Australian Sky & Telescope September - October 2021

WHAT DO YOU SEE when you look up? It depends on where you live, doesn’t it? Those at southern temperate latitudes have skies that are very different to those who live at equivalent latitudes in the northern half of the planet. And that’s the way it has been for most of human history — the only thing that determined what you saw was your latitude. But now, our skies are dominated by light pollution. Where once you might have been able to walk into the backyard, look up and clearly see the Milky Way stretching overhead, now you’re likely to see no more than, what?... 50, 100, 200 stars? It should be several thousand. And that’s the experience of so many city dwellers – we have generations of people who…

THE POWERFUL FLASHES of fast radio bursts (FRBs) are so fleeting, they’re hard to find. Astronomers had detected only about 140 of them since 2007. But the first data release from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), presented on June 9 at the virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, more than tripled that number with 535 FRBs, including 61 bursts from 18 previously reported repeating sources. After CHIME scans the whole sky visible from its location in British Columbia every night, astronomers use digital signal-processing to ‘focus’ on individual signals. Yet the telescope only sees the tip of the iceberg: Based on the first year of data, collected between 2018 and 2019, the CHIME/FRB Collaboration calculates that some 800 bright bursts occur every day. The radio flashes CHIME…

In 2018, a team of astronomers discovered a super-Earth about 6 light-years away, hidden in the meager light of its red sun, Barnard’s star. Now, a new study to appear in the Astronomical Journal challenges that claim. In the original study, Ignasi Ribas (Institute of Space Sciences, Spain) and colleagues analysed two decades of radial velocity measurements, which showed the star’s slight motions toward and away from us. Within those data, Ribas and colleagues saw the repeated signal of a planet’s gravitational back-and-forth pull as it circled its star every 233 days. But in a new analysis, which includes observations from the recently minted Habitable-zone Planet Finder on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas, graduate student Jack Lubin (University of California, Irvine) and colleagues concluded that stellar activity might have masqueraded…

NEW HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE observations have traced five enigmatic fast radio bursts (FRBs) to the arms of spiral galaxies, narrowing down the possible explanations for their sources. The study, led by Alexandra Mannings (University of California, Santa Cruz), will appear in the Astrophysical Journal. While scientists have detected hundreds of FRBs (including those just announced by the CHIME/FRB Collaboration), they have only traced about 15 of them to specific sources. Some of these are repeating sources, which makes it easier to localise the brief radio flashes within their host galaxies. But single bursts are harder to pin down. The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) makes this job a little easier, by pinpointing FRBs’ locations as they are detected. When an event triggers an automated pipeline, the receivers save all…

Optronic Technologies, Inc., better known to backyard astronomers as Orion Telescopes & Binoculars, has announced the acquisition of Meade Instruments following approval in bankruptcy court. Peter Moreo, president of Orion (and now president of Meade), stated, “I am honored to have the opportunity to work with Meade employees, customers, and suppliers as the next phase of Meade’s corporate journey begins.” For more than four decades, Meade Instruments has been one of the world’s largest designers and manufacturers of telescopes and accessories for amateur astronomers. In 2019, Orion Telescopes & Binoculars sued Meade, then a subsidiary of Chinese manufacturer Ningbo Sunny Electronic Co. Ltd, in an antitrust lawsuit that included several other manufacturers. The lawsuit found that Sunny had colluded with other Chinese manufacturers in a price-fixing scheme that formed a…

ASTRONOMERS HAVE CAPTURED 226 million galaxies up to 7 billion light-years away in an area covering about one-eighth of the entire sky. This treasure trove of data provides the best-ever probe of cosmic evolution and illuminates the role of dark matter and dark energy in shaping the large-scale structure of the universe. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) started back in August 2013. On May 27, the international collaboration behind the survey posted 30 scientific studies covering the first three years of observations. These papers will appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. (Although the Dark Energy Survey was completed in early 2019, the collaboration is still processing the last three years of data.) To map out large-scale structure, DES scientists start with individual galaxies. Based on a…