Kevin Silverson of Blind Bay got more than the pretty sunset he was expecting Saturday evening, Oct. 28, when he went mountain biking at the South Canoe Trails in Salmon Arm.
At approximately 5:30 p.m., Silverson turned to look at the sky and saw what he originally thought was a plane streaking across. A closer look, however, revealed what he now believes was a meteor, which he was able to snap a few pictures of on his phone.
“That’s what I assume. It was obviously something in the atmosphere,” he said. “Once I zoomed in, it was something that was on fire.”
Trying to get more information, Silverson shared his experience on Facebook, but found no other comments on the potential meteor or any mention of it having landed in the area.
“It’s super weird,” he stated. “It’s even weirder now that no one else saw it.”
In the end it was the dust that did it for the dinosaurs. At least that is the finding of computer simulations of the aftermath of the asteroid impact that reshaped life on Earth 66m years ago.
The cataclysmic impact in what is now Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula wiped out 75% of species on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs. But the precise nature of the deadly blow has kept scientists busy for decades, with soot-spewing wildfires, volcanic eruptions and vast quantities of sulphur all considered culprits.
Writing in Nature Geoscience, researchers in Belgium argue that the “exact killing mechanisms” set in train by the impact remain poorly understood and that too little attention has been paid to the role of potentially trillions of tonnes of dust kicked up by the violent event.
Swirling around in the atmosphere for years, soot, sulphur and dust all have the capacity to block out the sun and contribute to a global winter where vegetation fails, with devastating knock-on effects for the animals it supports.
To delve deeper into the role of the different factors, the scientists ran simulations of the ancient climate that took into account measurements of fine particles recovered from a site in North Dakota where a layer of dust generated by the Chicxulub impact settled.
According to the simulations, dust of the size found in Dakota could have remained in the atmosphere for up to 15 years after being blasted into the sky. By blocking out the sun’s rays, up to 2,000bn tonnes of it could have shut down photosynthesis for nearly two years and cooled the planet by up to 15C.
Created from pulverised granite and other rock at the impact site, the dust “most likely drove the last mass extinction event through the disruption of photosynthetic activity,” said Cem Berk Senel, a researcher on the study at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels.
The silicate dust emerged from the simulations as the “most efficient blocker of photosynthesis”, added Philippe Claeys, a geologist and planetary scientist at the Free University of Brussels and co-author of the study. “It renders the atmosphere opaque to sunlight, hampering the plants’ photosynthetic process.”
According to the computer models, it would have taken two years for photosynthesis to resume.
Steve Brusatte, a professor of palaeontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study, described the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs as “apocalyptic”.
He said: “It was the largest asteroid to hit the Earth in the last half a billion years, and it detonated with the force of over a billion nuclear bombs put together. But that’s not what really killed the dinosaurs and the 75% of other species that died out.
“What really drove their doom was what happened afterwards, as the dust and grime from the asteroid impact went into the atmosphere and blocked out the sun. The Earth went dark and cold for a few years. The asteroid didn’t kill all the dinosaurs in one go, but it was a more stealthy murderer, which triggered a war of attrition that led three out of every four species to die.”
Sales will help support the university’s student union food bank.
The Nipissing University Student Union (NUSU) recently launched a colouring book featuring significant North Bay locales. Nature’s Canvas: A North Bay Journey includes sites ranging from picturesque Lake Nipissing and Duchesnay Falls to the Dionne Quintuplets Museum and the historic Capitol Centre.
The idea is the brainchild of Sarah McGowan, a Nipissing alumna who is now NUSU’s director of communications. “I had noticed how drawn our students are to colouring as a wellness activity, as a way to get off tech and quiet their minds,” she said. Like many Nipissing students and alumni (known as “Lakers”), Ms. McGowan holds a special fondness for the campus, as well as for the city of North Bay and the surrounding region. Combining colouring with Lakers’ nostalgia for Nipissing’s local geography seemed like a logical next step.
A sample page from Nature’s Canvas.
Ms. McGowan researched, identified and photographed the sites, informally polling students and alumni about which places to include. “I asked about people’s favourite memories of their time in North Bay, the places that stood out for them. It was a real exercise in nostalgia.” She then teamed up with NUSU graphic designer Madison Turner, who rendered the images and ideas into colouring sheets that range from simple to complex. The result is a book that features approximately 20 classic Nipissing and North Bay attractions, with the university’s new NUSU student centre as its focal point.
“It was important to us to showcase the beauty of North Bay in all seasons,” said Ms. Turner, “from an ice hut in the winter to the surrounding forest in full leaf.”
The book also features more whimsical elements, like a series of forest “critters” — including an owl and a groundhog — who show up in several of the drawings and act as informal guides and mascots throughout the book’s pages.
At $10, the sale proceeds of the book are going towards the student food bank, which has seen usage rise between five and six times since 2019 — in large part due to the pandemic and its fallout. Rising rents and shortage of housing also make it difficult for students to make ends meet. Nature’s Canvas, said Ms. McGowan, is a creative way to keep shelves stocked at the food bank while showcasing the beauty of Nipissing and its North Bay surroundings.
Not only students and alumni, but also their parents and grandparents, said Ms. McGowan, have responded enthusiastically to the project. “It’s a perfect gift to bring back to younger siblings after parents have dropped off an older child. We’ve had great feedback about how a younger brother or sister wants to visit North Bay to see not only their sibling [who attends Nipissing], but also our historic Carousel [the Heritage Railway and Carousel Company].”
The book sold out of its initial print run of 300 and is now into subsequent printings. Tourism North Bay has also recognized the colouring book’s potential as a marketing tool and is promoting it, and copies also are on sale at the North Bay Museum. Ms. McGowan is grateful for the support and enthusiasm of the broader local community, which she said is a testament to Nipissing’s ongoing strong relationships with North Bay residents, businesses and civic infrastructure.
