This episode was produced by Brent Baughman, edited by Viet Le, and fact-checked by Emily Vaughn.
Many things are taking place:
Solar system smash could explain Uranus' big mystery - SlashGear
Perfect time to witness solar system in action - Delaware Gazette
The current health crisis forces us to “shelter in place.” Our universe has become inevitably constricted to our homes, our yards if we have one, and perhaps a walk around our neighborhoods.
Still, we may get a glimpse of the larger universe and our location in it simply by going out into our own backyards in evening and morning twilight.
We are in the midst of a grand planetary conjunction. In the evening, Venus, the brightest of all the planets, is visible in the west as an attention-grabbing point of pure white light, but it isn’t part of the conjunction.
Astronomers find 139 new minor planets in the outer solar system | Astronomy.com
A new method for hunting minor planets uncovered more than a hundred small, distant worlds. And the novel technique could even help resolve the mystery of Planet Nine.
The discovery of 139 new minor planets in the outer solar system, and especially the new method used to find them, might eventually help astronomers determine whether Planet Nine exists or not.
Astronomers have discovered 139 new minor planets orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune by searching through data from the Dark Energy Survey. The new method for spotting small worlds is expected to reveal many thousands of distant objects in coming years — meaning these first hundred or so are likely just the tip of the iceberg.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Scientists calculate age of massive neutron star crash that helped form our solar system | Space
Astronomers are on the hunt for the remnants of the neutron-star collision that gave Earth its precious metals.
"It was close," the project's lead scientist, Szabolcs Marka, who is a physicist at Columbia University, told Space.com. "If you look up at the sky and you see a neutron-star merger 1,000 light-years away, it would outshine the entire night sky."
* * *
Marka and his colleague Imre Bartos, an astrophysicist at the University of Florida, used meteorites from the dawn of the solar system to track down the collision. They analyzed the isotopes — flavors of elements with different numbers of neutrons in their atoms — in these rocks.
So You've Found a Comet With a Weird Orbit … | WIRED
On the evening of March 28, a small automated observatory on the Andean steppe in northwestern Argentina watched a previously undetected comet drift through the solar system nearly 500 million miles away. New comets are rare enough—astronomers only add a few dozen to the official tally each year—but this particular bit of space rock came with an added bonus.
The following week, Vladimir Lipunov, the Russian astronomer who manages the observatory, made several more observations of the unusual comet. The first two interstellar objects discovered, 'Oumuamua and 2I/Borizov , both had trajectories that clearly indicated they were not from our local galactic neighborhood. But the path of this new object, known as C/2020 F5, was more ambiguous. Maybe it was a local, maybe it wasn't. The only way to tell was to gather more data.
Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the moon to line up before sunrise this weekend - The Washington Post
Looking for a fun way to pass the time while social distancing? The heavens will be putting on a free show this weekend, with an ornamental assortment of planets decorating the morning and evening skies.
Weather permitting, you'll be able to catch the celestial rendezvous all weekend. In the evenings, you can spot Venus, while mornings will offer a lineup of the moon, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter.
The days have been growing longer, leading to later sunsets as we steadily inch toward the summer solstice. In Washington, for instance, our sunsets have inched up to near 7:50 p.m. That's a big difference from the 4:45 p.m. sunsets in December.
Comets are unpredictable travelers through the solar system
Now that the days are getting warmer and our entertainment options are more limited, this might be the perfect time to sit in isolation under the stars and contemplate your place in the universe. And if that sounds too metaphysical, you could just take in some old-fashioned stargazing.
Another topic for contemplation is the idea that comets are like cats – both have tails and are hard to predict. There are typically several comets per year that can be seen with binoculars. Most are tiny dots that are almost indistinguishable from faint stars unless you use a telescope to provide additional magnification. Rarely are comets visible to the naked eye. When they are, it is worth the effort to see them.
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