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 Online Content Code: ASY1609
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SEPTEMBER 2016
VOL. 44, NO. 9

ON THE COVER
Astronauts on the Moon, the
Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror,

CONTENTS
and the supermassive black hole

64 at the center of the Milky Way

are among the highlights in the
history of astronomy since 1900.

FEATURES
20 COVER STORY COLUMNS
A century of Strange Universe 8
astronomical discovery! BOB BERMAN
his special issue delivers
hundreds of amazing break-
For Your Consideration 10
JEFF HESTER
throughs in the history of
astronomy, from 1900 to the Observing Basics 16
present day. GLENN CHAPLE
· General relativity
· Discovery of Pluto 29 32 Secret Sky 18
STEPHEN JAMES O’MEARA
· Quasars and pulsars
· he Kuiper Belt and Astro Sketching 68
Oort Cloud ERIKA RIX

· Hubble’s discovery of the Binocular Universe 70

nature of galaxies PHIL HARRINGTON
· And much, much more!
QUANTUM GRAVITY
36 Snapshot 6
Sky this Month
Neptune at its peak. Astro News 12
MARTIN RATCLIFFE AND
ALISTER LING IN EVERY ISSUE
From the Editor 4
38 Letters 8, 16, 18, 70
StarDome and New Products 71
Path of the Planets
RICHARD TALCOTT;
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROEN KELLY
56 Advertiser Index 73
Breakthrough 74

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FROM THE EDITOR
BY DAV I D J. E I C H E R
A century of
astronomical
discoveries
L
ast year, the editors of
Astronomy put togeth-
er a special package
called “The 500 coolest
things about astron-
omy.” We thought about
another special edition of
the magazine this year and
decided to feature the great-
est discoveries of approxi-
mately the past century. The
editors thought this would
be particularly fun because,
unlike the other sciences,
astronomy offers the same
laboratory to amateurs and
professionals alike. So many
findings have come from
observing the sky, others
from physically exploring
the nearby universe.
Perhaps the idea came
from thinking about the
century that has passed
since Einstein’s general the-
ory of relativity was pub-
lished in 1915. And then we
thought, well, we should
really round things out and
extend the coverage back to
the turn of the 20th century.
And so the editors hope
you enjoy this compilation,
which includes an impres-
sive number of facts and
figures! Of course, Einstein
Follow the Dave’s Universe blog:
www.Astronomy.com/davesuniverse
Follow Dave Eicher on Twitter: @deicherstar
4 A ST R O N O M Y • SEPTEMBER 2016
makes appearances with the
general and special theories
and all manner of associated
finds. Other big break-
throughs are celebrated, too:
Edwin Hubble’s discovery of
the nature of galaxies, Clyde
Tombaugh’s discovery of
Pluto, the discoveries of dark
matter and dark energy, and
a whole lot more.
Space exploration also
runs through the timeline,
particularly during the
Apollo era. We relive the
triumph of Apollo 11, the
near catastrophe of Apollo
13, and the final missions
that explored the lunar sur-
face in great detail and hap-
pened, sadly, 44 years ago.
And of course, robotic mis-
sions to the planets loom
large: The Voyagers’ “Grand
Tour” gets big play, as do the
many martian rovers and
voyages of discovery to
Venus, Mercury, and the
outer planets, as with last
year’s spectacular New
Horizons flyby.
You may also uncover
many tidbits that are not so
familiar. How about
Johannes Hartmann discov-
ering the interstellar
medium in 1904? The
bright, yellowish visibility of
Comet Skjellerup-Maristany
in 1927? Lyman Spitzer’s
1946 proposal for what
would ultimately become an
orbiting space observatory?
This issue is one of those
packages that we hope will
give you hours of browsing
and reading pleasure, think-
ing about all the various
astronomical findings and
how they relate to each
other. I hope you hang on to
all of your issues, but this
one may be of special inter-
est in that regard. It makes a
neat little reference book
with lots of interesting
thoughts.
Enjoy it, won’t you? And
as you marvel at the incred-
ible progress we’ve made in
understanding the cosmos
over the past century, think
about all the surprises that
are left to come ...
Yours truly,
David J. Eicher
Editor
Editor David J. Eicher
Art Director LuAnn Williams Belter
EDITORIAL
Managing Editor Kathi Kube
Senior Editors Michael E. Bakich, Richard Talcott
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Adam Frank, John S. Gallagher lll, Daniel W. E. Green, William K.
Hartmann, Paul Hodge, Anne L. Kinney, Edward Kolb,
Stephen P. Maran, Brian May, S. Alan Stern, James Trefil
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MOREHEAD STATE UNIVERSITY
Space Science Programs
• Master of Science in Space Systems Engineering
• Bachelor of Science in Space Science
• Bachelor of Science in Physics
• Area of Concentration in Astrophysics
• Minor in Astronomy

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a 21 meter radio telescope, anechoic chamber and far field antenna test range. Recognized by U.S. News
and World Report as one of the top public universities in the South, MSU pairs academic excellence with
attractive tuition rates for both in-state and out-of-state students.

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MSU is an affirmative action, equal opportunity, educational institution.
QG HOT BYTES >>
TRENDING
TO THE TOP
PLUTO’S
HEARTBEATS
QUANTUM
GRAVITY
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSE THIS MONTH . . .

Sputnik Planum, the

heart-shaped area of
Pluto, is believed to
be replenished every
500,000 years.
SPACEX TO MARS
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
says he wants to land
an uncrewed vessel
on Mars by 2018 in
preparation for a future
WEIRD MOUNDS
Io is volcanically active
due to the squeeze
Jupiter puts on it, and
this same effect also
creates a chain of block-
human landing. shaped mountains.

SNAPSHOT

The big
discovery
In a century filled with unbelievable
finds, Albert Einstein still takes the cake.

In the past hundred years, we have wit-

nessed an explosion in our understanding of
the universe. We now know how the cosmos
originated, have a pretty good idea of how it
will end, and can comprehend the age, size,
expansion, and other characteristics of it all.
And hundreds of other discoveries have
permeated the past century, many of which
are mentioned in this special issue.
With the avalanche of recent discoveries,
it’s worth pausing to remember perhaps the
FERDINAND SCHMUTZER/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; NASA/SWRI/JHU-APL (PLUTO); SPACEX (MARS); NASA/ESA (IO)

most significant of all. It still comes from

that mastermind physicist and onetime
frustrated patent clerk, Albert Einstein.
Let’s set aside the spectacular contribu-
tions of special relativity. In 1915, Einstein
published his theory of general relativity,
which changed the paradigm of a Newtonian
universe and thrust us into understanding
the cosmos far more accurately.
Einstein pulled together aspects of spe-
cial relativity and also Newtonian gravita-
tion to create a new understanding of space
and time and how they behave. Gravitation,
which plays a key role in everything that
happens in the universe, suddenly made
sense in a modern and sophisticated way.
Einstein freed the world to see the universe
and physics the way they really are. After
all these years, we still owe a huge and
fundamental debt to this groundbreaking
Albert Einstein in Vienna in 1921, six years after publishing his theory of general relativity. and liberating discovery. — David J. Eicher

6 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
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W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 7
 STRANGEUNIVERSE
BY BOB BERMAN
Exam time
Have you been studying?
F
or millions of stu-
dents and teachers,
September means back
to school. And that
means tests. For many,
this topic may be a bit traumatic.
Yet we backyard astronomers
seem to enjoy testing ourselves
and our friends. We change the
eyepiece, focus on the Moon’s
bright face, and ask, “Can you
see the five little craters inside
of Clavius?” Maybe we just
love challenges. Various celes-
tial disciplines such as optics,
planetary observing, and even
meteorology have unique tests,
like being able to identify rare
phenomena like the amaz-
ing circumzenithal arc. (You
may have spotted one of these
“upside-down rainbows” in the
past without knowing its true
identity!) Let me salute this aca-
demic month by offering a few
of my favorite sky challenges.
There’s a unique one on
September 2. That evening,
Jupiter hovers next to the cres-
cent Moon. It should be gor-
geous. The problem is, they’re
really low and twilight is still
bright. If you look west 25
minutes after sunset, the Moon
will be only 3° high, slender as
a hair, and bright with earth-
shine. Can you see it? Can you
spot Jupiter next to it? If so, give
yourself an A for astronomical.
If not, use binoculars, which
should make it easy if you have
a truly unblocked horizon.
Our second test involves
vision and sky darkness. It’s not
your fault if your eyes are awful
or you live in Phoenix. But if
you’re away from city lights
during the moonless parts of
September (the first and last
weeks), see how many Pleiades
you can count. Average eyesight
sees six of the “sisters.” If you
BROWSE THE “STRANGE UNIVERSE” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/Berman.
8 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
can see the seventh faint mem-
ber, then your keen eyes should
observe an eighth, too. Good
eyes under dark skies can see
all nine that have names. Award
yourself 3,100 arbitrary asteroid
fragments if you succeed.
In this same faintness cat-
egory lays an old classic test:
glimpsing Uranus with the
naked eye. It’s in Pisces, with its
exact nightly position findable
online, or by using a program
like Stellarium. It’s magnitude
5.7 this month, similar to glob-
ular cluster M13. Can you see
it naked eye? If so, pick up 63
imaginary ether points. (Forget
this if you live near Seattle’s
bright lights.)
Our next test checks whether
you can ascertain a small
brightness difference. The star
at the point of the V in Taurus is
Gamma. The entire V points to
a star of similar brightness, and
this is Lambda. Now, every four
days or a shade less than that,
“MAYBE WE JUST LOVE CHALLENGES.”
Lambda loses half its light as it’s
eclipsed by an unseen compan-
ion star. These very cool eclipses
are obvious because you merely
need to ask yourself: Which is
brighter tonight, Gamma or
Lambda? If it’s Gamma, then
Lambda is in eclipse. Simple!
But do those stars show any
brightness difference when
Lambda shines at full light?
Because then, Lambda beats
Gamma by only one-third of a
magnitude. Discerning that dif-
ference is barely doable. You win
98 dark energy units if you can.
Our fifth test involves
averted vision. The famous
Beehive star cluster in Cancer is
FROM OUR INBOX
Mythology
I just got around to reading the March issue of Astronomy — a
great magazine thanks to contributors like Stephen O’Meara.
His column on Cetus, p. 18, brought back the long-dormant
mythologist in me. For many years, I taught mythology con-
ceptually and thematically as a specialty — not a usual
approach but still necessary because understanding the subject
doesn’t come from geographical approaches, as in Greek,
Norse, others. One of the topics in the syllabus for my intro-
ductory course was “the interpretation of myth through the
ages,” a kind of historical survey of how myths have been
approached by those seeking the “why” of a myth, meaning,
and intent of the target.
Keep writing good stuff, and encourage your colleagues at
Astronomy to keep on doing so, too. — Ron W. Smith, Providence, Utah
Old memories
I haven’t subscribed to Astronomy in years. Now, I’m getting
back into the hobby by helping my nephew refurbish my old
scope. As part of doing so, I decided to give him your maga-
zine. As I read the first issue he received, I was amazed at all I
had given up. Interesting article after article; I believe I read the
whole issue twice. — Ben Stansberry, Yadkinville, North Carolina
nicely up an hour before dawn. Saturn’s body does block the
Observers through the centuries Cassini division between the
called it a naked-eye “blob” or A and B rings at the far side.
nebula. But put your attention Also, Saturn is at quadrature
on it while looking slightly off this month, forming its largest
to the side. Does it suddenly and angle with Earth and the Sun.
magically change into a cluster This means the ball of Saturn
of innumerable stars? It sure throws its biggest possible
does for me. I think it’s the most shadow upon the rings. Can
dramatic and wonderful demo you see that bit of inky shadow?
Bingo: another one billion cos-
mic fulfillment coins.
The final test involves satel-
lites, which cross the sky every
few minutes. Can you tell specif-
of the power of averted vision. ics about each, like its altitude
Will the blob-to-cluster conver- (the slower it is, the higher up),
sion happen for you? If so, you’ve whether it’s still functioning (the
earned the right to take home answer is no if it blinks on and
the Great Attractor Trophy. off, indicating rapid tumbling)
The next test requires a tele- and its purpose? (A north-south
scope. It involves the outermost path means it’s likely a spy
ring (the A-ring) of Saturn, satellite.) If yes, you win the
which this month forms a strik- Eternally Clear Skies Prize.
ing triangle with orange Mars Hope these challenges are
and orange Antares, the bright fun. I’d love to hear some of
star of Scorpius. You can’t miss yours. And just in case you find
it. For the first time since 2004, all tests obnoxious, we won’t do
Saturn is so tilted that the edge this again for quite a while. Fair
of the A-ring goes completely enough?
around the body of Saturn. It’s
not blocked by Saturn’s disk at Contact me about
any point. Can you see this? my strange universe by visiting
http://skymanbob.com.
It’s a bit challenging because
 FORYOURCONSIDERATION
BY JEFF HESTER
Where are they?
Why E.T. might stay home.
A
long with a lot of you
out there, I grew up
on stories of sprawl-
ing interstellar
societies full of
creatures very like us. Spacecraft
powered by unexplained tech-
nologies sidestep the laws of
physics as we know them, allow-
ing various species of bipedal
humanoids to get together and
do what we bipedal humanoids
are wont to do. I still love a good
space opera. But, alas, such
things are not to be.
During an informal lunch-
time conversation at Los
Alamos in 1950, a group of
physicists were joking about
a cartoon in The New Yorker
depicting aliens and a flying
saucer. The cartoon inspired
Enrico Fermi to ask a simple
question: “Where are they?”
If the universe contains
numerous intelligent civilizations
whose inhabitants routinely
travel among the stars, then,
Fermi reasoned, those civiliza-
tions should quickly spread
throughout the galaxy. Yet, fan-
tastical claims about UFOs aside,
there is no evidence that we have
been visited. Fermi never thought
of this as a paradox. (That term
didn’t appear for another 25
years.) He just took it as evidence
that interstellar travel must be
really hard, and that coming to
Earth isn’t worth the effort.
Concerns about the difficulty
of interstellar travel are well
founded. In the real world, you
don’t get to sidestep physics, and
physics says that sending humans
across interstellar distances
would require vast resources and
journeys lasting many lifetimes.
From suspended animation
to zygote-laden incubator ships
to multigenerational vessels,
BROWSE THE “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/Hester.
10 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
people have played with lots of
ideas for how we might mount
such a campaign. But any way
you slice it, space is a hostile
environment for biological
organisms. Protecting passen-
gers and keeping them alive and
healthy for centuries or more is
a formidable task.
Then there are the extraor-
dinary psychological stresses
involved. Drawing on experi-
ence with Antarctic exploration,
long-duration space flight, and
numerous experiments aimed at
understanding the human fac-
tors encountered during a quick
trip to Mars, one thing seems
clear. Managing the isolation,
confinement, culture, and other
psychosocial aspects of inter-
stellar travel could be as daunt-
ing as the challenges facing
spacecraft engineers. It seems
likely that any intelligent social
species would face their own
versions of such hurdles.
Interstellar travel is difficult
and expensive. But even if it were
cheap and easy, would different
space-faring civilizations find it
especially useful to interact? As
is always the case when thinking
about life, evolution is the place
to start looking for answers.
Evolution has no destination.
Each time you push the “go” but-
ton, you end up someplace differ-
ent. Start things over on Earth (or
on another Earth-like planet) and
not only would there be different
species with perceptions and
intelligences that vary wildly
from our own, the very chemistry
of life would be altered as well!
That’s conjecture — but it’s
pretty safe conjecture. To see
why, let’s do a quick back-of-
the-envelope calculation.
Among other things, our DNA
contains instructions for building
Enrico Fermi was a brilliant, Nobel-Prize-winning nuclear physicist, but his name
is perhaps just as widely recognized for his speculation about the prevalence of life
in the universe. ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY
proteins out of sequences of
amino acids. For simplicity, let’s
assume that life always evolves
that same basic molecular
machinery. There are 500 or so
known amino acids, of which life
on Earth uses only 23. Sticking
with our KISS (keep it simple,
stupid) approach, let’s assume all
life uses those same 23.
The average protein in a
eukaryotic (nucleus-containing)
cell on Earth is about 450 amino
acids long. There are therefore
23450 (=10613) different proteins of
that length that the machinery
of our DNA might construct.
That’s a huge number! Not
surprisingly, terrestrial life has
stumbled upon uses for only a
small fraction of those possible
proteins — about 10 million.
So now let’s take those 10613
possible proteins and split them
into planet-proportioned groups
of 10 million each. With no over-
lap at all, there would be 10606 of
those piles! There are no more
than about 1023 habitable planets
in the entire observable universe.
You could spread those stacks of
proteins over the planets in 10583
similar universes without having
to duplicate a single protein on
any two planets!
The takeaway is this: The
likelihood that any two life-
bearing planets in the universe
share even remotely compatible
biochemistry is effectively zero.
Put all of that together, and
a civilization looking at Earth
as an interstellar destination
might reasonably assume three
things: 1) The existence of life
means that Earth is at best use-
less and at worst highly poison-
ous, 2) communication might
be as problematic as commu-
nication between humans and
octopuses, and 3) a decision to
send emissaries in our direc-
tion would be costly indeed.
So perhaps the answer to
Fermi’s question is that every-
body out there with technol-
ogy that might allow them to
travel the stars in search of life
understands that there is no
reason to do so.
Or perhaps not.
Personally, I think there
probably is a thriving civili-
zation out among the stars.
Watch this space.
Jeff Hester is a keynote speaker,
coach, and astrophysicist.
Follow his thoughts at
jeff-hester.com.







 


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W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 11
 ASTRONEWS
inflatable habitat on the International Space Station, with astronauts even stepping inside to test it out.
FROM STAR TO BROWN DWARF
T
he brown dwarf in the
binary system J1433
has had a rough go of
it. Once a star itself, its
companion started siphon-
ing gas off of it.
Typically, brown dwarfs
are stars that never gain
the mass to begin fusing
hydrogen, existing in a
regime between gas giant
planets and small stars. But
evidence shows that J1433b
was once a star that was
robbed of its status by J1433,
a hot, dense white dwarf.
A white dwarf is itself the
end stage of a Sun-like star
that has long since shed its
own outer layers. It then
becomes a dense ball of
hot gas, about the size of a
rocky planet, that can shine
for trillions more years.
MARS’ CLOSE APPROACH
Arabia Terra
Clouds
Sinus
Meridiani
Schiaparelli
Crater
RED PLANET PORTRAIT. On May 22, Mars reached opposition, the point where the Sun, Earth, and Red
Planet sit in a straight line. This opposition also brought Mars closer to Earth than any opposition in the past
10 years, allowing the Hubble Space Telescope to take an image so sharp that features as small as 20 miles
(30 kilometers) can be resolved. This image shows the planet in natural color and reveals clouds and detailed
surface features. — K. H.
12 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
STEP INSIDE. After a failed first attempt, NASA managed to slowly expand Bigelow Aerospace’s BEAM
BRIEFCASE
LESSONS IN PLANET MIGRATION
The Kepler-223 star system has four mini-Neptune-sized
planets locked into resonant orbits, according to research
published May 26 in Nature. This means that in the time it
takes the outermost planet to orbit three times, the next
one in orbits exactly four times, the next six times, and
the innermost planet eight times. The resonance strongly
RENE BRETON (UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER)
implies that the planets migrated into their current posi-
tions from more randomly distributed birth orbits. The
Kepler-223 family could help astronomers learn how star
systems — including our own — evolve over time.
•
STUBBORN ATMOSPHERES BAD FOR LIFE
New computer simulations, detailed in a study pub-
lished July 11 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society, might spell bad news for planets
previously thought habitable. The new research says
ZOMBIE STAR EATS FRIEND. In the J1433 system, a hot white that Earth-sized planets around M dwarf stars — smaller
dwarf cannibalizes its stellar companion into a substellar brown dwarf. and cooler than our Sun — are likely to retain thick
atmospheres instead of losing them to harsh radiation.
Some atmospheric loss would have been beneficial,
J1433 tugged the smaller the Very Large Telescope
since models and observations suggest these planets
object, J1433b, into a in Chile. Though this is form with stifling shrouds of hydrogen and helium, a far
78-hour orbit. In the pro- the first system discov- cry from Earth’s thinner, more hospitable atmosphere.
cess, it has absorbed about ered in this configuration, •
NEW HABITABLE PLANET
90 percent of the mass of astronomers expect there
Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles,
the companion star. This are others like it. The and the University of Washington found multiple ways
act of stellar cannibal- research was published for exoplanet Kepler-62f to be hospitable to life. The
ism was detected by the May 19 in Nature. planet is the outermost of five in its system, and it is
roughly 40 percent larger than Earth. In the May issue of
X-Shooter instrument at — John Wenz Astrobiology, the researchers describe testing models for
the planet’s composition and orbital path. They found
that multiple options allowed for habitability, though
Mars’ closest approach occurred
May 30, when it passed
FAST
most of them called for high levels of carbon dioxide in
the planet’s atmosphere. While they don’t yet know
46.8 million miles (75.3 million
FACT which of the scenarios accurately describes Kepler-62f,
the many different possibilities bode well for the plan-
North Pole kilometers) from Earth. et’s prospects to support life. — Korey Haynes
Clouds
Cassini Crater
No new moons for Haumea
NASA/ESA/THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STScI/AURA)/J. BELL (ASU)/M. WOLFF (SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE)
Clouds above
Haumea Pluto
Syrtis Major system system
Eris Makemake
system system
Huygens DWARF MOONS. All objects are shown to scale here
Crater to compare four dwarf planets and their moons. Pluto’s
system is the most complex, with the others hosting
only one or two simple moons. D. RAGOZZINE (FIT)/NASA/JHU/SWRI
Pluto appears to be alone among the known
dwarf planets in hosting a complex moon
Hellas Basin system. Haumea is the only dwarf planet aside
from Pluto to host more than one satellite,
Sinus
moons Hi’iaka and Namaka, but it appears to
Sabaeus have maxed out at two. In a study published
South Polar cap
May 27 in The Astronomical Journal, researchers
encouraged by Pluto’s rich family went hunting
for additional moons around Haumea, but came
up dry. But, not to be left too lonely, Haumea
does travel around the Sun with a cloud of icy
debris from some past collision. — K. H.
ASTRONEWS FUTURE LIFE. Methanol, a methane compound, was found in a distant protoplanetary disk by the ALMA
radio observatory. The organic compound could make the world more habitable when it fully forms.

QUICK TAKES
Galaxy clusters tell dark energy history ASTEROID WATER
Researchers using NASA’s had been off, then the
Asteroids, not comets,
Chandra X-ray Observatory, galaxies would be traveling
brought water to the Moon’s
optical observatories, and away faster or slower than surface billions of years ago,

X-RAY: NASA/CXC/UNIV. OF ALABAMA/A. MORANDI ET AL; OPTICAL: SDSS, NASA/STScI

the European Space Agency’s expected, making them and some remains today
Planck satellite studied more appear larger and fainter underneath the surface and in
than 300 galaxy clusters (older and farther away) the polar regions.
and concluded that the
amount of dark energy in
or smaller and brighter
(younger and closer) than •
GALACTIC WEIGHT
the universe appears to be expected, respectively. Calculations from McMaster
constant. They published But the clusters from University give an exact
their findings April 11 in the the universe’s younger weight to the Milky Way
Monthly Notices of the Royal days appear similar in X-ray Galaxy, including both its dark
Astronomical Society. observations to more nearby and normal matter: It weighs
Galaxy clusters should clusters, scaled down just 700 billion times the mass of
grow in size as the universe as astronomers expected. the Sun.
ages. Furthermore, the
universe’s expansion rate is
This implies not only that
the current cosmological
•
PELTED
determined by the so-called parameters are accurate, Researchers found that, on
cosmological parameters: but also that the universe’s average, Jupiter is pelted
the ratio and properties of dark energy supply has annually with six to seven
dark matter, “normal” mat- remained unchanged out to X-RAY CLUES. Four clusters from a survey of more than 300 objects large enough to have
ter, and dark energy in the at least the 8.7 billion light- are shown here. The individual galaxies in the clusters can be the physical effects seen from
universe. If the research- year mark that defines the seen, thanks to optical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Earth. Some of these fire-
ers’ understanding of the outmost limit of the cluster Hubble Space Telescope, while the Chandra X-ray Observatory balls can even be seen with
cosmological parameters survey. — K. H. reveals the hot gas (purple) that suffuses the clusters. backyard telescopes.
•
ALIEN OORT CLOUD
A young star called HD 181327
160 light-years away held an
icy surprise for astronomers
using the ALMA radio obser-
GOODS-S 29323 GOODS-S 33160 vatory: They found a belt of
comets orbiting the star.
•
HIGH WINDS
A black hole was spotted
devouring a passing gas cloud
so fast that it created 1,864
mile-per-second winds in the
accretion disk, the area of
orbiting material around the
NO STARS NEEDED. By combining X-ray event horizon.
(blue) with optical (orange) data, scientists
found strong evidence for black hole seeds, •
FAR-OFF GEYSERS
which form supermassive black holes from Researchers discovered
the direct collapse of gas (illustration), rather that Enceladus’ geysers can
than from the buildup of smaller black explode more violently than
holes born out of supernova explosions. normal when the moon is at
X-RAY: NASA/CXC/SCUOLA NORMALE SUPERIORE/PACUCCI, F. ET AL.,
its farthest from Saturn, in a
OPTICAL: NASA/STScI; ILLUSTRATION: NASA/CXC/M.WEISS
process not yet understood.
•
DOUBLING UP
Possible self-made black holes sighted By refining analysis
techniques, members of
the Kepler team more than
Sightings of supermassive black holes astronomers looking back to the cos- break into the supermassive category
doubled the size of their exo-
in the early universe have perplexed mic toddler years see supermassive by the time observations show their planet catalog without new
astronomers, as they seem to have black holes far earlier than they should existence. observations, adding 1,284
grown at inexplicable speeds from have been able to form. While there In research published June 21 new confirmed planets for a
their birth as the compressed rem- are many competing theories, none in the Monthly Notices of the Royal total of 2,326 planets from the
nants of massive stars. But new obser- convincingly explains how some black Astronomical Society, astrono- original Kepler mission.
vations lend credence to a different
kind of black hole theory — that
holes are able to mature to masses of
millions or billions of Suns, less than a
mers used data from NASA’s Great
Observatories — Hubble, Spitzer, •
NAMELESS GIANT
some of them can form without any billion years after the Big Bang. and Chandra, which investigate the The dwarf planet 2007 OR10
star at all. One possible workaround dis- optical, infrared, and X-ray skies, gets a revised diameter of 955
Historically, astronomers thought misses the idea that black holes must respectively — to find two real-world miles (1,535 kilometers), mak-
supermassive black holes grew from start out at stellar sizes. This theory examples of what computer models ing it the third-largest dwarf
many mergers of stellar-mass black suggests that massive gas clouds suggest these black hole seeds would planet after Pluto and Eris and
holes — the kind formed when a mas- could collapse directly into black look like. While far from certain, the pushing Makemake to fourth
sive star explodes at the end of its life. holes. By starting their lives jumbo- candidates are the best evidence yet largest. 2007 OR10 is the larg-
But even given the titanic size of the sized, they could then grow at speeds that a new way of making black holes est solar system object with-
universe’s first generation of stars, astronomers understand and still is possible. — K. H. out a common name. — J. W.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 13
 ASTRONEWS
Charon
bends and
breaks
New research published
September 1 in Icarus sug-
gests that strong tidal forces
between icy moons and
other bodies could cause
the giant cracks seen on
worlds such as Pluto’s largest
moon, Charon. Previously,
astronomers thought surface
processes similar to plate
tectonics might cause the
cracks, but new computer
models look to the moons’
icy composition and brittle
elastic behavior for an alter-
native answer.
“If you take Silly Putty
and throw it on the floor, it
bounces — that’s the elastic
part,” said Alice Quillen, a
scientist at the University of
Rochester and lead author on
THE MANY SIGNALS
OF HYDROGEN
SMALL YET MIGHTY. Hydrogen is the universe’s most abundant element by far, and it can give off
many different kinds of signals across the electromagnetic spectrum. Astronomers detect it with different
kinds of light depending on its energy state, which informs the observers about its environment. Here are
three of the most common hydrogen signals astronomers use to investigate the universe.
VISIBLE
1nm 10nm 100nm
ULTRA-
X-RAYS VIOLET
14 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
NEWER HORIZONS. En route to 2014 MU69, NASA’s Pluto probe New Horizons has busily returned data on other
Kuiper Belt objects, including the 90-mile-wide comet 1994 JR1, learning its rotation period in the process.
MYSTERIOUS MISSING LIGHT. The project logo
for Tabetha Boyajian’s Kickstarter proposal to find the
cause of lost light from Tabby’s Star incorporates her
paper’s original title. FRANK OKAY
SILLY PUTTY. New research suggests that, like Silly Putty yanked on
so sharply that it rips instead of stretching, icy moons might also crack
Kickstarter shines a
under enough strain from tidal forces. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
light on Tabby’s star
the paper. “But if you pull on The model primarily
it rapidly and hard enough, it considered Charon, but such A new crowdfunded research project hopes to
breaks apart.” cracks also appear on Saturn’s resolve questions about what organizers call
Quillen also found that her moons Dione and Tethys, “the most mysterious star in the galaxy.” Yale
model can explain how icy Uranus’ moon Ariel, and even University professor Tabetha Boyajian, who
moons change their rate of Mars — though the research- discovered the odd light curve of KIC 8462852
spin as they orbit their larger ers admit Mars is harder to in 2015 and inspired the name Tabby’s Star,
parent bodies. model in this way. — K. H. turned to a Kickstarter campaign to raise money
for further investigation into the star that has
captivated amateur planet hunters and the
general public alike.
Hydrogen-alpha is only one entry in the
Balmer series, where an electron falls
FAST
Initial theories about the star’s strange pat-
tern of light included alien structures called
FACT
from any higher level to the second level. Dyson swarms, but researchers were quick to
settle on a family of comets as the more likely
culprit. However, the details of how such com-
ets orbit and what they are made of remain
unsettled.
Boyajian and her colleagues laid out their
plan to discover the precise kind of material or
objects blocking the light from their star using
the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope
(LCOGT) Network. They needed money to buy
Wavelength observing time in an era where that funding is
LIGHT .001cm .01cm .1cm 1cm 10cm in short supply. So they chose Kickstarter to
RADIO help fund their $100,000 project, and they suc-
INFRARED MICROWAVES WAVES ceeded in a down-to-the-wire finish in the
funding drive’s final hours on June 16.
More than a thousand donors backed the
project, and observations will be scheduled after
Boyajian’s current round of LCOGT observing
concludes at the end of summer. — Jordan Rice
660
million solar masses
The size of the supermassive
black hole at the center
of NGC 1332 as measured
by the ALMA radio observatory,
accurate to within 10 percent.
ASTRONEWS FOLLOW-UP. Five hundred years after Tycho Brahe saw a bright
supernova, NASA’s Chandra telescope captured its debris in motion.

