The Solar Orbiter has been observing the sun since 2021, but it recently went on a side trip to Venus which significantly tilted its orbit and gave it a good view of the sun's polar region. That is how it was able to capture images that will historically be known as humankind's first-ever views of the sun's pole. All our galaxy's planets and the other spacecraft we've deployed orbit the sun around an imaginary ecliptic plane along the star's equator. But thanks to the Solar Orbiter's Venus flyby, it now has a view of the sun from below its equator, allowing it to see the star's southern pole clearly. The images you see above were captured from an angle of 15 degrees below the equator on March 16 and 17, but the probe has reached the 17 degree maximum angle it could achieve since then.

Three of the probe's instruments were responsible for the images. The Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) imaged the sun in visible light and mapped its surface magnetic field. Meanwhile, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) imaged the sun in ultraviolet light, and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument captured light "coming from different temperatures of charged gas above the sun’s surface, thereby revealing different layers of the sun's atmosphere."

So what exactly was the Solar Orbiter able to observe at the sun's southern pole? Well, the pole's magnetic field, simply put, is a mess at the moment. See, the sun's magnetic field flips roughly every 11 years, and it's about to flip this year if it hasn't yet. Normally, a magnet has a clear north and south pole, but the orbiter's PHI instrument showed that both north and south polarity magnetic fields are present at the sun's south pole right now. "This happens only for a short time during each solar cycle, at solar maximum, when the Sun’s magnetic field flips and is at its most active," ESA explained. 

After the flip, the magnetic field fixes itself so that the poles have single polarities. The process is gradual, however, and it will take five to six years to achieve solar minimum, wherein which the sun's magnetic field is at its most orderly. These solar cycles or regular magnetic field flips aren't fully understood yet, and the orbiter's observations could be the key to unlocking that knowledge. 

In addition, scientists used the orbiter's SPICE instrument to take Doppler measurements, or how fast clumps of solar material are moving. They then took that information to create a velocity map that shows how solar material moves within a specific layer of the sun. These measurements can show how the sun flings out particles into space in the form of solar winds, which is one of the orbiter's key goals. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/solar-orbiter-captures-images-of-the-suns-pole-for-the-first-time-123047746.html?src=rss

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© ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/PHI, EUI and SPICE Teams

Galaxies are far more than the sum of their stars. Long before stars even formed, dark matter clumped up and drew regular matter together with its gravity, providing the invisible scaffolding upon which stars and galaxies eventually grew.

Today, nearly all galaxies are still embedded in giant “halos” of dark matter that extend far beyond their visible borders and hold them together, anchoring stars that move so quickly they would otherwise break out of their galaxy’s gravitational grip and spend their lives adrift in intergalactic space.

The way dark matter and stars interact influences how galaxies change over time. But until recently, scientists had mainly only examined one side of that relationship, exploring the way dark matter pulls on normal matter.

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© ESO/S. Brunier

The unusual astronomical skirmish offers new insight into the dynamics of such collisions.

A 600-year-old stellar event described in cryptic language finally gets a scientific ID.

It's been textbook knowledge for over a century that our Milky Way galaxy is doomed to collide with another large spiral galaxy, Andromeda, in the next 5 billion years and merge into one even bigger galaxy. But a fresh analysis published in the journal Nature Astronomy is casting that longstanding narrative in a more uncertain light. The authors conclude that the likelihood of this collision and merger is closer to the odds of a coin flip, with a roughly 50 percent probability that the two galaxies will avoid such an event during the next 10 billion years.

Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies (M31) are part of what's known as the Local Group (LG), which also hosts other smaller galaxies (some not yet discovered) as well as dark matter (per the prevailing standard cosmological model). Both already have remnants of past mergers and interactions with other galaxies, according to the authors.

"Predicting future mergers requires knowledge about the present coordinates, velocities, and masses of the systems partaking in the interaction," the authors wrote. That involves not just the gravitational force between them but also dynamical friction. It's the latter that dominates when galaxies are headed toward a merger, since it causes galactic orbits to decay.

