Category: Star - Ascension Now

THAT NOVA YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE:

26/6/2024

By the time you finish reading this story, there could be a new star in the night sky. Recurrent nova T CrB (pronounced "tee-core-bore") is poised on the knife edge of a once-in-a-lifetime explosion.

"Our best estimate for the time of eruption is close to now," says Brad Schaefer, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Louisiana State University.
Schaefer is a leading expert on T CrB. He's been studying the star since he was a teenager. "When I was 18 year old, I calculated when T CrB should erupt again. The answer was 'around 2026' -- and I've been waiting for this moment ever since," he says.

Above: A T CrB infographic created by South Korean astronomer Bum-Suk Yeom

T CrB is a "recurrent nova." That means it erupts not just once, but over and over again. Its explosion in 1866 was the first nova anyone had ever seen in detail. "No one knew what caused it," says Schaefer. Another blast in 1946 established its period (79 or 80 years) and led astronomers to the modern interpretation:
T CrB is a binary star system consisting of an ancient red giant circled by a hot white dwarf. Hydrogen from the red giant spills onto the surface of the white dwarf. It takes about 80 years to accumulate a critical mass, then--BOOM--a thermonuclear explosion occurs. "It's an H-bomb that blows up on an incredibly large scale," says Schaefer.
After an explosion, the process resets and repeats. Looking at old light curves, Schaefer realized that T CrB tells us when it's about to explode. Approximately 1.1 years before each blow-up, there's a "pre-eruption dip" in brightness. This dip foretells the next blast.

Above: The pre-eruption dip in March 2023

Start the clock! "T CrB started its pre-eruption dip in March 2023. If the star behaves in 2023-2024 as it did in 1945-1946, then the next eruption should take place in 2024.4+-0.3," says Schaefer. "That's May 2024 plus or minus a few months."
The explosion will be visible to the naked eye. Schaefer expects it to be about as bright as the North Star. When it blows, T CrB will burst forth as an extra jewel in the "Northern Crown" (the constellation Corona Borealis), easy to find high in the summer night sky between Hercules and Bootes.
"T CrB will be the brightest nova for generations," says Schaefer. "It's a chance for everyone in the world to step outside, look up, and see the hellfire."
Observing tips:
(1) Go out tonight to see what Corona Borealis normally looks like: sky map. Then, when the nova explodes, you'll be able to see the difference.
(2) Sign up for Space Weather Alerts. All subscribers (Basic and Pro) will receive an immediate text message when the nova explodes.
https://spaceweather.com/

A NOVA WILL EXPLODE THIS SUMMER (PROBABLY):

7/6/2024

The night sky is about to get a new star. Sometime this summer, astronomers believe, a nova will explode in the constellation Corona Borealis (the Northern Crown). The exploding star will be bright enough to see with the naked eye even from light-polluted cities.

A NASA artist's concept of the T CrB binary star system

"It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event," says Rebekah Hounsell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "I believe it will create a lot of new astronomers out there."
T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) is a binary system 3,000 light-years from Earth. It consists of a white dwarf orbiting an ancient red giant. Hydrogen from the red giant is being pulled down onto the surface of the white dwarf, accumulating toward a critical mass. Eventually, it will trigger a thermonuclear explosion.
The last time T CrB exploded was in 1946. About a year before that blast, the system suddenly dimmed--a pattern astronomers called the "pre-eruption dip." In 2023, T CrB dipped again, heralding a new eruption. If the 1946 pattern repeats itself, the nova should occur between now and September 2024.

A sky map showing the location of T CrB (red circle)

The outburst will be brief. Once it erupts, the nova will be visible to the naked eye for a little less than a week – but Hounsell is confident it will be quite a sight to see. The expected magnitude is between +2 and +3, similar to stars in the Big Dipper.
"Typically, nova events are faint and far away," says Elizabeth Hays, chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA Goddard. "This one will be really close, with a lot of eyes on it. We can’t wait to get the full picture of what's going on."
https://spaceweather.com/

Iconic 'Pillars of Creation' captured in new JWST image

21/2/2023

Daily Mail: Wed, 19 Oct 2022 17:47 UTC

© NASA
These handout photos provided by NASA show the 'Pillars of Creation' that are set off in a kaleidoscope of color
in theJames Webb Space Telescope's near-infrared-light view (R) compared to the Hubble telescope's
2014 wider view in visible light

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the iconic "Pillars of Creation," huge structures of gas and dust teeming with stars, NASA said Wednesday, and the image is as majestic as one could hope.