Regional reconstruction of receding

3.4 billion-year-old ocean

Younger shoreline stand

1,000 km
Older shoreline stand
Older tsunami deposits 500 miles

5,600 meters

1,000 kilometers 1,000 km

Younger tsunami deposits 500 miles
500 miles –5,000 meters
ANCIENT DISASTERS. This chart displays the devastating effects of ancient tsunamis on Mars, overlaying
current maps. Two separate tsunami events are believed to have occurred, including one composed primarily
of ice. PLANETARY SCIENCE INSTITUTE

On Mars, the weather can get weird

In the past few months, new weather reports
from Mars have painted a picture of a volatile
world whose activity stretches back billions
of years.
For instance, like Earth, Mars experiences
periodic ice ages — new evidence published
in Science on May 27 shows that Mars seems
to be just exiting one. A few hundred thou-
sand years ago, the kinds of ice now seen at
the poles may have been global, with the
planet looking more white, rather than the
red hue we’ve grown so used to.
Of course, this is on a world already well
known for weird weather cycles and events.
There may be carbon dioxide geysers on the
planet, and dust devils sweep through the
hills and mountains.
The martian landscape might even be
shaped by water boiling and creating mini-
avalanches from the sand grains left behind.
A study published in Nature Geoscience on
May 5 sought to find a source for visible
streaks on the Red Planet by replicating its
environment in an Earth-bound lab. They dis-
covered that the boiling process, which hap-
pens on Mars when ices are exposed to the
Sun and the planet’s thin atmosphere, would
explain some of the strange features.
But that’s nothing compared to the Mars of
old. According to research published in
Scientific Reports on May 19, Mars suffered at
least two meteorite-caused tsunamis around
3.4 billion years ago. The first sent waves hun-
dreds of feet high across the planet and per-
manently scarred the surface of the world.
The other was much weirder. It sent floes of
ice cascading across the ancient ocean, a pro-
cess sometimes seen on Earth. Slushy water
would have moved through the partly frozen
ocean, ripping it apart, before coming to an
abrupt halt.
Each of these events, gathered from lab
work and observations by Mars Express and
the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, helps shed a
light on how water and weather have shaped
the planet over time, and may help piece
together what turned it from a lush, watery
paradise into a cold desert. — J. W.

Local galaxy is metal-poor

Dwarf galaxy AGC 198691
just gained a title as the most
metal-poor galaxy known.
Astronomers use the term
“metal” to describe any ele-
ment heavier than hydrogen
or helium. Since the cosmos
has accumulated its metals
from generations of stars
fusing elements during their
lives and explosive deaths, a
metal-poor galaxy is a good
field test of how the early uni-
verse looked and behaved.
Astronomers used the gal-
axy’s spectrum, or chemical
fingerprint, to identify and
measure the elements pres-
ent in the faint blue system,
which lies about 30 million
light-years away and contains
only a few million stars.
“A picture is worth a thou-
sand words, but a spectrum is
worth a thousand pictures,”
said John Salzer, an astrono-
LITTLE LION. Astronomers
mer at Indiana University and
nicknamed AGC 198691 Leoncino,
co-author on the research, or “little lion,” a nod both to its
published May 10 in The position in the constellation Leo
Astrophysical Journal. “It’s Minor and to Riccardo Giovanelli,
astonishing the amount of the Italian-born astronomer who
information we can gather first identified it. NASA/A. HIRSCHAUER & J.
about places millions of light- SALZER (INDIANA UNIVERSITY)/J. CANNON (MACALESTER
years away.” — K. H. COLLEGE)/K. MCQUINN (UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS)

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 15
 BOTH IMAGES: ADAM BLOCK/MOUNT LEMMON SKYCENTER/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
OBSERVINGBASICS
BY GLENN CHAPLE

Surface How easy is it to see

a deep-sky object?

brightness
S
ubsequent to my Size is the answer. The Helix Overall, M33 (left) is much brighter than M77, but the latter galaxy is easier to spot
October 2015 column Nebula covers an area half as because its light concentrates into a smaller area.
(“Understanding wide as a Full Moon, while the
Brightness”), I much smaller Saturn Nebula is The Night Sky Observer’s Guide scopically from light-polluted
received the follow- similar in apparent size to its also supplies surface bright- urban areas, yet its surface
ing email from Ross Warren namesake planet. Its light more nesses — in this case for galax- brightness is just 22.3. One
of Statesville, North Carolina: condensed, the Saturn Nebula ies only and in magnitudes per thing to remember is that these
“As an amateur astronomer, appears brighter because its square arcminute. values represent the average
I’ve often wondered who had surface brightness is greater. You can find a handy surface surface brightnesses of objects.
the bright (pun not intended!) The surface brightness of the brightness calculator online M31 has a bright nucleus that
idea of deciding faint fuzz- Helix is 20.8 magnitudes per (again, in magnitudes per rapidly gives way to faint spiral
ies such as the Helix Nebula square arcsecond, while that of square arcminute) at arms, which extend outward
(NGC 7293) would be given a the Saturn Nebula is 14.6 mag- www.users.on.net/~dbenn/ for several degrees. It might
magnitude as if you took all nitudes per square arcsecond. ECMAScript/surface_ help more to publish a surface
their light and squeezed it into You can calculate a deep-sky brightness.html. Plug in the brightness for the entire galaxy
a fake star? Why didn’t they object’s surface brightness magnitude and size, and voila! and another for the bright
assign a more truthful ‘average using a simple formula I won’t You have the surface brightness. nuclear region.
surface brightness’ instead?” list here. Fortunately, we can In general, deep-sky objects So, what’s the best way to
Good question. Most refer to sources that provide us with surface brightnesses portray the visibility of a deep-
observing guides assign the with surface brightnesses. below 22.0 magnitudes per sky object? Magnitude may be
Helix a given magnitude of 7 Among the best is Roger N. square arcsecond (13.0 mag- misleading, but surface bright-
— how bright it would appear Clark’s Visual Astronomy of the nitudes per square arcminute) ness doesn’t always tell the
if its light were concentrated Deep Sky, a classic guide that are considered faint. whole story, either. Without
into a point. Compare the addresses the concept of sur- Let’s see how magnitude making this discussion too
Helix with another Aquarius face brightness in great detail. versus surface brightness works complicated, we can get by with
planetary, the Saturn Nebula The book also contains an by comparing a pair of faint magnitude alone as long as we
(NGC 7009). The latter is a full appendix that lists the surface autumn galaxies with one that also take apparent size into
magnitude fainter, yet is far brightnesses of more than 600 should be faint but isn’t. The account. If Galaxy A is 9th
and away an easier telescopic clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. first is the 6th-magnitude magnitude and spans 3', it’ll
target. How is this possible? Kepple and Sanner’s popular Pinwheel Galaxy (M33) in appear brighter than 9th-mag-
Triangulum. Two Full Moons nitude Galaxy B that’s three
in apparent diameter, M33 has times as large, unless the latter
FROM OUR INBOX a paltry surface brightness of
22.8. Another hard-to-see face-
has a bright condensed nucleus.
Keep in mind that the vis-
More history on spiral is M74 in Pisces, ibility of a deep-sky object also
I enjoyed the recent article by Fred Nadis on p. 44 of the listed at 9th magnitude. Its depends on mode of observa-
June 2016 issue, “Camille Flammarion’s amazing universe.” I light spreads across a circle 9' tion (unaided eye, binocular, or
believe it is important to study the historical side of astronomy. in diameter, giving a surface telescope) and sky conditions.
Learning about some of the more obscure contributors to brightness of 22.4. Compare Experience is the true teller of
astronomy is just as important as studying the better-known M33 and M74 to the magni- what you’ll be able to see when
personalities. I would love to see more articles of this nature. tude 10 galaxy M77 in nearby you aim your telescope at a
— Mike Wells, Henrico, Virginia Cetus. It may be fainter, but its deep-sky target. So get out
light packs into an area 3.5' by there and observe — and learn!
1.7'. The resulting surface Questions, comments, or
We welcome your comments at Astronomy Letters, P. O. Box 1612,
brightness is 20.2. suggestions? Email me at
Waukesha, WI 53187; or email to letters@astronomy.com. Please
Surface brightness is more gchaple@hotmail.com. In my
include your name, city, state, and country. Letters may be edited for
telling than magnitude, but it’s next column, I’ll discuss
space and clarity.
not perfect. You can view the autumn star distances. Clear
Andromeda Galaxy (M31) tele- skies!

BROWSE THE “OBSERVING BASICS” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/Chaple.

16 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
ASTRONEWS NASA RELEASE. NASA released 56 patents into the public domain, hoping to spur innovation based on these
platforms, which include rocket engine schematics, injection systems, and alternative fuels.

Astrobabble
From asterisms to Thorne-Żytkow objects,
we turn gibberish into English.

Manx ob•ject Ul•tra•cool star

Referencing the tailless cat, astron-
omers gave this name to a class of
tailless comets, one of which ended
up being an asteroid catapulted
into an Oort Cloud-like orbit.
A star at the lower limit of mass
that can still produce helium
through hydrogen fusion, separat-
ing it from similar low-mass objects
such as brown dwarfs.

Met•a•sta•ble li•quids Lu•nar swirls >>

Small, unstable pockets of melted Areas of light and dark terrain on

NASA LRO WAC SCIENCE TEAM

ice on Mars. Recent observations
showed that while the water on
Mars may boil away at tempera-
tures as low as 0 degrees Celsius,
this water still has measurable
effects on surrounding terrain.
the Moon some 10 miles or more
across. They may be caused by
weak magnetic fields aligning
debris from meteorite impacts.
— John Wenz, jargon@astronomy.com

A MOON FOR MAKEMAKE Finding Big Bird’s home

13,000 Makemake is the
109 miles 891
miles apart miles fourth-largest known
Kuiper Belt object.
Other blazars Other blazars
The dwarf planet and
its moon, tentatively
named MK2, are
about 13,000 miles
(20,921km) apart, and
the moon is less than
PKS B1424–418 PKS B1424–418
one-eighth the size of
Makemake. ASTRONOMY:
JOHN WENZ AND KELLIE JAEGER
Plane of Plane of
Milky Way Milky Way

Makemake is very
bright. The moon is
very dark. Because it
also orbits so close to
Makemake, this left
astronomers initially
thinking Makemake
was a two-tone
world. Now, they
realize they may have
been seeing MK2
transit Makemake.
So how do you get
such a dark moon for
a light parent object?
One theory is that
sunlight may create an
aerosol chemical slurry
called tholin that evap-
orates off Makemake’s
surface and coats
the surface of MK2. A
similar process may
happen between Pluto
and Charon.
The dwarf planet Ceres may FAST
have started out as a Kuiper Belt
object and migrated into the
FACT
asteroid belt.
5°
NOT SESAME STREET. Fermi images show the sky lit up with gamma-ray bursts
emanating from blazars. Dashed circles show the area of sky in which the Big Bird
neutrino could have originated. In the observation from 2011 (left), PKS B1424–418
is quiet, but it is the brightest blazar in the sky in 2013 (right). NASA/DOE/LAT-COLLABORATION
For the first time in history, a high- electron volts. They named it Big
energy cosmic neutrino has been Bird. Big Bird’s exact origin was
traced to its origin, which scientists unknown, but scientists could
can attribute to a blazar. While sci- narrow it to a patch of sky in the
entists have ascribed lower-energy Southern Hemisphere equivalent to
neutrinos to supernova events or the apparent size of 64 Full Moons.
the Sun, the sources of the highest- The scientists working to deter-
energy events have until recently mine Big Bird’s origin turned to
remained mysterious. Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with
Approximately 10 billion years Austral Millarcsecond Interferometry
ago, an explosion of light poured (TANAMI), a long-term observing
out of a blazar, or galaxy with an program started in 2007 that moni-
active central black hole, named tors active galaxies in the southern
PKS B1424–418. The light from this sky, including those observed by
blast reached Earth in summer Fermi. Radio observations showed
2012, when scientists using NASA’s that PKS B1424–418’s core had bright-
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope ened by a factor of four between
saw the galaxy shining between 15 2011 and 2013 — and PKS B1424–418
and 30 times brighter than normal. happens to be in the same part of
Around the same time, the the sky as Big Bird’s origin.
IceCube Neutrino Observatory at In a paper published online April
the South Pole detected what was 18 in Nature Physics, researchers
at the time the highest-energy found only a 5 percent chance that
neutrino event ever observed: the PKS B1424–418 blast and the Big
Its energy topped 2 quadrillion Bird neutrino are unrelated. — J. R.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 17
 SECRETSKY
BY STEPHEN JAMES O’MEARA

Naked-eye
sunspot Take a (filtered) gander
at our daytime star
without optics.

DAVID TYLER
O
n a whim, I took one near the center of the disk.
out my eclipse- (It’s always more pleasing to
viewing glasses unexpectedly detect a naked- David Tyler of Flackwell Heath, England, captured this image of active region 2529 on
this past April eye sunspot than to look when April 17, 2016. Both the dark inner umbra and lighter outer penumbra are easy to see.
15 and looked at a known one occurs.)
the Sun. I was contemplating Turns out, this whopper of a a less dark penumbra (outer of about 90" and an umbra of
starting a project on naked-eye spot had been around since region) twice as large. about 45" when centered on
sunspot viewing and was curi- April 7. Designated AR (active The largest sunspot of 2016 the Sun’s disk. Sunspots appear
ous if any were visible. I hadn’t region) 2529, it had a dark to date, AR 2529 was neverthe- foreshortened (thinner and
checked reports on solar activity umbra (inner core) that mea- less a modest one historically. more elongated north to south)
prior to this observation, so I sured some 12,000 miles Take, for example, the great when near the Sun’s limb.
was pleasantly surprised to see (19,300 kilometers) across, and October 2014 naked-eye sun- So, by April 17, when I last
spot, whose penumbra spanned sighted the spot without optical
80,000 miles (129,000km), wide aid, it appeared about half its
FROM OUR INBOX enough to fit 10 Earths across
its length; that Jupiter-sized
size and was more difficult to
detect. The dark umbra mea-
Planet Nine behemoth was the biggest sun- sured only about 22" on that
I have enjoyed your magazine for many years and have always spot since November 1990. day. I could not separate the
felt that the science content and presentation were realistic and spot from the limb with the
as accurate as possible. Sadly, I have to take exception to some A naked-eye study unaided eye on April 18, when
wording in Richard Talcott’s short article in the May 2016 issue, In the 1994 Journal of the British the spot appeared half again
p. 10, titled “‘Planet Nine’ from outer space.” Astronomical Association (vol. smaller. These observations
In the second paragraph, it is stated that “evidence” has been 104, p. 86), Peter Wade of align with Wade’s experiences.
found for a new planet. In the third paragraph, it is touted as a Lancashire, England, details his
discovery, and “discovery” is again used in the fifth paragraph. study of naked-eye sightings A close call
As interesting as the science is, please be more careful of sen- from 1980 to 1994 using a weld- Two days after AR 2529 rotated
sationalist wording. I have already seen silly headlines online er’s glass for eye protection (#14 out of view, another spot, AR
about Planet X wiping out life on Earth “at any time!” is the only safe grade for solar 2533, rotated in. By April 26,
— Roy Grandy, Erin, Ontario viewing). The smallest spots he it neared the center of the
detected had penumbrae with Sun’s disk with a penumbra
Accuracy is something we strive for at Astronomy magazine, angular diameters of about 25" that spanned about 26". Try
but I don’t think we need to hang our heads in this instance. (about 1.3 percent of the Sun’s as I might, I could not detect
Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown did announce their evidence diameter). it with confidence without
for a new planet on January 20 (and published their results in the He also notes that even optical aid; perhaps AR 2533’s
February issue of The Astronomical Journal), and we described smaller sunspots close together umbra, only 13" wide, con-
the discovery as of a “putative planet.” could mimic a single naked-eye tributed to its elusiveness.
But you raise a good point about theoretical discoveries and spot of that size. This type of Nevertheless, the observation
when and how they should be acknowledged. Credit for the dis- “spot,” he adds, may have a dif- agrees well with Wade’s con-
covery of Neptune generally goes to both Urbain Le Verrier, who fuse appearance. He could also clusion that the smallest spots
used math to predict where it would be, and Johann Galle, who clearly resolve large double or he could detect had penumbras
first spotted it through a telescope. And the credit for gravitational multiple spots if they were sepa- with diameters of 25".
waves rightly gets divided among Einstein (who predicted them), rated by about 165", although Now I’m interested in hear-
Russell Hulse and James Taylor (who won the 1974 Nobel Prize the closest two he split were only ing from you. What is the
for deducing their presence from the behavior of a binary pulsar), 65" apart. smallest naked-eye spot you’ve
and the large international team that captured some waves from seen? What were the angular
colliding black holes last September. If astronomers one day spot How does extents of its umbra and pen-
“Planet Nine,” Batygin and Brown will gladly share credit for the mine size up? umbra? Send what you see
discovery with the lucky observer. — Rich Talcott, Astronomy editor AR 2529 was a substantial (and don’t see) to sjomeara31@
sunspot, having a penumbra gmail.com.

BROWSE THE “SECRET SKY” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/OMeara.

18 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 ASTRONEWS
meaning it existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang.
MMS witnesses magnetic reconnection
SO FAINT. Astronomers spied a galaxy 13 billion light-years away,
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(10 kilometers) apart. Together, they record electrons at the outer reaches of Earth’s magnetic field once every
30 milliseconds, allowing researchers to see changes in the magnetosphere in real time. NASA
NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mis-
sion has directly observed a magnetic recon-
nection event — the first ever seen in space or
in a laboratory. When magnetic field lines of
any kind break and reconnect, they can send
out powerful bursts of energy. Physicists think
that reconnection events are responsible for
many of the most energetic events observed
in Earth’s and the Sun’s magnetic fields: auro-
rae, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections
(outbursts of material from the Sun’s surface).
“Imagine two trains traveling toward each
other on separate tracks, but the trains are
switched to the same track at the last minute,”
said James Drake, a physics professor at the
University of Maryland and co-author on the
discovery paper, which appeared May 12 in
AVERAGE NUMBER OF CLEAR DAYS IN SEPTEMBER
ASTRONOMY: MICHAEL E. BAKICH AND KELLIE JAEGER, AFTER NOAA
Science. “Each track represents a magnetic
field line from one of the two interacting mag-
netic fields, while the track switch represents a
reconnection event. The resulting crash sends
energy out from the reconnection point like a
slingshot.”
While researchers had long identified
reconnection events with violent space
weather, the details of how the event unfolds
have remained a mystery. The MMS team
hopes to use the new observations and future
findings to better understand not only Earth’s
magnetic field, but that of the Sun and even
more extreme magnetic objects, such as mag-
netars, the dense, neutron star remains of
massive stars that carry powerful magnetic
fields. — K. H.
FAST
FACT
The early
DESCRIPTION OF THE
FORMATION OF WATER
FROM GAS EVER PUBLISHED.
“he theory of relativity was disproven when
Edwin Hubble discovered an expanding
Universe. Years later it was learned Einstein
had ‘fudged’ his equation by introducing the
now discredited ‘cosmological constant’ to
prove a contracting universe. In light of his
confession, educators and the Astronomy
community were in danger of ‘losing control
of the game’ so the establishment embraced
‘he Nebula Hypothesis’. Ater spending large
amounts of resources and manpower they
soon found accretion was deeply lawed
even ater bending some of the rules of physics
it was found, accretion could not be proven.
Many astronomers are now walking away
from that train of thought and leaning in a
new direction of planetary and water
formation. he thermal reaction process,
‘he formation of water and our solar system
from a ission process with an improved
heliocentric model (he AP heory)’,
describes in detail how our solar system
formed from the consequences of freezing and
thawing of galactic gases and kinetic energy.
his internationally acclaimed book with its
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through the astronomy community like a
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embraced by many scientists and non-
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describes exactly how and when hydrogen

evening sky
and oxygen became water and where the heat
in September and pressure came from to forge the gases into
features the H2O. he author ofers compelling evidence
Milky Way to prove gravity is not holding down our
arching high atmosphere but rather heliospheric gases of
overhead. lighter atomic weight are. he AP heory is a
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W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 19
You love history. You certainly delight in the
recent discoveries made by the Hubble
Space Telescope, but you’re also fascinated
by how that intricate piece of machinery
came to be.
Indeed, since the magazine began in
1973, we’ve run numerous historical
accounts of hard scientific subjects, such as
the expanding universe, spectroscopy,
Halley’s Comet, galaxy classification, celes-
tial motions, and Pluto.
In our March 2015 issue, we listed the 500
coolest things about space. It was incredi-
bly well received — we sold every copy and
received lots of positive comments via
email. With that success under our belt, we
felt the next natural step was to list the
greatest astronomy-related events since
1900. We initially limited the items to the
past 100 years, but 1900 seemed like a
much more natural starting point.
As you’ll see, more happens as decades
pass and knowledge and technology
advance. In fact, the entries covering the
first decade are so few that they all fit into a
sidebar within the 1910s pages. But “few”
does not mean unimportant or uninterest-
ing — just ask Einstein!
We know you’ll enjoy reliving many of
the great discoveries, achievements, and
breakthroughs that occurred from the 20th
century’s dawn all the way to the present.
We look forward to hearing from you.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 21

1901
Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer of
quantum mechanics for whom
the Uncertainty Principle is
named, is born in Germany.
1904
German astronomer Johannes
Franz Hartmann discovers the
interstellar medium.
1905
Albert Einstein describes the
photoelectric effect, introducing
the concept of photons.
Einstein publishes “On the
Electrodynamics of Moving
Bodies,” in which he outlines
special relativity.
1906
Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer
of Pluto, is born February 4
in Streator, Illinois.
German astronomer Max Wolf
discovers 588 Achilles, the first
identified Trojan asteroid.
1908
Something, likely a small
asteroid or comet, levels some
80 million trees along the
Stony Tunguska River in
Russia on June 30.
The 60-inch (1.5m) Hale
Telescope sees first light atop
Mount Wilson, California. It
was at the time the largest oper-
ational telescope in the world.
American astronomer George
Ellery Hale discovers magnetic
fields in sunspots.
1909
Swedish astronomer Karl
Bohlin proposes the idea that
the Sun is not in the center of
the Milky Way.
22 A ST R O N O M Y
ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Michael E. Bakich
Halley’s Comet appears in Slovenia on May 25, 1910. The comet arrives once every 76 years. DIGITAL LIBRARY OF SLOVENIA
1910 HALLEY’S COMET RETURNS TO THE NIGHT SKIES
→ On April 20, Halley’s Comet reaches perihe-
lion (its closest approach to the Sun) and on
May 20, it comes nearest to Earth at approximately
visitor, also known as Comet 1910 A1 or the Great
January Comet, was brighter than Venus at its
peak and was visible even during daylight hours
14 million miles away. Because of the favorable around its perihelion passage on January 17.
geometry, the comet blazes in the night sky at Halley’s Comet is famous for a number of rea-
nearly magnitude 0. sons. It was the first comet whose return was pre-
For years afterward, people reminisce about dicted. Observations of it stretch back at least to
seeing Halley’s Comet, and they may well have. 240 b.c. And it’s the only short-period comet (one
Many of those memories, however, probably recall whose orbit takes less than 200 years) visible with-
instead the first bright comet visible that year, an out optical aid. It will return in the not-too-distant
object often called the Great Daylight Comet. That future, with its next perihelion on July 28, 2061.
1910 1911 1914
The Great January Comet of The American Association of An informal dinner in New York
1910, perhaps the 20th century’s Variable Star Observers City brings together the main
brightest comet, reaches perihe- (AAVSO), an amateur group contributors of the AAVSO.
lion on January 17. It is brighter that monitors changes in star
than Halley’s Comet, which brightness, begins operation. In May, Slipher discovers that
appears the same year. “spiral nebulae” rotate.
1912
Italian astronomer Giovanni American astronomer Vesto M. 1915
Schiaparelli, who saw what Slipher takes the first spectro- British astronomer Fred Hoyle,
looked like natural channels on gram of the Andromeda Nebula staunch opponent of the Big
Mars, dies. (M31). It reveals a Doppler shift, Bang theory and discoverer of
the first such recorded. stellar fusion, is born.
German astronomer Johann
Gottfried Galle, who first 1913 Astronomy popularizer and the
observed Neptune (based on Astronomers George Willis inventor of the Dobsonian
predictions by others), dies. Ritchey and Henri Chrétien mount, John Dobson, is born.
invent the Ritchey-Chrétien
The first edition of Norton’s Star telescope, an error-correcting Scottish astronomer Robert
Atlas, perhaps the most popular telescope that inspired NASA’s Innes discovers Proxima
star atlas of the 20th century, is Hubble Space Telescope. Centauri (Alpha [α] Centauri
published. It is now in its 20th C), the nearest star to the Sun.
edition.
You are here. This is believed to be our Sun’s place in the Milky Way. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/R. HURT (SSC)

1914–18 OUR PLACE IN THE GALAXY

→ In 1914, American astronomer Harlow Shapley begins study-
ing globular clusters to try to accurately measure their dis-
tances. Specifically, Shapley obtains data from what he assumes to
be Cepheid variable stars, but which turn out to be a different class
of variables somewhat fainter than Cepheids. This causes Shapley
to overestimate the distances to them, but the fundamental fact he
discovers is unaffected.
He determines that the Sun is not at the center of the Milky Way.
In fact, when he plots the positions of 93 globular clusters, he sees
they form a spherical distribution centered on a spot in the constella-
tion Sagittarius between 25,000 and 30,000 light-years from Earth.
That means the Sun lies 27,200 light-years (the current best value)
from the Milky Way’s core.

American astronomer Percival

Lowell, founder of Lowell
Observatory and firm believer
Carnegie Observatories astron-
omers unknowingly record evi-
dence of an exoplanet system
1915/1919
Albert Einstein, the father of general relativity, in a 1921 portrait. UNDERWOOD AND UNDERWOOD

in intelligent life on Mars, dies. around van Maanen’s Star, a

white dwarf, though no one
EINSTEIN HAMMERS OUT HIS THEORIES
American astronomer Walter
Sydney Adams determines that
Sirius B is a white dwarf star,
recognizes it until 2016.

The 100-inch (2.5m) Hooker

the first ever found.
1916
German physicist Karl
Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s
general relativity field equa-
tions and derives the size of the
event horizon of a non-rotating
black hole.
American astronomer Edward
Emerson Barnard discovers the
star with the largest known
proper motion, thereafter called
Barnard’s Star.
1917
Ritchey discovers the first nova
(and supernova) in an object
other than the Milky Way, in
what we now know as galaxy
NGC 6946. Eight supernovae
have been spotted since then,
giving the galaxy its nickname,
the Fireworks Galaxy.
→ German physicist Albert Einstein published the special
Telescope sees first light at
Mount Wilson Observatory in
California. It is the largest tele-
scope in the world for nearly 30
years.
1918
Nova Aquilae 1918 peaks at
magnitude –0.5, becoming the
brightest nova witnessed since
the invention of the telescope.
English radio astronomer and
Nobel laureate in physics,
Martin Ryle, is born.
The AAVSO is formally incor-
porated in the state of
Massachusetts.
1919
The International Astronomical
Union is founded.
Barnard creates the first catalog
of dark nebulae.
theory of relativity in 1905, but that theory didn’t include
the effects of gravity. So for the next 10 years, Einstein labored
to combine gravity with the special theory. Finally, in November
1915, Einstein presents what other physicists later call his 10
field equations within the general theory of gravitation.
These equations describe how gravity works throughout the
universe as a result of space-time curvature due to mass and
energy. When the mass creating the gravity is small and the
velocity is low (nowhere near the speed of light), Einstein’s the-
ory acts just like Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation. But when the
mass is large or fast moving, it distorts space-time itself.
It takes quite a while for most researchers to accept the gen-
eral theory of relativity. But the first confirmation doesn’t take
long. Einstein demonstrates how the general theory accounts
for a slight variance in Mercury’s orbit (of only 43'' per century)
that Newton’s law of gravity couldn’t explain. Previously, this
discrepancy gave rise to the mistaken belief in a planet inside
Mercury’s orbit named Vulcan.
General relativity also predicts exactly how much light bends
around a massive object. To test this part of the theory, English
physicist Arthur Eddington captures images of the Sun during
a total eclipse on May 29, 1919. He sees that shifts in the posi-
tions of stars because of the Sun’s gravity change by the precise
amount given by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Later
measurements confirm the results.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 23
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Michael E. Bakich
1920
The New York Times publishes
the editorial “A Severe Strain on
Credulity” on January 13, which
casts serious doubts on Robert
Goddard’s ideas for rocket
travel. The newspaper would
publish a correction on July 17,
1969, the day after Apollo 11
launched toward the Moon.
Astronomers directly measure
the diameter of the red supergi-
ant star Betelgeuse (Alpha
Orionis).
1921
A major geomagnetic storm
occurs on Earth due to a coro-
nal mass ejection from the Sun
from May 13 to 15. Telegraph
systems are severely damaged as
a result.
The first American astronaut to
orbit Earth, John Glenn, is born
July 18 in Cambridge, Ohio.
Albert Einstein wins the Nobel
Prize in physics for his discov-
ery of the photoelectric effect
(not for the theory of relativity).
Henrietta Swan Leavitt,
who discovered the period-
luminosity relationship in
Cepheid variable stars, dies.
1922
A 20-ton meteorite lands in a
field near Blackstone, Virginia,
creating a 500-square-foot hole.
The International Astronomical
Union (IAU) adopts a three-
letter abbreviation system for
constellation names, proposed
by Ejnar Hertzsprung and
Henry Norris Russell.
Dutch astronomer Jacobus
Kapteyn, who performed star
counts to map the structure of
the Milky Way, dies.
Canadian astronomer John
Stanley Plaskett discovers what
will become known as Plaskett’s
Star, a binary system more than
100 times as massive as the Sun.
24 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
1923
This image sparked a revolution in cosmology. When Edwin Hubble realized, in 1923,
that a bright source is no nova but instead a variable star, he changed the label (upper
right) on this photographic plate. CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON
1923
British astronomy popularizer
Patrick Moore is born. Moore
1927 THE BEGINNING OF THE BIG BANG
hosted the BBC show The Sky
at Night, among other astro-
nomical activities.
The first planetarium opens to
the public in the Deutsches
Museum in Munich.
First American in space, Alan
Shepherd, is born November 18
in Derry, New Hampshire.
1924
English astronomer Arthur
Eddington proposes the mass-
luminosity relationship: Stars
with more mass are more
luminous.
English radio astronomer and
Nobel laureate in physics, Antony
Hewish, is born. His research
leads to the discovery of pulsars.
→ Belgian astronomer
Georges Lemaître
notes that if the universe
is expanding, its motion
should allow observers to
trace it back in time to a
single point. His revolu-
tionary theory, which he
calls “the hypothesis of
the primeval atom” (and
within which he introduces
the concept of the “Cosmic
Egg”) meets a lot of skepti-
cism. More than 20 years
later, on a 1949 BBC radio
broadcast, English astrono-
mer Fred Hoyle, an ardent
opponent of Lemaître’s
theory, coins a term for it
that persists to this day: the
Big Bang.
MOST “NEBULAE”
ARE GALAXIES
→ Edwin Hubble, work-
ing for the Carnegie
Institution of Washington,
takes a photographic plate of
the Andromeda Nebula (M31)
using the 100-inch Hooker
Telescope at Mount Wilson
Observatory in California. The
astronomer’s careful scrutiny
of this and other photographic
plates of M31 he takes around
this date lead to an insight.
Instead of being a nova (an
old star rapidly shedding its
outer layers), one point bright-
ens and dims, revealing itself
to be a Cepheid variable — a
star whose period is related
to its brightness. Calculating
its distance, Hubble finds the
Andromeda Nebula, as it is
known at the time, cannot pos-
sibly lie within our own galaxy.
After this epiphany, Hubble
takes his pen to the plate,
crosses out the “N” (represent-
ing nova) and scribbles “VAR!”
(variable). The universe as we
know it is suddenly much larger.
Georges Lemaître, discoverer of the Big Bang,
teaches at Catholic University of Leuven.
KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
 1925
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin sub-
mits a doctoral thesis hypoth-
esizing that hydrogen and
helium are the main constitu-
ents of stars.

Carnegie astronomers photo-

graph Pluto, but do not realize it
until some years later.

