How to best view the Eta Aquarids meteor shower that peaks tonight
Just two weeks after the Lyrids meteor shower, stargazers should get ready to see the peak of the Eta Aquarids meteor shower, which is expected to light up the sky on Monday night and early Tuesday morning. For anyone in the southern hemisphere, this is the chance to see up to 60 meteors fly by every hour.
Mark your calendars, because this will be the last major meteor shower for early 2025 until the Alpha Capricornids and the Southern Delta Aquarids overlap in late July.
Meteor showers happen when the Earth passes through the dust and ice debris or tail of a comet, according to NASA. Arguably the most famous and visible ones are the Perseids, which peak every August.
The Eta Aquarid meteors specifically come from comet 1P/Halley, aka Halley, one of the most famous comets. Each time Halley returns to the inner solar system, its debris results in the Eta Aquarids in May and the Orionids meteor shower in October. Halley itself takes 76 years to travel around the sun and will next be seen in Earth's sky sometime in 2061.
What sets the Eta Aquarids apart from other meteors is how quickly they travel. It's an estimated 40.7 miles per second into the Earth's atmosphere, which causes glowing 'trains' in the wake of the meteor that can last for several minutes in the sky.
While Eta Aquarid meteors are active from April 19 to May 28, their peak is May 5 to May 6, according to the American Meteor Society. 'Peak' means that about 50 meteors will be visible every hour compared with the usual rates of around 10 to 30 per hour.
The Eta Aquarids are visible in both the northern and southern hemispheres during the early morning hours, although NASA says the southern hemisphere is a preferred location to see them more clearly since they'll be higher up in the sky. In the northern hemisphere, the Eta Aquarids seemingly 'skim the surface of the Earth at the horizon' for viewers.
NASA recommends that viewers find a location away from city lights and streetlights to see the Eta Aquarids. For the best view, lie flat on your back with your feet facing east. NASA says that after about half an hour of looking at the night sky, your eyes will adapt and you'll likely be able to see the meteors.
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USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Dozens of NASA space missions could be axed under Trump's budget: Here's a look at 6
Dozens of NASA space missions could be axed under Trump's budget: Here's a look at 6 The budget request proposes slashing NASA funding by nearly 25% mostly by eliminating a significant portion of the agency's science portfolio. Show Caption Hide Caption Trump calls Elon Musk a 'fantastic guy' amid drug use allegations President Trump said he didn't know about Elon Musk's alleged drug use and backed the billionaire's cost-cutting. A total of 41 science projects would get the ax under the proposal, which would be NASA's biggest single-year cut in the agency's history, according to the Planetary Society. Many of the science missions President Donald Trump looks to cancel are still in development, while others are extended operations with uncrewed vehicles already deployed to orbit. Here's a look at six different types of space missions, from Mars exploration to future moon landings, that could be under threat if Trump's budget were to go into effect. Dozens of NASA's missions to explore the cosmos could be in jeopardy under a budget proposal from the White House. President Donald Trump's administration, which released an initial budget proposal May 2 for the U.S. space agency, dropped more details Friday, May 30 about just which NASA programs it looks to cancel. All told, the budget request for the next fiscal year proposes slashing NASA funding by nearly 25% – from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion – mostly by eliminating a significant portion of the agency's science portfolio. Trump's proposal, which would need congressional approval, has been lauded by acting NASA Administrator Janet Petro for "still prioritizing critical science and technology research," she said in a statement. But in its own statement, the Planetary Society called the proposed budget "an extinction-level event for the space agency's most productive, successful, and broadly supported activity: science." A total of 41 science projects would get the ax under the proposal, which would be NASA's biggest single-year cut in the agency's history, according to the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space exploration advocacy organization. Many of the science missions Trump looks to cancel are still in development, while others are extended operations with uncrewed vehicles already deployed to orbit. Here's a look at six different types of space missions, from Mars exploration to future moon landings, that could be under threat if Trump's budget were to go into effect. Mars missions: Mars Sample Return, orbiters For years, NASA's Mars Sample Return mission has sought to bring back a collection of rocks that could reveal details about potential past life on the Red Planet. The agency's Perseverance rover has been scooping up and storing intriguing rock samples since it first