Best Time to Observe the Moon This Month is Now
The next few nights are the best time this month to observe the moon with binoculars or a small telescope.
Tonight (Jan. 12) the moon will be just past first quarter. This means that the sun’s light will be falling on the moon from the right, causing very oblique lighting all across the center of the moon’s disk, the boundary between sunlight and shadow known as the terminator.
This map of the moon's craters shows some of the best natural landmarks to look for when observing the lunar surface.
In a small telescope, or even in binoculars, the easiest crater to see is the huge ring plain almost in the center of the moon’s disk, Ptolemaeus. This gigantic crater, 95 miles (153 km) in diameter, is named for the greatest Greek astronomer of ancient times, Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in the second century. [Gallery: Our Changing Moon]
Look also for the perfectly oval crater Plato close to the moon’s north pole. This crater is 63 miles (101 km) in diameter and named for the famous Greek philosopher who flourished in the fourth century B.C.E.
Because of the moon’s rapid movement around the Earth, the direction of the sun’s light changes greatly from one night to the next, making the study of the moon a constantly changing show. By tomorrow night (Jan. 13), the terminator will have moved westward. Ptolemaeus will be harder to see, though the dark floor of Plato continues to make it well-defined. New craters will be lit by the rising sun, such as Copernicus, near the center of the disk, and Tycho, near the moon’s south pole.
These craters are named for two astronomical "greats" of the 16th century.
Copernicus, 58 miles (93 km) in diameter with terraced walls, is named for the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who placed the sun at the center of the solar system. Tycho, 53 miles (85 km) in diameter, center of the moon’s brightest system of rays, is named after Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who was the most accurate observer of his time.
By Friday night, the sun will be penetrating farther westward, bringing into sunlight the graceful curve of the Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows) on the north shore of the Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains).
These fanciful names were given to these features in the 17th century, before we knew that the moon was a barren, airless world. To the north, the walled plain of Gassendi is a striking crater. The crater, 68 miles (110 km) in diameter, is named for Pierre Gassendi, a 17th century French astronomer.
Saturday night the sun will illuminate the crater Aristarchus. Although smaller than many craters at just 25 miles (40 km) in diameter, Aristarchus is one of the youngest and brightest craters on the moon. It is named for Aristarchus of Samos, third century B.C. Greek philosopher, the first to correctly place the sun in the center of the solar system.
One of the greatest treats for an amateur astronomer is watching the moon’s terminator sweep majestically across the face of the moon — and this is the perfect week to do that.
This article was provided to SPACE.com by Starry Night Education, the leader in space science curriculum solutions.
An American space tourism company that sells multimillion-dollar tourist flights to the International Space Station announced today (Jan. 12) that it will resume the high-society spaceflights in 2013, after a five-year lull.
Virginia-based Space Adventures will have three seats available on Russian Soyuz space capsules per year starting in 2013, according to a new agreement with Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and the country's spacecraft manufacturer, RSC Energia.
Space Adventures has arranged eight private space tourist flights to the station for seven people (one billionaire customer flew twice) since 2001. The last tourist to fly to the station with Space Adventures was Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte, founder of the circus troupe Cirque du Soleil, who used the trip to advocate global access to clean water through his nonprofit ONE DROP Foundation. Laliberte reportedly paid $35 million for the 11-day trip.
The new deal to send paying tourists to the International Space Station was made possible, in large part, by the planned increase in production of the nonreusable Soyuz spacecraft – to five spacecraft per year from the current four, adding an extra flight to the launch schedule, Space Adventures officials said.
"We are extremely excited to announce this agreement and would like to thank our Russian partners in increasing Soyuz production and providing Space Adventures [with] these well-sought-after transportation services on the only commercially available manned spacecraft currently in operation," Eric Anderson, the company's chairman, said in a statement.
Private space station trips
The trips will last an average of 10 days, and the distribution of the additional seats allotted to Space Adventures will be decided by Roscosmos and the other space station partners, Anderson told SPACE.com.