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© NASA/Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

While our Sun prefers to go solo, many other stars are parts of binary systems, with a pair of stars gravitationally bound to each other. In some cases, the stars are far enough apart that planets can form around each of them. But there are also plenty of tight binary systems, where the stars orbit each other at a radius that would place them both comfortably inside our Solar System. In these systems, exoplanets tend to be found at greater distances, in orbits that have them circling both stars.

On Wednesday, scientists described a system that seems to be neither of the above. It is a tight binary system, with a heavy central star that's orbited by a white dwarf at a distance two to three times larger than Earth's orbit. The lone planet confirmed to be in the system is squeezed in between the two, orbiting at a distance similar to Earth's distance from the Sun. And, as an added bonus, the planet is orbiting backward relative to the white dwarf.

Orbiting ν Octantis

The exosolar system is termed ν Octantis (or Nu Octantis), and its primary star is just a bit heavier than our Sun (1.6 solar masses). It's orbited by a far dimmer companion that's roughly half of our Sun's mass, but which hasn't been characterized in detail until now. The companion's orbit relative to the central star is a bit lopsided, ranging from about two astronomical units (AU, the typical Earth-Sun distance) at its closest approach to roughly three AU at its farthest. And, until yesterday, the exact nature of the companion star was not clear.

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The Curiosity Mars rover covers a lot of ground for a robot that only moves at a max speed of .1 mph. A photo snapped recently by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides a pretty cool visualization of what the rover has been up to so far this year, showing the tracks Curiosity left behind as it journeyed from its previous science target — an area called the Gediz Vallis channel — to its next destination. The rover itself is just a tiny speck at the front of the roughly 1,050-foot-long trail, and according to NASA, this snap “is believed to be the first orbital image of the rover mid-drive across the Red Planet.”

The image was captured on February 28 by the orbiter’s HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, and shows Curiosity’s movement over 11 drives starting at the beginning of that month. While a few weeks might seem like a long time for tire tracks to stick around in the dirt, this is normal for Mars. The tracks are “[l]ikely to last for months before being erased by wind,” NASA says. Curiosity is expected to reach its next science destination, which is home to formations thought to have been created long ago by groundwater, in the coming weeks.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-mars-orbiter-snapped-this-image-of-curiosity-trucking-along-down-at-the-surface-211404950.html?src=rss

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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The joint ESA and NASA Solar Orbiter mission has delivered a stunning new image of the Sun and its corona. The sun-observing satellite originally launched in 2020, and besides making the Sun look cool, the data it's captured has impacted things like our understanding of solar wind.

Today's photo shows off the spun-sugar-like particles caught in the magnetic field of the Sun's atmosphere, the dark "filaments" of cooler material weaving their way in between and bursting active areas that emit solar flares. The ESA says the photo is technically a composite of 200 separate images taken with the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, around 77 million km from the Sun. The EUI allows the traditionally unobservable parts of the Sun's atmosphere or corona to be visible in photographs.

ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team, E. Kraaikamp (ROB)

Solar Orbiter has regularly provided a clear look at our closest star, and even offered insights into Venus as it made its way to its current position observing the Sun. For more details on the image, and interactive labels explaining the different regions of the Sun, check out the ESA website. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/can-i-offer-you-a-nice-image-of-the-sun-in-these-trying-times-181135043.html?src=rss

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© ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team, E. Kraaikamp (ROB)

What does the "typical" exosolar system look like? We know it's not likely to look like our own Solar System, given that our familiar planets don't include entire classes of planets (Hot Jupiters! Mini-Neptunes!) that we've found elsewhere. And our discovery methods have been heavily biased toward planets that orbit close to their host star, so we don't really have a strong sense of what might be lurking in more distant orbits.

A new study released on Thursday describes a search for what are called "microlensing" events, where a planet acts as a gravitational lens that magnifies the star it's orbiting, causing it to brighten briefly. These events are difficult to capture, but can potentially indicate the presence of planets in more distant orbits. The researchers behind the new work find indications that there's a significant population of rocky super-Earths that are traveling in orbits similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn.

Lenses go micro

The two primary methods we've used to discover exoplanets are called transit and radial velocity. In the transit method, we simply watch the star for dips in the light it sends to Earth, which can be an indication of a planet orbiting in a way that it eclipses a small fraction of the star. For radial velocity, we look for red- or blue-shifts in the light received from the star, caused by a planet tugging the star in different directions as it orbits.

