News

The largest Martian Meteorite is auctioned by Sotheby's Some cool space news this week was the auction of the largest known meteorite to have originated from Mars. Sotheby's in New York sold the hunk of space rock for USD$5.3 million, or somewhat over $8 million in local money. The 25kg rock is a called NWA 16788 and was found in North West Africa, hence the name. This looks like an ordinary rock to me. How do we know it's from Mars? There's been nearly 80,000 confirmed meteorite finds on Earth. These are distinguished from "local" rocks by their composition and structure. This is often the result of many millions or even billions of years in space and a fiery journey to the Earth's surface. They're also identified based on where they're found, sometimes even polar regions where somewhat recently descended space rocks stand out from permanent ice and snow.  Only 770 of these meteorites have been confirmed to have come from Mars.  They're different from other meteorites in a few ways. First of all, they're younger, having arrived from Mars after the red planet was impacted by a large body which threw parts of the surface into space. (Meteorites from elsewhere in the Solar System are often much older.)Pockets of gas trapped in them match the atmospheric composition found on the surface of Mars by landers such as Viking and Curiosity. Their chemistry also doesn't match either Earth rocks or asteroids.  If we have meteorites from Mars, why do we need to carry out a sample-return mission there? We don't know when the event that caused them to be ejected into space happened or what part of Mars it came from.  The shock of having a space rock large enough to throw material not just into Mars orbit, but into the Solar System would have been vast. Any delicate structures would have been altered by this process. A (tiny) part of a Mars meteorite at BINTEL Any traces or fossils of ancient life, if it ever existed on Mars, would have likely been destroyed as well. NASA and other space agencies including the Chinese have plans for Mars surface landings with sample returns in the next decade. There's going to be some fascinating discoveries once we have proper samples of Mars rocks in Earth laboratories.   Can I buy Mars meteorites?  Yes. They are available. Big ones like this week's 25kg Mars rock might be worth millions, although smaller samples are a lot more affordable! The Great Sydney Solar Eclipse - 3 years to go! The 2017 Solar Eclipse in the USA (image via NASA/Aubrey Gemignan) This coming week marks the three year countdown to the next Total Solar Eclipse visible in Australia which will occur on the 22nd of July 2028.  It will cross right over Sydney as well as cutting a path across much of the central parts of the country. Path of the 2028 eclipse. More info here. While three years might seem a long way off, these events capture the world's attention and tourists will arrive from everywhere. You'll have to plan your travel well in advance to experience this amazing event! Gilmour Space scrubs the Eris-1 launch again A combination of weather and technical issues has again caused Gilmour Space to delay the launch this week of their rescheduled Eris-1 mission.  This will go ahead, possibly in August.  There's an interesting article with some more background info here. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 19th July 2025          

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS could be truly ancient More news following on from last week's announcement of the discovery of the third known interstellar visitor to the Solar System, 3I/ATLAS, which has now been confirmed to be a comet.  Further observations have put the path of this visitor on a steep incline to the plane of the Solar System, indicating it's from region of the Milky Way where many older stars are located. Findings presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2025) in Durham by astronomer Matthew Hopkins suggest it could be as old as 7 billion years.  By comparison, the Solar System is around 4.6 billion years. "All non-interstellar comets such as Halley's comet formed with our solar system, so are up to 4.5 billion years old," Hopkins said. " But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen." There'll be a lot more about this in the next week or two as more observations are made. We'll have a detailed update on it shortly. Meanwhile, we suggest you check out this extraordinary animation of Comet 3I/ATLAS as is moves against the background stars. it was captured by astrophotographer Andy Casely with a Celestron C14 from the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Check the post to the BINTEL Society Facebook page here. A still image from Andy Casely's video Interstellar Navigation Demonstration Speaking of interstellar travel, there are currently three objects made by humans that are headed away from the Solar System into deep-space. They are the Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 probes sent in the 1970s and the New Horizon mission which brought our first close up views of the dwarf planet Pluto and is now travelling into the Kuiper Belt. For future mission, how can spacecraft "get their bearings" and work out their location and direction? We now establish the positions of probes based on the timing of radio signals from Earth based tracking stations such as NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). However, these become increasingly week as the distance between us and the probe increases.  Now researchers have a demonstrated a surprisingly simple way to keep track of position in interstellar space and is based on how stars look from Earth compared to how stars look where the probe is.  As a quick experiment, hold up a pen a few centimetres from the end of your nose. If you close one eye and then the other, the position of the pen will change compared to objects in the background.  In much the same way, scientists were able to compare how the position of nearby stars against more distant stars change from where New Horizons is located compared to the view from Earth. How the position of our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, changes when viewed from New Horizons compared to Earth The technique is more of a proof of concept for now, although likely to be used in future space missions exiting the Solar System. “This pioneering interstellar navigation demonstration and its accompanying publication show that a deep-space mission can use its onboard imaging system to find its way among the stars,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “While for New Horizons, this method isn’t as accurate as NASA’s sophisticated tracking from Earth, it could be highly useful for future deep space missions in the far reaches of the solar system and in interstellar space.” Read more here. 3D Asteroid Images - and yes, you have to squint We talked about NASA's Lucy Mission visit to the asteroid Donaldjohanson in a previous blog entry that you can find here. Now further image processing by the Lucy team has  produced a series of images of the asteroid, designed for viewing in 3D either by using red/green glasses or defocussing your eyes. A stereo image pair combining the last complete approach image (right) with a slightly clipped image taken 72 seconds later (left). For a three-dimensional view of the asteroid’s structure, cross your eyes while focusing on the image. Lucy itself is now in a fairly quiet period while it passes through the asteroid belt at about 50,000 km per hour on the way to the Trojan asteroids nearer to Jupiter.  There's another six asteroids it will encounter, the first being Eurybates in August 2027. If you'd like to see these new images and try to view them in 3D, you can squint here Celebrate the third birthday of the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) with the Cat's Paw Nebula It's been three years since the JWST began its science mission and over that time has produced some ground breaking discoveries and thrilled the planet with some of the most spectacular space images ever taken.  To celebrate, this week the JWST team released this video showing a wide field pan of the Cat's Paw Nebula (NGC 6334). This is a large, star forming region and a favourite of many of our BINTEL customers to photograph. Check out some of their images here. “Three years into its mission, Webb continues to deliver on its design – revealing previously hidden aspects of the universe, from the star formation process to some of the earliest galaxies,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As it repeatedly breaks its own records, Webb is also uncovering unknowns for new generations of flagship missions to tackle. Whether it’s following up on the mysteries of dark matter with NASA’s nearly complete Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or narrowing our search for life to Earth-like planets with the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the questions Webb has raised are just as exciting as the answers it’s giving us.” Click on the YouTube video above or read more, including in-depth discussion about the feature of the region here. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 12th July 2025