Alexei Krasnov, director of Human Spaceflight at Roscosmos, said: "The addition of a fifth Soyuz spacecraft to the current manifest will add flexibility and redundancy to our ISS transportation capabilities. We welcome the opportunity to increase our efforts to meet the public demand for access to space."
Space Adventures, which was founded in 1998, is the only company that has booked private flights to the International Space Station. California-based tycoon Dennis Tito became the world's first privately funded space explorer with his high-flying trek to the space station in 2001. A string of wealthy individuals followed, with American billionaire Charles Simonyi flying to the station twice, in 2007 and 2009. Laliberte was the most recent to fly; the supply of seats dipped after his trip, as the space station's professional crew of astronauts and cosmonauts increased to six people.
"Since Guy Laliberte's mission, there has been an increase of interest by private individuals, organizations and commercial entities seeking ways to access the space station," Anderson said. "We have been speaking with these parties about science, education and multimedia programs and hope to make some major announcements in the coming year."
Space Adventures is remaining tight-lipped about what it will charge for upcoming orbital trips.
"We don't really talk about financials, but the cost is dependent on a lot of things, including the time spent in space, exchange rates, and things like that," Anderson said.
New spaceships coming
Interested customers will not have to wait long to throw their hat in the ring – the seats are already up for grabs.
"They're on sale now, as in 'today,'" Anderson said.
The agreement will likely help Space Adventures break new ground in the era of private spaceflight. The company has also partnered with aerospace giant Boeing to sell passenger seats for future flights on the Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100 capsule), which is currently in its development phase.
"Cumulatively, our clients have spent almost three months in space, traveling over 36 million miles, and have been true ambassadors in sharing their experience and explaining to millions of people around the world why it’s important to explore space," Anderson said.
You can follow SPACE.com Staff Writer Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow.
Cosmic lenses created by the ultra-strong gravity of some objects in space may spoil upcoming estimates of the number of galaxies during the universe's earliest days by as much as a factor of 10, a new study warns.
A great deal of mystery surrounds the days when stars were first born. To learn more about the first galaxies that formed, astronomers focus on the farthest ones they can see. If light from a galaxy took a long time coming to Earth, the galaxy must be very old as well as very distant.
After all, the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old.
The problem that researchers now face has to do with the way gravity warps space-time. The greater the mass of an object in space, the stronger its gravitational pull. This in turn can bend light around it, affecting the view by telescopes on Earth.
Blame it on gravity
Scientists call this cosmic effect "gravitational lensing." When it is caused by galaxies that lie on the way toward the ancient ones scientists want to study, it can lead to distorted views of the targets' light.
The probability of gravitational lensing distorting measurements of distant galaxies had been estimated at just 0.5 percent.
However, the study found that astronomers failed to account for "magnification bias," which can make a galaxy appear brighter than it is.
"Gravitational lensing is magnifying all galaxies lying behind a gravitational lens, and this happens much more often for the most distant galaxies," said the study's lead author, Stuart Wyithe, an astronomer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Galaxy-magnifying distortions
When astronomers search for galaxies in a certain patch of space, they don't want their images to be flooded with unnecessary light, so their telescope limits the brightness that can be detected (making some galaxies too faint to be observed). However, because gravitational lensing magnifies the light from galaxies relative to their intrinsic brightness, intrinsically faint galaxies start popping up in the results.
"Since faint galaxies are much more common than bright galaxies, the number of sources observed behind gravitational lenses is significantly enhanced," Wyithe told SPACE.com.
At very large distances, magnification bias can increase the number of gravitationally lensed galaxies detected by as much as a factor of 10, according to Wyithe and his colleagues.
The implication is that our view of the most distant galaxies through the Hubble Space Telescope "might be distorted significantly by gravitational lensing, a kind of cosmic hall of mirrors," Wyithe said.