A bright nova flares up in the

constellation Pictor, shining
at magnitude 1.2 in June. RR
Pictoris will later fade to
magnitude 12.5.

1926
Goddard launches the first
liquid propellant rocket
in Auburn, Massachusetts.

Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo

astronaut Virgil Ivan “Gus”
Grissom is born April 3 in
Mitchell, Indiana.

American astronomer Allan R.

Sandage, who co-discovers the
first quasar, is born.

1927
Photographic Atlas of Selected
Regions of the Milky Way, by
Edward Emerson Barnard, is
published four years after the
author’s death. It makes the case
that “voids” among the stars
actually are dark clouds of dust
and cold gas.

Comet Skjellerup–Maristany is
visible for one month, shining
yellow due to sodium content.
The 100-inch Hooker Telescope, which saw first light in 1917, was used by Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason in 1929 to measure
1928 the expansion rate of the universe. KEN SPENCER
American astronaut and com-
mander of the Apollo 13 mission,
James Arthur Lovell Jr., is born
1929 HUBBLE’S CONSTANT IS FIRST PROPOSED
March 25 in Cleveland.

British astronomer Edward

Walter Maunder, who studied
the sunspot cycle and solar
magnetic fields, dies.
The IAU formalizes the constel-
lation boundaries. This marks
regions of the sky that fall under
constellations, rather than rely-
ing on the formation itself.
→ Hubble’s law explains two astronomi-
cal observations: 1) Galaxies farther than
approximately 30 million light-years away show a
redshift indicating that the universe is expanding;
and 2) A proportional relationship exists such that
the more distant a galaxy lies, the faster it moves
away from Earth.
Although astronomers call this Hubble’s law, the
first person to propose it was Georges Lemaître in
1927. Lemaître also estimated the universe’s rate of
expansion. Edwin Hubble gets into the act in 1929
by using observational evidence to confirm the
law, and by calculating a more accurate value for
the relationship between a galaxy’s distance and its
recessional speed. Astronomers christen this num-
ber “Hubble’s constant.”
Usually, researchers use kilometers per second
per megaparsec (1 Mpc = 32.6 million light-years)
as the unit of measure for the Hubble constant, and
today most research indicates a value of 70 km/sec/
Mpc. So, as an example, if a certain galaxy lies 50
megaparsecs away, another galaxy 51 Mpc distant
would move 70 km/sec faster. A galaxy 52 Mpc
away would move 140 km/sec faster, and so on.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 25
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Raymond Shubinski

1930
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the
second person to walk on the
Moon, is born January 20 in
Montclair, New Jersey.

Adler Planetarium in Chicago

opens May 12.

Astronaut Pete Conrad, a vet-

eran of the Gemini, Apollo, and
Skylab programs and the third
person to set foot on the Moon,
is born June 2 in Philadelphia.

German optician Bernhard

Schmidt invents the Schmidt
camera, a nearly distortion-free
telescope that allows astrono-
mers to take wide-field photos
with relatively short exposures.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong,
the first man to walk on the
Moon, is born August 5 in
Wapakoneta, Ohio.
Robert Trumpler discovers that
interstellar dust permeates the
Milky Way Galaxy after finding
that stars in distant open clusters
appear dimmer than expected.
Astronaut Ed White, the first
American to walk in space,
is born November 14 in San
Antonio.
Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto through careful inspection of these small sections of two photographic plates. The arrows reveal the
world’s slight movement relative to the background stars over six days in January 1930. LOWELL OBSERVATORY
1930 CLYDE TOMBAUGH DISCOVERS PLUTO
→ Astronomically speaking, the 1930s get off
to a great start. On February 18, 24-year-old
Clyde Tombaugh steps into Vesto Slipher’s office at
Lowell Observatory to tell the director that he has
found an object fitting the bill for a planet beyond
Neptune. Slipher had hired Tombaugh, a Kansas
farm boy, to do the grunt work of a photographic
survey to look for a suspected “Planet X.”
By early April 1929, Tombaugh was photograph-
ing through the new 13-inch astrograph with its
custom-made objective. Using large plates, he
began taking images of the sky along the zodiac
— the region where all the planets reside. He
photographed each area a few days apart and then
examined the two plates using a blink comparator.
This device allowed Tombaugh to flip rapidly
between the two plates and find anything that
moved against the distant background stars. And
there were lots of moving objects. After thousands
of hours of “flipping,” Tombaugh spots a 15th-
magnitude candidate not far from the guide star
Wasat (Delta Geminorum). He is convinced it is
a new planet, and soon everyone else is, too.
Pluto presents problems from the very beginning,
however. This is not the Planet X astronomers had
expected — it is too small and its orbit far more
elliptical than any of the other planets. Yet it quickly
takes its place as the solar system’s ninth planet,
where it will remain for 76 years, until astronomers
relegate it to dwarf planet status in 2006.

The Institute for Advanced

Study in Princeton, New Jersey,
is founded. It would soon
attract such notable figures as
Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel,
Wolfgang Pauli, John von
Neumann, and Hermann Weyl.
1931
Astronaut Jack Swigert, com-
mand module pilot on the ill-
fated Apollo 13 mission in
April 1970, is born August 30
in Denver.
German physicist Ernst Ruska
and electrical engineer Max
Knoll invent the electron micro-
scope, which delivers far better
resolutions than a traditional
light microscope.
1931 BERNARD LYOT INVENTS THE CORONAGRAPH
→ For centuries, astronomers chased solar eclipses in an effort
to unlock the secrets of the Sun. These efforts often proved
expensive and dangerous — a few astronomers even paid with
their lives. As all astronomy buffs know, to see one of these rare
events, an observer has to be within a narrow band on Earth’s sur-
face at precisely the right time. If the sky is clear, the reward is a
spectacular view of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona.
In 1931, French astronomer Bernard Lyot invents a device that
allows astronomers to view the diaphanous gas surrounding the
Sun any time our star is visible. Lyot has his work cut out for him.
He designs an “occulting disk,” which fits in line with the optics of
a telescope, to block the bright solar surface. Unfortunately, a lot
of stray light still enters the telescope’s optical path. He solves this
The orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory problem by using a series of lenses with stops to further reduce the
has a coronagraph that blocks the Sun’s light. Fittingly called Lyot stops, all coronagraphs now use them.
visible surface and reveals its faint sur- Lyot’s invention has far-reaching consequences. Coronagraphs
roundings. In this image from December adorn telescopes in space that constantly monitor the Sun’s outer
15, 2011, Comet Lovejoy (C/2011 W3)
passes through the Sun’s corona. NASA/SDO/
atmosphere. And astronomers use these devices to block the light of
THE AIA, EVE, AND HMI SCIENCE TEAMS other stars to hunt for and study exoplanets and circumstellar disks.

26 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 1933 ARCTURUS LIGHTS UP
A WORLD’S FAIR

1933
Karl Jansky builds this rotating radio antenna to study terrestrial sources of interference.
With it, he discovers radio waves coming from the Milky Way’s center and launches the
field of radio astronomy. NRAO

THE BIRTH OF RADIO ASTRONOMY

→ Shortwave radio communications have become vital by the
1930s. Such transmissions can carry long distances because
these radio waves bounce off the ionosphere and thus can bend
around Earth’s curvature. Unfortunately, interference constantly
disrupts communications. Scientists at Bell Labs are asked if they
can identify the problem.
Karl Jansky is put to the task and completes it with what proves
to be cosmic results. His first job is to determine where the static
disturbances are originating. To do this, Jansky builds a directional
antenna about 100 feet (30m) long and 20 feet (6m) tall. The whole Organizers of the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago used light from
thing is mounted on a large turntable so it can be rotated. Jansky the bright star Arcturus, the luminary at bottom right, to turn on the lights. TONY HALLAS
began his observations in 1930 and spent the next year recording
and analyzing the static. He identified both nearby and distant thun-
derstorms as causes of interference. But a third mystery source
seemed to be emanating from the Sun. With time, however, the static
source appeared to move away from our star.
→ The night sky’s fourth-brightest star, Arcturus (Alpha
Boötis) in the constellation Boötes, fires up Chicago’s
Century of Progress World’s Fair May 27, 1933. The fair cel-
Jansky soon realizes that the static followed a sidereal day of ebrates the centennial of Chicago’s incorporation and is sched-
23 hours and 56 minutes, meaning it had to be located far beyond uled to open 40 years after the Columbian Exposition, also
the solar system. After correlating his observations with astronomi- held in Chicago. The theme of the fair is science and
cal charts, he pinpoints the mystery signals as originating from the technology. And what better way to open the event than with
constellation Sagittarius, and publishes his results in 1933. By 1935, light that had left Arcturus 40 years earlier during the great
he would conclude that the signals were coming from the center of Exposition? (Current measurements place Arcturus 37 light-
the Milky Way Galaxy. years from Earth.)
At the crucial moment during the opening ceremonies, light
from Arcturus is to pass through a telescope and focus on a
photocell. The photocell will then produce an electric current,
American chemist Harold Urey 1932 tripping a switch and turning on the fair’s lights. It may all
discovers deuterium, a heavy English physicist James Chad- sound a bit like Rube Goldberg, but it will work as long as it
isotope of hydrogen that con- wick discovers the neutron, a isn’t cloudy on opening night. Yerkes Observatory in Wiscon-
tains one proton and one neu- neutral particle with a mass sin is assigned the task of focusing light from Arcturus on a
tron in its nucleus. close to that of a proton that photocell. To avoid embarrassment, the director of Chicago’s
helps keep atomic nuclei stable. Adler Planetarium, Philip Fox, and others arrange to have
Albert Einstein begins a three- three observatories at the ready in case of clouds.
year stint working at the American physicist Carl The evening of May 27 is, in fact, cloudy at Yerkes. One
California Institute of Anderson discovers the posi- story claims Fox had a planetarium employee on the balcony at
Technology in Pasadena. tron, a particle with the same Adler with a small scope and photocell just in case something
mass as an electron but the went wrong. Although there are no clear records as to which
Scientists discover radio waves opposite charge; it is the first telescope actually provides the light from Arcturus, the plan
reflecting off of meteors. evidence for antimatter. works, to everyone’s relief.
 1935
Griffith Observatory opened in the hills above Los Angeles in 1935. It houses what
quickly becomes one of the most popular planetaria in America. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

PUBLIC ASTRONOMY COMES OF AGE

→ Both Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and New York’s
Robert Goddard poses with his first liquid-fueled rocket, which he launched on
March 16, 1926. By the mid-1930s, his propulsion and guidance systems are light-years
ahead of the competition. NASA
1935 ROCKET MAN TAKES OFF
Hayden Planetarium open in 1935. The first half of the
20th century sees a growing interest in developing science facili-
ties for the public. Many scientists and civic leaders believe that
the man in the street needs to understand the miracles of science
and technology and how they are changing lives for the better.
Institutions start popping up in major metropolitan areas to pro-
vide a guide to the wonders of the universe. America’s first tem-
ple to the stars, Adler Planetarium in Chicago, welcomes its
initial visitors in 1930.
On May 14, 1935, Griffith Observatory swings open its doors
to the public. The facility includes a Zeiss refracting telescope

→ Robert Goddard began working on rocket designs in 1914,

when he received two U.S. patents. Later, while teaching at
Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, he terrified the locals
with a 12-inch objective lens. Also housed under a massive cen-
tral dome is a Zeiss planetarium projector that takes visitors on
incredible cosmic journeys. America is in the depths of the Great
with his rocket experiments, including the March 16, 1926, launch Depression, and the construction happens in part through the
of the first liquid-fueled rocket. With the help of Charles Lindbergh Works Progress Administration. Artist and filmmaker Hugo
and funding from the Guggenheim family, Goddard relocated to Ballin paints several magnificent art deco murals that are
Roswell, New Mexico, in 1930. For the next few years, the rocket still on display.
pioneer developed new and better propulsion and guidance systems In October 1935, Hayden Planetarium opens to provide “a
that enabled his rockets to fly with more stability. more lively and sincere appreciation of the magnitude of the
Goddard achieves some of his greatest successes in 1935. On universe.” At a cost bordering on $1 million, Hayden accom-
March 8, he conducts a test flight in which the rocket “roared in a plishes this goal with yet another magnificent Zeiss planetarium
powerful descent” and reaches nearly the speed of sound. Later that projector. The nation now has its big three — Adler, Griffith, and
same month, using liquid fuel and gyroscopic stabilization, Goddard Hayden — where millions of Americans can come and enjoy the
launches a rocket that rises nearly a mile and then turns on to a hori- beauty of the cosmos.
zontal trajectory for another 2.5 miles. His guidance system will
become the crucial factor in developing usable rockets.
Although Goddard had been trying to interest the government
in his research since the 1920s, he had no luck. Even as the threat of
war grew in Europe, his work received little attention. Others, how- Astronomers Walter Adams A group of space flight enthu-
ever, are following his work closely. The German military is keen on and Theodore Dunham discover siasts found the British Inter-
developing rockets for their own war efforts. After the war, German copious amounts of carbon planetary Society to promote
rocket builder Wernher von Braun would state that Goddard had dioxide in the atmosphere and support space exploration.
been ahead of them all. Still, it would be years before America real- of Venus.
izes the extent to which it had neglected Goddard’s efforts. British astronomer Sir Arthur
German astronomer Rupert Eddington publishes The
Wildt discovers methane in Expanding Universe: Astronomy’s
Jupiter’s atmosphere. ‘Great Debate’, 1900–1931.
Estonian astronomer Ernst Physicists Roy Kennedy and
Öpik proposes that long-period Edward Thorndike conduct the 1933 Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky
comets originate in a distant first Kennedy-Thorndike exper- Soviet cosmonaut Yevgeny proposes dark matter as the
region of the solar system now iment, which verifies time dila- Khrunov, who will make the gravitational glue that keeps
known as the Oort Cloud, tion and supports Einstein’s first transfer from one manned galaxies in the vast Coma
named after Jan Oort, who will special theory of relativity. craft to another (Soyuz 5 to Cluster bound together.
independently suggest the idea Soyuz 4) on January 15, 1969,
in 1950. is born September 10 in Prudy, The Museum of Science and
outside of Moscow. Industry opens in Chicago.

28 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 1936 A GIANT MIRROR GOES FOR A TRAIN RIDE
→ The mirror that would become the glass giant of Palomar and open a universe
of wonder leaves the Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York, on March 26
for a 16-day train ride across America. The idea for the behemoth telescope atop
Palomar Mountain in Southern California is the brainchild of George Ellery Hale, the
former director of Wisconsin’s Yerkes Observatory and the man behind the 60- and
100-inch telescopes on Mount Wilson.
Although Hale received $6 million for the project from the Rockefeller Foundation in
1928, he went back to the American people at the height of the Great Depression to raise
more money. Children taped dimes to postcards and mailed them to Hale in support of
his endeavor. As the mirror makes its way through the American heartland, people line
the train’s route to watch history pass through their towns. Locals have to raise a number
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

of bridges to allow the upright mirror to pass. Not everyone views the transport favorably,
however, and a few take potshots at the massive crate. Thankfully, no damage is done.
The mirror blank arrives at the California Institute of Technology’s optical shop in
Pasadena without incident. It will require workers more than a decade to grind and figure
The 200-inch mirror that will become the heart of the Hale
Telescope on Palomar Mountain took a 16-day train ride from the 200-inch (5.1m) mirror to the correct parabolic shape, in part because of delays
New York to California in 1936. In this 1945 photo, workers pre- caused by World War II. Astronomer Edwin Hubble finally takes the first photo of the
pare to grind the mirror, a process halted during World War II. sky with this marvel January 26, 1949, nearly 11 years after Hale dies.

1934 British scientists Robert Watson- THE BIRTH

Astronomer Walter Baade and
Zwicky propose that the gravi-
tational collapse of a massive
star could trigger a huge explo-
Watt and Arnold Wilkins con-
duct the first radar experiments,
which ultimately would be used
to detect German aircraft dur-
OF NUCLEAR
FISSION
1938
sion and leave behind a neutron
star; Zwicky coins the term
supernova for the blast.
ing the Battle of Britain.

Austrian physicist Erwin

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin,
the first man to orbit Earth, is
born March 9 in Klushino, out-
side of Moscow.
Schrödinger publishes a thought
experiment, subsequently
dubbed “Schrödinger’s cat,”
in which he argues that a cat
trapped in a box with a radio-
active source and a flask of
→ It’s surprising how
many people think
that Albert Einstein
invented the atomic
bomb. But the story of
the discoveries that led
to the bomb begins at
Christmas in 1938. Lise
Meitner had been the

Astronomer and science pop-
ularizer Carl Sagan is born.
Austrian-British philosopher
Karl Popper publishes Logik
der Forschung (The Logic of
Scientific Discovery), which
argues that scientific research
should be based on falsifiability.
1935
American astronaut Roger
Chaffee, who would die in the
launchpad fire January 27, 1967,
during tests for Apollo 1, is
born February 15 in Grand
Rapids, Michigan.
American engineer Arthur
Hardy patents the spectro-
photometer, a device used to
measure the intensity of light
as a function of wavelength.
poison would be both dead and
alive under a common interpre-
tation of quantum mechanics.
1936
The Carnegie Institution of
Washington publishes the
Boss General Catalogue, a list
of 33,342 stars compiled by
American astronomer Benjamin
Boss that contains their posi-
tions, magnitudes, proper
motions, and spectral types.
1938
On June 24, a 450-ton meteor
explodes some 12 miles above
Chicora, Pennsylvania, creating
a huge fireball.
Albert Einstein and Leopold
Infeld publish The Evolution of
Physics, a book intended for the
general public that outlines the
development of ideas in physics.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
head of the physics
department at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for
Chemistry in Berlin.
Lise Meitner (left) and Otto Hahn work in their
Being of Jewish ancestry, laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
she eventually flees Nazi Chemistry in Berlin in 1912. They would later play
Germany for Sweden. critical roles in the development of nuclear fission.
Alone and miserable, she
welcomes a visit from her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, over
Christmas in 1938.
On a clear winter’s day, Frisch straps on skis and Meitner joins
him on a jaunt into the woods. While resting by a stump, they begin
to talk about news from a colleague and former scientific collabora-
tor, Otto Hahn, and his work in nuclear physics back in Berlin. Hahn
has been bombarding uranium atoms with the newly discovered
neutrons with some interesting results.
Meitner and Frisch soon work out why no natural elements
beyond uranium could exist. They also apply Einstein’s famous
equation, E=mc2, and come to fully realize the true nature of the
energy that would be released by fission.
Meitner is appalled at the idea of an atomic bomb, and refuses to
do any work related to the subject. Despite her fundamental contri-
butions, she would be passed over for a Nobel Prize in chemistry for
her work on fission, which goes solely to Hahn in 1944.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 29
 THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
→ With a script based loosely on the H. G. Wells novel
The War of the Worlds, a young Orson Welles plans to give
the American people a bit of a scare with the 1938 Halloween broad-
cast of The Mercury Theater on the Air. When listeners tune in to the
Columbia Broadcasting System, they are expecting a typical Sunday
night radio drama. Three minutes into the program, they hear:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music
to bring you a special bulletin.” If they had missed Welles’ introduc-
tion, what followed sounds all too real.
According to some accounts, widespread panic develops as people
sit glued to their radios, listening to the unfolding drama of an appar-
ent invasion from Mars. Eventually, New York policemen appear at
the radio studio and try to get in to stop the broadcast. One report
of mobs in the streets of at least one Midwestern town comes in.

1938
Orson Welles, second from the right in the front row, tries to explain to the media that
he didn’t mean to cause a panic with his Halloween 1938 radio broadcast of The War
of the Worlds. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
How could the public have been so easily fooled? It’s 1938, and
astronomers are still debating the possibility of life on Mars. War in
Europe seems a real possibility, and the country is still in economic
turmoil. Welles takes a bit of science and the fears of people who
have been through so much, and creates a believable falsehood.

German-American physicist
Hans Bethe demonstrates that
stars generate energy through
the nuclear fusion of hydrogen
into helium.

1939
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard
found the company that bears
their names January 1 in Palo
Alto, California.

American astronaut Dick

Scobee, who commanded the
space shuttle Challenger mission
that exploded shortly after
launch January 28, 1986, is
born May 19 in Cle Elum,
Washington.

Physicists Robert Oppenheimer

and George Volkoff calculate
the structure and properties This letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt — signed by Albert Einstein and composed by friend and fellow physicist Leo Szilard —
of neutron stars. informs the president of the possibilities of building an atomic bomb. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

American astronomer John

Duncan publishes his measure-
ments showing the rate of the
Crab Nebula’s expansion during
the previous 29 years. He esti-
mates that it formed in an
outburst around the year 1172
(118 years later than the now-
accepted date).
1939 EINSTEIN WRITES A LETTER
→ So much of physics and astronomy in the 1930s ties together that it’s often difficult to separate
the two, and perhaps we shouldn’t try. In 1938, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch found how massive
amounts of energy could be released through nuclear fission reactions. Their work led to what would
amount to the original nuclear arms race. Meitner and many other physicists refused to be drawn into
efforts to create an atom bomb. The most famous of these reluctant scientists was Albert Einstein.
Einstein was an avid pacifist. The closest he ever came to military service was when he became a
Swiss citizen. As with all able-bodied Swiss men, he was issued a rifle, which gathered dust above his
fireplace. In 1939, several prominent physicists approach him with the idea of writing a letter to
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to advance the idea of atomic research with a goal of making an
atomic bomb. Although initially reluctant to become involved, Einstein eventually signs a letter writ-
ten by fellow physicist Leo Szilard that encourages FDR to act before Germany can obtain such a
weapon. The power of the atom is about to be released upon humankind.

30 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Korey Haynes
Grote Reber’s radio telescope, which
he built in 1937, stands in his backyard
in Illinois. The dish measured 31.4 feet
(9m) across. This was the first such
instrument to use a parabolic dish and
the second radio telescope overall. NRAO
1940 GROTE
REBER PUBLISHES
“COSMIC STATIC”
→ Fascinated by the work of
radio pioneer Karl Jansky,
an amateur astronomer named
Grote Reber wants to investigate
the Milky Way at meter wave-
lengths. He is more or less alone
in his interest. Reber sinks half
his yearly salary into building a
30-foot dish in his backyard and
observing at different wave-
lengths until he begins to see
results. Between 1940 and 1944,
he publishes a series of papers
on “cosmic static” in various
journals, essentially founding
the field of radio astronomy.
Over the next decade, radio
operators mostly involved with
the war effort begin to notice
various astrophysical signals. By
the end of the war, Reber’s lonely
field becomes a veritable crowd.
1940
On March 15, a plane flying
20,050 feet above Antarctica
measures cosmic rays, trying to
learn more about these elusive
and mysterious signals.
1941
In October, Dmitry Maksutov
builds and patents the first
prototype of his namesake
telescope design, combining
lenses and mirrors in a compact
arrangement.
Most of us don’t think about the
Sun as a strong source of radio
waves. This image, made with the
Very Large Array radio telescope in
New Mexico, captured the solar out-
put at a frequency of 4.6 gigahertz.
NRAO/AUI/STEPHEN WHITE, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
1942
RADIO EMISSION
FROM THE SUN
DISCOVER: ROEN KELLY
1941
This illustration shows a supernova — the blast that occurs at the end of a massive star’s
life. But we can’t tell what type this is by looking at it. Only by using spectroscopy to search
→ Working with the
British Army,
English physicist and
for the presence or absence of hydrogen in the spectrum can we say it’s type I or type II.
radio astronomer James
THE DISCOVERY OF TYPE I
Stanley Hey is trying to
track German ships in the
English Channel. As a
AND TYPE II SUPERNOVAE member of the Army
Operational Research
→ After searching the sky with his observing partner Walter
Baade, Rudolph Minkowski concludes, from a list of just 14
supernovae, that two families exist: type I supernovae with no evi-
Group, he’s also keen to
understand the various
radar-jamming tech-
dence of hydrogen in their chemical signatures, and type II, which niques they have been
do contain hydrogen. This distinction isn’t perfect. In fact, astrono- employing against Allied
mers later learn that some species of type I supernovae share a com- forces. On February 27, he
mon progenitor with type II supernovae — they come from the notices a source of radio
death throes of massive stars. It is only the subset of explosions noise that tracks with the
known as type Ia supernovae that are truly unique. But Baade and Sun. After contacting the
Minkowski’s discovery is the first attempt to classify different kinds Royal Observatory in
of supernova events, and it starts astronomers down the path to Greenwich, he discovers
understanding these cosmic explosions. that a particularly large
sunspot group is active.
Hey writes a report about
his findings, correctly
1942 On October 3, Hannes Alfvén connecting the two phe-
Physicist Stephen Hawking describes a particular kind of nomena. Later in the same
is born. plasma wave, later called Alfvén year, American radio
waves, which help astronomers engineer George Clark
In April, Jan Oort and Nicholas understand processes occurring Southworth from Bell
Mayall conclusively identify the in objects such as the Sun’s Labs, also studying radio
Crab Nebula (M1) as the rem- corona and the interstellar interference, likewise
nant of the supernova of 1054 medium. This work earns him observes radio emission
seen by Chinese astronomers. a Nobel Prize in 1970. from the Sun. Both
reports remain classified
Walter Baade and Rudolph Enrico Fermi and his team with until the end of the war,
Minkowski, in two independent the Manhattan Project achieve although rumors some-
papers in the September issue the first self-sustaining nuclear how make their way into
of The Astrophysical Journal, reaction at the University of the fledgling radio astron-
tentatively identify the central Chicago on December 2. omy community.
source star of the Crab Nebula.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 31
 1942 FIRST SUCCESSFUL V-2 LAUNCH
→ World War II casts its shadow into all corners, and the first
modern rockets carry not satellites to space, but bombs into
Western Europe. What American rocketeer Robert Goddard could
not achieve in peacetime, the Nazis accomplish with military effi-
ciency. Nonetheless, the German V-2
that inflicts so much damage across
Europe becomes, on October 3, the
first man-made object launched to
space (assuming the military’s defini-
tion of space starting at an altitude of
50 miles [80km]). Later, it becomes the
basis for America’s rocket program.
The V-2 is the brainchild of
Wernher von Braun, though he
admits after the war that
Goddard’s work was crucial
to his success. After the war,
von Braun and most of his
engineering team move to
the United States, where
he continues his work.
After World War II ended,
Wernher von Braun immigrated
to America. Here he holds
a model of the V-2 rocket
he developed while
in Germany. NASA
1943
Carl Keenan Seyfert identifies a
new type of active galaxy that
later would bear his name. They
have bright centers, like quasars,
but have lower energies and their
surrounding galaxies are visible.
1944
In November, Gerard Kuiper
observes methane absorption
while conducting spectroscopy
of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan,
indicating that it has an exten-
sive atmosphere.
Grote Reber, unbound by war-
time secrecy, publishes the first
detections of radio signals from
the Sun in November.
1946
The U.S. Army Signal Corps
bounces radio signals off of the
Moon on January 10, the first
example of radar astronomy.
Horace Babcock discovers a
magnetic field around 78
Virginis, the first stellar mag-
netic field ever observed.
32 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
The U.S. Army announces the
world’s first fully electronic
computer — the Electronic
Numerical Integrator And
Computer, also known as
ENIAC — to the public
February 15, ushering in a new
era of scientific computing.
Astronomer Fred Hoyle con-
ceives the idea of stellar nucleo-
synthesis, that stars can create
elements in their hot and dense
interiors.
Lyman Spitzer writes
“Astronomical Advantages of an
Extra-terrestrial Observatory,”
discussing the need for and
challenges of a telescope that
would orbit outside Earth’s
atmosphere. Spitzer is widely
credited with seeding the idea
of a space telescope.
On August 12, President
Harry S. Truman establishes
the Smithsonian Air Museum,
which will one day become the
National Air and Space
Museum.
1944
Galaxies like M101 in Ursa Major contain two main populations of stars. Population I
stars are young and mainly lie along the spiral arms. Population II stars inhabit
a halo region centered on the galaxy’s nucleus. The halo also contains globular
clusters, which are primarily Pop II stars. TONY HALLAS
TWO POPULATIONS OF STARS
→ With the threat of World War II pressing down, the city
of Los Angeles goes dark to avoid detection from possible
enemy bombers. The bright side of the dark is felt at Mount
Wilson Observatory, where astronomer Walter Baade takes
full advantage and pushes the 100-inch Hooker Telescope to its
limits. He has the equipment mostly to himself, as his German
citizenship bars him from participating in the war effort like
most of his fellow astronomers. He resolves distinct stellar
populations in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy (M31). The blue
and red stars are segregated in the galaxy’s disk and bulge,
respectively. The full impact of his discovery — that the bulge’s
red stars are an older population than the blue conglomera-
tions in the disk — takes a few more years to resolve, but his
findings are immediately invaluable.
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array near Magdalena, New Mexico, is an example
of a radio telescope that uses interferometry to make the separate dishes function
as a single instrument. JOHN FOWLER/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
1946 RADIO INTERFEROMETRY
→ Martin Ryle, with a team of Australian radio astronomers,
builds the first radio interferometer. Interferometry is the pro-
cess of combining multiple wave signals to learn more than a single
signal can reveal. Ryle goes a step further and figures out how to
network multiple telescopes to work together as one large instru-
ment. This “synthetic aperture” technique allows a collection of
small dishes or antennas to function like one dish as big as the sepa-
ration between the individual pieces. Ryle’s team makes the first
observations with his new array in 1946. This work earns him a
Nobel Prize in 1974.
 Development of
Dark ages galaxies, planets, etc.

1947
In March, Bart Bok publishes
a paper about “Bok globules,”
small, dark nebulae he theorizes
are cocoons for star formation.
Chuck Yeager breaks the sound
barrier October 14 in the Bell X-1
plane, the first in a long line of
advanced experimental aircraft.
Physicists at Bell Labs invent the
transistor, which replaces vac-
uum tubes and becomes the
basis for virtually all electronic
equipment moving forward,
allowing calculators and cell
phones to fit in one’s hand, or
computers to cram into the lim-
ited area of a space satellite.
1948
The 48-inch (1.2m) Schmidt
telescope at Palomar
Observatory sees first light in
September. Its wide field of view
and sharp images make it one of
the most widely used survey
instruments in astronomy.
Ralph Alpher and collaborator
Robert Herman predict that a
microwave background glow
from the Big Bang should exist,
and advocate a search. An
unconvinced astrophysics com-
munity ignores their efforts,
and their work is mostly forgot-
ten until Arno Penzias and
Robert Wilson stumble onto the
predicted microwave signal by
chance in the 1960s.
Inlation
1948
THE STEADY
STATE
Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, and
Hermann Bondi develop a
“steady state” theory, which First stars
emerges as the primary com-
petition to the “Big Bang” — a
Big Bang expansion
term Hoyle coins in a 1949
13.7 billion years
radio interview to emphasize
the difference between the
This illustration shows 13.7 billion years of cosmic expansion. NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAM
two theories. By 1948, the uni-
verse is known to be expand-
ing, but steady-state claims
that matter is created continu-
1948 BIG BANG NUCLEOSYNTHESIS
ously, so that the universe’s
density remains constant. → Graduate student Ralph Alpher, with adviser George Gamow
and Gamow’s friend Hans Bethe, publishes a paper titled, “On
the Origin of Chemical Elements.” Within its pages, he posits that
the hot swirl of material following the Big Bang is responsible for
Richard Feynman introduces creating the elements of the universe in the proper observed abun-
Feynman diagrams, a new way dances. While it mistakenly assumes this process works for all ele-
of illustrating interactions ments, it is a crucial first step in what comes to be called Big Bang
between subatomic particles. nucleosynthesis, and is fundamental to understanding how the uni-
verse’s lighter elements — hydrogen and helium, which make up
1949 most of the cosmos — came into being.
On May 1, Kuiper discovers
Nereid, a moon of Neptune, and
the last to be discovered before
the 1989 Voyager 2 flyby.
President Truman establishes
rocket-testing grounds at Cape
Canaveral, Florida, on May 11,
setting the scene for decades of
future spaceflight.
In September, Herbert Friedman
uses Geiger counters aboard a
launched V-2 rocket to observe
X-rays from the Sun’s hot outer
layer, the corona.