The twinkling of thousands of stars illuminates the telescope's first shot of the gigantic gold, copper and brown columns standing in the midst of the cosmos.

At the ends of several pillars are bright red, lava-like spots. "These are ejections from stars that are still forming," only a few hundred thousand years old, NASA said in a statement.

These "young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars," the US space agency added.

The "Pillars of Creation" are located 6,500 light years from Earth, in the Eagle Nebula of our Milky Way galaxy. The pillars were made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope, which first captured them in 1995 and then again in 2014.

But thanks to Webb's infrared capabilities, the newer telescope -- launched into space less than a year ago -- can peer through the opacity of the pillars, revealing many new stars forming.

"By popular demand, we had to do the Pillars of Creation" with Webb, Klaus Pontoppidan, the science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said Wednesday on Twitter.

STScI operates Webb from Baltimore, Maryland.

"There are just so many stars!" Pontoppidan added.

NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn summed it up: "The universe is beautiful!" she wrote on Twitter.

© NASA
This handout photo provided by NASA on October 19, 2022 shows the 'Pillars of Creation' that are set off in a kaleidoscope of color in the James Webb Space Telescope's near-infrared-light view

The image, covering an area of about eight light years, was taken by Webb's primary imager NIRCam, which captures near-infrared wavelengths -- invisible to the human eye.

The colors of the image have been "translated" into visible light.

According to NASA, the new image "will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region."

Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, and has already unleashed a raft of unprecedented data. Scientists are hopeful it will herald a new era of discovery.

One of the main goals for the $10-billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main research focus is on exoplanets, planets outside Earth's solar system.
https://www.sott.net/article/473446-Iconic-Pillars-of-Creation-captured-in-new-JWST-image

Pam Gregory: Insights from the Galactic Center

29/4/2021

LeeHarrisEnergy

Pam Gregory, acclaimed astrologist and author, shares with Lee how deep space astrology is showing a new map of the current shift in consciousness and galactic evolution - and the impact that can have for us as human beings living through this time, in this excerpt from their interview for the Impact the World podcast.

For the full episode, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY69M...

SIRIUS IS PULSING WITH COLOR:

30/1/2021

There's something strange about Sirius. The brightest star in the sky is pulsing with color. To the naked eye, Sirius looks pale blue, almost white. But if you photograph it with a camera, using very short exposure times, Sirius reveals its true colors. Lots of them. Photographer Arne Recke of Broager, Denmark, just did the experiment, and this is what he found:

"Here are 16 pictures of Sirius," says Recke. "The uppermost picture was taken with 1/2 sec. shutter speed (ISO 6400). The other 15 pictures were taken much faster with a 1/500 sec.shutter speed (also ISO 6400). The short exposures are incredibly colorful."
Astronomers call this phenomenon "scintillation." It is caused by thermal irregularities in Earth's atmosphere. Packets of relatively warm and cool air act like prisms, spreading starlight into rainbow colors. When these packets drift in front of Sirius--voilá.
The reason Recke's first exposure looks white is because 1/2 sec. is long enough to average many colors together. Multiple packets of air drift by during that time. The shorter snapshots, however, capture individual packets; they look like tiny supernova explosions.
All stars scintillate, but Sirius does so most flamboyantly because of its extreme brightness. See for yourself. Step outside this evening an hour or so after sunset and look east for Sirius near the feet of Orion. The lower it is, the more it scintillates. You may be able to see the colors--no camera required.
www.spaceweather.com

Jupiter and Saturn to appear as brilliant star or ‘double planet’ in night sky this Christmas

28/11/2020

Jupiter and Saturn will come closer to each other in the Earth's night sky than they have for almost a millennium between December 16 and 25 in an extremely rare astronomical extravaganza. The pair will be separated by one fifth the diameter of a full moon as viewed from the Earth, in an extraordinary astronomical proximity event which has not occurred for 800 years.

