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Forbes
3 days ago
- Science
- Forbes
See The Perseid Meteor Shower Now Before It Peaks, Experts Say
A falling star crosses the night sky over Halle / Saale, eastern Germany, during the peak in ... More activity of the annual Perseids meteor shower on August 13, 2015. (Credit: HENDRIK SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images) The annual Perseid meteor shower is a highlight of the astronomical calendar. Its peak is still a few weeks away, but it began earlier this week — and so did a slew of poorly researched articles advising when to watch it. What almost no one else seems to realize is that this year, the normally prolific Perseids will generally disappoint because the peak rates of 'shooting stars' on Aug. 12-13 will occur in a night sky bleached by a near-full moon. Happily, all is not lost. Here's how and when to watch the Perseid meteor shower in 2025 — including what experts think is the best time to get a glimpse of it, despite the harsh sky conditions. The Problem With The Perseid Meteor Shower In 2025 The Perseids can produce about 75 'shooting stars' per hour on its peak night, but only in a dark sky. This year, under clear, dark skies with a wide-open view, observers might spot far fewer. 'I'd expect a typical person with a clear view of the full sky to be able to see somewhere in the ballpark of five to 10 meteors per hour during the night of August 12-13,' said Dr. Qicheng Zhang, astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in an email. That's how huge impact of a bright gibbous moon is. It will be about 84%-lit and rise just as it starts to get dark. Why You Shouldn't Wait For The Perseid To Peak Although Aug. 12-13 is the peak night, meteors may be more easily visible on nights both before and after, when sky conditions are better. For example, this Thursday there's a New Moon, which occurs when our natural satellite is roughly between the Earth and the sun. That means it's invisible, leaving the night skies dark all night all of this week. Anytime after dark this week is therefore a great opportunity for viewing the Perseid meteor shower — especially with the Southern Delta Aquariid meteor shower peaking on July 29/30 — though expect rates of 'shooting stars' to be relatively low. 'A few meteors might be visible in the early morning on the first couple of days [of August]How And Where To See 'Shooting Stars' The advice for meteor showers is simple — get far from light pollution. If you intend to go looking for Perseids this week, or after the peak has passed, seeking out dark skies is essential. Aim for a wide, open space with minimal haze and obstructions to catch as many meteors as possible. However, for the peak night on Aug. 12-13 for the Perseids this year, that's not helpful advice. Even if you get as far from artificial lighting as possible on that peak night, you'll still find yourself under a sky similar to that of a city. Why You Need To Be Patient Seeing a meteor shower successfully means being patient. It also means not looking at a smartphone, whose white light instantly kills night vision. Add the worsening problem of light pollution, and it's easy to see why almost nobody ever sees 'shooting stars' these days. 'As with most annual meteor showers, observing meteors takes a lot of patience, and it may take watching for an hour or more to see a handful of meteors,' said Zhang. Also, any strong and sudden outbursts in meteor activity — which are hard to predict, but possible — may last only a few hours. "Because they're unpredictable in time, they require either a lot of luck or watching for many hours to have a reasonable chance of catching,' said Zhang. Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The best window to see Pluto all year is closing
Think you can spot Pluto? On July 25, the famously elusive dwarf planet reaches opposition—its best and brightest moment of the year. That makes now the ideal time to try to catch a glimpse of it from your own backyard. But be warned: Even at its brightest, Pluto is still a barely-there speck, even through a telescope. But for those willing to search, it's a cosmic scavenger hunt—and a rare chance to see a world nearly four billion miles away. In astronomy, opposition is when a celestial body lies directly opposite the sun from Earth's point of view, placing our planet squarely in the middle. That alignment means the object rises as the sun sets and stays visible all night, making it the best time to observe it. (See National Geographic's first map of Pluto.) What makes opposition so useful for stargazing is a phenomenon known as the opposition effect. 'Things tend to get brighter when they're lit at a smaller phase angle, which is the angle between the sun's rays and the target and the observer. That shrinks to close to zero at opposition,' says Will Grundy, a planetary scientist at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Pluto was discovered. You can see this principle in action on Earth. When the sun is low in the sky, objects create long shadows. But when the sun is directly overhead, those shadows get much smaller, and sometimes they even disappear entirely. At opposition, Pluto's terrain has the fewest shadows, making the dwarf planet appear brighter to us. Because Pluto is so dim, you need a telescope to see it. 'A backyard telescope could do it under the right conditions,' says Grundy. Or you could visit a local observatory and use one of their publicly accessible telescopes. Lowell Observatory, for instance, has a suite of instruments on-site that the public can use six nights per week. But even with a telescope, the sky must be extremely dark to see Pluto. Light pollution, whether from artificial lights or the moon, will easily wash out the dwarf planet. (Did Pluto ever actually stop being a planet? Experts debate.) To find Pluto in dark enough skies, consult a star chart to determine its approximate location. 'It'll just look like one of many faint stars,' says Grundy. But Pluto moves slowly. 'It moves at about three arcseconds per hour, so you won't see it move unless you're willing to wait multiple hours,' says Grundy. You don't have to catch Pluto on July 25 exactly. Because it's so distant—about 3.7 billion miles from the sun—it remains near peak brightness for several days before and after opposition. 