hawaiian community. We honor the culture of the islands and its people and do our part to contribute to its future through our ongoing support of education and Hawaii Islands’ young people.”

Hawaii Gov. David Ige (D) also expressed gratitude to the court for its ruling, which he described as a “monumental task” that involved the review of “thousands of pages of documents and testimony over many years.”

“We’re pleased the court carefully considered and weighed all the varied and passionate testimony about TMT. We believe this decision is fair and right and will continue to keep Hawai‘i at the forefront of astronomy,” Ige said.

The project will now need to submit its construction plans to the land board for review and approval, Ige’s office noted, adding that those plans will have to take cultural protocols into consideration.

‘Goodnight, Kepler’: NASA’s Planet-Hunting Telescope Has Finally Run Out Of Fuel

Rest in space, Kepler.

By Dominique Mosbergen

NASA is saying “goodnight” to its pioneering Kepler telescope, which a few months shy of its 10th birthday but years past its expected lifespan, has finally run out of fuel.

The planet-hunting spacecraft, credited with discovering thousands of exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system, will be retired and left in its current orbit, a safe distance from Earth, NASA announced Tuesday. Kepler’s transmitter and other instruments will be shut down in the coming days.

Kepler was launched in March 2009 with enough fuel to keep it going for at least six years, according to The Verge. It far surpassed expectations, however, collecting data in deep space for more than nine years. In all, the telescope made more than 2,600 exoplanet discoveries, NASA said.

“As NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, said in a statement. “Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm. Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars.”

Kepler searched for alien worlds by looking out for their transits, which are dips in the brightness of stars that could indicate orbiting planets.

“It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,” William Borucki, who led the original Kepler science team, told AP of the telescope’s technology,

When Kepler’s stabilizing equipment began malfunctioning in 2013, NASA feared it was doomed.

But the mission team managed to salvage the telescope after figuring out how to use the pressure of sunlight to balance the spacecraft. Once the fix was made, NASA approved a new mission for the spacecraft, dubbed K2.

 Kepler continued to hunt for planets during its K2 phase. As Space.com notes, the spacecraft also studied “a variety of cosmic objects and phenomena, from comets and asteroids in our own solar system to faraway supernova explosions.”

In April, a spacecraft successor to Kepler ― NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS ― was launched.

“TESS builds on Kepler’s foundation with fresh batches of data in its search of planets orbiting some 200,000 of the brightest and nearest stars to the Earth, worlds that can later be explored for signs of life,” NASA said.

Calling Kepler’s mission “stunningly successful,” TESS project scientist Padi Boyd told AP that the retired telescope has shown us that “we live in a galaxy that’s teeming with planets.” 

Boyd also noted that our exploration of the cosmos has only just begun.

“We’re ready to take the next step to explore those planets,” Boyd said.

U.S., Russian Astronauts Make Emergency Landing After Failed Space Launch

They were headed for the International Space Station when the booster rocket failed mid-air.

Reuters

BAIKONUR COSMODROME, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - A booster rocket carrying a Soyuz spacecraft with a Russian and U.S. astronaut on board headed for the International Space Station failed mid-air on Thursday, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing.

The rocket was carrying U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin. Footage from inside the Soyuz showed the two men being shaken around at the moment the failure occurred, with their arms and legs flailing.

The rocket was launched from the Soviet-era cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. A Reuters reporter who observed the launch from around 1 km away said it had gone smoothly in its initial stages and that the failure of the booster rockets must have occurred at higher altitude.

Russian news agencies reported that the crew had safely made an emergency landing and were in radio contact and that rescuers were en route to pick them up.

“Search and rescue teams are in the air and heading toward the expected touchdown location for the Soyuz spacecraft returning to Earth carrying two crew members,” NASA said in a statement.

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field

Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.