On February 16, Kuiper discov- Fermi suggests that cosmic rays

ers Miranda, the smallest of achieve their incredible energies
Uranus’ round moons and the when they are accelerated by
last to be discovered before the magnetic fields in interstellar
2006 Voyager 2 flyby. clouds.
1949 THE PALOMAR SKY SURVEY
Using the brand-new 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar
Observatory, the National Geographic Society funds an all-sky sur-
vey of the Northern Hemisphere. It isn’t completed until 1958, and
the final data encompass 936 photographic plate pairs — one sensi-
tive to red light and the other sensitive to blue — to map more than
three-quarters of the sky. Astronomers studying the survey data dis-
cover and catalog thousands of previously unseen celestial objects,
and refer back to the survey’s images and data for decades. As the
century progresses, such immense sky surveys will become more
and more common, as teams of astronomers use large instruments
to carry out extensive mapping. The Palomar Sky Survey is the
beginning of a new era in astronomy.
The so-called “Glass Giant of Palomar,” the 200-inch Hale Telescope, was the
world’s largest telescope from 1949 to 1975. PALOMAR/CALTECH
1949 THE GLASS GIANT OF PALOMAR
→ The 200-inch Hale Telescope is an engineering feat, dou-
bling the size of the world’s largest telescope. It main-
tains its title well into the latter half of the century. More than
11 years pass from the time the glass is melted for the primary
mirror in 1934 until it is ready to be installed on Palomar
Mountain. The behemoth weights 14.5 tons. Dedicated June 3,
1948, Edwin Hubble takes the first image January 26, 1949,
and research begins in earnest by the end of the year. The tele-
scope is the workhorse of the 20th century, and astronomers
use it to determine the size of the universe, study stellar popu-
lations in nearby galaxies, and discover bright active galaxies
at the far reaches of the cosmos.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 33
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Richard Talcott

1950 DIRTY
SNOWBALLS
REVEALED
→ Continuing the
boom times for
cometary scientists,
American researcher
Fred Whipple devises
a new — and still-
accepted — model for
what comets are.
Jets of gas and dust spew from the “dirty
Whipple suggests snowball” nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-
that a comet’s nucleus — Gerasimenko in this March 2016 image from the
hidden to earthbound Rosetta spacecraft. ESA/ROSETTA/MPS/OSIRIS TEAM
astronomers by a dense
cloud of gas and dust — is a conglomerate of ices (mainly water,
carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide) mixed with a small
amount of dusty material similar to the stuff that makes up
meteorites. The catchy name “dirty snowball” soon takes over as
the standard description for comets, though spacecraft missions
starting in 1986 paint a picture of nuclei having less ice and

1950
The Oort Cloud is a spherical collection of 2 trillion comets that extends out to between
1 and 2 light-years from the Sun. ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY
more rock.
As a comet approaches the Sun, the growing warmth causes
its ices to sublimate (turn directly into gases), releasing dust
particles in the process. A typical comet probably loses less than
1 percent of its ices during a pass by the Sun, unless it comes
OORT PROPOSES A CLOUD OF COMETS uncomfortably close. The sublimation creates a huge envelope of
gas and dust, called the coma, which the Sun pushes away from

→ Comets once had a nasty reputation. The imaginative minds

of humans would link a bright comet’s appearance with some
terrible event on Earth, and then would conclude that the celestial
the nucleus to create the comet’s tails.
Whipple also correctly deduces that a rotating comet nucleus
would eject some of its gas and dust in a direction not aligned
visitor foreshadowed the earthly calamity. The random nature of perfectly with the Sun. He reasons this is why the orbits of com-
comet arrivals only heightened people’s fears that these divine omens ets like 2P/Encke and 6P/d’Arrest gradually change with each
were up to no good. passage through the inner solar system.
The mystery of comets started to fade in the early 18th century,
when English astronomer Edmond Halley deduced that bright
comets seen in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were all apparitions of the same
object. When the comet returned on schedule in 1758, scientists
at last knew that some of these bodies were ordinary solar system 1950 In the May issue of Astounding
members following orbits just like planets do. In the October issue of Mind, Science-Fiction, American math-
But two centuries passed before anyone could figure out where British mathematician and ematician and engineer Carl
comets originated. Expanding on earlier ideas by Estonian astrono- computer scientist Alan Turing Wiley publishes the idea of solar
mer Ernst Öpik and fellow Dutch researcher “Jos” van Woerkom, publishes his “Computing sails — using large mirrors to
Dutch astronomer Jan Oort studies the orbits of many long-period Machinery and Intelligence” harness solar radiation pressure
comets (those with periods greater than 200 years). In 1950, he pro- and introduces the Turing test — to travel through space.
poses that they originate in a giant spherical cloud centered on the to determine whether a
Sun that formed when the giant planets flung them out there during machine is intelligent, spawning Wiley invents synthetic aper-
the early stages of the solar system’s evolution. He further speculates leaps in computational ability ture radar, allowing scientists to
that passing stars could perturb the objects in this cometary reser- across all technical sciences. create high-resolution images of
voir and cause them to fall toward the Sun. landscapes. The Magellan
Astronomers now estimate that the aptly named Oort Cloud 1951 spacecraft will map Venus using
holds at least a few hundred billion to perhaps as many as a couple On March 25, American physi- this technique in the 1990s.
of trillion comets. The cloud forms a sphere surrounding the Sun at cists Harold Ewen and Edward
a distance of roughly 20,000 to 100,000 times the average Earth-Sun Purcell detect the 21-centimeter German astronomer Ludwig
distance, which places its outer edge more than a light-year from our emission line from neutral Biermann explains the behavior
star and near the limit of the Sun’s gravitational influence. hydrogen. It would prove of ionized gas in comet tails as
invaluable in mapping the being due to the ions’ interac-
Milky Way’s spiral structure. tion with the solar wind.

34 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 American physicists Frederick
Reines and Clyde Cowan tenta-
tively detect the elusive sub-
atomic neutrino in experiments
performed at the Hanford Site
in Washington.

Geologists Maurice Ewing and

The outer solar system body 1992 QB1 (circled here) is the first known Kuiper Belt object, though astronomers will later realize that
Bruce Heezen discover a deep
Pluto rightly belongs in this distant belt. DAVID JEWITT (UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII) canyon along the center of the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a finding
1951 THE SOLAR SYSTEM GETS A BELT that would prove important in
the developing theory of plate

→ Dutch-American planetary scientist Gerard

Kuiper discovered two outer planet moons
(Uranus’ Miranda and Neptune’s Nereid) and the
the Sun. A close encounter with one of the giant
planets could capture it into a tighter solar orbit.
Astronomers quickly adopt the name “Kuiper Belt”
tectonics, a cornerstone of plan-
etary science.

thick atmosphere surrounding Saturn’s Titan, yet
he’s best known for proposing a belt of icy objects
beyond the orbit of Neptune.
In 1951, Kuiper builds upon ideas first explored
by Frederick Leonard and Kenneth Edgeworth to
explain the existence of short-period comets (those
with orbits that take less than 200 years). These
“dirty snowballs” pass near the Sun so frequently
that they shouldn’t be able to survive beyond a few
hundred thousand years. Yet the solar system is bil-
lions of years old — how could any still be around?
Kuiper hypothesizes that a population of
extremely faint comets exists beyond Neptune and
that near collisions occasionally send one toward
for this band of hypothetical objects. Stanley Miller, a graduate
Unfortunately, the technology of the time isn’t student at the University of
good enough to find any of these faint objects. The Chicago, publishes results from
breakthrough will come in 1992, when University the Miller-Urey experiment
of Hawaii astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu showing that life’s basic build-
discover 1992 QB1 beyond Neptune. The floodgates ing blocks can be created under
quickly open, and by the end of the century, the the conditions thought to exist
count exceeds 1,000. Today, astronomers recognize on early Earth.
that the Kuiper Belt extends from approximately
30 to 55 times Earth’s distance from the Sun. 1954
Scientists also ultimately realize that one belt object On September 29, a consortium
had been discovered back in 1930. At the time, of 12 European nations founds
however, no one suspected that Pluto was actually the European Organization for
the tip of the Kuiper Belt iceberg. Nuclear Research (CERN).

American astronomer William 1951 THE FIRST

Morgan first recognizes the
Milky Way’s nearby spiral arms RADIO GALAXY
by tracing the hot, young stars
and ionized hydrogen gas
SHINES BRIGHT
within them.

1952
German-born American astrono-
mer Walter Baade confirms that
there are two classes of Cepheid
→ As radio waves bring the
early sounds of rock ’n’ roll
to listeners of Alan Freed’s radio
show in Cleveland in 1951, astron-
omers are listening to far fainter
radio emissions from the remote

variable stars — “standard can-
dles” astronomers use to calculate
distances. The result effectively
doubles the size of the universe.
On November 1, the United
States successfully harnesses the
Sun’s fusion power and detonates
the first hydrogen bomb on
Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall
Islands. Scientists discover two
new elements, einsteinium and
fermium, in the fallout.
1953
Edwin Hubble, the astronomer
who discovered galaxies and
the expanding universe, dies
September 28 at age 63, in San
Marino, California.
universe. Grote Reber had first
detected strong radio emissions
coming from the constellation
Cygnus in 1939, but astronomers
could not identify “Cygnus A”
with a known object because radio
observations were too imprecise.
Still, that didn’t keep scientists
from speculating. A who’s who
of midcentury astronomers was
on the case. Some, including
1974 Nobel Prize winner Martin
Ryle, were convinced that the
radio waves represented a previ-
ously unknown type of star in
the Milky Way. Others, including
iconoclasts Thomas Gold and
Fred Hoyle, believed that the
NRAO/AUI
This false-color image shows the radio-emitting jet and lobes of the spectacularly
bright radio galaxy Cygnus A. Red shows the strongest emission and blue the weakest.
emanations were from far-flung finds a bright galaxy at those
sources in distant galaxies. exact coordinates.
The debate resolves itself Cygnus A thus becomes
quickly in 1951. Using an the first known radio galaxy.
improved radio telescope in Astronomers now know that
Cambridge, England, Francis these beasts are among the most
Graham Smith nails down the luminous objects in the universe.
position of Cygnus A to within They typically emit most of their
an arcminute. He then sends the radio waves from a pair of lobes
refined position to Walter Baade that can span a million light-years
at the California Institute of or more. The energy for the emis-
Technology. Within a few weeks, sion comes from material being
Baade photographs the spot using swallowed by a supermassive
the 200-inch Hale Telescope and black hole at the galaxy’s center.
— Continued on page 44

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 35
 SKYTHIS
MONTH
September 2016: Neptune at its peak
Neptune appears as a small, blue-gray disk through typical amateur
telescopes, a far cry from the wispy clouds and banded structure visible
to the Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew past in August 1989. NASA/JPL
M
ars and Saturn rule
September’s evening
sky. They shine
brightly and provide
observers lots of tele-
scopic detail. They stand out in
part because the two brightest
planets — Venus and Jupiter —
set soon after the Sun does.
The overnight hours belong to
Neptune, which reaches oppo-
sition and best visibility early
this month. And shortly before
the Sun rises in late September,
Mercury puts on its best morn-
ing show of 2016.
You’ll need to be watching
the western sky during evening
Martin Ratcliffe provides plane-
tarium development for Sky-Skan,
Inc., from his home in Wichita,
Kansas. Meteorologist Alister
Ling works for Environment
Canada in Edmonton, Alberta.
36 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
MARTIN RATCLIFFE and ALISTER LING describe the
solar system’s changing landscape as it appears in Earth’s sky.
twilight to catch Venus and
Jupiter. After their majestic
pairing in late August, the
two brilliant planets gradually
move apart. Sluggish Jupiter
soon loses its battle with the
steadily advancing Sun and
slides behind our star on
September 26. Venus, on the
other hand, outpaces the Sun
and climbs higher with each
passing day.
You might spot a slender,
two-day-old Moon about 1° to
Jupiter’s left on September 2.
The planet shines at magni-
tude –1.7 and should be easier
to see against the bright twi-
light. You’ll need an unob-
structed horizon to view the
pair, which stands only 4°
high a half-hour after sunset.
Start at Venus — at magni-
tude –3.8, it’s the most con-
spicuous of the three — and
then scan the area between it
and the brightest area of twi-
light with binoculars.
The following evening pres-
ents an even prettier scene.
The Moon, Venus, and Jupiter
then form a line spanning
some 14°, with Venus midway
between the other two. All
three lie in Virgo, though
you’ll have difficulty seeing
any of that constellation’s stars
in bright twilight.
As Jupiter slips out of view
during September’s second
week, Venus grows more
prominent. On the 17th, the
inner planet passes 3° north
of Virgo’s brightest star, 1st-
magnitude Spica. And on the
month’s final day, Venus exits
Virgo and enters Libra.
Despite its appeal to naked-
eye and binocular observers,
Venus offers little to telescope
owners. The world shows an
almost fully illuminated disk
whose apparent diameter grows
from 11" to 12" this month.
Once Venus sets, look to
the southwest and its trio of
bright objects. Mars shines
The eighth planet shines brightest when it reaches opposition September 2
against the backdrop of Aquarius. ALL ILLUSTRATIONS: ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY
Visible to the naked eye
Visible with binoculars
Visible with a telescope
brightest, followed by Saturn,
and then Scorpius’ brightest
star, Antares. The three form
an attractive triangle that
changes shape weekly.
As September dawns, Mars
lies in northern Scorpius some
5° east of Antares. The two
ruddy objects make a lovely
pair throughout the evening
hours. At magnitude –0.3, the
planet appears nearly four
times brighter than the mag-
nitude 1.1 star. (Saturn, which
stands 6° northwest of Mars,
shines at magnitude 0.5.)
September 1 is the only day
this month when Mars resides
in Scorpius. The Red Planet
enters Ophiuchus on the 2nd
for a three-week stay. Pay par-
ticular attention to this region
when the First Quarter Moon
passes through on the 8th and
9th. Mars crosses into Sagit-
tarius on the 21st and makes
a beeline toward the Lagoon
Nebula (M8). The planet
passes 1.5° south of this strik-
ing star-forming region on the
28th, creating a marvelous
photo opportunity.
 RISINGMOON
A pair of nested craters in the deep south
It’s not hard to find similar cra-
ters located side by side or small
ones inside much larger ones.
Such combinations show up
seemingly everywhere on the
Moon. But where can you find
one crater nestled inside anoth-
er? The best example lies near
the Moon’s southeastern limb.
Boussingault Crater shows up
nicely from September 4–18,
essentially whenever sunshine
illuminates it.
At first glance, Boussingault
might look like a terraced fea-
ture. (In many large craters, the
inner walls slumped inward to
create terraces in the impact’s
immediate aftermath.) But after
a few seconds, you’ll notice it has
Mars pulls away from
Earth during September, and
the ruddy world’s disk shrinks
from 10.5" to 8.8" across as a
result. Observers who target
the planet through a telescope
will get some of their last great
views during this apparition.
The first thing to notice is that
the disk doesn’t appear per-
fectly round. Mars shows its
maximum phase effect in
September as the Sun illumi-
nates only 85 percent of its
Earth-facing hemisphere.
Next, pay attention to fine
surface details. For North
American viewers, Syrtis
Major appears centered dur-
ing September’s first week.
This feature is the most con-
spicuous dark marking on the
planet. By the month’s third
week, the huge volcanoes on
the Tharsis ridge lie on the
western limb. Although most
amateur instruments can’t
show them individually, look
for the bright clouds or mist
that tend to form around the
high mountain peaks. In late
— Continued on page 42
a distinctly different appearance.
Terraces don’t have raised rims
like the inner crater Boussingault
A. There’s no central peak here
either. The original one got
wiped out by the second impact,
and then lava pooled up from
below to cover the mountaintop.
Boussingault K, a small, sharp-
edged crater that adorns
Boussingault’s northern rim,
clinches the identification.
The region’s far-southern
latitude sustains shadows for
many days and keeps the cra-
ter’s double nature distinct from
the hundreds of other features
in these rugged lunar highlands.
These shadows help give the
crater a 3-D appearance that
METEORWATCH
A second shower
from Perseus
Although September doesn’t boast
any major meteor showers, two
minor ones are worth keeping an
eye on. The Aurigids peak the night
of August 31/September 1, and the
early morning hours of the 1st
could deliver up to six “shooting
stars” per hour. Observers have
reported a few bursts in the past,
most recently in 2007, though
astronomers don’t expect any
enhanced rates this year. Still, the
New Moon on September 1 makes
for ideal viewing conditions.
The month’s second shower is
the Epsilon Perseids, which peaks
the morning of September 9. The
First Quarter Moon sets before
midnight local daylight time, so
dark skies rule before dawn. The
meteors radiate from a point near
Algol, which climbs nearly over-
head just before twilight begins.
OBSERVING On September 1, observers along a narrow track that cuts across
HIGHLIGHT central Africa and Madagascar will see an annular solar eclipse.
Boussingault
N
K
A
Boussingault E
Look toward the Moon’s southeastern limb for Boussingault Crater
and its nested companion. CONSOLIDATED LUNAR ATLAS/UA/LPL; INSET: NASA/GSFC/ASU
might make you feel as if you’re orbit carries it a bit above and
in low lunar orbit. below Earth’s orbit around the
Compared to our view this Sun, the ecliptic. Astronomers
month, the picture above peers snapped the photo when the
just beyond the lunar limb. The Moon was north of the ecliptic,
Moon’s face nods up and down revealing a little beyond its
slightly because our satellite’s normal southern limb.
Epsilon Perseid meteor shower
Algol ARIES
Radiant
PERSEUS
Capella Pleiades
TAURUS
Aldebaran
AURIGA
10°
September 9, 1 A.M.
Looking east
The Epsilon Perseid meteor shower
should deliver a handful of “shoot-
ing stars” in the hours before
Epsilon Perseid meteors
Active dates: September 5–21
dawn on September 9.
Peak: September 8/9
Moon at peak: First Quarter
Barring an unexpected outburst,
Maximum rate at peak:
observers can expect to see an 5 meteors/hour
average of five meteors per hour.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 37
 N
STAR
DOME
ME
CA M81
How to use this map: This map portrays the PA
LO
M82
sky as seen near 35° north latitude. Located LI
DA R
inside the border are the cardinal directions S
and their intermediate points. To find
stars, hold the map overhead and
orient it so one of the labels matches NG PE
the direction you’re facing. The NE C8 R
84 S E U N C P Polaris
stars above the map’s horizon NG S
R
now match what’s in the sky. C
A
C8
69 MINO
S SI U R S A
O CE

AN
PE PH

T
The all-sky map shows IA EU

RI

DR
S
how the sky looks at:

AN

OM
10 P.M. September 1 GU CO

ED
RA
L

9 P.M. September 15

A
UM

D
M3
8 P.M. September 30
3

M3
Planets are shown

1
at midmonth

LA
PISC

C
ER
De

TA
ne
b
ES

CY

ga
Uranus

PEGASUS

GN

Ve
US

LY R A
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Pa
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Altai
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EQ

IN
CET

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LE
US

STAR
U
S

MAGNITUDES A
Q AQUIL
U A
Sirius A
R
IU
0.0 S M11
3.0
SCUT
UM M16
1.0
4.0 7
2.0 5.0 M1

0
CA
M22 M2
Fo

PI PR
m

STAR COLORS AU S C IC
alh

OR
A star’s color depends ST S I NU M8
au
SC

RI S
t

on its surface temperature.

U

N
U
LP

S
•
T

The hottest stars shine blue SE

O

M7
R

• Slightly cooler stars appear white MIC

S A G I T TA R I U S

• Intermediate stars (like the Sun) glow yellow

ROS
COP
IUM O NA S
• Lower-temperature stars appear orange COR
AU S
TRA
LI

• The coolest stars glow red GR

US
• Fainter stars can’t excite our eyes’ color
receptors, so they appear white unless you ESC
OPIU
M
IN DU TEL
use optical aid to gather more light S

38 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016 S
 Note: Moon phases in the calendar vary
in size due to the distance from Earth
SEPTEMBER 2016 and are shown at 0h Universal Time.

R SUN. MON. TUES. WED. THURS. FRI. SAT.

JO
MA
MAP SYMBOLS
SA
U R Open cluster
1 2 3
Globular cluster

Diffuse nebula
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Planetary nebula
NW
I
ES C

Galaxy
N TI

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

C E NA

r 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
iza
V
A

M 51
M
A CES

18 19 20 21 22 23 24
I
CO REN
M
BE

25 26 27 28 29 30

Calendar of events
ES

urus
ÖT
BO

1 New Moon occurs at 18 The Moon is at perigee

Arct

5:03 A.M. EDT; annular (224,872 miles from Earth),

solar eclipse 1:00 P.M. EDT
ALIS
M13

NA
ULES

2 Asteroid Ceres is stationary, The Moon passes 3° south of

CORO
E

9 A.M. EDT Uranus, 1 P.M. EDT

O R
HERC

Neptune is at opposition, 21 Mercury is stationary,

1 P.M. EDT 6 A.M. EDT
W
SERPENS
CAPUT

The Moon passes 6° north of The Moon passes 0.2° north of

VIRGO

Mercury, 1 P.M. EDT Aldebaran, 7 P.M. EDT

The Moon passes 0.4° north of 22 Autumnal equinox occurs at

Jupiter, 6 P.M. EDT 10:21 A.M. EDT
M5

3 The Moon passes 1.1° north of 23 Last Quarter Moon

S

Venus, 7 A.M. EDT occurs at 5:56 A.M. EDT

U
CH

6 The Moon is at apogee 25 Pluto is stationary, 11 P.M. EDT

IU

(251,689 miles from Earth),

PH

2:45 P.M. EDT 26 Jupiter is in conjunction with

O

the Sun, 3 A.M. EDT

A
BR

8 The Moon passes 4° north of

28 Mercury is at greatest western
LI

Saturn, 5 P.M. EDT

elongation (18°), 4 P.M. EDT
S 9 First Quarter Moon
SPECIAL OBSERVING DATE
P EN occurs at 7:49 A.M. EDT
R D A rn 28 Mercury climbs highest
S E AU tu
C Sa The Moon passes 8° north of before dawn as it puts on
Mars, 10 A.M. EDT its best morning show of
s the year.
re 12 Mercury is in inferior
rs nta M
4
Ma A conjunction, 8 P.M. EDT 29 The Moon passes 0.7° south of
Mercury, 7 A.M. EDT
M6 15 The Moon passes 1.2° north of
7 S
SW Neptune, 4 P.M. EDT Asteroid Parthenope is at
PU
LU opposition, 9 A.M. EDT
16 Full Moon occurs at
U S 3:05 P.M. EDT; penumbral 30
PI New Moon occurs at 8:11
OR 1
SC
23 lunar eclipse P.M. EDT
G C6
N
17 Venus passes 3° north of Spica,
7 P.M. EDT

BEGINNERS: WATCH A VIDEO ABOUT HOW TO READ A STAR CHART AT www.Astronomy.com/starchart.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 39
 PATH OF THE
PLANETS The planets in September 2016

The planets These illustrations show the size, phase, and orientation of each planet and the two brightest dwarf planets
for the dates in the data table at bottom. South is at the top to match the view through a telescope.
in the sky

Mercury Uranus
Mars
S

W E

N
Pluto
Saturn
Venus Ceres Jupiter Neptune
10"

Planets MERCURY VENUS MARS CERES JUPITER SATURN URANUS NEPTUNE PLUTO
Date Sept. 30 Sept. 15 Sept. 15 Sept. 15 Sept. 1 Sept. 15 Sept. 15 Sept. 15 Sept. 15
Magnitude –0.7 –3.9 –0.1 8.1 –1.7 0.5 5.7 7.8 14.2
Angular size 6.8" 11.4" 9.6" 0.6" 30.8" 16.3" 3.7" 2.4" 0.1"
Illumination 56% 89% 85% 99% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%
Distance (AU) from Earth 0.989 1.461 0.975 2.090 6.392 10.199 19.083 28.971 32.779
Distance (AU) from Sun 0.308 0.725 1.395 2.901 5.450 10.039 19.951 29.954 33.175
Right ascension (2000.0) 11h22.7m 13h11.9m 17h24.2m 2h25.9m 11h54.3m 16h36.0m 1h27.7m 22h47.7m 19h03.4m
Declination (2000.0) 5°28' –7°02' –25°47' 0°59' 1°49' –20°32' 8°31' –8°37' –21°24'

40 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
This map unfolds the entire night sky from sunset (at right) until sunrise (at left).
Arrows and colored dots show motions and locations of solar system objects during the month.

Jupiter’s moons
Dots display positions
LMi Io
of Galilean satellites at
11 P.M. EDT on the date Europa
shown. South is at the
oss
a top to match
S
the view
Ganymede
through a W E

telescope. N Callisto
SEX
1

2
A
3

5 Io
ANT
6

10 Jupiter

11

1 12

13

14 Ganymede

15

16

17

18 Callisto

19

20

21 Europa

22

23

24

25

26
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY

27

28

29

30

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 41
— Continued from page 37
WHEN TO VIEW THE PLANETS
EVENING SKY MIDNIGHT
Venus (west) Uranus (southeast)
Mars (south) Neptune (south)
Jupiter (west)
Saturn (southwest)
Neptune (southeast)
September, the dark Aurorae
Sinus and Mare Acidalium
take center stage.
Once you’ve scanned Mars
for subtle surface details, swing
your telescope toward Saturn
and its dramatic ring system.
As you slew from one planet to
the other, remind yourself that
the ringed planet lies about 10
times farther away. This will
add valuable perspective when
you see that Saturn’s disk spans
16", nearly double that of Mars.
Saturn is truly a giant, and its
beautiful ring system adds to
this perception. The rings mea-
sure 37" across and tilt 26° to
our line of sight.
Also notice Saturn’s family
of moons. Titan, the biggest
COMETSEARCH
A view from across the solar system
Most people would rightly sus-
pect that crabs have little to do
with amateur astronomy. So it’s
only a coincidence that this
month’s comet shares some
properties with these bottom-
dwelling crustaceans. First,
Comet 43P/Wolf-Harrington
resides in Cancer the Crab
during September’s first half.
Second, this periodic visitor
swims in the thicker parts of
Earth’s atmospheric ocean in
the hour before dawn. To see
this 12th-magnitude snowball,
you’ll need to observe from a
dark, haze-free site with a clear
view to the east. An 8-inch scope
should capture the comet.
Once you’ve arrived at its
plotted position, familiarize
yourself with the surrounding
star pattern. This will serve as an
42 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
MORNING SKY
Mercury (east)
Uranus (southwest)
Neptune (west)
and brightest, shines at 8th
magnitude and shows up
through any telescope. You
can find it due north of Sat-
urn on September 9 and 25
and due south of the planet
on the 16th.
A 4-inch scope brings in
four additional satellites. The
most intriguing of these is
Iapetus, which glows brightest
(10th magnitude) on Septem-
ber 8 when its ice-covered
hemisphere fully faces Earth.
It then lies 8.3' west of Saturn.
Although Iapetus has faded by
a magnitude when it passes
2.1' due north of Saturn on
September 28, its proximity to
the planet makes it easier to
spot. Use Titan, which then
anchor when you bump up to
medium power. Then, using
averted vision, scan around the
field for a small, ghostly cotton
ball. Try gently nudging the
scope to create movement and
trigger your motion-sensitive
peripheral vision.
Typical observers can expect
to view a short-period comet
like Wolf-Harrington during a
few returns to the inner solar
system. But Japanese amateur
astronomer Kazuo Kinoshita
calculates that 2016 could bring
our final visual sightings of 43P.
A relatively close approach to
Jupiter in 2019 likely will alter
the comet’s orbit, almost dou-
bling its distance at closest
approach to the Sun and drop-
ping its peak brightness by a
couple of magnitudes.
Mercury at its morning best
Regulus
LEO
Moon
Denebola Mercury
5°
September 28, 30 minutes before sunrise
Looking east
Northern Hemisphere observers are in for a treat in late September as the
innermost planet puts on its best predawn show of the year.
lies 2.6' east of the planet, as a in the south-southwest among
distance guide. the background stars of north-
Three 10th-magnitude ern Sagittarius. Pluto glows
moons circle Saturn inside dimly (magnitude 14.2), how-
Titan’s orbit. Tethys, Dione, ever, so you’ll need an 8-inch
and Rhea all lie within 1' of the or larger telescope to see it
rings’ outer edge and show up visually. The distant world
on every clear night. lingers some 0.5° northwest of
Hunt for Pluto in the hour 4th-magnitude Omicron (ο)
after darkness falls. The dwarf Sagittarii. To confirm a sight-
planet then lies reasonably high ing, sketch or image the field
Comet 43P/Wolf-Harrington
e N
c
b
Sept 1
4
7
29
E
10
Path of Comet 43P
CANCER
45 13
50 27
16
1°
`
This 12th-magnitude comet slides through Cancer during what could be
its final appearance through amateur scopes.
Max Wolf discovered this Researchers didn’t link the two
comet in 1924, but it wasn’t comets until its next return in
recovered until Robert Har- 1957, when it became the 43rd
rington spotted it in 1951. known periodic comet.
 The Sun’s burning ring of fire
An annular solar eclipse awaits observers who position themselves along
a narrow path that cuts across Africa on September 1. RUBEN KIER
of view and return to it a few
nights later to identify the
object that shifted position.
Neptune reaches opposi-
tion on September 2, rising
with the faint stars of Aquarius
just as the Sun sets. Although
this marks the peak of the
outer planet’s apparition, you’ll
be hard-pressed to see much
difference the rest of the
month. Neptune shines
steadily at magnitude 7.8 and
moves slowly relative to the
background stars. You can
track down the ice giant
through binoculars in the same
field of view as 4th-magnitude
Lambda (λ) Aquarii. Neptune
lies 1.3° southwest of Lambda
at opposition; the gap grows to
2.0° by late September. Don’t
confuse the planet with a simi-
larly bright star that lies 0.4°
north of it early in the month.
Although Neptune lies clos-
est to Earth at opposition, it’s
still 2.69 billion miles away. So,
even though it’s four times
larger than our planet, a tele-
scope reveals a disk just 2.4" in
diameter. Neptune’s orb glows
with a subtle blue-gray hue.
Uranus rises as evening
twilight fades and stands high
in the southeast at midnight
local daylight time. You’ll need
a reasonably dark sky to trace
the faint lines of stars that
define the planet’s home
constellation, Pisces the Fish.
Once you spy them, it’s pretty
easy to find Uranus through
binoculars. Under excellent
conditions, keen-eyed observ-
ers can spot the magnitude 5.7
planet without optical aid.
Use 5th-magnitude Mu
(μ) Piscium as your guide.
In early September, Uranus
lies 2.5° due north of Mu.
Although the separation
barely changes during the
month, the planet moves to
a position more northwest of
the star. Point your telescope
at Uranus and you’ll see a dis-
tinctly blue-green disk mea-
suring 3.7" across.
The final planet appears
as twilight starts to paint late
September’s predawn sky.
Mercury passes between the
Sun and Earth at inferior con-
junction on September 12 and
then springs into the morning
sky 10 days later to start its
finest morning appearance
of the year. On the 22nd, it
appears 8° above the eastern
horizon a half-hour before
sunrise. Shining at magnitude
0.9, the innermost planet
shows up clearly through bin-
oculars, and to the naked eye
once you’ve spotted it. A tele-
scope reveals an 8.6"-diameter
disk that’s just 21 percent lit.
GET DAILY UPDATES ON YOUR NIGHT SKY AT www.Astronomy.com/skythisweek.
LOCATINGASTEROIDS
Galloping through the Little Horse
Unusual objects are good for
astronomy — outliers help to
test theories and provide valu-
able context for typical bodies.
Asteroid 2 Pallas serves as a
good example. When German
astronomer Heinrich Olbers
discovered it in 1802, many
scientists hailed it as a second
chunk of the “missing planet”
once thought to orbit between
Mars and Jupiter. Its large incli-
nation to the ecliptic (the orbit-
al plane of the solar system’s
other planets) seemed to bol-
ster the now-disproven idea of
a catastrophic breakup.
Pallas’ 35° orbital tilt carries it
from far south of the ecliptic to
Pallas stampedes the Little Horse’s corral
N
9 Sept 1
6
`
11
_
E QU U L E U S
E
Path of Pallas
Track down 9th-magnitude Pallas as it races south through the dim
background stars of Equuleus the Little Horse.
Mercury brightens quickly
as it approaches greatest elon-
gation September 28. That
morning, it shines at magni-
tude –0.5 and climbs 11° high
in the east 30 minutes before
sunup. Through a telescope,
the planet appears 7.1" across
and half-lit. The following
morning, a slender crescent
Moon slides 1° below Mercury.
An annular solar eclipse
occurs September 1 across
its current home in Equuleus the
Little Horse well to the north.
This constellation tends to be
overshadowed by its neighbor
and big brother to the east,
Pegasus the Winged Horse.
Both constellations ride high in
the south during late evening.
Pallas begins September in
east-central Equuleus. It then
drops southward, passing just
south of three 9th-magnitude
stars on the 9th. To positively
identify Pallas, look for its dis-
placement relative to this back-
ground over a night or two. The
325-mile-wide asteroid then
slides 1° west of 4th-magnitude
Alpha (α) Equulei on the 11th.
4
3
16 1
21
26
Oct 1
1°
parts of central and southern
Africa. Because the Moon is
on the outer part of its orbit, it
covers only 98.7 percent of the
Sun, so observers must use a
filter to protect their eyes dur-
ing the eclipse. The path of
annularity tracks from Gabon
to Mozambique and then to
Madagascar. At maximum
eclipse in southern Tanzania,
the annular phase lasts 3 min-
utes and 5 seconds.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 43
— Continued from page 35

