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:

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."

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

The sun is hitting its stride. Earth's closest star shot off yet another powerful solar flare today (June 11) after producing a pair of major solar storms Tuesday.   The X1-class flare reached its peak at 5:06 a.m. EDT (0906 GMT) and came from Region 2087 near the southeastern limb of the sun's disk, the same region of the star that produced the two powerful solar flares yesterday. NASA captured an amazing video of the X1 solar flare using its space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Today's solar tempest did cause a brief radio blackout on Earth, but officials with the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center based in Boulder, Colorado, don't think that the flare has an associated coronal mass ejection - a burst of hot plasma sent out from the sun during some solar flares.   While officials with the SWPC didn't initially think that Tuesday's flares produced a coronal mass ejection - a burst of plasma associated with some solar flares - later analysis shows that the flares did produced two CMEs. The first solar flare produced a relatively small CME, with the second merging with it shortly after, according to astronomer Tony Phillips at spaceweather.com.  The CME is expected to give Earth a glancing blow, when it reaches our part of the solar system Friday (June 13). It's possible that the incoming CME could create polar geomagnetic storms, according to Phillips.

The sun is in the active phase of its 11-year solar cycle, called Solar Cycle 24. NASA officials now think the sun is in its maximum, which they have dubbed the "mini max". Although the sun's activity is on the upswing, this solar max is still quite weak by comparison to other solar maximums on record, NASA officials have said. Scientists expected that the solar maximum (the peak in the sun's activity for the cycle) would occur in 2013.

"It's back," Dean Pesnell, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a NASA statement Tuesday (June 10) on the sun's weather cycle. "Solar max has arrived."

Wednesday's solar flare is the eighth documented X-flare shot out from the sun in 2014. The most powerful flare of the year - a monster X4.9-class flare - occurred in February. X2 flares are two times as intense as X1 flares. If aimed toward Earth, X-flares can damage the planet's power grids and put satellites and astronauts in space in danger.

The sun also shoots out other, less powerful classes of solar flares. M-class flares can produce incredible auroras, and our nearest star also emits weaker C-class flares.

NASA has a fleet of sun-monitoring satellites in orbit today. The Solar Dynamics Observatory, the space agency's twin STEREO probes and the joint U.S.-European SOHO spacecraft all keep watch on the sun from space.

Shannon Hall;  Universe Today;  Tue, 06 May 2014 16:26 CDT

© NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones
This artist’s impression shows a gamma-ray burst with two intense beams of relativistic matter emitted by the black hole.

Roughly once a day the sky is lit up by a mysterious torrent of energy. These events - known as gamma-ray bursts - represent the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, sending out as much energy in a fraction of a second as our Sun will give off during its entire lifespan.  
Yet no one has ever witnessed a gamma-ray burst directly. Instead astronomers are left to study their fading light.

New research from an international team of astronomers has discovered a puzzling feature within one Gamma-ray burst, suggesting that these objects may behave differently than previously thought.

These powerful explosions are thought to be triggered when dying stars collapse into jet-spewing black holes. While this stage only lasts a few minutes, its afterglow - slowly fading emission that can be seen at all wavelengths (including visible light) - will last for a few days to weeks. It is from this afterglow that astronomers meticulously try to understand these enigmatic explosions.

The afterglow emission is formed when the jets collide with the material surrounding the dying star. They cause a shockwave, moving at high velocities, in which electrons are being accelerated to tremendous energies. However, this acceleration process is still poorly understood. The key is in detecting the afterglow's polarization - the fraction of light waves that move with a preferred plane of vibration.

"Different theories for electron acceleration and light emission within the afterglow all predict different levels of linear polarization, but theories all agreed that there should be no circular polarization in visible light," said lead author Klaas Wiersema in a press release.   "This is where we came in: we decided to test this by carefully measuring both the linear and circular polarization of one afterglow, of GRB 121024A, detected by the Swift satellite."

And to their surprise, the team detected circular polarization, meaning that the light waves are moving together in a uniform, spiral motion as they travel. The gamma-ray burst was 1000 times more polarized than expected. "It is a very nice example of observations ruling out most of the existing theoretical predictions," said Wiersema.   The detection shows that current theories need to be re-examined. Scientists expected any circular polarization to be washed out. The radiation of so many electrons travelings billions of light-years would erase any signal. But the new discovery suggests that there could be some sort of order in the way these electrons travel.

Of course the possibility remains that this particular afterglow was simply an oddball and not all afterglows behave like this. 
Nonetheless "extreme shocks like the ones in GRB afterglows are great natural laboratories to push our understanding of physics beyond the ranges that can be explored in laboratories," said Wiersema.  ( The paper has been published in Nature. )

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting in the "habitable zone" of another star. The planet, named "Kepler-186f" orbits an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way: full story.        http://spaceweather.com/

This is a good week to see the planet Mars. Today, April 8th, Mars is "at opposition"--that is, perfectly opposite the sun in the midnight sky. And then, on April 14th, Mars makes its closest approach to Earth since 2012.