Another interstellar visitor to the Solar System - meet  A11pl3Z or Comet 3I/ATLAS (I'm putting this blog entry up a couple of days early as there's been some breaking news astronomy news overnight.) Observers using the ATLAS telescopes in Chile have observed a new object in the Solar System, called A11pl3Z for now, on the 1st of July 2025. It has been confirmed as a visitor from interstellar space. Provisional naming also has this called 3I/ATLAS as it's highly likely to be a comet. Once it was found, researchers were able to look at images from the 14th to the 21st of June 2025 and found it there as well. There's been over 100 other confirmed observations and this number is expected to grow dramatically. It is currently about as far out as Jupiter's orbit. You can find more information via the Minor Planet Center listing here  The discovery of new bodies travelling around the Sun happen every day and the number of known objects in the Solar System grow by many thousands each year. This new observation is of something quite different. Rather than finding another member of the local family, A11pl3Z appears to have arrived at the Solar System from another star. It won't go into orbit around the Sun and will depart for interstellar space.  A11pl35Z / 3I/ATLAS is travelling at around 60 km per second or around 216,000 km per hour which means it's going too fast to be captured by the Sun's gravity. A11pl3Z or 3I/ATLAS, as seen by Deep Random Survey, Chile. You can see it near the middle of the image moving compared to the background stars. Image via K Ly (astrafoxen) This is also only the third* object from deep-space to visit the Solar System that we have found and quite different from the other two visitors from other stars we've seen previously.  First of all, A11pl3Z won't hit Earth.  "It will fly deep through the solar system, passing just inside the orbit of Mars." said Richard Moissl who is the European Space Agency's head of planetary defence.  The predicted high-speed path of A11pl3Z through the inner Solar System. Image via Catalina Sky Survey How big is this new object? Current size estimates have it at 10-20 km wide. This figure is likely to be updated as more observations are made. Given its speed, location and recent discovery, there are no plans to send a space mission to intercept or observe it.  We simply don't have anything that would be able to catch it! There have been a number of proposals of how to intercept interstellar visitors such as this one from MIT, but none of these are likely to be built soon. Can I see it with my telescope? "It will get brighter and closer to the sun until late October and then still be observable (by telescope) until next year." Moissl added.  However statements like these are about A11pl3Z   3I/ATLAS being visible in extremely large, professional telescopes located in major observatories. You won't be able to see or photograph it with your own telescope at this point. We will be publishing charts to show which region of the sky it's located in as it progresses through the Solar System. Where did A11pl35Z 3I/ATLAS come from and has it encountered any stars previously? Where's it heading to next? Good questions! We'll soon know more about what part of the Milky Way it arrived from as more is known about its path. It may have originated from a nearby star and had its orbit disturbed by another large planet or passing star, ejecting it from is host system. It might have also been travelling from a far more distant part of the Milky Way. Along the way if A11pl35Z encountered other stars, it might have even experienced in increase in speed as it "slingshotted" around them, much like we use gravity assisted flybys for space missions.  What were the other two known visitors from interstellar space and is A11pl35Z different? There's been two other confirmed interstellar objects. The first was ʻOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) which was found in 2017. This is quite a fascinating object and nothing like anything we've seen before or since. It was a reddish coloured body that seemed to be tumbling. It also appeared to be highly elongated, and accelerated slightly as it "left" the Solar System, likely due to outgassing or pressure from Solar radiation. It was travelling from the Sun's perspective at less than half the velocity of A11pl35z, although this speed almost matched the Local standard of Rest for this part of the Milky Way. In other words, from our home galaxy's point of view, it was keeping still while the Sun, the Earth and other parts of the Solar System passed by.  There's a LOT of things we don't know about ʻOumuamua and this will be a topic of research and discussion for some time. Comet 2I/Borisov (C/2019 Q4) was found in 2019 by amateur astronomer and telescope maker, Gennadiy Borisov. Rather than being an exotic body like ʻOumuamua, Comet Barisov behaved like a fairly standard comet as it entered the Solar System from interstellar space. It's chemical composition was rare, but not unheard of. It disintegrated as it made its closest approach to the Sun as many comets do.  A11pl3Z  / 3I/ATLAS appears to be a circular as there's no variations in brightness observed so far. This could change as it gets closer to the Sun.  Are we going to find more interstellar visitors and why are the important? With new, large survey telescopes becoming operational, it's highly likely we will discover more interstellar visitors. Many expect the Vera. C. Rubin Observatory which we talked about last weekend could find one new interstellar object per month.  Visitors like these, even though they might be beyond our capabilities to visit close up or land on for the foreseeable future, do allow us to observe chunks of other star systems in more detail than if they were orbiting their host stars light years away. They could help us learn more about exoplanet formation. We could also discover more about the conditions for life on other star systems if chemicals like amino acids are found as well. Planetary astronomers David Jewitt and Darryl Z. Seligman modelled data in a 2023 study that proposed there could be as many as 10,000 interplanetary visitors passing through the Solar System at any one time. We've obviously got a lot more to find. There's going to be a lot of news about this discovery in the coming days. I'll update this article as we know more.  Gilmour Space Launch slips another week or so We mentioned last week that Gilmour Space was planning to attempt a launch from their base in Bowen QLD of their Eris-1 spacecraft. This would be the first commercial launch of a mission into orbit from Australia. This has now slipped another week or so, with a NET (No Earlier Than) date of July 16th 2025. You can stay up to date with their progress here. Cheers, Earl White  BINTEL 3rd July 2025 PS: *Ok, so while I've said this is the third visitor to the Solar System, there have been a couple of other objects that are not fully accepted by the wider scientific community. This includes Interstellar meteor 1 (IM1) or CNEOS 2014-01-08 which is thought to have impacted off the coast of Papua New Guinea in early 2014.    

