In 2017, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a huge wing-shaped shadow cast by a fledgling star’s unseen, planet-forming disk. The young star, called HBC 672, is casting the shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region—like a fly wandering into the beam of a flashlight shining on a wall.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Paul Morris (USRA): Producer / Editor/Visualization Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. James and G. Bacon (STScI)/Jason Steele [ ASCAP ]/Soundcast Music [ SESAC ] and Universal Production Music.
As of June 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO — has now been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its orbit in space around the Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system.
With a triad of instruments, SDO captures an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument alone captures images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light. This 10-year time lapse showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer — the corona. Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes. The video shows the rise and fall in activity that occurs as part of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and notable events, like transiting planets and eruptions.
While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed towards the Sun, there have been a few moments it missed. The dark frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. A longer blackout in 2016 was caused by a temporary issue with the AIA instrument that was successfully resolved after a week. The images where the Sun is off-center were observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO/Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Lead Producer/Tom Bridgman (GST): Lead Data Visualizer/Mara Johnson-Groh (Wyle Information Systems): Lead Science Writer/Lars Leonhard
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and retired Spitzer Space Telescope have found a young Neptune-size world orbiting AU Microscopii, a cool, nearby M dwarf star surrounded by a vast disk of debris. The discovery makes the system a touchstone for understanding how stars and planets form and evolve.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA): Lead Producer/Chris Smith (USRA): Lead Animator/Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park): Science Writer
K2-18b was identified as part of the Kepler space telescope program, one of over 1,200 exoplanets discovered during the “Second Light” K2 mission. The discovery of K2-18b was made in 2015, orbiting a red dwarf star (now known as K2-18) with a stellar spectral type of M2.8 about 124 light-years (38 pc) from Earth. The planet was detected through variations in the star’s light curve caused by the transit of the planet in front of the star as seen from Earth. The planet was designated “K2-18b” as it was the eighteenth planet discovered during the K2 mission. The predicted relatively low contrast between the planet and its host star would make it easier to observe K2-18b’s atmosphere in the future.
In 2017, data from the Spitzer Space Telescope confirmed that K2-18b orbits in the habitable zone around K2-18 with a 33-day period, short enough to allow for observations of multiple K2-18b orbital cycles and improving the statistical significance of the signal. This led to widespread interest in continued observations of K2-18b.
Later studies on K2-18b using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and the Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrographs (CARMENES) instruments also identified a likely second exoplanet, K2-18c, with an estimated mass of 5.62±0.84 M⊕ in a tighter, 9-day orbit, but this additional planet has not yet been confirmed, and may instead be due to stellar activity.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass one-thousandth that of the Sun, but two-and-a-half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined. Jupiter is one of the brightest objects visible to the naked eye in the night sky, and has been known to ancient civilizations since before recorded history. It is named after the Roman god Jupiter. When viewed from Earth, Jupiter can be bright enough for its reflected light to cast shadows, and is on average the third-brightest natural object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus.
Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen with a quarter of its mass being helium, though helium comprises only about a tenth of the number of molecules. It may also have a rocky core of heavier elements, but like the other giant planets, Jupiter lacks a well-defined solid surface. Because of its rapid rotation, the planet’s shape is that of an oblate spheroid (it has a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator). The outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries. A prominent result is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that is known to have existed since at least the 17th century when it was first seen by telescope. Surrounding Jupiter is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. Jupiter has 79 known moons, including the four large Galilean moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these, has a diameter greater than that of the planet Mercury.
2I/Borisov, originally designated C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), is the first observed interstellar comet and the second observed interstellar interloper after ʻOumuamua. 2I/Borisov has a heliocentric orbital eccentricity of 3.36 and is not bound to the Sun. The comet passed through the ecliptic of the Solar System at the end of October 2019, and made its closest approach to the Sun at just over 2 AU on 8 December 2019. In November 2019, astronomers from Yale University said that the comet (including coma and tail), was 14 times the size of Earth, and stated, “It’s humbling to realize how small Earth is next to this visitor from another solar system.” In the middle of March, 2020, the comet was observed to fragment; and later, in April, even more evidence of fragmentation was reported.
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