In July of this year, an asteroid roughly 30 to 60 meters across passed Earth to within one-quarter of the distance to the Moon. It posed no threat to our world, but if it had struck Earth it would have created a blast three times greater than the 2013 Chelyabinsk impact. And we only noticed it two days after it passed. It’s a good example of how sizable asteroids still miss detection. Not ones large enough to threaten our extinction, but large enough to threaten millions of lives. If a similar asteroid was detected just days before impact, could we stop it? That’s the question raised by a recent study in the arXiv.
The paper considers an asteroid similar to the aforementioned 2023 NT1 and looks at whether it could be countered by the Pulverize It (PI) method. It sounds like something out of a blockbuster movie, where the heroes blow up the rock at just the last minute, but with only a short warning it is about the only option. Deflecting an asteroid can be done, but only if we have a long lead time. So the question really becomes whether we can launch a counter-offensive in time and whether that counter-offensive would be enough to fragment the asteroid into harmless bits.
Fragment clouds from interceptions of small (top) and large (bottom) asteroids. Credit: Lubin 2021
Surprisingly, the answer to both of those questions seems to be yes. Given current launch technology, we could launch a defense rocket within a day, assuming we were to keep one on standby. To pulverize the asteroid, the authors propose using a combination of kinetic and explosive impactors. The rocket would release a cloud of impactors at a high relative speed to the asteroid, shattering the body into fragments no more than 10 meters across. Given a typical density and composition, hypervelocity simulations show that this would be an effective way to destroy the asteroid. Even if the fragmentation occurred just hours before Earth impact, the resulting debris cloud would pose limited risk to us.
All that said, this proposal is still just a proof of concept. We have no rockets in place to launch, and no impactor system for it to carry. If we detected an imminent asteroid tomorrow we would have no way to counter it. We have the ability to build a planetary defense rocket, but the question remains on whether we have the will to build one.
The International Space Station is about to pass a remarkable milestone. In November, the giant spacecraft will have been in orbit around our planet for a quarter of a century.
For the past 25 years, hundreds of astronauts have made temporary homes there while other visitors have included frogs, worms, shellfish and butterflies: each has been the subject of experiments aimed at uncovering the effects of weightlessness, radiation and other extraterrestrial phenomena on living creatures. In addition, astronauts have carried out studies of dark matter, cosmic rays and Earth’s ozone layers.
Yet the days of this 100-metre-long behemoth – which began on 20 November 1998 when its first segment, Russia’s Zarya module, was blasted into orbit – are now numbered. The station has already been operating for a decade longer than planned, and it is suffering more and more from air leaks, thruster failures and other mishaps that are intensified as it is heated and cooled 16 times a day while sweeping round the Earth at 17,500mph. Vibrations from spaceship dockings and crew movements are only adding to these woes, as well as its ageing – near obsolete – equipment.
As a result, Nasa has decreed that the ISS, which now consists of 16 pressurised modules, will be terminated and sent spiralling into the Pacific Ocean in 2031. The space agency insists the risks posed to humans by the 400-tonne craft striking our planet will be minimal. “Once the debris enters the ocean, it would be expected to settle to the ocean floor,” it says. “No substantial long-term impacts would be expected.”
The forthcoming destruction of the International Space Station raises key questions. Was it worth £120bn to build and operate? What have we have learned over the past 25 years that justifies this incredible outlay? What will replace it, and who will pick up the bill?
The first question is the most controversial. Many scientists point out that the ISS has provided invaluable insights on how to live and work in zero gravity, knowledge that will be crucial as humanity prepares to return to the moon and head off on long-duration trips to Mars and beyond. Thanks to the space station, we have learned that humans can make homes in outer space and that is a crucial lesson, they state.
Others disagree. They argue that the money spent on the ISS would have been better invested in different projects. In the 1990s, when planning of the ISS began, the US – the principal funder of the international station – was considering two major rival scientific projects. The first was the ISS. The second was a proposed particle accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider. Both came with colossal pricetags, and the US Congress decided the nation could only afford to provide cash for one. Mainly for political reasons, it chose the ISS and axed funding for the super collider.
The decision left Europe free to build its own particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at Cern, in Geneva, where research has since garnered a host of Nobel prizes. By contrast, the US ended up with an “orbital turkey”, as the late US Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg described the ISS. “The only real technology that the space station has produced concerns the technology of keeping humans alive in space – which is a senseless and circular process if you realise there is no point in having humans in space,” he argued.
This point is backed by the UK Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees. “The case for sending humans into space gets weaker and weaker every year as robots get cleverer and more sophisticated,” he told the Observer. “They can do the science and assemble large structures in space and are much, much cheaper to operate in space. We don’t need humans to do research in space.”
“Just look at the headlines,” Rees added. “The only time the ISS makes news is when its toilets stop working or an astronaut floats about with a guitar singing Space Oddity.”
Space stations are not about to disappear from the night sky, however. The ISS may be destined for termination in a few years, but the US, Europe, Japan, Canada and India have all revealed plans to launch and build new orbiting laboratories, while China has already constructed its own permanently crewed station, Tiangong. Now scheduled to outlive the ISS, Tiangong is set to be fitted with extra modules to double its current size in the near future.
For its part, the US – in partnership with Europe, Japan and Canada – is planning to build Gateway, a smaller version of the ISS which would then be put into orbit round the moon. The station would be visited by groups of astronauts, initially for weeks and then for months at a time. From there, they will direct robot craft that will explore the moon’s surface and help prepare for the construction of a permanent crewed base there.
However, it is the arrival of private entrepreneurs that is expected to transform the market, with one key player, the US-based company Axiom, making headlines last week from the announcement that it had reached agreement with the UK Space Agency to send four British astronauts on a two-week space station mission in the near future.