Vera C. Rubin Observatory delights the world with its "First Look" Unless you've been hiding under a rock or down a burrow this week, you would have seen the magical "First Look" images released by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in recent days.  We've been talking about this new observatory for a number of years now, and it's the result of decades of planning by astronomers.  Images from the First Look The first batch of images released this week were some of the most detailed, wide field views of the Universe ever produced. What's more, they were the results of a comparatively few hours of observation and while stunning, are only hints of what will be captured over the next decade. The Virgo Cluster A popular region of the sky for amateur astronomers, this is a collection of prominent galaxies many of which were discovered by early observers using some of the first telescopes. Some of the galaxies can be seen with your eyes even using binoculars and many more are visible in even small telescopes. It's over 53 million light years from Earth. The Virgo Cluster is visible tonight in the northern part of the sky just after dark from most parts of Australia.  The crosshairs mark the region of the sky containing The Virgo Cluster as seen from Sydney, on the 28th June 2025 at around 6.30pm local time The "First Look" image of the same region contains some 10 million galaxies.  A version of The Cosmic Treasure Chest image release by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory with labels indicating many main features. Click here for a larger version What's staggering about this image is both the amount of sky it covers, and the details captured even during the Vera C. Rubin's initial observing run. If you have the computing resources, you can even download a 14 Gb full size image to explore the vast number of different galaxies it contains. No two of them appear the same either. The scale, type and age of each galaxy appears unique. Remarkable as this image is, it captured just 0.05% of the 20 billion galaxies the Rubin C. Observatory will photograph in the next few years. Trifid and Lagoon Another set of images released in The First Look is of part of the sky where the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae are located. There's a few different types of nebulae in the sky.  They're usually regions of interstellar gas some light years across where new stars are being formed. We see them as they are lit up either by reflecting the light from nearby stars or emitting their own after absorbing energy from them. Nebulae are favourites for visual observers where they appear as ghostly patches of "clouds" through a telescope eyepiece, as well as popular targets for astrophotographers. The Trifid Nebula (M20) and Lagoon Nebula (M8) are located in the rich star fields embedded in the Milky Way and are visible tonight.  Where to find the Trifid Nebula (M20) and Lagoon Nebula (M8) on the 28th of June 2025 from Sydney at around 10.00pm local time.  (We'll be covering both in more detail in an upcoming BINTEL What's in the Sky Southern Hemisphere YouTube video.) The Vera C. Rubin Observatory First Look release of this part of the Milky Way showed both of these nebulae embedded the in rich clouds of gas and stars. This image is the result of just seven hours of imaging by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Larger version here.  Full sized 24 Gb image here. When zooming into the full sized image, some areas that seem to the gas clouds are actually made up of almost countless individual stars. Again, this expansive panorama is only scratching the surface of what we'll see down the track from this new telescope.  Other highlights of the First Release Another major part of the initial data was the discovery of 2104 new asteroids of various types including 7 near-Earth objects. Check out this YouTube video to learn how new asteroids were discovered during the first imaging runs of the new telescope About 20,000 new asteroids are found every year by observatories around the world. Asteroids are mainly found by comparing two different images of the same part of the sky. If a "star" moves from one image to the next, it's likely an object in the Solar System and astronomers can investigate further. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory discovered around 10% of this figure in just 1,185 frames from its camera. What's more, there are just under 4,000 objects detected of which around 1,800 were previously observed. This means that a quick peek at a part of the sky more than doubled the number of asteroids known to be visible at that time.  The telescope has a unique sensitivity to help us detect fast moving bodies.  More than just cataloguing more objects of the same sort we already know of, there's a strong possibility it will find something unexpected and possibly even the long conjectured "Planet 9". The ongoing unveiling of unknown parts of the Solar System will help us understand its formation and history and possibly even help us spot threats to the Earth.  Can I explore The Very C. Rubin Observatory data myself? Yes! Simply head over to their SKYVIEWER Website that can be found here. They have tours and guides. More data will be added as the telescope completes further imaging sessions. Gilmour Space Technologies aims for a launch this week The first commercial orbital space launch from Australia, the delayed Gilmour Space Technologies Eris 1 mission, now has a possible launch date of No Earlier Than (NET) the July 2nd 2025, due to expected weather conditions. You can stay up to date with the Eris 1 launch schedule from its Bowen, QLD facility, here. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 28th June 2025  

First images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are due this coming week Astronomers, from complete beginners to renowned academics, are excitedly waiting for the release of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in an event they're calling the "First Look". (It will happen at 1.00am on the 24th of June 2025 Sydney time, but I'm sure many will be staying awake for it!) We've talked about this new observatory in several articles in recent times.  It's certainly not the largest telescope ever built. Even larger telescopes are under construction and will become operational in the coming years. What's so exciting about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the amount of astronomical information it will produce.   The Vera C. Rubin Observatory during the commissioning phase The telescope's unique optical design will allow its 8.4 metre primary mirror to see a 3.5 degree field of view. By comparison, the full Moon is about 0.5 degrees wide. It images the sky with the largest digital camera ever constructed, the 3.5 tonne Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) with 3,200 megapixels.  