The Night Sky

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An ancient star casts new light on the birth of the universe

Astronomers have discovered an exceedingly old star at the edge of our galaxy that seems to have formed only a few million years after the Big Bang.
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He said SPLUS J2104−0049 – a red giant star with about 80 percent of the mass of the sun – is at least 10 billion years old and possibly just a few million years younger than the universe itself, which astronomers estimate is 13.8 billion years old.
 

China’s Mars rover touches ground on red planet​

pressherald.com/2021/05/22/chinas-mars-rover-touches-ground-on-red-planet/

Associated Press May 22, 2021
A landing platform and the surface of Mars are seen from a camera on the Chinese Mars rover Zhurong. China's first Mars rover has driven down from its landing platform and is now roaming the surface of the red planet, China's space administration said Saturday. (CNSA via AP)

BEIJING — China’s first Mars rover has driven down from its landing platform and is now roaming the surface of the red planet, China’s space administration said Saturday.

The solar-powered rover touched Martian soil at 10:40 a.m. Saturday Beijing time (0240 GMT), the China National Space Administration said.

China landed the spacecraft carrying the rover on Mars last Saturday, a technically challenging feat more difficult than a moon landing, in a first for the country. It is the second country to land and operate a spacecraft on Mars, after the United States.

Named after the Chinese god of fire, Zhurong, the rover was running diagnostics tests for several days before it began its exploration Saturday. It is expected to be deployed for 90 days to search of evidence of life.

The U.S. also has an ongoing Mars mission, with the Perseverance rover and a tiny helicopter exploring the planet. NASA expects the rover to collect its first sample in July for return to Earth as early as 2031.

China has ambitious space plans that include launching a crewed orbital station and landing a human on the moon. China in 2019 became the first country to land a space probe on the little-explored far side of the moon, and in December returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.
 
Past lunar eclipse photo, taken in Greece during a thunderstorm here:
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We've got one on Wednesday night's "Blood Moon", but we ain't going to see much...
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Damn that high-resolution photography...

Remember this 1976 photo of Mars and all the noise about it?

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What a difference 30 years makes. Here's a 2006 photo of the same area, there went all the National Inquirer articles. The "Face" mesa from the above photo is in the lower right corner of the photo just to the right of the small crater.

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Here's a closeup...

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You could try muting the sound, playing the theme music from 2001 Space Odyssey, and checking out this website on your phone when that talking head comes on.
 
Pretty cool image. I have a special place in my heart for M57, the first Messier Object I observed with my telescope...

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Colors: Ring Nebula versus Stars
Image Credit: Robert Vanderbei (Princeton U.)
Explanation: What if you could see, separately, all the colors of the Ring? And of the surrounding stars? There's technology for that. The featured image shows the Ring Nebula (M57) and nearby stars through such technology: in this case, a prism-like diffraction grating. The Ring Nebula is seen only a few times because it emits light, primarily, in only a few colors. The two brightest emitted colors are hydrogen (red) and oxygen (blue), appearing as nearly overlapping images to the left of the image center. The image just to the right of center is the color-combined icon normally seen. Stars, on the other hand, emit most of their light in colors all across the visible spectrum. These colors, combined, make a nearly continuous streak -- which is why stars appear accompanied by multicolored bars. Breaking object light up into colors is scientifically useful because it can reveal the elements that compose that object, how fast that object is moving, and how distant that object is.
 
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Astronomers see back of a black hole for first time, proving Albert Einstein was right

Astronomers have managed to look behind a black hole for the first time and have proved that Albert Einstein was right about how these mysterious celestial behemoths behave. An international team of researchers used high-powered X-ray telescopes to study a supermassive black hole 800 million...
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Black holes are born when a gargantuan star explodes in a supernova and then collapses in on itself. This forms an incomprehensibly dense material which swallows up everything in its general vicinity, and therefore it should be impossible to see light from the back of a black hole.

However, Einstein’s dogmatic theory of general relativity predicted in 1915 that the gravitational pull of black holes is likely so enormous that they warp the very fabric of space, twisting magnetic fields and bending light.

As a result, Einstein’s work asserted that it should be possible to see light waves ejected from the far side of the black hole because of the distorted magnetic fields acting as a mirror.
 
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