landed in 2021 in the Jezero Crater. But ballooning costs and mission delays have hampered both NASA and the European Space Agency in executing a plan to actually retrieve and transport the samples to Earth for scientists to study further. Meanwhile, Mars Odyssey and MAVEN are two spacecrafts that have been orbiting Mars for years. While those missions could be eliminated, Trump looks to inject another $1 billion to tap the private sector to help lay the groundwork for future Mars exploration. That includes establishing a new NASA initiative called the Commercial Mars Payload Services Program (CMPS). The program would operate similar to NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program by awarding contracts to private companies that would develop spacesuits, vehicles and other technology aimed at reaching the Red Planet. Outer solar system: New Horizons, Juno The New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close when it flew by the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14, 2015. In 2019, the space probe reached the Kuiper belt – a doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies extending far beyond the orbit of Neptune – where it continues to make discoveries about the outer solar system. The Juno probe, meanwhile, continues to reveal new insights into the gas giant Jupiter and its Jovian moons nine years after arriving in 2016. The spacecraft recently relayed data unmasking the harsh environments of both Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io. Moon missions: Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion space capsule – both seen as centerpieces in the effort to return Americans to the moon – may have their days numbered. The SLS and Orion, which have both launched just once on an uncrewed mission in 2022 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, are due to play a role in NASA's lunar ambitions under the Artemis campaign. But Trump seeks to phase out both the SLS and the Orion after just two more missions. 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Planetary defense: OSIRIS-APEX NASA's OSIRIS-REx, which gathered and returned a sample of asteroid Bennu in September 2023, had been renamed OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer (OSIRIS-APEX) and sent on a path that would allow it to meet up with an infamous asteroid in 2029. That asteroid is name Apophis, and it initially posed a sizable threat to Earth when it was first discovered in 2004 before scientists eventually calculated that its trajectory was harmless. OSIRIS-APEX was meant to spend 18 months mapping the asteroid's surface and analyzing its chemical makeup during a rendezvous with Apophis in June 2029 after the asteroid has a close encounter with Earth. Scientists had considered the mission an invaluable endeavor to allow NASA and other space agency's to build up planetary defense capabilities if a space rock ever posed a threat. Space telescope: Chandra X-Ray Observatory The Chandra X-ray Observatory has spent more than 25 years detecting exotic environments in the cosmos to help astronomers understand the structure and evolution of the universe. The space telescope, which launched in 1999 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, continues to provide data allowing scientists to make new cosmic discoveries. While the observatory is targeted under Trump's budget proposal, other famous space telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope would remain in operation. Contributing: Brooke Edwards, Rick Neale, USA TODAY Network Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@
Yahoo
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In space, no one can hear you scream — But it still gets incredibly noisy
You've probably heard astronauts talking to mission control while they perform operations in space. In these recordings, you can hear the back-and-forth chatter, along with the astronaut's breathing and the background noise of their spacesuit pumping oxygen into their helmet to keep them alive. Yet, if they removed that helmet and broke the barrier of the suit shielding them from outer space, that conversation would be cut — and all sound would go radio silent. As astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson once explained on the podcast StarTalk, astronauts would be able to hear things from within the body itself — like their own heartbeat. 'The sound of silence is the sound of things that were always making noise that you never noticed before,' he said on the podcast. Sound waves are a vibration carried through some sort of medium, like air or water or in the case of the heartbeat, the body. When those vibrations reach our ears, they send a vibration through our eardrums, which is recognized in the brain as sound. Because sound needs something to travel through, it can't make its way through the vast majority of space, which is a vacuum containing essentially no particles. Interplanetary space contains just a few dozen particles in each cubic centimeter — in comparison, the air we breathe has tens of quintillions of molecules per cubic centimeter. (For scale, 10 quintillion seconds is longer than the age of the universe.) 