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The Summer Triangle — 3 stars, 1 seasonal mystery

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On clear September evenings, I often find myself looking up just after dusk, expecting the sky to feel a little less like summer. Yet there, still commanding the overhead darkness, are Vega, Altair , and Deneb — the three brilliant stars of the famous Summer Triangle. Their familiar pattern can make the season feel as though it is lingering above us, even as cooler nights and earlier sunsets suggest otherwise. In fact, even as late as mid-November, the Triangle is still nearly overhead soon after sunset at dusk. That contrast raises a simple but intriguing question: if this bright celestial landmark remains so prominent well into autumn, why do we still call it the Summer Triangle? Why not simply call it the Autumn Triangle? Why it belongs to summer The answer lies not in the calendar, but in how the Triangle moves across the sky over the course of a summer night. The chief reason is that, at ...
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On this day in space! Sept. 10, 2011: NASA launches GRAIL probes to the moon to map lumpy lunar gravity

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On Sept. 10, 2011, NASA's GRAIL spacecraft launched on a mission to the moon! GRAIL, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, was sent to the moon to map its gravitational fields . Scientists could study the moon's interior structure by looking at maps of the moon's gravity. Asteroid impacts from billions of years ago left dense pockets of material under the lunar surface, which can exert extra gravitational pull on spacecraft orbiting the moon . So by measuring that gravitational pull, the GRAIL mission could reveal information about what lies beneath the surface. The mission actually consisted of two twin spacecraft named Ebb and Flow , which would fly in tandem around the moon to map variations in its gravitation field. Both lifted off on the same Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida and arrived in lunar orbit almost four months later. They mapped the mo...
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LINK spacecraft gets close to NASA's Swift Observatory, but not close enough to save it

LINK, the satellite sent to boost the orbit of NASA's Swift Observatory, may have had to give up on its mission, but LINK's manufacturer and operator Katalyst Space hasn't completely abandoned the spacecraft to its cosmic demise. NASA called off LINK's mission to rendezvous with its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory when the specialized probe encountered a thruster control issue. LINK was delivered to orbit on July 3, aboard an air-launched Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, but began to spin uncontrollably about three weeks after reaching space. Swift's orbit began decaying faster than expected last year, due to increased solar activity, and LINK was designed to rendezvous with Swift, grapple it, and then raise the observatory to a more stable altitude. LINK's Swift Boost mission was considered a "Hail Mary" attempt from its onset. NASA's discovery of Swift...
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This 'impossible' black hole merger may be explained by a warp in spacetime

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A "forbidden" merger between two massive black holes may not have been quite as impossible as previously thought. That's according to new research that suggests the black holes involved were smaller than expected. On Nov. 23, 2023, the gravitational wave detector LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detected tiny ripples in spacetime caused by the merger of two black holes. What was incredible about this signal, designated GW231123 , was that it seemed to be the result of a black hole with 140 times the mass of the sun colliding with another that holds 100 solar masses. This raised eyebrows among researchers because usual models of stellar evolution struggle to account for such massive black holes, especially ones that seemed to be spinning as fast as these two. While scientists have been attempting to explain how such an odd black hole binary could form. T...
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International Space Station astronaut gives out of this world tribute to honor Star Trek’s 60th anniversary

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Celebrations of Star Trek's 60th anniversary made it all the way to the final frontier. Among the science and supplies delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) for European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Sophie Adenot's mission on orbit was a small piece of memorabilia to honor one of the most influential pop culture phenomena that has continually called for humanity to turn its gaze to the stars . Adenot carried a small Starfleet badge from one of Star Trek's newest series, Strange New Worlds, which she wore during a video posted by ESA and Star Trek . "It's a small object, but it carries something bigger: sixty years of a story that taught us to dream about exploring together," ESA said in a separate post picturing the golden badge floating in front of the station's large Cupola windows. "From the crew of the USS Enterprise to the crews on the Inter...
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Astronomers discover two stars that joined together to form a binary system just 60 years ago

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Using the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) radio telescope, astronomers have watched as two stars come together to form a massive stellar binary. The observations revealed that these stars didn't form from the same collapsing cloud of gas and dust, as most binary stars are assumed to form, but instead came together later in their infancy. Here on Earth, we are slightly prejudiced by our single sun to view stars as somewhat solitary bodies. However, around half of sun-sized stars in the Milky Way have a companion star. This percentage of stellar partnership rises to around 90% of massive stars. Eventually, these massive stars go supernova and shape their cosmic surroundings. Thus, understanding these binary systems is vital to our understanding of stars and of galaxies in general. The team behind this research initially observed the still-growing massive stars, or protosta...
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NASA's newly launched Roman Space Telescope will 'directly' image exoplanets. But what does that mean?

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A brand new observatory began its tenure on Aug. 30 — it's called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and it's equipped with a high-tech tool that can directly photograph planets beyond our solar system. The tool is called a coronagraph; in simple terms, a coronagraph is a device that can be affixed to a telescope and block out the light of a star the telescope is looking at to study features around that star. Without such a device, starlight can be so overpowering that it outshines details nearby. You can think of a coronagraph as a way to recreate a total solar eclipse, except instead of the moon blocking out the sun it's a humanmade mask of sorts that does that trick. But while coronagraphs have been used many times before, the one that just launched toward the stars is unprecedented. "The Roman Space Telescope is carrying the most advanced coronagraph that humanity has...
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