Solar System: Things To Know This Week

February 7, 1984 – Astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart make the first untethered spacewalk using the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) during mission STS-41B of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

(NASA)

This is the coolest outer space animation ever. It shows the Crab Supernova explosion, happened in 1054, and its evolution into the remnant it is now - called the Crab Nebula. Basically a thousand years speeded up into less than a minute.

Modern understanding that the Crab Nebula was created by a supernova, an explosion of a massive supergiant star, dates to 1921 when Carl Otto Lampland announced he had seen changes in its structure. This eventually led to the conclusion that the creation of the Crab Nebula corresponds to the bright SN 1054 supernova recorded by Chinese astronomers in AD 1054. There is also a 13th-century Japanese reference to an appearance of a new or “guest” star in Meigetsuki. It was then so bright it was visible during the daytime for 23 days.

animation credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen)

Visible light emitted from a black hole has been detected for the first time

Got a decent telescope at home? That's all you need to observe a nearby black hole.

For the first time, astronomers have observed bursts of visible light being released by a black hole as it swallows matter from nearby stars.

These flashes of light, which lasted between several minutes to a few hours, were seen coming from a black hole in the Cygnus constellation, located about 7,800 light-years away from Earth. Incredibly, some of the flashes were so bright, the team says amateur astronomers could see them with a modest 20-cm telescope.

“We find that activity in the vicinity of a black hole can be observed in optical light at low luminosity for the first time,” astronomer and lead researcher, Mariko Kimura from Kyoto University in Japan, told Charles Q. Choi at Space.com.

“These findings suggest that we can study physical phenomena that occur in the vicinity of the black hole using moderate optical telescopes without high-spec X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes.”

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M7, Open Star Cluster 

Elon Musk has released this video of today’s Falcon 9 landing attempt. The first stage of the JASON-3 mission’s Falcon 9 touched down on the surface of the Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship around ten minutes after today’s 1:42pm EST launch.

However, according to Musk, landing strut #3 didn’t lock in to place properly, and vehicle toppled over. In this newly-released video, the Falcon 9 can be seen gently coming to land on the desk of the ship, falling on the improperly secured leg shortly thereafter.

Musk also said that preliminary data suggests ice build up from foggy launch conditions may have caused the strut to improperly secure upon deployment.

Gravitational waves are real — and that’s a huge f***ing deal!

A century ago, Albert Einstein theorized there was such a thing as a fabric of space and time — that the universe was malleable, and that large objects and events would cause it to bend.

He was right. From studying the signals emanating from the merging of two black holes — have separate masses equal to 36 and 29 suns — scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory were able to observe gravitational waves. Their measurements matched expectations of what Einstein predicted in his General Theory of Relativity.

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If I heard space music I would probably rocket

SN 1006 Supernova Remnant by NASA, ESA and Zolt Levay