'In the universe, an absolute vacuum is rare, and most of the universe is very low-density high-temperature plasma,' said Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. 'In principle, sound could travel through that, but it would have very different properties to what we are used to.' Gas clouds, dust clouds and solar winds for example, could all have sound waves pass through them, even if they are relatively low-density, said Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs The Bad Astronomy blog. The structures of many gas clouds, for example, can be formed by sound waves, or shock waves in the case that the material moves faster than the speed of sound, he explained. 'We see the effects of sound in these objects all the time,' Plait told Salon in an email. This would be nothing like the sound we are used to on Earth and wouldn't be detectable by the human ear, which can only hear a very narrow range of frequencies. You may remember the black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster about 250 million light-years away, from which NASA detected emanating pressure waves in 2003. Although this was not a sound recording like you would hear from a microphone, NASA did convert these pressure waves into sound, albeit one that is far too low of a frequency for the human ear to detect. For what it's worth, though, they did find that the waves corresponded to the note of B-flat, about 57 octaves below the middle C note on a piano. Then, in 2022, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory sonified this wave data into a couple of sounds the human ear could hear at frequencies 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than the original. (To get a sense of just how astronomical this figure is, one study estimated that there are 20 quadrillion total ants on Earth.)"What's going on is that matter is surrounding the black hole, and when some stuff falls in it can create a powerful wind that compresses the material around it, making a sound wave,' Plait said. 'We don't detect the sound itself, but we can see the ripples in the gas and they can be converted into sound we hear.' There are entire projects dedicated to sonifying data from astronomical objects. In the Cassini mission, for example, NASA detected radio waves emitted from charged particles in magnetic fields, which were converted to sound. Still, these were plasma waves, and not sound waves. However, sound has been detected within our own solar system. During NASA's Perseverance mission on Mars in 2021, the rover's microphones detected the whir of the mission's helicopter and noises created by the rover. It also detected naturally occurring sounds on the planet itself — including Martian wind. Back in 1981, Russia also reported sounds on Venus during the Soviet Venera 13 mission, which sounds like waves hissing on a beach. Yet sounds on other planets sound different than they do on Earth because other planets have different atmospheres. On Earth, the unique combination of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases, combined with the effects of gravity and solar heating, create a certain density of molecules that carries sound as we know it. In contrast, the atmosphere on Mars is roughly 2% as dense as Earth's, and its composition is dominated by carbon dioxide. Overall, sounds would be quieter and slightly muffled, and it would also take longer to reach you than it would on Earth. Some higher pitched sounds would be inaudible entirely. Interestingly, if you played a church organ on Mars, the set of flue pipes that create sound in a way similar to a flute would go up in pitch, but the reed pipes, which produce sound in a way similar to a saxophone, would go down in pitch, said Tim Leighton, an acoustics professor at University of Southampton, who created models to predict sound on other planets. Saturn's moon, Titan, is probably acoustically the closest to Earth. However, the pressure and density are a bit higher at ground level, and the speed at which sound travels through the atmosphere is lower than Earth. As a result, many sounds such as voices, flutes and organ pipes would play at a lower pitch, Leighton said. On Venus, sounds that are caused by solid objects vibrating, like harmonicas or reed organ pipes, would be pitched down because the atmosphere is dense and soupy. However, sounds from things like flue organ pipes or flutes, which are propagated through air, would be pitched higher than Earth. That's because the extremely hot temperatures on Venus make sound travel faster than on Earth. Additionally, if we theoretically heard a sound like a vocalization on Venus, our perception of the size of the creature it was coming from would be a little distorted. That's because humans evolutionarily developed a way of hearing vocalizations in which sound travels to the top of the nose of the speaker and back again in a form of echo, which we subconsciously use to estimate how large a creature is based on the tone they emit, Leighton said. On Venus, "this pulse quickly travels up to the top of the nose and back again much sooner than it would on Earth,' Leighton told Salon in a video call. 'Your brain hears that and imagines the person is about three feet tall.' As we continue exploring more distant planets, recording sound could help scientists better understand them. For example, measuring the sounds of wind on Mars could provide clues on how the planet's surface forms, Leighton explained. 