Axiom is scheduled to add four new segments – or habitats, as it calls them – to the ISS, with first launch scheduled for 2026, Michael Baine, the company’s chief engineer, told the Observer. “Each habitat will support four astronauts, who will be sponsored either by an individual nation or a private company, and they will do research and meaningful work in orbit.” This will not be a tourist venture, in other words.
Baine said its four modules would be launched on privately owned rockets, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launcher. Once put together at the station, the modules would later be detached as a single new space station prior to the ISS being de-orbited and sent to crash into the Pacific. The station would arise from the ashes of the old, in short.
“Each module is designed to last for 15 years or more, possibly 30 years, and we aim to increase capacity there considerably over the years,” added Baine.
“There are many biological and pharmacological products that can be made in space, as well as crystals, fibre optics and metallurgy. All have a strong potential revenue, and we are aiming to exploit that.”
Other private operations being backed by Nasa include US companies such as Orbital Reef and Starlab, with the former describing its planned space station as “a business park in space”.
“We see future space stations as being a combination of zero-gravity factories and research laboratories. That is the potential they offer,” added Baine.
Call me chief priestess for the moon goddess,” says Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock when I ask whether she prefers to be known as an astronomer, physicist or space scientist. She is, after all, entitled to all of them because before presenting The Sky at Night on the BBC she trained as a physicist, then an engineer and is now the nation’s go-to woman for all things space. But it seems that she really has her eye on the job of a 4,300-year-old Sumerian religious leader.
“I was giving a talk in the Scottish parliament,” she explains when we meet at a photographer’s studio hidden in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it alleyway in east London, “and I mentioned En Hedu’anna, the first female scientist who was known as chief priestess for the moon goddess of the city of Ur [in ancient Mesopotamia].” After the talk, the chair suggested they vote to bestow on Aderin-Pocock the title of chief priestess for the moon goddess of the city of Edinburgh. “That’s what I would like on my business card,” she says with a delighted clap of the hands and the kind of irresistible enthusiasm that viewers of The Sky at Night will be familiar with.
Forgotten or uncredited scientists, such as En Hedu’anna, feature prominently in Aderin-Pocock’s new book, The Art of Stargazing, a practical guide to identifying and understanding the 88 constellations. She is also keen for us to look at these familiar formations through non- western eyes. We are accustomed to a version of the celestial map that was charted and tagged, she says, “by white men in togas”, but many people in cultures and civilisations outside Ancient Greece and Rome have done this thing of looking up and saying, “Doesn’t that patch of stars look a bit like our dog?”
But these days, when the James Webb Space Telescope is peering back in time to the birth of entire galaxies and we can photograph black holes, why are we still fascinated by something so low-tech as drawing pictures in the night sky? “People take the sky for granted, they don’t look up enough,” she says, “and the thing is, astronomy is a science, but it’s a science that anyone can do: anyone can look up and think, what’s that? It’s something we should get back to.”
Looking up was something Aderin-Pocock, 55, did a lot with her husband and 14-year-old daughter at their Surrey home during the first lockdown. Each would do their own thing during the day, but at night they would get together and look up at the stars. “It put things into perspective and made everything feel less oppressive.”
And so the idea of getting back to astronomy basics was born, and she was soon researching the history of the constellations and the forgotten science of ancient cultures – something that wasn’t as hard as you’d think. “There’s actually a whole area of study called archaeoastronomy. All these cultures have been looking at the stars and trying to understand them for thousands of years – and that mustn’t be forgotten.”
But why is outdated ancient science from long-dead civilisations still important? “When I grew up, there were many kids who looked at science and thought: ‘Well, someone like me doesn’t do that because it’s not my culture, it’s not for me – I don’t have a history of this.’ Diversity is about bringing different ideas and people into science because if it’s all just done by the European white guys, we get a very blinkered view of the world. That’s why access to the history of astronomy is important for everyone.”
Is the world of science getting better at diversity? “I think it is, but things need to move faster. There are still the dinosaurs who are all, ‘Women don’t do science! What are you talking about?’ But I also think those dinosaurs are dying out and there is opportunity – and that’s where I’ve been quite lucky being black and female – with the timing.”
And also qualified, I point out: “Yes! I love the subject and I’ve worked hard at it so I don’t think I’ve been given anything I didn’t deserve, but I think my voice has been louder because of the demographic I come from.”
Aderin-Pocock, who is dyslexic, grew up in a block of council flats in Camden, north London. Her parents divorced when she was a child – her mum was a youth worker and magistrate, and her dad had been a teacher in Nigeria and ran an import/export business in the UK. Young Maggie’s interest in the stars was sparked in childhood by TV shows such as TheClangers and Doctor Who. She was also a fan of The Sky at Night with Sir Patrick Moore, the grandfather of astronomy popularisation, and her route into science began when she bought a not-very-good telescope because, “I wanted to be able to see the things that Patrick was talking about on television.”
But the telescope didn’t work. It was then that she saw an ad for a make-your-own-telescope evening class at a local school. She went along, but there was a surprise waiting for her. “I remember opening the door and walking in and the average age was 50, and they were all white guys!”
Did she feel intimidated? “No, I wasn’t unwelcome at all, because we all had a common goal. It was just an ‘I-am-not-like-the-other-guys-in-this-room moment.’ For me, making a telescope was a means to an end. I just wanted to get closer to what was out there – I actually wanted to go out to space myself, but that wasn’t possible, so the next best thing was to build instruments that could get me closer.”
Aderin-Pocock says she owes a lot to that homemade telescope. “I still have it. When I went to university, I used it for my undergraduate project. Working on that telescope got me into optics, which got me into instrumentation and gave me my career.”