1953 RADIOACTIVITY PINS DOWN

EARTH’S BIRTHDAY
→ Aristotle believed Earth
always existed. At the
opposite end of the scale,
Archbishop James Ussher of
Ireland calculated in 1654 that
our planet was born in 4004
b.c. The truth lies somewhere
in between.
The first scientific
attempts to measure Earth’s
age began shortly after
Ussher’s biblical calculations. Clair Cameron Patterson used fragments
of the Canyon Diablo meteorite like the
In the 1660s, Danish scientist one seen here to date Earth’s formation to
Nicolas Steno was among the 4.55 billion years ago. ROBERT HAAG
first to link geological layer-
ing to the rate at which sediments get deposited. Others took this
idea and calculated how long it took all of Earth’s layers to accu-
mulate. Although answers ranged widely, most came back at no
more than 100 million years.
Physicists took a different tack. Lord Kelvin assumed Earth
started completely molten and then determined how long it
would take to cool to its current temperature. Other scientists
deduced how long it would take the Sun to condense from the
original solar nebula to its current size. These answers ended up
in the tens of millions of years.
The first accurate measurements come in the 1950s. By then,
scientists understand how radioactive elements decay and how
they can be used to date objects. Unfortunately, no Earth rocks
date to our planet’s formation. American geochemist Clair
Cameron Patterson realizes that meteorites would give the age of
the solar system and thus of Earth, too. He studies lead isotopes
from the decay of uranium in the Canyon Diablo meteorite (the
rock that created Arizona’s Meteor Crater) and deduces an age
of 4.55 billion years, give or take 70 million years — a number
consistent with today’s results. He presents his findings at a 1953
meeting of the National Academy of Sciences and publishes
them in scientific journals in 1955 and 1956.
1957
Comet Arend-Roland exhibits a spectacular anti-tail of dust. The thin thread of
light (lower left) pointing toward the Sun is an optical illusion created by the
viewing geometry. LICK OBSERVATORY
TWO GREAT COMETS LIGHT UP THE SKY
→ Great Comets (ones that become exceptionally bright)
appear in Earth’s sky about 13 times per century, on aver-
age, or once every seven to eight years. But few astronomical
events are as unpredictable. Sometimes the gap between such
wonders stretches for decades, and occasionally you get two in
a single year.
For Northern Hemisphere observers, 1957 brings a taste
of both. The previous Great Comet was none other than
1P/Halley in 1910. (Comet Skjellerup-Maristany [C/1927 X1]
and the Eclipse Comet [C/1948 V1] were both strictly Southern
Hemisphere objects.)
But now the long dry spell gives way to a double dose of great-
ness. The brighter and more spectacular of the two is Comet
Arend-Roland (C/1956 R1), which reaches magnitude 0 with a
tail some 30° long shortly after mid-April. But the remarkable
aspect of its appearance occurs between April 20 and early May,
when it develops an “anti-tail” — a spike of light that appears to
point toward the Sun instead of away — spanning 15°.
Comets normally exhibit two tails, though one frequently
dominates. The first contains ionized gas, looks bluish, and
points directly away from the Sun like a windsock caught in
the gusty solar wind. The other, which typically curves and
appears slightly yellowish, consists of dust particles gently
pushed away from our star by radiation pressure. The precise
geometry of the Sun, Earth, and comet makes part of Arend-
Roland’s dust tail appear to curve in a sunward direction, giv-
ing viewers a gorgeous anti-tail.
Only three months after Arend-Roland, Comet Mrkos
(C/1957 P1) stretches its normal two tails across evening and
morning skies when it peaks at 1st magnitude in early August.

On November 30, the first 1955

known case of a human injury
from a falling meteorite occurs
when an 8.5-pound rock crashes
through a roof in Sylacauga,
Alabama.
At the General Conference on
Weights and Measures, scientists
propose six base units in the
metric system for length (meter),
mass (kilogram), time (second),
electric current (ampere), tem-
perature (kelvin), and luminous
intensity (candela).
Physicists Emilio Segrè and
Owen Chamberlain discover the
antiproton, the proton’s anti-
matter partner, in experiments
at the Bevatron particle accel-
erator in California.
Albert Einstein, the architect of
the general and special theories
of relativity and perhaps his-
tory’s greatest physicist, dies
April 18 at age 76 in Princeton,
New Jersey.
Astronomers Fred Hoyle and
Martin Schwarzschild use early
computers to model the evolution
of red giant stars with masses
slightly larger than the Sun.
With a duration of 7 minutes
and 8 seconds, the June 20 total
solar eclipse is the longest in
875 years.
English physicist Louis Essen
develops the first practical
atomic clock, which keeps time
by measuring a transition of the
cesium-133 atom.
Danish astronomer Jan Oort
confirms that some of the light
emitted by the Crab Nebula
arises from synchrotron radia-
tion — electrons moving at
close to the speed of light in a
magnetic field.
1956
Frederick Reines, Clyde Cowan,
and colleagues confirm the dis-
covery of neutrinos and detect
the first antineutrinos.
American physicist Bruce Cork
discovers the antineutron at the
Bevatron particle accelerator in
California.
Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass
publishes “The Carbon Dioxide
Theory of Climatic Change,”
which describes how increasing
levels of atmospheric CO2 would
warm the planet.

44 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 1957
ASTRONOMERS FIND THAT
WE ARE ALL “STAR STUFF”
→ “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our
stars, But in ourselves.” This line from
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act 1, Scene 2) begins This replica of Sputnik 1, the world’s
first artificial satellite, resides in the
perhaps the most important astronomical paper National Museum of the United
in the 20th century’s second half. “Synthesis of States Air Force at Wright-Patterson
the Elements in Stars” appears in the October Air Force Base in Ohio. U.S. AIR FORCE
1957 issue of Reviews of Modern Physics. And how
appropriate the quote is — in the article, authors
Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William 1957 THE SPACE
Fowler, and Fred Hoyle describe for the first time
how stars created nearly all the elements in the
AGE BEGINS
cosmos.
Before B2FH (a nearly universal shorthand for
the article), most astronomers thought the com-
→ It’s no exaggeration
to say that the world
changes on October 4, 1957.
position of the universe was largely set at the Big Although the Soviet Union
Bang. They knew, thanks to the efforts of Hans has been hinting that they
Bethe and others in the 1930s, that stars shine by might attempt to send a
converting hydrogen to helium. But most believed satellite into low Earth
that the cosmic abundances of the other elements orbit during the ongoing
had changed little since the beginning. International Geophysical
B2FH changes all that. The authors describe how Year, the launch of Sputnik 1
stars use nuclear fusion to build heavy elements The tattered remains of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant catches much of the world
show a small fraction of the elements created by the star during
from lighter ones in their cores. The process stops its life. In this image, dark blue represents oxygen, red denotes
— and the American public
at iron because fusion of that element generates no sulfur, and the white, pink, and red colors indicate a mixture of — off-guard.
energy. But the story doesn’t end there. The writers the two. NASA/ESA/THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STSCI)/AURA With the Cold War in full
go on to explain how heavier elements form during swing, it’s no wonder that
the late stages of a star’s life and during the super- The authors essentially invent the entire field of people feel anxious at see-
nova explosion that ends the life of most massive stellar nucleosynthesis. And their work accurately ing their country’s principal
stars. Through these explosions and less violent predicts the abundances of nearly all the elements rival lofting a payload into
planetary nebulae, the elements then get dispersed except for primordial hydrogen and the helium and orbit. Sputnik 1 is simply
into the interstellar medium, where they are incor- the trace amounts of lithium produced in the first a polished metal sphere
porated into new generations of stars. minutes after the Big Bang. about the size of a beach ball
(some 23 inches in diameter)
with four external antennas.
Still, anyone on Earth can
1957 The United States establishes 1958 go out on a clear night and
IBM delivers the first compiler the Amundsen-Scott South Pole The largest solar maximum on see it moving across the sky,
for Fortran (short for “formula Station in Antarctica as part of record occurs when the average or detect its radio signal
translation”), a computer lan- the International Geophysical number of sunspots peaks at 201. with the proper equipment.
guage adept at crunching num- Year. The extremely cold, dry Although the satellite
bers and scientific computing. air there makes it a perfect spot President Dwight Eisenhower carries no instruments, that
for telescopes exploring the dis- signs the National Aeronautics doesn’t stop scientists from
German astronomer Wilhelm tant cosmos. and Space Act into law, offi- gleaning as much as they can
Gliese publishes the first Gliese cially creating NASA. from it. Most importantly,
Catalogue of Nearby Stars, On November 3, the Soviet they track the craft’s pas-
which includes data on 915 stars Union launches Sputnik 2 with American physicists Arthur sage through Earth’s upper
within 65 light-years of Earth. its canine crew of one: a female Schawlow and Charles Townes atmosphere precisely, which
mutt named Laika. She dies publish a paper in the provides valuable details on
American physicist Hugh long before the spacecraft re- December 15 issue of Physical the gas density at altitudes
Everett III proposes the many- enters Earth’s atmosphere some Review Letters that describes previously inaccessible.
worlds interpretation of quan- five months later. the principles of lasers. Sputnik 1 stops transmit-
tum mechanics, in which every ting in late October and
event causes the universe to On December 6, the United On December 18, the United burns up as it falls back to
branch onto equally real but States attempts to launch a sat- States successfully launches Earth on January 4, 1958.
separate paths. In this view, ellite into orbit, but the Signal Communications by But the brief mission initi-
Schrödinger’s cat is dead on one Vanguard TV3’s booster loses Orbiting Relay Equipment ates the Space Age and
branch and alive on the other. thrust just two seconds after (SCORE), the world’s first com- launches a race that cul-
liftoff and explodes as it falls munications satellite. minates a dozen years later
back to the launchpad. when the first humans step
on the Moon.
 1958 AMERICA
CHARGES INTO
SPACE
→ Although the United
States’ first attempt to
keep up with the Soviet Union’s
Sputnik 1 ended in the spectacu-
lar launchpad explosion of the
Vanguard TV3 on December 6,
1957, America soon catches up.
On January 31, the Explorer 1
spacecraft lifts off from Cape
Canaveral, Florida, on a
Jupiter C rocket developed
by Wernher von Braun.
Explorer 1 enters a highly
elliptical orbit that swoops
within 220 miles (350km)
Explorer 1 lifts off from Cape Canaveral,
of Earth’s surface at closest Florida, on January 31, 1958, marking
approach and then soars out America’s entry into the space race. NASA
beyond 1,500 miles (2,400km) at
maximum. It makes one complete circuit every 115 minutes and
completes 640 orbits by the time of its last transmission May 23.
(It will not re-enter Earth’s atmosphere until March 31, 1970, by
which time it will have completed more than 58,000 orbits.)
Explorer 1 is a cylindrical probe that measures just 80 inches Humanity’s first view of the Moon’s farside comes in October 1959, when the Luna 3
long by 6 inches wide and weighs 31 pounds. Unlike Sputnik 1, probe loops around our neighbor. The formerly hidden terrain has more craters
and far fewer maria than the nearside. NASA/GSFC
it does carry science instruments. University of Iowa space sci-
entist James Van Allen provides the primary one: a cosmic-ray
detector. The instrument finds far fewer cosmic-ray hits than
anyone expected. Van Allen speculates that Earth’s magnetic
field might be trapping charged particles, and strong radiation
1959 HUMANS PEEK AT
THE MOON’S FARSIDE
from them could have saturated the instrument. Explorer 3, which
launches two months later, confirms the results, and scientists
now call the doughnut-shaped region of energetic particles the
→ Although the Moon is Earth’s closest neighbor, humans
had seen barely half of it as the 1950s were winding
down. Tidal forces acting between the two objects had long ago
Van Allen radiation belts. The discovery marks the first impor- locked our companion in place so that it spins on its axis with
tant science result to come from space exploration. the same period as it revolves around our home world. This
means we see the same beautiful face at every Full Moon, but
the opposite hemisphere is forever hidden.
Well, not truly forever. With the start of the Space Age,
scientists finally have an opportunity to send spacecraft to
1959 Physicists Giuseppe Cocconi explore the farside. The first success comes in October 1959,
On January 2, the Soviet Union and Philip Morrison publish when the Soviet Union sends Luna 3 to photograph this terra
launches Luna 1. Although the the first article in a science incognita. The spacecraft swings around the Moon on
mission fails to hit the Moon as journal that considers a realistic October 7, snapping 29 photos covering about 70 percent of
intended (missing by a few approach to the search for the farside. The camera shoots 35mm film that is developed
thousand miles), it nevertheless extraterrestrial intelligence. onboard, scanned by a television system, and then converted
makes history as the first space- “Searching for Interstellar into radio signals for transmission. As the probe heads back
craft to leave Earth’s gravity. Communications” appears in toward Earth, it sends back 17 noisy, low-resolution images
the September 19 issue of before ground controllers lose contact.
On February 17, the United Nature. Astronomers expect the farside to look similar to the one
States successfully launches we see, with maria — large basins filled with solidified lava —
Vanguard 2, the world’s first On December 4, the United covering nearly one-third of the surface and the rest mostly
weather satellite. States launches Little Joe 2 on a heavily cratered highlands. But as often happens in astronomy,
suborbital flight with a rhesus the scientists are wrong. Craters cover nearly the entire hemi-
On September 12, the Soviet monkey named Sam aboard. sphere, with only two small maria — Moscoviense and Ingenii
Union launches Luna 2. Two The flight — designed to test — breaking up the rough landscape. It is an eye-opener that
days later, it becomes the first components of the Mercury will be repeated many more times as space probes venture far-
spacecraft to land on another space program — lasts 11 min- ther into the solar system.
world when it impacts the utes and reaches an altitude of
Moon just east of the large cra- 55 miles before returning Sam
ter Archimedes. safely to Earth.

46 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Richard Talcott
1960
American radio astronomer
Frank Drake conducts the first
search for extraterrestrial intel-
ligence, Project Ozma, using an
85-foot (26m) radio telescope at
Green Bank, West Virginia, and
targeting the stars Tau Ceti and
Epsilon Eridani.
American geologist Harry Hess
suggests that Earth’s crust
moves away from mid-oceanic
ridges in a process now called
seafloor spreading; the concept
will prove crucial in the devel-
opment of plate tectonics.
Using the 60-foot (18m) solar
tower at Mount Wilson
Observatory in California,
American physicist Robert
Leighton discovers 5-minute
oscillations at the Sun’s surface.
1961
On April 12, cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin becomes the first
human in space and the first to
orbit Earth after he blasts off
from Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan.
On May 5, astronaut Alan
Shepard becomes the first
American in space during a
15-minute suborbital flight after
lifting off from Cape Canaveral,
Florida.
On May 25, President John F.
Kennedy delivers a speech to a
joint session of Congress declar-
ing: “I believe that this nation
should commit itself to achiev-
ing the goal, before this decade
is out, of landing a man on the
Moon and returning him safely
to the Earth.”
Drake writes his famous Drake
equation, which researchers use
to estimate the number of
extraterrestrial civilizations in
the Milky Way Galaxy that are
currently capable of communi-
cating with Earth.
American astronomer Horace
Babcock explains the Sun’s
22-year magnetic cycle as a con-
sequence of the twisting of solar
magnetic field lines.
Quasar 3C 273 looks like a star in visible
light. The wavy line to the upper left is a
jet of high-energy particles originating
from the vicinity of the quasar’s central
black hole. ESA/HUBBLE AND NASA
1963 QUASAR
MYSTERY SOLVED
→ At the dawn of the 1960s,
the cosmos seemed to be
1962
John Glenn rides in the cramped quarters of his Freedom 7 spacecraft during the
first orbital flight of the American space program. NASA
a fairly tranquil place filled with
stars and galaxies that lived long
and usually uneventful lives. Sure,
stars would explode on rare occa-
sions, but these were just minor
JOHN GLENN ORBITS EARTH glitches in the cosmic order.
Astronomers considered the
→ To most observers of the space race in the late 1950s and
early ’60s, it seemed to be a one-nation competition. The
Soviet Union sent the first probes into Earth orbit and to the
Sun to be a typical star: It radiates
lots of visible and infrared light,
a bit of ultraviolet light, and little
Moon, and the first humans into space and Earth orbit. The else. The Sun’s radio emissions,
United States seemed to be perpetually lagging behind. for example, are so weak that our
The tide starts to shift February 20, 1962. That morning, star would be undetectable from
astronaut John Glenn rides his Freedom 7 spacecraft into orbit beyond the solar system.
following a perfect launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Naturally, astronomers never
During the 4-hour-and-56-minute flight, Glenn completes three anticipated seeing radio radiation
orbits of Earth, reaches a maximum altitude of 162 miles, and from other normal stars.
travels at a speed of nearly 17,500 mph. You can imagine the shock in
Glenn becomes an instant American hero. President John F. 1960 when observers discovered
Kennedy awards him the Space Congressional Medal of Honor, a starlike object shining brightly
and he receives a ticker-tape parade in New York. America is at radio wavelengths. This
back in the race, and on pace for that next dream of space travel: “radio star,” cataloged as 3C 48,
a human landing on the Moon. was just the first of many. By
1963, astronomers had found
three more. But radio emission
wasn’t the only strange feature
of these bodies. A detailed anal-
1962 1963 ysis of their visible light revealed
On July 11, AT&T’s Telstar sat- American physicists David Frisch emission lines unlike any seen
ellite transmits the first live and James Smith prove that the before. Astronomers called these
(though non-public) trans- lifetimes of subatomic particles objects quasi-stellar radio
Atlantic television broadcast; its called muons moving at close to sources, or quasars for short.
first publicly available broadcast light-speed increase in accor- California Institute of
takes place on July 23. dance with the time-dilation Technology astronomer
predictions of Albert Einstein’s Maarten Schmidt solves the
The world’s first successful special theory of relativity. mystery in February 1963.
planetary flyby occurs on While examining an optical
December 14 when America’s On June 16, cosmonaut Valentina spectrum of 3C 273 taken with
Mariner 2 flies past Venus, Tereshkova becomes the first the 200-inch Hale Telescope, he
revealing the planet’s hot sur- woman in space, eventually realizes that the spectral lines
face and carbon-dioxide-rich completing 48 orbits of Earth are those of ordinary hydrogen
atmosphere, as well as the during her three-day mission. shifted to much longer wave-
changing speed, density, and lengths. This huge redshift
composition of the solar wind. New Zealand mathematician means that cosmic expansion is
Roy Kerr solves the field equa- carrying 3C 273 away from us at
Niels Bohr, who won the 1922 tions of Einstein’s general the- nearly 16 percent the speed of
Nobel Prize in physics for his ory of relativity that describe a light, and thus it must lie in the
work on atomic structure, dies spinning black hole, and sug- distant universe.
November 18 at age 77, in gests that such objects should
Copenhagen. be widespread.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 47
1964
Astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson use this horn-shaped antenna in Holmdel,
New Jersey, to discover the cosmic microwave background radiation. NASA
Comet Ikeya-Seki (C/1965 S1), perhaps the 20th century’s brightest comet, boasts
FAINT WHISPERS OF THE BIG BANG a long tail as it rises before dawn October 29, 1965. ROGER LYNDS/NOAO/AURA/NSF

→ By the mid-1960s, astronomers are divided into two camps.

One believes that the cosmos began billions of years ago from a
tiny, unimaginably dense region and has been expanding ever since,
while the other thinks that the universe has always existed in pretty
much the state we see it now. Proponents of the Big Bang and steady
→ Some bright comets first appear well out in the solar system,
state models, respectively, cling tightly to their positions, and it is an
active area of dispute.
Nothing could be further from the minds of Bell Labs radio
astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson as they start a new
project in 1964. They plan to revive a 20-foot horn-shaped antenna
in Holmdel, New Jersey, built four years earlier to support the Echo
satellite system. Advancing technology has rendered Echo obsolete,
and the astronomers want to use the antenna to study radio emis-
sions from between galaxies.
But as soon as they start their research, they encounter a persis-
tent microwave “hiss” that seems to come from all parts of the sky.
They embark on a rigorous program to eliminate all traces of inter-
ference (including, famously, the removal of several pigeons nesting
in the antenna), and still the hiss remains.
At the same time, Princeton University astrophysicist Robert Dicke
and colleagues are preparing to launch a search for the microwaves
they believe are a relic of the intense radiation released shortly after
the Big Bang. When the two research teams get together in early 1965,
they realize that Penzias and Wilson have already discovered the fad-
ing glow. And though some die-hard supporters of the steady state
model hold out hope for a while, the discovery of the cosmic back-
ground radiation proves to be the biggest nail in that theory’s coffin.
1965 THE COMET OF THE CENTURY
providing observers with plenty of time to prepare. Comet
Hale-Bopp (C/1995 O1), discovered nearly two years before it
reached its peak in spring 1997, is a prime example. Others flare
up brilliantly within a few weeks after discovery. The poster child
for the quick-hitting visitor has to be Comet Ikeya-Seki (C/1965 S1),
arguably the 20th century’s most brilliant comet.
A pair of Japanese amateur astronomers, Kaoru Ikeya and
Tsutomu Seki, independently discover this fuzzy, 8th-magnitude
object within 15 minutes of each other on September 18.
Preliminary orbital calculations show that it will pass near the Sun
a month later and likely brighten to easy naked-eye visibility.
And boy, does the comet deliver. It swoops within 300,000
miles (450,000km) of the Sun’s surface on October 21. For sev-
eral days around then, it shines at magnitude –5 and shows up
during broad daylight. Several observers in Japan report that it
peaks near magnitude –11 — nearly as bright as the Full Moon
— within a few hours of its closest approach to the Sun. The heat
and strong tidal forces from our star apparently split the comet’s
nucleus into three pieces, yet it still displays a long, bright tail as
it rises before dawn in late October and early November.
Comet Ikeya-Seki belongs to the family of comets known as
Kreutz sungrazers, named after the 19th-century German
astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who studied them.

The world’s largest single-dish
radio telescope, the 1,000-foot-
diameter (300m) behemoth at
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto
Rico, officially opens on
November 1.
1964
Physicists Murray Gell-Mann
and George Zweig indepen-
dently propose the existence of
quarks — the subatomic entities
that make up protons, neutrons,
and many other particles.
On July 31, the Ranger 7 space-
craft returns the first close-up
pictures of the Moon, taking
more than 4,300 images during
its final 17 minutes of flight
before crashing into the
lunar surface.
On October 12, the Soviet Union
launches Voskhod 1, the first
manned mission with more than
one person onboard (there are
three) and the first in which none
of the crew wears a spacesuit.
Chia-Chiao Lin and Frank Shu
explain the Milky Way’s spiral
arms as density waves that
rotate through the galaxy. As
stars and interstellar clouds
orbit the galaxy, they travel
through these denser regions
much like cars moving through
a traffic jam.
British physicist Peter Higgs
(among others) proposes a sub-
atomic particle, later dubbed the
Higgs boson, that explains how
elementary particles get mass.
1965
On March 18, Soviet cosmonaut
Alexei Leonov becomes the first
human to walk in space during
a 12-minute excursion just
90 minutes into the flight
of Voskhod 2.
On March 23, NASA launches
the initial manned mission of
the Gemini program. Gemini 3,
which features America’s first
two-person crew (Gus Grissom
and John Young), circles Earth
three times.

48 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
On June 3, astronaut Ed White
becomes the first American to
walk in space. His 23-minute
jaunt outside the Gemini 4 cap-
sule comes less than five hours
into the four-day mission.
On July 14, Mariner 4 becomes
the first spacecraft to fly past
Mars. It returns 21 photographs
of a heavily cratered topography
and data that show a cold sur-
face beneath a thin atmosphere.
1966
On February 3, the Soviet
Union’s Luna 9 probe gently
touches down on the Moon,
marking the first soft-landing on
another world. The spacecraft’s
camera also returns the first pho-
tos from our satellite’s surface.
The Soviet Union’s Venera 3
spacecraft crashes into Venus
on March 1, becoming the first
human artifact on another
planet. Unfortunately, the com-
munications system fails before
the probe can return any data
on Venus.
On March 16, American astro-
nauts Neil Armstrong and
David Scott conduct the first
docking in space when they join
1967
their Gemini 8 capsule with an
Agena target vehicle. Although
the docking is successful, the
linked spacecraft soon starts
spinning, and NASA aborts the
mission.
The Soviet Union becomes the
first country to place a satellite
into orbit around another world
when Luna 10 reaches the Moon
on April 3. The spacecraft finds
no discernible atmosphere or
magnetic field but does show
that the world has an uneven
mass distribution and that its
rocks appear to be basaltic.
NASA achieves its first soft-
landing on the Moon with
Surveyor 1 on June 2, paving
the way for the upcoming
Apollo missions. The craft takes
more than 11,000 photos, and
measures the ability of the
Moon’s surface to bear weight This giant tank of cleaning fluid in a South Dakota gold mine collected neutrinos
and its temperature. from the Sun for nearly three decades, but it found only one-third the expected
number. BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LAB

TAKING THE SUN’S PULSE

1966 A METEOR STORM FOR THE AGES → Ever since Hans Bethe figured out that the Sun and other
stars generate energy by fusing hydrogen into helium,

→ Most major meteor showers

play the role of a faithful
friend from year to year. Sure, the
Moon might diminish the show
in some years, and every shower
shows natural variations over
time, but normally you can count
on the major players to put on a
good show.
The Leonids are not like most
major showers. In normal years, A view of the 1966 Leonid meteor storm
this annual November event from Kitt Peak National Observatory
struggles to deliver 15 to 20 mete- in Arizona. NOAO/AURA/NSF
ors per hour at its peak. But every
33 years or so, rates rise to storm levels, when an observer can expect
to see 1,000 meteors or more during a typical hour. The return of
the Leonids’ parent comet, 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, every 33 years drives
the periodic nature of these storms. Debris from the comet has not
yet had time to spread evenly along its orbit, so we get great displays
whenever the comet passes through the inner solar system.
Still, no one is quite prepared for the 1966 spectacle. On the morning
of November 17, people across central and western North America wit-
ness the greatest meteor storm in at least a century — a veritable bliz-
zard compared with the shower’s typical scattered flurries. Observers
who can quickly count estimate seeing 40 meteors per second at the
peak, equivalent to nearly 150,000 meteors per hour. Sadly, astrono-
mers aren’t predicting any similar shows for at least several decades.
solar scientists thought they knew what was going on at the
heart of the Sun. But an experiment that starts in 1967 makes
astronomers just a tad uneasy.
While it takes light from the Sun only eight minutes to
travel to Earth, the energy generated in our star’s core needs
tens or hundreds of thousands of years to meander to its sur-
face. So, observations of sunlight today give researchers a pic-
ture of what was going on in the interior long ago.
American chemist and physicist Raymond Davis decides to
find out what’s happening now. Bethe’s equations showed that
nuclear reactions in the solar core give birth to neutrinos, sub-
atomic particles so elusive they rarely interact with matter and
thus exit the Sun without delay. Davis builds a neutrino collec-
tor — a tank holding 100,000 gallons (379kl) of cleaning fluid
— nearly a mile underground in South Dakota’s Homestake
mine. Calculations show that of the 10 million billion neutri-
nos passing through the tank every day, roughly one would
interact with a chlorine atom and change it to argon.
But the detector, which will operate until 1994, records
only about one-third the expected number of neutrinos. This
so-called solar neutrino problem stumps astronomers and
has some questioning how well we know the Sun. A solution
doesn’t arise until the late 1990s, but it nets its discoverers a
Nobel Prize in physics.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 49

Although astronomers discovered
gamma-ray bursts in 1967, they
won’t confirm where the blasts
originate until 1997. This Hubble
Space Telescope image shows the
fading afterglow of a February 28
burst immersed in the soft glow of
its distant host galaxy. ANDREW FRUCHTER
(STSCI)/ELENA PIAN (ITSRE-CNR)/NASA
1967
A SUDDEN
BURST OF
GAMMA RAYS
→ On July 2, a suite
of U.S. Vela satel-
lites orbiting 65,000 miles
above Earth detects a short,
intense burst of gamma rays.
More than a dozen similar
gamma-ray bursts follow
in the next five years. But
because the Vela system is a
military project — the space-
craft are looking toward
Earth for gamma rays
originating from a potential
thermonuclear explosion in
violation of the Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty — the discovery
remains hush-hush. The
story won’t hit the astro-
nomical press until an article
appears in The Astrophysical
Journal in 1973.
The gamma-ray bursts
prove baffling. Astronomers
know they originate from
outside the solar system, but
are they objects in our own
galaxy or located in the dis-
tant universe? Because the
blasts seem to appear only
in gamma rays, and detec-
tors can determine only
vague positions at best for
these high-energy photons,
there is no way to link them
with any visible objects.
Theories flourish in the
absence of hard data, with
scientists devising dozens
of hypotheses as to what
these strange bursts might
be, including collisions
between objects ranging
from comets to stars.
50 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
1968 FIRST PULSAR ANNOUNCED AND DECIPHERED
→ Are we alone in the uni-
verse? For a brief period
at the end of 1967, a pair of
English astronomers thought
they might have an answer.
Cambridge University gradu-
ate student Jocelyn Bell and her
thesis adviser, Antony Hewish,
found pulses of radio waves
repeating every 1.34 seconds
coming from the constellation
Vulpecula. They entertained the
idea that they might have picked
up a signal from an intelligent
species and playfully nicknamed
the source LGM-1 (standing for
“Little Green Men”).
But the team soon found
more pulsating radio beacons
and realized they had to be
astronomical sources. They
publish their initial findings in
the February 28, 1968, issue of
Nature, and soon radio astrono-
mers everywhere are hunting
for “pulsars.”
For such an extraordinary This combined optical and X-ray view shows the heart of the Crab Nebula and the
discovery, an explanation comes pulsar (at the center of the inner hole) that energizes the entire nebula. Astronomers
quickly. Just three months later, discovered this pulsar in 1968. NASA/HST/CXC/ASU/J. HESTER ET AL.
astrophysicist Thomas Gold
publishes a paper in Nature suggesting that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with strong mag-
netic fields that beam their radio emission. Astronomers see a pulse every time the beam points in our
direction, as if it were from a lighthouse.
Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky proposed in 1934 that a massive star’s gravitational collapse could
trigger a supernova explosion and leave behind a neutron star. When observers discover a pulsar at
the heart of both the Crab and Vela supernova remnants later in 1968, astronomers accept Gold’s
suggested connection.
1967 The Soviet Union’s Venera 4 1968
Physicist Steven Weinberg pro- probe descends through Venus’ Gagarin dies March 27 at age 34
poses a model that unifies two of dense clouds on October 18, when the MiG-15 fighter jet he
the four fundamental forces of providing the first direct mea- is training in crashes in
nature — the electromagnetic surements of another planet’s Kirzhach, Russia.
and weak nuclear — into a single atmosphere. During the 93
“electroweak” force. minutes before it succumbs to The movie 2001: A Space
Venus’ pressure, it finds carbon Odyssey, based on a novel by
On January 27, a tragic fire dur- dioxide makes up at least 90 per- Arthur C. Clarke, has its U.S.
ing a preflight test for Apollo 1 on cent of the thick blanket of air. theatrical release on April 3.
the launchpad at Cape Canaveral
kills astronauts Gus Grissom, On November 9, the U.S. On September 15, the Soviet
Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. performs a complete test of the Union launches Zond 5 and its
massive, three-stage Saturn V crew of two tortoises and other
On April 23, Soviet cosmonaut rocket that will take humans to specimens on a mission to loop
Vladimir Komarov dies when the Moon in less than two around the Moon and return to
his Soyuz 1 capsule crashes after years. The rocket launches the Earth. Most experts believe it was
its parachute fails during land- unmanned Apollo 4 space a precursor to a manned lunar
ing. It is the first in-flight fatal- capsule into Earth orbit. mission that never materialized.
ity in space exploration history.
This panoramic photo from July 20, 1969, shows Little West Crater in the right foreground, the lunar module Eagle in the left background, and several of the science experiments
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set up. NASA

1969 THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

→ For most of humanity’s 200,000-year history, Earth has been
our one and only home. But in the three-year period from 1969
to 1972, a dozen people take our species’ tentative first steps into the
cosmos by setting foot on the Moon’s surface.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong first realizes this dream July 20, 1969. As
commander of Apollo 11, Armstrong is in charge of the mission’s over-
all success. He pilots the July 16 launch and guides the lunar module
Eagle to a soft-landing on Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquility)
on the afternoon of the 20th, apparently with just a few drops of fuel to
spare. That evening, after NASA realizes that Armstrong and his crew-
mate, Buzz Aldrin, are not going to be able to sleep, the two prepare to
step outside. (Command module pilot Michael Collins remains in
lunar orbit, anxiously listening to the goings-on below.)
As Armstrong steps off Eagle’s footpad, he matter-of-factly utters
the most famous line in the history of space flight: “That’s one small
step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” After a preliminary
reconnaissance, Aldrin joins him on the surface. They then tackle
the more mundane tasks of collecting samples to return to Earth,
setting up scientific instruments, planting an American flag, and
taking a phone call from President Nixon. After about two-and-a-
half hours on the surface, Armstrong follows Aldrin back to the
safety of the lunar module. After a good night’s sleep, they rendez-
vous with Collins before heading back to Earth for a successful
splashdown in the Pacific Ocean and a hero’s welcome July 24.
The space race is won, and the U.S. looks forward to raising sci-
ence’s second-class status to a top priority on future missions.

