Astronomy

Fireball sightings were reported in multiple states across the southeastern United States during the day on Thursday, which NASA determined was produced by an asteroidal fragment weighing over a ton and moving over 30,000 mph.

The American Meteor Society said it received 215 reports of fireball sightings Thursday over six states -- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The bright daylight fireball was reported at 12:25 p.m. ET, NASA said.

Washington (AFP) – The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile published their first images on Monday, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies.

More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos.

One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula -- both several thousand light-years from Earth -- glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops.

The image reveals these stellar nurseries within our Milky Way in unprecedented detail, with previously faint or invisible features now clearly visible.

Another image offers a sweeping view of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.

The team also released a video dubbed the "cosmic treasure chest," which begins with a close-up of two galaxies before zooming out to reveal approximately 10 million more.

"The Rubin Observatory is an investment in our future, which will lay down a cornerstone of knowledge today on which our children will proudly build tomorrow," said Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Equipped with an advanced 8.4-meter telescope and the largest digital camera ever built, the Rubin Observatory is supported by a powerful data-processing system.

Later this year, it will begin its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Over the next decade, it will scan the night sky nightly, capturing even the subtlest visible changes with unmatched precision.

The observatory is named after pioneering American astronomer Vera C. Rubin, whose research provided the first conclusive evidence for the existence of dark matter -- a mysterious substance that does not emit light but exerts gravitational influence on galaxies.

Dark energy refers to the equally mysterious and immensely powerful force believed to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. Together, dark matter and dark energy are thought to make up 95 percent of the cosmos, yet their true nature remains unknown.

The observatory, a joint initiative of the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, has also been hailed as one of the most powerful tools ever built for tracking asteroids.

In just 10 hours of observations, the Rubin Observatory discovered 2,104 previously undetected asteroids in our solar system, including seven near-Earth objects -- all of which pose no threat.

For comparison, all other ground- and space-based observatories combined discover about 20,000 new asteroids per year.

Rubin is also set to be the most effective observatory at spotting interstellar objects passing through the solar system.

More images from the observatory are expected to be released later Monday morning.

As we're approaching the summer solstice, I'm going to harden my heart to the fact that it won't be getting nice and dark until, like, ten where I'm at. What are you guys going to be looking for tonight? If you're not going out, do you have any recommendations?

I'm largely going to be focused on the easterly sky. I'd like to try and spot some of the targets near Antares if my neighbor's tree plays nice with me. Otherwise, I'm mostly going to be hitting the globular clusters that are going to be visible in and around Hercules. I'm also going to take some time to soak up some photons from Epsilon Lyra. If I've got time, I may try to run down some of the planetary nebulas and emission/reflection nebulas that will become visible to me later in the night.

It's a really great time to be out and looking at globular clusters, if you can deal with the late start, and with our view into the heart of the galaxy on the rise, it's only going to get better through the summer.

Happy stargazing!

Paris (AFP) – The Milky Way may not have a catastrophic collision with another huge galaxy as has been predicted, computer simulations revealed Monday, giving our home galaxy a coin-flip chance of avoiding destruction.

But don't worry either way: no galactic smash-up is expected for billions of years, long after our ageing Sun will have burnt away all life on Earth.

The Milky Way and the even-larger galaxy Andromeda are speeding towards each other at 100 kilometres (60 miles) a second, and scientists have long predicted they will collide in around 4.5 billion years.

That would be bad news for our neighbourhood.

Previous research has suggested that the Sun -- and our Earth -- could wind up in the centre of this newly merged "Milkomeda" galaxy and get sucked into its supermassive black hole. Alternatively, the Sun could be shot out into the emptiness of intergalactic space.

However "proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated", according to a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy.

There is only a roughly 50 percent chance the Milky Way and Andromeda will smash into each other in the next 10 billion years, the international team of astrophysicists determined.

"It's basically a coin flip," lead study author Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki told AFP.

The researchers ran more than 100,000 computer simulations of our universe's future, using new observations from space telescopes.

A galaxy merger in the next five billion years is "extremely unlikely", Sawala said.

Much more likely is that the galaxies will zoom relatively close to each other -- say, a little under 500,000 light years away.

In only half of the simulations did dark matter then eventually drag the two galaxies together into a cataclysmic embrace.

But this would likely only occur in around eight billion years -- long after our Sun has died, the researchers found.

"So it could be that our galaxy will end up destroyed," Sawala said.

"But it's also possible that our galaxy and Andromeda will orbit one another for tens of billions of years -- we just don't know."

fate of our galaxy is still completely open," the study summarised.

The researchers emphasised that their findings did not mean that previous calculations were incorrect, just that they had used newer observations and taken into account the effect of more satellite galaxies.

Future data releases from Europe's recently retired Gaia space telescope as well as Hubble could provide a definitive answer to this question within the next decade, Sawala predicted.

How much all this all matters to us is a matter of debate. The Sun is expected to make Earth inhospitable to life in around a billion years.

"We might have some emotional attachment" to what happens after we're gone, Sawala said.

"I might prefer the Milky Way not to collide with Andromeda, even though it has absolutely no relevance to my own life -- or the lives of my children or great-great grandchildren."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYcKYvGsiYc

Here's an addendum to my Kepler story I've been meaning to add for a while, but it took a surprising amount of research!

Kepler's personal life, finding a second wife, and unwittingly following Euler's number statistics. Insight into the man's intuition that lead to remarkable discoveries.

I like Nick. He's a good journalist for creating unique content and insights.