The planets will appear as a singular point of brilliant light or a “double planet” to anyone lucky enough to have clear skies at the time of their yuletide rendezvous

“Alignments between these two planets are rather rare, occurring once every 20 years or so, but this conjunction is exceptionally rare because of how close the planets will appear to one another,” says astronomer Patrick Hartigan from Rice University.

For context, their previous closest celestial encounter on record (as we see them anyway) was on March 4, 1226. As always, the best viewing conditions will be near the equator but, with clear enough skies, it should be visible from anywhere on Earth about an hour after sunset each evening. Stargazers should point their telescopes toward the western sky, especially during the closest approach on December 21, when the pair will appear as a “double planet.”

“For most telescope viewers, each planet and several of their largest moons will be visible in the same field of view that evening,” Hartigan adds.

The viewing window will be shorter for those in the northern hemisphere, however, so stargazers are encouraged to make preparations well in advance and head out early to avoid missing the mesmerizing meeting.

Their next astronomical alignment is expected in March 2080 and then again in 2400.
https://www.rt.com/news/507528-jupiter-saturn-alignment-double-planet/
Read also: https://www.iceagenow.info/jupiter-and-saturn-about-to-do-something-not-seen-since-the-year-1226/

Lost Nebulae Images Hubble Forgot to Tell You About | 4k60 Annotated | 2000 Photos over 7 years

5/7/2020

DTTV - Science Answers

Discover the universe via telescope data and imagery, artwork, photography, over 2000 Lost Images have been compiled to bring you this amazing Annotated nebulae documentary which has taken 7 years to compile, See the universe come to life via animations, scientific visualizations, expert music alignment software

BETELGEUSE IS BRIGHTENING AGAIN:

21/2/2020

"Don't panic! Betelgeuse is not likely to undergo a supernova explosion anytime soon," says South Korean research astronomer Bum-Suk Yeom. "The red supergiant star Betelgeuse appears to have finally stopped its unprecedented dimming. It's been brightening over the last few days." Yoem assembled this light curve from data collected by American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO):

According to the data, Betelegeuse reached its minimum brightness between Feb. 12th and 14th, and now it is slowly brightening again.
This development was actually predicted. Ed Guinan and Richard Wasatonic of Villanova University recently suggested that Betelgeuse might "bounce back" within a week of Feb. 21st. Their prediction was based on a Fourier analysis of Betelgeuse's light curve, which revealed a strong 430-day period. If the current dimming was just an unusually deep dip in Betelgeuse's natural 430-day variability, they reasoned, its brightness should start to increase again on Feb 21st +/- 7 days.
Their prediction seems to be coming true. However, it is too early to draw a firm conclusion because the turnaround--if that is indeed what is happening---is still in its early stages.
www.spaceweather.com

THE FAINTING OF BETELGEUSE:

23/12/2019

One day, perhaps in our lifetimes, perhaps 100,000 years from now, the red giant Betelgeuse will dim a little--and then explode. The supernova will rival the full Moon in the night skies of Earth and cast shadows after dark. This month, Betelgeuse has dimmed a little. So far it has not exploded. Alan Dyer photographed the star rising as usual with the rest of Orion on Dec. 21st:

"This is Orion rising over my home in Alberta, Canada, on a partly cloudy and foggy night," says Dyer. "Yellow-red Betelgeuse is shining at upper left, reportedly dimmer than usual."
Betelgeuse caused a sensation among professional astronomers earlier this month when Edward Guinan of Villanova University and colleagues reported a significant "fainting" of the star. "[Betelgeuse] has been declining in brightness since October 2019, now reaching a modern all-time low of V = +1.12 mag on 07 December 2019 UT," they wrote. "Currently this is the faintest the star has been during our 25+ years of continuous monitoring."
Astronomers have long known that Betelgeuse is on the precipice of an energy crisis. It's about to run out of fuel in its core. When that happens, the star will collapse and rebound explosively, producing the first known supernova in the Milky Way since 1604. Experts in stellar evolution believe Betelgeuse could die at any time during the next 100,000 years--a blink of an eye on time scales of astronomy.
The current dimming did not herald that final blast. Betelgeuse is also a slow variable star, and this seems to be no more than an episode of slightly deeper-than-usual dimming. Orion remains intact ... for now.
www.spaceweather.com

WEEKEND COMET FLYBY:

18/12/2018

Over the weekend, Comet 46P/Wirtanen made history. The green ball of gas wrapped around a nugget of dirty ice flew past Earth only 11.5 million km away--so close that it cracked the top 10 list of comet flybys during the Space Age. During the hours of closest approach, 46P/Wirtanen appeared in the constellation Taurus alongside the Pleiades star cluster:

Michael Jäger took the picture on Dec. 16th from Turmkogel, Austria. "To create the image, I combined 6-minute exposures through red, green and blue filters," says Jäger.

