James Webb Space Telescope Amazing View Of Protostar Explained By NASA
Travel to James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam and MIRI instrument views of protostar L1527. The protostar is about 100,000 years old. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Paul Morris: Lead Producer Thaddeus Cesari: Script Dr. Michelle Thaller: Narrator Music Credit: "Looking to the Future" by Carl David Harms [IMRO] via BBC Production Music [PRS], and Universal Production Music.
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CBS News
34 minutes ago
- CBS News
Tiny fragment of asteroid giving Field Museum scientists a glimpse 4.6 billion years into the past
The Field Museum is the new temporary home to a tiny piece of pristine asteroid. The fragment of the asteroid Bennu, on loan from NASA, won't be on display for visitors, but will give scientists the chance to study an asteroid sample uncontaminated by Earth's atmosphere. A tiny, black fragment might not seem exciting, until a scientist explains it's a specimen from space. "It's an honor of a lifetime to be able to study this sample," said Field Museum curator Dr. Philipp Heck. How did Heck feel when the little rock first arrived at the museum and he held the vial containing the sample? "It was amazing. I was looking forward to that moment for a long time," he said. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission was planned decades ago. In 2016, a spacecraft launched. In 2018, it arrived at Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid as wide as the Sears Tower is tall. The mission collected pieces of the asteroid and brought them back to Earth in 2023. "This is the first U.S. mission that sends a spacecraft to the asteroid and brings a sample back to Earth," said University of Chicago graduate student Yuke Zheng, who is part of the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team. "It's a tiny, dark, black fragment that is fragile, so we want to protect it very carefully." She'll use the museum's scanning electron microscope to get an up-close look at a tiny sample of Bennu. "What struck me is how dark the sample is. I had never seen such a dark sample," Heck said. The fragment is like a time capsule, taking scientists back 4.6 billion years. "We believe Bennu contains part of the ingredients for life, and part of the ingredients of the formation of Earth," Heck said. Suddenly, a fragment at the bottom of a vial can have you pondering your place in the universe. "I've never studied a pristine sample from an asteroid," Heck said.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Solar Orbiter Captures the First-Ever Images of the Sun's South Pole
We Earthlings see the sun every day of our lives—but gaining a truly new view of our star is a rare and precious thing. So count your lucky stars: for the first time in history, scientists have photographed one of the sun's elusive poles. The images come courtesy of a spacecraft called Solar Orbiter. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020 and has been monitoring our home star since November 2021. But the mission is only now beginning its most intriguing work: studying the poles of the sun. From Earth and spacecraft alike, our view of the sun has been biased. 'We've had a good view of centermost part of the sun's disk,' says Daniel Müller, a heliophysicist and project scientist for the mission. 'But the poles are effectively not visible because we always see them almost exactly edge-on.' [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] We began getting a better perspective earlier this year, when Solar Orbiter zipped past Venus in a carefully choreographed move that pulled the probe out of the solar system's ecliptic, the plane that broadly passes through the planets' orbits and the sun's equator. (The new views show the sun's south pole and were captured in March. The spacecraft flew over the north pole in late April, Müller says, but Solar Orbiter is still in the process of beaming that data back to Earth.) Leaving the ecliptic is a costly, fuel-expensive maneuver for spacecraft, but it's where Solar Orbiter excels: By the end of the mission, the spacecraft's orbit will be tilted 33 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. That tilted orbit is what allows Solar Orbiter to garner unprecedented views of the sun's poles. For scientists, the new view is priceless because these poles aren't just geographic poles; they're also magnetic poles—of sorts. The sun is a massive swirl of plasma that produces then erases a magnetic field. This is what drives the 11-year solar activity cycle. At solar minimum, the lowest-activity part of the cycle, the sun's magnetic field is what scientists call a dipole: it looks like a giant bar magnet, with a strong pole at each end. But as the sun spins, the roiling plasma generates sunspots, dark, relatively cool patches on the sun's surface that are looping tangles of magnetic field lines. As sunspots arise and pass away, these tangles unfurl, and some of the leftover magnetic charge migrates to the nearest pole, where it offsets the polarity of the existing magnetic field. The result is a bizarre transitional state, with the sun's poles covered in a patchwork of localized 'north' and 'south' magnetic polarities. In the solar maximum phase (which the sun is presently in), the magnetic field at each pole effectively disappears. (It can be a bumpy process—sometimes one pole loses its charge before the other, for example.) Then, as years pass and solar activity gradually declines, the continuing process of