Look for the Red Planet rising in the east at sunset, shining brighter than a 1st-magntitude star. Alan Dyer sends this picture of the Red Planet from Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia:

"The reddish tint of Mars contrasts nicely with blue-white Spica, the brightest star in Virgo," says Dyer. "If the arrangement of Mars and Spica looks unusual, it's because I took this from Australia. So the relative position of Mars and Spica looks upside down compared to a northern hemisphere view. The gum trees in the foreground are illuminated by the waxing Moon."

To learn more about the close encounter, watch the video "Opposition of Mars" from Science@NASA.

www.spaceweather.com

http://wavechronicle.com/wave/?p=1151
Author: Ben Davidson ('Suspicious Observer' :  See also Ben's latest video below)

In 1986, some scientists laughed as other scientists seriously pondered the existence of water on Mars. Today we know that there is ice, and even the potential for liquid water on the surface of Mars. That news made headlines, especially with the newest rover sending back close-up images and data from direct samples.   The vast majority of relevant and more-surprising information on the topic of extraplanetary water has managed to go under the radar. Additionally, breakthroughs in extreme-environment chemistry, astronomy, physics, and more have not yet been expressly interconnected to draw new hypothetical inferences about the nature of the universe, and the abundance of life.

In STARWATER, an educational documentary outlining the relevant research about water outside earth, we examine the wide range of places to find water, and why this is likely to be true everywhere. Would you believe that we have proof of water on every planet? We discovered permanent ice near the poles of Mercury, many moons of Jupiter and Saturn are icy spheres with liquid oceans beneath the surface, the centers of Neptune and Uranus are icy materials, and Pluto is mostly made of water ice.

That’s right, earth does not have the only liquid water oceans in the solar system, and Pluto is a ball of frozen water. It gets better…   We found water vapor in sunspots, in massive quantities in pre-planetary and pre-stellar nebulae, and surrounding black holes. We have even discovered some exoplanets that appear to have watery atmospheres, based on spectral emission. Surrounding our solar system, and other stars as well, we find a pseudo-shell of rocks and ice that mark the boundary of the solar wind. This icy shell explains a good deal of the water found in our solar system, and likely found in others. The solar wind has been discovered to contain nearly every known element, a startling revelation about elemental production, but it is mostly comprised of hydrogen and hydrogen ions.

Recent breakthroughs have shown that the solar wind can liberate oxygen trapped in space rocks, moons, planets, etc., and then combine with that oxygen to form water. This discovery came within weeks of another one- that interplanetary dust carries space water, and potentially, organic materials, down to all materials in the solar system. Why should it stop at our neighborhood? It shouldn’t, and neither should it stop at the solar wind characteristics of our star or its ability to radiologically create water from the rocks.

NASA has discovered that Earth’s upper ionosphere erupts enormous amounts of oxygen during impact from coronal mass ejections (CME) from the sun. This oxygen does not need to be  liberated from rocks; it’s “ready to go” and has an abundance of solar wind particles in the impacting CME with which to create water.

What do these breakthroughs tell us? Our star is a raw-materials distribution center for everything touched by its solar wind. Rocky bodies are going to have water, and are more likely to have oxygen-rich atmospheres for the same reason of oxygen liberation. Those oxygen-rich atmospheres are conceivably the best method for water production in the known universe; our planet’s reaction to the solar hydrogen is to toss out a shield of oxygen.

You can read the rest of this article at : http://wavechronicle.com/wave/?p=1151

The papers, scientists, discoveries, and revelations are explored in the STARWATER series, available for members at Suspicious0bservers.org, but the research and resources to private material are always made free for everyone here.

According to some scholars, the Star of Bethlehem might have been a close encounter between Venus and Jupiter. The two brightest planets in the night sky, merged, would have made a spectacle of Biblical proportions. This Christmas, NASA's STEREO-B probe is observing a conjunction of three planets--Venus, Earth and Jupiter. 

UPDATED:  Instead of Jupiter and Venus merging, however, the combined planets are Jupiter and Earth:

Unlike conjunctions of the distant past, this one includes our home planet. STEREO-B is located on the far side of the sun where it can look back and see Earth along with other worlds in the Solar System. Only NASA's twin STEREO probes, equipped with their high dynamic-range Heliospheric Imagers, can witness this kind of conjunction.

From STEREO-B's point of view, Earth and Jupiter are less than 0.5 degrees apart, while all three planets fit in a circle 3 degrees in diameter. This meeting is not nearly as tight as the putative Star of Bethlehem conjunction ~2000 years ago. At that time Venus and Jupiter could have been as little as 6 arcseconds (0.00166 degrees) apart. Nevertheless, the ongoing conjunction is still a beauty. Stay tuned for updates as the three planets converge.  