The colors in Jäger's image are remarkable--a striking contrast of green vs. blue. Wirtanen's green comes from diatomic carbon (C2)--a gaseous substance common in comet atmospheres that glows green in the near-vacuum of space. The Pleiades, on the other hand, appear blue because the stars themselves are that color. Hot and massive, the Seven Sisters shine their blue light into surrounding clouds of gas and dust, which reflect the azure hue.

46P/Wirtanen is receding from Earth now, but it will still be nearby for days to come. The main challenge for observers is not distance, but rather moonlight. The glare of the waxing Moon will dilute the comet's brightness, making it a challenge to see with the unaided eye. Digital cameras and widefield telescopes will have no trouble, however, capturing the comet's exit. It is currently glowing like a big misty star of 4th magnitude near the horns of the Bull:

www.spaceweather.com

Biology and Consciousness - Kryon

20/1/2018

From Kryon Live Channelling: "The Five Alignments"
May 2017 in Geneva, Switzerland

Dear ones, the truth is that you are a combination of the biology of the evolution of this planet, plus the evolution of consciousness from the stars. Although your mainstream science will take a very long time to see this, they will continue to see the pointers to it - the missing pieces of the Human evolutionary chain.

KRYON; through Lee Carroll, the Original Kryon Channel

Ultra-bright star in the Crab Nebula, breaks all the rules

27/2/2017

Cosmos Magazine: 24 Feb 2017

© NASA/Getty Images
Multiple images of the Crab Nebula made over a span of several months with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show matter and antimatter propelled to nearly the speed of light by the Crab pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star the size of Manhattan.

Well, bang go those theories. Astrophysicists have identified a neutron star that overturns not one but three well supported hypotheses.

The star, known as NGC 5907 ULX, is emitting far more x-rays than any other ever observed. So huge is the output that it has been classified as an "ultraluminous x-ray source" (ULX). It is by no means the first ULX to be recorded in nearby galaxies, but all the others are confidently predicted to be generated by black holes - this is the first one that uses star-power.

So there goes the first theory.

But there are still more baffling elements to the discovery, made by a team led by Gianluca Israel from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, Italy, and reported in Science.

For a start, until now it was thought that there was a physical constraint that prevented a neutron glowing as brightly as NGC 5907 ULX. It's called the Eddington limit, which describes the theoretical maximum set by the balance between the force of radiation acting outward and the gravitational force acting inward.

This star exceeds the Eddington limit by 1,000 times - which shouldn't be possible, but evidently is. So there goes theory number two.

The third theory that has taken a battering is one that is familiar to every primary school pupil: magnets, planets and stars have two poles. Ordinary stars do, of course, but NGC 5907 ULX is far from ordinary.

Israel and colleagues contend that the only way the star could achieve such an extremely high output is by having multiple magnetic poles.

"Such high luminosities are often displayed by many ULXs that have previously been classified as accreting black holes," they write. "A multicomponent strong magnetic field is necessary to account for the properties of NGC 5907 ULX."

PHOTOGRAPHING THE PRECESSION OF EARTH:

6/5/2015

The North Star is Polaris, but it wasn't always Polaris. Thousands of years ago, the spin axis of Earth pointed toward another star--brilliant Vega. This is because Earth, akin to a spinning top, slowly wobbles or "precesses". Astrophotographer Miguel Claro has long wondered what the sky would look like if Vega were still the North Star. "After a long time of burning my mind with new ideas," says Claro. "I figured out how I could do it, developing what I think is, a totally new astrophotographic technique." Here it is:

This is a camera mounted on two clock drives. The axis of one clock drive points at Polaris, and rotates opposite to the spin of Earth. This freezes the motion of stars around today's North Star. The axis of the second clock drive points at Vega, and transfers the spin of our planet there. This contraption allowed Claro to compare the North Stars, Polaris vs. Vega, in the form of star trails:

"All the images were taken from the Mourão Castle, in the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, the First Starlight Tourism Destination in the world, in Alentejo, Portugal," says Claro.