It’s a career that saw her graduate from Imperial College London with a PhD in 1994 and includes work on satellite surveys of ship movements in Singapore and studies of climate change (“70% of the work I’ve done has been ground-based with satellites looking at Earth to help us down here”). In 1996, she began work with a branch of the Ministry of Defence on landmine detection and missile warning systems. She returned to Imperial in 1999 to join a project that was developing a spectrograph for the Gemini South telescope in Chile, and that was her launchpad into space science. But it is her work on The Sky at Night that she is best known for.
The show had been presented by Patrick Moore for 56 years until his death in 2012 and he was part of the national fabric, so when Aderin-Pocock was approached to join the presenting team after he died, she was a little apprehensive. “I was so keen, because that’s part of my childhood. But I was also nervous, because he was such an icon.” (Although she had been on the programme a couple of times before joining in 2014, she never met him.)
The offer to co-present alongside Chris Lintott, Pete Lawrence and Lucie Green – the team at the time – also brought out those harrumphing dinosaurs of science. “Some people were a bit, ‘Oh, it’s the BBC being politically correct,’ but by then I’d gone out speaking to thousands of kids and done lots of science communication so I was well qualified, but they saw a Black woman doing a job and thought, ‘Well, yeah, it’s PC.’”
Nine years on, the programme, one of the longest-running TV shows in the world, is still going strong – even if the number of episodes in each series keeps being reduced (yes, we notice, BBC). “And it’s so much fun. Sometimes when I interview someone, I go, ‘Really? You can do that now?’ because there’s so much astronomy going on that’s pushing the science of the impossible. Some of the things that when I was at university we’d only dream of, we’re doing them now.”
But such enthusiasm for astronomy isn’t always universal: the criticism sometimes levelled is that it’s all a little esoteric. What’s the use of knowing there’s a black hole at the centre of our galaxy? It’s an attitude she is familiar with. “When I told my dad I wanted to do physics he was a little perturbed. He thought I should go into medicine, because that was what minority kids did – law, medicine, the set goals. But with physics you can’t see a set path for it. And then later, when I’d appear on Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman would be all, ‘So you’re doing this – but what’s the point?’
“The thing is, people don’t say that about poetry and art. They enhance the soul. I think that’s hard to argue with, but on top of that astronomy does so much more. It pushes the limits of our technology. When you develop something for a space telescope, you can use it on the ground. So it’s not a standalone thing that has no impact on human beings. It enhances our knowledge and tells us our place in the universe. But also develops so much of our tech, too.”
When I ask if she ever gets bored with all the wonder, she tells me about leading the team that installed the spectrograph she helped develop at Imperial College on the Gemini telescope in the Chilean Andes. “It’s on top of a mountain and I was out there for six months, and every night I’d sit and have a glass of the local Chilean wine and I’d toast the moon and look at the sky. And I thought that, after a while, I might get bored of it. But I couldn’t help it, I was out there every night, because it was just so glorious and I think it draws us to it, we wonder what lies beyond. And I wonder, if we lived on a planet with a thick atmosphere like Venus that obscures the stars all the time, would we be different?”
Yet at the same time as she was heading up prestigious projects such as the Gemini telescope, she was facing a constant battle to fill scientific posts: “I wasn’t getting enough applications for jobs I was advertising.”
It was something she had seen the signs of for a while. “I called it the dinner party test: you’re sitting next to someone at a dinner party and they say what do you do? And you say ‘scientist’ and then watch the horror on their face. But when I started to tell them exactly what I do, they were fascinated, almost as if they didn’t think science could be fascinating.”
Faced with a challenge, she decided to do something about it and set up a company, Science Innovation, with the aim of reaching out to convert the public to the joys of science. “I thought, I have to go out and sell Stem [science, technology, engineering and maths] to people, especially to the kids, and show them it makes a difference to our lives.”
Aderin-Pocock’s now been going into schools and speaking at conferences for 19 years and estimates she has spoken to 500,000 people – mainly schoolchildren. “I do see the enthusiasm in kids’ eyes. They see things differently, they don’t have the limitations of adults. They’ll say ‘Why?’ to everything. To me, that’s what it means to be a scientist: asking, why?”
One of the questions she likes to ask children is, would you be terrified or excited if we found aliens? (She always puts her hand up for both options.) “I do believe there is life out there, because it’s a numbers game. There are billions of stars in our galaxy and there are 200bn galaxies so why would life just be here? But what form that life would take, I don’t know.”
Talk of alien life leads inevitably to UFOs and conspiracy theories – so does she think governments are keeping things from us? “I’m less inclined to believe in alien abduction and things like that because of the distances involved. Also, one of the major factors is, do civilisations overlap? I say to kids, imagine the aliens landing and stepping out on Earth to find… dinosaurs, because our civilisations don’t overlap. There’s lots of things that would work against us in terms of finding aliens, but I still believe they’re out there.”
The Sky at Night has been going for 66 years and during that time so much has happened in the world of astronomy. What would she like to see happen in the next 66 years? She claps her hands and the enthusiasm ramps up another notch. (If you’re a Sky at Night fan, be assured, her joy for the subject is boundless. I once interviewed Patrick Moore and had a sense of standing before a fire hose of knowledge and enthusiasm – there was no need to utter a single question. Aderin-Pocock has a similar touch and fervour.) “One of my fond memories of looking through the archive, is Patrick saying things like, ‘When we meet the Martians’, because at the time we thought there would be Martians. So, the evolution of ideas since then is fantastic, and what excites me the most right now are exoplanets, planets around other stars.”
I could talk space with Aderin-Pocock all day, and she is only just getting started – drilling down into the prospects of sending probes to those exoplanets that so engage her, or how we might communicate with aliens if we discover them – but more down-to-Earth concerns interrupt as her daughter is in need of picking up.
One final question: building satellites and telescopes, educating the nation on the complexities of the universe, and taking Stem to thousands of school kids – she seems to do it all with such ease, is there anything that the chief priestess for the moon goddess finds hard?