After a nearly two-year hiatus,

1968 TO THE MOON AND BACK

Americans return to space on
October 11 with the launch of
Apollo 7. The three-person crew
spends nearly 11 days in Earth

→ For billions of years, life on Earth had

been rooted to a minuscule layer near the
planet’s surface. Starting in 1961, a few select
unexplored terrain. They fire the spacecraft’s
engines 10 minutes later to enter lunar orbit.
As they come out from behind the Moon on
orbit, testing many of the sys-
tems that will be needed for a
mission to the Moon.
astronauts ventured beyond this hospitable their fourth orbit, Lovell sees a sight he almost
zone and reached low Earth orbit, but even they can’t believe. As he will recount to Astronomy 1969
were firmly in the grip of our planet’s powerful in a 2014 interview, “[When I] saw the composi- On May 22, during the Apollo
gravity. It takes until December 1968 before the tion of the Earth with respect to the lunar hori- 10 mission, astronauts Thomas
three crew members of Apollo 8 break Earth’s zon, I said, ‘Bill [Anders], this is it. This is the Stafford and Gene Cernan take
gravitational shackles. picture.’ ” The Earthrise photo becomes one of the lunar module to within 10
Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William the most iconic images in space flight history. miles of the Moon’s surface. The
Anders lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral At the end of their 10th orbit, the astronauts mission serves as a nearly com-
on the 21st and then, near the end of their sec- again fire their engines, setting them on a plete dress rehearsal (without
ond orbit of Earth, fire the Saturn V rocket’s return course for Earth. They splash down in the landing) for Apollo 11.
third stage to send them toward the Moon. the Pacific Ocean on December 27.
The largely uneventful journey culminates On September 28, a large mete-
on the 24th. They speed around our satellite’s Earth rises over the Moon’s limb orite falls near Murchison, in
farside, becoming the first humans to see this in the most famous photo from Victoria, Australia. The
the Apollo 8 mission. The three Murchison meteorite contains
astronauts are the first humans substantial amounts of organic
ever to witness such an event. NASA
compounds and amino acids
that originated in space.

On November 19, Apollo 12

astronauts Pete Conrad and
Alan Bean become the third
and fourth people to walk on
the Moon.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 51
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by David J. Eicher

1970 The 100m Effelsberg Radio

Comet Bennett appears bright
in Earth’s skies, dazzling
observers who track it with
backyard telescopes.
The 88-inch (2.2m) reflector is
completed on Mauna Kea,
Hawaii, becoming the moun-
tain’s first large telescope and
planting a flag on what will
become a world center for
astronomy research.
Stephen Hawking postulates
the horizon area theorem of
black hole dynamics, which
graduate student Jacob
Bekenstein adds to by drawing
an analogy to the second law of
thermodynamics.
Telescope is built southwest of
Bonn, Germany, becoming the
largest fully steerable radio tele-
scope on Earth, a record it holds
for 29 years.
NASA launches the first satellite
specifically designed for X-ray
astronomy, dubbed Uhuru,
which orbits Earth for 2½ years.
Landing in Mare Imbrium (the
Alan Shepard plants a flag on the lunar surface during the Apollo 14 mission. NASA
Sea of Rains), Luna 17 unleashes
its Lunokhod 1 rover on
November 17, becoming the 1971 APOLLO 14 AND APOLLO 15
first lunar rover.
EXPLORE THE LUNAR SURFACE
On December 15, the Soviet
probe Venera 7 becomes the
first craft to soft-land on
→ Two significant Apollo exploration missions follow the danger-
ous accident experienced by Apollo 13 astronauts. Launching
January 31, Apollo 14 carries its crew of Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa,
another planet, exploring the and Edgar Mitchell on a mission to the Fra Mauro formation, the
surface of Venus. intended site of Apollo 13. The nine-day mission includes two exten-
sive moonwalks by Shepard and Mitchell, as Roosa stays aboard the
orbiting command module.
Experiments focus on seismic studies, magnetic experiments, solar
wind analysis, and other basic measurements. On the second walk,
Shepard and Mitchell set out for Cone Crater but have to abandon their

1970
APOLLO 13 TRIUMPHS
goal so their oxygen does not run out. All told, they collect nearly 100
pounds (45kg) of Moon rocks. Famously, Shepard brings along a golf
club and strikes two balls great distances in the weak lunar gravity.
Six months later, Apollo 15 sets off for the Moon with a crew of
DESPITE IN-FLIGHT David Scott, Alfred Worden, and James Irwin. This 12-day mission
features Scott and Irwin walking and driving — the first use of a
MALFUNCTION manned rover! — on the Moon’s surface in a range of experiments and
data collection. They explore Elbow Crater along Hadley Rille, conduct
gravity experiments, collect 170 pounds (77kg) of lunar rocks, and
A view from the lunar module/
command module of Apollo 13 much more. The mission returns safely to Earth on August 7.
shows the severely damaged
service module, fractured in an
oxygen tank explosion. NASA
1971 1972

→ The harrowing story of Apollo 13 — a near tragedy and

then triumph — becomes a worldwide headline. Intended
to be the third lunar landing mission, Apollo 13’s crew consists
The first spacecraft impact on
Mars takes place when the
Soviet Mars 2 probe strikes the
NASA launches Pioneer 10, the
first spacecraft bound for
Jupiter.
of James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, and launches on planet after imaging and analy-
April 11. The mission objective is to explore the area of the Fra sis. Later the same year, Mars 3 1973
Mauro formation, a hilly area believed to have formed by ejecta is the first spacecraft to make a The 158-inch (4m) Mayall
from the impact that created Mare Imbrium. soft-landing on Mars. Telescope is completed on Kitt
Some 56 hours into the mission, while Apollo 13 is about Peak in Arizona, serving as
205,000 miles (330,000km) from Earth, flight controllers ask The first space station of any the largest telescope on the
Swigert to turn on the hydrogen and oxygen tank stirring fans. kind, Salyut 1, is launched by mountaintop and an important
About two minutes later, the crew hears a loud bang. One of the Soviet Union and briefly research engine for years to
the oxygen tanks reads zero and fuel cells fail. Lovell sees some hosts a crew. Tragedy strikes, come.
gas venting out of the craft. Then the other oxygen tank however, when the cabin rapidly
depletes toward empty. depressurizes during re-entry, Many scientists come to believe
The crew is forced to abort the lunar landing, power down killing all three crewmembers. that Cygnus X-1 is probably a
the command module, and use the lunar module as a lifeboat black hole, the result of a dead
for the dangerous trip back to Earth. They sling around the On November 14, Mariner 9 star. A famous bet made
Moon and then return home to a safe splashdown six days after becomes the first probe to orbit between Hawking and Kip
launch, with the world watching in angst during the perilous another planet when it enters Thorne in 1975 aims to settle
flight back. martian orbit, returning images the uncertainty; near-total con-
and data. sensus arrives only in 1990.

52 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
The United States launches its
first space station, Skylab, set to
orbit Earth for six years and
embark on a program of many
experiments conducted in zero
gravity.
Astronomers studying Supernova
1972E, in the galaxy NGC 5253,
propose what comes to be known
as the standard model for under-
standing type Ia supernovae.
Pioneer 11 launches toward
Jupiter and Saturn, examining
the asteroid belt, cosmic rays,
and solar wind on the way.
1974
BL Lacertae, a quasar-like
object, is found to be very dis-
tant when astronomers produce
a redshift for the object that
suggests it is 900 million light-
1974
The turbulent center of the Milky Way Galaxy hides a supermassive black hole
known as Sagittarius A*. NASA/CXC/UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN/Y. BAI ET AL.
years away.

Late in the year, Pioneer 10 flies
by Jupiter and conducts exten-
sive imaging of the planet and
its moons. The encounter pro-
duces the first close-up pictures
of the Great Red Spot and many
other features.
After fooling astronomers with
the promise of becoming spec-
tacularly bright, the so-called
Comet of the Century, Kohoutek,
fizzles, leaving a trail of disap-
pointed, would-be skywatchers
in its wake.
Astronomers Russell Hulse and
Joseph Taylor discover the first
pulsar in a binary system, PSR
B1913+16. They measure the
decay of its orbit due to gravita-
tional radiation escaping the
system, leading to a 1993 Nobel
Prize in physics.
Launched late in 1973, the
Mariner 10 spacecraft arrives at
Mercury following its flyby of
Venus, and transmits the first
images of this barren planet in
the spring.
Gene Cernan makes his
way across the lunar
surface in the world’s
most expensive car
during Apollo 17. NASA
ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER
SAGITTARIUS A*
→ In 1933, astronomer Karl Jansky detected radio emission
from the Milky Way, and believed it was concentrated
toward the center of the galaxy. A powerful, discrete source of
radio emission from the galactic center, however, is discovered
only in 1974. With observations made on February 13 and 15,
astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown detect a strong
source they dub Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”). They use
the Green Bank Interferometer at the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory in West Virginia.
Strong emission from Sgr A* shows that energy is pouring out
of the system, suggesting material flung around the accretion
disk of a central black hole in the galaxy. In 2009, astronomers
would calculate the mass of the Milky Way’s supermassive black
hole as 4.3 million Suns by studying the dynamics of stars orbit-
ing close to the black hole.
In 2012, a group of astronomers would find a large gas cloud
orbiting near Sgr A*. They designate the gas cloud G2, and
find it has a mass about three times that of Earth. At that time,
researchers determine that G2 is heading on a path that will
likely cause it to fall into the black hole. Astronomers believe the
cloud will be disrupted or swallowed in 2014, when its orbit car-
ries it close to the accretion disk, but then fail to see the galactic
fireworks that should have ensued.

Following a visit to Moscow the 1975

previous year and consultation
with colleagues, Hawking pos-
tulates evaporative radiation
1972 THE LAST LUNAR MISSIONS from black holes. His new the-
ory of “Hawking radiation”
The lander portion of the Soviet
probe Venera 9 sets down on
Venus, providing the first venu-
sian surface images, and is fol-
lowed by Venera 10 three days

→ The final two manned lunar missions — for more than 44 years
now — commence when Apollo 16 launches on April 16. The
crew, made up of John Young, Ken Mattingly, and Charlie Duke, sets
means that black holes can lose
mass and energy over time.
later.

U.S. and Soviet craft dock in the

off for the Descartes Highlands region west of Mare Nectaris. Young Pioneer 11 flies past Jupiter dur- Apollo-Soyuz Test Project,
and Duke explore the surface by moonwalks and rover driving while ing the final two months of the marking a high point of inter-
Mattingly orbits in the command module overhead. year, transmitting numerous national cooperation and the
Apollo 16 deploys an experiments package and collects Moon rock images and vast amounts of last use of an Apollo spacecraft.
samples. The crew explores the lunar surface extensively, visiting Stone data back home to Earth.
Mountain, the Cinco Craters, North Ray Crater, and other features. The 6m BTA-6 (Large
The final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, lifts off on December 7. The The 3.9m Anglo-Australian Altazimuth Telescope) is com-
crew, made up of Gene Cernan and Ronald Evans, also features the first Telescope is completed at Siding pleted near Mount Pastukhov in
trained scientist on a lunar mission with geologist Jack Schmitt. The Spring Observatory, Australia, Russia’s Caucasus Mountains. It
mission lasts more than 12 days and splashes down December 19. The becoming for a time the largest never achieves sufficient image
mission boasts the longest Moon stay, the longest moonwalks, the lon- telescope in the Southern quality to live up to its potential.
gest time in lunar orbit, and the largest returned sample of Moon rocks. Hemisphere.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 53
1975-76
Comet West puts on a spectacular show in the morning sky for observers in the
spring of 1976. ESO
The Viking landers reset what we know about the planet Mars. NASA/JPL

1976 VIKING 1 AND VIKING 2

COMET WEST DAZZLES SKY OBSERVERS
→ Nothing brings out interest in backyard astronomy like a
really bright comet. In late 1975 and early 1976, amateur
astronomers are treated to one of the best comets of recent
decades in Comet West (C/1975 V1). Discovered in the summer of
1975 by Richard West at the European Southern Observatory, it
soon becomes clear that this comet will be dramatically bright in
spring the following year. (The comet, by the way, like the name
of its discoverer, is pronounced “Vest.”)
Astronomers calculate that West is on a near-parabolic orbit
with a period of about 254,000 years, and that it will pass within 18
million miles (29 million km) of the Sun on February 25, 1976. At
the time of perihelion, this comet shines so brightly that one can go
outside during early morning, look eastward, and immediately see
it, even without dark adaption. At its brightest, West glows at mag-
nitude –3, approaching the brightness of Venus, and has long gas
and dust tails that can be seen with the naked eye and binoculars.
By early March 1976, millions of people view Comet West in the
predawn sky. At the end of the first week of the month, telescopic
observers notice that the comet is fragmenting. Two pieces of
nucleus can be seen, and later in the month, sharp-eyed observers
notice more shards as the comet breaks apart as it passes the Sun.
LAND ON MARS
→ Just after America’s bicentennial, on July 20, 1976, NASA’s
Viking 1 lander becomes the first spacecraft to touch down on
Mars and succeed with its mission. The Viking program, conceived
long beforehand, sends the Viking 1 lander and an orbiter along with
it, as well as similar spacecraft in the Viking 2 lander and orbiter. This
grand program opens up the science of the Red Planet like nothing
before, and it sends back the first detailed images of Mars from the
planet’s surface. The Viking 2 lander sets down on September 3, some
six weeks after the first landing. The orbiters convey the landers to
Mars and then act as communications relays for data from the
ground, as well as conducting science experiments of their own.
Vikings 1 and 2 revolutionize knowledge about the Red Planet.
They detect numerous geologic forms linked to water, and cause an
explosion in understanding that Mars hosted large amounts of water
on its surface in the ancient past. Images of geologic features show
river valleys, rilles, grooves, and other features that betray the presence
of long-gone liquid water flowing in large quantities. Areas of so-called
chaotic terrain suggest that floods occurred and then quickly dried up.
The missions deliver a wholly new conception of ancient Mars as dra-
matically different from the current Red Planet, and commence scien-
tific thinking about why such a huge change has occurred.

1976
The 158-inch (4m) Blanco
Telescope at Cerro Tololo,
Chile, is completed, becoming a
Southern Hemisphere twin of
the 4m scope atop Kitt Peak.
1977
Astronomer Charles
Kowal, working at Palomar
Observatory, discovers centaur
2060 Chiron, a small body orbit-
ing between the main asteroid
belt and the Kuiper Belt, and the
first discovered of its kind.
The 140-inch (3.6m) ESO
Telescope is completed at La
Silla, Chile, becoming a work-
horse instrument of the
Southern Hemisphere.
Voyager 1 and 2 launch to con-
duct a grand tour of the solar
system. Combined, the two
craft target Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune, as well as
their attendant moons.
1978
The Pioneer Venus Orbiter and
Pioneer Venus Multiprobe space-
craft are launched, beginning a
NASA-led exploration of our
sister planet that lasts 14 years.
The first fully imaging X-ray
observatory, NASA’s Einstein
Observatory, launches into a
circular orbit of Earth and
begins an extensive study of the
X-ray sky.
1977 ASTRONOMERS
DISCOVER RINGS
AROUND URANUS
→ Everyone knows about the gorgeous
rings of Saturn, discovered by
Galileo and examined in greater detail by
The rings of Uranus glow in
Christiaan Huygens. But until March 10, false color in a photograph
1977, no one knows of rings around a sec- captured by Voyager 2. NASA/JPL
ond planet in the solar system. On that
date, James Elliot of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his
team observe an occultation of the star SAO 158687 by Uranus with
the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a converted C-141A Starlifter jet.
The researchers’ aim was to look at the uranian atmosphere as it
moved in front of the steady light of the star. However, during the
occultation the astronomers see the star disappear five times both
before and after the planet’s atmosphere moves into the picture. They
analyze the observations and conclude that the planet must have a
system of narrow rings in orbit. Later, the same group finds four more
rings around the planet. Nearly a decade later, when the Voyager 2
spacecraft flies past Uranus, it images the ring system directly.

54 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 VOYAGER 1 AND
VOYAGER 2 VISIT
JUPITER
→ During the 1960s and
early ’70s, NASA managers
planned a spectacular program

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Pluto’s moon Charon shows an
amazing geology in this 2015
New Horizons spacecraft image.
of planetary exploration. In what
came to be called the “Grand
Tour” of the solar system, the
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space-
craft launched in 1977, setting off

1978
ASTRONOMERS
for distant worlds Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune.
On March 5, 1979, the first
major event of the series occurs
1979
The Voyager spacecraft define much of what we know about Jupiter, including its
magnificent Great Red Spot. NASA/JPL
when Voyager 1 flies past Jupiter.
DETECT A MOON Voyager 2 accomplishes its own jovian flyby some four months later. The spacecraft carry a battery of
ORBITING PLUTO detectors and experiments along with imaging cameras that provide the first detailed study of the solar
system’s largest planet.

→ On June 22, U.S.

Naval Observatory
(USNO) astronomer James
Voyager 1 encounters Jupiter from about 217,000 miles (349,000km), taking most of its pictures during
a 48-hour period of closest approach. The spacecraft focuses on moons, rings, magnetic fields, and radia-
tion belts along with the planet itself. The discovery of volcanoes on Io is the most stunning finding,
Christy has a problem. He along with the discovery of jovian rings. The flybys vastly increase knowledge of the jovian moon system,
is in the middle of examin- and several new satellites are found along the way. Images of strange surface features on Europa lead to
ing images of Pluto made the first thinking that the moon has a thin crust and a subsurface ocean.
with the observatory’s
61-inch (1.6m) astrometric
telescope, and sees that — at
very high magnification The International Ultraviolet 1979 LENSED QUASAR DISCOVERY
— Pluto appears to have a
bump on one of its sides.
Explorer satellite launches and
begins a mission of collecting
CONFIRMS EINSTEIN PREDICTION
USNO astronomers make
subsequent observations
that suggest Pluto might
ultraviolet spectra from the
nearby solar system out to dis-
tant quasars.
→ Early in the year, a team of
astronomers at Kitt Peak
National Observatory use the
have a moon, including 84-inch (2.1m) telescope to image

ESA/HUBBLE AND NASA

noting that the bulge seems Astronomers announce the first a peculiar quasar — the young,
to wander in a fashion that satellite of an asteroid, orbiting energetic core of a galaxy with a
corresponds with Pluto’s 532 Herculina, but Hubble later powerful supermassive black hole
rotation. finds no evidence for it. in its center. On examination,
The body believed to be they find that QSO 0957+561, The double quasar QSO 0957+561
present in the Pluto system 1979 sometimes later called the Twin confirmed one of Einstein’s magnificent
is designated S/1978 P1. A Skylab re-enters Earth’s atmo- Quasar, is a gravitationally lensed predictions: gravitational lensing.
short time later, Christy sphere and disintegrates amid object. A mass located in between
suggests the name Charon, an international media craze Earth and the true quasar, far in the background, splits the light of
borrowing both from and much guesswork about this object and creates a double image. This is a stunning finding as
mythology about the under- where the craft would come QSO 0957+561 is the first object found of its type, and gravitational
world ruled by Pluto and down. Some debris lands south- lensing was one of the only visually observable predictions of
from his wife’s given name, east of Perth, Australia, and in Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Charlene. Ironclad proof of other parts of western Australia. The energy output from material swirling around the quasar’s black
Charon’s existence comes hole is what makes it bright enough to see from a very great distance.
beginning in 1985, when Astronomers are treated to a QSO 0957+561 is 7.8 billion light-years away, and it lies in the constel-
a series of mutual eclipses bright supernova (SN 1979C) lation Ursa Major in our sky. Because of the bending path of light
and transits occurs between that appears in the galaxy around the intervening mass, the light from one image of the quasar
Pluto and Charon, which M100, a popular object in the reaches us about 14 months later than the light from the other image.
last for a period of five years. Virgo Cluster.
With the New Horizons
flyby in 2015, planetary sci- Pioneer 11 reaches Saturn,
entists confirm that Charon with its closest approach on The 142-inch (3.6m) Canada- The 178-inch (4.5m) Multiple
is some 753 miles (1,212km) September 1, and begins trans- France-Hawaii Telescope is Mirror Telescope is completed
across, almost exactly half mitting images back to Earth, completed on Mauna Kea, and begins operations on
the diameter of Pluto, and showing the ringed planet and Hawaii, becoming one of the Mount Hopkins in Arizona,
just under one-tenth the its many moons in unprec- observatory’s most productive using an array of six 71-inch
diameter of Earth. edented detail. instruments. (1.8m) mirrors.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 55
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Korey Haynes

1980
The Solar Maximum Mission FIRST SHUTTLE
launches February 14 to study
solar flares and the Sun’s active
LAUNCH
atmosphere.

On June 6, Luis and Walter

Alvarez suggest that an asteroid
crashing to Earth was respon-
sible for the death of the dino-
saurs 65 million (later amended
to 66 million) years ago.
→ On April 12, NASA sends
its first space shuttle hur-
tling skyward with the launch of
Columbia, STS-1. NASA
designed the shuttle as a reus-
able, relatively inexpensive way
to send astronauts back and
forth between ground and space

1980
VLA BEGINS
OPERATIONS
The Very Large Array (VLA)
sees first light August 23.
Twenty-seven telescopes,
each nearly the size of a
baseball diamond, link
together to form it. Operating
at radio wavelengths, the VLA
is the largest telescope net-
work in the world, and it
remains a world-class instru-
ment to this day. By dragging
the dishes along rail tracks, the
Y-shaped array can be
expanded to 22.62 miles
(36.4km) across or contracted
to only 0.64 mile (1km). The
different sizes of the array
allow astronomers to investi-
gate the cosmos at different
spatial scales, allowing them
to map vast clouds of
hydrogen gas or study ice
on Mercury.
— a commuter’s space bus. In
reality, each flight costs 10 to 20
times more than originally
planned, and the promise of near
1981
Space shuttle Columbia launches with astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen
aboard. The first mission of the Space Shuttle Program lasted 54 hours and traversed
weekly flights dwindles to only a just over a million miles (1.7 million km). NASA
handful per year. But the five
shuttles that become America’s launch and save the Hubble The frontier days of the Apollo
human space flight program for Space Telescope, and in total program are already past, but
30 years will serve to build the carry 355 men and women into the modern Space Age is just
International Space Station, a new era of space exploration. beginning.
Mark Birkinshaw and col-
1981 INFLATION THEORY leagues detect the Sunyaev-
In a succinct, 10-page paper dated January 15, American theoretical Zeldovich (S-Z) effect for the
physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth tackles two major problems fac- first time from clusters of galax-
ing the Big Bang theory and comes up with one strange but eventu- ies May 3. The S-Z effect,
ally widely accepted idea to solve them: inflation. The “horizon a valuable cosmological tool,
problem” points out the eerie smoothness of our universe despite its happens when high-energy
immense size. The “flatness problem” refers to the suspicious fine- electrons “boost” microwave
tuning other cosmological parameters require to explain the
background photons,
observed flat shape of our universe. Inflation theory neatly solves
distorting them.
both problems by positing a brief (10 –33 second) period just after the
Big Bang where the universe expanded by some 1050 times. Guth’s
theory undergoes its own tweaks by cosmologists over the next few
The space shuttle Discovery lifts
years, but the core concept remains intact. Strange as inflation off for the first time August 30.
sounds, it uses physics more or less as we understand it to describe It will venture into space more
the universe we see today. times than any other shuttle.

In December, the SETI

The television series Cosmos:
A Personal Voyage premieres
September 28, hosted by astron-
omer and science communica-
tor Carl Sagan.
Voyager 1 makes its closest
approach to Saturn on
November 12.
Sagan, Bruce Murray, and
Louis Friedman found the
Planetary Society to support
exploration of both our home
world and those beyond the
solar system.
1981
Voyager 2 makes its closest
approach to Saturn on August 25.
The Association of Universities
for Research in Astronomy
teams up with Johns Hopkins
University to form the Space
Telescope Science Institute, in
order to run operations for the
upcoming Hubble Space
Telescope.
1982
Don Backer and his team dis-
cover PSR B1937+21, the first
millisecond pulsar, December 16.
1983
The Large Space Telescope,
still under construction,
changes its name to become the
Hubble Space Telescope.
The Infrared Astronomical
Satellite (IRAS) launches
January 25 to survey the infra-
red sky from space.
Sally Ride hurtles to space on
board the shuttle Challenger on
June 18 to become the first
American woman in space.
On October 19, Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar wins the Nobel
Prize in physics for his work on
black holes.
1984
On February 7, Bruce
McCandless becomes the first
astronaut to perform an unteth-
ered spacewalk.
(Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) Institute is
founded to supplement
NASA’s program, which
is undergoing a roller coaster
of funding increases
and decreases in the
NASA budget.
Also in December, a team
of meteorite hunters in
Antarctica uncover the
ALH84001 meteorite, which
some scientists later think
contains microscopic fossils.
The Soviet Vega 1 and 2
spacecraft launch on their way
toward Venus on December 15
and 21.

56 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 The first deep-space mission of
the European Space Agency,
Giotto, flies past Comet Halley
on March 14.

1988
The Soviet spacecraft Venera 13 arrives at Venus and drops a lander that sends back this 170° panorama — the first color picture On June 9, American astrophys-
from Earth’s sister planet. NASA icist Jacqueline Hewitt uses the
Very Large Array to image the
1982 VENERA 13 AND 14 ARRIVE AT VENUS radio object MG 1131+0456,
which turns out to be the first

→ The Soviet space program took advantage of

a launch window in 1981 to send twin mis-
sions to Venus, Venera 13 and 14. The spacecraft
sample the atmosphere during descent and drill
samples of rock once they touch down. But Venus’
savagely inhospitable climate makes short work of
observed Einstein ring.

Also June 9, astronomers watch

arrive in March 1982 and each drops a lander both vehicles. Venera 14 succumbs to temperatures Pluto occult, or pass in front of,
through Venus’ thick clouds. Venera 13 sends back blistering at 880° F (470° C) and an atmosphere 89 a background star. The star
the first color pictures from Earth’s inner neighbor, times heavier than Earth’s after 57 minutes; Venera dims before passing out of sight
revealing a world that appears visually not too dif- 13 lasts a scant 127 minutes. Still, its record stands behind the planet, conclusively
ferent from Mars — rocky and red. Both landers to the present day. proving that Pluto has an
atmosphere.