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© Harvard-Smithsonian,Center for Astrophysics/D. A. Aguilar

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is reportedly way behind schedule, according to an investigation by Bloomberg. This is the company’s satellite internet service, which intends to rival SpaceX and Starlink. The issue seems to be one of scale, as the company has had trouble increasing production of the actual satellites.

The reporting indicates that the Kuiper team has only managed to manufacture a few dozen of these satellites. As a comparison, there are currently over 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. The initial production of the Kuiper satellites was delayed until the tail-end of last year, so Amazon hasn’t had too much time to ramp things up.

Beta testing didn’t start until earlier this year. Amazon had planned for an initial launch on April 8 for 27 satellites, but that got delayed until April 28.

Project Kuiper hopes to eventually provide broadband connectivity to at least 400 million households, in addition to providing service in remote areas. However, it needs to launch over 3,000 satellites to reach that goal. Additionally, it secured a government contract with a deadline to put 1,600 satellites in orbit by next summer. Insiders suggest that it will probably have to seek an extension from the FCC.

"We’ve designed some of the most advanced communications satellites ever built, and our primary objective is to build and launch enough of them to begin delivering service to customers later this year," an Amazon spokesperson told Seeking Alpha. "Our manufacturing schedule is on track to support this target, and we’ll continue to increase our production and launch rates as we begin a full-scale deployment of our network."

It did manage to launch a pair of prototype satellites into space in late 2023. This was followed by successful tests of an optical mesh network that linked the two satellites in low Earth orbit. 

The company is scheduled to conduct a number of launches throughout the year, with help from Arianespace, Blue Origin and SpaceX. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, will handle the April 28 launch. Amazon hasn’t indicated why satellite production has hit this hiccup. We reached out to the company and will update this post when we learn more.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/amazons-starlink-rival-project-kuiper-is-reportedly-way-behind-schedule-153514471.html?src=rss

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© Amazon

There is a signal, born in the earliest days of the cosmos. It’s weak. It’s faint. It can barely register on even the most sensitive of instruments. But it contains a wealth of information about the formation of the first stars, the first galaxies, and the mysteries of the origins of the largest structures in the Universe.

Despite decades of searching for this signal, astronomers have yet to find it. The problem is that our Earth is too noisy, making it nearly impossible to capture this whisper. The solution is to go to the far side of the Moon, using its bulk to shield our sensitive instruments from the cacophony of our planet.

Building telescopes on the far side of the Moon would be the greatest astronomical challenge ever considered by humanity. And it would be worth it.

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© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

If you were wondering whether it’d be possible to ferment foods in space, the answer is apparently yes. In a study published in the journal iScience, researchers from the US and Denmark say they were able to make decent-tasting miso on the International Space Station — but the flavor and smell was distinct from that of miso made on Earth. While it still scored well in the taste tests, with similar ratings to Earth miso in qualities like umami and saltiness, the ISS miso was found to taste nuttier and more roasted than the usual stuff.

The team suggests the findings reflect a sort of “space terroir,” playing off the term often used in relation to wine grapes to describe unique, location-specific flavor characteristics. For the study, the researchers sent a package containing the miso paste ingredients (cooked soybeans, rice koji and salt) to the ISS in March 2020, and let it ferment for 30 days. They also started miso batches back at home in Cambridge, MA and Copenhagen, Denmark, and monitored the environmental conditions of each setup. After a month, the space miso was sent back and analyzed in comparison to the Earth batches.

“There are some features of the space environment in low earth orbit — in particular microgravity and increased radiation — that could have impacts on how microbes grow and metabolize and thus how fermentation works,” co-lead author Joshua D. Evans of Technical University of Denmark said in a press release. “We wanted to explore the effects of these conditions.”

Not only were there differences in flavor, including the notable roasted nuttiness of the space miso, but also in the microbial composition of the misos. The team concluded that “overall, the space miso is a miso,” but says the findings “suggest a specific fermentation environment in space.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/researchers-who-made-miso-in-space-say-it-tastes-good-but-different-215410333.html?src=rss

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© Jimmy Day