“Writing a book with dyslexia!” she shoots back immediately. Then, almost as if she feels bad for dissing her dyslexia, she adds: “It has steered my career to places where I can excel better – but my worst-case scenario is to be given a speech and have to read it out. Just talking about things I know is no problem, I love that. Shutting me up is the key.”
The Art of Stargazing, My Essential Guide to Navigating the Night Sky by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock is published by BBC Books on 2 November at £16.99. Buy it for £14.95 at guardianbookshop.com
According to In the Sky, observers in New York City will see the Hunter's Full Moon rise around 5:19 p.m. local time, with the sun setting at 5:53 p.m. Little ghosts and goblins will then enjoy the full moon's light until it sets at 08:14 EDT the following day. This Hunter's Moon will be particularly special, as it will be subject to a partial lunar eclipse, with the moon appearing as if a bite has been taken out of it.
Look out for bright Jupiter shining close enough to the moon to share the same view in a pair of binoculars.
Following the Hunter's Moon, the illuminated face of the moon will begin to recede, progress astronomers call waning, heading to the completely dark new moon on Monday, Nov. 13. This will also signal the start of a new 29.5-day lunar cycle.
The name for October's full moon, the Hunter's Moon, can be traced back to the early 1700s, according to Farmer's Almanac. It refers to hunting deer, turkey, pheasants, and other game animals in mid to late Autumn that have spent summer gorging on abundant food.
A map of the world showing the path of a partial lunar eclipse over Africa, Europe and Asia on Oct. 28, 2023. (Image credit: In-The-Sky.org/Dominic Ford)
Though the Hunter's Moon is the most common name for the October full moon in the Northern Hemisphere, there are alternative names connected to hunting such as the Pagan and English Medieval names, the "Sanguine Moon," or the "Blood Moon."
The Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region call it Binaakwe-giizis, the Falling Leaves Moon, or Mshkawji-giizis, the Freezing Moon. The Cree Nation of central Canada calls it Opimuhumowipesim, the Migrating Moon — the month when birds are migrating. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois / Mohawk) of Eastern North America use Kentenha, the Time of Poverty Moon.
The frosty lunar monikers will continue into November with next month's full moon, which falls on Nov. 27, commonly called the Beaver Moon but given the alternative names "Moon of Much White Frost On Grass" from the Algonquin and the "Frost Moon" in the language of the Assiniboine Nation.
If you are hoping to catch a look at the Hunter's Moon, our guides to the best telescopes and binoculars are a great place to start.
Editor's Note: If you snap an image of the Hunter's Moonand would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.
Meltwater flowing out to sea from beneath Antarctic glaciers, or subglacial discharge, could be making them lose ice faster, researchers have found in a new study.
Modelling the influence of this subglacial discharge on the retreat of two glaciers in East Antarctica, the researchers found that it raised the glaciers' contribution to sea-level rise by 15.7 per cent -- from 19 millimetres to 22 millimetres -- by the year 2300.
The findings, relevant in a high emissions scenario featuring 20 per cent higher CO2 emissions by 2100, suggested that the subglacial discharge's influence was large enough to make a meaningful contribution to global sea-level rise, the researchers at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US said.
The East Antarctic glaciers, named Denman and Scott, together hold enough ice to cause nearly 1.5 metres, or 5 feet, of sea-level rise, they said in their study published in the journal Science Advances.
Current models making major sea-level rise projections, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), do not take into account this mechanism of subglacial discharge, the researchers said.
Thus, it could mean that current projections underestimate the pace of global sea-level rise in decades to come, they said.
"Knowing when and how much global sea-level will rise is critical to the welfare of coastal communities," said Tyler Pelle, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps.
"Millions of people live in low-lying coastal zones and we can't adequately prepare our communities without accurate sea-level rise projections," said Pelle.
In Antarctica, subglacial meltwater is generated from melting occurring where the ice sits on continental bedrock.
When subglacial discharge flows out to sea it is thought to accelerate melting of the glacier's ice shelf, which is attributed to ocean mixing that stirs in additional ocean heat within the cavity beneath a glacier's floating ice shelf.
The resulting glacial retreat can then contribute to and drive sea level rise.
The reason why this mechanism of subglacial discharge is not currently considered in sea-level rise projections is because many researchers weren't sure if its localised effects were sufficiently large to increase sea-level rise globally, according to Jamin Greenbaum, co-author of the study and a researcher at Scripps Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.
A key takeaway of the study, however, is the importance of what humanity does in the coming decades to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, said Greenbaum.
This is because their model found that in a low emissions scenario, the glaciers did not retreat all the way into the trench and thus did not result in making runaway contributions to sea-level rise.
"If there is a doomsday story here it isn't subglacial discharge," said Greenbaum. "The real doomsday story is still emissions and humanity is still the one with its finger on the button."
Meanwhile, the Thai National Observatory is holding an open house, to experience the most advanced state-of-the-art telescope technology in Southeast Asia. Participants will have the opportunity to get hands-on with a 2.4-metre diameter telescope, the largest in the region, and observe planets through a 1-metre diameter telescope. This event takes place at the Chalermprakhiat Astronomical Observatory, located on the Doi Inthanon National Park in Chiang Mai.
The open house will be held on January 6 and on February 3, limited to 120 participants per session. The registration fee is 300 baht per person. Additionally, visitors will have the opportunity to tour the workspace of astronomers during this event.
The Narit AstroFest 2024 will take place on January 13, 2024, from 9am to 10pm. It's a full day of astronomy-related activities, held in conjunction with National Children's Day. This event is held only once a year, similar to the National Observatory open house.