A team of scientists discovers

1985
On September 11, the
International Cometary
Explorer (ICE) spacecraft flies
through the tail of Comet 21P/
Giacobini-Zinner, the first mis-
sion to buzz a comet.
Atlantis, the fourth (of five)
shuttles added to NASA’s fleet,
leaves the launchpad for the
first time October 3.
1986
VOYAGER 2 FLIES
BY URANUS
On January 24, the Voyager
“Grand Tour” of the solar sys-
tem encounters its first new
object when Voyager 2
becomes the first — and only
— spacecraft to fly past Uranus.
While the planet itself remains a
mystery under its thick clouds,
the spacecraft reveals 10 previ-
ously undiscovered moons, two
additions to Uranus’ ring sys-
tem, and a surprising magnetic
field where none had been
expected. The magnetic field
also shows an odd corkscrew
pattern, thanks to the planet’s
extreme tilt as it orbits the Sun.
Voyager 2 photographs Uranus’
larger moons, including
Miranda’s extreme geologic
faults and scars. Scientists sus-
pect, based on these and later
images, that Miranda just
barely escaped catastrophe
from a long-ago impact.
deuterium on Mars on June 24.
This heavy cousin of hydrogen
allows researchers to measure
how much water the Red Planet
once contained.
In July, researchers announce
the first evidence for an extra-
solar planet around the star
Alrai (Gamma Cephei). The
data are of poor quality and
later retracted, although other
Halley’s Comet is within one month of its maximum brightness in this image, astronomers do prove its exis-
which astronomers captured on March 8, 1986. NSSDC’S PHOTO GALLERY (NASA) tence with higher-quality data.
1986 HALLEY’S COMET The Soviet Phobos 1 and 2 mis-
sions launch for Mars in July.
→ Halley’s Comet is back again. Not only have cameras and
instrumentation evolved enormously since its previous visit in
1910, but this time, humanity also flies out to meet the comet part-
Phobos 1 suffers a communica-
tions error and is lost en route.
Phobos 2 achieves martian orbit,
way. Halley’s Armada, as it is called, comprises the European Giotto but also loses communication
probe, two Soviet craft named Vega 1 and 2, and the Sakigake and before it can release its lander.
Suisei spacecraft from Japan. Together, they pinpoint the comet’s
position and study its nucleus up close. The Great Comet’s ’86 The International Dark-Sky
appearance proves disappointing for visual observers because the Association is founded to fight
comet’s closest approach is its most distant in the modern era. Still, the growing problem of light
Astronomy Contributing Editor Stephen James O’Meara manages to pollution and preserve skies for
spy the comet in January 1985, months before any other amateur viewing enthusiasts.
observers spot it.
Stephen Hawking’s popular
science book, A Brief History of
Time, is published and immedi-
1986 The first results from the ately becomes a bestseller.
A group of seven astronomers Harvard Center for
identifies the location of the Astrophysics Redshift Survey On November 15, the Soviet
Great Attractor, an apparently reveal a “stick man” shape in space program launches Buran,
massive collection of galaxies the data, indicating that the a reusable spacecraft that should
whose tugging on the local uni- distribution of galaxies is any- have been competition for
verse was clearly observed, but thing but random, and shows NASA’s shuttle program. Buran’s
whose location was a mystery. specifically the collection only flight is unmanned, and it
known as the Coma Cluster. never flies again.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 57
 1986 THE CHALLENGER DISASTER

ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN OBSERVATORY/DAVID MALIN IMAGES

Space exploration stumbles to a devastating halt when the shuttle
Challenger explodes just 73 seconds after launch on January 28,
resulting in a total loss of ship and crew. The shuttle carries five astro-
nauts and two payload specialists, including high school teacher
Christa McAuliffe. Engineers voice concerns about the potential dan-
gers of the cold temperatures on launch day on the shuttle’s rubber
O-rings, but a flawed chain of decision-making fails to prevent catas-
trophe. NASA spends months investigating its mistakes, and years try-
ing to learn from them. President Ronald Reagan addresses the nation
that night while the country and the world mourn Challenger’s loss:
“We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us.
… We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that
we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers.” It takes nearly three years
for NASA to return to human space flight.
Supernova 1987A marked the death of a massive star. These two images show the
explosion (left) and the region prior to it, with the original star marked by the arrow.
1987 SUPERNOVA 1987A
→ On February 23, a brilliant star lights up the Large Magellanic
Cloud. Actually, Supernova 1987A exploded some 168,000
years ago, but its light reaches Earth for the first time that day, wow-
ing astronomers and providing invaluable observations of a cosmi-
cally close-up supernova — about as nearby as astronomers would
find comfortable. Aside from the spectacular glowing images cap-
tured over the next few years, astrophysicists delight in the detection
of 25 neutrinos that arrive a few hours before the photons strike
Earth and its telescopes. While the supernova releases billions of
neutrinos, these nearly massless particles are notoriously tricky to
detect, and 25 is considered practically an avalanche. More impor-
tantly, the neutrinos’ arrival confirms important theories about how
core-collapse supernovae explode. Supernovae are some of the few
astronomical events that unfold on human timescales, and getting to
watch this one up close adds whole chapters to scientists’ under-
standing of these cosmic explosions.

1989
On March 13, a massive solar 1989
storm overwhelms the power
grid in Quebec, plunging the
COBE LAUNCHES
province into darkness. On November 18, the
Cosmic Background Explorer
(COBE) satellite launches
The Magellan probe launches
into space carrying just
toward Venus on May 4 to map

1986
Astronauts captured this view of the Mir Space Station from space shuttle Endeavour
on February 9, 1998, during the STS-89 mission. NASA
the planet’s surface through its
thick clouds.

The Hipparcos satellite launches

three instruments. They
search for the infrared
background of the universe,
map cosmic radiation,
and measure the spectrum
into space August 8 to pinpoint of the microwave back-
MIR LAUNCHES TO ORBIT the location and movement of
100,000 stars, the most detailed
ground. The spacecraft
spends four years studying

→ While plagued by its share of problems from the annoying to

the nearly disastrous, Mir, launched February 20, is humanity’s
first semi-permanent long-term home outside of Earth’s atmospheric
study of stellar motion to date.

Voyager 2 sends back the first

the quiet and pervasive
whisper of light that underlies
the whole sky. But the first
shelter. The space station operates for 15 years, outliving its Soviet ever pictures of Neptune’s rings spectrum is returned to the
home country and becoming a Russian outpost overnight. It eventu- August 22. ground after only nine
ally welcomes even American astronauts after the Cold War thaws. minutes of observation, and
Mir oversees thousands of science projects and multiple joint mis- Voyager 2 makes its closest it immediately becomes one
sions with other nations, and its inhabitants break every record for approach to Neptune on of the most famous and
space duration, some of which stand to this day. Much like some of August 25. satisfying examples of
our earthly homes, Mir can be messy, accident prone, and even have observation matching
a peculiar smell. But it is also warmth in the darkness of space, and The Galileo spacecraft launches prediction, and the Nobel
Committee would later refer
125 cosmonauts and astronauts from 12 different nations eventually toward Jupiter on the shuttle
to the mission as “the starting
gain the privilege to call it home. Atlantis on October 18.
point for cosmology as a
precision science.”

58 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by Raymond Shubinski

THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE

OPENS ITS EYE
→ On April 24, the space shuttle Discovery lifts off from Cape
Canaveral, Florida, carrying a massive telescope in its cargo
bay. Astronauts deploy the Hubble Space Telescope the following day,
and the orbiting observatory sees first light on May 20, when it cap-
tures a small part of the star cluster NGC 3532.
NASA received initial funding for what would become Hubble in
1977, but problems plagued the project from the start. The most
tragic setback came on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle
Challenger exploded, pushing Hubble’s launch back nearly four years.
NASA chose Perkin-Elmer to make Hubble’s 2.4-meter primary
mirror. It is not the optical company’s finest hour. The telescope’s
first images reveal the mirror has significant spherical aberration,
which means it cannot bring light to a sharp focus. Although the
telescope is usable, it’s far from the precision instrument scientists
expected. The mirror flaw severely damages NASA’s image and repu-
tation, and Hubble soon becomes the butt of jokes on late-night TV.
1990
Astronauts aboard Discovery use the shuttle’s Remote Manipulator Arm to deploy
the Hubble Space Telescope on April 25, 1990. NASA
In December 1993, however, astronauts on the space shuttle
Endeavour service Hubble for the first time. They install two new
instruments that correct the telescope’s vision and increase its reso-
lution to original specifications.
Hubble begins returning breathtaking photos of the cosmos,
including the Pillars of Creation, the interacting Antennae Galaxies,
and the multiple Deep Fields. Hubble thus opens an important new
era in observational astronomy, and will go down as one of the great-
est science instruments of all time.

1990
On February 14, the Voyager 1
spacecraft takes an image of
Earth, later dubbed “Pale Blue
Dot,” from a distance of
3.76 billion miles (6.05 billion
km). It shows our planet as a
speck in the emptiness of space.
On April 23, NASA’s Swift sat-
ellite detects a gamma-ray burst
born from a collapsing star
when the universe was just
630 million years old.
1992 EXTRA, EXTRA, POPE PARDONS GALILEO!
The Magellan spacecraft enters
orbit around Venus on August
10 to start a four-year mission
that will use radar to map the
cloudy planet’s surface.
The Keck I Telescope on Mauna
Kea, Hawaii, achieves first light
in November with nine of its 36
mirror segments. Science obser-
vations with the 10-meter scope
will begin in March 1993.
On November 13, CERN com-
puter scientist Tim Berners-Lee
publishes the first web page,
titled “The WorldWideWeb
Project.”
1991
Scientists announce that a
110-mile-wide (177km) circular
structure on Mexico’s Yucatán
Peninsula is an impact crater
that likely marks the spot where
an asteroid struck Earth, wiping
out the dinosaurs.
On April 7, astronauts aboard
the space shuttle Atlantis deploy
the Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory, the second of
NASA’s Great Observatories
(after Hubble).
NASA’s Galileo spacecraft
achieves the first asteroid flyby
on October 29, when it visits
951 Gaspra.
Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale
Frail discover the first planets
beyond the solar system, orbit-
ing the pulsar PSR B1257+12.
They will publish their findings
in Nature on January 8, 1992.

→ No, this is not the head-
line from some 17th- or
18th-century tabloid, but a typi-
cal announcement in newspa-
pers worldwide in late October
1992. According to The New
York Times, “With a formal
statement at the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences, [Pope
John Paul II] will formally close
a 13-year investigation into the
Church’s condemnation of
Galileo in 1633.” The move
effectively forgives the Italian
astronomer for advocating that
Earth revolves around the Sun.
The row had its origins in
1610, when Galileo Galilei pub-
lished a thin volume declaring
that the Moon had mountains
and valleys like Earth. Even
more exciting were his observa-
tions that four bright satellites
revolve around Jupiter. This flew
in the face of church doctrine
that Earth is the center of all
motions. In 1613, Galileo pub-
lished his observations showing
that Venus goes through phases
like our Moon. This phenom-
enon could only happen if both
Venus and Earth revolve around
the Sun.
In 1616, the church issued
a stern warning to Galileo to
knock it off. Rather than lie low,
Galileo pushed ahead with his
Copernican agenda. The ham-
mer fell hard in 1633, when the
scientist went before the Inqui-
sition and was condemned to
house arrest for the rest of his
Galileo was in his early 70s and under
house arrest for supporting the
Copernican model of the solar system
when Justus Sustermans painted this
portrait in 1636. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
life. It would take the church
more than 350 years to admit its
mistake and exonerate Galileo.
1992
Scientists using data from the
Cosmic Background Explorer
satellite announce they have
discovered tiny fluctuations
in the cosmic microwave back-
ground radiation, the seeds
from which galaxies and
galaxy clusters formed in the
Big Bang’s aftermath.
NASA launches the Extreme
Ultraviolet Explorer satellite on
June 7 to conduct an all-sky
survey at wavelengths inacces-
sible from the ground.
On August 30, David Jewitt
and Jane Luu discover 1992 QB1,
the first Kuiper Belt object
beyond Pluto.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 59
1994

Jupiter’s cloud
tops bear the dark
scars of multiple impacts
from the fragments of Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994.
NASA/THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE COMET TEAM
COMET SHOEMAKER-LEVY 9
SMASHES INTO JUPITER
→ One of the most incredible astronomical events of the
1990s plays out in July 1994, when fragments of Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact Jupiter.
The story began in March 1993, when Eugene and Carolyn
Shoemaker, along with noted comet hunter David Levy, were
searching for near-Earth objects with the 48-inch Oschin Schmidt
Telescope at Palomar Observatory. Instead, they discovered a
comet in a close orbit around Jupiter. The giant planet’s powerful
gravity ripped the comet into a couple dozen fragments in 1992,
and they were on a collision course with the gaseous world.
Astronomers are incredibly excited, and can make only edu-
cated guesses as to what will happen — no one had ever wit-
nessed an impact on such a scale before. Amateur astronomers
and professional observatories around the world and in space
put other projects on hold to watch the event.
Beginning on July 16 and lasting for nearly a week, the frag-
ments penetrate Jupiter’s upper atmosphere with spectacular
results. The individual pieces strike the planet at speeds of
approximately 134,000 mph (216,000 km/h). The impacts pro-
duce huge fireballs and leave behind enormous dark spots that
will remain visible for months. The Shoemakers and Levy had set
out to find ways to help protect Earth from rogue asteroids. As a
result of their efforts, however, the team provides dramatic proof
of how powerful nature can be — and of the threat cosmic
impacts pose to our planet.
Comet Hale-Bopp sports a dramatic blue gas tail and a curving dust tail as it
swings through the inner solar system in March 1997. GERALD RHEMANN
1995 PRELUDE TO A MASTERPIECE
→ On July 23, 1995, Thomas Bopp co-discovers a fuzzy
object that would become the Great Comet of 1997. He is
observing from Stanfield, Arizona, looking at star clusters and
galaxies in Sagittarius. Not far away in New Mexico, Alan Hale
is observing the same area of sky from his driveway. Hale is an
enthusiastic (though, until then, unsuccessful) comet hunter, but
neither he nor Bopp could imagine how spectacular their find
would become.
At the time of the discovery, Comet Hale-Bopp (C/1995 O1)
is some 575 million miles (925 million km) from Earth, well
beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Hale and Bopp each peg the comet
at between magnitude 10.5 and 11.0 and can discern a coma,
both highly unusual for such a distant comet. As Hale-Bopp
approaches the inner solar system, it brightens steadily. By May
1996, observers can see the comet with the naked eye. And when
it passes closest to the Sun in April 1997, it shows even in day-
light. The Great Comet will remain visible without optical aid
for a record 18 months.
Hale-Bopp also triggers a bizarre and tragic event. In Novem-
ber 1996, an amateur astronomer claims he has photographed
an object “following” in Hale-Bopp’s wake. Some UFO enthusi-
asts quickly embrace this as new evidence of alien life visiting
Earth. In California, a cult called Heaven’s Gate sees this as a
sign that they will be transported to the “mother ship.” In prep-
aration, 39 cult members commit suicide.

Astronomers detect both X-ray
and gamma-ray pulsations from
Geminga, confirming that the
mysterious gamma-ray source is
a nearby pulsar.
1994
Using images the Galileo space-
craft took during its August
1993 flyby, scientists discover a
moon orbiting asteroid 243 Ida.
Later named Dactyl, it is the
first known asteroid moon.
Astronomers discover the
Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal
Galaxy. At a distance of only
about 50,000 light-years from
the Milky Way’s center, it is the
closest galaxy to our own.
Astronomers discover the first
known brown dwarf — an
object bigger than a planet but
smaller than a star — in orbit
around the star Gliese 229.
Astronomers discover an
unusual pair of rings around
Supernova 1987A in Hubble
Space Telescope images.
Researchers later determine
that they are material expelled
tens of thousands of years
before the explosion.
1995
In February, Project Phoenix
begins a nine-year search for
alien transmissions from about
800 nearby Sun-like stars.
On April 1, the Hubble Space
Telescope photographs the
Eagle Nebula (M16), which
results in the iconic “Pillars of
Creation” image.
The Ohio State University
Radio Observatory’s 22-year
“Big Ear” project to find extra-
terrestrial transmissions comes
to an end.

60 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
On October 6, Swiss astrono-
mers Michel Mayor and Didier
Queloz announce their discov-
ery of a planet orbiting the star
51 Pegasi. It is the first planet
found circling a Sun-like star.
The Galileo spacecraft enters
orbit around Jupiter on
December 7, the same day that
its atmospheric probe plunges
into the giant planet’s thick
clouds.
1996
German scientists create element
No. 112 on February 9; they will
later name it Copernicium after
Polish astronomer Nicolas
Copernicus.
NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker
spacecraft launches from
Cape Canaveral, Florida, on
February 17. It would enter orbit
around the near-Earth asteroid
433 Eros on February 14, 2000.
In October, the 10-meter Keck II
Telescope on Mauna Kea in
Hawaii sees first light.
Astronomer and science
popularizer Carl Sagan dies
December 20 at age 62, in Seattle.
A spectacularly long gas tail stretches more than halfway across the sky during
the close approach of Comet Hyakutake in early April 1996. GERALD RHEMANN
1995 FINDING OUR PLACE ON EARTH
→ It’s amazing how quickly
we take things for granted.
The World Wide Web, smart-
phones, digital cameras, and so
much more were unheard of
50 years ago. Now, many of us
use planetarium programs on
computers, tablets, and phones.
To work, all require exact loca-
tion information. Enter the
Global Positioning System
(GPS), which becomes fully
operational in 1995. The
system we so depend on came
out of the Cold War and the
needs of the U.S. military. The
entire project is overseen by the
Department of Defense.
The infrastructure is enor-
mous. At any given time, 24
to 32 satellites are involved.
Multiple systems for control and
communication also operate on
the ground. Overall, millions of
people now depend on this GPS
network. In short, like the
World Wide Web, GPS weaves
into many aspects of our lives.
There is a little-recognized
hero in all of this: Albert Ein-
stein. The GPS satellites are
moving with respect to observers
1996
A few dozen satellites orbiting about 12,550 miles (20,200km) above Earth provide
the navigational accuracy the Global Positioning System needs. U.S. GOVERNMENT
on Earth, so special relativity according to the precepts of gen-
demands that the clocks on the eral relativity. With both effects
satellites will appear to run ever- taken into account, the GPS
so-slightly slower compared system can achieve an accuracy
with clocks on the ground. The of close to 14 nanoseconds.
curvature of space-time caused That’s what it takes for that
by Earth’s mass also means smartphone or navigation unit
satellite clocks must run fast in your car to keep you spot on.
COMET OF THE LONG TAIL
→ In December 1995, amateur astronomer Yuji Hyakutake
detected a fuzzy object while observing through large binoc-
ulars from southern Japan. It would turn out to be a comet, and
astronomers would officially designate it C/1995 Y1. Hyakutake
continued to follow his discovery through January 1996.
On the morning of the 31st, he finds another comet not far from
the discovery location of the first. The second Comet Hyakutake
(C/1996 B2) soon puts on a spectacular show. This long-period visi-
tor had last journeyed through the inner solar system some 17,000
years earlier. On its 1996 pass, however, it has some stiff media com-
petition from the newly discovered Comet Hale-Bopp. On March 25,
Hyakutake comes within 10 million miles (16 million km) of Earth
— a stone’s throw on the scale of the solar system. It remains visible
all night from the Northern Hemisphere during its closest approach.
During the final week of March, the comet peaks at magnitude 0.
Its head appears distinctly greenish, and is exceptionally large —
nearly four times the diameter of a Full Moon. But the most spec-
tacular feature of Hyakutake is its tail, a gossamer streamer that
stretches across nearly 100° of sky. The comet’s head passes within a
few degrees of Polaris, the North Star, and races so fast that observ-
ers can see motion in just a few minutes.
Hyakutake fades quickly and disappears to the naked eye by late
May. It’s the first of two Great Comets in the mid-1990s, followed a
year later by the even brighter Comet Hale-Bopp.
W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 61
 1997
1996 Clyde Tombaugh, the astrono-
IT CAME FROM MARS mer who discovered Pluto, dies
January 17 at age 90, in Las

→ “Today, rock 84001 speaks to us across all

those billions of years and millions of
miles.” No, these weren’t the musings of an
Cruces, New Mexico.

Astronomers using the Hubble

astronomer; President Bill Clinton spoke these Space Telescope discover a
words on national television while talking about supermassive black hole in the
a meteorite known as Allan Hills 84001. core of galaxy M84, confirming
On August 7, NASA scientist David S. McKay the existence of these extraordi-
announces that he has found evidence for micro- nary objects.
scopic fossils of possible microbes in this rock. Martian meteorite ALH84001 and this embedded wormlike
Meteorite hunters found the stone in the Allan structure, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a fossilized A host of space-based telescopes
Hills ice field of Antarctica. A chemical analysis microbe, ignite debate about life on Mars in 1996. NASA confirm that gamma-ray bursts
shows that it originated on Mars. reside in the distant universe.
The rock appears to have solidified from molten things they expected to see are what appear to
rock about 4 billion years ago, when the Red Planet be nanoscale fossils. 1998
had liquid water on its surface. The bacteria-like After the August 7 announcement, many peo- On March 5, scientists
structures apparently formed around the same ple are thrilled with the discovery — and there announce that observations by
time. About 17 million years ago, a huge meteorite are many doubters, as well. Later experiments the Lunar Prospector spacecraft
or small asteroid slammed into Mars and blasted show that structures such as these could form found evidence for water ice at
ALH84001 free of Mars’ gravity. And approxi- without being biological in nature. both the north and south poles
mately 13,000 years ago, the martian meteorite Even today, after 20 years, no one has been able of the Moon.
came to rest in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. to determine conclusively whether ALH84001
McKay and his team used an electron micro- contains long-dead Martians or just nonbio- Observations made with the
scope to examine the rock’s interior. The last logical imposters. Super-Kamiokande neutrino
detector in Japan show that
these subatomic particles
have mass.

Astronaut Alan Shepard, Amer-

ica’s first man in space and the
only person to play golf on the
Moon, dies July 21 at age 74, in
Pebble Beach, California.

On October 29, after a 36-year

hiatus, John Glenn returns to
space. The 77-year-old is a pay-
load specialist aboard the space
shuttle Discovery.

Scientists using data from the

The aptly named “Twin Peaks” jut from the horizon southwest of the rock-strewn landing site of Mars Pathfinder. NASA/JPL
Galileo orbiter at Jupiter dis-
cover strong evidence that an
1997 A BUSY YEAR ON MARS ocean of liquid water lies under
the ice of the moon Europa.

→ NASA does Mars on the cheap in 1997.

According to then NASA Administrator
Daniel Goldin, the space agency wants to do
things “faster, better, cheaper.” The idea is soon
put to the test. On November 7, 1996, Mars
Global Surveyor lifts off from Cape Canaveral,
Florida. On December 4, Mars Pathfinder fol-
lows suit.
The relatively lightweight Mars Pathfinder
makes the journey more quickly, bouncing to a
landing on a cushion of air bags on July 4, 1997.
Pathfinder consists of two parts: a station named
in honor of planetary scientist Carl Sagan and a
small mobile unit called Sojourner. It is the first
successful American mission to Mars since
Viking 1 and 2 arrived in 1976.
Pathfinder’s mission is a ground-based study
of the planet’s geology, climate, and atmosphere.
The little Sojourner rover makes a number of
The Antu Telescope — the first
of the four 8.2-meter telescopes
exploratory runs and demonstrates that cheap that form the European
can work. The final data transmission from Southern Observatory’s Very
Pathfinder comes at the end of September. Large Telescope on Cerro
For the cost, Mars Global Surveyor proves to Paranal, Chile — sees first light.
be worth every penny. The spacecraft goes into
orbit around Mars on September 12, 1997, and Scientists at three laboratories
returns a tremendous amount of data about the around the world demonstrate
atmosphere, gravity, and surface features of the quantum teleportation, sparking
world. And unlike Pathfinder, Surveyor just keeps cries of “Beam me up, Scotty!”
going and going: After completing its primary
mission in 2001, NASA extends Surveyor’s mis-
sion again and again until finally losing contact
with the spacecraft in November 2006.

62 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 A BASE IN SPACE
→ The International Space
Station (ISS) has to rank
among the grandest achievements
of the 20th century. The station
allows astronauts to conduct
experiments in astronomy, phys-
ics, biology, and other sciences
in a microgravity environment.
The ISS is not the first inhab-
ited space station — the Amer-
ican Skylab in the mid-1970s and
the Soviet (later Russian) Mir
from 1986 to 1999 were two of
the most successful — but it is
the most durable.
On November 20, 1998,
a Russian Proton rocket carries
the first components into low
Earth orbit. The Zarya Control
Module holds power units, com-

munication equipment, and fuel
storage. Two weeks later, space
shuttle Endeavour leaves Earth
with the Unity Module aboard.
This section, which connects
directly to Zarya, also serves as
the docking station for future
shuttle missions. In May 1999,
Discovery delivers more equip-
1998
The mammoth International Space Station stands nearly completed as the space shuttle Atlantis pulls away in May 2010. NASA
ment and supplies to the fledg- whole space station is nearly as than 200 astronauts since
ling space station. long as a Boeing 747 and wider November 2000, and should
Today, more than 40 missions than an American football field be able to continue operations
later, the ISS is complete. The is long. It has been home to more for another 20 years.

1999
In January, both the 8.2-meter
Subaru and 8.1-meter Gemini
telescopes achieve first light on
Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
On July 20, Oceaneering
International, Inc. recovers
Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury
space capsule flown by
Gus Grissom on America’s
second space flight, from the
Atlantic Ocean.
On July 23, astronauts aboard
the space shuttle Columbia
deploy the third of NASA’s
Great Observatories, the
Chandra X-ray Observatory.
On December 16, NASA’s
Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory detects the so-
called Beethoven Burst, one of
the most powerful gamma-ray
bursts ever seen.
1998 THE UNIVERSE IN OVERDRIVE
→ After years of painstaking
analysis, astronomers
announce their startling conclu-
sion that the expansion rate of
the cosmos is accelerating.
In the late 1920s, Edwin
Hubble discovered that nearly
every galaxy exhibits a redshift.
In other words, the dark lines in
their spectra are all shifted to
longer (redder) wavelengths.
This could only mean that gal-
axies are moving away from one
another. Hubble calculated the
rate of expansion and found it
to be uniform throughout his
observations — the farther away
a galaxy resides, the faster it
recedes.
During the 1990s, two teams
of astronomers study type Ia
supernovae in an effort to map
the universe more precisely. This
kind of supernova — created
when a white dwarf star accu-
mulates too much mass from
a companion and detonates
— produces nearly the same
amount of energy in every blast.
They thus make great “standard
candles” to determine cosmic
distances.
To everyone’s surprise, the
farthest of these candles appear
fainter than their distances
would imply. Both research
teams conclude that the only way
this could happen is if the uni-
versal expansion rate is speeding
up. So what’s happening?
Astronomers believe that
a mysterious repulsive force
they’ve dubbed “dark energy” Observations of distant supernovae,
such as 2002dd (the red dot at the
drives this acceleration. The image’s center), helped astronomers
most recent results from the discover that the cosmos is expanding
European Space Agency’s Planck at an accelerating rate. NASA/J. BLAKESLEE (JHU)
spacecraft show that dark
energy accounts for 69 percent 26 percent of the cosmos. And
of the mass-energy content of the ordinary matter that makes
the universe. An equally myste- stars, planets, and people — the
rious substance known as “dark only stuff that astronomers can
matter,” which gives off no light observe directly through their
but interacts with other matter telescopes — contributes a
through gravity, constitutes measly 5 percent.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 63
 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
by David J. Eicher

NASA/ESA/H. TEPLITZ AND M. RAFELSKI (IPAC/CALTECH)/A. KOEKEMOER

(STSCI)/R. WINDHORST (ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY)/Z. LEVAY (STSCI)
2000
Bolstered by novel techniques
for casting glass, the MMT
Observatory reopens as a 6.5m
single-mirror instrument on
Mount Hopkins, Arizona.

NASA/JPL/JHUAPL A team of solar system hunters

led by astronomer Brett
The last image of asteroid Eros taken Gladman finds 11 previously
before the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft
unknown moons of Saturn. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field shows more than 10,000 distant galaxies in a single frame.
crashes into it shows a portion of surface
only 20 feet (6m) across.
The last of the four 320-inch
2001
NEAR SHOEMAKER
(8.2m) components of the Very
Large Telescope, Paranal
Observatory, Chile, sees first
2003 HUBBLE’S MAGNIFICENT
ULTRA DEEP FIELD
TOUCHES DOWN
light, inaugurating the greatest
telescope of the Southern → Aside from studying thousands of individual objects in
the universe, the Hubble Space Telescope periodically
ON 433 EROS Hemisphere. focuses intensely on small regions of the sky. In 1995, HST
astronomers produced a “Hubble Deep Field” in the constella-

→ Launched in 1996, the

Near-Earth Asteroid
Rendezvous-Shoemaker space-
The 318-inch (8.1m) Gemini
South Telescope on Cerro
Pachón, Chile, sees first light,
tion Ursa Major, recording extremely distant galaxies to survey
the early cosmos.
In 2003, Hubble astronomers take this approach a big step
craft set off on an ambitious opening another major work- further with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The HUDF focuses
mission to orbit and study the horse telescope. on a small region of space in the constellation Fornax and pro-
near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros. duces an image containing 10,000 distant galaxies in a field of
The spacecraft carried an array A team led by astronomers Scott view some 2.4 arcminutes on each side.
of instruments, including an Sheppard and David Jewitt dis- When it was completed in 2004, the HUDF was the deepest
X-ray/gamma-ray spectrom- covers 10 moons of Jupiter. image of the universe ever taken, and it is used as a search field
eter, a multispectral camera, for the most distant galaxies known. Some of these objects
a laser rangefinder, a near- 2001 formed just 400 million to 800 million years after the Big
infrared imaging spectrograph, April sees the launch of the Bang, and they are blobby protogalaxies, believed to have
and a magnetometer. NEAR 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft, accreted by combination into more mature galaxies as the uni-
Shoemaker, named for planetary which enters martian orbit six verse aged. Hubble astronomers find that during the formation
scientist Eugene Shoemaker, set months later and begins science of young galaxies, less than a billion years after the Big Bang,
goals of examining the compo- operations. very high rates of star formation occurred. They also catalog
sition, mineralogy, mass, and young galaxies — their sizes, characteristics, and luminosities
magnetic field of a near-Earth Another team including — over a range of the early universe. They find that galaxy
asteroid for the first time. Sheppard and Jewitt discovers structures were primitive in the early universe, and that they
En route to Eros, the craft 11 more moons of Jupiter. evolved rapidly over time.
made a flyby of asteroid 253
Mathilde, studying it from a
distance of 750 miles (1,200km).
On Valentine’s Day in 2000,
after a journey of four years and
one missed orbital insertion
2001 WMAP EXAMINES
and subsequent recovery, the COSMIC MICROWAVE
spacecraft closed in on Eros and
began a year of orbital science. BACKGROUND
On February 12, 2001, NEAR
sets down on the asteroid sur-
face. Its wealth of data leads to
→ The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
Probe (WMAP), named for cosmologist
David Wilkinson, launches in 2001 to study the
the first three-dimensional map cosmic microwave background radiation. Like its
of an asteroid, and the realiza- predecessor, the Cosmic Background Explorer, The WMAP sky shows the echo of the Big Bang and redefined
tion that Eros has been geo- WMAP confirms and further refines cosmological what astronomers know about the cosmos. NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAM
logically active, with grooves, data that supports our view of the Big Bang origin
ridges, craters, and rocky of the universe. Further, WMAP plays a signifi- of the universe is currently 69.3 km/s/megaparsec;
debris. The team counts more cant role in confirming the current cosmological and the composition of the universe is 71.4 percent
than 100,000 craters larger than so-called Standard Model, known as Lambda- dark energy, 24.0 percent dark matter, and 4.6 per-
50 feet on the rock, which spans CDM (for cold dark matter). cent baryonic (normal) matter. These results will be
21 miles (34km). After more than nine years of data collection, the further refined a decade later by the Planck satellite,
satellite produces the following data set: The age of but WMAP pushes our knowledge of the fundamen-
the universe is 13.77 billion years; the expansion rate tal parameters of the cosmos a huge step forward.

64 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
 The Deep Impact
spacecraft slams
into Comet
Tempel 1.