Better telescopes needed
The next-generation James Webb Space Telescope will be required to properly investigate the lensing phenomenon. By looking for redshift — the distortion in light from an object as it moves away from an observer — one might be able to overcome this magnification bias "and measure an unbiased census of early galaxies," Wyithe said.
Knowing how many galaxies existed in the early universe is key to investigating enigmas such the so-called "reionization" of the early universe. This critical, but not yet fully understood, event occurred when the atomic hydrogen that once pervaded the universe was ionized into its constituent protons and electrons, increasing the temperature of the universe to some 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees Celsius).
Studies of the most distant, ancient galaxies suggest they did not put out enough radiation to reionize the early universe.
"This reionization occurred between about 400 million and 900 million years after the Big Bang, but astronomers still don't know which sources of light caused it to happen," Wyithe said. The new galaxy candidates now being seen in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field come from right in this important epoch in the evolution of the universe, and could thus help solve the mystery.
The scientists detail their findings in the Jan. 13 issue of the journal Nature.
This story was updated at 4:05 p.m. ET.
Astronomers have glimpsed a 'protocluster' of galaxies as they appeared only a billion years after the Big Bang, making it the most distant galaxy cluster yet seen, a report in today's issue of the journal Nature announced.
Using a slew of telescopes, including NASA's Spitzer, Chandra and Hubble space observatories, and the Keck telescope in Hawaii, Peter Capak of California Institute of Technology and his team were able to locate the beginnings of a cluster of galaxies from very early in the universe.
A galaxy cluster is a grouping of hundreds of individual galaxies bound together by gravity. A typical cluster contains between 50 and 1000 galaxies, with a mass ranging from 100 trillion to 1 quadrillion times the mass of the sun. The Milky Way is part of a galaxy cluster known as the Virgo Cluster, which contains roughly 2,000 galaxies.
But finding and studying the birthplace of these regions is difficult. Early protoclusters are rare, and challenging to locate. Astronomers must look very far away, so that they are viewing objects whose light has taken billions of years to travel to Earth, thus presenting them with a window back in time.
"In an area 16 times the size of the full moon, we can expect to find only two to five protoclusters," Capak told SPACE.com
Lighting up the dark
To hunt down protoclusters, Capak and his colleagues searched for brighter, easier-to-find objects such as quasars, starbursts, and massive galaxies — all of which could indicate the presence of a young galaxy cluster. They searched in the same area of the sky studied by the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS).
Within the field, they found a galaxy called AzTEC-3 that was forming stars at a rapid pace, and a quasar – a bright outpouring of light that occurs when mass falls into a black hole.
Like all starburst galaxies, AzTEC-3 has an exceptionally high rate of star formation. Massive stars are created from the abundant gas within the galaxy, burning quickly and brightly, and often exploding as supernovas. This makes starburst galaxies among the brightest galaxies around.
Also in close range lies a quasar, a compact region in a massive galaxy powered by its supermassive black hole. Formed around black hole accretion disks, quasars can outshine the galaxy they inhabit, and are the most luminous objects in the universe.
Because of their high luminosity, starbursts and quasars are relatively easy to locate in the night sky. In order to function, both require space dense with gas and other materials. They tend not to exist in isolation, but rather in heavily populated areas.
"These types of regions are associated with clusters and protoclusters," Capak told said. "Around this system, we found eleven times more galaxies than you would expect in a random area of the sky."
The dense galactic population indicated the presence of a protocluster. More than 40 million light-years across, this protocluster lies nearly 13 billion light-years away from Earth.
Because of the time it took this object's light to travel to us, astronomers saw it as it was only a billion years after the Big Bang.
Studying the environment around the protocluster helps astronomers understand what led to its creation. Similarly, the interactions within the protocluster reveal a great deal about cluster formation at the beginning of the universe.
"What's particularly interesting about this one is that we can characterize what's going on," Capak said. "We can get an idea of what the conditions were in early protoclusters."