Ad-astra-affecte-spe - Reach For The Stars With Hope

With giant storms, powerful winds, auroras, and extreme temperature and pressure conditions, Jupiter has a lot going on. Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of the planet. Webb’s Jupiter observations will give scientists even more clues to Jupiter’s inner life.  

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt. Read more

New pics of Io just dropped

More are over here at NASA's Juno probe site.

Spiral Galaxies from Webb & Hubble: NGC 1566 4303 3351

Did Betelgeuse Swallow a Binary Partner ?

The star hit the news back in late 2019 when it suddenly dimmed in an event known as the great dimming, and since there's been a lot of papers and theories to what really happened.

At the time, there was talk of supernova from a minority, while most astronomers reserved judgement on this, which turned out to be the right call, although even they had to admit bafflement at why this star suddenly become so dim.

Since, then the prevailing and mostly accepted theory is that the star ejected a huge amount of material which included carbon and thus concealed parts of the star, causing the dimming.

A new paper from Department of Physics and Astronomy at Louisiana State University has looked at another idea, that at some point in the recent past the star had consumed a binary partner.

While the study can only make suggestions at this point, some of the observed facts about Betelgeuse certainly fit the bill. The star spins very quickly for an old supersized red giant, even faster than our own sun, and the team believe a past consumption may have transferred energy to the star, accounting for this spin rate.

The next thing was that the super giant star didn't just dim, it rebounded and actually brightened considerably too. These events of material coming to the surface and briefly causing a brightening effect are predicted through models of this occurrence.

The star is not likely to go supernova anytime soon, but I would put bets on the likelihood of the star surprising us once again in the coming decades.

Astronomical photographs, Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, 1890-1920

I'm having too much fun taking Skye sky photos on a cloudless winter's night. From May until the end of July it doesn't get dark enough for stars. (Pixel 5 in Night Mode / Astrophotography AI on.)

Into the Cosmic Heart, IC 1850 © Aleix Roig

Earth, which is about 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away in this image, captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft 🚀

NGC 6744

via APOD/NASA; Credit: NASA, ESA, and the LEGUS team