This combination will photograph the entire sky visible from its location in Chile every three nights. This means when fully operational, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will generate more astronomical data in a single month than all other telescopes throughout history - combined! We'll of course be showcasing these new images next week and touch on some of the science objectives the new facility hopes to explore in the next decade. SpaceX Starship explodes. On the ground this time, not in flight We'd all hoped that SpaceX's Starship program would be producing successful launches with the largest rocket ever built busily preparing to carry heavy payloads into orbit and further towards Mars in the coming years. The recent launches of Starship, while producing precious engineering data according to SpaceX, have seen many failures and explosions. The most recent one happened this week while the Starship 36 was undergoing testing on the ground in Texas. Starship 36 explosion in Texas this week. Luckily, there were no injuries although there was extensive damage to the facilities. This latest setback is making Elon Musk's projected timeline for uncrewed exploration of Mars before the end of this decade and landing humans on the red planet in the first part of the next even more difficult to achieve. I asked the president of the Mars Society Australia, Dr. Jon Clarke, why timing is critical when going to Mars. "This is problematic for Musk’s Mars ambitions because, unlike for an Earth orbiting mission, where failure means you can try again as soon as you are able to launch again, Mars missions can depart for Mars only when the launch window opens.  If Musk misses that he will have to wait for 26 months until the next window is available.  The 2026 window will be in November-December.  The one after that is December 2028-January 2029.  This means that Musk has 17-18 months to orbit, recover, and reuse Starship and successfully and reliably along with its booster, demonstrate and then bring into service the tankers needed to refuel the Starship going to Mars, be able to perform the necessary orbital refuelling, all before the end of next year." Astronomers find most of the Universe's missing matter If you've ever wondered where most of the "stuff" or baryonic matter that makes up the Universe is located, you've probably thought most of it would be clumped together in the stars, planets and ever nebulae that form galaxies, the with the vast distances between them empty. (Baryonic matter is the everyday ordinary matter you're familiar matter. The device you're reading this on is made of baryonic matter for example.) Rather we've known for many years that the majority of ordinary matter is missing. There were estimates, but no way of determining the amount or location with any accuracy.  There'd been various attempts to do so using quasars, but thin, high temperature gasses could not be seen by telescopes.  Astronomers found that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) can be used to measure baryonic matter but had trouble finding locations. Fast radio bursts are high intensity, short bursts of radio waves from galaxies. We're not sure what they are exactly. How intense? They can emit as much energy as they Sun puts out in several days over a period of just a few seconds.  By investigating 60 FRBs, including the most distant one ever observed at over 9 billion light years away, they've been able to map the space between galaxies and found the missing matter in the regions between them. This is called the intergalactic medium (IGM). "The decades-old 'missing baryon problem' was never about whether the matter existed," said Liam Connor, CfA astronomer and lead author of the new study. "It was always: Where is it? Now, thanks to FRBs, we know: three-quarters of it is floating between galaxies in the cosmic web." In other words, scientists now know the home address of the “missing” matter. Bottom line - about 76% of the ordinary matter in the Universe is in the IGM, floating around in the space between galaxies  You can read more about this announcement here.  Astronomers have now found the largest Oort cloud comet has started to become active Many would know about the Oort Cloud, a large region between the outer extremities of the Solar System that extends most of the  way to the nearest star system. It's thought to contain billions of objects bigger than 20km wide and trillions of bodies more than a kilometre in size. Occasionally, one of these bodies are disturbed from their position in the Oort cloud and start heading towards the inner Solar System. These Oort Cloud comets haven't been into the inner parts of the Solar System where the planets and the Sun are located and can result in some displays so bright they can even be seen during the day. Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) was first found in archival data in 2024, and has now been observed to be active by astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) while it was some 16.6 times the distance from the Sun and the Earth. What's amazing about this Oort Cloud comet is its size, at about 140km across. This is more than 10 times the size of most comets we've ever observed.  An illustration of Comet C/2014 UN271. Image via NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/M.Weiss C/2014 UN271 was found to have jets of carbon monoxide gas and producing heat emissions while the comet was still at a large distance from the Sun. “These measurements give us a look at how this enormous, icy world works,” said lead author Nathan Roth of American University and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “We’re seeing explosive outgassing patterns that raise new questions about how this comet will evolve as it continues its journey toward the inner solar system.” Sadly for astronomers this giant comet won't be visible with just your eyes when it makes its closest approach to the Sun in January 2031. It will be some 10.9 AU or about the distance between the Earth and Saturn and it will not enter the inner Solar System. More about this discovery here. In All, a Rather Ho-Hum Week... Just the usual: we’ve found most of the missing matter in the Universe, the biggest astronomical data stream in history is about to open, the largest comet ever seen is headed our way (sort of), and Starship exploded again. Cheers, Earl White  BINTEL 21st June 2025    