'It can tell us a lot about the atmosphere and how it changes as the sun goes up and down, and how that, in turn generates winds to shape the surface of Mars,' Leighton said. 'That indicates the power of these microphones.' Sound could also help us explore planets like Jupiter and Saturn, which likely have plenty of sound to hear but have thick clouds and inhospitable conditions that make it difficult to access visually, Impey said. 'In fact, since the atmosphere is sort of opaque and you can't really see through it, it might be a way to sense what's happening better and more efficiently than you could with any sort of a camera, which wouldn't really work very well at all,' he told Salon in a phone interview. When looking for sound in the universe, astronomers have also looked back in time. Back in the early years of the universe, it was a hot plasma soup that was far more dense. That plasma carried acoustic oscillations, although still not at an audible range. However, in one research project, astronomer Mark Whittle compressed the first million years of the universe into 10 seconds, shifted up by 50 octaves so that the human ear could hear. It sounds like "a descending scream, a deep roar and a final growing hiss," he reported. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, sound waves called Baryon acoustic oscillations rippled through the cosmos to influence how galaxies were distributed. As such, one could say that life on Earth as we know it in some way originated from a sound wave. It's not called the Big Bang for nothing, after all. 'Within that sea of brilliance, the seeds for all that we now know were already present, latent, waiting to unfold,' Whittle wrote in his report. 'Most remarkable of all, perhaps, these seeds were sounds – pressure waves coursing through the fluid.'
Yahoo
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There's a 50/50 Chance the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy Will Merge
The universe might not meet its end for another quinvigintillion years, but our galaxy's fate teeters on a far less certain line. New research shows that there's a 50% chance that the Milky Way and its nearest major galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, will converge within the next 10 billion years. Previous analyses have made out the convergence to be a sure-fire thing, but it turns out that one dwarf galaxy is recalibrating the scales. Though about 2.5 million light-years currently lie between the Milky Way and Andromeda, the two galaxies are creeping closer to each other. In 1913, astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher noticed via Arizona's Lowell Observatory that Andromeda (then known as the Andromeda Nebula) was approaching the Milky Way at 186 miles per second. Since then, researchers have not only verified Slipher's math but also found via multiple simulations that Andromeda will someday combine with the Milky Way. One paper from 2021 even proposes that the two galaxies will meet 4.3 billion years from now, with a complete merger taking another 6 billion years after that. But these simulations failed to account for one small yet mighty factor: the Large Magellanic Cloud. Roughly 160,000 light-years from our Milky Way, this dwarf galaxy has long been considered an insignificant part of the so-called Local Group. But in 2015, the beginning of the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History, or SMASH, found that the Large Magellanic Cloud was larger and more complex than initially thought. Astronomers have spent the years since sifting through SMASH data for dwarf galaxy secrets. Illustration of a hypothetical merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, DSS, Till Sawala (University of Helsinki); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) It's for this reason that the latest Milky Way-Andromeda merger simulation actually includes the Large Magellanic Cloud. To cover for every possible uncertainty, an international team of astronomers ran their simulation nearly 100,000 times and found that just under 50% of the time, the Milky Way and Andromeda collided and merged. Alternately dropping different nearby galaxies showed that Messier 33 (the third largest galaxy in the Local Group) made a merger more likely, while the Large Magellanic Cloud reduced the odds of a convergence. That's because the Large Magellanic Cloud pulls the Milky Way out of Andromeda's path, as a comic book hero would pull a civilian off some train tracks. The Large Magellanic Cloud might only get to bask in its glory for a few hundred million years, however. The researchers' simulation showed that the Milky Way will almost certainly collide with the Large Magellanic Cloud in 2 billion years, disappearing the latter galaxy. As observatories gather more data about the universe—and scientists' models inevitably become more advanced—we'll find out whether the Large Magellanic Cloud really will swoop in to save the day. Of course, we won't see the benefit either way. But it will be nice to know whether our galactic home will continue to exist after we're gone.