At the AstroFest, you can visit advanced astronomy technology laboratories, experience the research work of astronomers from various fields, and have the chance to receive special souvenirs. There will be a plethora of educational resources and activities related to astronomy available during the event.
You can also join the festivities in different regions, including Nakhon Ratchasima, Chachoengsao, Songkhla, and Khon Kaen, at the Chalermprakhiat Astronomical Observatory. Participation in this event is free of charge.
Stargazing Night has been scheduled for January 13, 2024, from 6pm to 10pm. This will be the first time that people across Thailand will collectively gaze up at the sky and observe the stars using telescopes. It is an opportunity to observe celestial objects and winter constellations, including the Moon during early evening, as well as planets, such as Saturn and Jupiter, galaxies, nebulas and various star clusters.
This nationwide event is organized by Narit, schools within the astronomy network, and dark-sky conservation areas in Thailand. There will be over a hundred observation points available for participants across the country. The event is open to the public, and participation is free of charge. It's a great opportunity for people to come together and explore the night sky.
The Dark Sky Star Party is a stargazing and astronomy tourism event that will take place on February 10, 2024, from 5pm to 10pm. This event will be held at Pha Taem National Park in Ubon Ratchathani province. Attendees will have the opportunity to experience the wonders of the night sky in one of Thailand's best dark-sky areas, with an excellent view of the stars.
The event will feature over a hundred telescopes provided by amateur astronomers and the astronomy network. Participants can engage in various astronomy-related activities, learn about the history of astronomy, enjoy the natural beauty of the night, and even take part in an astrophotography workshop.
Participation in this event is free of charge. It's a fantastic opportunity to explore the night sky and learn more about astronomy in a stunning natural setting.
Narit Public Night is a stargazing event open to the public, where you can observe the night sky through telescopes. The event features a 0.7-metre diameter telescope and several smaller telescopes. It provides basic guidance on stargazing.
This event takes place every Saturday night from 6pm to 10pm and is free of charge. It offers a great opportunity for people to explore and appreciate the night sky using various telescopes.
November 2023 has its share of some close passes by the moon with various solar system objects. One of the precursors will be in the evening of Oct. 29 when the moon passes about 3 degrees north of Jupiter. Jupiter reaches opposition (directly opposite the sun) on Nov. 3, so we’ll be at our closest and that planet and its moons will be at their brightest and easiest to see. Watching Jupiter’s four big moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – do their intricate dance around the planet is always fascinating and I always wonder how mind-blowing it must have been for Galileo to realize what he was watching in 1610 or so.
The moon does another close pass on Nov. 9, this time by Venus. At 03:30 and due East, the very thin crescent moon and Venus rise about one degree apart. Interestingly, with a good telescope, you would see Venus looking like a last-quarter moon. The moon looks so thin because it’s much closer to us than the sun and only a sliver that we see gets sunlight. Venus, however, is just about the same distance as the sun and we see the sunward half of it lit.
Later, the moon makes a pass by Saturn on Nov. 20 in the evening and by Jupiter on Nov. 24. Although I’ve never managed to see it with binoculars, Saturn’s big moon, Titan, ought to be visible with 10x or greater as long as you can stabilize the binocs with a tripod. Jupiter’s moons are more easily visible (half as far away and brighter), easy in a telescope but doable with just binoculars most of the time. I use the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Observer’s Handbook to figure out the best views but Stellarium can show them to you with amazing accuracy and it’s free, so there’s no excuse for not having a look.
The International Space Station finishes up its routine of morning passes in early November, takes a break, then resumes evening appearances around mid-month. Heavens-Above has the best info on these.
The somewhat cryptic title of this article is because it’s been one hundred years since an astronomer proved that a certain nebula in the constellation of Andromeda was definitely farther away than other objects in our sky. At the time, there was no consensus on how far away many objects actually were. We must remember that there were then very few large telescopes and all were limited to the visual spectrum. Astrophotographic records were limited to very slow black-and-white pictures recorded on glass plates. Distance estimates for some stars were made by calculating the changes in position of nearby stars as Earth moved around its orbit but most objects were too far away to show the effects of parallax. While it was well understood that stars appeared dimmer when farther away, it was not straightforward whether a given star was big and bright and far away or smaller, dimmer and nearby. Spectral analysis (colour) gives you some idea of the brightness of main sequence stars but it’s the weird ones – the short-lived giants – that confuse everything. Betelgeuse, for example, is roughly the same colour as the many dull red dwarf stars around us but it’s 650 light years or so away and is so bright because it’s a red supergiant star about to blow itself to bits in a supernova.
One solution to this problem began to appear with the discovery of certain variable stars in the eighteenth century. Called Cepheid variables after the prototype star Delta Cepheus, they display regular variations in brightness ranging from a few days to a few weeks. By 1912, enough of these had been observed to correlate their absolute magnitude with the period; basically, the greater the absolute magnitude, the longer the period of the cycle. Remember, it can take months to get enough good data on a single star to establish if it varies and 10 times that to determine if it’s regular – not easy!
Regardless, a certain astronomer spent much of his time looking for Cepheid-type stars in the Andromeda nebula; on Oct. 4, 1923, he recorded a photo of the nebula using the 100-inch Hooker telescope.
Over the next few months, he discovered that one unusually bright star he’d recorded was not a one-time flareup but a Cepheid-type variable. That gave him the correlation he needed to prove that the nebula had to be well beyond all the other objects visible in our sky – that the Andromeda “nebula” was no gas-and-stars cloud like some Milky Way objects but another separate galaxy similar to our own. Within the space of a few years many more galaxies had been established, their spectral red shifts had been proven to mean they were receding from us, the universe was huge and clearly expanding and our understanding of it had changed immeasurably. The man’s name was Edwin Hubble, (1889 – 1953). He’d be stunned to know what we’ve discovered with his namesake telescope.