Should we paint satellites black to help astronomers? Well, maybe. Many of our customers have found trails from satellites appearing as streaks in their astro images. While the odd one or two might look interesting, more satellites will make it harder and harder to take clear, long exposure photos of night sky. There are around 8,000 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) at the moment, and this figure is expected to rise to over 60,000 in the next five years. It's an even more serious problems for professional observatories. We've talked about the "first light" of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the coming weeks. This remarkable new observatory will image the entire sky visible from its location every few nights. Estimates are that up to the 40% of what it captures will be affected by trails in long exposures left by satellites. An example of what satellites can do with an astro photo of the Milky Way. Image via Bernt Olsen What we see when satellites leave streaks across images or when we spot them in the evening sky is sunlight reflecting from their surfaces. They don't emit light themselves.  Given this, one solution would be to simply paint satellites so they don't reflect light. You've probably seen matt black cars, caravans or even buildings in daylight and while they appear darker than their surroundings, they're still visible as they're still reflecting some light.  There are special coatings that reflect almost no light and can make an object practically disappear from view. Could this be the answer for astronomers? Once such coating is Vantablack 310 from Surrey NanoSystems. This reflects around 2% of the light that fall on it. Made from carbon nanotube arrays, this coating is also able to handle the tough conditions found in orbit.  The company is teaming up with researchers from the University of Surrey to test how effective Vantablack 310 is hide the reflections from satellites. The coating will be trialled on Jovian 1, the first satellite mission from JUPITER – the Joint Universities Programme for In-Orbit Training, Education and Research due to launch in 2026.  It's certainly a promising way to solve a major problem facing astronomers of all types. Companies like SpaceX have identified this as problem and it's something they're "working on" for both optical and radio astronomers. Check out more on this project here. If you've never seen something painted in Vantablack or similar, it's a bit freaky. Our brains can't really process looking at something with no light reflecting from it. It makes things appear like a strange void with no details. South pole of the Sun seen for the first time Seen for the first time this week was the south pole of the Sun, a region previously unexplored by spacecraft.  The region around the Sun's south pole. Image via ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team, D. Berghmans (ROB) The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft has provided a unique perspective of our nearest star thanks to a change in the plane of its orbit around the Sun. On the 23rd of March, it took this image from an angle some 17 degrees south of the Sun's equator.  There will be further changes to the orbit of Solar Orbiter, so more detailed images of these regions will be on the way in the future.  They will add to our understanding of the Sun by helping us learn more about is cycles, magnetic fields and more. Until now, all the images of the Sun have been from the ecliptic plane, or the same angle the Earth and major Solar System orbit around.  “Today we reveal humankind’s first-ever views of the Sun’s pole,” says Prof. Carole Mundell, ESA's Director of Science. “The Sun is our nearest star, giver of life and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behaviour. These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science.”  You can read the full news release and check out some more images here.  The strange workings of the "Bunny Ears" galaxy Astronomers lead by Harrison Souchereau and Jeffrey Kenney from Yale University have observed a strange galaxy in the Coma cluster, some 300 million light-years away. A Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 4858, with orange tendrils overlayed showing the "bunny ears" and inner tail taken by the ALMA radio telescope Dense galactic clusters like the collection of galaxies in the Coma formation are some of the largest and most extreme bodies we've observed in the Universe.  All galaxies are moving on their own path, including our own Milky Way. Interactions with other galaxies will change their shapes or even merge with together as they get close over vast timescales.  In dense clusters, they can even be torn apart by other members and this is what appears to be happening with NGC 4858.  Interactions with other galaxies cause extreme outside pressures (called ram pressure or “wind”) and this can strip away part of a galaxy’s interior gas.  “This galaxy, NGC 4858, is traveling very quickly through the Coma cluster,” said Souchereau, a doctoral student in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and first author of the new study. “It is effectively in a wind tunnel, and its gas is in the process of being stripped away by the wind.” This stripping away of gases causes this galaxy to have its jellyfish shape and unique "bunny ears". It also has features from fallback. This is where is gasses are pulled away from the galaxy but don't have enough velocity to escape the galaxy's gravity and fall back elsewhere into the galaxy. Read more at Yale here. Another example of the vast array of galactic wonders that make up the visible Universe.  Winter Solstice next Saturday Next week we'll be chatting about the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Cheers, Earl White  BINTEL  14th of June 2025    

iSpace RESILIENCE lunar lander appears lost Japan's iSpace appears to have failed in its second attempt to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon's surface near a region called Mare Frigoris or the "Sea of Cold" on its northern hemisphere. Contact was lost during the spacecraft's descent, about 20km from the Lunar surface. In a statement about the final moments of the landing attempt, iSpace said: "Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Center has been able to confirm the following: The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface." The failed mission included the Tenacious rover, the first European vehicle to explore the Moon. An illustration of the Tenacious rover next to the Resilience lander on the moon. Image via: ESA/ispace You can read more about this via the ispace statement here.  It's taken more than two centuries to discover about 1.5 million asteroids. That number could double in two years. There are eight known planets in our Solar System, and well over a million smaller bodies of sizes that range from dwarf planets such as Pluto or Ceres down to tiny objects a few metres across.  These are all largely unchanged since the early part of the Solar System's history and astronomers already regard them as fossil records that are key to understanding its past.  Now the team at Sorcha have produced a simulation of how many more Solar System bodies instruments at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will discover in the coming years and the predicted results are staggering. This new telescope will photograph the entire night sky visible from its location in Chile every three nights and will build over the next decade a catalogue not just of the sky, but also capture changes in the sky or transient phenomena.  It's in the final stages of testing with first images set to be revealed to the world on the 23rd of June 2025. (And most certainly yes - we'll be featuring these!) The Simonyi Survey Telescope inside the Rubin Observatory dome on Cerro Pachón in Chile. Image via: RubinObs/NOIRLab The combined size of telescope along with observations of the same part of the sky on frequent basis with different filters means faint Solar System bodies can be discovered and identified on a large scale for the first time.  