The new full-color XDF image reaches much fainter galaxies, and includes very deep exposures in red light from Hubble's new infrared camera, enabling new studies of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The XDF contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do the large, fuzzy red galaxies where the formation of new stars has ceased. These red galaxies are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their declining years. Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, more distant galaxies that were like the seedlings from which today's striking galaxies grew. The history of galaxies – from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like our Milky Way – is laid out in this one remarkable image.

Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits (made over the past decade) for a total of 50 days, with a total exposure time of 2 million seconds. More than 2,000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble's two premier cameras – the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends Hubble's vision into near-infrared light – and combined to make the XDF.

"The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before," said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) program.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars extraordinarily brighter than our Sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a "time tunnel into the distant past." The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang.

Before Hubble was launched in 1990, astronomers could barely see normal galaxies to 7 billion light-years away, about halfway across the universe. Observations with telescopes on the ground were not able to establish how galaxies formed and evolved in the early universe.

Hubble gave astronomers their first view of the actual forms and shapes of galaxies when they were young. This provided compelling, direct visual evidence that the universe is truly changing as it ages. Like watching individual frames of a motion picture, the Hubble deep surveys reveal the emergence of structure in the infant universe and the subsequent dynamic stages of galaxy evolution.

The infrared vision of NASA's planned James Webb Space Telescope (Webb telescope) will be aimed at the XDF. The Webb telescope will find even fainter galaxies that existed when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. Because of the expansion of the universe, light from the distant past is stretched into longer, infrared wavelengths. The Webb telescope's infrared vision is ideally suited to push the XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled the early "dark ages" of the universe with light.

The XDF/HUDF09 team members are G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), M. Carollo (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH)), M. Franx (Leiden University), V. Gonzalez (University of California, Santa Cruz), I. Labbe (Leiden University), D. Magee and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), M. Stiavelli (Space Telescope Science Institute), M. Trenti (University of Cambridge), and P. van Dokkum (Yale University).

Hubble in safe mode, but science operations suspended: NASA

 October 9, 2018 - NASA

Scientists are currently performing analyses and tests to determine what options are available to recover the gyro to operational performance. Till then science operations with Hubble have been suspended. 

Hubble uses three gyros at a time for maximum efficiency, it can still continue to make scientific observations with just one. (Image: NASA) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has entered safe mode, following the failure of another gyroscope, but its science operations have been suspended, the US space agency said. Hubble entered safe mode after one of the three gyroscopes (gyros) being used to point and steady the telescope failed last week. Safe mode puts the telescope into a stable configuration until ground control can correct the issue and return the mission to normal operation.

October Skies

Weird Goblin Planet Found On The Edge Of Solar System

The dwarf planet is new evidence of the long-sought Planet X.

 By Ed Mazza

A strange little dwarf planet with a colorful name is giving astronomers new evidence in the hunt for Planet X.

The Goblin is a newly confirmed dwarf planet that travels to the fringes of the solar system. Formally known as 2015 TG387, the nickname came from the “TG” part of the designation along with the fact that it was first seen around Halloween of 2015, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The organization also released an artist’s conception of The Goblin:

The dwarf planet is currently about two-and-a-half times further from the sun than Pluto is right now, but it’s in an elliptical orbit so extreme that it will eventually be some 67 times the distance from the sun as Pluto and into the Inner Oort cloud.

With a diameter of just 186 miles, The Goblin is also on the small side, even for a dwarf planet.

“We think there could be thousands of small bodies like 2015 TG387 out on the solar system’s fringes, but their distance makes finding them very difficult,” the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen said in a news release. “Currently we would only detect 2015 TG387 when it is near its closest approach to the sun. For some 99 percent of its 40,000-year orbit, it would be too faint to see.”

Scientists said The Goblin’s orbit ― and the orbits of similar objects at the far reaches of the solar system ― suggest they are being shepherded by the gravity of Planet X. That’s a theorized, but as yet unseen, planet several times the size of Earth somewhere on the edge of the solar system.

Hally's Comet

September Sky