The Sunshine Coast Astronomy Club’s monthly meeting will be at the Sechelt Library at 7 p.m., Nov. 10, at which The Sky This Month will be presented. Please check the club website at: https://sunshinecoastastronomy.wordpress.com/ for the subject of the guest lecture. Refreshments may include coffee, cookies and carrot cake.
Researchers believe they can use mushrooms to accelerate the work of composting toilets.
Lorena Polovina and Isobel McLean have spent nearly a year tinkering in a tiny basement room at UBC on a novel way to make shitting safer and more sustainable. The School of Architecture students may not find the place inspiring, but their work has the potential to make a difference in an often-overlooked area of environmental health: waste management.
They’ve been experimenting with mycelium shells — essentially a bucket made of mushroom roots that traps heat and houses bacteria — to accelerate how composting toilets break down waste. Now, thanks to a $50,000 grant from Campus as a Living Lab, they’re ready to test out the project.
The project — nicknamed the MycoToilet — includes Joe Dahmen, an associate professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA). He’s already used mushrooms to create sustainable furniture and to create an award-winning toilet. Now, he and the team want to use mushrooms to speed up existing composting toilets.
“We’re targeting about half the time of a typical composting toilet to go from fecal waste to safe, non-pathogenic fertilizer,” said Dahmen. “So it’s basically the same process of any composting toilet, but just radically accelerated.”
“We take some mycelium culture, inoculate rye, and then inoculate the sawdust with the rye,” said Polovina. “The sawdust acts as food for the mycelium to grow on and it expands this little network to basically overtake the sawdust and grow in and around it.”
Mycelium growing in bags of sawdust. Bridget Stringer-Holden / The Ubyssey
Once the mycelium has been grown, it is cooked in an autoclave—a device that heats up the sawdust to kill off bacteria that might compete with the mycelium for nutrients. Then, the team will craft the mycelium and sawdust into a bucket shape to fit into the toilet.
Once the insert is shaped, it’s sent to the UBC Department of Microbiology and Immunology, where the team will experiment with different types of heat-loving bacteria to find a combination that will accelerate the decomposition and cleaning of the waste.
“We'll test the different selection of microbes to find and optimize the breakdown of waste so that we make sure that we have the right blend of microbes,” said Dahmen.
Once the team has the right combination of bacteria and enough inserts made from mushrooms, the UBC Botanical Garden will host a test toilet this summer. Daniel Mosquin, UBC Botanical Garden research manager, will coordinate the next phase of the project.
“It’s the whole idea of using biodiversity to inspire solutions that meet fundamental human problems, particularly if it can be done in a low cost, low impact way,” said Mosquin, “and something that doesn't rely on a lot of infrastructure.”
Daniel Mosquin explains how UBC’s Botanical Garden will host the MycoToilet. Luke Faulks / The Ubyssey
The team designed the MycoToilet for use in areas that don’t have running water for a sewage system. The Government of Canada estimates that 40% of the world’s population doesn’t have access to sufficient clean water.
“We're targeting places that don't have easy access to typical sanitary facilities,” said Dahmen. “If you take the refugee camp example, it's quite common that there's a lot of disease, stemming from pathogens in refugee camps due to inadequate sanitation.”
McLean and Polovina are currently working on creating 100 prototypes of the mushroom insert. The insert design is crucial to help speed up the amount of time it takes for composting toilets to clean and break down human waste.
Once the inserts are complete, they’ll be sent to the UBC Department of Microbiology and Immunology. There, the team will experiment with different combinations of bacteria to see what breaks down waste most efficiently. Then, the mushroom insert’s unique ability to hold heat will help the bacteria get to work processing human waste.
The final product will be the result of a years-long partnership between the UBC SALA, the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and the Botanical Garden.
“We've been told it's more a mixture of art and science than just pure science, and I would say that's true,” McLean said. “We're kind of at the point now where we understand all the variables that we need to control, so now we can start producing.”
For both McLean and Polovina, the inter-departmental collaboration has been a highlight of the project.
“It's a very interdisciplinary group combining architecture and engineering and sciences together to make something that’s pretty radical in terms of how human waste is being treated right now,” said Polovina. “I come from a more liberal arts background, so it's been pretty amazing to sit in these very interdisciplinary team meetings and learn about all these different perspectives, and [to be a part of] something as cool as growing a toilet!”
New research suggests Earth’s sister planet may have been home to microbial life billions of years ago due to tectonic activities
The clouded globe of Venus captured by NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft. Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Venus, often referred to as Earth’s sister planet, may have experienced tectonic activity about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago, according to a new study.
Plate tectonics may have been instrumental in creating its carbon dioxide- and nitrogen-rich atmosphere on Venus, the new report published in the journal Nature Astronomy noted. The planet’s atmospheric composition is mainly composed ofcarbon dioxide (96.5 per cent) and nitrogen (less than 3.5 per cent).
Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that describes how Earth’s thin outer shell is broken into big pieces called tectonic plates, which float on the planet’s mantle.Plate tectonics gave rise to oceans, continents and mountains, along with playing a critical role in nourishing life on Earth.
The new findings suggest that ancient Venus may have been home to microbial life, thanks to tectonic activities. That means Earth and Venus may have been even more alike than thought.
“One of the big-picture takeaways is that we very likely had two planets at the same time in the same solar system operating in a plate tectonic regime — the same mode of tectonics that allowed for the life that we see on Earth today,” Matthew Weller from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston and lead author of the study said in a statement.
However, Weller explained that plate tectonics would have likely ended on Venus after it lost water and its atmosphere got too hot and thick. This process may have dried up the necessary ingredients that make tectonic movements possible.
Venus and Earth are about the same size, mass, density and volume. Still, Venus is the least understood of the terrestrial planets, according to the study.