'It's a challenge, so it's kind of cool to be able to see Pluto,' says Grundy. Pluto's origin story begins with two other planets. After Uranus was discovered in 1781, astronomers realized that an undiscovered planet might be perturbing Uranus' orbit. 'Sure enough, Neptune was discovered basically bang-on where astronomers predicted it should be,' says Grady. But Percival Lowell, the founder of Lowell Observatory, believed there to be another planet affecting Uranus' orbit: a mysterious 'Planet X.' After a decade of searching, Lowell died in 1916 without finding it. (Discover seven other night sky events to see in July.) Eventually, the search resumed at Lowell Observatory, culminating in Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto in 1930. As it turns out, Pluto wasn't the gravitational culprit Lowell had imagined. It was far too small to tug on Uranus's orbit in any meaningful way. But it was still a monumental discovery: the solar system's ninth planet—at least until its reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006. To find Pluto, Tombaugh diligently photographed the night sky, then used a machine to compare two photographic plates, looking for any tiny pinpricks that moved. That's essentially the same method Grundy suggests stargazers use in July to ensure they're looking at Pluto. Following its discovery, Pluto remained just a faint dot until the 1990s, when the Hubble Space Telescope provided some grainy images showing light and dark spots. But it wasn't until 2015 that we got a close-up look at Pluto, thanks to a flyby by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The images showed a dynamic, geologically active planet with icy mountains, nitrogen glaciers, and even hints of a subsurface ocean. 'It could be inhabitable if there's liquid water and lots of organic materials and rocks for minerals,' says Grundy, who serves as a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission. That revelation has major implications for astrobiology. 'Pluto moved the goalpost of where inhabitable planetary settings are—much, much farther away from the sun than we ever thought possible,' says Grundy. 'And the same thing will be true around other stars, too. Basically, the inhabitable zone just expanded hugely.'
Forbes
30-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
In Honor Of World Asteroid Day, A Short History Of Planetary Defense
World Asteroid Day started with a real bang. An artist's illustration of asteroid Bennu On June 30, 1908, an asteroid about 65 meters wide collided with Earth's atmosphere and exploded several miles above Siberia; the force of the blast flattened and burned millions of trees over an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers. Today, the anniversary of the Tunguska blast has become World Asteroid Day: a science holiday co-founded by a rock music legend and an Apollo astronaut. In 2015, Apollo 9 lunar module pilot Rusty Schweickart helped launch World Asteroid Day with astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May. The United Nations officially recognized the event a year later in 2016. Earlier this month, Arizona senator Mark Kelly – also a former astronaut – introduced a Senate resolution that, if passed, would officially recognize June 30 as World Asteroid Day in the U.S. I spoke with Kevin Schindler, resident historian at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, about the origins of World Asteroid Day, the history of planetary defense, and what asteroids can reveal about the history of our Solar System. Discovering the Danger from Outer Space Around 200 years ago, in the 1830s, geologists began to study fossils and figure out that several mass extinctions had wiped out whole ecosystems of species on Earth in the distant past. 'In recent decades, they realized that those weren't necessarily caused by something on Earth, but by something impacting from space – like the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary,' says Schindler. An artist's impression of a giant meteor impact. In the 1960s, geologist Walter Alvarez discovered a thin layer of black clay in rocks around the world. Below the black line, the rocks were rich in fossils; above it, they were nearly barren. The same layer of black clay showed up all around in the world: in rock outcroppings in Italy and New Zealand, and in samples from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. And it clearly marked a deadly before-and-after moment in Earth's history – one that happened around 66 million years ago. Alvarez suspected that the black clay was something alien; it contained bizarrely large amounts of an element called iridium, which is vanishingly rare here on Earth but more common in asteroids. He began to realize that an asteroid or comet may have slammed into our planet 66 million years ago, kicking off a mass extinction and scattering iridium-rich black dust over the planet like a burial shroud. The pieces came together in 1978 when geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo discovered the outline of a crater hundreds of kilometers wide at the edge of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Its center lies at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Penfield and Camargo named the crater for one of the communities that now lies within its boundaries: Chicxulub Pueblo. Other craters – smaller but still impressive – also make it obvious that our planet has had more than a few run-ins with meteors during its long history. 'And while there's not as much debris floating around in our Solar System as when it was newly-formed, there's still stuff out there,' says Schindler. 'And it's inevitable that at some point that stuff will come back and get us again.' NASA's Asteroid Watch tracks known asteroids and comets in the Solar System, while observatories ... More like Lowell scan the skies for more. From Deep Impact to DART So we've known almost 60 years that asteroids and comets could threaten life on Earth. 'In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a search to look for bodies that specifically could impact Earth,' says Schindler. 