sunspots developing and dissipating creates a new magnetic field of the opposite charge at each pole until, eventually, the sun reaches its calm dipole state again. These aren't matters of academic curiosity; the sun's activity affects our daily lives. Solar outbursts such as radiation flares and coronal mass ejections of charged plasma can travel across the inner solar system to reach our neighborhood, and they're channeled out of the sun by our star's ever changing magnetic fields. On Earth these outbursts can disrupt power grids and radio systems; in orbit they can interfere with communications and navigations satellites and potentially harm astronauts. So scientists want to be able to predict this so-called space weather, just as they do terrestrial weather. But to do that, they need to better understand how the sun works—which is difficult to do with hardly a glimpse of the magnetic activity at and around our star's poles. That's where Solar Orbiter comes in. Most of the spacecraft's observations won't reach Earth until this autumn. But ESA has released initial looks from three different instruments onboard Solar Orbiter, each of which lets scientists glimpse different phenomena. For example, the image above maps the magnetic field at the sun's surface. And from this view, Müller says, it's clear that the sun is at the maximum period of its activity cycle. Heliophysical models predict 'a tangled mess of all these different patches of north and south polarity all over the place,' he says. 'And that's exactly what we see.' As their accordance with theoretical models suggests, the solar poles aren't entirely mysterious realms. That's in part because while Solar Orbiter is the first to beam back polar images, it isn't the first spacecraft to fly over these regions. That title belongs to Ulysses, a joint NASA-ESA mission that launched in 1990 and operated until 2009. Ulysses carried a host of instruments designed to study radiation particles, magnetic fields, and more. And it used them to make many intriguing discoveries about our star and its curious poles. But it carried no cameras, so despite all its insights, Ulysses left those regions as sights unseen. Fortunately, heliophysics has grown a lot since those days—and space agencies have learned that, in the public eye, a picture can be worth much more than 1,000 words. The result: Solar Orbiter can finally put the spotlight on the sun's poles.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
South pole of the Sun pictured for the first time
The south pole of the Sun has been seen for the first time, in images sent by the British-built spacecraft Solar Orbiter. Usually it is impossible to see underneath the Sun because Earth and all other spacecraft orbit within a flat disc around its equator. For the first time, Solar Orbiter has moved into a tilted orbit of 17 degrees below the equator, giving a new view of our star. 'Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the Sun's pole,' said Prof Carole Mundell, director of science at the European Space Agency (ESA). '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.' Solar Orbiter, which is a joint venture between the ESA and Nasa, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2020, taking two years to reach the Sun. Constructed by Airbus in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and carrying several British instruments, the probe was designed to give unprecedented images of the Sun, helping predict dangerous solar flares in time for counter measures to be implemented, such as grounding planes or backing up power plants. Although extreme solar storms are rare, smaller flares have caused widespread disruption in recent times, with a geomagnetic storm leaving six million Canadians without power in 1989. A recent analysis shows that 'severe' magnetic storms occurred in 42 out of the last 150 years, and 'great' super-storms occur six times in every 150 years. The government is so concerned about space weather that it is now listed on its National Risk Register. Over the coming years, the spacecraft will tilt its orbit even further, so the best views are yet to come. 'This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven',' said Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist. 'In the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the Sun's polar regions. 'These data will transform our understanding of the Sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity.' Scientists are hoping to learn how material moves in the Sun's outer layers and why the star's magnetic field flips every 11 years. One of the first scientific findings from Solar Orbiter's polar observations is the discovery that at the south pole, the Sun's magnetic field is currently a mess. While a normal magnet has a clear north and south pole, magnetic field measurements show that both north and south polarity magnetic fields are present at the Sun's south pole during the solar maximum. We are currently experiencing a solar maximum and, in five to six years, magnetic activity is expected to become more orderly. 'How exactly this build-up occurs is still not fully understood, so Solar Orbiter has reached high latitudes at just the right time to follow the whole process from its unique and advantageous perspective,' added Prof Sami Solanki, who leads the PHI instrument team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. 'We didn't know what exactly to expect from these first observations – the Sun's poles are literally terra incognita.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