UPDATE:  From STEREO-B's point of view, Earth and Jupiter are so close together that the spacecraft's Heliospheric Imager can barely tell the two apart. Venus is only 2 degrees from the Earth-Jupiter pair, so this is actually a 3-way conjunction.  www.spaceweather.com

Notes:   [Messenger Spirit]
In ancient Mesopotamia the planets were seen as gods in their own right.  The planet Jupiter was known as Neberu (Nibiru?) and associated with the god Marduk. He was the patron god of Babylon, and considered equivalent to the older Sumerian god Enlil, the king of the gods, and hence associated with rulership and wisdom.  In the Jewish cabbala, Jupiter is the fourth sphere, Mercy (Chesed).  Chesed also lies on the pillar of creation between Chokmah (pure creative power) and Netzach (individualised images), representing archetypal ideas.   _http://www.skyscript.co.uk/jupitermyth.html

Venus in myth is the goddess of love.  In the Jewish Cabbala, Venus is the seventh sphere: Victory or Netzach.  Situated at the base of the pillar of action, Netzach manifests the creative power in emotion and instinct, and all human creativity, both sexual and imaginative The latter includes the arts, and also the god-forms of polytheism, created by man in his own image, yet nevertheless reflecting something of the nature of the universe. Both desire and imagination are to some extent superficial. The term 'glamour' originally meant a magic illusion cast upon something, and the victory of Netzach involves triumphing over the glamour of its outer manifestations to reach that which they symbolise.  An ancient text calls Netzach the Hidden Intelligence, "because its brilliant outpouring is received by those spiritual virtues which are seen, in the ecstasy of faith, only by the initiated".
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/venusmyth.html

On Dec. 19th, the European Space Agency launched one of the most ambitious astronomy missions ever: GAIA, an observatory that will survey more than one billion stars in the Milky Way. By the time GAIA's five year mission is over, astronomers will be able to build the first accurate three-dimensional map of celestial objects in our home galaxy. GAIA will do its work from the L2 Lagrange point approximately 1.5 million km from Earth. On Dec. 20th, amateur astronomer Dave Eagle of Higham Ferrers UK observed the spacecraft hurtling toward that distant station: 

"It was great to see the spacecraft in the exact position predicted, near the shield of Orion," says Eagle. "After watching the launch live on the Web in the morning, I was glad to be able to track it down and wish it well in its coming mission. It was much brighter than I expected, so its newly deployed Sun shield is doing a great job."

Once it reaches its L2 parking orbit and begins observing, GAIA will log the position, brightness and color of every star that falls within its field of view. By repeating these observations throughout its mission, astronomers will be able to calculate the distance, speed and direction of motion of each star GAIA sees, chart variations in their brightness, and determine whether they have nearby companions.

This kind of detailed information about the Milky Way is unprecedented and may lead to important new discoveries about the evolution and structure of our galaxy. For updates about GAIA, stay tuned to the ESA.                       www.spaceweather.com

A state of the art satellite is being sent into space to monitor the blind zone between the Earth and the sun to warn of incoming asteroids.  Astronomers have previously not been able to spot asteroids in the 'blind zone' due to radiation from the sun blocking information.  But now The European Space Agency intends to launch the Gaia Space Telescope with its key task being to monitor the area between the Earth and the sun and warn of any impending collisions. One recent asteroid which could have been spotted as it travelled through the 'blind zone' months before it collided with the Earth, was that of the Russian asteroid of February this year which caused a spectacular fireball before smashing into Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Russia.

Gerry Gilmore, professor of experimental philosophy at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy told the Sunday Times: "Gaia will measure all the asteroids including those between us and the sun which are the really nasty ones because we can't see them."

During its five-year-mission the £800 million Gaia will also map the stars with unprecedented precision - giving astronomers the first accurate 3D map of our galaxy and measure distance between the stars.   A spokseman for the ESA said: "During its anticipated lifetime of five years, Gaia will observe each of its 1billion sources about 70 times, resulting in a record of the brightness and position of each source over time.

"Together with the unprecedented accuracy of the astrometric measurements, this will lead to the discovery of planets around other stars, asteroids in our Solar System, icy bodies in the outer Solar System, brown dwarfs, and far-distant supernovae and quasars.  The list of Gaia's potential discoveries makes the mission unique in scope and scientific return."

The satellite completed final preparations in Europe last year and will take off from a launch site in French Guiana on November 20.

http://www.sott.net/article/267825-Asteroid-fear-Gaia-satellite-sent-into-space-to-monitor-blind-zone-between-sun-and-Earth

Sid Perkins, ScienceShot : Tue, 22 Oct 2013 17:45 CDT

Stars in our part of the Milky Way seem to be doing "the wave," a new study suggests. The finding comes from an analysis of the motions of more than 70,000 red giant stars that lie within 6500 light-years of Earth - a distance that, in one direction, reaches about one-fourth of the way to the center of the galaxy.

Above the horizontal plane that slices through the center of the galaxy, stars closer to the center of the galaxy than the sun are, in general, moving away from the plane at speeds of 10 kilometers per second or less. Meanwhile, those farther from the galactic center than the sun are moving toward the plane - in some cases, as fast as 17 kilometers per second.

Altogether, the complexity of motions observed by the team is similar to that seen among molecules in a gas with a sound wave passing through it, the researchers report this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As of yet, the reasons for these anomalous motions aren't clear, the researchers note. The "wave" may indeed be a ripple caused by a long-ago collision with a small companion galaxy, or it may result from perturbations in pressure triggered as the Milky Way's spiral arms push their way through space as the galaxy rotates.    
http://www.sott.net/article/267895-The-Milky-Way-does-the-Wave