'Phase one of all this started with, 'okay, let's look for these bodies that could hit us,' and then a couple decades later is when we got to phase two, 'what can we do about it if we do find these things?'' Strangely enough, it was a pair of high-budget, low-scientific-accuracy Hollywood blockbusters that really brought planetary defense to public attention, according to Schindler. The summer of 1998 featured not just one but two movies about humanity trying to save itself from extinction by blowing up an incoming chunk of space rock. In Armageddon, a wildly-improbable effort by a team of offshore drillers saves Earth from an asteroid impact; in Deep Impact, a similarly-improbable effort fails to save Earth from a comet (so the summer ends in a cinematic tie). Two men in a space suit using a piece of machinery in a scene from the film 'Deep Impact', 1998. ... More (Photo by) 'The good thing about those movies is that, even though they're not scientifically accurate in every way, they certainly built awareness enough to where lawmakers said, you know, we should put some money aside to study this stuff more,' says Schindler. 'Hollywood, in some ways, has helped the cause to learn more.' And, as science fiction often does, Deep Impact and Armageddon provided thought experiments (albeit not super-accurate ones, to put it mildly) for the ideas that would eventually become actual efforts at planetary defense. According to Schindler, theoretical ideas about whether we could destroy an incoming meteor eventually shifted to ideas about just nudging the deadly object off-course. 'This is just something that's really been developed in the last decade or so and – I wouldn't say culminated, but really became well-known with the mission that went up to deflect the moon of an asteroid to see if it was possible,' says Schindler. Artist rendering of the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) space probe approaching the ... More asteroid Didymos and its minor-planet-moon Dimorphos. The DART spacecraft aims to collide with Dimorphos in autumn 2022 in order to study the effect of an impact with near-Earth objects. Created on September 13, 2021. (Illustration by Nicholas Forder/Future Publishing via Getty Images) That mission was NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, in which an intrepid little spacecraft flew 7 million miles to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos and knock it off-course. Dimorphos is actually a mini-moon that orbits another, larger asteroid called Didymos. Astronomers at Lowell carefully measured Dimorphos's orbital path around its parent asteroid before and after the impact – and they saw evidence that DART had succeeded in knocking Dimorphos into a different orbit. It's a long, long way from deflecting one tiny asteroid moonlet onto a different path around its parent asteroid to deflecting something the size of the Chicxulub impactor – or even Tunguska – as it's barreling toward Earth. But the consensus seems to be that DART was a good start. 'The biggest thing, I think, was that it is possible. This was a very controlled initial step,' says Schindler. 'This was certainly promising enough that we should keep doing these tests in different sizes of body and different compositions, because depending on what it's made of, a body might react differently to something impacting it.' Fossils of the Early Solar System This illustration depicts the 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer-wide) asteroid Psyche, which lies in the ... More main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Meanwhile, Schindler and World Asteroid Day also want the public to know that asteroids are more than potential threats: they're an orbiting treasure trove of information about the history of our Solar System and even the origins of life. Most asteroids are chunks of rock that coalesced early in our Solar System's history but never grew massive enough to become planets; they're like the seeds of planets that might have been. Others are the debris left behind by collisions between objects in those chaotic early days of the Solar System, when planets were forming and gas giants migrated, scattering lesser objects in their wake. 'They tell us what the early composition was and what a chaotic time it was in the early part of our Solar System,' says Schindler. Those clues are written not just in the chemical and physical makeup of asteroids, but in their orbital paths around the Sun. By studying and modelling how those paths have changed over the years, scientists can reconstruct how asteroids and planets may have interacted. The orbits of modern asteroids are like the 'footprints' of planet formation, migrating gas giants, and long-ago collisions. Today, NASA's Lucy mission is exploring the asteroid belt, getting up close and personal with several of these objects. Meanwhile, NASA's OSIRIS-APEX mission is on its way to study the asteroid Apophis, which will pass close (but not too close!) to Earth in 2029. The surface of asteroid Bennu, as seen by OSIRIS-REX in late 2020, is strewn with boulders. 'And now we are studying planetary systems around other stars. Better understanding our Solar System, we can now look at others and see how typical we are,' says Schindler. 'You don't know that without knowing your own Solar System pretty well, so it really has helped us to learn about, sort of, our heritage, I guess.' World Asteroid Day World Asteroid Day aims to tie all of those things together, promoting awareness of planetary defense but also of the immense scientific value – and maybe monetary value, eventually – of asteroids. At Lowell Observatory, that awareness is hard to escape; the observatory stands just an hour's drive from Meteor Crater – which is exactly what the name suggests, a 213-meter-deep, 1200-meter-wide crater where an object about the size of a Boeing 747 slammed into the desert floor around 50,000 years ago. 'The proximity of Lowell Observatory, where we're studying bodies in space, and Meteor crater, where we've seen the result of one of those bodies hitting Earth – how convenient is that? We're looking at both ends of it, from when it's still up in space to the final product if something like this hits.'