Weller and his colleagues focused on the mechanisms that probably created Venus’s atmosphere, which they speculated were linked to its interior. So they compared the present-day Venusian atmosphere to those generated by computer models.
Their analysis showed that only early plate tectonics could explain the present Venus’ current atmosphere and surface pressure.
Sometime after the planet formed, about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago, plate tectonics may have existed on Venus. This early tectonic movement would have been happening on Earth and Venus simultaneously, the researchers explained.
Venus may have transitioned from limited tectonic movement early in its history to the stagnant lid model that exists today. A stagnant lid means its surface has only a single plate with minimal amounts of movement to release gases into the atmosphere.
“We have so far thought about a tectonic state in terms of a binary: it’s either true or it’s false, and it’s either true or false for the duration of the planet,” Alexander Evans, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University and co-author of the study explained.
The new findings, he said, suggest that planets may transition in and out of different tectonic states. “This also means we might have planets that transition in and out of habitability rather than just being continuously habitable,” he highlighted.
The researchers are hopeful that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s upcoming mission to Venus, DAVINCI, may provide some clues and confirm the study’s findings. They also plan to understand how Venus lost its plate tectonics.
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The question of the shape of space certainly seems a bit nonsensical. Space just is. It’s the place that holds stars and planets, and it’s big enough to allow comets and asteroids to buzz about the Sun, with very little chance of any of them colliding. Asking whether space has a shape doesn’t seem to make much sense.
But the question of the shape of space has very real implications for the future of the cosmos — playing a role in whether the Universe will expand forever, or reverse its current expansion in a cataclysmic Big Crunch. Furthermore, space could be infinite, or it could be that if you travel far enough in one direction, you’ll return to your starting point.
3 possible shapes of space
The idea of space having a shape arose with Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1915. In it, he discovered that he could describe the effect of gravity not as a force between two astronomical bodies, but rather as the bending of space and time. While Newton described the motion of the Moon around the Earth as the Moon traveling in a circle, Einstein described it as the Moon traveling in a straight line, but in a curved space. It’s not so different from how a person walking in what seems like a straight line along the Earth’s equator is actually following a giant curve.
In Einstein’s theory, close to every astronomical body, space is curved and distorted from the shape it would be without any matter nearby. Near a black hole, space is distorted enough to trap even light itself, despite classical physics saying that massless light does not experience gravity at all. If space can be distorted, and the Universe consists of space, what is the shape of the Universe?
Credit: Three possible geometries of space: spherical, saddle, and flat. (Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team)
Imagining the curvature of our familiar three-dimensional space is rather difficult, so it is valuable to think about the curvature of a two-dimensional one. Three shapes of space are commonly discussed: flat (like a tabletop), spherical (described by the surface of a globe), and hyperbolic or “saddle” (which looks essentially like a giant saddle). Flat and saddle space are infinite in extent, while spherical space is not.
The 270° triangle
The behavior of flat space is taught in high school geometry courses. In it, two parallel lines never cross, and the sum of the angles of a triangle add to 180°. In spherical space, things are quite different. Here, parallel lines cross, and the sum of angles in a triangle are more than 180°.
Don’t see it? Take a city like Quito, Ecuador, which sits directly on the equator. The angle separating north and west is 90°. Follow the equator to a location 90º west of there. At that location, north and east are also separated by 90º. If you follow the two lines northward, which are parallel at the equator, they meet at the North pole and form a 90º angle. And, if you sum the angles of the triangle described by the two cities and the North pole, they add to 270°.
Saddle space has similar surprises, however in saddle space, two parallel lines diverge, drawing farther apart. And the sum of the angles in a triangle in saddle space is less than 180°.
Determining the shape of space
So, is it possible for researchers to determine the shape of the Universe? It turns out that it is. Astronomers have employed a very clever approach to answer the question. And it begins by using radio antennas to image the Universe shortly after the Big Bang.
Shortly after the Universe began, it was filled with a hot plasma, which glowed white hot. The plasma also was full of soundwaves with a preferred wavelength. Just like sound waves in the air, this caused density differences in the plasma. Where the plasma was denser, it was a little hotter; conversely, areas with lower density were colder. The distance between the hot and cold spots was determined by the wavelength of the sound waves.
In the 13.8 billion years since that time, the Universe has expanded and cooled. What once was white hot, has cooled to a temperature of about -450°F (-268°C). At this temperature, that early temperature variation cannot be seen by the human eye, but it can be imaged using sensitive radio telescopes.
Light travels at a fixed speed, which means that light from distant objects was emitted far in the past. This also means that if we look at light emitted far enough away, we can literally see the conditions of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. Indeed, light of the Big Bang emitted 13.8 billion years ago can now be seen on a sphere that encircles the Earth.
The wavelength of sound in the early Universe set the distance between two adjacent hot spots. The distance between the hot spots and the Earth is determined by the speed of light and how long it took the light to get to Earth. The centers of two adjacent spots and the Earth form a triangle. And astronomers can use geometry to calculate the angle between two adjacent hot spots as seen in an Earthbound telescope.
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Remember that the shape of space can distort triangles. If space is flat, the spots should be separated by 1°; if space is spherical, the angle should be bigger than 1°; and if space is saddle-shaped, the angle should be smaller than 1°.
A flat Universe
When astronomers examined their data, they measured the angle to be 1°. From this, they concluded that the shape of space in the Universe is flat, which means it is infinitely large — much larger than the Universe we can see with telescopes.
However, no measurement is 100% accurate. They all have uncertainty. So, it remains possible that the Universe is slightly curved, and our equipment isn’t precise enough to measure it. Or perhaps the Universe is curved and very big, and it is only because we see only a little piece of it that it looks flat.
Given that flat is one unique possible shape out of countless alternatives, explaining its flatness is one of the unanswered mysteries of science.
The clouded globe of Venus captured by NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft. Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech 
