How, when, and where to look to see Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) after sunset this Sunday, Oct. 13, with sky charts, before it gradually fades from view.
Category: space – Page 44
The ambitious target is part of a plan to build a base on the Red Planet, in an intensifying space rivalry with the US.
Manchester, England— On a rare sunny day in northern England, the National Graphene Institute (NGI) here gleams like a five-story block of obsidian. Squeezed into the University of Manchester’s sprawling downtown campus, the research center is clad in almost 2000 lustrous black panels with small hexagonal perforations—an architectural nod to the structure of the atom-thin sheet of carbon that gives the building its name.
NGI exists because graphene was first isolated a short walk away in a University of Manchester lab. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov presented it to the world 20 years ago this month and later won a Nobel Prize for the work. Since its unveiling, billions of dollars of R&D funding have flowed to graphene, in a global race to exploit its peerless properties. It is better at carrying electricity than any metal, a superb heat conductor, and hundreds of times stronger than steel—selling points trumpeted in the marketing materials of universities and companies alike.
Early on, researchers were not shy about promising graphene breakthroughs, with predictions that it would enable superthin rollable TVs and space elevators, and even supplant silicon in computer chips. “Expectations were very, very high,” Geim says. “The companies I was involved in were mostly based on hype.”
It’s “one of the brightest comets in our lifetimes”, and only becomes visible every 80,000 years, so no wonder the science community is so excited about the upcoming celestial event.
A recently discovered comet, known as C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, will make its closest approach of Earth on Saturday. Sky-gazers won’t want to miss the event since it may be the last time the comet will be seen in the night sky for another 80,000 years.
The comet successfully reached perihelion, its closest point to the sun in its orbital path around the parent star, on September 27, and was visible for those in the Southern Hemisphere in September and early October. Now, the icy body is on its way out of the inner solar system and will be visible to those in the Northern Hemisphere in mid-October through early November, according to NASA.
“Studying how known benchmarks like Uranus appear in distant imaging can help us have more robust expectations when preparing for these future missions,” said Samantha Hasler. “And that will be critical to our success.”
How can Uranus teach us about exoplanets? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how gas giants like Uranus can be used to better understand the characteristics of exoplanets. While exoplanets have been discovered using the direct imaging method, no exoplanet has been directly imaged itself. Therefore, this study holds the potential to use gas giant planets within our solar system as analogs for exoplanets throughout the cosmos.
For the study, the researchers analyzed data collected from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope to study the atmosphere of Uranus in various wavelengths. Both telescopes exhibit different imaging properties, as Hubble is built to obtain up-close images from far away while New Horizons is built to obtain up-close images from close-up. As a result, the images from Hubble revealed far more detail while the images from New Horizons revealed Uranus as a small dot.
“Uranus appears as just a small dot on the New Horizons observations, similar to the dots seen of directly-imaged exoplanets from observatories like Webb or ground-based observatories,” said Samantha Hasler, who is a PhD Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the study. “Hubble provides context for what the atmosphere is doing when it was observed with New Horizons.”
Astronomers are reveling in the James Webb Space Telescope’s discoveries about the formative epoch of cosmic history.