The simulations suggest that the results could mean: Visit the Sorcha website here to learn more about their estimations and some background on the different types of Solar System bodies. It's certainly an exciting time for astronomy. Are the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies going to merge? Maybe not, but it now looks like we're on course to merge with the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the next two billion years. It's long been thought that the two largest members of our local group of galaxies, our own Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) are likely to merge together in the distant future. Unlike other galaxies which have a redshift in the light coming from them, meaning they're moving away, M31 is heading towards us and is blue shifted at some 109 km per second. In fact, we'd known this even before M31 was recognised as being another galaxy.  Given the speed of M31 towards us and the size of our two respective galaxies, the collision seemed inevitable and unavoidable.  How the night sky could appear from Sydney in 3.75 billion years around 9.30pm daylight saving times. Image via NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel Now astronomers have delved deeper in the movements of other galaxies in the local group. They've found there's a high chance of the orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) running perpendicular to the Milky Way, along with the movement of third largest member of the local group, M33 called the Triangulum Galaxy has reduced the chance of the collision to around 50%. "The future collision - if it happens - would be the end of both the Milky Way and Andromeda, with the structure of both being destroyed and a new galaxy with an elliptical shape arising from the merger." said University of Helsinki astrophysicist Till Sawala, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. "If a merger happens, it is more likely to occur 7-8 billion years in the future. But we find that based on the current data, we cannot predict the time of a merger, if it happens at all," Sawala said. Given how far apart star systems are in galaxies, the chances of planets or stars or even black holes running into each are remote. Think of it more like two ultra-thin, vast clouds of smoke merging.  You can read more here. Massive planet found around a tiny star The theories about how planets form around stars might have to be fine tuned after the discovery of a large gas planet called TOI-6894b, about 53 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting a red dwarf star.  For some time, astronomers have thought that low mass stars less, than one third the mass of our Sun, would not have enough material bound to them by the star's gravity to form planets. Large planets pull in or accrete matter via gravity from the region around the host star. This was likely the case with Jupiter for example, but current thinking puts this as unlikely to have occurred around a red dwarf. This discovery plus a number of other examples are challenging this theory and pointing towards the need for new theories about how planets are formed. Using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) astronomers identified 15 potential giant planets orbit low mass stars.  The red dwarf hosting TOI-6894b has about 20% of the mass of the Sun and the planet orbits the star every three days.  You can read more here. Antares scoots behind the Moon Finally for this week, the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius, the red giant Antares, will slide behind the Moon on the 10th of June 2025 at 7.23pm Sydney time and reappear a little later at 8.41pm.  This event, called an occultation, will be visible in the western sky when the Moon is almost full. The Moon from as seen from Sydney on the 10th of June 2025 around 7.30pm You can observe this with your eyes or binoculars, although even a small telescope will let you see Antares approach and disappear behind the Moon.  More here, where you can also check the timing for other locations. Cheers, Earl White  BINTEL 7th June 2025              

SpaceX Starship 9 flight Big space news this week is no doubt the 9th test flight of SpaceX's Starship mega rocket.  On the plus side, this was the second flight of the massive booster which was flown on flight 7 in January of this year and captured back at the launch pad with its "chopsticks". (Check out more here.) Starship 9 launch. Image via SpaceX  While the booster made it to space, it broke apart some 6 minutes and 20 seconds into the flight just as it had started its return burn. It suffered a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" (RUD) as described by SpaceX or as we like to call here at BINTEL a "Ballistic Angular Non-recoverable Gyrations" (BANG). The Starship spacecraft itself got further into the compared to flights 7 and 8, however its mission objective of releasing dummy Starlink satellites failed when the doors failed to open. It also suffered a breakup during re-entry. Starship re-entering over Namibia No firm date for the next Starship launch. SpaceX have indicated an increase in their frequency, aiming to launch every three to four weeks. Has another cousin for Pluto been found? One of the reasons Pluto was booted from the line up of Solar System main planets in 2006 was Pluto was simply the first discovered of what was turning out to be a another group of Solar System locals called dwarf planets. In fact, there's now  general agreement on the largest nine potential dwarf planets :  Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Ceres, and Orcus.  (The IAU has recognised five of these.) Dwarf planets recognised by the IAU, plus the newly discovered 2017 OF201 There's another few that under investigation, with researchers from Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Natural Sciences lead by Sihao Chen announcing this week the discovery of an extraordinary trans-Neptunian object (TNO), which has been assigned the name  2017 OF201. (This is just a catalogue number for now. No doubt a more prosaic name will be bestowed to it soon.) This object is the largest new body found in the Solar System for some years, and may be large enough to qualify as a distant dwarf planet. It was found by trawling through large chunks of publicly available data obtained from Victor M. Blanco Telescope and Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).  2017 OF201 was found in 19 different images taken over 17 years. It appears to be around 700km in diameter, although more observations using ground-based radio telescopes will be needed to narrow this figure down.It has an extreme orbit around the Sun which takes some 25,000 years to complete.  “The object’s aphelion—the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun—is more than 1600 times that of the Earth’s orbit,” explains Cheng. “Meanwhile, its perihelion—the closest point on its orbit to the Sun—is 44.5 times that of the Earth’s orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit.” Illustration of where 2017 OF201 is currently located and how its vast orbit compares to the inner Solar System. Such an orbit might also point to history of interactions with other large planets or it  maybe even ejected to the Oort cloud and then pushed back into the inner Solar System. The discovery of 2017 OF201 might also pose problems about for existence of "Planet 9" a large body at the edge of the Solar System we talked about last week which has been proposed to explain the movements of groups of TNOs. Read about this fascinating discovery here. Yet again, there seems to be much to discover about our home in the Milky Way, the Solar System. JWST Deep Field peers back in time A new image released this week from the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) peers back even further than the 2016 image of the same region taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  An image of galaxy cluster Abell S1063 taken by Hubble as part of  as part of the Frontier Fields programme. In this image, the bright central region is the vast galaxy cluster Abell S1063 which is approx. 4.5 billion light years away from Earth. The combined mass of this group of clusters is enough to bend the light of even more distant galaxies through a process called gravitational lensing.  Much like a telescope's lens, this galactic "lens" brightens these galaxies so they can be observed. The JWST specialises in deep field images such as this.  It's where the telescope spends large amounts of time observing a single target. In this case, Webb spent over 120 hours peering into this view obtaining images of some the earliest parts of the Universe's history.  This image was obtained as part of Webb's GLIMPSE program, which aims to observe galaxies that existed when the Universe was only 200 million years old as well as the earliest but as yet unobserved Population I stars.  (We touched on the various populations of stars in an earlier BINTEL blog article.) You can read ore about this amazing Webb image here Comet C/2025 K1 (Atlas) A new comet has been discovered, C/2025 K1 (Atlas). It's still very faint and at this point more than likely visible in binoculars in the Northern Hemisphere in October after possibly a brief stint in our southern sky in September.  Path of C/2025 K1 (Atlas) via The SkyLive You can follow this comet here. Like all comets, a lot will depend on how it survives its closest encounter around the Sun. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 31st May 2025      

A Solar storm far more destructive than the Carrington Event A lot of keen astro folks would be familiar with the Carrington Event, where a large storm on the Sun sent a huge stream of charged particles called a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME towards the Earth in 1859. This produced spectacular aurora even at latitudes close to the equator. More importantly, it happened when there was a new network of telegraph and powerlines. The current these charged particles induced burnt out miles of wiring and caused widespread electrical fires.  Sunspots of 1st September 1859 as drawn by Richard Carrington It's always been a sobering thought about the damage a Carrington type event would cause to our complex electrical communications networks, transport systems. and to our society in general. Solar storms are not rare, with events like the 1989 storm causing widespread power outages in the USA and the 1972 storm which was severe enough to damage spacecraft in Earth orbit. In 2012, a Solar storm large enough to produce another Carrington level event was observed. Luckily for us, it was pointed away for Earth. Even more concerning is that multiple even larger solar storms have been recorded both through remarkable displays of aurora observed by writers of the time and also in tree rings which can then be carbon dated. Scientists had recorded a huge spike in 12,350 BCE, some 14,300 years ago, but didn't have enough information about to work out the strength of the event.  Researchers from the University of Oulu, Finland, have now been able to model the event in more details and found it be some 18% stronger than the 775 AD storm which was the largest ever recorded in the tree ring history.  “Compared to the largest event of the modern satellite era — the 2005 particle storm — the ancient 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense, according to our estimates”, says Dr. Golubenko, one of the finding's authors.  It certainly indicates just how strong Solar storms can get. While a Carrington type event  might cause severe damage to our modern infrastructure, the Sun has a long history of throwing even more dangerous events our way. Read more here. Jupiter used to be double its current size New research released this week by astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Fred C. Adams have calculated the size of Jupiter around 3.8 million years after the Solar System's first solid bodies formed and the cloud of material from which the planets and other bodies formed was disappearing.  At the time Jupiter was about twice its current size or about 2,000 times that of the Earth. Its magnetic field was also 50 times stronger than what we currently observe. This was discovered by looking the orbits of some of the gas giant planet's moons. An illustration of the magnetic fields surrounding Jupiter. Image via: K. Batygin "Our ultimate goal is to understand where we come from, and pinning down the early phases of planet formation is essential to solving the puzzle," Batygin says. "This brings us closer to understanding how not only Jupiter but the entire solar system took shape." These results help to complete more details around the early history and formation of the Solar System.   Read more about this discovery at the Caltech news site here. "Clean rooms" not as clean as we thought All interplanetary spacecraft go through a rigorous decontamination process in clean rooms here on Earth before they head off on their missions. There's a few reasons for this, with the one main being the need to avoid possible contamination of another world with terrestrial microbes that might take up residence in their new, pristine environment.  As many interplanetary missions look for signs of life as part of the main science objectives, sterilization also increases the chances of instruments spotting local lifeforms instead of hitchhikers from Earth.  Even NASA's Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s underwent a long and thorough sterilization process to avoid Earth microbes making the journey to the red planet and taking up residence there.   A Viking Mars lander in its bioshield for sterilization in nitrogen gas at more than 110 degrees C for 40 hours prior to launch in 1975. Image via NASA Researchers have now discovered 26 unique species of bacteria in NASA Spacecraft Assembly facilities. What's more, they were previously unknown and their DNA included characteristics found in microbes known to able to handle extreme environment like space.  