2005
Marathon Valley on Mars typifies the view the Opportunity rover has along various sites on the Red Planet. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/CORNELL UNIVERSITY/ NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UMD
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

2004 SPIRIT AND OPPORTUNITY ROVERS EXPLORE MARS

DEEP IMPACT
→ Launched in 2003, the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, arrive on the Red Planet in
January 2004 and commence explorations. The twin rovers measure some 5 by 7 by 5 feet (1.5 by 2
by 1.5 meters) and produce the largest trove of martian data up to their time.
SPACECRAFT
Spirit lands in Gusev Crater, a site that seems to have been inundated by liquid water in Mars’ ancient STRIKES COMET
history. Spirit goes on to explore Bonneville Crater, the Columbia Hills, Husband Hill, McCool Hill, Silica
Valley, and other sites. Its twin, Opportunity, lands in Eagle Crater and sets off to explore a series of
9P/TEMPEL 1
important sites, including Endurance Crater, Erebus Crater, Victoria Crater, and Endeavor Crater.
Each rover carries a battery of numerous instruments and studies a wide range of martian science. The
rovers find a mesmerizing number of surprises: ancient, acidic lakebeds; minerals like jarosite that
→ On January 12, NASA
launch controllers sent the
Deep Impact spacecraft on its
require abundant liquid water to form; environments that would have been habitable for timescales of journey toward Comet Tempel 1
millions of years in the past; meteorites on the planet’s surface; windblown dust and dust devils; systems (9P/Tempel), a periodic comet
of ancient hydrothermal flows; recent water and frosts; and a dynamic atmosphere. known since 1867. Some six
months later, on July 4, the
spacecraft images the approach-
ing comet and then deploys an
2003 impactor to smash into the
Sheppard discovers nine more 2004 CASSINI-HUYGENS nucleus of Tempel 1, ejecting
moons of Jupiter. material in a cloud for the flyby
SPACECRAFT ORBITS SATURN spacecraft to study. The only
Astronomers Mike Brown, Chad previous missions sent to study
Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz comets were also flybys, begin-
discover icy dwarf planet Sedna ning with Comet Halley in 1986.
far out in the solar system. This mission ambitiously sam-
ples a comet and, by crashing
Comet NEAT (C/2002 V1) grows into the nucleus, is able to deter-
bright, briefly, early in the year. mine what the comet is made of.
Beginning about 60 days
Astronomers Brett Gladman, The Cassini mission sent back a hoard of data on Saturn and its satellites, before the encounter, Deep
Sheppard, and others find 12 redefining our view of the ringed world. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SSI Impact took high-precision
new moons of Jupiter. measurements and images of

Astronomers from several

research groups discover three
→ An enormous, large-scale mission, the Cassini-Huygens
new moons of Uranus.
2004
The Genesis spacecraft returns a
sample of solar wind particles to
Earth, a first-time occurrence.
The European Rosetta space-
craft launches toward Comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
It will reach the comet after a
10-year journey.
Voyager 1 sends back data from
within the heliosheath, the
outer part of the Sun’s bubble-
like region of space.
spacecraft arrives at Saturn after a seven-year cruise on
July 1. The NASA craft consists of two major elements: the
the comet. During June, the
spacecraft recorded two unusual
outbursts of activity, and by
Cassini orbiter and the Huygens probe, the latter destined to month’s end it prepared for the
land on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005. impact phase.
The Cassini mission is a spectacular success, with flybys of Deep Impact maneuvers to
Earth, Venus, and Jupiter en route. The probe tested general place itself within the path of
relativity by using radio waves, and on its approach to Saturn it the oncoming comet and
commenced major scientific operations using a large array of deploys the impactor, allowing
instruments. Tempel 1 to slam into it. The
Among the fruits of the mission is the discovery of six new spacecraft records a bright flash
moons of Saturn. In the summer of 2004, the spacecraft flies and cloud of debris a short time
past Saturn’s moon Phoebe, a heavily cratered satellite that later. NASA finds the density of
probably holds large amounts of water ice. The spacecraft also the comet to be like talcum
conducts a flyby of Titan, revealing the moon’s surface for the powder, and observes evidence
first time. Radar images eventually uncover lakes of methane of clays, carbonates, sodium,
on the moon’s surface. The spacecraft also studies Saturn’s and crystalline silicate minerals
rings in unprecedented detail, observes storms on the planet, in the nucleus.
performs flybys of other moons, and returns spectacular
amounts of data.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 65

An image relayed from the surface of
Saturn’s moon Titan shows a muddy,
mucky, frozen landscape littered with
denser balls of mostly water ice. NASA/JPL/
ESA/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2005
A team of astronomers led by
Brown announce the discovery
of the dwarf planet Haumea.
Scientists celebrate first light for
the twin 330-inch (8.4m) mir-
rors of the Large Binocular
Telescope atop Mount Graham,
Arizona.
The 400-inch (10m) Southern
African Large Telescope (SALT)
is completed near Sutherland,
South Africa, becoming a domi-
nant Southern Hemisphere
instrument.
The Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter spacecraft launches,
reaching the Red Planet seven
months later.
The European Space Agency’s
Venus Express spacecraft
launches, reaching the planet
five months later.
The Spirit rover on Mars per-
forms the first astronomical
observations from the surface
of another planet, including
imaging an eclipse when the
moon Phobos moves into the
shadow of Mars.
66 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
2005 HUYGENS PROBE LANDS ON A Hubble Space Telescope
SURFACE OF SATURN’S MOON TITAN imaging team including Hal
Weaver and Alan Stern discov-
→ Continuing the marvelous success of the Cassini mission to
Saturn, 2005 sees the landing of the Huygens probe on the sur-
face of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. This historic event marks the
ers Nix and Hydra, two small
moons of Pluto.
first landing of a spacecraft on an outer solar system body. The Japanese Hayabusa space-
Separating from the Cassini orbiter in mid-December 2004, craft explores asteroid 25143
Huygens maneuvers and lands on Titan on January 14. The lander Itokawa, imaging and collecting
carries an atmospheric structure instrument, a Doppler wind experi- detailed data.
ment, a descent imager, a mass spectrometer, and other hardware to
investigate the large moon. The probe is designed to transmit data as 2006
it passes down through Titan’s atmosphere, and probably for a few In a controversial action, the
minutes directly from the surface. Actually, it sends back data for 90 International Astronomical
minutes while sitting on Titan. Union votes to demote Pluto to
Huygens returns incredible images from the surface that depict a dwarf planet from the full
globules most likely composed of water ice, a substrate of finer- planetary status it enjoyed for
grained particles, and a hazy, dense atmosphere close to the surface. 76 years.
One of the principal scientists described the moon’s surface as a hard
clutter of objects sitting atop a sticky, dense, muddy subsurface. A NASA’s New Horizons space-
thin haze of methane covers everything. Images suggest “seas” of craft launches for Pluto, arriv-
ethane and methane, along with drainage channels. The overall ing nine years later.
lighting is about one-one-thousandth that of sunlight on Earth.
The Japanese Hinode and U.S.
STEREO spacecraft launch to
study the Sun.
2005
ASTRONOMERS
A team of astronomers led by
Sheppard and Jewitt discover
six more moons of Saturn.
2007
DISCOVER DWARF Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1)
PLANETS ERIS becomes brilliant in the Southern
Hemisphere sky and is briefly
AND MAKEMAKE visible in the north.
An artist’s view depicts dwarf
planet Eris and its tiny satellite, The Phoenix Mars lander
far from the Sun. NASA/JPL-CALTECH launches in August and arrives
at Mars nine months later.
The Japanese SELENE space-
craft, aka Kaguya, launches in
September to study the Moon.
→ In this year, a team of Caltech astronomers led by Mike
Brown makes some big discoveries in the distant solar
system. In January, Brown’s team, which includes astronomers
In October, the Chinese Chang’e
1 lunar orbiter launches.
Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, detects a distant asteroid
that would come to be classified as a dwarf planet. They name 2008
the object Eris, after the Greek goddess, a personification of The Indian spacecraft
strife and discord. Chandrayaan-1 launches in
Soon astronomers confirm the existence of Eris and mea- October and studies the Moon,
sure it to be 1,445 miles (2,326km) across, which turns out to finding widespread water ice.
be slightly smaller than Pluto (although at first it was believed
to be somewhat larger than Pluto). Eris follows an orbit taking 2009
it far out to 97 times more distant than Earth is from the Sun, The Lunar Reconnaissance
over a period of 558 years. Eris also has a very small moon, Orbiter spacecraft launches to
named Dysnomia. study the Moon.
Two months later, the same team finds a second distant
object, which they name Makemake, after the mythology of Astronomers celebrate first light
Easter Island. Makemake is also found to be a dwarf planet, for the 10.4m Gran Telescopio
some 900 miles (1,460km) across. It travels in an orbit that Canarias, currently the largest
carries it 53 times farther away from the Sun than Earth, over optical telescope in the world.
a period of 309 years. In one year, the solar system gains two
significant outer bodies.
 2006
STARDUST MISSION
RETURNS COMETARY

NASA/JPL-CALTECH
DUST TO EARTH

NASA/KEPLER MISSION/WENDY STENZEL

→ A historic first takes place in
January, when the Stardust robotic
space probe lands in the Utah desert, The images of Comet Wild 2 reveal
craters and pits on the comet’s
carrying the first samples of cometary 3.5-mile-diameter (5.5km) surface.
particles ever returned to Earth.
The mission commenced with a launch in 1999, after which the
spacecraft flew past and studied the asteroid 5535 Annefrank, and
then encountered and sampled the well-known periodic Comet
2009
The Kepler Space Telescope is the greatest discoverer of extrasolar planets in history.

Wild 2 (81P/Wild). This comet is a 3.5-mile-diameter (5.5km) object

that orbits the Sun between 1.5 and 5.3 times the distance between KEPLER SPACE TELESCOPE LAUNCHES
Earth and the Sun. Unusually, it passed within 600,000 miles (1 mil-
lion km) of Jupiter in 1974. The giant planet altered Wild 2’s orbit to HUNT FOR EXOPLANETS
plunge it into the inner solar system.
Stardust carried several instruments, including a navigational
camera, a cometary and interstellar dust analyzer, a dust flux moni-
→ Astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting a star other than
the Sun in 1992, and the first planet orbiting a Sun-like star in
1995. But the business of discovering extrasolar planets, or exoplanets,
tor instrument, and, most importantly, an aerogel dust particle col- gets into high gear with the Kepler Space Telescope’s launch in 2009.
lector. About the size of a tennis racket, the collector picked up Named for the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, the
particles as the spacecraft swooped through Wild 2’s tail in 2004. instrument launches into an Earth-trailing, heliocentric orbit that
Two years later, scientists begin studying the cometary particles places it slightly farther from the Sun than Earth. Kepler carries a
and eventually find they contain the simplest amino acid, glycine, 1.4m primary mirror and, at the time, the largest camera ever
one of the fundamental building blocks of life. launched into space, consisting of 42 conjoined CCDs.
After its launch, Kepler wastes no time in cranking out exoplanet
discoveries. Although the spacecraft observes a relatively small area
— 100 square degrees centered between Cygnus and Lyra, and its
2010 The EPOXI mission flies past stars mostly dozens or a few hundred light-years into the galaxy — it
The Japanese Hayabusa space- Comet 103P/Hartley. becomes a workhorse. The telescope detects exoplanets by observing
craft returns the first-ever transits, when a planet moves in between us and its host star, causing
sample of an asteroid, 25143 In May, the Japanese Akatsuki a slight dip in the star’s light. To date, the craft has uncovered more
Itokawa, to Earth. probe launches toward Venus. than 2,200 planets orbiting other stars, and an additional 4,500 can-
didate planets. From these results, astronomers estimate that as
The Solar Dynamics The Chinese Chang’e 2 probe many as 40 billion rocky Earth-sized exoplanets could exist within
Observatory is launched in launches in October, bound for habitable zones of their stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
February to study the Sun. the Moon.

ASTRO MILESTONES SINCE 2010

→ Although we have completed not quite
six years since 2010, the astronomy world
has witnessed some incredible advances dur-
ing that interval.
2011 was particularly impressive. We saw the
MESSENGER spacecraft enter orbit around
Mercury, the launch of the Mars Science
Laboratory — including the Curiosity rover —
toward the Red Planet, and the Dawn space-
craft enter orbit around the asteroid 4 Vesta.
Scientists launched the Juno mission that has
just arrived at Jupiter, sent the GRAIL mission
off to study the Moon, and celebrated and also
mourned the final space shuttle mission. That
year also saw the discovery of two more jovian
moons and the discovery of Kerberos, a tiny
moon of Pluto.
The following year brought long-awaited
news for particle physics and cosmology: the
discovery of a particle consistent with the
Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. The
Hubble Space Telescope also delved further
into the distant universe by capturing the
eXtreme Deep Field, and planetary scientists
discovered Styx, another tiny moon of Pluto.
2013 was another very busy year. The Planck
satellite team published data on the cosmic
microwave background radiation, updating our
view of the contents of the cosmos. A meteor-
ite exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring
1,500 people when the shock wave shattered
glass in buildings. Comet ISON promised to be
a delightful sight for amateur astronomers until
it fizzled in the light of the Sun. The United
States launched the MAVEN mission to study
the martian atmosphere. And the Chinese
Chang’e 3 spacecraft launched to the Moon.
The past three years also have brought sur-
prises. 2014 was a big year in planetary explo-
ration, with the Rosetta spacecraft’s arrival at
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and its
Philae lander’s touchdown on the comet’s sur-
face. The Japanese Hayabusa 2 mission also
launched toward its sampling of asteroid
162173 Ryugu. Last year, planetary scientists
rejoiced over the flyby of New Horizons past
Pluto, completing the exploration of solar sys-
tem bodies commenced with the Voyager pro-
gram in the 1970s. And the Dawn spacecraft
entered orbit around dwarf planet Ceres,
beginning to study its surface.
Just this year, astronomers shook the world
by announcing they had detected gravitational
waves from the collision and merger of two
distant black holes. Caltech astronomers
announced the discovery, extrapolated by
mathematics, of a distant “Planet Nine” far out
in our solar system. Perhaps the next decade
will celebrate the scientists who observe it for
the first time.

W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 67
 ASTROSKETCHING
BY ERIKA RIX

Graphite pencils
For simplicity, I tend to use a (similar to a #2 pencil) is
#2 graphite pencil for most of medium-grade. 4H has the
my deep-sky drawings. After hardest lead and produces the
all, a pencil and paper are all lightest mark. I’ll explain their
that’s really needed to record use with two objects in the
an observation. Is a minimal- constellation Cygnus the Swan.
ist approach the best option, The Crescent Nebula (NGC
though? An entire set of graph- 6888) lies at the heart of the
ite pencils could be more useful swan, 2.7° southwest of
to render star magnitudes and Gamma (γ) Cygni. Its elon-
contrast tones, and HB-grade gated shell-like shape measures
pencils fit the bill. But what do 20' by 10' and contains at its
those grades mean? center a magnitude 7.4 Wolf-
The letter H in the grading Rayet star. WR 136 (also
system designates the graph- known as HD 192163), like
The author observed NGC 6894 with a
ite’s hardness, the B its black- others of its kind, is shedding (OIII) and ultra-high contrast 12mm eyepiece for a magnification of
ness. The degree of each material from its surface and (UHC) filters, but you’ll need 152x. She used a #2 blending stump
attribute is represented by a then blowing it away with its a night of good transparency and 4B and HB graphite pencils. Due to
the planetary nebula’s small size, she
number. For example, in a set strong stellar winds, both to observe it. Through an used a 3⁄16-inch tortillon for detailed
containing 8B, 6B, 4B, 2B, HB, building and carving out the 8-inch telescope, the Crescent blending.
2H, and 4H pencils, an 8B cre- Crescent’s distinctive shape. resembles a shallow arc that
ates the blackest mark, and This faint emission nebula cradles WR 136. It begins at NGC 6894 appears as a
also has the softest lead. HB responds well to Oxygen-III an 8th-magnitude star on gauzy circular patch through
its northeast tip and reaches an 8-inch telescope. The ring
north to a 7th-magnitude dou- surrounding it pops into
ble before sloping southwest. view with the use of an OIII
The western edge thickens filter. Increasing aperture
through a 12-inch scope, with to 12 inches reveals a slight
knots and bright filaments northeast to southwest elon-
stretching throughout the arc. gation with a star just inside
Look for wisps of nebulosity in its northwest rim. Through a
its southern region. Through 16-inch scope, you can spot
excellent transparency, bright specks along the north-
increased aperture will reveal west and southeast edges.
its faint oval shape. Once I had drawn the star
I used 8B, 2B, and 2H graph- field and base layer of the plan-
ite pencils to render the star etary, I switched to a 4B pencil
magnitudes in my sketch. I to enhance the ring. I softened it
created the faint base layer of with a clean blending stump,
the nebula with the tip of a then added the star on its north-
blending stump that had west rim. I rendered the bright
graphite on it. With light pencil specks along the ring with an
pressure, I added the brighter HB pencil and then softened
details with a 4B graphite and them by gently tapping with a
then softened them with a 3⁄16-inch tortillon, a blending
clean blending stump. tool with a firm, narrow tip that
I nudged my telescope 6° works best for tight areas.
The author used a 13mm eyepiece for a magnification of 140x to observe the Crescent
Nebula (NGC 6888). Transparency was below average, making it difficult to observe
southeast of Eta (η) Cygni to It doesn’t take long to appre-
nebulosity in the southern portion of the Crescent. For NGC 6888, the author used a #2 locate the next target, plan- ciate the contrast range pro-
blending stump and a 4B graphite pencil. For both sketches, she used white printer etary nebula NGC 6894. It has vided by a set of HB-grade
paper and observed with a 16-inch f/4.5 reflector and an Oxygen-III filter. She plotted a magnitude of 12.3 and spans pencils. Be sure to give them a
the stars with 8B, 2B, and 2H graphite pencils. She then scanned the sketches and
removed the rough star edges in Photoshop. The images are rotated so that north is to 44" by 39". A 9th-magnitude whirl during your lunar and
the top, west is to the right. ALL SKETCHES BY ERIKA RIX star shines 7.5' to its north. planetary sessions as well.

68 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
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W W W.ASTR ONOMY.COM 69
 BINOCULARUNIVERSE
BY P H I L H A R R I N G TO N
Lyra’s summer
bino treats
Three stars — Vega, Deneb,
and Altair — dominate the
late summer sky and serve to
frame our binocular universe
both this month and next.
We will begin this month by
focusing in on the brilliant,
blue-white stellar diamond
Vega (Alpha [α] Lyrae). There
is no missing Vega these eve-
nings. It ranks as the fifth-
brightest star in the sky and
comes in at No. 2 in our survey
of stars north of the celestial
equator. Only Arcturus (Alpha
Boötis) outshines it, barely.
Slightly defocusing your
binoculars will enhance Vega’s
bluish color. The telltale color
comes from the star’s blistering
surface temperature, nearly
17,000° F (9,427° C). That’s
7,000° F (3,871° C) hotter than
the surface of our Sun. Vega is
paying a price to achieve that
temperature, however. Despite
its being a little more than
twice as massive as the Sun,
Vega is consuming its fuel at a
furious rate. It’s only about 500
million years old, or about one-
tenth the Sun’s age. But for
Vega, that’s already middle-
aged. At this rate, it will run
The Double-Double, Epsilon Lyrae, makes a beautiful sum-
mertime double star in any binoculars. The artist sketched
Epsilon using a 6-inch f/8 reflector at 240x. JEREMY PEREZ
70 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
out of fuel in another half-bil-
lion years.
Snap your binoculars back
into focus, but don’t shift your
aim. Instead, glance just to
Vega’s northeast to see a pair of
close-set stars. That’s Epsilon
(ε) Lyrae. The northern star in
the pair is known as Epsilon1,
while the southern is Epsilon2.
They appear separated by 208".
That’s near the naked-eye reso-
lution limit for most people.
Can you split the Epsilons by
eye? If not, even the slightest
optical aid will do the job.
Epsilon1 and Epsilon2 are
also called the Double-Double
because each is actually a
close-set pair of stars. Unfor-
tunately, it will take at least 80x
to see them because they are so
closely spaced.
If seeing Epsilon left you
wanting more, take a gander at
Zeta (ζ) Lyrae. It is composed
of 4th- and 6th-magnitude
suns separated by about 44".
The fainter companion lies due
south of the brighter star. I can
just make out both through my
10x50 binoculars, while the
added punch of my 16x70s
clearly resolves them. Both
The Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra is one of the most beautiful
planetary nebulae in the sky, and is visible as a faint
“smoke ring” through binoculars. MARK HANSON
FROM OUR INBOX
Corrections
In the June 2016 issue’s “How Vera Rubin discovered dark
matter,” p. 26, we mistakenly said that Martin Schwarzschild
defined black hole sizes, but it was his father, Karl. — Astronomy
Editors
In the May 2016 article, “A wrinkle in space-time confirms
Einstein’s gravitation,” the illustration on p. 25 shows the beam
splitter oriented wrong. It should have been rotated 90° clock-
wise. — Astronomy Editors
In the May 2016 issue’s “Meet the next generation space tele-
scope,” the illustration on p. 56 shows visible and ultraviolet
images of Europa, not visible and infrared. — Astronomy Editors
impress me as shining pure Our final stop this month is
white. How about you? at the globular cluster M56.
Aim along the southern side It lies about halfway between
of the Lyra parallelogram. By Gamma Lyrae and Albireo
placing Beta (β) and Gamma (Beta Cygni). Sure, M57 may
(γ) Lyrae on opposite edges of garner more press, but M56 is
the field, our next target is easier to identify through bin-
almost perfectly centered. The oculars. It will look like a dis-
Ring Nebula (M57) was discov- tant ball of cotton nestled in a
ered by Antoine Darquier in field strewn with stardust. It
1779 and is the sky’s most is easy to see how Charles
famous planetary nebula. Messier could have mistaken it
Spying the Ring through for a dim comet when he dis-
binoculars is daunting because covered it in January 1779.
of its tiny size. M57 shines at Do you have a favorite bin-
magnitude 8.8, but measures ocular target that you would
less than 4' in diameter. like me to feature? Please send
While it appears little more your suggestions to me at
than a dim star, M57 is indeed binophil@outlook.com.
visible. Admittedly, its famous Until next month, always
smoke-ring shape requires remember that two eyes are
more magnification than most better than one.
binoculars can muster, but
even under suburban skies, I Phil Harrington is a longtime
have seen it through 7x35s. observer and contributing
Give it a go. And please let me editor of Astronomy.
know how you make out.
Globular cluster M56 is often overshadowed by the great
Hercules Cluster (M13), which lies relatively nearby, but
M56 makes a great binocular sight. BERNHARD HUBL
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 BREAK
THROUGH
Fire in the
Furnace
Fornax the Furnace may
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local universe. Among its
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1399 (the largest fuzzy
blob at bottom), which
grew so big by devouring
many smaller galaxies.
Also notice the beautiful
barred spiral NGC 1365
at top right. Astronomers
captured this view with
the 2.6-meter VLT Survey
Telescope in northern
Chile. ESO

74 A ST R O N O M Y • S E P T E M B E R 2016
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 SOUTHERN
SKY
November 2016: Jupiter returns at dawn
November starts off with a fine
pairing of Venus and Saturn.
The two bright planets adorn
the western evening sky from
twilight until after 10 p.m. local
daylight time.
Venus stands out because it
shines at magnitude –4.0, far
brighter than any other point
of light in the night sky. It lies
against the backdrop of Ophi-
uchus the Serpent-bearer,
though the more conspicuous
body of Scorpius the Scorpion
appears just to the planet’s
left. The Scorpion looks like
a reversed question mark as it
stretches up through the west-
ern evening sky. Venus moves
rapidly eastward relative to
the background stars during
November, crossing the border
into Sagittarius on the 9th.
The planet becomes a more
interesting telescopic object
as the month progresses. On
November 1, it appears 14"
across and 78 percent lit; by
the 30th, its disk spans 17" and
the Sun illuminates 69 percent
of it. I often find I get better
views of Venus by observing
during twilight or with a neu-
tral density filter in the eye-
piece. Both techniques reduce
the planet’s glare and make it
easier to see the gibbous phase.
You can find Saturn 4° to
Venus’ lower right on Novem-
ber 1. Shining at magnitude 0.5,
the ringed planet appears quite
prominent despite being only
1.5 percent as bright as its
neighbor. While Saturn sinks
lower with each passing eve-
ning, Venus climbs higher. And
though Saturn quickly loses its
planetary partner, it retains a
stellar companion for a few
MARTIN GEORGE describes the solar system’s changing landscape
as it appears in Earth’s southern sky.
weeks. Look for ruddy Antares,
Scorpius’ 1st-magnitude lumi-
nary, nearly 10° to the planet’s
left. Saturn will be in conjunc-
tion with the Sun in December,
and it disappears in the twi-
light glow during November’s
final week.
As you might guess, the
best views of Saturn through
a telescope will come when
it’s higher in the sky in early
November. On the 1st, the
planet’s disk appears 15" across
while the rings span 35" and tilt
27° to our line of sight — a
beautiful sight in spite of the
relatively low altitude.
Look well above Venus
and Saturn and you can’t miss
Mars. The Red Planet shines at
magnitude 0.5 but stands out at
least as much for its distinctive
orange-red color. Mars moves
from the star-cluttered back-
ground of Sagittarius into the
fainter confines of Capricornus
during November’s second
week. Unfortunately, the planet
is but a shadow of itself when
viewed through a telescope. Its
disk measures just 7" across
and shows little detail. Even
worse, it will take another 16
months before Mars appears
even this large again.
The evening sky gains a
fourth bright planet in late
November. Mercury hangs
low in the west-southwest after
sunset during the month’s final
week. It passes 3.5° south of
Saturn on the evenings of the
23rd and 24th, though you’ll
need binoculars and a haze-
free sky to spy the pair. At
magnitude –0.5, Mercury
shines a full magnitude
brighter than Saturn.
By November 30, Mercury
appears 8° above the horizon
45 minutes after sunset. A
telescope then shows a 5.5"-
diameter gibbous disk. The
view will improve noticeably in
a few weeks as the innermost
planet approaches greatest
elongation.
The lone bright planet visible
before dawn is mighty Jupiter.
The solar system’s largest planet
grows more conspicuous during
November as it climbs higher in
the early morning sky. On the
15th, it stands 10° high in the
east an hour before sunrise. Its
altitude doubles at the same
time by the end of the month.
And because the planet shines
so brightly, at magnitude –1.7
in mid-November, you won’t
mistake it for any other object.
A telescope reveals Jupiter’s
32"-diameter disk and typically
four bright moons.
The starry sky
On several occasions, I have
written that the Southern
Hemisphere evening sky is
rather dull at this time of year.
The reason is that the Milky
Way — the band of light that
traces our galaxy’s disk and
harbors many of the best deep-
sky objects — hangs low in the
sky. Crux the Southern Cross
appears nearly upside down low
in the south, and for people
who live closer to the equator,
it is below the horizon.
But from where on Earth
does the Milky Way precisely
skirt the horizon?
To answer this, we need to
know the position of the South
Galactic Pole. This is the point
that lies at a right angle to the
plane of our galaxy on its
southern side. The Interna-
tional Astronomical Union
(IAU) defined its exact position
in 1958 at its General Assembly
in Moscow. Two IAU com-
missions had worked together
to slightly improve earlier sys-
tems and came up with the
South Galactic Pole being at
right ascension 0h51.4m and
declination –27°08' (in 2000.0
coordinates).
This point resides in the
constellation Sculptor, about 3°
northwest of the 4th-magnitude
star Alpha (α) Sculptoris.
So to answer the question as
to where in Earth’s Southern
Hemisphere the galactic equa-
tor coincides with the horizon,
it is the line of latitude that
equals the galactic pole’s decli-
nation: 27°08' south.
In Australia, this corre-
sponds closely with Brisbane,
the far north of South Australia,
and Denham Sound in the far
west of Western Australia; in
South America, it passes near
Florianopolis in Brazil across to
near Copiapo in Chile; and in
South Africa, it lies close to
Johannesburg.
Remarkably, and almost
fittingly, one of the finest galax-
ies for small telescopes lies near
the South Galactic Pole. The
Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253)
stands only 2° north-northwest
of the pole. NGC 253 even
shows up as a little streak of
light through 7x50 binoculars.
I find the best way to locate it
with binoculars is to look at a
point just under halfway along
the line joining Alpha Sculp-
toris and Beta (β) Ceti, then
scan a little to the west.
 STAR S
DOME AU S
TR
T R IA A L E
NGU
LUM
MUSCA
3372
NGC
THE ALL-SKY MAP AR
SHOWS HOW THE A
SKY LOOKS AT: I NA R
CA
11 P.M. November 1 NG
C6 ELEON
10 P.M. November 15 7
39 APUS C HA M A
9 P.M. November 30
T
EL
Planets are shown ES AN
S
at midmonth O
C SCP OL V
PI O C TA

A OR
PA NS

U
U

C
M VO 6
ST ON 51 2
GC
R A
A
ENS
A

M N
LI

0 R
207 C O
S

H Y DRU S CT
NG PI
SA

LMC
GI

NGC 104 SMC UM

T

UL
TA

IC

us
T
RE

op
R

MI
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IN

n
th

Ca
CR
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D
of

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OS

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TU M

A
CA
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Achernar

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OP

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un

LO

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Mars

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L
AE
CAPRICORNU

PH

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C
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NI
X
AU S T R I N U S
PISCIS

LPTO
Fomalhau

ANUS
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NG

SG

ERID
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53

CET
US
AQ
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Mira
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MAGNITUDES M33

Sirius Open cluster ULUM

T R IA NG
0.0 Globular cluster M31 ol
Alg
1.0
Diffuse nebula ANDRO EU
2.0 M E DA RS
PE
3.0 Planetary nebula
4.0
5.0 Galaxy

N
 HOW TO USE THIS MAP: This map portrays
the sky as seen near 30° south latitude.
Located inside the border are the four
NOVEMBER 2016
directions: north, south, east, and
west. To find stars, hold the map Calendar of events
overhead and orient it so a
A
EL direction label matches the 2 The Moon passes 4° north of 15 The Moon passes 0.4° north of
V direction you’re facing. Saturn, 19h UT Aldebaran, 17h UT
The stars above the
map’s horizon now 3 The Moon passes 7° north of 17 Leonid meteor shower peaks
match what’s Venus, 4h UT
18 Mercury passes 3° north of
in the sky.
Asteroid Eurynome is at Antares, 21h UT
opposition, 17h UT
20 Neptune is stationary, 10h UT
77

6 The Moon passes 5° north of

S

24
PI

Mars, 12h UT 21 Last Quarter Moon occurs at

P

G C
PU

8h33m UT
N

7 First Quarter Moon occurs at

19h51m UT 25 The Moon passes 1.9° north of
A

Jupiter, 2h UT
MB

9 The Moon passes 1.0° north of

OR
U

Neptune, 15h UT 27 The Moon is at apogee

OL

AJ

(406,554 kilometers from Earth),

C

IS M

12 The Moon passes 3° south of 20h08m UT

M47

Uranus, 11h UT
CAN

29 New Moon occurs at 12h18m UT

M41

14 The Moon is at perigee

Asteroid Juno is in conjunction
MONOCEROS

(356,509 kilometers from Earth),

LEPUS

11h21m UT with the Sun, 20h UT

Sirius

Full Moon occurs at 13h52m UT

E
Rigel

N
M42

ORIO

e
geus
Betel
n
ra
ba
de
Al

STAR COLORS:
M

S Stars’ true colors

U
R
U depend on surface
TA
temperature. Hot
stars glow blue; slight-
ly cooler ones, white;
intermediate stars (like
the Sun), yellow; followed
by orange and, ultimately, red.
Fainter stars can’t excite our eyes’
US color receptors, and so appear white
without optical aid.

Illustrations by Astronomy: Roen Kelly

BEGINNERS: WATCH A VIDEO ABOUT HOW TO READ A STAR CHART AT www.Astronomy.com/starchart.

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