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Photos: Strawberry Moon wows across the world
June's Strawberry Moon put on a show around the world with a slight berry hue and a view low on the horizon for the first time since last summer. The Strawberry Moon reached peak illumination around 3 a.m. on Wednesday and appeared full and bright on Tuesday evening. The video at the top of this story was taken on Tuesday from Chicago, where the lucky photographer captured a helicopter and plane passing in front of the glowing Moon. The final full Moon of spring is named the Strawberry Moon for the time when the berries are ripe for picking and also the slight reddish hue because it is lower in the sky. "When it spends more of that time in that lower portion of the sky, you're looking through more of Earth's atmosphere, which makes these moons generally look redder and more golden," said Dr. Tyler Richey-Yowell, a postdoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. This golden glow was on display Tuesdsay night in New York City, where the Empire State Building and the Moon made a beautiful pair. How To Photograph The Moon With Your Phone In Florida, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft presented a trifecta of space with the Moon looming large in the night sky. Saharan dust moving up the Southeast coast could have contributed to the yellow and orange tint of the Moon on Tuesday. Wildfire smoke provided an added boost to the red coloring of the Moon in Columbus, Ohio, as the image below shows. In the United Kingdom, the Moon appeared berry red near the northeast coast of England along Whitley Bay. A golden Moon appeared peaking out from behind the mausoleum of Mustafa in Turkey on Tuesday in the creatively set image article source: Photos: Strawberry Moon wows across the world
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Why Strawberry Moon will appear more red than usual
The Strawberry Moon will be fullest early Wednesday, but the evening before will be the best time to see the last full Moon of spring as it may appear more red than usual. The Strawberry Moon gets its name from the time when the berry is ripe for picking, but it also corresponds with the slight hue as the Moon is lower in the sky during the evening hours. June's full Moon ushers in the best time of year for evening Moon-gazing. Dr. Tyler Richey-Yowell, a postdoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, said this is the first Moon to appear this low on the horizon in about a year. How To Photograph The Moon With Your Phone "When it spends more of that time in that lower portion of the sky, you're looking through more of Earth's atmosphere, which makes these moons generally look redder and more golden. And also, they appear bigger," Richey-Yowell said. "The atmosphere actually bends some of the light. And so while there's not really any astronomical significance to moons in the summer, we do actually get cooler, bigger, prettier moons in the summer." This year, the Strawberry Moon may appear more berry-like with a hint of red and orange because of two ongoing weather events. In the Southeast, Saharan dust crawling up the Southeast coast can also scatter light in a way that creates vibrant sunrises and sunsets, as well as a tint to the Moon. If the dust is still in the atmosphere, the Moon will appear more red because of the dust, according to Richey-Yowell. Meanwhile, in the North, wildfire smoke continues to waft into the northern Plains and Great Lakes regions from Canada. The smoke has reduced air quality, but if residents can see through the haze, these smoke particles scatter wavelengths of light differently, which can sometimes result in colorful red skies. Smoke particles tend to scatter more blue light than red light, leaving the remaining red light coming through. The same effect happens with the Moon. For the Strawberry Moon on Wednesday, it will be at its biggest and brightest after midnight (Pacific time) and after 3 a.m. (Eastern time). Next month, the full Buck Moon appears at its fullest just after 4 p.m. ET on July 11, which will make for a spectacular sunset and article source: Why Strawberry Moon will appear more red than usual