Critters like these microbes are often referred to as extremophiles. "Our study aimed to understand the risk of extremophiles being transferred in space missions and to identify which microorganisms might survive the harsh conditions of space. This effort is pivotal for monitoring the risk of microbial contamination and safeguarding against unintentional colonization of exploring planets," explained King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Professor Alexandre Rosado, the lead KAUST researcher on the project and a contributor to several NASA working groups on planetary protection and space microbiology. Not only does this study point to ways that spacecraft sterilization can be further improved, it also shows how just how hardy life is, even in the most hostile of environments. Have we found Planet 9? No - not that Planet 9, another one....  There's been a lot of speculation about a large planets that orbits the Sun at enormous distance, with the only way to detect it is by the effects of a group of small asteroids referred to as ETNOs (Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects). There seems to be something BIG on the fringes of the Solar System that we haven't been able to track down and identify. There's a BINTEL blog article from last year about it here.  If identified this large "Planet 9" might help explain the history of the Solar System and add to our knowledge of how planetary systems form.  It's been a long and arduous search but hopes are high that it will be found.  An illustration of what Planet 9 might look like. Image via Caltech Astronomers have been trawling through archival data from Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS), a NASA-Netherlands-U.K. satellite launched in 1983; and AKARI, a Japanese satellite launched in 2006. By comparing catalogues compiled decades apart by these two spacecraft and shifting through millions of points of data, they narrowed down two points of small dots that might be a distant planet. The problem is that this "Planet 9" lies in a completely different direction from the original region that appeared to be effected by a large and hidden body. It's effectively another Planet 9.  This mismatch “doesn’t mean it’s not there, but it means it’s not Planet Nine,” says Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who, along with his colleague Konstantin Batygin, came up with the Planet Nine proposal nearly a decade ago. “I don’t think this planet would have any of the effects on the Solar System that we think we’re seeing.” Hopefully when next generation telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory start imaging the entire sky every few nights for year on end,  we'll more easily be able to spot small movements in the outer regions of the Solar System. Read more here. SpaceX Starship 9 Flight At this point, the next launch of the massive Starship is due for the next week. Stay tuned for news..... Cheers, Earl White  BINTEL 24th of May 2025  

Gilmour Space Launch Postponed Probably the biggest space news in Australia this week is the postponement of the launch of the Gilmour Space rocket, Eris, from their Bowen complex in north Queensland.  Image via Gilmour Space After a delay from the first attempt, the next planned launch early on the 16th of May was scrubbed due to an equipment failure. The mechanism that opens the rocket's nosecone unexpectedly activated just before the planned launch window. There was no fuel onboard Eris at the time and there were no injuries or damage to the launch pad or the rocket itself. Especially important is the payload including a jar of Vegemite was unharmed. (Although as we all know, it would take more a rocket explosion to cause any problems with that particular Aussie delicacy.)  Gilmour Space CEO, Adam Gilmour, commented that a replacement nosecone will need to be sent to the launch site while a full investigation is carried out as to the cause of the incident.  It's certainly better to have happened when it did and not 15 seconds into the flight. As they say - "space is hard!" More here. Is the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) being torn apart? Astronomers led by Satoya Nakano and Kengo Tachihara from Nagoya University in Japan have discovered groups of Cepheid variable stars that are being pulled apart in different directions in one the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Cepheids are often referred to as "standard candles" because their variations are tightly linked to brightness and can be used to measure their distance.  The SMC captured by Chi Chan and posted to the BINTEL Society Facebook page. By looking at the movement of these groups of stars, they estimated there's complex movements within the SMC beyond its own gravity. The galaxy seems to be being pulled in one direction by its large neighbour, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in one direction and another, unknown body the opposite direction.  “When we first got this result, we suspected that there might be an error in our method of analysis,” Tachihara said. “However, upon closer examination, the results are indisputable, and we were surprised.” You can read more about their research here. It's always fascinating to learn about the slow and complex movements of our galactic neighbourhood.  Both the LMC and the SMC will be visible in southern skies tonight, although the glare from the nearly full Moon can make observation tricky.  The LMC and SMC as seen from Sydney around 6.30pm tonight, the 16th of May 2025. Image via Stellarium. Webb finds water in another early star system The JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) has scored another first - the observation of water in another star system. It's long been thought that water is likely to be found at other stars. It is not only found in  liquid form here on Earth, but elsewhere in the Solar System as ice, and water Illustration of water ice around the star HD 181327. Image via  NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) Now Webb has found water around a young, Sun-like star, HD 181327, which is some 155 light years away.  “Webb unambiguously detected not just water ice, but crystalline water ice, which is also found in locations like Saturn’s rings and icy bodies in our solar system’s Kuiper Belt,” said Chen Xie, the lead author of the new paper and an assistant research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Ice in particular is important to the formation of a solar system, influencing things like the way giant planets are formed and then delivering water to the surface of rocky planets.  “The presence of water ice helps facilitate planet formation,” Xie said. “Icy materials may also ultimately be ‘delivered’ to terrestrial planets that may form over a couple hundred million years in systems like this.” You can read more at the NASA's science news here. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL  17th May 2025