Claro's multi-drive system causes the landscape to move during the exposure. "I made a mask merging the landscape with the first frame to have a more pleasant result," he explains. More information about his technique may be found here.

Earth wobbles with a period of about 26,000 years. In only 14,000 years, Vega will become the North Star again. Thank you, Miguel Claro, for the preview.
www.spaceweather.com

NASA Satellites catch 'growth spurt' from newborn protostar

24/3/2015

Using data from orbiting observatories, including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and ground-based facilities, an international team of astronomers has discovered an outburst from a star thought to be in the earliest phase of its development. The eruption, scientists say, reveals a sudden accumulation of gas and dust by an exceptionally young protostar known as HOPS 383.

Stars form within collapsing fragments of cold gas clouds. As the cloud contracts under its own gravity, its central region becomes denser and hotter. By the end of this process, the collapsing fragment has transformed into a hot central protostar surrounded by a dusty disk roughly equal in mass, embedded in a dense envelope of gas and dust. Astronomers call this a "Class 0" protostar.

"HOPS 383 is the first outburst we've ever seen from a Class 0 object, and it appears to be the youngest protostellar eruption ever recorded," said William Fischer, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Infrared images from instruments at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO, left) and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope document the outburst of HOPS 383, a young protostar in the Orion star-formation complex.
Background: A wide view of the region taken from a Spitzer four-color infrared mosaic.
Image Credit: E. Safron et al.; Background: NASA/JPL/T. Megeath (U-Toledo)

The Class 0 phase is short-lived, lasting roughly 150,000 years, and is considered the earliest developmental stage for stars like the sun.

A protostar has not yet developed the energy-generating capabilities of a sun-like star, which fuses hydrogen into helium in its core. Instead, a protostar shines from the heat energy released by its contraction and by the accumulation of material from the disk of gas and dust surrounding it. The disk may one day develop asteroids, comets and planets. Because these infant suns are thickly swaddled in gas and dust, their visible light cannot escape. But the light warms dust around the protostar, which reradiates the energy in the form of heat detectable by infrared-sensitive instruments on ground-based telescopes and orbiting satellites.

HOPS 383 is located near NGC 1977, a nebula in the constellation Orion and a part of its sprawling star-formation complex. Located about 1,400 light-years away, the region constitutes the most active nearby "star factory" and hosts a treasure trove of young stellar objects still embedded in their natal clouds.

A team led by Thomas Megeath at the University of Toledo in Ohio used Spitzer to identify more than 300 protostars in the Orion complex. A follow-on project using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, called the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey (HOPS), studied many of these objects in greater detail.

This article can be read in its entirety at : http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellites-catch-growth-spurt-from-newborn-protostar/#.VREU_xZ1tV4

MARS vs. ANTI-MARS:

25/9/2014

Shining bright red in the heart of the constellation Scorpius, 1st-magnitude star Antares is often mistaken for Mars. In Greek, "Antares" means "rival of Mars" or "anti-Mars," so-named because it is about the same brightness and color as the Red Planet. As September comes to a close, the rivals are converging. Jeff Dai sends this photo of Mars and Antares setting side-by-side behind Mount Balang in Sichuan, China:

"I was looking southwest in the evening sky on Sept. 20th when a conspicuous pair of ruddy objects grabbed my attention," says Dai. "Red planet Mars is moving in for a close encounter with its ancient rival, the red supergiant star Antares."

On Sept. 28th and 29th, the nights of closest approach, Mars and Antares will be only a few degrees apart, a conjunction tight enough to fit behind your outstretched palm. Sept. 29th is the best night to look because the Moon will join the display, lining up to form a near-vertical column of heavenly bodies just above the southwestern horizon. Sept. 27th is a good night, too, but for a different reason: A slender crescent Moon will pass very close to Saturn not far from Antares and Mars. Sky maps: Sept. 25, 26, 27, 28, 29. www.spaceweather.com